By james art 
I write this in the spirit of the Holocaust Day of Remembrance of this 80th The anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps – and my duty and your never forget.
Weeks ago I taught a university class. I focused on history lessons, a topic that I am interested in so much that an average two books a week, mostly history and biographies.
For ten years, I’ve been hosting two dozen people in my home to talk about books and history. One example of what everyone should know: Hitler came to feed legally in 1933. At least partly because business leaders and others consider more or less: “I know it’s a little crazy but better than the Communists . “Ten years later, 70 million people were dead.
After the class, a military veteran appeared to comment on something I had said. I had quoted a single sentence from the famous Diary of Anne Frank, written while hiding in Amsterdam with her family during the years of the Holocaust (later to be betrayed and die in March 1945 in a Nazi concentration camp): It is great that no one needs a moment before you start improving the world. “
My new friend said that he realized that her diary was fake because, among other reasons, it was written with a pen and these do not exist then. I told him I would check and report. It turns out that while ball pens were invented in the late thirties, few were available and the quality was abnormal. Further, post-war studies show that the diary is written in gray-blue fountain ink and color and black pencils. What we had here was another moment of the Holocaust. This is the nature of today’s media landscape.
Today, the newspaper business, where I spent 35 years of my life as an edition-reporter, has been reduced and watching network television news is in a significant decline. In today’s world, so many otherwise degree and “educated” people think they know what is happening after reading two things on their iPhone.
I consume two newspapers daily in printing and an abundance of applications from serious sources. I also see Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and X daily and to find myself to be tormented by records that look real, but not. This republic depends on informed citizens who receive their news and opinions from a wide range of resources.
Too many people want to know “when it’s over”, so you get a 19-year war in Afghanistan, in which we spent $ 2 trillion to bring democracy to this country (and we failed). The Second World War in America lasted less than four years.
Years ago, I bought the first edition of the last good work of Sinclair Lewis “Can’t happen here”, written in 1935, with a topic of fascist ingestion that is happening here. Jonathan Greenblat, CEO of the League to Combat Defamation, wrote a book in 2022 called “It can happen here: why America is directed from hatred to unthinkable-and how can we stop it.”
Yes, this can happen here.
That is why the Council for the Study of Holocaust Education is so important. You and I have to pursue the truth throughout our lives and not accept that we have found it. We all need to learn history lessons.
A well -known television show from my childhood was Dragnet, where Detective Joe Friday said many times, “Only the facts, ma’am.” “Facts”, yes, should be accurate, but what facts are used and what is the context?
Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Gusples, another known television show than my much younger years, told us six decades ago: “Hate is not the norm. Prejudice is not the norm. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, redemptive country – none of them is the transcendental aspects of the human personality. They are diseases. They are the cancers of the soul. They are infectious and infectious viruses that have been bleeding humanity for years. And because they were because they are, are they necessary to be? I think not. “
Amen.
David Lawrence, Jr., a retired publisher of Miami Herald, chaired Florida Children’s Movement.
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