Why are we not debating this?
Two and a half years ago, Lev Golinkin set out to document the remaining monuments to Nazis around the world for the Jewish news site The Forward, in a project modeled after the Southern Poverty Law Center's effort to catalog the physical remnants of the Confederate past. What he found surprised him. |
"Readers suggested I look at Germany and the U.S.," Golinkin wrote me in an email. "I had naïvely assumed these places wouldn't openly celebrate Nazis. I was wrong." |
Harvard, for one, has a professorship and a fellowship named for a man who was convicted at Nuremberg, Stanford has a program named for the same man, and NASA lauds the work of two scientists who were brought to America under a postwar program called Operation Paperclip, which quietly rehabilitated Nazi scientists to leverage their expertise in the Cold War. |
In his provocative guest essay, Golinkin points to America's reassessment of historical monuments and figures and suggests we should further expand our reconsideration of the past. Though in recent years books have been written on the role of Nazi scientists in this country after the war, he argues, there has been no major public debate about what it means when major institutions and communities continue to honor these men. |
"We may debate the founding fathers," he wrote me. "But surely Nazi war criminals and individuals who played a key role in manufacturing weapons used to slaughter civilians and American troops shouldn't be honored." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
Forward this newsletter to friends to share ideas and perspectives that will help inform their lives. They can sign up here. Do you have feedback? Email us at opiniontoday@nytimes.com. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment