It is unfortunate that time seems to dim the stark atrocity that was the Holocaust.

… for you writing this.

I don’t know how you do it. But … spellbinding as always, Art.

http://remember.org/forgotten/

I remember talking to a very well educated college graduate who had never even heard for example, that at least a million non-Poles were also killed (a number that does not include combat deaths), and the actual number is probably higher.

In large part, evil exists because people doubt its existence and thus are unlikely to confront it until it is too late. Evil forces us to make difficult and inconvenient decisions, and most of us don’t like that.

I don’t know how any educated person can study history without either (1) becoming terminally depressed or (2) believing in God.

Whether intended or not, I think it tends to grow the idea that the people who willfully and gleefully took part in the murder of millions were somehow duped into it, or were just braindead henchmen. That what happened was normal and that anybody could have been caught up with it.

As you alluded to, the Germans and the people of East Europe (hell, even the French) were all too willing executioners, who knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyways.

In the minds of the perpetrators, it was like exterminating insects - the emotional attachment to the vicitms as fellow-humans had long been extinguished. No violent hatred; indeed the effort was to push this away from consciousness - as you note, to make the death so pervasive that is just faded into the background (for those not killed, of course) as another fact of the planet.

Having just seen a play adaptation of the Screwtape Letters, I am again reminded of Lewis’ view of modern-day evil and Hell; not the visceral fires and anguish of, say Dante - but rather as Lewis phrased it, a “thoroughly nasty bureaucracy,” or perhaps more closely, Stalinist Russian. And the Nazis in their heyday chiefly differed from the Stalinists in that they were even more efficient in the execution of mass murder.

And again, it is the lack of passion - and this unceasing preoccupation with self that Lewis called the hallmark of hell - this characteristic is so dominant in Obama - and it is this trait, even more than his devotion to Communist ideology, that makes Obama so scary.

Read again Lewis’ introduction to Screwtape Letters - and then look at our leadership in Washington…

speech said that the holocaust wiped out one third of the Jews in the entire world.

Great post Art,

The other thing that I find worthy of mention is the fact that they fully controlled media, academia, entertainment , and all venues of information dissemination. It just goes to show that when you have such control you can get a majority of people to believe the most outrageous things. This is not the dark ages in Africa. We are talking about 20th century Western Europe. Not that I am comparing liberals to Nazis, but Its not hard to understand how they can successfully persuade people to believe in the most absurd things like global warming due to their full control of information dissemination.

A very, very solemn place. It can’t really be described in words.

a few years back. You had to choose a theme, read and review three books through that theme, write a not less than 20 page paper and give a 10 minute precis of your paper. I chose “The Legal Basis of the Holocaust” and did a lot of research on the workings of the German legal system under the Nazis.

The thing that struck me most was the fact that Germany was far and away the most developed, sophisticated, educated, and democratic country in the developed world at the time. Almost everything that they did and that we later named Crimes Against Humanity was done through the processes and with the authority of a democratic government and supported by their court system. It was a very dark, ugly world and I don’t recommend spending a semester there. I can hardly visualize a sunny day in Germany of that era.

I initially got B on my paper from my very leftist professor who just ripped into me for my conclusion that the elimination of any moral absolutes turns a democracy into a monstrous system capable of doing anything that comported with “the healthy opinion of the Volk.” I wasn’t taking a B, though I’ll admit it wasn’t a particularly well done paper, so I asked to see some of the A papers. I knew that only a small minority of the mostly juniors and seniors in college could even write in complete sentences, so I wanted to see what he thought was an A paper. Of course he refused, so I said I was appealing the grade to the chancellor and we could all see the A papers together. He relented and I got my A.

Comrade Obama mastered the “healthy opinion” of 52% of the American “Volk,” and all it would take is a few tweaks of those moldy old documents to render those who don’t share the “opinion” of the 52% non-persons outside the protections afforded persons under the law. That is the ultimate danger of secularism. We’ve removed people from the protections of civil society in this Country before; the slaves before 1866, the Nisei, unborn children now. A few words in a USSC decision or in an Act of Congress would be all it took.

Here is the blog post from a couple of years back.

A full-blown democracy can be a terrible thing. Sometimes the will of the people has to be tested and proven to be decent. Give the mob everything they want, and you can pretty much expect the Salem Witch Trials.

For some reason hearing that the entire Final Solution made it through the German Democratic process as the will of the people makes me regret our constitutional amendment in favor of the direct election of Senators.

is too short for my liking, when Humanity applies, and I’m eating dessert first from now on.

Never Forget.

Firstly, calling Nazis a rational response is bunk. They were always war mongering predators playing on impoverished Germans’ hatred and the Jews were just always a great target. There was always going to be a target, the Jews were the easiest. I find your 101 to be a 1.1 as far as covering the essentials of the topic.

Secondly, the idea that Holocaust only or should only refer to the Holocaust of the Jews during WWII is even more bunk. Nuclear holocaust is a readily used term and has been for decades. Holocaust means great loss of life, especially by fire (but not necessarily). So while you can squabble over whether or not the term should be used as freely as it sometimes is, saying or implying that it only should is not only wrong, it’s overtly PC. I won’t take that from a Dem and I won’t take it from a Republican.

Darfur is a holocaust. Somalia was/is a holocaust. The Soviets had a bigger holocaust. China had THE biggest holocaust. And yes, natural causes are included so the Tsunami was a holocaust. Any great loss of life can be applicably called a holocaust. And I say this as a person who doesn’t call anything a holocaust but The Holocaust in conversation. So don’t lecture me or anyone else on words we should use or not use. That kind of thinking is how textbooks are created.