Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On How Could This Happen 20140629

The windsor case and goma was decided on its merits. It was a decision. It took all of the arguments made and it also talked about the importance of marriage and wide marriage is important which is very much an argument though wasnt in the case and, in so i think its every one is under challenge of the state or federal level. Of course they cite windsor but in every federal case the judge has also cited the perry, im pretty sure its every case they went to the trial record in making judgments about their sexuality of choice or the harm that is done to and in their children by telling people you cant get married. I think both those cases have been mutually beneficial and we will relatively have to see what the Supreme Court decides to do in the end. You touched on briefly about the fact that the entire culture between movement was behind the fact that they were bring it to the Supreme Court. What are your thoughts . For instance the former Bishop Robinson was against the fact that it was going to the Supreme Court and you thought it was too early. The case of the civil rights amendment civil rights amendment they didnt pursue the Supreme Court level so the majority of the country was for it. Do you think it was too early in what are your thoughts if you dont think it was too early . Guest i think you have to play the whatif game. I didnt think anything. I thought it was a great story and i wanted to follow it in right of book about it. But with the benefit of hindsight what if cap will somehow gotten his way. Kettles and did not want a trial. That trial slow things down than he also did want a bunch of things that opted to slow the pace down when it was in the appellate face. What if it had gotten up to the Supreme Court as fast as he wanted to get . With the outcome have been the same because the concern was not that everybody can share the goal. The concern was five justices of the United States Supreme Court would vote and say these spams are unconstitutional and enshrine out into legal precedent. The worry was people remember what happened. Bowers was the case that preceded lawrence fico texas. The bowers case was essentially the consensus was georgia statute. The consensus was the Supreme Court doesnt like to reverse itself and so how much longer could this way. On the other hand lets talk about those that are what if on the other side. The people bringing this thought was you know this wasnt just about marriage. That it was about one state says that certain kinds of relationships are worthy of something and others are not, but that has consequences that goes far beyond the ability not to walk down the aisle and call yourself married. And chad griffins view it drives things like bullying in schools. It drives things like the fact that and teenagers have a higher suicide rate. It drives things like the higher rate of and homelessness. So from their point of view their point of view is what if another generation or five grades of kids grow up and are still being taught this. Chris testified at the trial and she said if bands like proposition he did not exist biking california her entire life would have been left on a higher so from their point of view there is more no more time to wait and what if mitt romney had been elected instead of barack obama . That was a distinct possibility and came somewhat close to happening. One of the older liberal justices were to die and be replaced by romney. Let there be even the possibility of five boats at that point in how much longer would he have to wait then . Thats been a kind of thing about history. You cant predict it and its hard to know how things would have turned out if it didnt play out the way it did. I have a broader question sort of in which case was the watershed but what really, what really legalized gay marriage around the country . Was that the case and its kind of this question, is it brown or worse at the Civil Rights Movement that change things in this country . So im asking you that question. I know you focused on math because for one thing you had to call Taylor Branch and write three books to at least write about the movement. And im almost hearing your answer. Both are important but i want to put it on the spot a little bit and i really want you to choose. Was that you know, just some people deciding in a room the case or was it a movement . It is a movement and its so many important facts. It is what happened at stonewall and for those of you who dont know what stonewall is, the police used to go into bars and raid gay bars. They warned a lot to congregate in bars. It was the stonewall riots when police raided a bar in new york city. It was the aids activists who mobilized in a Health Crisis and people like cleave jones who was one of the main characters of my book and the creator of the aids adult. It was all of the work that people like evan wilson did on the ground on the political ground and it was also and i know you dont like the answer but i think a certain point and this is what was in dispute but at a certain point you need to basically say look, if this is the civil rights you cant put civil rights up to a vote. You got you dont get to put basic civil rights up to a vote. You cant pull a referendum in New Hampshire and say i dont want it in schools. Not possible. So i think the debate over when was it that time to go federal executive accords, it wasnt that was ever not part of the movements plan but it was just a question of when. Matthew shepherd and what happened to the gay people just because they are gay. E and you know over the course of this reporting period over the last five years there was a moment when one of the lawyers, one of a young gay attorneys on the team said there had been this rash of terrible teen suicides. I dont know if you remember all of these but the boy had hung himself after being taunted at school. A College Student at whose roommate taped him in an intimate act. He threw himself off of the George Washington bridge. Its this moment where this lawyer says i think we are make you so much progress. I think we are doing so much good and then Something Like this happens. And e that kind of thing shocks the conscience. One more. Hi. I have a comment and a question in the comment is i wanted to add to what you just said because i think in terms of this movement that it has also been lgbt people coming out. I think about when i was younger no one would have watched allen and now everybody watches ellen. I think as more people have been out all over whether to sportsperson, and it just becomes part of our life and i think thats a huge issue that has shifted just in my lifetime. The question that i have though is wheres this movement going and where do you think the bonds are going to be. Having been in california so much as move so fast in the northeast and not as much of the west and i wonder where you see us going in the next few years. I want to go back to your first which is that as the number one reason and we talk about a movement and we talk about different historic movements and different people but the bottom line is the reason that we are where we are today is because people have come out and have told their stories. Nine out of 10 people now know someone who is gay or lesbian. And that is the number one predictor of whether you think that people gay and lesbian couples should be allowed to marry. There is no question people who have come out and been brave enough to face the discrimination that comes with that, all of the credit goes to them. Wheres the movement going . I think it went back to the Supreme Court quickly. I dont think it can. Right now the two cases mike there are three cases that are on the fasttrack in the United States Supreme Court so that they dont do this on a technicality. One is in virginia, one is in utah and one is in oklahoma. If at the Appeals Court judge upholds the lower courts ruling and the utahs ban is unconstitutional one of the most conservative areas of the country i cant imagine that the Supreme Court would deny and not review that decision. I think that theres a huge challenge ahead and for those of you who dont know in more than half the states you can still discriminate against and because there is no federal law. There is no law besides the Civil Rights Act so you can say i want to fire you because you are gay or i dont like to stay in my hotel because you are gay. You can get away with that in the states that dont have specific protections which are more than half. Thats a bill in congress right now. There is a big fight over it and there is a fight about the opponents of this are saying well you have to have these liberty exceptions and you have bakers who wont bake cakes for a gay wedding. If you think about that in substitute the word i dont want to bake a cake because you are africanamerican, you couldnt do that. So i think thats going to be a big fight. As i talk to people too part of it is i think part of it is the challenge is right now theyre so Much Movement so quickly that its easy to forget that still there is 40 of the country that is give or take depending on the pull that remains to be convinced, so how do you sustain this kind of coverage in and the kind of attention and try to move those 40 . I want to thank you all for being such a great audience audience. I want you to know their books for sale. Most of all i want to thank jo for a wonderful presentation. [applause] if you like the book please post your review on amazon. [laughter] we believe that all men are created equal yet they are denied equal treatment. We believe that all men have certain inalienable rights, yet Many Americans do not enjoy those rights. We believe that all men are entitled to liberty yet millions are being deprived of those lessons. Not because of their old but because of the color of their skin. The reasons are deeply embedded in history and tradition and the nature of man. We can understand without rancor or hatred how this all happened. But it cannot continue. Our constitution, the foundation of our republic, permits the principles of our freedom for many. Morality it permits in the law i will sign tonight forbids it. Booktv said Dennis Hillary clinton in little rock to discuss her newest book hard choices. I learned before but certainly as secretary of state to expect the unexpected. Nobody expected the socalled arab spring antilla was upon us and we have to learn to be agile and ready for the unexpected. While we try to build the world that we want, especially for our children and now for my future grandchild, but we have got to be aware of the fact that all these other countries, all these billions of people, they are making hard choices every single day. We have to be ready for that. Because im absolutely convinced that we have to continue to lead the world into the kind of future that we want. We cant sit on the sidelines. We cant retreat. We are going to have setbacks. We are going to have disappointments but over time our story has become the dominant story. It represents the hopes and aspirations of people everywhe everywhere. That is what i want americans to understand and the main reason i wrote this book. I know theres a big debate going on about our role in the world and we have some real unfortunate consequences still to deal with from prior decisions and the like but we cant abdicate our responsibility. How we define it, how we execute it will be the stuff of political debate that the world needs us, america matters to the world and yes the world matters to america for our prosperity and our security and our democracy. Hillary clinton spoke with us a better decisionmaking process the perceptions of United States around the globe and some of the position she had to make as secretary of state. The full interview airs on booktv saturday july 5 at 7 00 p. M. Eastern and sunday july 6 at 9 15 a. M. Eastern. Dan mcmillan is next on booktv. He presents as causes for the holocaust from the prevalence of antisemitism and political fissures incurred from world war i to germanys inability to become a democracy until 1918. This is a little under an hour. Thank you very much for being here. The holocaust has been with me for a long time now. My experience, it affects us in a way that is qualitatively different from how we respond to contemplating other historical events. When we look at all of the terrible suffering that human beings have inflicted on each other down through the centuries, we are often saddened by what we see and sometimes we are also angry. When we look at the holocaust we are frightened. The holocaust frightens people. Why is that . What is different . What is special . What is perhaps unique about the holocaust . Today i will offer you an answer to that question. I will talk first for five minutes about my book, what is new about this book and why you think you may find it useful. Then i will take 15 minutes to summarize the central argument of my book which is my explanation, my answer the question why the holocaust happened and for the last 12 minutes of my remarks i will return to the question. In what sense may reconsider the holocaust to be unique, to be in a category by itself not only among episodes of genocide but among all historical occurrences as in fact i think it is. As the title of my book implies, its an attempt to explain why the holocaust happened. Up until now we have gotten only rather partial answers to this question. The closest we have calm and books in print to an answer have been the histories of the holocaust, the narrative accounts and the defect with regard to explanation of the event they focus almost entirely on the immediate shortterm causes of the genocide. That is to say what adolf hitler believed about the jewish people and what were the situational pressures or the context that encouraged hitler to radicalize his policy from discrimination in 1933 to forced immigration by 1938 to fullblown genocide by the end of 1941. These doctors are essential of course understanding these events but are completely inadequate as an answer to the question why. They only take so many larger and important questions. For example where did hitler get his ideas in the first place and even more interesting how is it possible that the educated elite of one of our most advanced society would take these ideas since seriously that to the point they would be willing to kill for him and what went wrong and the longterm development of germany that a man like adolf hitler could come to power in the first place and how do we understand the attitude of tens of millions of germans who did have substantial knowledge of the killings while they were happening and yet you seem to have responded to the fate of the jewish neighbors with cold indifference. And eight or 10 other questions that need to be answered if you want to put together a coherent and comprehensive than satisfactory answer to your question implied. This is not to say historians over the last seven decades have been idle. Quite the contrary. Historians have in fact adequately answered all of the many specific narrow were some questions that together make up the larger question why. But they have done so by a large and specialized Academic Studies each examining this or that cause of the holocaust by and large in isolation from the others and thus we have books on hitler, books on world war i, books on antisemitism, books on psychological factors and german politics in the failure of germany and so one but no books have put these different pieces together in a coherent whole. To put it another way the historical profession long ago, at least 20 years ago, adequately answer the question why did the holocaust happened. The answer they have given us has been useless to us because it has been available to us only in fragments, not in a coherent whole. Particularly if you are not in academically trained historian. That is to say if you were normal like everyone and where are you going to start . How we going to know how to put these all these different scholarly studies together in some kind of explanation. Even if you are a professional historian it isnt immediately intuitively obvious with a proper relationship between the different causes of the holocaust. This is what my book does. It just unites the fragments. It is important i think because its the first book to weave together all of the major strands of causation, all the most important pieces of the puzzle and a coherent and reasonably comprehensive answer to the question that all of us have asked, why did this happen . So, that being said why did the holocaust happened . It happened in significant part because the pressure for democracy in germany from the 1880s on which was considerable coming from the german people, the pressure to transform the imperial political system as authoritarian to a democracy such as people lived under in france and england at the same time. Unfortunately this pressure came almost entirely from one Political Party in this Political Party was the socialist party of germany. This was very very unfortunate because it meant from the outset that for many, for most germans the idea of democracy was tainted by association with socialism. And this taint was a very heavy tainted indeed because the socialist party in germany at least in its rhetoric and its formally stated program is quite radical. They called for an end to private property and for almost everyone in germany outside of the industrial working class which was the base, the constituency of the socialist party the socialists were terrified. Compounding this problem and its impact was the second issue and that is that democracy simply came to germany very late. The first german democracy was not founded until 1919 after a revolution that followed the days of the First World War. These two factors in combination, the linkage between socialism and democracy and a late arrival of a democratic form of government to german soil had the effect that from the very beginning of the republic, a very large fraction of the electorate was held hostile to the democracy because they equated it naturally enough with socialism and making the problem even worse the republic being found it so late or to put it another way so close in time to the Great Depression had no time, had no breathing space no period of stability and prosperity in which you can win over these hostile voters and establish its legitimacy among the german people attending a form of government must among its citizens. The republic after 1999 was overwhelmed by the Great Depression which struck germany with exceptional fury. So in the end game you have an electorate thats a large part of which is a hostile democracy in a large other faction is indifferent to democracy and people who are desperate amid economic chaos like they think they have ever seen in those circumstances and armed with those attitudes and majority of german voters in the last elections of 1932 gave their ballots to extremist Political Parties that were violently democratic, but calmness on the left and the nazis on the right. It takes a long way to understand a man like hitler in our country would have had no chance at all because in our country the idea of democracy was art a respected and established Broker Center before the Great Depression began. A democratic form of government its legitimacy was never in question. This is i guess the short answer to the question why given the American People and the german people experience comparable levels of economic suffering from the Great Depression we ended up with fdr who was our political leader and they got adolf hitler. A second sort of cluster of issues is also related to this rapidly rising socialist party and that is that the league of German Society is very conservative ruling class. That is to Say University trained professionals and managers of large corporations and military officers, this ruling class of a half million men on the eve of world war i in 1914 a strategy of using nationalism and antisemitism as weapons against the rising socialist parties and the way it affected the logic of it was, let us try to get germans to overlook their different class differences especially the crucial working class versus the rest of society divide by getting them to unite on the basis of something that supposedly they have in common, their german blood which was not defined also by the exclusion exclusion of the jewish who were held as a separate race. This was at it and incidentally what later became the fatal notion that the jewish people were a race and this is appointed and heard german political discourse. This strategy and was one of saying to germans, on, let us not be upper class and let us not be middle class and for heaven heavens sakes let it not be the working class in these nasty socialists and their theory theory. Live us all the german together in one way to the do besides their german this is to unite their enemies against foreign powers who are painted to the german public is being hostile and at home the jewish who are blamed for fostering the division and the German Society. Crucial to this problem of this strategy was the false claim that the jewish people were the originators of marxism, that they had created the socialist party, that they controlled the socialist party and as this thinking was taken further after the Russian Revolution of 1917 that they controlled and had created the communist parties of the world. You know there were a lot of thats really crucial because in germany and europe during the first four decades of 20 century there all kinds of different antisemitisms. Many different state strands of antisemitism. Antisemitism as a religious and hostilities economic competitors as a form of social snobbery. All these different forms of hostility to the jewish people were important played a role in the holocaust in one way or another. This particular strand the equation of jewish and marxism blaming for the commonest threat was something that in the 30s and 40s was very deeply feared this was the strand of antisemitism that led directly to the holocaust. Also seem to have completely failed. The way forward was entirely unclear and the situation is dire and within a few short years hitler seemed to have solved all their problems and appeared as the savior of the country. I will give two examples. The first is becomes a power in 33. Unemployment is 30 in four years later germany has returned to full employment. In our country unemployment remained in double digits until war production world war ii kicked us out of the Great Depression. Germany was the only Major Industrial economy to climb out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. That along one hitler a great deal of admiration but the second example in the spring of 1940 German Forces invade western europe and conquer france. They drive the british armies off the continent of europe and six weeks of fighting at the cost of 30,000 german soldiers killed. Compare this to their experience in the First World War. Where the germans fought for four years. They lost 2 million men and they lost the war. Measured against that yardstick i think hitler would have appeared as a miracle worker not only to germans that the people of any country. Who to have experienced their experiences. So the worship of hitler has won radicalizing factor and the second is that the slaughter, the pointless slaughter of 10 million young men including 2 million german soldiers in the First World War could be said to have devalued human life to have lowered the bar for violence in europe. All of the later violence in europe and a 20 century the crimes of hitler and the crimes of stalin and everyone elses crimes is just not conceivable without the president that was set and the damage that was done to the value of human life by the slaughter and for many men who lived through it including combat veterans like adolf hitler he adolf hitler who served in the western front with world war i is the point of reference murdering millions of civilians could seem like nothing more than one of those perhaps regrettable facts of political life. A third factor finally, one that kind of reinforced and its effect that dehumanizing consequences of the First World War is that racism back then unlike today was not seen as prejudice of the uneducated people we would call losers but rather had complete respectability and this made it possible to define the jewish people is almost a separate species and thereby to rob them of their humanity which made it easier to murder them. The holocaust happened for half a dozen other reasons as well. The ones ive summarize for you here i think are however the most important and could stand as the core of the argument of my book although theres a lot more that i have to say. Now i want to return finally to the question i pose to you at the beginning of our conversation which was white as the holocaust frighten us and why is it so important to us . I want to tell you a story. Its an incident that took place at the death camp in 1942 to 1943. We learned about it from the journalists in a series of interviews she conducted in 19 1971, a man named franz stein all. He had been the commandant ed to death camps in german occupied sri lanka. Its quite impossible to understand. By which he meant that sends allows thought it was too old to be useful as slave labor he could find no excuse to his death. He understood this but do not want his father to meet his end of a gas chamber so he took his father to the kitchen served him a final meal and escorted into the socalled infirmary which was sort of a structure disguised as a medical facility by a red cross. They are at the door the two men would have said their goodbyes. A prisoner from the camp would have escorted the older man, the elderly man down a long corridor to the edge of an open pit. They are an ss guard most likely a man who was notorious for his sadism ordered the old man to take off his clothes, stand on the plank at the edge of the pit and murdered him with a pistol shot to the back of the neck. Later that day blau returned, the younger blau returned to his office and thanked him. There is no need to thank me but if you want to thank me you may. In his eyes he had done balao the favor of arranging to have his father murdered by gunshot and set up by poison poison gas and this favor counted among the human relations that he had enjoyed with prisoners during his time at troubling to. I very much wish that i could say to you that he was an aberration and his attitude towards these prisoners was atypical but i think instead one must test to see this as near as we can tell an attitude that was emblematic of the way that many perpetrators of the holocaust thought about or felt about their victims. They subscribed to a racist belief system which held that the were not fully human and thus killing them was nothing to be upset about are anxious about or to feel any tension about and they could and did live among these condemned victims in the camps and in the case of some prisoners for a period of years and lived among them every day and talk to them every day without any apparent sign of discomfort. Their attitude toward the people they were murdering is reminiscent of not being quite so much as that of a farmer living among livestock that he has destined for slaughter. And this attitude, this way of seeing and thinking about and feeling or rather not feeling about the victims in my view goes to the heart of what makes the holocaust so important. The holocaust is so important i contend because it constitutes histories most uncompromising rejection of the idea that human life has any inherent value or meaning. And i think you can best appreciate the import of what has been a somewhat abstract statement that i just made by asking yourself, by asking yourself why not . Why not commit murder . How do you know and the emphasis is on certainty. How do you know that murder is wrong . And two this question. We all have the same answers. We believe that human life is precious. We believe every individual has rights. We believe that our systems here on this planet has a meaning and a purpose. These are good believes. They are your beliefs and mine also. That is to say that in those episodes it is used in relative terms sparingly and its always used metaphorically. In the holocaust this language is used pervasively. Secondly related to that first is the way that they deny their victims humanity by reducing them to the status of material objects they process for value almost as if they are animal caucuses carcasses. Harvesting the teeth to melt out the fillings shearing off womens hair to make textiles. A second distinctive feature of the holocaust is that in sharp contrast in rwandan are combating on cambodian cases they were not murdered. For any purpose that anyone could remotely defined as rational it was rather that the very existence of the jewish people was unacceptable to their killers and so for the first time and only time in history we have come to murder millions of our fellow human beings for the purpose of taking their lives. The deaths were in and of itself which leads me to the last point i wanted to make. The jewish people are the only large ethnic minority to have ever been targeted for complete biological extension extinction. Had they won the war in europe with the resources of the european continent at their disposal than militarily capable of overwhelming the United States we cant prove this because it didnt happen and yet its sort of in the logic of what they were doing in europe and so much of what they said. We tend to agree that the next step would have been to strike at every single remaining Jewish Population around the globe no matter how small. The perpetrators of the holocaust saw the jewish people the Way Public Health officials used to see smallpox, as a virus that had to be eradicated completely so that i could never ever grow back anywhere on earth. In sum, moving to conclusion, but not cease have compelled us to confront the horrible question of whether our life has meaning, worth, significance, purpose because they affirmed so dramatically with such determination on such a colossal scale that it does not. And this i think is i contend is what makes the holocaust unique in what megs important what makes it so frightening. Is that the holocaust is the historical event thats far more than any other confronts us with questions of existential significance. And as anyone who has pondered them can tell you the existential questions are the scariest questions of all and also perhaps the most difficult to answer. I am going to add to our conversation to an half minutes of concluding remarks. I now want to stop and take questions from you. If you have a question please move to the microphone on that side of the room and we have about 15 to 17 minutes for questions. There is a microphone there. Im sorry. I said there was a microphone on that site. Theres a microphone on that site as well. Ive heard it said and rea read sorry. Thank you. I have heard it said and in fact read somewhere that hitlers antipathy towards the jews was exacerbated by the fact that he was not allowed to enter an art academy when he sought it and that as a result of that he found that most of the judges who had turned him down him when he sought it and visitors as a result of that he found most of the judges who had turned him down for jews and that exacerbated his antipathy toward them. Is there any truth to this and have you come across that . At the commonly broached theory. Hitlers justified feelings of impurity are wellknown. His feelings of ambient humiliation and of anger are enormously important and the success of so many jewish germans and austrians in the art world. Its quite plausible to think that put an edge on his hatred but i think the best explanation for adolf hitlers hatred for the jewish people comes from the fact that he was personally so deeply invested in the german victory in the First World War because he had been such a complete loser up until then in his life. This was his first accomplishment in the first time he was respected by anyone. Germany surrenders and a lot of people on the rightwing of german politics joined the socialist party for the surrender and since he and many other people believe the jews are behind the socialist that seems to be, but we cant say for sure but thats her best educated guess as to the source of his hatred which was ferocious absolutely. I know there are a lot of books on the holocaust and the murder of the jews. I often wondered what about the gypsies and all but people and they medically stress people . I their books about back . Today celebrate the holocaust also . Yes, i mean there are separate scholarly treatment of all these different classes of victims. Thats quite right. In my book i really focus only on jewish victims because i have wanted to focus on what is really kind of unique to the holocaust which is the school with complete extermination and complete the humanization of the victims and so on and so forth. Even the gypsies who suffered in large numbers. The death toll is very high and even though they were the targets of racist thinking, it wasnt nearly as uncompromising as it was with respect to the jewish people. I dont have much to say about that but just off the top of my head on the patients who were murdered in the socalled Euthanasia Program but i have forgotten, i have actually forgotten the title but its Hendry Friedlander into very good book that explores that. There is also some good work by Michael Burley a british historian who has written about that episode. The gentleman on the right. Thank you for your presentation. I think its very professionally thought out. Thank you. Thank you. Someone said you know if we dont study history we will repeat it so i want to put that out there. My question is, do you think that what happened to the jews by the not cease have affected the mentality of the jewish people in israel and around the world the short answer is im not qualified to answer that question because i dont know a lot about israeli politics. Off the top of my head my guess would be that given the intensity of that conflict, the Palestinian Conflict and how long its gone on i am always kind of surprised by the degree to which the israelis have been able to maintain the quality of their democracy and the degree to which although their Security Services often engage in quite a lot of violence against some of the Palestinian Community is impressive to me frankly how hard they worked to keep that in balance and how much that troubles them compared for example to the way our country reacted to 9 11. So i wonder if that aspect and not that im praising israeli