A Disturbing Little Brush with Reality

I’ve been known to say casually that I think that a second Holocaust is unlikely in the twenty-first century because there’s less racism in the world today. And that largely hopeful attitude comes from the fact that I’m surrounded by people—students and other faculty members—who tolerate and even appreciate diversity. But maybe that’s why academia is called “the Ivory Tower.”

Teaching a course on the Holocaust does sometimes cause me to confront reality. Last semester, I went searching on the web to see whether a piece of movie music was the “Horst Wessel Song.” It was, and I found the answer to my question on a web site where one could buy Hitler and Himmler bobble head toys.

Last semester, also, one of my students did his research project on Holocaust denial websites and the difficulty we have in the US of controlling hate speech on the web. It’s a difficult problem in a nation that prides itself on protecting free speech, and there’s no really good answer to the problem.

Today I was looking at youtube, a site that I probably don’t know well enough, to see if I could find examples of concentration camp liberation films to demonstrate that the different Allied powers—the UK, the US, and the USSR—made different choices when they documented conditions in the camps. I’m not yet skillful enough in cinematography to be able to distinguish different national styles, but it doesn’t take much skill to recognize anti-Semitism when it rears its head. In fact, there’s a lot more than I would have expected.

Today's experience made me reconsider whether it could happen again.