professors, who looked into how the education can best be leveraged to have a lasting effect on genocide prevention in the society.
The reflection on genocide requires, above all, a broad analysis of social, political and moral conditions that enable some ideologically incorporated group to gather the strength and tools to carry out their murderous visions. At the same time, thought should be given to the passivity of most people even against the most extreme events.
In the course of the conference, Dr. Piotr M.A. Cywiński called for conclusions to be drawn from the silence of the world against last year’s genocide, which occurred in Burma. In his opinion, the then mass murders fully exhausted both definitions of genocide adopted by the UN and Rafał Lemkin.
Meanwhile, the only thing the UN General Assembly could do was express grave concern over the reports flowing from there. Little more than that was the stir in the world media and the human society that was completely uninterested in it.
"Thus, the mechanism described by Pastor Niemoeller returned, who observed decades ago that “When they came for the communists, socialists, trade unionists, Jews, I did not speak out because I was not a communist, socialist, trade unionist or Jew. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me," Piotr Cywiński, said.
He also stated that without in-depth education curricula on extermination and other genocide in school programmes that is not just limited to history; it would be impossible to bring about significant changes in the response of the world, especially in the age of growing populism, demagogy and the return of various forms of xenophobia.