Open Source Atrocity


(photo from AP/Jan Bauer)

Writing about something as horrific and far-reaching and anti-soul as Auschwitz is a tricky business. You can wing off into purple prosevania, deadening the event with overwrought verse until you become an unfortunate practitioner Hannah Arnedt's phrase "banality of evil." Yet, on grim milestones such as the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp, there's some prudent, well-meaning push by your soul to say something about it, setting you up for another trick: The vacuum of meaning.

There's little to be said that hasn't been said already by thousands of writers, captured by hundreds of photographers, imagined and reinvented by directors. The Holocaust is a cash cow for the contemplative and creative, not unlike Mel Brooks' sly yet grim comment: "Hitler's been great for my career." You fall back on "Never Again" and then the freshly minted ghosts of Rwanda mock you for your idealism. You can't understand how a nation can methodically round up people and detain them for who they are, and then Abu Ghraib slaps you for your arrogance, thinking racism and abuse of power can't meet again.

This is all American-centric, of course, because it's the most reliable filter I see through when it comes to history. The Holocaust, to me, belongs in the same column as the rounding up and detainment of Japanese Americans during World War II: items from the dark side of the Greatest Generation. Evidence existed in both cases supporting the claims that Jews were being rushed into camps for death as well as making plain that Japanese Americans weren't a threat to American national security after Pearl Harbor. Nagging little facts like those quash the "Greatest Generation" myth, so we don't think about it, don't dwell on the idea that we could have done more to preserve life in the face of tyranny...Janus-like in its foreign and domestic consumption. There was a war on. We had to spread freedom. Sound familiar?

Never Again. Really? Do we understand what those words mean? Can we fathom the organized infrastructure of the death camps? More than million methodically killed by thinking men, whose descendents crafted the engineering in my new Beetle. Are we afraid to see that there was a civilized and organized nation spiritually behind the roundup and disappearance of the Jews, the homosexuals, the intellectuals, the outsiders? Are we afraid to see it because, well, it might happen again? The hardest thing for Americans to understand about Auschwitz and the Nazis is that it's not unique. We view World War II as some mythological battle between good and evil, and we Yanks were the tops in the Good department, never to be infected with the poisons that make nations turn into butchers. That's not us. We have diversity, the Statue of Liberty, the melting pot. We are that shining light.

And yet we forget the lesson of Auschwitz: Once you make your enemies sub-human, you can do anything you want to them. For decades after World War II, the rest of the world watched Germany, making sure she didn't rise up to some sort of default pogrom mode. But instead, we got arrogant. We believed we would always be righteous. And if we had to break the rules, well, it was for a good cause.

We have to search for the meaning again, that terrifying definition of organized bloodshed through systematic means. But I don't think we as a nation know how. In the past 10 years, we were slow on Rwanda, Bosnia and, recently, the Sudan. We have access to satellites and instant news media, but we treat genocide as if it was just a terrible documentary. We are fat in a media-gluttony age...awash images yet unsure how to help. We reduce tragedy to blips on the news networks or Web video feeds. We strip them of flavor and context. We butt disaster footage next to celebrity interviews. Survivors of a tsunami get their footage on Larry King, interview underneath sounding like DVD commentary. Death has become too media-friendly.

Days from now, the tributes at the gates of Auschwitz will fade into that frequency that only ghosts hear. We'll go back to our lives, and the 60th anniversary becomes another event, interchangeable and mutable. There is a war halfway around the world where people are dying for a parade of lies. We accept that. We accept lies and the propaganda that tells us we're fine. Nothing to worry about. Just a slight adjustment of the Constitution here, just a little media-driven scare there. We don't have that sense of outrage to stop it, any of it. And in the end, that scurvy of the soul leads us to the gates of Auschwitz again. Not as tourists, not as victims, but as likely proprietors.