Power corrupts.
(Absolute power corrupts absolutely.)
_____
Powerlessness corrupts.
(Absolute powerlessness corrupts absolutely.)
______________________________
The October 13, 2022, issue of Mosaic features an absolutely superb essay by Dr. Ruth R. Wisse, Why Despite Good Intentions Ken Burns’s “The U.S. and the Holocaust” Fails, concerning Ken Burns’ documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust“. She focuses on the central problem with the PBS production already noticed by Jonathan Tobin, Shmuel Klatzkin, and Daniel Greenfield: The three-part series explores events of the past not in order to directly interpret and understand that past, in terms of…
– the implications and political utility of Jew-hatred in terms what this inevitably portends for the health, future, and survival of any society, nation, or civilization;
– how best to assure the collective survival of the Jews. Or, more aptly phrased, how the Jews themselves must best assure their own survival;
… but instead serves – first – as an ideological cudgel that not-so-indirectly draws fallacious parallels between the experience of European (and not just European) Jews from the 1920s through the 1940s, and, dire questions about the economic, demographic, and political future of the United States in 2022 and beyond. And second – in the sadly and totally politicized world of the twenty-first century – as a minor, ambiguous (oh, but not so insubstantial!) form of validation for the cultural and social bona fides of PBS viewers. (Hey, who needs epaulettes and badges of rank when you’ve got a tote bag?!)
As is typical of Dr. Wisse, her thoughts are profoundly original and deep, while she has a superb talent for discerning analogies and parallels that might otherwise remain unnoticed. Her work is above all refreshing in her ability to dismiss comforting rationalizations and deal with unpleasant realities (whether those realities are historical or contemporary) in an unflinching way. This is immediately evident in the many videos and podcasts in which she presents her thoughts about the history of Yiddish (not just linguistically, but for what the language reveals about Jewish history), Jewish history “in general”, and especially, the implications of power in terms of collective and national survival.
Or, to quote from the intro to the Tikvah Fund podcast on Jews and Power (see below): “Lord Acton famously proposed that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse provides an analysis of Jewish history that suggests the exact opposite. With neither sovereignty, nor centralized government, nor even mechanisms of self-defense, the Jewish people reconceived the meaning of their nation in manifestly moral terms. They fell prey to the danger of being corrupted by powerlessness. Generations of exilic Jews sought to live as “a light unto the nations,” seeking toleration and protection from their host rulers. But their political dependency left diaspora Jews vulnerable to being scapegoated – a tendency that has persisted despite the resumption of Jewish sovereignty in Israel.”
And so, akin to my brief excerpts from the essays of Tobin, Klatzkin, and Greenfield, below you can find numerous excerpts of Dr. Wisse’s Mosaic essay, which I think convey her central arguments most powerfully and effectively. Still, these pithy and powerful thoughts – taken alone – don’t at all do justice to the totality of her thoughts, so I highly recommend (really!) that you read, and contemplate, and read again, her essay in full.
Oh… In the same way that I formatted the excerpts from the three other essays for easier and quicker reading, such has been done with these excerpts. Also, I’ve inserted links (not actually present in Dr. Wisse’s essay at Mosaic!) to opinion pieces and news items that I think directly illustrate her points.
So…!
Why Despite Good Intentions Ken Burns’s “The U.S. and the Holocaust Fails”
The Public Broadcasting Service’s regular appeal for support to “Viewers Like You”
speaks not just to those who contribute financially
but to a much larger audience that is assumed to share its views and values.
Burns, who is not a historian or a political thinker but a filmmaker who satisfies that audience,
has mirrored their eagerness to do good and to atone for past iniquities.
The series’ heavy-handed apologetics for this Democratic icon –
absolving FDR of accountability for the people whom he installed,
the policies he administered, and the country he led –
appeared in sharp contrast to its unsparing exposure of the home-bred fascists
who drummed up support for Hitler.
In doing so, the series paid far greater attention to those who kept Jews out
than to those who helped secure their entry –
or who focused on winning the war.
According to Robert Lloyd, the TV critic of the Los Angeles Times,
“American nativism,
xenophobia,
and white supremacy,
having been given cover by the previous president [i.e., Donald Trump], are renascent,”
and the producers “make that connection explicit.”
In that last respect, most striking to “Viewers Like Me”
and others more familiar with the subject than the average PBS viewer
is how faithfully this documentary follows the rationale
of the exhibit and “narrative” of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
In telling their story,
the filmmakers include no questions,
information,
or political considerations
beyond those already calcified in the American version of “The Holocaust.”
In the United States,
where the Puritan ethic has made moralism something of a national trait
and moralizing a national posture, Americans have . . .
preferred to address themselves to the eternal verities,
the large questions of good and evil,
rather than to understanding how Nazi ideology and racist prejudice
were embodied in the [German] state’s institutions
and how the Nazi state enlisted those institutions in the murder of the Jews.
During the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s, for instance,
the American press, secular and religious,
moralized a lot about man’s capacity to sin and his propensity for evil,
but did not give much thought to Eichmann himself,
the deeds he did,
and the system that created him.
Blaming themselves for harboring racist prejudices and for being sinful creatures,
the editorialists intoned as one: “We are all guilty.”
[Historian Lucy] Dawidowicz, who by 1985 had moved from studying the events in Europe
to studying America’s role in the war,
was shrewdly suspicious of this contrition.
After working her way through all the “what-ifs,”
Dawidowicz concludes that preaching history,
as opposed to writing history,
turns the record of the past from what it was into a record of what it should have been.
She recommends that we concentrate instead on what history has actually revealed:
the mobilizing powers of anti-Semitism in whatever form it arises;
the indispensable role of military power in arresting it;
and, above all, the lesson “which every Jewish child now knows” –
namely, that without political power Jews have no chance for survival:
Had a Jewish state existed in 1939,
even one as small as Israel today,
but militarily as competent,
the terrible story of six-million dead might have had another outcome.
And that is the gist of it:
none of the lessons that Dawidowicz thinks history teaches us
can be derived from either the Holocaust Museum in Washington
or from the Ken Burns documentary series based upon it.
Communist influence in America was disproportionately present among the intellectual elites,
many of whose descendants (again, including disproportionate numbers of American Jews)
would continue to champion hard-left enmity to the state of Israel.
To this day,
bashing capitalism,
trashing liberal democracy,
and undermining confidence in America and Israel
continue to play out everywhere in American institutions.
In the Burns documentary, there is no mention of them.
I am persuaded that in the years since Lucy Dawidowicz warned against it,
the exclusive emphasis on Nazism –
deliberate in some cases, unthinking in others –
has become a means of deflecting attention
from the real and very present dangers now assaulting both the Jews and America.
Jewish parents should be aware, for example, that those are not proto-Nazis
making college life hell for their children from Berkeley to NYU.
In the U.S. Congress, those are not proto-Nazis fomenting hatred of Israel.
In the State Department, it is not neo-Nazis who are urging treaties and amity
with an Iranian regime that has vowed to exterminate the Jewish state and its people.
Nor is it neo-Nazis assaulting Jews in Brooklyn,
or neo-Nazis at the New York Times maligning the Jews and their homeland.
Yet sadly among those last-mentioned maligners are, to repeat,
American Jews and even some who pride themselves on repairing the world.
All of this is known to Ken Burns and to PBS,
which is why they and others have taken such care
to redirect any potential anxiety about the precipitous rise in anti-Jewish politics
away from such threats toward the more convenient and already disparaged far-right.
I am certain that Burns and his team did not deliberately set out
to obscure some of the world’s anti-Semites,
to undermine Jewish and American self-confidence,
or to allow the ongoing defamation of Israel.
But their documentary does just that,
with a significant segment of American Jewry,
wittingly or unwittingly,
cheering them on.