Auschwitz

Richard Cohen:

...

Auschwitz is never far from my mind. I have been to the place and read its literature. But even if I hadn't, even if I knew it just as a place where more than 1 million Jews and others were murdered, it would still intrude at one of those treacly moments when someone mentions the goodness of mankind or the benevolence of God. It has been this way with me since childhood, when, over and over again, I asked the rabbis in religious school: Why? How? Explain! They could not.
Events like Auschwitz happen when people are not allowed to, or do not, respond to the question, "Why don't we...?" It happened in the Soviet's Ukraine, it happened in Saddam's Iraq, and it happened in Rawanda. Sometimes the scale was larger as in the Ukraine, or smaller as in Iraq but it usually happened for the same reason. There was a group of people who were perceived to be inconvient to the objectives of a government who had no answer to the question.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains