We have a duty to learn from history, columnist writes

In a column published by mbl.is, Ögmundur Jónasson argues that people have a duty to learn from history, particularly from the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes against humanity.

Adolf Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the masses had a very limited capacity to understand, but a tremendous capacity to forget. Jónasson also refers to the often-attributed words of Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels that anything, true or false, could be made acceptable if it was repeated firmly enough.

Laurence Rees, a British author, offers a different view in his book The Holocaust. The book concludes that the history of the Holocaust shows, perhaps more clearly than any other history, what the human species is capable of doing.

Rees began researching the crimes of Nazi Germany in order to understand and communicate what had happened. He interviewed Holocaust survivors, many of whom were already dying as his research began.

Jónasson says the fragile state of the world makes these reflections relevant. He writes that the reason he has focused on Rees’s book is that Morgunblaðið published an excerpt from one of its chapters during the summer. The excerpt stayed with him, as it did with a reviewer in the British newspaper the Telegraph, who said the book “demanded to be read”.

He also thanks historian Jón Þ. Þór for translating the book into Icelandic and the publisher Ugla for publishing it.

Jónasson says the question should not be whether people can learn from history, but that they are obliged to do so. They must understand how atrocities begin with ruthless ideas directed at other people, and how one development leads to the next. Rees quotes one of his interviewees as saying that disaster is certain if someone is given total power over other people and weapons.

Jónasson recalls a former colleague from television saying in a programme broadcast this week that she knew she could not change the world, but that showing people love could make life better. He suggests there may be truth in the idea that each person must begin with themselves and cultivate their own garden, as expressed in Voltaire’s Birting, a work by one of the leading advocates of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the movement on which the rule of law would later rest.

That system, he concludes, is too valuable to be allowed to collapse.