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

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

We should see the plastic shredding devices that Labour MP Ann Clwyd brought to the world's attention, with the following testimony from Iraqi witnesses: "There was a machine designed for shredding plastic. Men were dropped into it and we were again made to watch. Sometimes they went in head first and died quickly. Sometimes they went in feet first and died screaming.... Their remains would be placed in plastic bags and we were told they would be used as fish food."

We should read testimony from the survivors of the chemical attack on Halabja that killed a minimum of 5,000 people. We should see the torture chambers and the rape rooms. We should see mass graves like the one near al-Hilla described by Christopher Hitchens: "The remains of at least 3,000 individuals were brought to the surface.... [E]yewitnesses from the horrific repression of 1991 report having seen three truckloads of prisoners three times a day, for a month, being unloaded there." We need to see these images again, for too many seem to have forgotten them.

Rebuilding Iraq is not going perfectly well. We all know that because the press has been all too anxious to propagate that story, and because we can see the images coming out of that country, too. But rebuilding any country is difficult. When I attended left-wing rallies on behalf of human rights in my youth, I used to hear the quote from Tom Paine that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." In the Middle East--the cradle of dictatorship and terrorism--we are beginning the world again. This is what such work looks like. Yet many have forgotten that all beginnings are difficult. If it succeeds, we will see more democracy, less war, and less torture. And, someday, we may even have the luxury of saying about this, and other memorials to horror, that we do not remember the world that brought them about. In the meantime, we must preserve these recent memories because, already, the wrong things--the best reasons for action--are being forgotten. With such amnesia, "never again" seems less a guarantee and more a remote desire.

Mr. Bennett is the Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute and the author of Why We Fight: Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism.