See No Evil? City Journal. Watch Downton Abbey Season 5 Episode 2. Incredibly, it wasn’t until I was 1. I learned that there had been a Holocaust. My hyper- assimilated, New England Jewish family and friends looked only to the present and future. We focused on the polio vaccine that promised to banish the iron lungs that had been our childhood terror.

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We trusted in the United Nations, whose gleaming buildings my father took me to see when they were brand- new, and from which I came away with hopeful admiration—mixed, however, with a vague sense, which I couldn’t have put into words then, that perhaps an enterprise housed in architecture so grandiosely superhuman, so showy but flimsy, and so modernistically disdainful of the past, might be too utopian to ensure the world peace it envisioned. I know that I read The Diary of Anne Frank back then, but I was probably too young to identify with a girl, so it made no impression. But as a college freshman, I went to see a movie that had as its unannounced co- feature Alain Resnais’s spare, half- hour documentary Night and Fog, made up of photographs and film clips of the Nazi death camps. Utterly unprepared and unsuspecting, I came abruptly face- to- face with what had actually happened in the very recent past—indeed, was still happening even in the first months of my own life. I came out of the Thalia theater weeping like a baby, forever changed. True, as I learned later, the movie never uttered the word Jew, and the films that General Eisenhower ordered to be made of the liberated camps, so that people would believe the otherwise incredible, were still more gruesome. No matter. I was never the same.

Resnais showed enough—the packed cattle cars; the mounds of shorn human hair, gold dental fillings, wedding rings, worn shoes; the emaciated men in striped pajamas lying miserably shoulder to shoulder on bare wooden bunks stacked to the ceiling as in a battery henhouse; the hopeless victims sitting on surgical tables, castrated or subjected to demonic medical experiments; the crowds of naked women, terrified but trying to preserve a shred of modesty by covering themselves with their hands, as kapos herded them into the “showers,” where, as the gas killed them, their vainly desperate fingernails left scratches on the walls; the chimneys streaming infernal smoke; the Allied bulldozers piling up the wasted dead bodies at the liberation of what the Germans called, with stark precision, the Vernichtungslagers, the “becoming- nothing camps.” And, of course, we saw the tattooed serial numbers, the ledgers that recorded them, the soap and lampshades made from the dead: a modern, methodical, highly organized industrial society had done this. I knew that the world had not always been as secure and flourishing as the mid- century America I grew up in: my mother told many stories of the Great Depression, with all its hardships and fears, though I discounted her claim that, whenever her mother- in- law had a joint of meat to roast, she lacked a nickel for the gas meter to cook it with. But I always knew that prosperity was not a given, and that what had happened before could happen again. But evil of such enormity as the Nazis? I never dreamed it possible, and learning that it had actually happened, in my own lifetime and to my own kinsmen, turned my worldview upside- down.

If I had to pick one image that summed up the mid- century American spirit I grew up in, it would be Ronald Reagan, as host of television’s weekly GE Theater, intoning reassuringly, “At General Electric, progress is our most important product.” Progress! And to us, that didn’t just mean the scientific progress of the Salk and then the Sabin polio vaccines or the mighty rockets thundering into the unknown from Cape Canaveral. We also believed in the moral progress that the UN supposedly embodied. Was not American anti- Semitism evaporating like morning fog in those years? Did not the Supreme Court’s 1. Brown v. Board school- desegregation decision herald the end of U.

S. racism? Did not the arc of history—to quote the German- inspired illusion of a recent president—bend toward justice? I went into the Thalia theater with those rosy hopes as unquestioned bedrock assumptions.

I came out with such certitude shattered. If so advanced a society as Germany’s—with so glorious a past in music and philosophy, such mighty achievements in science and industry—could do this in modern times, all talk of moral progress was just wind. I was hardly the first young person to have such a rude awakening, nor will I be the last.

The greatest poem by the twentieth century’s greatest poet, William Butler Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” describes how the First World War sparked just such a disillusionment in his generation—at least, those of it who survived. They had grown up with complacent pride in the immense achievements of the liberal long nineteenth century: We too had many pretty toys when young: A law indifferent to blame or praise,To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong. Melt down, as it were wax in the sun’s rays; Public opinion ripening for so long.

We thought it would outlive all future days. O what fine thought we had because we thought. That the worst rogues and rascals had died out. Echoing his revered fellow Irishman Edmund Burke, Yeats had believed that custom, culture, and the rule of law had thoroughly legitimized dynasties born from brutal conquest, civilizing today’s kings into mild and just monarchs, and softening knights and serfs into gentlemen and citizens. An immense achievement—with the single caveat that “no cannon had been turned/ Into a ploughshare,” though that seemed a mere oversight at the time. And then, seemingly out of nowhere in the midst of this prosperous, complacent, decades- long peace, erupted the war, which killed the flower of Europe’s young men, but not before they had suffered cold, wet, privation, gas, and fear in the muddy, rat- swarming trenches, which failed to protect so many from the shells and sharpshooters of the enemy.

Yeats writes: Now days are dragon- ridden, the nightmare. Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery. Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,To crawl in her own blood, and go scot- free; The night can sweat with terror as before. We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting in a hole. The survivors survived but never recovered. They bore indelible scars, if not on their flesh then on coarsened, disillusioned, selfish, and misanthropic souls.

We, who seven years ago. Talked of honour and of truth,Shriek with pleasure if we show. The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.

Vanished along with its civility were the Victorian beliefs in progress, benevolence, and Imperial Europe’s civilizing mission. And for the soldiers’ younger brothers and sisters, gone, too, were all ideals. Virtue? Truth? Wisdom? The new culture’s keynote was cynical mockery of such moral and intellectual achievements as mankind can show. The West had entered an age of contempt for the great, the wise, and the good, whose thoughts and deeds seemed irrelevant to the postwar weasel- world.

Bereft of ideals, the mockers felt contempt for themselves as well—a state of mind that you can still see on any political- comedy TV show today. And such a culture, in Yeats’s glum summation, threatened to devolve further into blind lust, blind anger, and blind stupidity. The imperial civilizing mission! All efforts to bring the world under a rule, from the UN to the EU, end in disillusionment, but European colonialism was misguided in its own specially cynical, dishonest way. Until academic political correctness sent it to stand in the corner for being racist, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—as powerful a prose masterpiece as we have—was our hardest- hitting indictment of this fraud. All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” writes Conrad of his charismatic Belgian protagonist, born to a half- English mother and half- French father. And what had all Europe made?