Never again, again: the Holocaust Museum and 9/11

National Review, Dec 8, 2003 by William J. Bennett

AT a recent "Days of Remembrance" event at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., Elie Wiesel said, "Memory is tragedy's most indispensable element." No modern evil compares to the Holocaust, and the Holocaust Museum--along with the preservation of the Holocaust's memory--has taught much. Its ten-year anniversary this year is to be celebrated.

The Holocaust Museum succeeds in its mission by showing one grim, discouraging, horrible picture after another. To go through the museum is to see the center of Hell. It is neither an uplifting nor an encouraging experience, but, better, especially for our times, it is a deepening one. In a world where a majority of images speed by us and are forgotten, such deepening experiences--even into the heart of darkness--are indispensable for memory, perspective, and action. It is an irony of our time that, while many advocate the personal expression of any and all emotions and feelings, we are squeamish about telling the stories of human atrocity. Why should such hesitancy govern when allowing it to do so leads to amnesia and loss of will?

A tragedy forgotten is a tragedy that happened only to a direct victim. A tragedy remembered is a tragedy that teaches all of us lessons: that we cannot sit idly by as our brothers' blood is shed; that what happened as a result of the indolence of the decent should never happen again. "Never again" is the main lesson we have learned from the Holocaust--never again would we allow human beings to be slaughtered when we could have prevented it; never again would we sit silently while we knew slaughter was taking place. Another lesson: If tragedy can be prevented before it happens, prevent it. If Hitler could have been stopped in 1928, or 1938, the world would have forgiven such action--or so one would hope. It is a human duty to remember humanity, to remember that other human beings shall not be treated like animals and slaughtered, that tyrants shall not be allowed to act like gods, choosing who shall live and who shall die.

That tyrants and terrorists today may be Arabs and Muslims--and not Germans--is no reason to be less concerned about the intolerable. So let us remember what terrorists have done to us, and to human beings everywhere. Let us erect a museum to commemorate September 11 and its aftermath so that we do not forget what happened that day, what could happen again, and what was happening in the Middle East and Afghanistan before we responded. We need such a museum today so that foolish and dangerous comments like Michael Moore's--"There is no terrorist threat"--do not become the coin of the realm in thought, conversation, and indifference.

That museum need not be elaborate, nor need it be confined to one location. Let it be put on CD-ROM, DVD, and VHS. And let the media announce that they are going to show these atrocities, and let them then be shown. In fact, the media should make time in their otherwise anodyne lineups for such true reality shows. There have been complaints of late that the Pentagon is enforcing a ban on displaying military caskets. That ban should be lifted, but only so long as the unspoken ban on the footage of what led to this war is also lifted. That footage should be aired late at night, without graphic promotional video. There should be warnings about the content: Parents should make sure that their younger children are out of the room, and should talk with their older children before watching it with them.

The first images of the museum should be of the airplanes flying into the Twin Towers. Then, with slight alterations to preserve anonymity, there should follow footage of the estimated 200 people who jumped from the towers. We should watch their seemingly eternal, yet final, last ten seconds of life. We should think about what they were thinking as "the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands," as Esquire contributor Tom Junod has written. We should then see image after image of the Towers crashing. We should see images of the Pentagon on fire. And we should see photograph after photograph of those who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania--with their families, at their weddings, at celebrations, enjoying a life that 19 thugs and a poisonous ideology ripped from them, and from us.

Then, we should see image after image of what the Taliban, bin Laden, and Mullah Omar trained people to do. We should see al-Qaeda training camps. And, with his family's consent, we should see images of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl's execution.

On to Iraq, the latest focus in the war on terrorism, the latest effort to rid the world of another mass-murdering tyrant. We should see the videos that former New York City police chief Bernard Kerik saw in Baghdad: "Interrogations of Iraqis whose lives ended with the detonation of a grenade that was tied to the neck or stuffed in the shirt pocket of the victim ... living bodies disintegrate at the pull of the pin ... a tape of Saddam sitting and watching one of his military generals being eaten alive by Dobermans because the general's loyalty was in question."