To Protect a Civilization

By Rabbi Rosenblatt
May 5, 2016

Honourable ministers of the legislature, Survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. I am
honoured to be given the privilege to address you. There are many of us who may silently
wonder if this proclamation is necessary. 71 years have passed since the industrial scale
slaughters of the holocaust and we assume the world has learned much, matured much in that
time. Segregationist laws in the United States are blessedly reversed and a nation that once
owned slaves elected an African American president. Apartheid has given way to truth and
reconciliation in South Africa. The last residential school closed 20 years ago, and Prime
Minister Harper voiced a formal apology 12 years thereafter. This legislature has apologized
for the Chinese head tax. We are tempted to be proud of these changes, pat ourselves on the
back and assume that such forms of intolerance are relics of the past.

But such a temptation is naive. Only 4 days ago Andrew Sullivan a former editor of the New
Republic and the Atlantic reminded us that philosophers as far back as Plato predicted that
mature democracies will turn upon themselves. Plato wrote “tyranny is probably established out
of no other regime than democracy.” It is a scenario where too much freedom yields it own kind
of economic slavery and the masses look to any anti-establishment leader even if he or she
turns upon the foundations of democracy to pull them out. Sullivan finds Plato’s words
shockingly predictive of the intolerant and violent speech of the current elections to our south.

Isaiah Berlin, the great British philosopher, wrote a book Freedom and Its Betrayal, Six enemies
of human Liberty. His enemies of Human liberty are not Hitler, Stalin and Jefferson Davis.
Instead the enemies of freedom celebrated philosophers, Rousseau, Hegel and Saint-Simon.
Most notably Berlin points out that there was not a tyrant from Mussolini to Hitler who did not
quote Rousseau’s philosophy of the social contract to infringe upon liberties and pave the path
to genocide. The words of the very philosophers of democracy were twisted into the barbed
wire of concentration camps.

It is no accident that the greatest oppression known to man took place in the most advanced
country in the world at the time. The society that produced Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein
and Max Plank also produced the final solution. And it is no accident that the Bible’s first great
organized civilization of the Tower of Babel is also the first one to stamp out diversity.
Democracy and Freedom tend to betray themselves; discrimination is a gravitational force, a
unfortunate certainty of human nature—A certainty unless we remind the world what has
happened, unless we bear witness to atrocities that humans can visit upon their fellows. I am
not sure we are doing this well enough. The people of Rwanda or Darfur know all to well that
the lessons of the Holocaust have not been universally learned. 71 years after the Holocaust
Jews are marking fresh graves and saying Kaddish for our brothers and sisters slaughtered in a
Synagogue in Copenhagen and Kosher markets in Paris. The dangers of genocide are not
behind us. So, regrettably, this event is necessary, and will always be necessary. In this
Legislature which embodies our democracy we must remember the Shoah. Remembering the
Holocaust will help us protect our precious democracy from itself.