Auschwitz Versus Humanity

Re “Inside the Heart of Darkness,” Commentary, Jan. 24: When a worrisome percentage of school-age children don’t even know what Auschwitz was, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s article was a needed reminder of mankind’s troubled past.

One point was missing though. At its core, Auschwitz was testimony to the evil that results when we view elements of humanity as less than human. Auschwitz stands at the top of a long list of horrors in our history books.

However, before we in the 21st century point at a moment in time 60 years in the past as a mythic ending of fascism, we should look at ourselves and our own Auschwitzes.

For how else can we explain abortion or embryonic stem cell research or the zeal to kill Terri Schiavo than our own inclination to view others as less than human, expendable for our own needs? So before we whose grandfathers liberated humanity from Nazism become too self-congratulatory, perhaps we should reflect on our own attitudes, and we’ll see that, although Nazism is gone, the attitudes in some small part remain.

Fred Decker

Whittier

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Goldhagen should get his facts straight. He mentions Denmark, among other countries, as “struggling with [its] past and ... duties of repair.” He is barking up the wrong tree.

Danes refused to enact anti-Jewish laws. When the Jews were forced to wear a yellow armband with the star, the king donned one too.

When the Danes learned that the Jews were to be sent to concentration camps, they hid them, then, at great danger to themselves, helped them to escape to neutral Sweden.

As for reparation, Jewish homes, businesses and bank accounts were sealed and protected. When the Jews returned from Sweden after the war, their homes were safe and their bank accounts intact, with earned interest. Obviously Goldhagen does not know this.

I am a proud American, but I am immensely proud of the way my former countrymen acted during the war.

Lisa Eriksen

Redondo Beach

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Of course, the Holocaust was monumental evil, as have been all genocidal crimes. And it is important to accept that the racism that has allowed this to happen was experienced not just by the direct killers but by the societies from which they came. In all cases, the slaughter was possible because the killer society preached that the victims were less or other than human.

Could the colonists of the U.S., Canada, Australia, etc., have killed so many natives with indifference if they had regarded them as human? Or if the society in which they had lived had regarded them as human? Could so many Africans have been sold into the slave trade if they had been regarded as human? And the slaughter in Vietnam, Cambodia, Armenia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Tibet, Burma, Sudan, Congo -- all by one group of another?

We British built a great empire around the world because we believed we were naturally superior to native peoples, our gods were better than their gods.

Today, under President Bush and the neocons, the U.S. claims the right to decide other peoples’ lives for them. Any time any person looks at another and sees less than a human, the seed of this evil starts to grow.

Christopher Leadbeater

Ashford, Britain

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I lived through World War II and remember the horrors of Auschwitz and the Holocaust. I can also recall other atrocities used by the Nazis in their drive to conquer Europe: preemptive attacks on defenseless countries, killing of innocent civilians, concentration camps, torture, detention without charges or legal representation.

I used to think that we in the United States were the “good guys” and only the “bad guys” did these things. After seeing what has gone on in Iraq in the last two years, my opinion of this country and its leaders have changed, and I am ashamed.

Charles Doherty

Hermosa Beach