Mayors are stepping up lately (Miami-Dade aside).... this video from Marty Walsh of Boston vowing to use City Hall as a sanctuary site if need be had me tearing up:

Gonna put this here, just because it’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Not, you know. For any other reason.

My reaction to this:

He has experience in dealing with nuclear waste, inasmuch as he tried to privatize the disposal of it to a company that had donated to his campaign:

France just switched to an opt-out organ donation policy. I look forward to the Catholic right here losing its shit as loudly as they do over abortion.

I mean, Jesuits are a lot of things, but in my experience they’re pretty sharp. They may disagree with you, but they’re people you can talk to intellectually about this stuff. That’s one of the reasons I’m reassured by the pope being a Jesuit.

“a Catholic law student and self-described feminist”

I thought we all agreed LiLo had signed a life-endorsement contract with the Turkish government. This is just the next step in that.

Yeah, there was definitely a process of desensitization (if that’s even the right word) at work.... Have you read Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands? He does what I think is an incredible job showing how both the Nazis and the Soviets unleashed horror on the civilian populations of what’s now Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus,…

I definitely know a lot more about Hungarian migrant policy and EU law than you do, so yeah.

That’s a really great perspective; thank you for sharing it. Honestly, I wasn’t totally comfortable with the comment, but I felt like I should present it in its entirety. I’m glad it compelled you to write all this, because I do think it’s something to keep in mind.... lately it feels like there are way too many…

I don’t know about that. I’d say it depends on where you are in the West. Having lived in several parts of Western Europe and talked with people about it, the knowledge of the other extermination camps (so not places like Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, and Terezin, but Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek)…

It’s not an excerpt from the book. As I said above, it’s a quote from an interview with the author, Rudolph Herzog, aka son of Werner and grandson of Nazi-supporting Germans. In the interview, he talks about how some of his impetus for researching humor in Nazi Germany was the disconnect between private criticism and…

I mean, it’s something we knew about to some extent — the Einsatzgruppen trials took place in 1947-1948, with testimony about the mobile killing units entered into public record. But the actual scale of the slaughter during this period was very difficult to quantify before the fall of the Soviet Union opened up the…

In general, I agree with where you’re coming from, but I think it’s important not to over-idealize Weimar Germany. After all, Berlin wasn’t the whole country — and in fact, the strength of the Communists during the period suggests to me that people across the spectrum were disillusioned with liberal democracy. Plus,…

Yup. The latest number is somewhere around 42,500.

Exactly.

Like I said, it’s not surprising you hadn’t heard about it. These campaigns left so few survivors, and those who did make it out of the war alive were largely in Eastern Bloc countries, where public discussion the Holocaust was heavily censored. It was only in the 1990s that this stuff started being talked about more…

And that’s the worst part for me: nobody went “crazy.” The people of Germany didn’t have a collective psychological episode where they blacked out and woke up to find that, with the connivance of large segments of almost every other European country, they’d somehow slaughtered millions of innocent people.

Patrick Desbois! He published a book about his work; I’ve had students read excerpts of it. It’s crazy how long it took for these stories to reach a global audience, though.