The article was written in response to a group of teabaggers who had retaliated against writer, professor, activist, and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. Wiesel had apparently criticized a group of health care reform protestors for holding up a sign showing the dead bodies of Holocaust victims and comparing it to the Democrats' health care plan. The teabagging attack on the Nobel Laureate, was laced with profound ignorance.
Wiesel's book "Night" is a book that will forever haunt me. I find it so difficult to believe that so many, like these protesters, still feel that the Holocaust was exaggerated, or use it as propaganda to further their own agenda. There is so much injustice in having a story, like Wiesel's, be discredited based on nothing, based on absolutely nothing. It diminishes everything the victims and the survivors went through, and to me this is terrifying.
In terms of diminishment and terrifying behavior, my favorite poem, written by W.H. Auden, called Musee des Beux Arts, touches on the subject. It was written a year before Germany invaded Poland. A tribute to how our world turned a blind eye to what had been occurring across Europe at that time. It's powerful.
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
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