spider1

…is full of lessons for humanity.

But apparently we aren’t supposed to say what they are.

That monstrous event didn’t burst from some metaphysical realm into history. It is history — like the earlier genocide of the Armenians and the later ones in Rwanda and the Balkans. It’s time to stop treating it as something wholly apart from every other crime against humanity. It’s time to stop sacralizing it.

Learn what the Holocaust has to teach: that, like every other genocide, it began with words, everyday bigotry, stereotypes, negative assumptions, and the cynical use of fear by the state. That within that dark matrix it flourished, continuously enabled by the same attitudes from which it sprang.

The Holocaust was not an unspeakable atrocity. It was a profoundly speakable one — if only it can, in effect, be permitted to do so.