The Tennessean, TN
Oct 13 2007
Vanderbilt’s Holocaust lecture series remains as relevant as ever
By RAY WADDLE
Thirty years ago, Vanderbilt started something new on a college
campus – an annual Holocaust lecture series. It would try to grasp
the systematic Jewish slaughter under Hitler, a stain on history that
was already receding from memory in 1977.
Still, I thought the lectures idea would soon exhaust itself. The
Holocaust seemed safely unassailable, an enormity unquestionable,
unrepeatable. Surely shamefaced humanity had learned from it. Surely
anti-Semitism was finally discredited.
But even as the lectures unfolded that year, mass murder was secretly
under way again, this time in Cambodia. There’s been no shortage of
butchery since – in Bosnia, East Timor, Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, Darfur
– tyrants and militias getting away with it, or thinking they can,
or, when it suits them, denying the Jewish Holocaust ever happened.
Vanderbilt’s series has since expanded its genocide theme to keep up
with our homicidal headlines, which make the painful point: Humanity
has learned nothing. The killings continue, for the same old
religious, ethnic reasons.
"Behind these genocides are leaders who think they can perpetuate
crimes against helpless communities – and the world won’t care," says
Shaiya Baer, a Vanderbilt series organizer.
Anti-Semitism lives
That was Hitler’s conclusion, Baer says. Noting the world’s
indifference to the Armenian genocide around 1915, Hitler figured he
could make his own plans to destroy Europe’s Jews with impunity.
"Genocides since the Holocaust all have their own special
circumstances, but they all speak to suffering inflicted on people. …
If we don’t understand the Holocaust, then our understanding of other
genocides is incomplete."
Themes of the 30th Holocaust Lecture Series range from conditions of
children under Nazism to the killings of Iraqi Kurds. The series
begins Sunday on yet another theme: America’s own racial cleansings.
Journalist Elliot Jaspin speaks about terrorist episodes organized by
whites who rid their towns of blacks between Reconstruction and the
Great Depression. (7 p.m. at Sarratt Cinema.)
These last three decades offer other reasons for the Lectures’
continued urgency – the persistence of Holocaust denial and
anti-Semitism as convenient political strategies.
Altering the context further was 9/11. Lately, writer Martin Amis
finds something in common among Nazi sadism, Stalinist cruelty and
radical Islamic terror – a "death cult" mentality that exalts its
godlike leader, thrills at fiery destruction, harbors feelings of
humiliation and hatred of liberal society, and nurtures
anti-Semitism.
Anti-Jewish feeling is always near when the killers dream of carnage.
It persists as a primal evil, a theological mystery, a virus that
carries other hatreds forward – hatred of women, Mother Nature,
minorities, God, self. Fruitlessly seeking a scapegoat for its own
failings, anti-Semitism ends in self-extinction fantasies.
Vanderbilt’s Holocaust Lectures annually throws light on a human
darkness that otherwise defies explanation and resists publicity.
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