From an article in yesterday’s Financial Times (link only good with trial subscription):
One year ago on these pages, Edgar M. Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, warned of surging anti-Semitism in Europe, a phenomenon most thought had disappeared more than half a century ago. This week we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation; at the same time, a BBC study has found that nearly half those surveyed have never heard of Auschwitz, suggesting that the memory of the Holocaust remains unacceptably corralled in a Jewish ghetto.
I don’t know what percentage of the American public has heard of Auschwitz. Probably similar to Europe. But Auschwitz is not in Montana; it’s in Poland. And there’s never been anything quite like it in the history of the human race (except maybe Treblinka).
(HT: Catherine)
*sigh* Maybe we have to let Europe be overrun for a couple of years again. It seems to be the only way they learn anything.
Indeed, Richard. “Life is a harsh teacher, delivering the test first, and the lesson after.”
Roger,
Maybe part of the problem here is with words no one likes to hear. `Holocaust’ is bad enough, `Auschwitz’ somehow worse. Yet a strong majority of Euros, I imagine, have some idea how Hitler felt about Jews. Why he was that way is another matter, and the lack of easy answers is perhaps part of the problem in remembering. I recall learned university profs, not so long ago, spouting on about the economic and status problems of the German petit-bourgeoisie, as if this were sufficient to explain antisemitic resentment. But then they were left-liberals who, of course, did not question deeply their own Marxoid resentment, let alone the continuing world historical implications of the chosen people’s discovery/invention of monotheism. Similarly, how many commentators today dare dwell on the fundamental problem with Islam: that it is in the first place, and thus inherently, a somewhat negative response to Judeo-Christian precedence in religion?
I have a friend who immigrated from China a few years ago. She was a university chemistry teacher, and I was a little surprised to discover she has no idea of the Beatles, Oprah, and much else about western pop and high culture. But she does know about Hitler and the Jews. Yet, despite my efforts, I don’t think she understands what motivated him. In thinking I understand, thanks to sixty years of largely Jewish (surprise surprise) inquiry, I wonder if I’m just more learned in my ignorance and anger.
And there’s never been anything quite like [Auschwitz] in the history of the human race (except maybe Treblinka).
Um…. the “killing fields” in Cambodia? Stalin and the Ukraine? The Rape of Nanqing? The Romans and Carthaginians at the end of the Punic Wars?
Sadly, Roger, I think you’re mistaken.
Charlie, murder (as opposed to killing in war or sacrifice) is everywhere and time a sin. This is one reason to believe in a universal morality and our need to condemn all murders equally.
Somehow perversely related to this fundamental equality is the desire of the murderer to destroy the hated presence of his putatively superior or inferior victim. That this desire is in vain, because the memory of a tragic figure will survive to torment, or at least leave the murderer incapable of standing tall without a need to deceive, is what murderers donít get. Because it is the murdererís desire to eliminate the historical specificity of his resented victims, it is the survivorsí duty to remember that specificity.
The horror of genocide, where the victims are reduced to numbers, abstractions, is that the murderers are discovering that if you kill enough it becomes harder and harder to tell the victimsí story and hence remember. No one victimís story can exemplify the crime. Stories just come to an end, largely forgotten alongside their families in the killing fields. It is a small point, but some genocidal regimes are somewhat more aware of this. It is no accident that ìAuschwitzî was located in the Polish countryside and that the killers were told to forget their victims.
After genocide, our memory is largely in debt to the survivorsí stories. Otherwise, the story is largely and inevitably the story of the killersí resentment and methods, not of victimsí lives. Given this horrible situation, it is important but not enough to condemn all murders equally; we should also remember what we can of the specificity of each crime. Antisemitism is not the same as the communistís hatred for all things bourgeois, notwithstanding the similar consequences and Marxís hatred of Jews as epitomizing the bourgeois. One might note about a certain place its gas chambers and Mengele.
There has never been ANYTHING quite like the Holocaust or Auschwitz… because those events crouch right smack dab in the middle of a century that believed that with enough wealth, and enough education, societies would rise out of Evil, and people would become nicer and kinder and more reasonable, as well as cleaner.
Instead, the Nazis showed us that a sophisticated culture (Bach, Beethoven, Einstein, etc etc), with an up to date system of roads and railways and electricity and radios and movies… can put all that knowledge to work doing Evil on a grand and modern scale unheard of in history. Lists were made, people were funneled into Hell, and records were kept, slaughter of humans was made into a bureaucratic process. Indeed.
I have a book of commentaries of early 20th century “modern” thinkers, who had thrown aside all that silly old stuff about “God”… nice people who could not see Hitler, and Stalin, and the systems they built – for what they were. It took a Victorian, embued with that old time Victorian religion and romance to recognize what was growing in Europe in the 1930s.
And that is what “Auschwitz” should mean to all of us – for all our pride and comfort and education, we make our world, and we have shown that we can make a very evil one. Caution is advised.
Heather, thank you for sparing me the effort to compose my thoughts on the exceptionalism of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. I was compelled to comment on Roger’s post when the comment difficulties prevented new comments.
As you so well expressed, the special horror of the Holocaust versus other horrors of history (even the gulag) arises partly from the fact that Central Europe in general and the Germanic region in particular had achieved such heights of what we regarded as civilization. Excellence in technology, engineering, physics, math, industry, theology, literature, splendid music and architecture, a long history of Judeo-Christian thought, home of the Reformation…
Despite those achievements, despite the moral groundings of much of the past intellectual development, this society was able to direct its protean abilities to the lowest depths of evil. Ordinary people acquiesced, aided and promoted the techological application to the lowest ends. This from a people that should have known better, but were incapable of effective resistance to evil, indeed were complicit in it.
Charlie, societies and places with tribal or power-centered inclinations, places that were often full of fear and savagery, of them we are not so surprised when mankind’s worst tendencies are displayed.
When an oh-so-civilized Europe, with a long and proud history of achievement and enlightenment, can descend into the methodical destruction of millions of lives, that sends a message to us all about the capacity for evil that lurks just beneath the surface of our failed and sinful human race.
The determination of the Jews to live and prevail, and the US-led allies who reject justifications for the Holocaust and are determined to prevent such future agonies, provide some hope that mankind can suppress and defeat the evil urges at such a systemic level.
As Catherine so frequently points out, people frequently lack basic numeracy. They don’t understand the sheer scale of The Holocaust and how down right hard the Nazis worked to kill Jews.
Just some examples. Once the Nazis decided to put the “Final Solution” into action they killed, on average, more than 3,000 Jews per day, 365 days per year, for five years. It took the sick, murdering, bastards a while to “ramp up production” and transition from bullets to Zyklon B and such, so the peak numbers are much higher. Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, just one concentration camp and industrial murder facility, reached a “high” of 9,000 prisoners killed in one day. As a comparison, consider that US military deaths in WWII, from ALL causes, averaged less than 250 per day for the war. The Germans rounded up and murdered Jews at a rate that was, on average, an order of magnitude greater than they managed to kill Americans through outright, unrestricted, warfare.
To put the scale of murder of the Holocaust into perspective another way… the combined military might of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union killed roughly the same number of Germans (military and civilian) with all their bullets and bombs – deliverd by soldiers, ships, tanks, aircraft, and artillery – as the Nazis killed Jews though industrialized murder factories.
The numbers are staggering and difficult to comprehend. That difficulty, however, is no excuse for the idiotarians and moronic moonbats who so casually equate their political oponents with the likes of Hitler and Nazis and fascists. Such people need to grow up and purchase a freakin’ clue and do so in a big hurry.
Right, Catherine, it’s human nature that has not changed and will never change, and therein lies the challenge. The banality of evil and all that. It is always with us and rears its ugly head when good people turn away, even at USC.
http://www.mererhetoric.com/archives/11271245.html
PJ,
Don’t know if you saw it, but you might be interested in Theodore Dalrymple’s Frivolity of Evil article.
Ah, but the sophistication of Germany also played a part in the Holocaust. There were theories about genetics and breeding that were brought up as scientific justification for eliminating the “unfit”. They were never carried to this extreme elsewhere, but it was very trendy to talk about controlling the growth of minority populations before their genes contaminated other, more “pure” ethnic groups. Margaret Sanger pushed abortion and birth control partially as a means to prevent the black population from exceeding the white, and explicitly to cut back on breeding among the poor of any color.
There was a famous demonstration that if an intelligent couple has two children around the age of 25 and a stupid couple have two children around the age of 20 and each couple’s children do the same thing, 150 years or so later the stupid couple would have far more descendants than the smart couple. This is of course true and fit with general observation, except that the stupid couples weren’t stopping at two.
The good news is that this doesn’t really seem to mean what people thought back then it did; that the poor and stupid would drag us all down to their level and we’d end up eventually climbing back into the trees as the morons continued to breed more than the intellectuals. Or that the intellectuals would have to work multiple jobs just to keep the systems working (as in the classic SF tale, The Marching Morons). Stupid couples have average kids and average kids produce some smart grandchildren, while very bright people are quite capable of producing average kids who contribute some grandchildren who don’t live in Lake Woebegon. The much-feared “mongrelization” turns out to be beneficial in many respects. And of course nowadays few are concerned about overbreeding, it’s the lack of children that’s causing problems, especially in Europe.
Everyone should see Shoah (course it’s 11 hours) but is amazing. Many of the deaths of course came in forced marches towards the end of the war and in “police” actions before the camps were instituted. The ghettos also had high mortality rates from starvation and disease. The Holocaust is not just gas chambers although that is what sticks in the mind because the image of industrial, assembly-line death seems more terrible to us. A good read is “Conscience and Courage” by Eva Fogelman which documents non-Jewish rescuers of Jews. The Holocaust is people crammed into attics and cellars for years not knowing who would win the war and their rescuers trying to find enough food for them and not be discovered. The Holocaust was a complete assault on humanity, the human psyche, the understanding of right and wrong in everyday life for over 5 years Europe.
I think this image is appropriate.