Greetings from London.
My name is Andrew Barr, and I represent a group called Jews for Justice. We are all Jews – and many of our families suffered in the Holocaust. We therefore consider it as our moral and indeed sacred duty – to all the victims of the Holocaust – that we should warn against the danger of history repeating itself.
What has happened – across the developed world – in the last two years has evoked for us the collective memory of the history of Nazi Germany. We do not say that what is happening now should be compared to the Holocaust itself, but we do say that it should be compared to the sequence of events that led up to the Holocaust.
No-one living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s knew that the Holocaust was going to happen. No-one knew that millions of Jews were going to be exterminated. What people did know was that their civil liberties had been taken away from them under the guise of an emergency, and that a whole class of society had been excluded from public life under the guise of fighting a ‘virus’.
From 1935 onwards, two years into the Nazi regime, Jews were formally excluded from civil society; today, two years into the coronavirus panic, unvaccinated Germans are similarly excluded from public life – from public transport, from shops and cafes and restaurants.
Under the Nazi regime, Jews were vilified in the media as a threat to the health of the German nation; today, the unvaccinated are vilified in the media in exactly the same way.
Those who protest against the discrimination of the unvaccinated are condemned by the corporate media as ‘Nazis’ and ‘anti-Semites’ – which is the precise opposite of the truth. Those of us who protest against discrimination are in fact honouring the memory of the Holocaust; those who seek to silence us are the true Holocaust deniers – because they are denying us our right to learn from history.
The corporate media seek to silence us, and our posts are removed from social media because we question their narrative. It is no accident that today’s event is being held in the Bebelplatz, the site of a notorious conflagration of supposedly ‘un-German’ books by Nazi students in 1933. As the memorial here indicates, there was a direct line from the burning of books to the burning of people.
All children today are taught in school about the Holocaust: that it began with discrimination and censorship, and ended with genocide. Well, that lesson needs to be taught again – today we have discrimination and censorship; to what will they lead tomorrow?
To quote an old saying, ‘Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.’
We – Jews for Justice – are sending a warning to the entire world that we must learn from history. We may already be reliving the experience of Nazi Germany; we can yet avoid reliving the Holocaust. But we must act now, or it may be too late. We must speak out.
Above all, we Jews must speak out. It is our history; it is our collective experience. No-one can tell us that we are not allowed to shout out about it.
Thank you, children and adults of Berlin.
– Andrew Barr, London 16 February 2020