ECKLEBURG
2004-10-19 - 5:48 p.m.
Bad Eckleburg!
Where are your priorities! Just because your parents came to town, and work got busy, don’t you love your blog anymore? Weren’t you just sitting in front of your computer the other night looking up random phrases in Google Image Search just to see what pictures would come up? You could have been blogging then, no?
So the parent's trip was very nice actually. Since Grumblecake can’t drive, ad my parents don’t like to drive standards I was official chauffer for the weekend. This reminded me how bad North Virginia traffic can be, it reminded me of this for up to 6 hours a day in fact.
We saw the Holocaust Museum. We had been procrastinating on seeing it, waiting for the right mood to go and become horribly sad. The Holocaust Museum is the best museum I have ever seen. The building that holds the museum is in is best, most beautiful museum building ever – which is quite a feat considering the grim mood it is trying to set. The way everything is presented, with not just artifacts, but many spaces that just envelope you – it is awesome. We spent about 3.5 hours there, and got about halfway through before the museum closed and we got kicked out, but we looked and read EVERYTHING there is to offer in the first half of the museum (it is one single linear exhibit) My parents thought we were ahead of them and so went through twice as fast and ended just in time.
It was really sad, but interesting to see a fair amount of pictures/artifacts from the Jewish ghetto in Lodz, Poland, where virtually all of my father’s side of the family was held before being moved. There wasn’t anything left in that part of the world to re-connect to after the war, so seeing this part gave this really strange, powerful sense of connection and heritage. If you ever come visit the D.C. area, this is the one museum to go to.
The other thought I kept coming back to, while in the museum, related to the rise of the Nazi’s. I kept trying to relate the arguments that Hitler et. al. used to take power and justify their actions and relate them to modern times. Try replacing “the Jews” in Hitler’s propaganda with “the terrorists” and there are some striking similarities. The purely emotional appeals to fear, the smug camaraderie of anti-intellectualism, the selective use/disuse of facts, the shallow and disingenuous logical arguments – well, lets just say I was really frustrated that I can’t envision any way to safeguard against these sufficiently going forward, and a sadness that I don’t think our society has come up with any decent safeguards since then either.
The inverse of this these feelings came as we saw the international reaction and debate as to how to respond to what was happening in Germany. And it made me think of Iraq and the current parallels to our debate over the justification of invasion. The exhibit leaves no doubt that if the Nazi’s had stopped after taking over Poland or Hungary perhaps, if they had allowed us any reason not to fight, we wouldn’t have. But they still would have completed the Holocaust. We too often think of WW2 and our fight against the Nazi’s and immediately intertwine it all up with the Holocaust. But we didn’t go to war to stop it, and had we been able, we would have avoided the war, and by default let it happen. And I wonder if our threshold for intervention in Iraq, or any other country, is so high that we risk repeating history.
So I came out far more pro-invasion of Iraq, and far more anti-THIS-President’s-invasion-of-Iraq, all at the same time.
