Can we learn?

I'm hopeful. Even though it has been sixty years, we still recoil in fresh horror at the discoveries Allied troops made at Auschwitz.

But we're going to have to work hard at it. Never again must we villify a race or an ethnicity. The first people to take shots at Jews did not have genocide on their minds. In no way do I imagine Shakespeare's rogueish portrayal of Shylock means that Shakespeare was of the same mind as SS guards. No, iIt took hundreds of years for a racism-accomodating culture to acclimatize people into participating in such a horrible action.

But there are many reasons to be wary as well. For not even is it that some have not learned the larger lessons of the Holocaust, there are many who refuse to learn even its specific lessons. In some parts of the Middle East, many conflate the political problem of Israel with anti-semitism, and have re-embraced anti-semitism as a result. Two tears ago, a Syrian TV series dramatized the completely fraudulent "Protocols of Zion" that the Nazis used for propaganda, and which dramatized Jewish characters drinking the blood of innocents. It was this kind of blood libel that slowly permitted a culture capable of extinguishing an entire religion possible.

It was only twelve years ago that the citizens of Rwanda went on a week long spree, hacking a million of their countrymen into pieces. Some lessons seem to need re-learning. But the shock that people still experience, the way people flinch, when Auschwitz is described to them encourages me. Not because I want people to be horrified, but because our capacity to be horrified means something - it means our ability to do these things is not bred in the bone, is not natural to us.