Samantha Power on the Lessons of the Holocaust
In this clip from a Facing History and Ourselves panel discussion, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Samantha Power ("A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide) discusses the lessons learned -- and not learned -- from the Holocaust.
"In the spirit of my naiveté I then set out to understand why that could be, that is, why our response was what it was, time and again, and why it was that we learn so few lessons across time.
"Part of what was important about the story was that we have made a series of commitments in terms of education and putting a museum on the mall with our country's most treasured monuments. This is a big deal, you know.
"So there is something. I wouldn't call 1945 a turning point, but certainly maybe the late 1970s, when the commitment really begins to take hold and the Holocaust ceases to be a dirty word--well, it will forever be a dirty word, hopefully-but becomes a discussed dirty word, and when given the attention it deserves.
"I wanted to look at the sort of before and after, too, a little bit, and say, ‘Well what has the Holocaust actually given us, in terms of lessons and in terms of the stretching, at least, of the moral imagination, such that when atrocity happens in other places we're something different?' We as individuals, we as government-whatever we are, whatever hat we're wearing-is there a shift?
"Or does it set the bar too high? Is actually the problem that we set the bar at six million at an intention to exterminate every last one of a specific group, which that criteria [very few post-Holocaust cases] would meet. Rwanda actually happens to meet it, but it's very difficult to see if a case is going to meet it until after you've counted the bodies and uncovered the documents."
