Letters to the Editor: History Remembered, History Rewritten
Two powerful letter-writers make compelling arguments
Image: ChatGPT
Forgotten lessons of the Holocaust
The world remembered the Holocaust, but not us in this corner of the globe. We seem to have forgotten this important international day of remembrance.
There was no mention of the Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 in the media or by any politician or government. It happened a long time ago in far away Europe.
So why should we bother about it? Eighty years ago on January 27 Soviet troops entered Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and liberated the surviving inmates. Auschwitz was the the biggest and most evil of the concentration camps. More than 1.3 million Jews, as well as other prisoners, were gassed to death at Auschwitz.
It was part of Hitler's grand plan to eliminate the Jews from the face of the earth. Millions of Jews were rounded up all over Europe, loaded onto wagon trains like cattle and sent to the concentration camps to be gassed to death. Their crime? They were Jews.
To mark this atrocity on humanity, the United Nations declared 27 January Holocaust Memorial Day. Despite the world’s outrage at the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews, there have been several genocides after the Holocaust: Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and many more.
There are still some survivors of the Holocaust and they tell the world of how they survived the horrors of the concentration camps.
Of course, the remembering the Holocaust is a very significant day of mourning in Israel. But the irony is that the people who suffered the most under Hitler have now become ruthless killers themselves. Netanyhau is no better than Hitler.
Backed by Trump, he has taken the lives of over 71 000 innocent Palestians in Gaza.
How could a nation which suffered so much under Hitler themselves turn into butchers? | T Markandan Kloof
Defence of Cuba defies history, reality
If The Idler was still being published in your sister paper, The Mercury, the late Graham Linscott would have had a field day taking apart the hyperbole and duplicity of Cuba Society activist Clever Banganayi’s spirited defence of Cuba’s dystopia (January 28).
To be fair, however, Banganayi’s piece is a model essay on how truth can be distorted and inverted.
Repeatedly he refers to Cuba as having a sovereign government wedded to the principle of self-determination. Yet in reality it is a communist dictatorship which has been the fiefdom of the Castros for 60 years. But in Banganayi’s lexicon, oppression is freedom.
He boasts that Cuba has “stood up against imperialism.” However, the record shows that Cuba was a vassal state under Soviet imperialism until 1991. Since then it has allied with Chinese imperialism. Banganayi rails against “plunder” by the “international order” yet is silent about the Castro family’s plunder of Cuba and how Fidel Castro became a billionaire. That said, Banganayi exhibits another fine example of when propaganda is rendered as truth.
That line of deception echoes blatantly in his insistence that “Cuba is a free and independent nation that will not give in to threats.” If that was the case, why do many Cubans languish in jails because they oppose the oppression which masquerades as freedom? How is it that more than one million have fled Cuba because of repression and disillusionment with communist dystopia?
Fear that Trump may end communist dictatorship of Cuba and liberate its oppressed people, reflects Banganayi’s realization that the looting and exploitation that has sustained the communist elite for six decades would end – the same fear the ANC has of losing power in South Africa.
Content to parrot the lie that “law and justice” prevail in Cuba, Banganayi is silent about the impoverishment of the majority of Cubans where in the 21st century, basic access to water is not out of a tap but out of a bucket and where all aspects of life are regulated by the communist regime.
As the Overton Window widens in 2026, Clever Banganayi’s days of churning out untruths about Cuba are not looking too promising because Trump is not going to compromise on the Monroe Doctrine as it applies in the Caribbean. | DR DUNCAN DU BOIS Bluff
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