Nothing Changes

It is the eve of the Jewish New Year, so I suppose it is fitting that I am watching Episode 3 of the amazing Ken Burns Documentary about the US and the Holocaust. Episode 3 takes place during my lifetime, and also during the time the vast majority of Europe’s Jews were being aggregated in ghettos, labor camps, and death centers to be shot, gassed, and slaughtered by the Nazis. No wonder my mother couldn’t nurse me. But oh yeah, that was the past. It was so long ago. We have come so far since then. We have cars that almost drive themselves.

Really? Well if that’s what you think, you had better sit back and take a look at what happened to the Jews, because it also happened to the Armenians, and the Rwandans, and is about to happen again if we vote for the wrong candidates. The worst thing about the fall of democracies, the rise of tyrants, and the scapegoating of minorities is how often they happen. Again and again. Different tyrant, same tune.

This particular piece of world history, known as World War II, took place just as I was being born, and is so familiar to my generation of Americans that we hear it as background noise: oh, that. It is only World War II, it is taught at the end of the second semester. But now there are superseding wars: the Korean War, the VietNam War, the Iraq War. They threaten to bury the particular atrocities of World War II somewhere in the middle of the second semester.

It takes a film with the power of “The US and the Holocaust” to exhume the guilty secrets of the United States.