When a Holocaust Museum Whitewashes a Nazi.

so this is the kind of video you don't
get very much on YouTube and it's the kind of feedback you don't get very much in real life not in academia not in any kind of theater I can imagine um it is read of all that in 2018 it is genuinely necessary for me to mention that I am F nicly Jewish not a member of the Jewish faith I'm an atheist um I did grow up knowing one Holocaust survivor it would be ridiculous if I knew ten there aren't that many around and for my generation I'm only only 40 years old so obviously most of them are deceased of old age and I was growing up I do have connections to the Holocaust in my family and also just nerves my interest in political history there are ways in which is something I positively care about and I'm someone who has visited Holocaust museums I can't quite say all over the world the two that really stand out in my memory we recently went to basically two different Holocaust museums in in France in Paris Paris France and many years ago I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC I have probably been to other Holocaust museums and because of my parents MIT T because of my parents peculiar profession Holocaust museums and human rights museums were a big part of my life growing up hearing about the changing tide in musial Aegean government policy of governments around the world more and more making an effort to build you know multi-million dollar institutions big budget museums that were based around immortalizing ideas and that were not built around interpreting objects so the sort of classical Western museum is Avaaz on a pedestal with a label and we all know that's not the purpose and that's not the format of a Holocaust Museum and my parents were two of the most influential people in that transitional period culturally and bureaucratically as governments around the world started to make what what they called idea museums and we all know one of the reasons why Holocaust museums exist is that there is a small but vocal minority all around the world trying to claim that the Holocaust didn't happen or did or that some revisionist position in history should be should be taken on it so this is a case where or setting down the basic facts of history in contrast to to generalize the ignorance is more of a struggle than I don't know in almost any other province you know if you were gonna make a museum taking seriously the history of First Nations people indigenous people you know you'd face ignorant you'd face contempt you'd face indifference many people just don't want to know what that history but you would not face organized conspiratorial thinking on the way that Judaism almost uniquely in the 21st century the history of the Jewish people it's really about Jewishness not Judaism faces global hostility on an unbelievable scale unbelievable depth and intensity you know when I was a kid I thought that was going to style I thought when I grow up this is gonna be a thing of the past we're gonna look back on like the decade of the 1980s is the decade when it's acceptance of what's fainting out but no I mean if anything I think it's a more powerful force in society and you know there's Eastern European eighty Semitism there's Islamic anti-semitism there's like American white neo-nazi anti-semitism there are really many different schools of anti-semitism they're all very vocal very active so I say this as a disclaimer at the start of this video because what I'm about to do is criticize a particular Holocaust Museum I digress briefly to come right back to my point just yesterday I reached out to and sent some email to a guy they were actually Facebook messages same thing a guy here on YouTube who is an activist for the vegan cause he does animal rights and veganism and he is a guy who said a lot of really embarrassing things about communism lately making pro-communist statements and I thought it was interesting that his audience had the moral fiber to stand up to him and say hey this stuff you're saying about communism you're actually you know justifying and making excuses for running roughshod over the deaths of tens of millions of people this is an issue that were there's a huge body count so you know you sound ignorant as hell you got to really reconsider what you're saying here this is a disservice there move all this this kind of warning being given to him I thought both of those things were interesting and it is very strange that murder on the scale of millions of people is handled so differently in the context of the history of communism than it is in the history of fascism but I took some time to reach out to this guy and say hey look I realize you're probably saying these things that ignorance but this is who I am this is my academic background this is why I know so much about the reality of communism including the events that killed tens of millions of people at a time of which there are many many separate discrete events that it's not it's not just one Holocaust in the case of the history of communism history of Russia history of China history of Cambodia there all these different examples you can draw on in different periods lasted much longer than the Nazi regime last in Germany but what I'm fundamentally dealing with there is the puzzle of ignorance in politics and we tend to think about morality as if we're all making informed choices between alternatives that have been set out on the table in front of us and were not almost all of us if you think about a deck of cards being laid out in the table the problem is precisely people are only looking at the cards they're only looking at the options that they're already aware of they're rarely seeking out and examining new options so when you're talking to somebody like that there's an interesting question of making the effort to say hey look I'm not here to just damn you and condemn you and I wrote to him saying look I assume you really can't understand why these people are responding in this harshly in this harsh man are condemning you but as a hypothetical thought experiment think about how you would feel if one of your relatives like I don't know you're at Thanksgiving dinner and your uncle if one of your started saying positive things about Adolf Hitler about the history of the Nazi Party think about the combination of embarrassment and awkwardness and shame and I know maybe some anger and outrage you'd feel and you think what am I gonna do am I gonna sit down with Uncle Charlie and really try to talk him through the history of World War two am I gonna just walk out of the room am I just gonna laugh in his face you know what's what what are you gonna do in this situation and it's very very rare for people to reach you up positively and try to address these these questions you can't make the right choice when you don't even know what the options are and that's really one of the tragedies of politics in 21st century you know to some extent people act in their rational self-interest but to a much greater extent they act out of a real ignorant of both historical context and of the alternatives that are that are presently available them and frankly that's why I think this question of how the Holocaust is interpreted and memorialized and taught to the next generation that's why I think it's so important and I've known people um I mean I was recently talking to a guy who's you know basically Palestinian grew up connected to Palestine and obviously he grew up with a version of the history of Israel and Palestine remarkably different from you know the version of history as I know it and you know we actually had a pretty productive conversation where I was telling him some facts they really were neutral objective facts and he could google them and see oh wow here's this other side of the history and story I didn't know at all that kind of dialogue you might think of the 21st century the internet was gonna foster that that if there's gonna be a blossoming of this kind of challenging of preconceptions challenging of preconceptions as never before but as we all know the effect of the internet tends instead to retrench people into a narrow chorus of conformist opinion that just affirms their sense of self-righteousness so that is why it is so important for Holocaust museums to tell the truth and it's not just Holocaust museums when was the last time you saw a museum dealing with the reality of the history of the British Empire the Queen of England got rich dealing dope literally the British Empire was a heroin Empire they stopped making money at a slavery they said how are we gonna make money it's gonna be dealing dope and they became the world's greatest opium dealing ring opium and heroin are the same drug in case you didn't know there are two different forms of the same drug made it at the same poppy it is true it was called opium back then and not heroin but I digress who is going to deal with that history it's so easy to use this this I don't know this worn out cliche learning the lessons of history was it really mean well I'll tell you what it means if you're making a Holocaust Museum in the city of Detroit you have to tell the aspect of the history of the Holocaust that is linked to Detroit and that takes courage it takes courage to be a curator in a city where the the Main Street is named after Henry Ford where the biggest museum the biggest institutions the biggest skyscrapers are all named after Henry Ford where the Ford Corporation hospitals are have Ford's name on them where memorials and statues to the greatness of Henry Ford are everywhere it takes courage to stand up against that cultural expectation and say guess what Henry Ford wasn't just a fascist with a lowercase F Henry Ford was directly linked to Adolf Hitler Henry Ford was a powerful part of the production of the uniquely Nazi form of anti-semitism Henry Ford invented the form of conspiracy thinking the form of modern anti-semitism that still exists with us to this day and that was a crucial part of the development of Nazi ideology guess what Henry Ford literally had a picture of Adolf Hitler on his desk in his office with displayed with admiration and simultaneously in Nazi Germany Adolf Hitler had a photograph of Henry Ford the admiration was mutual I just fact checked this I saw several sources claiming that in both cases it was a portrait on their desk on on the table but the actual photographic evidence I've seen was actually that that Hitler had a picture of Henry forward on his wall of his office like a poster sized picture of him in a frame of all um maybe both maybe I mean maybe Hitler had more than one office just this kind of detail I don't know about Henry Ford I've addressed this on this channel before published vitriolic insane anti-semitic conspiracy theories that changed the course of world history all right he really did innovate and say things that had not been said before and that came from the position of someone who was at that time the most admired industrialist and technological innovator in the world Henry Ford at that time was much more respected than today the leader of Microsoft Corporation or Apple Corporation at that time he was one of the titans of industry and you know he was seen he was seen as having changed the world for the better especially in Germany Germany with its tradition of industrial engineers and it's not just something academic Germany a country that in that time was really committed to the notion of science technology and heavy industry transforming them pulling them out of you know the bucolic past into a modern future and so on Henry Ford he just as a man was a powerful symbol in Germany and the impact of him creating his own newspaper and publishing his own dedicated books inventing and propelling anti-semitic theories who is he huge Henry Ford was both a proto Nazi in that he was part of the generation of and definition of what Nazi Oh ideology was and became and then once Nazism once fascism became a maturity ology in Germany he flew to Germany and received a medal for made Hitler never forget that they met person in person and why did he laugh Hitler give Henry Ford a medal not for being a great industrialist not for his innovations in science in technology he was given a medal for his contributions to anti-semitism for the development of anti-semitism okay so that is the crucial chapter of the history of the Holocaust that happened in Detroit Michigan if you go to a Holocaust Museum in Paris they probably won't mention it if you go to a Holocaust Museum in Israel they may or may not mention it it's not something happened in Israel even if you go to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC or Los Angeles it may get a very brief mention benefit but guess what if you're in Detroit if you're creating a Holocaust Museum in Detroit for the people of Detroit for the future of Detroit about the history of Detroit don't you [ __ ] pretend that the most important thing about Detroit was that they used to manufacture tanks there to fight in World War two that's ridiculous the man who is still celebrated on every street corner of your city as a local hero was a villain and he wasn't used to dealing in some generalized sense he wasn't some fascist with no particular link to anti-semitism or the August he was absolutely the worst type of fascist he was literally more despicable than Goebbels this is ridiculous and and where's the reckoning of history even in 2018 well I could read it to you I photographed the only mention of Henry Ford and his connect connections to Nazism in the whole museum because I was looking for it I went through your Holocaust Museum in in Detroit and you know here here's the wording after the war comma Henry Ford allowed the protocols of the Elders of Zion to be reprinted in his newspaper that Dearborn independent his name also appeared on the book on a book the International Jew containing many similar ideas to those in the protocols he was sued for libel in 1927 and apologized we calling copies of the newspaper he never allowed his name to be used in anti-semitic activity again if that is not a whitewash I don't know what is when your version of the history of Henry Ford is connections to Nazism anti-semitism looks like a whitewash compared to Wikipedia it calls into question the most basic premise of why a Holocaust Museum should exist at all if you can't do better than Wikipedia if you can't speak truth to power why does your museum exist at all because it doesn't exist for the reasons why traditional museums exist it doesn't exist because you have a vods that you want to display with a label or a collection of paintings it's not an object oriented object driven Museum the reason why it exists is to reach out to people and educate people and make them aware make them aware of the cards laid out in the table by history make them aware of the legacy of the last hundred years 500 years whatever it's going to be and what the options are and the decisions are now that they're making and how those really connect with the history the banality of evil is that people today still make excuses and justifications for mass murder under communism and some of them know what they're doing some of them do it consciously and intentionally but the vast majority of them do it out of sheer ignorance and that is the banality of evil and what you're trying to counter here is not really the conscious and intentional evil of the tiny minority of people who are really making excuses for Adolf Hitler who are really making excuses for Henry Ford it's to enlighten the people who are participating who are complicit in that evil out of sheer ignorance