Fields

 

Fields

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

A field of honour can be a battlefield or the setting for a duel, but ‘having a field day’ was originally a British military expression from about 1747 describing a day of manoeuvres or inspections out of doors rather than in indoor facilities. Soldiers would leave their barracks to practice battle drills and tactics. It was used in the Royal Navy to describe a day of ‘deep cleaning’ a ship.

Now it means deriving a good deal of pleasure, sometimes at the expense of others.

One may have a field day by playing the field, which can be fun for the principal player but not necessarily for the other participants. The others might not consider themselves ‘on a level playing field,’ where everyone has an equal chance of success, and of becoming ‘the best in field.’  

‘The Killing Fields’ is the term for mass grave sites in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge, under the control of Pol Pot, committed the genocide of between 1.3 and 3 million people between 1975 and 1979, about a quarter of Cambodia’s population at the time. 

Anyone who posed a threat, real or imagined, was either executed or worked to death. Intellectual and professional people, religious groups, including Christians, Buddhists and Muslims, ethnic Vietnamese and Thai groups, were considered an obstacle to the creation of a Communist agrarian civilisation, a so-called ‘classless’ society.

Ultimately, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, and overwhelmed the Khmer Rouge. Subsequent decades were spent bringing the perpetrators to justice, some of whom died before the conclusion of the trials, which ran from 2006 to 2022.

Holocaust Memorial Day

 

Holocaust Memorial Day, Monday 27th January

Genocide is the deliberate political determination to destroy a racial, ethnic, religious, or national people.

January 27^th annually marks Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD). On that day in 1945, eighty years ago, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the largest camp of its kind. More than 7,000 prisoners were released. During the five years of its operation, more than one million men, women and children were murdered, ninety per cent of them Jewish. Victims also included Poles, Romani, Soviet prisoners of war, political prisoners, gay people, and those who were physically or mentally disabled.

From the HMD website: Auschwitz-Birkenau has become a symbol of the horror of industrialised murder, and what can happen when hatred is left unchecked.

 Holocaust Memorial Day also commemorates the millions of people worldwide who have been killed in genocides.

Remember the victims of the genocides of more than two million in Cambodia, under Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, 1975-1979, and around one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, in Rwanda, in 1994.

In July 1995, eight thousand Muslim men, and boys over the age of twelve, were murdered in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serbs. This was the largest mass murder in Europe since World War Two.

Darfur, Sudan, was the setting in 2003-2005 for the genocide of two hundred thousand black Africans. War continues in Sudan.

Discrimination and persecution, bigotry and hatred continue to this day, in every nation, in every walk of life. From casual generalisations and crude jokes to organised marches and demonstrations, we are only ever a short step away from the breakdown of a civilised, caring society.