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41 " By declaring “I support states’ rights” just miles from the spot where the civil rights workers were murdered, Reagan revealed—to those who knew anything about dog whistles—that behind his grandfatherly pose he was a strong supporter of white supremacy, as his actions during his presidency would prove. His opposition to civil rights legislation, escalation of Nixon’s war on drugs, and support for apartheid South Africa were prefigured at Neshoba. Every Mississippian could decode the message. "
― Susan Neiman , Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
42 " But if I had to set priorities, I’d prefer that political commitments—expressed in laws preventing expressions of racism, punishing racist crime, and roundly condemning it from the highest levels of government to the teachings in elementary schools—come first. "
43 " I doubt that anyone in town belongs to the Klan, or even its more respectable cousin, the White Citizens’ Council. They’d simply prefer to leave the past unexamined, cover it with honeysuckle, and go back to their bourbon. It’s the kind of response that ensures no one will reflect on the ways that past seeps into present. "
44 " The monuments were not innocuous shrines to history; they were provocative assertions of white supremacy at moments when its defenders felt under threat. Knowing when they were built is part of knowing why they were built. "
45 " You can learn that no country, no culture, no religion is immune to falling into the abyss into which we fell. And once it begins, there will always be people who shut down their consciences and side with the strongman. Knowing that, we need to develop a kind of preventative uncertainty. "
46 " Descendants of Confederate soldiers have self-serving reasons for denying that their ancestors fought and fell in service to a criminal enterprise. "
47 " It’s natural to defend the honor of your forebears, if only with arguments so facile that a well-educated child could see through them. He fought for states’ rights. States’ rights to do what? "
48 " Another plaque states that Nazi students burned books on this spot, but the words are too sparse to convey what thousands of tourists passing by need to know: it wasn’t an unwashed, unlettered mob, but hundreds of well-off and well-read students, and their professors, who gleefully followed the Nazis’ first orders. There are photos showing their faces beam as they toss books into the flames right in front of the Humboldt University. We’d like to believe that illiterate masses are responsible for right-wing nationalism, but the numbers tell another story. "
49 " What can other countries learn from the German experience? “To look at your own country as if it were a foreign one. It’s crucial to have a broken relationship to your past, to be ready to see your own history with shame and horror. "
50 " If you invite representative voices, shouldn’t you listen to them, even when their claims are at odds with what you want to believe? West German beliefs about East Germany are so tenacious that the subjects of concern went unheard. In America, when white people tell black people how to feel about their own history, it’s called whitesplaining. There isn’t a word for it in German. "
51 " We are historical beings, unable to describe ourselves without describing ourselves in space and time. "
52 " Public memory: what every half-educated member of a culture knows in her sinews, for it seeped into them in ways she can hardly remember. "
53 " The focus on Auschwitz is a form of displacement for what we don't want to know about our own national crimes. "