I worry what happens when the last of those that actually remember any of this die and all we're left with is the stories and the grainy footage. Humanity's track record for repeating mistakes is not encouraging.
There have been acts of genocide since World War 2 so it's not really a memory problem. To have countries not repeat mistakes like this would need a new approach?
The memory thing can be tricked. "This time is different", "These savages deserve it" and "We need to preserve ourselves against this invasion" are excuses I hear every day.
The comparison you appear to be hinting at is poor. A better fit:
Suppose the Holocaust had gone down a tad differently. Instead of a German army sweeping across Europe, the German Nazis had simply migrated to neighboring countries. Let's say that Poland was mostly Jewish, and that German Nazis generally agreed that German Nazis shouldn't convert to having Polish/Jewish culture. So the immigration happens, and the Holocaust follows. Would it have been wrong for those Polish Jews to build a wall or impose a German Nazi ban?
Similar cases have actually happened. Consider the North American aborigines (American Indians, native Americans, etc.). They did not prevent immigration from Europe, and they paid dearly. Consider the Christians in Lebanon, frequently slaughtered by those who have immigrated in the last 70 years. All the world over, since the dawn of time, things have often gone very badly for those who failed to defend territory and preserve it for their own group.
> To have countries not repeat mistakes like this would need a new approach?
The old approach is the best approach. Novels and movies are a good way of passing this information in a way that appeals to our intelligence and to our feelings.
And I'm not only talking about "Schindler's List", but also on the topics in X-Men commercial movies.
What we can't experience ourselves, we can learn it from books and movies. Oral history did that for millennia, and it survived in myths and religion even beyond it was intended. Each time you recommend a good book that teaches a lesson, you are part of that chain of shared knowledge.
> There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.
-- Hannah Arendt
Read the serious thoughts of the heavy weights who lived through that time. Don't other Nazism, so many things that made it tick have since metastasized, not vanished. I would say we're constantly reenacting it on various scales, and to during that then solemnly swear to never forget that one horrible thing is kind of perverse in its own right.
> I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’.
> When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.
> For my mother, the Nazi holocaust was a chapter in the long history of the horror of war. It was not itself a war – she was emphatic that it was an extermination, not a war – but it was a unique chapter within the war. So for her, war was the ultimate horror. When she saw Vietnamese being bombed during the Vietnam War, it was the Nazi holocaust. It was the bombing, the death, the horror, the terror, that she herself had passed through. When she saw the distended bellies of starving children in Biafra, it was also the Nazi holocaust, because she remembered her own pangs of hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto.
-- Norman Finkelstein
Read Sebastian Haffner's book about the times in Germany before the Nazis and see if you can find parallels, I found it uncanny. Everybody and their dog is all about numbers, be it users, money, hits. Not about judging your workmanship with your own mind. Judging "objectively" is something we actually pretend we can do, rather than something only lunatics would assume for themselves.
Hannah Arendt again:
> The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
> One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
> For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
> The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different.
> The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more...
Well, that's kinda encouraging. Interesting to see the number of genocides fall off starting in 1989. Maybe normal statistical variation + dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991?
Depending on where you live, if you pay taxes you probably already have, millions of them, for atrocities on a scale that make Kristallnacht look tame.
olewhalehunter said "millions" in the context of a singular "you", which is the exaggeration. Of course, collectively, all the US tax payers have paid for millions of weapons.
One of the greatest privileges I had while I was in school in Germany was listening to Holocaust survivors, live on stage, speak about their and their parents experiences.
When learning about the Nazi time in history class I always had some amount of emotional distance between me and the subject.
Hearing survivors' accounts made away with that. That was when I, as a German(who had a grand-grandfather who fought for the Nazis), felt deep genuine regret and sorrow for the actions(or inaction) of my ancestors.
I worry what will happen when the last survivor dies.
In kindergarten I asked a friend why "Hitler didn't like Jews". He said his grandmother was Jewish and he didn't like her, which made sense to us. When I was 9, my Jewish best friend and I had friendship armbands in neon colors, which I loved to bits, exclaiming that "I'm a Neon-Nazi". Still totally clueless, it was still all just words to me. The deeply appalled reaction of his mother was like a gut punch, probably like my innocent but horrid statement was to her.
When I was 11 and alone, I randomly changed channels (we only had the 3) and was faced with a bunch of corpses being shoved into a grave by a caterpillar. I remember that as if it was yesterday, and with everything I learned since then, that was the horrible anchor. But like you probably too, I wouldn't want to unsee it either. And I still sometimes can't help but wonder about the streets I walk through. Did some of those houses see people get dragged out and carried to their murder? How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.
While I also think testimonies, big and small, by real people (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem/videos ) are important and need to be preserved, I can honestly say that for me, they were not really necessary, that is they came long after this had already become and integral part of me. Even "just" what can be read in books sufficed, but that's because I went looking for it, because I needed to learn. Similarly, I think it's perfectly possible for people to be so jaded to even shrug off a testimony given in person. So that's both good and bad news, I guess?
>How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.
The dead were people too, not saints. They share the burden of creating an unjust society.
I'm genuinely curious to read more accounts of those very early days when Jewish people were first being treated like the enemy by a very small but vocal minority wielding righteous indignation as their weapon of choice.
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."
Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
33 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 88.4 ms ] threadAre you seriously equating disallowing entry to systematic extermination?
Suppose the Holocaust had gone down a tad differently. Instead of a German army sweeping across Europe, the German Nazis had simply migrated to neighboring countries. Let's say that Poland was mostly Jewish, and that German Nazis generally agreed that German Nazis shouldn't convert to having Polish/Jewish culture. So the immigration happens, and the Holocaust follows. Would it have been wrong for those Polish Jews to build a wall or impose a German Nazi ban?
Similar cases have actually happened. Consider the North American aborigines (American Indians, native Americans, etc.). They did not prevent immigration from Europe, and they paid dearly. Consider the Christians in Lebanon, frequently slaughtered by those who have immigrated in the last 70 years. All the world over, since the dawn of time, things have often gone very badly for those who failed to defend territory and preserve it for their own group.
The old approach is the best approach. Novels and movies are a good way of passing this information in a way that appeals to our intelligence and to our feelings.
And I'm not only talking about "Schindler's List", but also on the topics in X-Men commercial movies.
What we can't experience ourselves, we can learn it from books and movies. Oral history did that for millennia, and it survived in myths and religion even beyond it was intended. Each time you recommend a good book that teaches a lesson, you are part of that chain of shared knowledge.
The new approach is changing human nature through genetic engineering / mind emulation.
-- Hannah Arendt
Read the serious thoughts of the heavy weights who lived through that time. Don't other Nazism, so many things that made it tick have since metastasized, not vanished. I would say we're constantly reenacting it on various scales, and to during that then solemnly swear to never forget that one horrible thing is kind of perverse in its own right.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-f...
> I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’.
> When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.
> For my mother, the Nazi holocaust was a chapter in the long history of the horror of war. It was not itself a war – she was emphatic that it was an extermination, not a war – but it was a unique chapter within the war. So for her, war was the ultimate horror. When she saw Vietnamese being bombed during the Vietnam War, it was the Nazi holocaust. It was the bombing, the death, the horror, the terror, that she herself had passed through. When she saw the distended bellies of starving children in Biafra, it was also the Nazi holocaust, because she remembered her own pangs of hunger in the Warsaw Ghetto.
-- Norman Finkelstein
Read Sebastian Haffner's book about the times in Germany before the Nazis and see if you can find parallels, I found it uncanny. Everybody and their dog is all about numbers, be it users, money, hits. Not about judging your workmanship with your own mind. Judging "objectively" is something we actually pretend we can do, rather than something only lunatics would assume for themselves.
Hannah Arendt again:
> The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality.
> One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
> Now the police dreams that one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at any given moment to establish who is related to whom and in what degree of intimacy; and, theoretically, this dream is not unrealizable although its technical execution is bound to be somewhat difficult. If this map really did exist, not even memory would stand in the way of the totalitarian claim to domination; such a map might make it possible to obliterate people without any traces, as if they had never existed at all.
> For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst.
> The fanaticism of the elite cadres, absolutely essential for the functioning of the movement, abolishes systematically all genuine interest in specific jobs and produces a mentality which sees every conceivable action as an instrument for something entirely different.
> The ceaseless, senseless demand for original scholarship in a number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famous knowing of more...
According to that source, in 2012, for the first time in at least a hundred years, there were no ongoing genocides.
Also, here are some numbers on famine:
Data Dive: Slipping into famine http://www.reuters.com/article/us-datadive-famine-idUSKBN18M...
What about China's oppression of certain religious groups such as Falun Gong & Buddhists?
When learning about the Nazi time in history class I always had some amount of emotional distance between me and the subject.
Hearing survivors' accounts made away with that. That was when I, as a German(who had a grand-grandfather who fought for the Nazis), felt deep genuine regret and sorrow for the actions(or inaction) of my ancestors.
I worry what will happen when the last survivor dies.
When I was 11 and alone, I randomly changed channels (we only had the 3) and was faced with a bunch of corpses being shoved into a grave by a caterpillar. I remember that as if it was yesterday, and with everything I learned since then, that was the horrible anchor. But like you probably too, I wouldn't want to unsee it either. And I still sometimes can't help but wonder about the streets I walk through. Did some of those houses see people get dragged out and carried to their murder? How would the dead judge our too common unwillingness to speak out against injustice, even though we're very free to do so in comparison to them? There's so much, but I fear it less than I fear looking away.
While I also think testimonies, big and small, by real people (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/user/YadVashem/videos ) are important and need to be preserved, I can honestly say that for me, they were not really necessary, that is they came long after this had already become and integral part of me. Even "just" what can be read in books sufficed, but that's because I went looking for it, because I needed to learn. Similarly, I think it's perfectly possible for people to be so jaded to even shrug off a testimony given in person. So that's both good and bad news, I guess?
The dead were people too, not saints. They share the burden of creating an unjust society.
"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow