The Holocaust is now on Facebook
By Paul Greenberg
WARSAW (AP) — The memorial museum at Auschwitz has launched a Facebook page hoping that the popular social-neworking site will help it reach young people around the globe and engage them in discussions about the former Nazi death camp and the Holocaust…
It had to happen. The Holocaust is now on Facebook. From enormity into classroom discussion topic. It’s the standard modern metamorphosis. Awe has given way to science, horror to the antiseptic dissection of it. Modernity means trivialization.
Now we have Holocaust Studies. Just as we have American/Black/Jewish/Women’s/ Middle East Studies. Have you noticed? The addition of Studies to any discipline has a way of ending it as a discipline. And marks its beginning as … what? Fad, obsession, ceremonial observance, group therapy? All of the above and vaporous more?
The process is familiar by now. It happened long ago to the Holocaust. Something singular, ineffable, monstrous … is turned into nothing distinctive, quite discussable, almost cut-and-dried. The pain too deep to be voiced, all the pity and sorrow and shame and anguish have been transmuted into … what, exactly? Another pseudo-science? College major? Genocide like any other? Call it Holocaust 101.
More here:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/greenberg110209.php3?printer_friendly
