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Why the Holocaust Should Matter to You

People tour the nation’s capital to be delighted by symbols of America’s greatness and history. They seek out monuments and museums that pay tribute to the nation state and its works. They want to think about the epic struggles of the past, and how mighty leaders confronted and vanquished enemies at home and abroad.

But what if there was a monument that took a different tack? Instead of celebrating power, it counseled against its abuses. Instead of celebrating the state and its works, it showed how these can become ruses to deceive and destroy. Instead of celebrating nationalist songs, symbols, and stories, it warned that these can be used as tools of division and oppression.

What if this museum was dedicated to memorializing one of history’s most ghastly experiments in imperial conquest, demographic expulsion, and eventual extermination, to help us understand it and never repeat it?

Such a museum does exist. It is the US Holocaust Museum. It is the Beltway’s most libertarian institution, a living rebuke to the worship of power as an end in itself.

I lived in Washington, DC, when the Holocaust Museum was being built, and I vaguely recall when it opened. I never went, though I had the opportunity; I remember having a feeling of dread about the prospect of visiting it. Many people must feel the same way. Surely we already know that mass murder by the state is evil and wrong. Do we really need to visit a museum on such a ghastly subject?

The answer is yes. This institution is a mighty tribute to human rights and human dignity. It provides an intellectual experience more moving and profound than any I can recall having. It takes politics and ideas out of the realm of theory and firmly plants them in real life, in our own history. It shows the consequences of bad ideas in the hands of evil men, and invites you to experience the step-by-step descent into hell in chronological stages.

The transformation the visitor feels is intellectual but also even physical: as you approach the halfway point you notice an increase in your heart rate and even a pit in your stomach.

Misconceptions

Let’s dispel a few myths that people who haven’t visited might have about the place.

  • The museum is not maudlin or manipulative. The narrative it takes you through is fact-based, focused on documentation (film and images), with a text that provides a careful chronology. One might even say it is a bit too dry, too merely factual. But the drama emerges from the contrast between the events and the calm narration.
  • It is not solely focused on the Jewish victims; indeed, all victims of the National Socialism are discussed, such as the Catholics in Poland. But the history of Jewish persecution is also given great depth and perspective. It is mind boggling to consider how a regime that used antisemitism to manipulate the public and gain power ended up dominating most of Europe and conducting an extermination campaign designed to wipe out an entire people.
  • The theme of the museum is not that the Holocaust was an inexplicable curse that mysteriously descended on one people at one time; rather the museum attempts to articulate and explain the actual reasons — the motives and ideology — behind the events, beginning with bad ideas that were only later realized in action when conditions made them possible.
  • The narrative does not attempt to convince the visitor that the Holocaust was plotted from the beginning of Nazi rule; in fact, you discover a very different story. The visitor sees how bad ideas (demographic central planning; scapegoating of minorities; the demonization of others) festered, leading to ever worsening results: boycotts of Jewish-owned business, racial pogroms, legal restrictions on property and religion, internments, ghettoization, concentration camps, killings, and finally a carefully constructed and industrialized machinery of mass death.
  • The museum does not isolate Germans as solely or uniformly guilty. Tribute is given to the German people, dissenters, and others who also fell victim to Hitler’s regime. As for moral culpability, it unequivocally belongs to the Nazis and their compliant supporters in Germany and throughout Europe. But the free world also bears responsibility for shutting its borders to refugees, trapping Jews in a prison state and, eventually, execution chamber.
  • The presentation is not rooted in sadness and despair; indeed, the museum tells of heroic efforts to save people from disaster and the resilience of the Jewish people in the face of annihilation. Even the existence of the museum is a tribute to hope because it conveys the conviction that we can learn from history and act in a way that never repeats this terrible past.

The Deeper Roots of the Holocaust

For the last six months, I’ve been steeped in studying and writing about the American experience with eugenics, the “policy science” of creating a master race. The more I’ve read, the more alarmed I’ve become that it was ever a thing, but it was all the rage in the Progressive Era. Eugenics was not a fringe movement; it was at the core of ruling-class politics, education, and culture. It was responsible for many of the early experiments in labor regulation. It was the driving force behind marriage licenses, minimum wages, restrictions on opportunities for women, and immigration quotas and controls.

The more I’ve looked into the subject, the more I’m convinced that it is not possible fully to understand the birth of the 20th century Leviathan without an awareness of eugenics. Eugenics was the original sin of the modern state that knows no limits to its power.

Once a regime decides that it must control human reproduction — to mold the population according to a central plan and divide human beings into those fit to thrive and those deserving extinction — you have the beginning of the end of freedom and civilization. The prophets of eugenics loathed the Jews, but also any peoples that they deemed dangerous to those they considered worthy of propagation. And the means they chose to realize their plans was top-down force.

So far in my reading on the subject, I’ve studied the origin of eugenics until the late 1920s, mostly in the US and the UK. And so, touring the Holocaust Museum was a revelation. It finally dawned on me: what happened in Germany was the extension and intensification of the same core ideas that were preached in the classrooms at Yale, Harvard, and Princeton decades earlier.

Eugenics didn’t go away. It just took on a more violent and vicious form in different political hands. Without meaningful checks on state power, people with eugenic ambitions can find themselves lording over a terror state. It was never realized in the United States, but it happened elsewhere. The stuffy academic conferences of the 1910s, the mutton-chopped faces of the respected professorial class, mutated in one generation to become the camps and commandants of the Nazi killing machine. The distance between eugenics and genocide, from Boston to Buchenwald, is not so great.

There are moments in the tour when this connection is made explicit, as when it is explained how, prior to the Nazis, the United States had set the record for forced sterilizations; how Hitler cited the US case for state planning of human reproduction; how the Nazis were obsessed with racial classification and used American texts on genetics and race as a starting point.

And think of this: when Progressive Era elites began to speak this way, to segment the population according to quality, and to urge policies to prevent “mongrelization,” there was no “slippery slope” to which opponents could point. This whole approach to managing the social order was unprecedented, and so a historical trajectory was pure conjecture. They could not say “Remember! Remember where this leads!”

Now we have exactly that history, and a moral obligation to point to it and learn from it.

What Can We Learn?

My primary takeaway from knitting this history together and observing its horrifying outcome is this: that any ideology, movement, or demagogue that dismisses universal human rights, that disparages the dignity of any person based on group characteristics, that attempts to segment the population into the fit and unfit, or in any way seeks to use the power of the state to put down some in order to uplift others, is courting outcomes that are dangerous to the whole of humanity. It might not happen immediately, but, over time, such rhetoric can lay the foundations for the machinery of death.

And there is also another, perhaps more important lesson: bad ideas have a social and political momentum all their own, regardless of anyone’s initial intentions. If you are not aware of that, you can be led down, step by step, to a very earthly hell.

At the same time, the reverse is also true: good ideas have a momentum that can lead to the flourishing of peace, prosperity, and universal human dignity. It is up to all of us. We must choose wisely, and never forget.


This article was originally posted on March 8, 2016 at the Foundation for Economic Education.

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Free the People publishes opinion-based articles from contributing writers. The opinions and ideas expressed do not always reflect the opinions and ideas that Free the People endorses. We believe in free speech, and in providing a platform for open dialog. Feel free to leave a comment!

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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16 comments

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  • Your comments are both chilling and hopeful. Thank you Mr. Tucker for your thinking, research and sharing. I’m hopeful because that is the best choice I have.

  • Jeffrey,

    This is one of your best articles yet! It is always perplexing, to those of us that believe in liberty, to try and understand how progressivism gained such a foothold in America, how we so lost our way in this grand American experiment. Clearly it was always about folks who thought their choices for other people were superior to what those folks might choose for themselves. But race superiority – and cleansing of the populace – adds another dimension to that attitude. It’s so ironic that the folks who claim to be so against Hitler and the KKK and racism and bullying and so forth, ad nauseum, actually inherit their own progressive political views, and their superiority complex , from the very folks that promoted such “ideals” as cleansing at the turn of the century. And, of course, their solution to every problem, perceived or real, is ever more government, while it is governments themselves that have always spawned the damage.

    • Absolutely! No history lesson about the rise of any particularly tyrannical ruler is complete without a study of the circumstances, conditions, and people who permitted their rule. This is why Trump worries me no more or less than any of the other candidates. They will all take as much rope as the people permit them to take–no more and no less. The pertinent question is how much rope will people permit them to take.

  • While I went through the museum years ago shortly after it opened, I am eager to go through it again, this time looking at it through “Tucker Eyes.” It was educational then, but will be even more so the next time for slightly different reasons. Thank you, Jeffrey.

  • Another sobering museum in a similar vein is the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima, Japan. Here there is no doubt about the direct complicity of the United States. It is intense to say the least. For more information see: http://atomicbombmuseum.org/ Jeffery, thank you for sharing your experiences with the US Holocaust Museum.

  • The Shoah is an end result of when a State reaches near total control over a Nation. Deliberately planned Genocide is far less likely to occur when a State is highly limited or nonexistent. The Holomodor and the extermination of Armenians in Anatolia roughly a century ago did not happen because people enjoyed too much freedom or had too many means to defend themselves. Gut Shabbes to everyone!

  • Reparations?

    The best way is to stop the slavery that exists in the world today – in honor of and as reparation for. Those that cannot see the slavery in the world today have swallowed the ideology of statism hook , line, and sinker. These indoctrinaires are like the slaves in previous times who were afraid of the world beyond their enslavement and afraid to rile up their overlords.

  • I visited the museum this last time we went to DC. I was a little apprehensive to go because of the controversy that you dealt with in the article. I am so glad I decided to go! Thank you for the article.

  • When the Holocaust Museum was being built, Grover Norquist proposed and might have started fundraising for a “Museum of Communism,” to show the story of the development of Marxist and Hegelian thinking, “scientific socialism,” and the rise of the total State (before Hitler) and to have exhibits on the achievements of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and numerous others – we could probably add Castro, Chavez, and even Nehru. I hope it also will be built some day on the Mall in the nation’s capital. We must remember Goebbels got the idea of concentration camps from the British, who used them in the Boer War, and Lenin had been filling his new Gulag with victims of the Russian revolution as soon as the Bosheviki took power. So much for the visions of social engineering and central government planning.

    • One day there will be a Museum for the Victims of Collectivism. Not just Fascism or Communism. If the Ayn Rand brand or flavor of liberty prevails then it may very well be the “Museum for the Victims of Altruism, Collectivism, and Mysticism.”

      • I don’t think Ayn Rand would like it.

        “Of the two, the material parasite is psychologically healthier and closer to reality: at least, he eats or wears his loot. But the only source of satisfaction open to the spiritual parasite, his only means to gain “prestige” (apart from giving orders and spreading terror), is the most wasteful, useless and meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments.

        “Greatness is achieved by the productive effort of a man’s mind in the pursuit of clearly defined, rational goals. But a delusion of grandeur can be served only by the switching, undefinable chimera of a public monument—which is presented as a munificent gift to the victims whose forced labor or extorted money had paid for it—which is dedicated to the service of all and none, owned by all and none, gaped at by all and enjoyed by none.”

        The Objectivist Newsletter Vol. 1 No. 12 December, 1962 “Check Your Premises: The Monument Builders”

        I know I wouldn’t enjoy it. I have no use for any public monuments or most museums. That one should be dedicated to some kind of sadistic celebration of the worst of human horrors is obscene.

  • I was a public high school social studies teacher for 14 years. I taught about eugenics in both my American History class and my American Government class. When the new standards came out with Common Core I was no longer able to fit that topic since it was not on the State test. One of many reasons I resigned from my state teaching job and started my own educational services company.

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