Beginning to forget

I’m never expecting anything pleasant when I stop to read political flyers around campus – great truths are rarely stapled. But recently I saw something that raised (or perhaps lowered) the bar for my indignation – a poster comparing the Monroe County Jails to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz.\nIt’s part of a movement to legalize drugs. Apparently, Bloomington narcotics enthusiasts are sick of being ignored simply because they are irrelevant. The Nazi comparison is their nuclear option. In their defense, they follow a rich tradition of Nazi comparisons. Tired of rhetorical devices that require subtlety or accurate appraisal of a situation, they want what’s easy. \nBut when it appears on flyers around campus, you know it simply has to stop. There’s a certain threshold for dramatic license in promoting a cause, and a certain point where it becomes unacceptable. That point is several orders of magnitude behind the Holocaust. \nThe flyer states that the Monroe County jails are “worse than Auschwitz,” as they deprive inmates of “sunshine, nature and family,” because these are “essential to human health.” I’m not leaving anything out – apparently the flyer maker thought that the worst crime the Nazis committed was depriving people of companionship or the outdoors. It wasn’t that they starved people, gassed them, worked them to death or conducted experiments on them. Apparently, the Holocaust was not unlike being assigned to a submarine. \nWe constantly trot out these obscene comparisons, to the point where it almost isn’t noteworthy anymore. That’s precisely when a response is needed. What all these comparisons do is soften our memory of human nature’s worst potential. The most costly lesson that society ever learned – now smoothed through overuse. You can’t call it a “silver lining,” but if anything came out of the Holocaust not uniformly horrible, it was the lesson it instilled. So when we compare present issues to the Holocaust, we might raise our issues up on the scale of perceived magnitude, but we also deaden our reaction to what really happened back in the war. \nWhen we study the Holocaust, or any great human tragedy, it’s an effort to convey how unimaginable it is. And it isn’t something we should soften. Racism or fear we often attempt to diffuse through understanding, but this isn’t the same. When you reference something, you implicitly pretend to understand it. \nTrue, we can’t preserve our horror forever. As history goes on, things get deleted from textbooks. More space has to be made room for, and the evidence rusts. It won’t be very long until all the holocaust survivors have died. While it fades from view, people will continue to deny that it ever happened, the atrocities will mature into what comedians consider usable material, and the lesson will lose its potency. Some might argue that Darfur is evidence that we’ve already begun to forget just what we can’t allow to happen again. But for as long as our minds permit, we have to choose to remember. When we forget history, it all starts over again.