Remembering the Srebrenica Genocide

Srebrenica ceremony: Crowd chases Serbian PM as more victims buried

There’s a famous quote by Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana, better known as George Santayana:
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
I couldn’t agree more with the famous Spanish philosopher. I would add to it that the same is bound to happen to those that don’t even know history and current events to begin with, let alone worry about remembering it.
I vividly remember going to the movies to watch “Schindler’s List” in 1993. “How terrible!” I remember thinking as I left the theater. As a young teenager, I took comfort in knowing that such brutal barbarism, with people being massacred just because of the faith, was something that had happened before my time. We sure must have evolved and advanced as humans since then and it was now a thing of the past. How naïve. It was only as an adult that I learned that my own people, Catholics, had been tortured and kept in concentration camps in UK from 1971 to 1975 or that at that same time “Schindler’s List” was released Bosniaks were being slaughtered, children getting their throats slit by the thousands and systematic rape was being perpetrated both as an instrument of terror and ethnic cleansing.
It’s been 20 years now since the Srebrenica Genocide where more than 8.000 men, women and most of all children were massacred during the Bosnian war. As you read this, bodies are still being recovered and buried by their loved ones. Many are still missing.
What about today though? Do we know or even care about what’s happening in places like Palestine and Yemen? Or do we have to wait another decade so as to only then go “how terrible”?
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. Let’s make sure we don't do that. Let’s make sure we learn what’s really happening around us even if sometimes it takes some extra effort to see through the mainstream media smoke curtain.
We have no choice but to do that if we expect to be ready for what’s coming our way.
FerFAL
Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”.