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Dear editor:
CBS journalist Margaret Brennan categorically declared in a recent interview with Secretary of State Rubio on Face the Nation that the sole cause of the Holocaust was “the weaponization of free speech.” Are you sitting down? Margaret Brennan on behalf of CBS News declared that the sole cause of the murder of six million Jews was “the weaponization of free speech.”
Ms. Brennan’s words on behalf of everyone at CBS News are so ignorant, so antisemitic and so amoral, it is hard to know where to begin.
Three points need to be emphasized:
1. There was never was any free speech in Nazi Germany to be “weaponized.” From January 1933 forward the only speech that was publicly permitted in Nazi Germany was the condemnation of the existence of the Jewish people. Anyone who spoke otherwise was ultimately arrested, imprisoned and murdered.
One cannot “weaponize” what never existed in Nazi Germany…except in the minds of the ignorant, the antisemitic and the amoral.
2. The genocide of the Jews of Germany was the result of the genocidal antisemitism of the German people who voted for Hitler’s promise to eliminate the Jews and who infused every aspect of German society with their genocidal antisemitism: education, law, the judiciary, the army, the railroads, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen, etc. etc.
The antisemitic genocidal ethos of the German people is the cause of the Holocaust — not a fallacious ignorant amoral antisemitic idea of the “weaponization of free speech.”
In 1996, Daniel Goldhagan, former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard, brilliantly described the fact that the German people very enthusiastically and very willingly were Hitler’s willing executioners. (“Hitler’s Willing Executioners“, Daniel Goldhagen, 1996). In his extensive research about the German people’s embrace of the Holocaust, somehow Associate Professor Goldhagen missed the “weaponization of free speech” as an impetus for the German people’s embrace of the Holocaust.
3. What is the most egregious part of Margaret Brennan’s and CBS News’ embrace of the fallacious ignorant antisemitic and amoral declaration that the sole cause of the Holocaust is the “weaponization of free speech” is that it excuses the criminal evil of the perpetrators.
In 1999 Ron Rosenbaum, the historian and author of “Explaining Hitler“, brilliantly wrote that Hannah Arendt’s perverse and amoral phrase “the banality of evil” denies the full criminality of the perpetrators. (“Eichmann and the Banality of Evil“, Ron Rosenbaum, The Observer, 8/29/99).
CBS News and Margaret Brennan have gone one amoral step further than Hannah Arendt.
They have excused the full criminality of the perpetrators with their fallacious ignorant antisemitic amoral declaration that the entire Holocaust was not the result of the pure evil of the criminal perpetrators, but rather the result of an amorphous non existent “weaponization of free speech.”
Having thereby excused the entire criminality of perpetrators of the Holocaust with a modern fascistic sleight of hand, CBS News and Margaret Brennan have emerged as a 21st century version of Joseph Goebbels Nazi Propaganda Ministry and nothing more.
Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida
