Throughout the month of September, I've been challenging myself to write a mini-essay each day. I enlisted 30 of my friends to help me by assigning each of them a day and having them send me an essay title at midnight.
My Sept. 24 title was a quote from a Polish holocaust survivor: "The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed
and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins."
I mention David Mamet's essay, The Jew for Export, in my essay. As such, I think it appropriate to post here.
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The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed
and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.
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What in the world can that mean?
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Want
to win an Academy Award? No problem. Just make a documentary about the
Holocaust. Or a short film about the Holocaust. Or a feature film about
the Holocaust.
Or so they say.
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In David Mamet's
essay The Jew for Export, he refers to Schindler's List as emotional
pornography.
The film works, he says, by allowing the audience to feel
superior because, after all, they would never treat the Jews the way the
Nazis did. He writes: "Members of the audience learn nothing save the
emotional lesson of all melodrama, that they are better than the
villain. The very assertion that the film is instructive is harmful."
I
saw Schindler's List in theatres in 1993. It's the only time I've
witnessed a crowd applaud after a movie. I didn't applaud - not because I
didn't appreciate it but because I didn't see the point in applauding
an artist who was not there to hear it.
I will say that
Schindler's List is not the best modern movie about the Holocaust. I
ascribe that honour to Roman Polanski's The Pianist.
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I
know next to nothing about the Holocaust save what I see in movies and
what some veterans of the Second World War have told me. Every year
their number dwindles and I am told that young people today must learn
of the Holocaust so that they will not make the same mistake in the
future.
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My favourite book about WWII is Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse Five, which is actually about the firebombings in Dresden
and aliens from the planet Tralfalmadore.
In chapter one,
Vonnegut tells about a discussion he had about his book with Harrison
Starr, who was a famous movie director at one point.
Starr asked if it was an anti-war book. Vonnegut replied that it was.
"Do you know what I tell people who are writing anti-war books?" Starr asked.
"No."
"I ask them why they don't write an anti-glacier book instead."
The
point is that there will always be wars just as there will always be
glaciers. And trying to stop wars is as difficult as stopping glaciers.
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The
Holocaust IS going to happen again. That's a fact. It's probably going
on right now. As long as there are people who believe different things,
we will go to war. We're xenophobic by nature.
As the terminator told a young John Connor, it's in our nature to destroy ourselves.
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There's an old standby among philosophers when it comes to ending an ongoing debate.
How
do you know it's over. The discussion has been going for hours - days
even - and neither side is willing to capitulate to the other. How can
you tell when one side is victorious if no one is willing to surrender?
The answer: Hitler. As soon as someone compares his opponent to the Nazis, he loses.
Hitler,
after all, is the 20th century sobriquet of pure evil. Very few will
dispute that. Everyone believes he's the devil incarnate - even the
world's warlords who even now are butchering innocent people.
They don't believe that they're not as bad as Hitler, they don't believe they're bad at all.
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I
find it curious that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipelago
may be the greatest account of suffering ever written, was reluctant to
publish his book.
"My obligation to those still living outweighed my obligation to the dead."
He must have believed that not humiliating his friends was more important than tribute.
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Is a book a monument? Is a film? A play?
WWII was fought because a German madman insisted on committing genocide.
WWIII will probably be fought over drinking water.
There are those who would say that robbing people of potable water makes us as bad as the Nazis.
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In The Jew for Export, Mamet points out that each of us has the capacity for benevolence and atrocity.
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On Remembrance Day, I will wear a poppy.
