The Oscar for Denial

'And the winner is – The American People'

"...Rosenbaum incorrectly accuses The Reader of claiming that most Germans were ignorant of the The Holocaust.  The film's underlying assumption is far more damning: everybody knew, but nobody acted on that knowledge.  Of course, as Samantha Power recounts in her Pulitzer-Prize winning study of genocide, A Problem From Hell, the United States was also well aware of Hitler's extermination of European Jewry before and during World War Two and also chose to do nothing.

Power's book is a shocking indictment of American neutrality in the face of evil, during the Holocaust and other systematic programs of genocide all around the world - in Turkey, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq and elsewhere - over the past hundred years.  "The key question" writes Power, after presenting hundreds of pages of documented evidence, "... is: Why does the United States stand so idly by?  The most common response is, 'We didn't know.' This is not true."

"Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it," Power's says.  "Bystanders were thus able to retreat to the 'twilight between knowing and not knowing.'"  It was easier not to probe for certainty because uncertainty did not demand action.  Power concludes that America failed to act against genocide not because the country lacked knowledge or influence but because it did not have the will to act.  U.S. officials "were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it."

Now the United States faces a new moral crisis, the subversion of our own legal and moral values by high officials of our own government.  We are, in this moment. as awash in complicity and willful denial as the principled middle-class denizens of the Third Reich.  We are the Good Germans of the new millennium in Bush America because we knew about the illegal kidnappings and tortures, the self-serving legalisms that subverted the Geneva accords and papered over Constitutional lapses, the lies that led us into conquest and occupation.  Starting well before the invasion of Iraq - which millions around the globe protested in unprecedented numbers before it occurred - we knew the "weapons of mass destruction" and Saddam's connections to al-Qaeda were bullshit excuses.  But many millions of us tried to pretend that we really weren't sure.

In his Sunday column entitled: "What We Don't Know Will Hurt Us," Frank Rich remarked upon this "American reluctance to absorb, let alone prepare for, bad news.  We are plugged into more information sources than anyone could have imagined even 15 years ago... Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable."  Or as Bob Dylan put it, in the context of race relations a generation ago, "How many times must a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?"

We know, deep inside us we know, as the Germans who kept their heads down and tried to lead 'normal' lives as genocide exploded all around them, in their name, by their own government, knew, that our government has committed terrible atrocities at home and abroad.  If we do nothing to bring these crimes to light and their perpetrators to justice, then we are as guilty and worthy of moral condemnation as the war generation of silent Germans whom Ron Rosenbaum rightly abhors..."

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