Reading Elie Weisel's Night I am reminded of how much the holocaust means for us. By us, I think, I mean Americans. I may also mean the Church, the Christian community. I may also mean Leftists. I'm not sure what the 'us' signifies all the time in cases like this as if the holocaust works, almost, as a kind of common ground between multiples.

In the first part of the testimony (as Elie Weisel calls this narrative) we are presented with the Jews unbelief that humanity, in 1943, could do anything as 'inhuman' as what the mystic Moché gives account of. Later on, this theme of unbelief recurs as Elie and his father march towards the fires of the furnace during their first night the young son remarks that "I did not believe they can burn people in our age, [...] humanity would not tolerate it." The response from his father is that humanity is not concerned with them, that the order of humanity had forgotten them or simply ceased to be in this place of the crematorium. The Jews that heard the original testimony of Moché did not believe him because, for some reason, they believed in the decency of humanity and then in Auschwitz that humanities indecency is exposed as if it was suddenly there.

Often times Auschwitz, and for Americans World War II in general, is seen as a time of the worst kind of humanity. In that day, it is often thought, the project of Europe, the Enlightenment project, the highest of humanity had failed. We even say, without shame, the Holocaust as if this was the evil act par excellence. But even Elie Weisel mentions the relation of the camps to the actions of the past. The Armenian genocide before it, the Spanish Inquisition, the First World War, the Pogroms, the slave trade, ad nauseum. What ever made these people believe in their unbelief? That humanity wasn't capable of these things! That humanity surely would speak out! As a point of evidence the finger is normally directed towards the 'cold Rationality' of the German's, specifically the actual SS murderers. These men are normally described, almost universally in literature dealing with the Holocaust, as unemotional and intelligent. I still fail to see what this has to do with murder, I understand the horror but would it have been more bearable of a crime if they had been uncultured? If the SS guards hadn't appreciated Beethoven would God and poetry have survived Auschwitz? This seems to become the litmus test of all cruelty: how intelligent were the murderers? I will never understand why Americans, Christians, that hidden we, are significantly less horrified at the unintelligent 'humor' invoked in the by the imagery of victims of Abu Ghraib than we are at watching someone kill coldly, with complete confidence in their right to kill this person.

The Enlightenment didn't fail, the project of Europe didn't fail - their promises were deferred, a deferment that was held in the very promises. Jacques Derrida says what we need is a new Enlightenment and I think that this must come without the deferment of promises, without Protestant sola Gratia, sola Fide. Faith separated from works, in a universal way, led to the failure of the Enlightenment as envisioned by those who believed in it. Waiting, in a pattern of non-movement, was its failure. I sometimes wonder if our piety to the European holocaust as it is presented to us in Hollywood movies and the powers that be still defers the future envisioned by those who loved Europe and Europeans.