#9

Fear 

Amelia Wurzburg

Fear is innate. It is a basic emotional response, and survival mechanism that every human being is hardwired to know. Fear is one thing we all have in common, regardless of how or where we live on this planet. 

Once I had a dream that I was at the grocery store with my mother, when another shopper came running towards us, screaming that there were men outside, with guns. Everyone began to herd towards the back exit, where the loading dock was, but somehow, we couldn’t seem to move fast enough, and I could hear screams and gunshots. Suddenly, men wearing masks and carrying machine guns burst through the front doors, and at that moment, the herd of people pushed my mother away from me. I woke up shaking and gasping for air as I fumbled to turn on my lamp and bring myself back to reality. 

I was recently reminded of this dream while watching a documentary about the genocide happening now in Darfur. I remember thinking about the fear I felt in my dream, and how alarmingly real it seemed, both in my mind and body. But after some reflection, I realized that I could not remember ever feeling that sheer terror in waking life. 

As someone who is privileged with a relative degree of comfort and stability, it is difficult to comprehend living every day in fear. There are women, men, children, and elderly people living in Darfur who feel terror everyday. On any day, there is the chance of feeling the special kind of fear that can only be inspired by the knowledge that one is going to die, immediately and violently. They experience immobilizing terror in real time; there is no waking up, and there is no comforting light to switch on. The documentary I saw showed the image of a little girl, sprawled face first in the dirt, her colorful skirt fanned around her. I imagined the fear she felt before she died. Did she scream for her mother, as I did in my dream?

Every person should be able to live without fear. It is a privilege to live without the constant shadow of terror, but it is also a basic human right. All human beings should be entitled to work, sleep and play without fear for our survival or the survival of our loved ones. Perhaps in this situation the innate human ability to feel fear can act not just as a survival mechanism for those who are persecuted, but also as a reminder to those of us who live in safety. We should all pause for a moment, and think about the most fear we have ever felt, and consider what we can do for the people who feel that fear every single day. 

If you would like to print this out to distribute throughout your town, please include the following message: After the Holocaust the U.N. said "Never Again," would they let such an atrocity happen, but since then there have been Genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, and now Darfur. This piece is part of an anti Genocide, anti Ignorance project called Open Eyes. To learn more and contribute, visit www.openeyesforgenocide.blogspot.com

#8

In The Arms of Reason
Alexander Foster



"Gold is most excellent; gold is treasure, and he who possesses it does all he wishes to in this world." – Christopher Columbus

On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the New World on a sea voyage to chart a shortcut to the Indies, funded by Queen Isabella of Spain. By chance, Columbus landed upon a small island in the Caribbean populated by a group of friendly and pacifist indigenous people, the Taino, who met the oncoming Spanish with gifts of gold, jewels and shells. Columbus wrote in his diary after his first contact with the Taino, "with fifty men they can all be subjugated and made to do what is required of them." After his second voyage, Columbus sent a consignment of Native slaves back to Spain. The lives of the Natives, and indeed, of all the people of the world, would never be the same.
Columbus’s first action was to divide the island into colonists and Natives. Next, hundreds of Natives were sent back to Spain to be bought as slaves. On the island, they were forced into slavery, and those who escaped to the mountains were hunted down by hounds and killed. Thousands committed suicide by taking a poison made from Cassava. Many parents killed their children to spare them torture and an agonizing death at the hands of the Spanish rule. Native women were raped. Men and boys were enslaved, tortured, starved and killed. In only two short years, half of the 250,000 Natives were dead. By 1548, no more than 500 remained.
Since 1971 Columbus Day has been recognized as a national holiday, and in 2002, President George W. Bush issued a presidential proclamation celebrating "Columbus' bold expedition [and] pioneering achievements," directing that "the flag of the United States be displayed on all public buildings on the appointed day in honor of Christopher Columbus."
Mass killings and genocide did not cease after Columbus departed. During the Spanish Inquisition, thousands of indigenous people were routinely rounded up, tortured and burned alive for heresy, oftentimes decrees were read to them from distant Spanish ships coming to shore, with hordes of soldiers ready to jump onto the beach and murder and capture all of the nearby tribes who were proclaimed heretics, whose lives were therefore compromised by the Church.
The killings didn’t stop there, even up until the beginning of the 20th century, during the great South American Rubber Boom, tens of thousands of indigenous people were rounded up by rubber barons and enslaved, tortured by flogging, fed to dogs, and the women were routinely raped. It is projected that over 50,000 indigenous people were killed.
Ten to twenty million people perished at the hands of Joseph Stalin. Eleven million people died in the Holocaust. Mad dictator Pol Pot of Cambodia ordered one million Cambodians killed, including everybody that wore glasses because he believed the Marxist declaration that those who wear glasses belong to the educated class, the bourgeoisie, exploiters of the peasants. In Cambodia, this meant that all who wore glasses were rightfully subject to elimination. The Khmer Rouge soldiers took hundreds of thousands of Cambodians into what became known as the “Killing Fields”, where they dug their own mass graves and were beaten to death by the Khmer Rouge soldiers with iron bars and hoes, buried alive, and the babies were smashed against trees. A Khmer Rouge directive decreed “Not a bullet is to be wasted.”
Genocide has come to dominate the 20th century. The Herero Genocide of 1904 in Namibia claimed ¾ of the population, roughly 60,000 people. The Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1923 claimed 1.5 million people. The East Timor Genocide, from 1975 to 1999 claimed 120,000 people. Rwanda in 1994, 800,000, and Darfur from 2003 to present is still debated, 100,000, 300,000, 500,000 people?

To study history is to become increasingly aware of an ancient and on-going succession of human cruelty. Genocide is the act of rounding up a group of people from a specific social construct, whether it be class, race, religion, or ideology, who are then murdered. How can such madness permeate the minds of men, and so integrate itself within the false claims of reason? What reason is to be found in burning another humans flesh because they do not believe in the same God, do not share similar ideologies, do not bear the same color skin, and are born into a different ethnic class?
War is generally the conductor of such symphonies of murder, but who are the conductors of war? Out of Nationalistic cries and the fervor of demonizing the common enemy, people are being persecuted and power is being achieved. All lives are a compromise to this common cause of “good”, which is so often inherently evil. Groups of men, women and children are virtually wiped out and civilizations demolished in the wake of a new, stronger, more rightful empire that is here to preserve the everlasting status quo of human civilization: Power.
Power makes a strong nation. It makes an ideology, a religion, an army, an Empire. Power can turn an intelligent, cultured nation into a group of bloodthirsty murderers, and has done so time and time again throughout the dark pages of our history. Power is comprised of greed, of wealth, of possessions, and it knows no bounds, for it is insatiable, and it’s only aim is the endless progression for more.
It acts like a cancer cell, constantly reproducing, so devastatingly that it kills the organism which it lives on, and in so doing causes it’s own destruction. Can not human beings be viewed as such a ruthless and short-sighted creature? Have we not destroyed 95% of America’s old growth forests? Have we not created a global economy that is inherently flawed, because it’s only survival depends upon infinite growth, while the resources on this planet are obviously and ecologically limited? Have we not poisoned our air, water and land for profit? Have we not genetically mastered food, only to witness and accept the harrowing negative impacts to our health? Have we not created wars for profit, drugs for profit, life and death.. for profit?
Power rules the current paradigm, and in so doing rules the hearts and minds of Humankind. We see it every day, a war for resources in Afghanistan, rising dictatorships across the globe, the domination of corporate control in the political spectrum, SOPA, now CISPA, a cybersecurity aim for governments and corporations to share internet information, and to ultimately control the internet. We see it everywhere in the destruction of the natural processes of our planet, which paradoxically provides life for all living organisms, a class for which humans are not excluded. We are cutting down our forests and planting seeds of an unsustainable technologically advanced society, all the while ignoring the basic tenets of ecology, that we cannot replace the real world with an artificial one and hope to survive.
We are crushing peaceful regimes around the globe, and strengthening the destructive dictatorships and tyrannies. We are knowingly and unknowingly participating in the game of artificiality, of materialism, which defines social classes and further propagates the destruction of our dying resources, the sole creators of our possessions. We have built an empire on a false foundation of non-renewable resources that are quickly running out and laying devastation in their absence in economies throughout the world, while our governments and corporations crush the rise of renewable energy, energy that can be free to all people on the planet. Our governments that have not already done so, are creating a culture of fear, and we are fearful.
Wherever power lies, so too, do the power-less. Now is the unequivocal time in Mans rise to power, a time more tumultuous and testing than any other point in human history, a time when we are moving towards the peak of our own destruction, when the next war to be waged may very well render extinct our own species, and perhaps all life on Earth. There is a lesson to be learned here, a lesson that has been understood by the few and ignored by the many. Unfortunately, if we do not pay heed to the knowledge of Reason, and quickly learn to adopt a new world, one without power and greed and war, and if we continue to ignore the many sufferings that we inflict upon ourselves and all other living things, Humankind is sure to pay the full price for it’s supreme stupidity. Not only have we not learned from the atrocities we have inflicted, but furthermore, we have repeated them to awful grandeur, and only propagated the violence.
We are now in the waiting room of History. Crimes go punished and unpunished alike, but we must make the decision here and now, of whether or not we will let these crimes occur at all. For if they occur again, they very well may be the last crime we ever made against our fellow selves.

#7

Untitled
Anonymous

Its
On my face, in my hair, in the air around us, misting down on all the
huts, the stones, the dust that floats unbidden into ever crevice and
corner of our small and seemingly insignificant humanity;
Blood

The smell
Rank and sweet and sickly and nothing familiar about it and nothing to
spark the senses and comfort them into knowing that its supposed to be
there and we should forget it until the next time;
Blood

It
Came on the wind last night, the proceeding dust before a storm that
kicked up under the hooves of horses that brought the actual
destruction of body after the destruction of bombs had already
softened our disposition into unbelieving numbness;
Fire

The smell
Of charred flesh, clogging nostrils, blocking the pores of our body
and our mind and our soul as the screams rent air and sand and water
in the wells that dried up long ago when the desert began its slow
invasion into our places of work and living and life;
Fire

It
Grew slowly inside of each of us as the whisper and rumor of it spread
through each hut and village that had not already been burned and
desolated and left to melt back into the sand;
Despair

The smell
Is actually a poignant thing that creeps under each nose of each man
and each woman and each child as the days draw into weeks and the
weeks draw into years and most of us are not in our homes or not in
our country or not with those we love because they are dead dead dead
and we are alone alone alone;
Despair

You
Are not so different from me even though your hands hold the guns
while mine hold nothing. The blood that is on my face and in my hair
would be on you if I chose to stick you full of holes and hurt with
the hatred that I do not understand;
Confusion

There
Are over 400,000 of us that are forgotten somewhere in the South of
Darfur as the rest of the world watches and reacts in small particles
and small ways and small inklings of bigger things and pretends and
pretends and pretends to care but if you could smell the smells that
wrap our world, then you would not forget
Blood.
Fire.
Despair.
You.
Over there.

If you would like to print this out to spread around your town, please include the following message: 

After the Holocaust the U.N. declared "Never Again," would they let such an atrocity happen, but since then there have been Genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and now, Darfur. 

This piece is a part of an anti Genocide, anti Ignorance project called Open Eyes. To learn more and contribute visit www.openeyesforgenocide.blogspot.com 

#6

Open Your Eyes
Anonymous

“Open your eyes.”

How many times have I’ve heard those words?

In how many different tongues?

The years go by swift, like wind against the leaves. An intricate dance they do together; my new hobby to watch them in the park when my dear friend, Isaac, takes his time to contemplate over a meager pawn. I say nothing, for how quickly a single pawn could change the tides of such a game.

You could say that I’m older, but I do not feel that way.  I aged young, younger than most men should.

“לפתוח את העיניים “ (Open your eyes)

My father sternly whispers to himself.

The day of my Bar Mitzvah. I was nervous, a bad habit of mine to shut my eyes. Though I had read the passages in practice for many years before, I was worried of mispronunciation. Looking back, such a fear seems so trivial, yet those were much happier days.

“Otwórz oczy” (Open your eyes)

My beloved Sophie, the morning of our honeymoon.  How sweetly you pressed your lips upon my own. I was convinced God had given us one another. In my head I mapped out how we would spend the rest of our days together. Looking back, how naïve it was of me, yet not a day goes by where I do not relive us.

“Aprite gli occhi” (Open your eyes)

My mother delicately places her hand on my shoulder. The day I lost God. We are no longer in the ghetto now, though the uncertainty fills the cattle cars.  There are many voices, some of reassurance, of prayer, of sobs, some in discussion of the fate that awaits us. I turn to Sophie, all I can keep saying is I love her.

Öffne Deine Augen!” (Open your eyes)

He spits in my face. I am kneeling in the mud. The sky is snowing, yet it is not winter. My head held firmly in his grip, I watch as the smoke rises from the stacks. I watch everything I’ve ever loved in this world ascend to the heavens, while I am still here. I no longer care for the matters that transpire on this earth.

“Open your eyes”

You son of a bitch, I want you to see this coming.  The Sauer is clenched firmly in my skeletal hands. The thought that I must be the image of death himself runs through my mind, I smile. I can’t remember the last time I smiled. “Bitte-“The shot drowns out the rest of the words. I will remember his face for the rest of my life.

“открой глаза” (Open your eyes)

The nurse checks for any other diseases. Our liberators begin to disassemble the camps. I wish I could say that when they buried the bodies properly, there was a great burden lifted off my shoulders, but I cannot say that.  Much like no matter how hard they scrub away the grime on my flesh, the ink remains deep within the skin.  I will carry this burden for the rest of my life.

“Open your eyes”

Professor, have you dozed off again?  I’ve made my move 10 minutes ago.  “I’m sorry, Isaac. My old mind wanders sometimes” Like leaves they dance, and I watch.  But I still wish for the day. The day I can put them all to rest. The day I won’t have to...

Open my eyes.

If you would like to print this piece out to distribute it throughout your town, please include the following message:
After the Holocaust, the U.N declared "Never Again," would they let such an atrocity happen, but since then there have been Genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and now, Darfur.
This short story is part of an anti Genocide, anti Ignorance project called  Open Eyes. To learn more and contribute go to www.openeyesforgenocide.blogspot.com

#5

Untitled

Anonymous

Love and sunlight
bundled together, add some
food and water and you
have a person full of smiles
and thoughts, more things
to say than you can imagine
all waiting inside to be
let out, things that could
change the world or at least
bring a light to someone else's face--
and then with one violent act
systematic, merciless act of hate
and greed and unthinking brutality
someone wipes out that voice
all that sunshine all those days
someone decides that no one matters
that no one has a right to live
that it's better, more convenient,
or just collateral damage
if you end up in a hole
with your eyes closed
and all your thoughts left unsaid.

If you want to print this poem out and distribute it throughout your town, please include the following message on the back of the paper:

The UN declared "Never Again," after the Holocaust, but since then there have been Genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and now, Darfur. This piece is part of an anti Genocide, anti ignorance project called Open Eyes. To learn more and contribute, visit www.openeyesforgenocide.blogspot.com

#4

The Fire in their EyesAnna Ingraham

If you would like to print this out and distribute it throughout your town, please include this message on the back of the paper:

In the ongoing Darfur Genocide, Janjaweed soldiers handcuffed schoolgirls and burned them alive. The UN declared "Never Again," after the Holocaust, but since then there
have been Genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and now, Darfur. This piece
is part of an anti Genocide, anti ignorance project called Open Eyes. To
learn more and contribute, visit www.openeyesforgenocide.blogspot.com

#3

Untitled
David Littlefield

genocide is a perversion of humanity that is refracted through several spheres of glass, transformed into a numeric code designed to reproduce color and light information onto a quarter sized piece of highly manipulated metals, absorbed through a metallic mesh microphone, fused together, transferred through a wire onto a computer, converted into a specific series of 0's and 1's, rearranged for maximum emotional impact, consolidated, broken down into billions of invisible particles, shot through three hundred miles of atmosphere into space, received and transmitted by a sophisticated system of metals and plastics orbiting the earth, beamed back down to the surface, reassembled back into 0's and 1's, interpreted by 4.9 ounces of sweatshop labor, converted into a series of flashing lights and minute changes in air density, refracted through the lens of a human eye, absorbed by a flap of skin inside a human ear, transferred through a network of electrical impulses, and interpreted by a human brain

If you would like to print this out to distribute it throughout your town, please include this message on the back of the paper:
The UN declared "Never Again," after the Holocaust, but since then there have
been Genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda and now, Darfur. This piece is part
of an anti Genocide, anti ignorance project called Open Eyes. To learn more and
contribute, visit www.openeyesforgenocide.blogspot.com