Irish Examiner view: Learn the right lessons from history

A Palestinian boy inspects the damage at the site of an Israeli strike on the Al-Shati refugee camp on July 9. Picture: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP/Getty

Just days ago, we passed the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, when some 10,000 people were murdered in the biggest mass killing since the Second World War.

Many survivors never came back, and those who finally have are treated as foreigners even on their own property.

But what have we learned from that event in history, as revisited by UN special rapporteur Mary Lawlor on these pages? The genocide isn’t even taught in local schools, while hardline politicians in the region have taken to say that there wasn’t a genocide at all and the numbers were inflated.

So many people have been killed by the Israeli invasion of Gaza that the official death toll must be behind the times: some 800 have been killed trying to access food alone since May. And what about Sudan, as highlighted by our columnist Jennifer Horgan last week? Or eastern Ukraine, where a sustained campaign of war crimes by Russia has been ongoing since 2014, well before the wider invasion?

We can learn well or badly from history. Critics of the Trump regime noting that it is following the German playbook of the 1930s are now being reminded that Germany then was following the examples it had seen of how America had treated its indigenous and black populations. That’s exactly the sort of thing people should be learning never to do again, not repeating with concentration camps in the Florida swamps.

We have a duty of care, not only to our own descendants but the wider world we’d like to see. But we also have to put a structure and system in place where following generations can be clearly taught the wrongs of our collective past.

As Mick Clifford noted on Saturday, much online hate speech is driven by fear. We have avoided the worst excesses of far right and anti-immigrant hate so far in Ireland, but that is no reason to be complacent. You never think it can happen to you, or your neighbours, until it does.

No action exists in a vacuum, and that includes violence and hate. Any single incident — Tulsa race riots to gerrymandering, or the massacre of Protestants at Scullabogue during the 1798 rebellion — is a culmination of a steady drip of other pressures, fears, and flashpoints. We must always, always do our utmost to learn from history to make sure such things never happen here.

Changing the narrative

While we consider the lessons from history, and the history we hope to leave to our descendants, it’s worth noting that sometimes the lessons are simply not heeded — or, indeed, are completely forgotten.

The conservative US backlash to James Gunn’s Superman film should, perhaps, have been expected given the charged environment and the cult-like status of the current regime, but is nonetheless sobering. Superman has variously been criticised as “woke” (is empathy and helping those less fortunate a bad thing?). Somewhat depressingly, one of the critics has been Dean Cain, who while playing Superman on TV for several years evidently internalised nothing about the character. Meanwhile, Superman’s background is seemingly being retconned by social media commentators, with “he is not an immigrant, he’s an orphan” being a typical critique.

Let us remind ourselves, if we need reminding, that Superman’s origin story is landing on Earth as an unaccompanied child refugee from space. He didn’t exactly present a passport and papers on arrival. This same Superman was created by Jewish immigrants to America. His chief antagonist throughout the comic strips of the 1930s was the Ku Klux Klan. He featured in posters in the 1950s and 1960s reminding American schoolchildren that bigotry and discrimination was un-American. He has always been woke.

It is sad, to say the least, that we are living in a world where comic book supervillains are with us in daily life. Sadder still that a character created to show the commonality of humanity and its trials, joys, and potentials can become demonised by a social group who want to deny such basic unity, emboldened by a president who has never had an empathetic thought in his life.

Presidential race

At least, for all this country’s faults, we have a legacy of presidents who actually stand for something.

It is a plum job, and prestigious, so it should be no surprise that the first party-backed presidential candidate has finally been declared, but it is still a surprise that the big three — Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and Sinn Féin — were not the ones to do it.

Independent TD Catherine Connolly, endorsed by the Social Democrats and with support from members of Solidarity and People Before Profit, is effectively first out of the traps, with her campaign to officially begin next week. She needs 20 members of the Oireachtas to back her bid, and believes between parties and Independents that she has the numbers.

Mairead McGuinness is expected to get the nod for Fine Gael now that Seán Kelly has ruled himself out, while Fianna Fáil, Labour, and Sinn Féin are still deliberating.

While the election is still months away — expected in October or November, with incumbent Michael D Higgins finishing his second term in November — it remains surprising that there has been so little organised campaigning by the big parties. Or by any party, really, with some non-party candidates occasionally taking centre stage, even if the odds of them being on the ballot are slim (but not impossible).

In his column last week, Fergus Finlay stressed the importance of having an open contest for the presidency, rather than a candidate elected by default by being the only choice. At least now we have the makings of a contest between individuals who demonstrate the sort of heart and quality advocated by our columnist Sarah Harte.

Will there be more? One hopes so. But ultimately, the president is our most prominent ambassador, and the choice should very much lie with the people.

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