Unforgivable Ignorance

How, it is perfectly legitimate to ask, can a significant proportion of any population be completely unaware of a historical event so hugely affective throughout the world, so sweeping in its evil intent, so incorrigibly successful in its execution, so unspeakable in its finality?

That a brutally militant nation under a totalitarian egomaniac was almost successful in overturning world order. That a nation enjoying a superlative veneer of culture and the admiring esteem of other nations, could turn into a ravening beast destroying millions of innocent lives?

Put that in a work of fiction and it simply would not work for who could believe that such destructive intent and mechanistically evil power even existed? But reality, that is another thing altogether. For such destructive intent and power did exist, did bring the world to the brink of extinction as a burgeoning collective of liberal democracies.

And most certainly did bring death and destruction to millions upon millions of people. The physically disabled were targeted, Gypsies, Homosexuals, political and religious dissidents - all set aside to be dealt with as society's undesirables. Among them the Jews of Europe, of whom six million perished in an organized, precision-planned and systematic extermination plan, the Final Solution.

This is not a pleasant memory. Not one to celebrate, the reality that groups of human beings, entire nations, could lend themselves to the unspeakable enterprise of achieving world domination, and as a sideline, target the most vulnerable and helpless of the world to doom.

This is not the figment of some writer's feverishly odious imagination, set down for posterity as a warning of what humankind's dark nature can descend to. It is history as many still living know it to have occurred, some of whom escaped that fascist-inspired tale of morbidly-vicious destruction.

So how can it possibly be that a survey in Canada, conducted by Leger Marketing, points out that fully seven percent of all respondents had never heard of the occurrence of the Holocaust? Fully 13% of individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 had no idea what the world "Holocaust" referred to?

And that roughly 12% of francophones had no idea whatever of that historical blot on humankind, let alone the 4% of English-speaking respondents who also begged ignorance.

The conclusion being that awareness of the Holocaust is there among the greater general population, some pockets of blissful ignorance aside, while in the Province of Quebec, a greater latitude of ignorance marks that peoples' general disinterest in matters not French in origin or intent.

One wonders do they recognize the name of (Marshal) Henri Philippe Benoni Omer Joseph Pétain? Would they care?