This was originally a paper I wrote on politics as required by Mr. Louie Montemar:
I want to start my paper with a clich̩, as most articles, papers and novels are not started off. I have never been one to really engage in or even think about politics or politicking for that matter. Allow me to clarify that Mr. Montemar has, if I recall correctly, made the argument that politics is something that we could never totally eradicate from our lives, and has suggested the term politicking to articulate the sentiments of many misinformed people Рmy ignorant and misinformed self included of course. Well Sir, if you think that I have been beating around the bush with my quaint but totally irrelevant opening, you are correct. To tell you the truth, I had to ask a number of people for suggestions as to what a good topic might be. Most proposed topics given to me can be generally classified as current events and I, being one who never got into the habit of reading periodicals even through constant insistence on my part (somehow I never got past the comics section whenever I tried), believed that I could never write a sensible-enough paper about politics - sensible-enough, to merit a grade to suit my purpose that is. The fact of the matter is, I have never had a concrete idea of politics before my POLIGOV subject although I suspect that I already had many first hand experiences of it in my life. The agonizing part is that, thinking that I have almost finished the subject, I would have already recalled these particular moments of my life and identified them with politics. But I do not - and that obviously, is my troublesome ball-and-chain as of the moment.
Moving on from a clumsy start, I would like to give a somewhat informal discussion of politics the way I have haphazardly experienced it in my life. Modest as these haphazard encounters with politics might be compared to most people, I believe that it would serve my purpose in this particular paper. If not, I would always have the consolation that what I have written here is better (forgive me for my arrogance) than the lousy paper a certain Ms. Marquez has submitted to the same professor I am writing this paper for. A word of petition on my part though, please do not share my sentiments with other people in any case as it would only embarrass me nor inform Ms. Marquez of my opinion about her paper.
This card tells the story of a real person who lived during the Holocaust…
Anyway, in the summer of two thousand and three, I found myself walking towards a museum whose name caught my fancy – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. After minutes of lining up for admission, I was dutifully inspecting a makeshift identification card a museum personnel gave me (she said it was part of the program). I was supposed to be Ilona Karfunkel Kalman, born on May 12, 1906 in Erdobenye, Hungary and that I was gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz. That information I thought to myself, sounded somewhat grim. Wouldn’t you agree with me dear Sir?
Of course, important aspects of a discussion are always given definition and to provide just that, let me quote its description from the museum pamphlet. The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. During that time, I later on learned, six million Jews were murdered as well as Poles, Roma or gypsies, people with disabilities. They were all targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic and national reasons as they were believed to be a race weaker than that of Hitler’s Aryan race. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political dissidents, also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi tyranny. And I was offered a glimpse of this horror as I saw videos, pictures and materials that spoke of the said oppression. One section of the exhibit that engraved itself in my mind was a section where a room (to give a descriptive estimate, half the size of Gokongwei rooms) was full of mounds and mounds of shoes. They were all grey with ash and looked beaten. On a wall wrote (or something like it anyway) we are the witnesses of a great injustice as our owners were thrown into the flame. We could survive the fire, their flesh however, could not.
I remember that I could not even begin to describe what it was that I felt upon reading those words as I stood there fully alive with my trusty Kickers on. Suffice to say that the emotions I felt during that moment are beyond the pale of my descriptive capacity for melancholy. Call it a reaction. An affective orientation if you wish to be politically correct.
For the dead and the living we must bear witness…(Ellie Weisel)
The deaths, the massacre and the injustice, all these stemmed from one political ideology – fascism. And fascism as we know it has a face, that of Adolf Hitler’s. The Holocaust as I see it was an inhumane exercise of power and authority in the name of one political ideology – the unity and harmony of government and society defined by opposition to forces that might weaken that collective unity (Danziger). Fascism is a philosophy that would give rapid development to a country. Fascism as displayed by Hitler however, was an idea poisoned and corrupted by personal loathing which he crafted and spilled amongst the German people.
Put it this way, Fascism had great ideological promise I’d give it that but perhaps the way the ideology was interpreted and the means of execution for reaching fascism’s political goals were just too costly and in the strictest argument, bible-sense wrong. No such aggregate of people should suffer in account of any ideology be it political, economic or social in nature. We do not need any form of education to know that. Politics I believe should only be a mechanism for enhancing the people but the reality is, it is a double-edged sword like many other things.