[Bedi] Blast Ant was contemplating the Holocaust yesterday. About how to explain it to the children. “The children have to know this is preventable. It still is preventable,” she said. … …So, she and Ansel decided to spare them the details of the brutality, and focused on the industrial slave labour aspect of the concentration camps. Wanted them to make the connection to the Spanish mission system and slavery in the Americas. It’s a major aspect of the Holocaust but is rarely covered in American schools. “So is the postwar continuity of the NSDAP membership,” Didi added. The kids were upset that IG Farben built and ran its own concentration camps, but all the bosses were granted early release and directorships in postwar companies.
“When children ask, ‘Can it happen again?’ we have to make an honest accounting of what happened after the Holocaust,” she said. The universities, the courts, the companies—nothing had really changed. “‘Never again!’ is a noble sentiment, but I cannot in good conscience cry it when for thirty years after the war the slogan was ‘We shall never talk about it again!’”
She slept some more. Some of the narcolepsy seems to be returning. She passed out during Dr King’s 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam” at the Riverside Church. We hope it’s a sign of healing. Yesterday she read three books on pigeons and all about Thor’s encounter with Skrymir, the jötunn.
[Nova] She wouldn’t have been capable of that just last week. For much of the day, those two spent much agony rebuking themselves over their lack of activity. Ah…
A transcript of King’s speech can be found here, though the audio available on that page is of significantly lower quality than the recently unearthed recording also discovered by the Stanford Martin Luther King, Jr Research and Education Institute.