Never again?

Byline: Mahir Ali

IT will be 75 years ago next Monday that soldiers from the Red Army entered Poland's Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous of the extermination camps set up by Nazi Germany.

The sounds of war had by then resonated for weeks, reviving the optimism of inmates who had abandoned hope long ago. RelaAtively able-bodied inmates were marched off. The sick and the infirm were left behind without guards, although Nazi troops occasionally returned to reduce their numbers.

The Soviet troops were greeted by the living dead - the emaciated survivors of one of the most heinous experiments in human history. Among them there were no longer any Soviet prisoners of war, some of the earliest inmates in Auschwitz, alongside Polish Jews and dissidents.

Since 2005 the occasion has been commemorated as International Holocaust ReAAmembrance Day, and two of the Auschwitz camps are a UN World Heritage site. Could there conceivably be a worse heritage than the smoking crematoria of the mid-1940s?

We are drifting down a slope that leads to the ghosts of Hitler and Stalin.

The Allies who defeated Nazi Germany in 1945 vowed that 'never again' would such crimes against humanity be tolerated. But it hasn't exactly worked out that way.

The sheer vindictive ferocity of Nazi crimes against humanity has never been replicated. But its echoes have never quite died away either.

European colonial powers, notably France in Indochina and Algeria, saved some of their worst atrocities for the postwar period. The United States justifiably takes pride in its role in defeating the Nazi menace, but right afterwards became complicit in perpetrating comparable horrors, beginning in Korea and not quite culminating in Vietnam.

Arguably, worse has followed. The awful term 'ethnic cleansing' wasn't coined in the 1940s but, from Bosnia to Rwanda, the concept was par for the course 50 years later. And it could be argued that in no nation state have the ideas of racial superiority been more consistently and assiduously applied than in Israel, which is often seen as recompense for the Holocaust.

Fascism never really disappeared following the defeat of Nazi Germany and its collaborators in 1945. Somewhat ironically, some of its earliest manifestations surfaced in the US, where members of the far right, in their frequently violent opposition to communists, Jews and African-Americans - all condemned in the same breath - threatened to 'finish Hitler's work'.

That was then. In much of...