Category Archives: Auschwitz

Freedom isn’t free. It requires constant diligence. It requires us to want it badly enough to fight for it, to guard against it’s erosion — our failed delivery of “democracy” in Iraq should tell us that it can’t be given, it must be earned. The Righty’s will tell us the price of freedom is the sacrifice of our liberties in these troubled times, and the acceptance of the loss of our children deployed to kill those who are deemed enemies. But freedom isn’t about killing others to keep it … it’s about policing the mythologies and illusions about who we are as a nation and entering the uncomfortable space of taking responsibility for every policy and action. Freedom isn’t a condition of the body, it’s a state of the soul. Continue reading →

Amalia, Sept. 27, 2006. Photo by Eric Francis. [Editor’s Note: This article was originally published Oct. 12, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series … Continue reading →

The basis of the Big Lie is that people are more likely to believe a great deception than a small one. Big, as in so big, it is inconceivable that someone ever possibly could do or say something like that. Hitler and his men understood that people tell small lies all the time. They play on this fact. Because people tell small lies as a matter of getting through the day, they expect others to do so. What we do not expect is for someone to be so brazen as to tell a lie so huge it could have absolutely no basis in truth, and yet be used to justify astonishing, outrageous conduct, and to destroy civilization, or some large part of it, at the same time. Continue reading →

[Editor's Note: This article was originally published Oct. 10, 2006. For a more detailed introduction to this series, please see this link. The approximately eight articles and 15 photos in this series will be published evenings at about 6 pm … Continue reading →

Originally published Oct. 9, 2006. THE GUY in the photo above is called Leonard. He is a minister who brings groups of kids to Auschwitz a few times a year from Norway and Sweden. There were a lot of students … Continue reading →

One of the framers of the U.S. Constitution once remarked that the time to start worrying is not when all your rights are gone, but rather when the first of them is threatened. I have noticed that it’s finally becoming less taboo to “be political,” as we figure out that “political” is about OUR lives, our futures. We might want to think of more creative ways to do that, how to raise awareness and how to take action. Continue reading →

WE ARE ACCUSTOMED to the story of the Nazis being about mass murder, hearing about thousands at a time gassed and cremated. At the beginning, the killing happened one person at a time; and inside the gas chambers, it also happened one at a time even though hundreds of others were present. Was it really the tendency of the Nazis to kill millions that made them what they were, or was it their nonexistent value on the life of an individual? Continue reading →

If you take a look at what happened, it’s really pretty shocking. Any public library will have a dozen books on the shelf, though I wonder who reads them. Librarians know what happened. Yet no matter how much we may look at them in astonishment, the ordinary people of that era who let it go on, who knew and looked away, are, to me, stranger still. Perhaps we have some reckoning to do with the awesome power of fear, of denial, of elective ignorance. Continue reading →