Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Chris Clarkson Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Chris Clarkson (Heywood and Middleton) (Con)]

Having been born and raised in Germany, where people do not shy away from their past lest the lessons be forgotten, I thought I was reasonably well versed in this subject. Then, last January, I had the opportunity to visit Yad Vashem. I would urge any Member here to visit that memorial, Auschwitz-Birkenau, or any of the other testaments to the unspeakable evil we are debating today. I have no shame in saying that that experience broke me.

There is a passage in the Talmud that states:

“Once a person has sinned and repeated the sin, [he treats it] as if it has become permitted.”

That verse warns of the mesmeric ease with which the worst of human behaviour can be repeated and then normalised—what political theorist Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”. We have a duty, as a people who have enjoyed nearly 1,000 years of relative wealth, prosperity and freedom, to stand against that banality of evil wherever we perceive it. We have not always been equal to that task.

One of the darkest stains on the soul of this nation and, indeed, this place began with the phrase

“a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

The catastrophe that followed allowed us to know those people a lot better, yet we still abandoned them to over 40 years of communist oppression after world war two as we turned inward to look after ourselves. “Enlightened self-interest” is rarely anything but. As Martin Niemöller once put it:

“Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestierte.”

“When they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me.”

In commemorating the shoah, we must not satisfy ourselves that we are remembering an historical event that happened many years ago; in a very real sense, it is ongoing. The places—Darfur, Srebrenica, Rwanda—and the names—Yazidi, Rohingya, Uyghur—have changed, but the evil has not.

By our simple luck of birth, we cannot justify turning a blind eye. Nor can modern geopolitical realpolitik give a free pass to the perpetrators, whom we meet on a regular basis, whom we talk to, and one of whom we invited here to give a speech in Westminster Hall. When Andrew Marr can show the Chinese ambassador footage of Uyghurs being rounded on to trains and his response is to talk about tourism in Xinjiang, and when official Chinese social media accounts can boast of liberating Uyghur women by sterilising them, we are staring into the void. We must decide whether we want the void to stare back at us.

As we remember the 6 million stolen lives of the shoah—HaShem yikom damam—I hope that Members across the Chamber will also remember those still fighting to live just because of who they are.