DB641026

Watch: Bigotry to Persecution

Hi, I'm shy acres, Dean of the helm School of Government. As we continue our discussion of American foreign policy toward israel, I'd like you to keep in mind as you're going through the materials in the class. The importance of this interplay of deeply held ideas and the impact of those ideas. Now we've talked in the past about the fact that ideas serve as the basis for public policy. Once they're mixed with governmental action. However, ideas mixed with any action produce result, whether it's governmental action or private action. One of the ways that we've seen then is with the subtle rise of bigotry, which is, which is an idea being held to persecution. Which is not just an idea, but it's an action related to an idea. And that persecution in the past has been of different people at different times, both by private individuals and by public entities. In particular importance to this course. Of particular importance to this course is the rise of anti-Semitism and the bigotry that took place there to the place where a state could actually act on those ideas.

We've had the great benefit of seeing many, many interviews with Holocaust survivors. Steven Spielberg several years ago, created a project that recorded as many of these as possible, as many interviews as possible with survivors of the Holocaust. One of them that I heard not long ago raised a very important question. A survivor of the Holocaust was ask on a, on a national media channel whether she thought the Holocaust could ever happen again or another Holocaust to another people could ever happen again. And her response was incredulity. Her response was, of course, it can. She said The one thing that we would, that I would like she speaking the people to know about the Holocaust was that we, the people who suffered it, didn't see it coming. We thought she said that they would never, that the government would never act in inappropriate ways toward the Jewish people because they provided so much to the state, especially in Poland. But then when the antisemitism began, they said, Well, surely it will never rise to a level of physical activity. And then when it did, people said Surely it will never rise to the level of death. And then it did. Now what we see in this as a progression, you talking about the institutionalization of a set of ideas. At some point, especially in Poland and in Germany, where the idea took root. Not only that, that this somatic line of people who arose from the Middle East were inferior to Hitler's idea of, of, of a perfect race, but were indeed a blight on German society. You see something that, that really needs to be understood for modern foreign policy. And that is that these ideas work their way in gently and subtly, but they have an incremental effect on public policy. Hitler didn't just look up one day and say, We should have a Holocaust. They started very subtly by distinguishing the Jews from the non-Jews in creating propaganda campaigns against the Jewish people in the minds of the Polish and the German people. And then in state actions that acted based on the moral force, the worldview that they had crafted that included in it anti-Semitism.

Now, we've also talked about the American example, which recognized covenant and a special place of the Jewish people in the religious mind. And how that religious idea, that religion based that Judeo-Christian idea, that God had covenant with the Jewish people arose to shape foreign policy toward the Jewish people and toward the creation of a Jewish state in the land of Israel, in the American people. So what we see is that ideas, this is why we spend so much time in these courses discussing the philosophical bases for ideas. Because eventually those ideas rise through popular adoption. So you have an idea that then becomes adopted by a body politic that then gets infused through governmental action into the design of a regime. Now, if those ideas are good, then it helps to make the regime good. And if those ideas are bad, then it enables regimes to do great evil that's completely consistent with an ideology that was created. This is why it's so important as we look and continue to look at United States involvement with the globe at its own, at the interplay of worldview in the United States and how that affects especially the United States foreign policy toward the Middle East.