Um yeah, about that

Dr. X posts this from the Holocaust Museum:

"Today is Hitler's birthday. A waste of time to even mark it as significant, of course. But given all we have talked about over the years, perhaps an opportune time to study up a little, and engage in some sober reflection.

"The Laird made the most perceptive remark I have heard about Hitler. He didn't start out as a dictator. They elected him.

"Stalin knew what he was about when he said 'one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.' In college I sat in a poetry class where an eminent poet refused to comment on a Holocaust poem written by a student. 'You cannot write about that,' said the old man - 'you cannot write about it.'

"The sheer scale destroys human understanding. It is like calling the sun 'hot'. Sure it's hot - it's so hot you have no idea what that even means. It's not hot like a sauna - or like burning your hand on a stove - it's so hot any contact would snuff out your body and accompanying senses instantly. Such, the elder poet seemed to believe, is the distance between Dachau and a small liberal arts college in upstate New York.

"And that can leave us rudderless - unable to cope with the overload. From the dictator's perspective, this is a desirable benefit of genocide - collective guilt leading to collective moral paralyzation. But a human being need not surrender to it. Kurt Vonnegut, who saw the aftermath of Dresden, managed to retain his humanity (an excellent interview with him is here). He distilled his world view into one clear sentence, one that Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama could all affirm: 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'

"The most direct and meaningful effort to come to terms with the Holocaust that I have encountered is Evvy Eisen's Legacy Project, a portion of which can be viewed in a travelling exhibition called "Multiply by Six Million", which I saw at Santa Clara University. It features personal portraits of survivors living in Northern California (here is one), along with their stories.

"Evvy Eisen's project reminds us that the Holocaust was not a statistic - it was six million individual tragedies. Stalin may have been right - we cannot feel appropriate compassion for six million victims. But we can relate to individuals. In doing so we can reclaim the humanity these genocidal monsters try to deny us. And we can reflect on the stakes we play for in our political engagements, in our public discourse, and in our satirical efforts.

"So today our thoughts turn to Evvy Eisen's re-humanization of the horrible wrong turn humanity took in the last century. Eisen-geiste, indeed."