Remembering Auschwitz

Sixty years ago this week, the Red Army entered the German extermination camp at Auschwitz. What they found there shocked the world. In the next months, similar camps would be liberated. This is an appropriate time to reflect on how the concentration camps and the Second World War changed the world.

WWII was an anti-fascist war. It changed the ideology of the Western civilization. Broadly put (and of course, putting anything broadly risks over-generalization), the ideology of liberalism and humanism was triumphant. In the years immediately following the war, this had a profound impact on the Western world. It marked the moral demise of imperial foreign policies -- the idea that it was appropriate for a powerful country to exploit and oppress its neighbors. In the US, there was a direct connection between the war and the struggle for human rights and democracy at home in the 1950s and 1960s. Women's equality also was lifted by these ideas. In short, victory put liberty, equality, peace, and above all human rights, at the center of world political and moral discourse. Liberal ideology condemns slavery, racism, and torture, and that has became the dominant ideology of the Western world. In the 1990s, liberal ideas began to dismantle the oppression of gays and lesbians. The ascendancy of these ideas has made the ideological atmosphere pre-WWII world, where eugenics and mandatory sterilization were practiced even in the USA, almost impossible for most of us to imagine. The point is not that everything has changed, but that the dominant hegemonic ideas have changed.

In the latter half of the 20th century, the following went from being dominant to the defensive: official racism, anti-semitism, sexism, religious intolerance, and elitism. The headmaster of Eton remarked that before 1964, all the working-class boys tried to imitate the accents of their "betters." By the late 1960s, that had reversed. Before WWII, the dominant political ideology in the West was that white men of the upper classes were destined by God to christianize and subdue the rest of the world, using any means. Today few advocate this openly -- those who do so couch their ideas in the language of the times, the language of universal human rights and democracy.

In many ways, however, this is a failed revolution. Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur remind us that we have not even abolished genocide. Slavery is on the resurgence in Africa, and human trafficking has brought it into Europe and America again. The Economist estimates that the price of a human being, approximately $100, has never been cheaper. Religious intolerance in the form of fundamentalism is on the rise. Fundamentalist militant Islam is part of the picture. So is "fundamentalist" hinduism, ultra-orthodox judaism in the West Bank settlements, fundamentalist Christianity that preaches substituting allegiance to selected biblical passages over conscience. Bombing abortion clinics and "reform schools" that young boys and girls who sexually "misbehave" are examples of religion that has been cut loose from moral moorings.

The liberation of Auschwitz is, above all, a time to recognize that the liberal ideology that was triumphant and ascendant in the latter half of the 20th century is now on the defensive everywhere. To give you an idea, just try to imagine - even as late as the Reagan administration - Republicans and Democrats discussing what kind of torture is acceptable. Try to imagine Clinton calling Rwanda genocide (as Powell has called Darfur genocide) and then doing nothing about it. Clinton resisted calling it genocide because he assumed that once he did so, he would have to act. It would have been unthinkable in 1989, when the Berlin wall was being breached, for the Israelis to have built their "security barrier" in the West Bank. Now the unthinkable has become commonplace.

The problem is that powerful conservative political elements in the USA have never adopted these values. Conservatives fought civil rights. Then, conservatives said "yes, but not women's rights." Next it was "yes, women's rights, but not gays." Conservatives opposed divorce, then accepted it. Now they want to "protect marriage" as we understand it in the 2005 (with easy divorce, and no legal enforcement of monogamy), and pretend this is as it always was. Each time, conservatives pretend they have a moral basis for the next opposition, when it is actually political expediency. At each stage, until now, they have lost and regrouped. Now, they may be winning. The result -- US government using torture and offensive war -- is sad to see. Europeans haven't indulged in this backsliding nearly as much. European rightist movements are minorities; here, they are the Republican majority.

The anniversary of the liberation Auschwitz should be a reminder for liberals to focus on the battle at hand. Liberal ideas became detached from philosophy -- indeed postmodernists decry any kind of unifying worldview at all. The result is that we have lost the ability to talk about morality in a way that allows us to demand that others desist from immoral behavior. Conservatives know how to talk about morality. The 2004 election showed that Americans perceive conservatives as morally steadfast, as 'firm in their convictions' but cannot say the same for liberals. In much of the 20th century, until the 1960s, liberalism expressed itself often through religious ideas, but liberal christianity is a small force today, a shadow of the 'social gospel' and the early 20th century. Also, multiculturalism has made religion an inadequate moral framework for modern ideas. I do not know how to begin to fight back for liberal ideas. Auschwitz, however, reminds us why we cannot fail. Once conservativism succeed in persuading us to bite into the apple and trade away the value of human dignity for other chimeric but tempting goals such as 'security,' or 'prosperity', we have lost our moral compass. We become unmoored. We can, in the tsunami of fear, be led anywhere. Without a map, without a compass, without our moorings, the roads lead to dark places beyond the edge of our imagination.