Wednesday, August 28, 2019 Slavery and the Holocaust: How Americans and Germans Cope With Past Evils Credit: Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Statue of Robert E. Lee, Charlottesville, Va. By Deborah E. Lipstadt Aug. 27, 2019 LEARNING FROM THE GERMANS Race and the Memory of Evil By Susan Neiman What can be compared to the Holocaust? Everything? Detention camps on America’s border? Nothing? This history war, generally the province of academics, has recently become part of American political discourse. Into this discussion comes Susan Neiman’s “Learning From the Germans.” Neiman, who has lived in Germany for much of her adult life, and who directs Berlin’s Einstein Forum, contrasts Germany’s response to the Holocaust with America’s response to slavery and centuries of racial discrimination. Her concern is not “comparative evil” — which event is worse — but “comparative redemption,” how each community has responded to and reframed the memory of its unsavory past. Neiman contends that postwar Germany, after initially stumbling badly, has done the hard work necessary to grapple with and come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust in a way that could be a lesson to America in general, and the American South in particular. The history wars shape far more than how we remember the past. They shape the societies we bequeath to future generations. Susan Neiman’s book is an important and welcome weapon in that battle. Deborah E. Lipstadt’s latest book is “Antisemitism Here and Now.” She teaches the history of the Holocaust at Emory University. Learning From the Germans Race and the Memory of Evil By Susan Neiman 415 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.

Sunday, September 1, 2019 Slavery and the Holocaust: How the NYT Compares Apples to Oranges and Misses the Gorilla The book the Times is reviewing1 compares the social response of the perpetrating nation to a genocide it committed in WW2 with the social response in a nation which practiced slavery in an era in which it was an accepted form for exploiting human labor. If I infer the purpose of the book from its title, Learning From the Germans, the author aims to teach Americans how to deal with a war crime they, as a society, committed, using Germans as role models. The era in which the Germans perpetrated the Holocaust was WW2. What war crime, in that same era, did the U.S. commit? Objectively, it was aerial bombardment of cities, culminating in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.2 What is the U.S. response to its perpetration of those war crimes? Denial. In the official narrative, they weren't war crimes because they saved the lives of American soldiers. For an author bent on teaching Americans something from the German experience, the American denial of its war crimes in WW2 and the consequent threat of its repetition created by that denial would have been a rich and relevant field of exploration. Human slavery as practiced on antebellum Southern plantations cannot be revived and never presented a risk to the continuation of human civilization or the survival of the people of Africa. For a propaganda outlet like the NYT to put it on the same level as the Holocaust strongly suggests a state interest in pandering to African-Americans. The final paragraph in the NYT's review is: The history wars shape far more than how we remember the past. They shape the societies we bequeath to future generations. Susan Neiman’s book is an important and welcome weapon in that battle. By failing to acknowledge its WW2 war crimes and by the perpetuation of that failure by the author and the reviewer, the latter are complicit in creating a situation where there may be very little left to "bequeath to future generations." After missing the gorilla in the room, the reviewer actually asserts that the book "is an important and welcome weapon." In an earlier post to this website, it was stated that "Stupidity is the HIV of infected intellectuals." If book authors and their reviewers can be considered to be intellectuals, these two are case studies. Footnotes 1. Link. 2. Eric Markusen and David Kopf, "The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing," p. 255, Westview Press, (1995). "Having reviewed important differences and similarities between the Holocaust, as a quintessential example of genocide and strategic bombing, we now have reached the point where we must state our answer to the question, Was strategic bombing genocidal? Put bluntly, our answer is yes, it was."