“Everyone was doing it.” And, still are.
Bruce Kesler
Columbia University provost Alan Brinkley responded to Inside Higher Ed, regarding coziness by the then Columbia president between 1933-1937 to Nazi speakers and universities, that:
If the events that Professor Norwood describes are examples of “collaboration,” then the collaborators include many thousands of leaders and citizens of the United States, Britain, and many other nations.
Brinkley has been roundly criticized, not for this statement of fact but for Columbia’s failure to apologize for its particular acts.
However, there’s a broader and more contemporary issue at stake: What responsibility do today’s universities have to avoid repeating such acts?
A professorial critic replies:
That kind of everyone-was-doing-it attitude is appalling. Is that the kind of message that one of the most prominent universities in America wants to send to its students – that if many people are doing something, it can’t be so bad…?
Anne Applebaum addresses today’s historical revisionism in her Washington Post column, as it emanates from a Jimmy Carter, from Arabist and Palestinian apologists, or from Iran’s current exercise in holocaust denial:
Of course, Holocaust denial also has broader roots and many more adherents in the Middle East, which may be part of the point, too: Questioning the reality of the Holocaust has long been another means of questioning the legitimacy of the state of Israel, which was indeed created by the United Nations in response to the Holocaust, and which has indeed incorporated Holocaust history into its national identity. If the Shiite Iranians are looking for friends, particularly among Sunni Arabs, Holocaust denial isn't a bad way to find them….
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this particular brand of historical revisionism is no joke, and we shouldn't be tempted to treat it that way. Yes, we think we know this story already; we think we've institutionalized this memory; we think this particular European horror has been put to rest, and it is time to move on. I've sometimes thought that myself: There is so much other history to learn, after all. The 20th century was not lacking in tragedy.
[Read on.]
