STUPIDITY CAN BE POWERFUL
Before the mass shootings
The poisonous showers and furnaces
Supposedly fuming without smoke or smell,
We were forbidden to own typewriters
Musical instruments and bicycles,
Any form of communication
That would link any two People of The Book
Until six million disappeared
Without a notice like cottony thistles
Floating away in the air.
Building Hell required German efficiency
And Swiss currency.
Even today,
Despite all the books and letters
Photographs and motion pictures
And the Shoah in computerized files,
Even today,
Thirty percent of our youth younger than thirty
Are stupid with residual hatred
And don’t believe it ever happened.
________________
Michael Salcman
Review by Jared Pearce
Another war poem, but this piece takes an historical approach that makes me wonder if the Holocaust itself was worse than the current consideration that it didn’t. In such a position, even history doesn’t survive a war, as Ryzhykh says and as Salcman proves.
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Sure, the knowledge of history is fundamental; it is a due act of respect towards the victims and a means to hold the culprits accountable.
Echoing Friedrich Hegel, Sting sings “history will teach us nothing”, and sometimes I wish he were right. And I wish that, because reality is far more sickening. The one lesson we should take from history is that atrocities are committed by those who’ve mastered history’s playbook. War criminals are often hyper-literate in history and weaponize it deliberately. They must be called out, and we must recognize in all crimes against humanity the use of the very same methods and narratives, leaving the same fingerprints: Africa, Middle East, Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Oceania.
It is established beyond all doubt that historical literacy and moral progress do not go hand in hand. And I confess, when the grief for the current state of affairs is too much, I sometimes wish we could all forget History, bury it with what we did, what we are capable of doing – a very naïve way I suppose to try to rebuild some sort of boundaries, if not standards of conduct, and limits to the suffering we are capable of inflicting on one another. Because
Power doesn’t disbelieve history, doesn’t question it – it rebrands it.
Knowledge does not prevent evil – it refines it.
The root of evil isn’t forgetting – it’s calculating.
Genocide isn’t a slipup – it’s policy.
Slavery isn’t an oversight – it’s an industry.
War isn’t a memory lapse – it’s a business.
What good are archives and memories when the killers keep the keys?
They don’t burn the books – they footnote them to death.