Remembering The Holocaust & Learning From It
Hate is both ancient and common. The Holocaust is neither. The Holocaust required more than hate — it required removing all limits from government power.
Note: You’ll find an audio version of this Substack essay several paragraphs below.
Yesterday, January 27, was International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
It is no secret that large numbers of Americans know little about the Holocaust, including many high school students who have never heard the term. Many Americans don’t know the full extent of the government slaughter; they cannot say what Auschwitz was; they don’t know that the process by which Hitler became Chancellor was framed by democratic elections.
The sheer ignorance regarding the Holocaust (and other historic examples of tyrannical governments and genocide) might explain, partly, why so many of our fellow Americans respond to every problem—real or imaginary, big or small, affecting many people or few, local or national, exaggerated or understated—by demanding more government control over our lives and property, effectively transforming us from citizens into subjects.
Not About Hate
For many years, I’ve been teaching students, teachers, and ordinary fellow citizens that “hate” was neither the single nor the most important cause of the Holocaust.
When I’ve led tours of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, I’ve stood outside and taught the same lesson, which is strikingly contrary to the main theme inside the Memorial Museum—that the Holocaust was all about hate.
The message is clear: Hitler hated. Nazis hated. If you hate, then you are like Hitler and other Nazis. The message is also terribly inaccurate and misleading.
Hate, after all, is as old as human nature because hate is woven into the frabic of human nature. Hate is as common as human families, tribes, clans, cities, & nations. As we learned from the most famous of all postmodern romantics—Frederick Nietzsche—hate is inseparable from love.
When you truly love someone or some thing, you hate that which threatens the person you love, or harms the thing you love. Eliminating hate requires eliminating love, which requires eliminating an important part of the core that makes human beings human.
Where there are human beings there is hate. Hate even finds a home where yard signs announce “Hate Has No Home Here.” If you doubt this, ring the door bell and ask the people who live inside what they think about Donald Trump. They will likely explain, instantly, that they hate him with a burning passion that will outlast most stars and supernovas.
Here is the audio recording for this Substack essay.
Recently, I posted on social media the rantings of a college-educated, professional adult who was exploding with unbounded hate and unrelieved invective regarding Trump one day, and then several days later posted he was sad and disappointed because—get this—there’s too much hate in the world.
That’s how common hate is: Even those who say they oppose hate are brimming with it.
Yet, throughout the annals of human history, holocausts are not common. Individuals can hate others. Sometimes they even act upon that hate. But the scope of destruction and death that a hateful individual can commit, even if well-prepared, is a drop in the ocean compared to a holocaust.
An individual consumed by hate might murder, what, several people, or maybe several dozen? Holocaust murders are counted by the millions.
What Makes Holocaust Possible?
There is no denying that Adolph Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi officers—many of whom were educated in the same German universities to which American academics flocked in the 19th and 20th centuries—hated Jews. But, to be frank, many people have hated Jews for many thousands of years. What is Jewish history other than a group of humble people who have been the objects of hatred, suspicion, envy, and derision simply because they have tried to be true to their promise to God?
And, most people who have hated Jews don’t force them into death camps.
A holocaust on the scale of what Germans perpetrated during the first half of the 1940s requires two things that have no intrinsic connection to hate:
Modern technology, which makes it possible for a relative few to control, confine, destroy, and dispose of large numbers of others, numbers reaching into the millions.
The removal of all limits on government power.
Requirement number 2 is especially important because only governments spend other people’s money, time, resources, and energy building large-scale factories of death. Only governments specialize in effective, wide-scope destruction.
Still, a government of unlimited power in the ancient world was limited in the destruction and death it could dish out simply because of the limits of technology. It turns out, killing many millions of people is no simple or easy thing. It requires many resources—usually the many resources of other people.
When limits are removed on the power of government in an age of modern technology, however—an age when everything, including death, can be mass-produced on mass scales never before seen—then the natural human tendency toward hate has the potential to become holocaustic.
In what might be best described as the tragic irony of progressivism, many United States citizens today assume that it is a good idea to remove constitutional limits from government power precisely because we now live in an age of modern technology.
Technology scares them, understandably. And they assume only government can or will protect them from technology. So they advocate endlessly for loosening or removing limits on government power, including redefining and re-interpreting the Constitution in ridiculous ways that authorizes those in government to do more or less whatever they please.
Progressives today don’t seem to understand that the central planning and social engineering of Nazis—including death camps, and eugenics—was progressive central planning and social engineering.
A wise mind thinks differently: Limits on government power become even more important, even more critical, as technology advances because technology means government power becomes even more dangerous.
What is scarier than a government without limits? Answer: A government without limits that possesses the powers of modern technology. The victims of the German Holocaust would attest to that statement if they had not been slaughtered by a government without limits that possessed the power of modern technology.
Never Again
“Never again” is a slogan used by those who want to teach others about the Holocaust, what it means, what happened, and why, so that we might prevent it from happening again.
In order to prevent a holocaust from happening again, however, requires that we identify the conditions that made the Holocaust possible and vow that we shall never allow our government to possess so much power over our lives, our liberty, our property, and our free pursuit of happiness.
A nation of citizens who remember the Holocaust is a nation of constitutionalists who refuse to tolerate those in government doing anything We The People have not explicitly given them permission to do.