Recently I was read through some of my classmate’s blogs for out Literary Responses to War and Peace class at Grand Valley State University and I came across a post entitled Media Kept the Holocaust on the Downlow. This post states that the New York Times rarely ever put articles about the Holocaust on the front page of the paper, in fact the blog claims that “the 1,186 articles that the Times published during 1939-1945 about Europe’s Jews, only 26 (about two percent) of them appeared on the front page, and even those articles “obscured the fact that most of the victims were Jews.” These numbers really make me think about what would have happened to the memories of those who died at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust if survivors like Primo Levi and Vladek Spiegelman did not tell their story. Would the memory of all those millions of people be lost to time with nothing left but the remains of Auschwitz? Would the world know of the horrors that an entire race of people were made to suffer?
Asking these questions led me to another one. Is there any race of people that are now being oppressed and murdered in the same way that the Nazis oppressed and murdered the Jewish people? I think about all the technologic advances that we have made since 1945 and I think that it would be impossible for us to miss something like that. Now we have news blogs, podcasts, and many other types of news articles on the internet. It seems like the world can’t have anymore secrets. Then I am drawn to a blog post from another classmate of mine where they discuss how currently there are 289,000 Sri Lankans who live behind barbed wire fences. Maybe I don’t pay enough attention but I have never seen much about the suffering of those in Sri Lanka.
-Rob
I always find it interesting how society as a whole is sheltered from what is going on outside our borders. Most of what is happening in our world I find out through various classes, for example I had no idea about the encampment of the Sri Lankans until late last year while taking a Political Science class. There is a somewhat obscure saying, that provides one of the most enlightening insights into how history works, “History is written by the victors”. Those in charge, or with power are the ones that decide what the world gets to hear, meaning that much of history is forgotten. This very idea is terrifying to me, that what I am being taught might not even be true, what else does government and the media hold back and not tell us. If I remember right a majority of the newspapers during WWII were primarily racist and on top of that they did not want to horrify the public, so they kept people blind, I cant help think that it was part of an attempt to get people to keep people active in the war effort and conventrate of winning. I dont think we as a society intentionally miss what is going on around us, a large part is that we arnt being told.