Just one day

The day to remember what happens when the philosophy of selfless sacrifice, the belief that the common good is more important than people pursuing their own ends, the belief that the ends justify the means, the belief that people's ancestry is more important than their deeds, and when individualism is snuffed out completely and absolutely.

Holocaust Memorial Day is a day to recall the millions who were systematically removed from their homes, transported as cattle, enslaved, tortured and murdered industrial style in a manner that has yet to be paralleled by any regime.

It is also a day now to remember how the radical anti-capitalist Red Khmers took over Cambodia, declared Year Zero, abolished money, abolished property, systematically emptied the cities and shot, terrorised, tortured and starved between a quarter and a third of the population of that impoverished country - with the full material and moral support of the People's Republic of China.

A day to remember when the Orthodox Christian Serbian fascists went from town to town in Bosnia Hercegovina and ordered out the non-Serb men and boys, marched them out of town and shot them, and then went about raping the women and girl children of the towns (and one should not forget the Catholic Croatian fascists who did the same on a less organised scale to non-Croats).

A day to remember when the Hutu people of Rwanda had the fear and hatred struck into them to slaughter and butcher the Tutsi people, on a scale and extent that most has never really fully understood.

AND especially a day to remember when the Islamist thugs backed by the Sudanese dictatorship entered Darfur to slaughter, starve, rape and maim thousands of those who were not of them.

Many other mass slaughters and murders should also be part of today, and hopefully they will also be noted, such as the murder of Armenians under Turkish rule in the early 20th century, the Soviet slaughter of ethnic minorities and deemed class enemies under Lenin and Stalin, Mao's mass starvation of Chinese people in the 1960s, the murder, disappearance and purge of one third of the people of Equatorial Guinea in the early 1970s.  The list goes on.

It is why the use of the term "holocaust" should not be used lightly.  It is about the systematic slaughter and indiscriminate murder of vast numbers of people because of their background.   A scourge that the 21st century has sadly not yet purged from the desires of some politicians or religious leaders.