"[Y]ou may observe the niceties of Holocaust Memorial Day, but still not have learned the lessons of history. You may be remembering to forget, practicing a spurious innocence, externalising evil, forgetting that, as Adorno argued, as long as we live in the conditions that could produce Auschwitz, we are all guilty . The only thing that could conceivably alleviate that guilt is to act against those conditions. Hence, Stone's preference for many and varied forms of memory, at different levels, detached from the rituals of the great and good. What are those conditions? The Trust identifies "racism and hate" in a general way, presumably intending to be as uncontroversial and therefore inclusive as possible. However, histories of Germany and fascism in recent decades, by Mark Mazower, Enzo Traverso, Jurgen Zimmerer, Isabel Hull, Sven Lindquist, Casper Erichsen, David Olusoga and Shelley Baranowski, to name just a few, have in common that they have foregrounded an emp...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51