Rememories

Anonymous asked whether the fact that my father was present at the Nuremberg trials affected me. I'll answer this way.

Dad didn't tell me a whole lot about what he saw there, but he did show me some photos and other memorabilia from Germany. He clearly had loved the German people he met, and said they treated Americans very well. He had "liberated" two German rifles, which were the things that I admired most as a little boy.

When I was about 12, I think, I found William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which I read several times. Later, as an adult, I found Shirer's brilliant Berlin Diary.

These helped me learn the context of the Holocaust. As people in my (post-war) generation came of age, the brilliant writers who survived the Nazi death camps started writer their books and films. There are too many to list here. For kids, the best was to start is with the Maus books.

The way all of this affected me, from an early age, was awareness of America's complicity in the Nazi's war crimes against humanity. Of course, we liberated the few surviving Jews from the death camps when we finally defeated Hitler's army; but one never got the sense we went to war to save the Jews.

Rather, the U.S. would have stood by, and let the extermination happen, as long as Hitler played by the rules of non-aggression set by an international community that preferred to look the other way on his "domestic" policies.

Rather like the situation in Darfur today, eh? Or, Rwanda in the 90's, right? Most Americans probably paid attention to the Rwandan genocide only after it was so completely over that Hollywood could release the movie version.

Please read, if you have not yet: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch.

Inaction in the face of evil is tantamount to complicity. That is my belief. Shame on the United States of America for its complicity in the Holocaust, as well as the genocides in Southeast Asia, the "ethnic cleansings" in the Balkans, and the horrific extermination campaigns in Africa. They all happened on our watch, as the supposed "leader of the free world."

Until and unless we face this truth, Americans will not understand why most of the world sees the blood on our hands, even if we cannot bear to look ourselves.

And, please, don't even get me started about the war against Iraq and the shattering of the Geneva Conventions by the Bush Administration. Nuremberg has come full circle during my lifetime. Soon, if there is to be a fair system of global justice, it will be Donald Rumsfeld in handcuffs, facing his day in court.