WAS at the Holocaust museum in New York once and as I walked in tearful silence, past horrible pictures of concentration camps, faded pictures of pretty girls, anxious mothers, despairing fathers and eager sons who had been murdered; six million of them in the gas chambers, I realized the weapon used with sharp incision like precision, were not bullets or poison gas, but deception.
Till the doors of the gas chambers were closed on them, the poor victim had no idea he or she was going to die. The Nazi’s used deception to trick the Jews, used deception to fool the world, and used deception in making their own people believe their Ache Din had arrived! How frighteningly terrible are the power of lies!
The Germans even had a model village constructed, where Jews were shown going about their daily chores, looking happy and content, and to this village the Red Cross and other neutral international organizations were taken to fool them into believing nothing was wrong.
Later when a few Jews from Auschwitz escaped, fled to Switzerland and informed the world of the atrocities, no one believed them. The Germans had painted such a rosy picture that those escapees were nearly put in an asylum!
I learnt one lesson as I wandered through the horrors of that museum yesterday; that deception is the mightiest weapon one can use and is used today, in even more alarming proportions. Hitler used the camouflage of ‘progress’ as he went about his cruel, inhuman agenda. And ‘progress’ is a good enough, powerful shield to fool us all.
Most in our country are so happy when prices fall, when they get better infrastructure, cheaper housing or even a stable government, that they close their ears to whispers of what the government could otherwise be quietly doing.
Keep the people happy with food and jobs, give them houses and subsidy and while lost in this make believe world, horrors begin: First journalists are killed, then small thrusts into areas like the freedom of speech, then the controlling of the internet, and slowly but firmly the chains of control wrap around us.
The holocaust took place barely seventy years ago. There are people living who can tell you the horror of what a whole country cruelly did, and what any leader, using the tools of deception can do. Guard against deception. Open every seemingly rosy picture, every political ad that paints pictures about progress and look for the can of worms hidden behind every ache din promised..!
