Today I visited Auschwitz-Birkeneu. It was an extremely profound experience and impacted me greatly. I know that I will be thinking about it for a very long time to come, perhaps for years.
There is a point in the tour in Auschwitz-I where youāve spent a long time outside viewing the buildings but then they take you inside for the first time to show you some of the objects taken from the murdered victims if the camp. The first object that they show you is a roll of textiles made from human hair. The nazis sold this material commercially. The price was 1 mark per 2kg. Perhaps there are still buildings in Germany with human hair providing insulation beneath the carpets. Or in German attics there might still be sacks of old trinkets and the sacks are made from Jewish hair.
I turned around from staring at this material and saw in the distance a nightmare, barely visible through the gloom. As I approached my worst fears were confirmed. It was a massive rotting heap of female ponytails, almost as tall as myself. These were the ponytails that were taken from the young ladies who arrived and were immediately sent to the gas chambers. That image will always stay with me.
We moved on to Auschwitz-II Birkenau which is much bigger and is where the great majority of the killing occurred. It is an absolutely massive site, over 1 km2. It is full of the ruins of dormitory huts which run in a perfect regular grid as far as the eye can see. There was something very unnerving of how they were all perfectly aligned. It was so civilised and organised and yet so sinister and evil.
I stood on the remains of the train platform, where it was decided who from the arriving prisoners would be gassed immediately and who would be kept alive to work for a few months. Those people were also intended to die after a few months. There were about 90,000 prisoners in Auschwitz-II at any point. They vastly, vastly out numbered the guards but they had no chance of escape.
An howlinggust of wind wind blew through the ruins and across the grey site. It was then, standing on the ruins of that railway platform, looking at the awesome, sprawling, organised power of the state that I decided that everyone should have a revolver, locked inside an iron box in their house. That was the law in Ireland long ago after independence and it should be the law in Ireland again. Guns are dirty, nasty, ugly little things but we have grown lazy and decadent if we canāt see how it is necessary for the populace to be able to defend themselves against their government if necessary. We have lived a blessed existence that we have never needed to defend ourselves against our government before but thereās no way of guaranteeing that this blessed existence will continue forever. Gun enthusiasts are complete idiots, awful people, but ultimately the power of the government is just too great for the public to allow it a complete monopoly on violence. The laws on gun ownership in Ireland should be returned to the situation in my grandparentsā time, when the country was safer.
Like I said, it will take some time for me to draw conclusions about what Iāve seen today, if indeed I ever do. Perhaps I will stop using the phrase āhealth fascismā or perhaps Iāll decide that it needs to be used more often. I dont know.
But I know this: defend your freedoms at all cost. Give away nothing willingly. Fight tooth and nail for every inch that you have. Support the underdog - the black, the gay, the trans, the northerner, the prod, the corkonian. Glorify the individual. And resist NPHET. Resist these restrictions.
