I can't remember the last time I actually cried while reading an article, but when I reached the part in "This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write" where the author began listing all the things she was sorry for, my heart began breaking and the tears flowed hard. The article is linked below, but first here is a bit of my own history.
There was a span of about ten years, 2000-2010, where I read every book I could find about government-led massacres and cruelty. I amassed quite a collection of books on the horrors that took place during the Holocaust, in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Soviet Union, during the Iranian Revolution, in Communist China, the Dominican Republic, Armenia -- the list goes on and on. There are so many, too many, horrible episodes even in our relatively recent human history.
I read those books because I was trying to figure something out, to understand what dark developments in society and in individual human hearts enable events like these to happen. I'm not sure I ever arrived at a single definitive answer for it all, but I did learn one thing. It was Lord Acton who said power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, which is certainly true. However, the truth behind genocide was detailed by R.J. Rummel in his book "Death by Government" which reveals that in the 20th century, six times more people were killed by their own governments than by all the century's wars combined.
Power does more than just corrupt - it kills. And when governments have absolute power, they kill absolutely. RJ Rummell passed away in 2014, but his website is still lovingly maintained by someone, and his book is now in its fifth printing. If you want to understand the forces behind all those atrocities, I highly recommend you read both.
I had not thought about that era of my life for some time. Reading this excellent article brought it back.
This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write
For years, my friend’s father asked me to recount his childhood escape from the Nazis. Why did it take me this long?
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner, April 6, 2025
Excerpt:
I was born in 1975, into a world where the people affected by the Holocaust seemed very old to me and the war seemed a very long time ago. But now I’m almost 50, and I realize that I am just about as old as my grandparents were when I was born and that the period between my birth and the Holocaust is roughly the same as between now and the Challenger explosion. I am not an old lady, and the Challenger tragedy still seems awfully recent to me. What it must have been like to try to explain all these things to children who simply had lucked out by being born when they were born. How I should have understood that I was hearing recent history; how I should have understood that a lifetime ago is not actually a very long period of time.