|
|
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2009
Museum murder is attack on thought
The murderous attack on the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was an attack on all of humanity. It was an attack on a human attempt to intellectually comprehend an event of utter inhumanity, the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe.
In addition to the museum's displays and exhibits, it houses a library, an archive and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, an important institution for scholarly efforts of Holocaust documentation and interpretation. Among the recent undertakings the archival collections of the Center has supported is the work of Father Patrick Desbois, a French priest who is systematically documenting the Nazi campaign to destroy the Jewish population of Ukraine after the invasion of the USSR in 1941. Desbois and his colleagues record interviews with elderly villagers who witnessed the events and carry out forensic work on the mass graves that are pointed out to them. He describes his experiences in a recent book, The Holocaust by Bullets.
The Holocaust denial movement, one thriving form of contemporary anti-Semitism of which the perpetrator of the museum attack was an adherent, persists in part because of the Holocaust's utter inhumanity. That is to say, it was so inhuman that to certain minds of an empirical bent, it approaches unbelievability. It is no accident that one of the first prominent American Holocaust deniers, Arthur Butz, is a professional engineer.
The murder of six million European Jews did happen, however, and the artifacts, images and archival documents gathered in the Holocaust Memorial Museum prove it. In this respect, the attack on the Museum can be said to have been an attack on the human power to think critically.
The bullets fired by the museum attacker killed Stephen T. Johns, an African-American security guard carrying out his duties. We cannot let those same bullets intimidate us and prevent us from thinking and acting critically.
--Kevin Michaels
|
