No thanks… I Really Bloody Well Do NOT want a Tour of a Genocide Site

When the macabre joins hands with the merciless money- making mind-set

Photo by Majkl Velner on Unsplash

I am visiting sunlit Krakow this Spring. I decided I needed to get away, put some distance between me and everything that was suffocating my spirit and burdening my soul. I have four days here, before I join people for a teaching assignment.

Sometimes one gets so tired of being the different one, the odd one out.

I have always been that one person labelled a troublemaker, taking a stance in a sea of compliance and conformity.

For instance, the very first time I went to hear some classical music being played… I think it was my third year at Uni – imagine my surprise when everybody in the audience – and the players on stage – stood up as one body. Why? Well the national anthem had began to be aired.

For a split second, I was taken by surprise. But not so much that I blindly followed the example of everyone. It was 1984 and I knew enough about the damn queen’s obscene extent of inherited wealth, to know I could not join in with even pretending to sing, God save the glorious queen etc etc’.

So, Dear Reader, I stayed seated. The philosophy MA student who had invited me, Mr Hippy with the long hair, wearing bangles and dirty jeans, who had impressed me with his dissertation on Human Rights and International Amnesty, kinda squirmed in his seat and his face reddened but he also did not get up.

From such symbolic acts of expressing no respect for Rule Britannia, to doing things that got me arreste, dismissed and disciplined at various workplaces, I have refused to go along to get along with the Whyte supremacist order that plays at being liberal/ socialist/ champion of civilised values and human rights.

Now I’m trying not to think of the changes on the socio- political stage of the U.K but it feels like forever that I ccan’t fit in with U.K. sensibilities, whether social or political .

Now in Krakow, I’m strolling along, rucksack on my back near the centre of the Old Quarter. admiring the plum trees in flower when this Polish guy approached me with leaflets, saying he offers tours of the Jewish Quarter, the area made famous by the film, ‘Schindler’s List’ and also, guided tours of Auswitz.

I didn’t need to think about it. I politely refused. But he persisted … He began quoting prices and then I got irritated and put my hand up to stop him.

‘Look, when I went to Cambodia I had no interest in seeing ‘the killing fields’ or the school that was used to slaughter people under Pol Pot. I don’t like that the suffering of the tortured and murdered becomes a tourist attraction. I don’t even know what good that does. I mean those people who go there, are they raising their voices in protest of the genocide in Gaza? Are they pushing for Natanyahu to be arrested ?

The guy was nothing if not persistent and came back at me with a suggestion that for €50 I could have a ride all around the Old Quarter in his open-air buggy. He pointed it out to me a few metres away. It was electric – not horse-drawn like the carriages I’d just passed.

Thanks but I prefer to walk said I. But maybe next year when my Italian friend joins me and as she can’t walk much, we’ll take your tour around this area. I took his leaflet and turned to go but he wanted to talk more.

“Here is my card. See, I’m a professor at the university, now retired. I’ll finish at 8.00 pm so I’ll be happy to talk more with you then, if you like”.

“Oh, that’s a long day for you”.

I honestly felt sorry for him having to hawk passersby to be customers for tours that he was probably sick of doing too .

But if my heart’s not in something, I just can’t do it. My perennially low bank balance is witness to that !

Far from having the sales pitch for selling fridges to Eskimos, I couldn’t even sell them to the Saudis. I just couldn’t do business with such corrupt lackeys of the West’s genocidal machine.

I did go back to the area where the retired Prof said he’d finish working because I was curious about life in Poland after the USSR broke up and wanted to see what he thought of Eastern Europe’s transition to a capitalist economy, hanging onto the coattails of the Western Empire.

Well Dear Reader, I believe he knew he didn’t have a moral leg to stand upon, making money off the macabre fascination with seeing the artefacts and architecture of a carefully planned genocide.

I recall the writer @angelamartinangel on Medium sharing in her article on Hanania, that:

The official reason Hanania gave for no longer writing in English was the profiteering by certain UK and US publishers from books glorifying the killing of Arabs by US and British special forces.

TONY HANANIA — THE WORLD’S MOST RECLUSIVE WRITER?

Not writing in English as a form of resistance…. Hmmm first of all, I don’t have that option, as I don’t have literacy in any other language, thanks to the monolingual central to the UK’s form of ‘education’. I have been trying to remedy that, by teaching myself Urdu in recent months. Secondly, communicating in English is more effective as it reaches people all around the world. English language learning for liberators practices is the principle I’ve followed as a teacher of English.

Back to the retiredPolish professor. I think he knew very well, he was profiting from the ghoulish interest in the Zionist-manufactured Holocaust industry, that seeks to keep Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis, in the public/global consciousness all the time. The blatant idiocy, the moral bankruptcy, of blanketing with silence, the decades of genocidal actions by Zionists is of course never to be mentioned. Nor too, the complicity of the Zionists with the Nazis in order to to garner world-wide support for the establishment of Israel on Palestinian land.

I had merely joined the dots, during our brief conversation.

So, he didn’t turn up. Or maybe he was just tired, having done a 10-hour shift, trying to sweet talk foreigners into spending their money.

Howsoever that may be, it is definitely the case that wherever you go, there you are… and in Poland too, I just can’t go along to get along.

Perhaps my resistance is a luxury few can afford.

But in point of fact, I’d rather go without material goods than the moral good that nourishes my spirit . Is that being priggish? I hardly think so !

It’s simply that if I and my community were being murdered over decades in a planned genocide, I’d be frigging livid that people want to come and gawk at the places we were tortured and died.

It’s not that difficult to understand, is it ?

What do you think ?