"We rightly say 'Never again'. But action is much harder"
Koif Annan - UN Secretary General
Today marks 60 years since Soviet troops entered Auschwitz and liberated the captives who has survived this Nazi death camp. It is right that we pause to remember such horrific events. It is right that we stop and morn.
Yet our remembrance has fails to stop genocide happening again. The list of genocides that have taken place, which are still taking place, makes horrific and depressing reading. Why did our resolve to never let this happen again fail those in the killing fields of
Cambodia, the camps in Kosovo, the villagers of Rwanda and Burundi? Perhaps the most shocking of recent mass murders was the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Lebanon. It was not the scale of this that shocked the most, but that Israel, the people who had survived the Holocaust were complicit in this killing.
As Jeremiah reminds us, "the heart is more deceitful than all else, and is desperately sick; who can understand it"? We live in a world full of deceit and desperately sick hearts, and politicians cannot provide the cure. All the more reason to pray as Jesus taught his disciples, "come your kingdom, be done your will on earth as it is in heaven".
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