 Welcome back to Think Tech, on a given Tuesday I'm here with Seymour Kazimurski, who has been close to Think Tech for many years, welcome to the show Seymour, great to have you. Thank you, it's wonderful to be back, I'm usually sitting in that chair, and I'm now sitting in this chair. Then you'll tolerate me for a few minutes. I absolutely will, it's such a pleasure actually. So we'll call this bigotry in America, that's one of our series, and more specifically we'll talk about the Congressional controversy over references to the Holocaust. It is a matter of linguistic evolution, there are boundaries to linguistic evolution here on bigotry in America. And Donald Trump president has created a lot of divisiveness, that divisiveness certainly lives in Congress, and in Congress we have divisive groups right now and frankly it seems to be getting worse. One of the most recent iterations of that divisiveness is a controversy over the use of the term Holocaust, the use of the term concentration camps, the use of the term Nazi, and the term never again. These are all terms out of and referring to the Holocaust in the 30s and 40s in Europe. These are highly sensitive, highly charged terms, and we want to discuss today whether the analogy of those terms and what's going on at the border according to what AOC Cortez in Congress and others in Congress is appropriate. There is a controversy about it and we want to explore the controversy, we want your views of it Seymour, Seymour you've had plenty of contact with the Holocaust, can you talk about it? Absolutely, my parents were Holocaust survivors, they lost 65 members of their family, nobody was left alive, brothers, sisters, grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, they're gone. So they had to live through the ghettos and through the concentration camps in Europe and it became my job and my legacy to try to teach people the importance of never again because those concentration camps, anybody who lived through the concentration camps were scarred for the rest of their lives. We lost 12 million people in those concentration camps, 6 million of them were Jews and I think to compare the detention centers, which are horrible, we're totally inadequate, we don't have the facilities that we should have in the detention centers but to compare them to the concentration camps is to me just a lack of knowledge on the part of AOC Cortez. It's an abuse of history. I think so and I have some photographs after that will show. Yeah, I'd like to see the photographs but I'd like you to read the definition that you've found, I guess it's the term concentration. It is and this is the definition from Webster and it says, a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. Now that in itself forced labor and mass execution, if you say 6 million Jews were killed, 12 million people total, they were all labor camps, they were all slave labor camps, nothing and that description fits what Cortez is talking about in what I call detention camps. The term is mostly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933 to 45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Delsen and Auschwitz and I visited all of them today and I can tell you they are nothing. As terrible as the situation we have in Texas and in the south basically, we cannot compare the two and they shouldn't be compared because it belittles what I'm teaching when I go to talk to the kids, when I talk to university students. I speak to about 100, 120 lectures a year throughout the state of Hawaii and in all of them I'm trying to teach them that words hurt. I'm trying to teach them that bullying is wrong. I'm trying to teach them that we as a society must stand up for what's right not what's wrong. So if you belittle a word like concentration camp and use it in a form that really doesn't make it right, it absolutely hurts what I'm teaching these people. I think we can agree that the whole phenomenon in Nazi Germany, the concentration camps and the Holocaust was the worst crime against humanity that has ever been portrayed in the history of the world. And it's not just the 6 million and the 12 million, but people who survived who as you said are scarred for life, carry these memories around with them. But if the 12 million died, they were murdered, murdered, murdered, that's really special. That's a fantastic crime against humanity. And when they said never again, they meant that just a level of this crime should never be permitted to repeat itself in any context anywhere in the world. So really we don't have 12 million people at risk at the border, sorry we just don't have that. The reality is that we're overwhelmed at the border. The people who are to take care of those who come to seek immigration to the United States, they're totally overwhelmed. If they have a facility for 3,000, right now there's 30,000, that's 10 times the amount. I heard yesterday that 300,000 people in the first six months of this year have tried to gain asylum. 300,000. Do you know how many were prepared for? 3,000. It's impossible to give them adequate facilities. As horrible as it may seem, I think we're doing as best as we can. Not the best we can, but as best as we can. So we have to create more housing for them. We have to create a system that stops a lot of these people coming through. And it's happening slowly but surely. But when you hear these terms being bandied about and analogies made and comparisons made to what happened in Europe where 12 million people were murdered and went through incredible pain-suffering terror on a daily basis for years where communities were destroyed intentionally, willfully, we've never seen anything like it. So the comparison isn't really appropriate. And that's when a person who's skilled in a Holocaust, you have to be mighty offended. I am offended. And I felt when you and I spoke about me coming back on the show, I said, it's important to me that people understand the difference between what's going on in the South and what is happening or what has happened in the Holocaust. So, yes, that's a very critical issue. So let's get some context and look at your photos. Okay, here we go. So these are some of the photos. I'll tell you what camp that is from. That is from Auschwitz. This is a group of people that have been there a year and a half with hardly any food. That these people would get would be a potato and a bowl of soup. That's it. And that's breakfast, lunch, and dinner for them. And look what happens to them. Next, these are the children as despicable as this looks. These are the children that we're experimented on by Dr. Joseph Mengele. And it's horrible to think that we allowed this to happen in a Western society. But these were just some of the kids that were experimented on. And I don't want to go into it because it's so horrific. I don't want people to really get absolutely turned off by what happened. But as you can see, it was not very good. Next, this is a group of kids that have already gone through Mengele's treatment. He tried to change boys into girls. He tried to change girls into boys. He did all sorts of operations to see how much pain they could tolerate without any anesthetic whatsoever. It was incredible. Inhumane. Yeah. Inhumane, it's correct. Next, then we get to what happened after the concentration camp. This one is Bergen-Belsen. They found people in pits, basically, in which the Germans had just had them stand at the edge of the pit. And then they would just take machine guns and people would fall into the pit. And as you can see, they were pulling people out from the pit. There were over 4.2 million people that were absolutely buried alive during the Holocaust. Go ahead. This is one of the photos that I use when I lecture at the schools. This is a mother holding her child and the German is shooting the mother and the child. He has no feelings of whether it's right or wrong. He's just doing it because he was told what to do. You can't tell me that this is anything compared to what's happening to people down in the south. This is the ultimate pathology. Yeah. Next. This is one of the worst pictures that comes from Dachau. Dachau was a concentration camp in Germany. And as you can see, the piles of bodies that came out of the gas chambers, they would bury them. And then after the war, those are American soldiers. After the war, they wanted to count. And they had the German people that lived around Dachau go and dig out those people. And this is what they found. This is not one, Jay. There were over 600 barrels of people, like the wheelbarrows of people. Next. Living conditions. We've heard a lot about the living conditions down in the south, obviously, in the detention centers. Here, the living conditions, six people to a bunk. If you go to Auschwitz or you go to any of the Holocaust centers, you'll see it. Six people to a bunk, one lying one way, one lying the other way. And as you can see, they're totally malnourished. This is how they had to live from 1940 to 1945. And die. A lot of them died in those bunkers. They do. They absolutely do. A lot of them prayed to die, Jay, because the effect on the mind and the body is so severe during the Holocaust. Next. Well, this typifies a living man who has basically at the end of his life, and he's waiting to be saved by the ally. This is actually from the Russian side of the Holocaust. These are how they found people when they liberated some of the camps. I mean, it's so inhumane that I can't even, you know. How could human beings do this to other human beings? Terrible. I think we have a couple more. The people were told to undress before they go into the gas chambers, and they are told to undress to be counted. They want to make everybody feel like they're worth nothing. This is how people had to live. Men, women, it didn't matter to them. They were just treated as objects. They were treated as slave labor. No, no food, no medical care, nothing whatsoever. It's a core initiative of the Nazi Party. Yes, it was. We'll talk about that in the second half of the show. Next. And I think this is the last photo. They tried to count the people that they found buried. And this picture was taken by a U.S. soldier. And when he took this picture, he just broke down. It was so horrible for him. And he said, how can mankind do this to a human being? That's the last picture. Powerful. Thank you. Thank you for taking us through that and for sharing your thoughts about it. Looking at the words, we're talking about linguistic evolution. The words that come out, and these are not the only words, but the word Holocaust, you've described what it means. The word Nazi, it was a core initiative of the Nazi Party. This was a very important thing for them to do this. They were bent on doing it. They spent a lot of time, money, resources. Then we have the term concentration camp, which stayed perfected as a way to kill people by the millions. Well, Jay, you know, we've had a lot of comment about definition of concentration camp. And there have been other concentration camps, and there have been internment camps. We had the U.S. had our own internment camp for the Japanese, but it wasn't a concentration camp. I believe that the word concentration camp should be solely used for what happened in Nazi Germany. I'm not just saying to the Jews, but to all the people that were in the concentration camp. That is the lesson that is so important for us to know, that if we allow bigotry, if we allow inhumanity from one man to another man, we could end up in another concentration camp issue. Yes. And it's so important for us to look at these pictures and say, we're not going to vote for somebody who may do something like this. Yes. And the other term which sticks with me, because I grew up in the 50s, and I saw all of this. I knew people who were survivors. It's never again. Never is a really strong word. Never again. And the idea was that if you knew about this, you had to spend a lot of effort. You had to dedicate yourself, taking whatever steps were appropriate to stop it from ever happening again. Well, that's the malaise of our time. If we don't do exactly what you say, it's bound to happen again. It actually has happened again since our war. It's happened in Africa. It's happened in China. It's happening in many different places where the rule of law becomes so strong that people become subservient to the rule of law, and therefore they allow it to happen in their own countries. And if we don't do something about it in the Western world, we're going to see it happen over and over again because our environmental issues, our monetary issues, our economic issues are all leading towards problems. There's nothing right now that makes me feel certain areas of the world where we're going to have big problems. So there are categories. One is the kind of person who never knew about the Holocaust. Nobody ever told him. Then there's the kind of person who knew, but it just didn't sink in, and he didn't see the enormity of it. Then there's the kind of person who for political reasons either knows or doesn't know, but he chooses to deny the Holocaust. We've seen all of those and maybe other machinations where people don't accept it or don't know about it. I wonder how you feel about the state of consciousness and recognition, the state of awareness and acknowledgement in the world today about the Holocaust and what happened. I think people our age remember it because we were taught about it and it became something that's important. But Jay, there's a statistic you're not going to believe. 41% of high school students in the United States have no idea of what the word Holocaust is. 41%. That's almost half of our high school kids don't know what the Holocaust is, and it's not because it's not taught, it's just they're taught so many things. It's one paragraph in a history lesson for a whole year and it's gone. So my job, if we think that this is important, my job and people like me who do what we do, it's not so much to teach about concentration camps. It's to teach about how we use the Holocaust as a lesson for our future. Critical. Absolutely critical. So you teach kids? You teach school kids and high school kids? I only started high school. I started high school and I go to college and I do, I mean at UH, I'm part of the fascism study group. I teach at all of the private and public schools and I give them a lecture on it. And there are a few teachers who are so well prepared that when I come, they have the right questions. They ask, one of the questions they ask is deniers. Well, some people say that this never happened. This is a Jewish PR program for Israel. I mean the most ridiculous thing when you see pictures like this. And don't forget, some of their soldiers here in Hawaii were the ones who liberated Dachau. Senator Dan Inouye, God bless him, he was one of the guys and he became one of my best friends and would come with me so he could attest to it. I saw it with my own eyes and that you can't, you can't deny that. I'll give you an example. I was teaching at UH Political Science 401, I think, and there were some kids in the back and I noticed them, they weren't really paying attention. We have like two, three hundred kids in the auditorium. And all of a sudden I have a Q&A after it's all done and I said, any questions? And there's a couple of questions. All of a sudden one of the guys in the back says, this thing never happened. It's just a big PR stunt and I was going to answer it and I didn't have to answer it. Because two of the young people in the front stood up and faced those two guys and said, didn't you just see all this? How could you say it didn't happen? This did happen. So you see, they stood up, they took what I had given them as information and they made it a part of how they were going to make sure those guys weren't going to get the last word. How about those guys? Did they accept this? No. They never will. There will always be deniers. Is that anti-Semitism? Of course. You can't help it. And they'll find anti-Semitism, anti-Israelism, there's a lot of anti's around. And Jews have a tendency to be a wonderful group of people to pick on because they tend to make the money. Economically we're amongst the best. And it's easy to say it's the Jewish people's fault. So that's part of my lecturing. Part of my lecturing is to show the kids how I had to stand up through all of the bullying, through the term which I hated, which if anybody ever says it to me, they'll get more than words from me. And I used to have a term they used to call me dirty Jew. In French it was called mauvege with, which is a bloody Jew. And that was so derogatory. And I had to take that because I lived in a little French-English town. My father was a doctor and they had done well from poverty, from nothing. We came from Europe without a penny. My mother was washing people's clothes. During the summer they would rent out our rooms and we would sleep in the basement on a hard floor. There was no wood. It was dirt so that they could make some money and build up what they had to build. And when people saw that, I was the mauvege riff, the dirty Jew. Incredible. It is. And unfortunately there's a lot of people who have not been educated or do not accept the fact of the Holocaust. This is very troubling and I'm so happy that you do what you do. On the other hand I think we've seen a lot of divisiveness in this country and a lot of it has emerged in this administration, the Trump administration. More and more we see arguments and in this case we see an argument among members of Congress where a small group led by AOC Cortez was taking the position that she can call what's happening at the border, a concentration camp and a Holocaust of her own. This is very troubling and what has happened is the Holocaust Museum in Washington has made it clear that she's wrong. She and her friends in Congress, three or four of them and I think they're going to ultimately blow away because nobody is going to accept what they have to say. And finally, Yad Vashem in Israel, which is a kind of Holocaust Museum there, the south of Israel, has made a similar statement at the same time, and this is what I'm going to ask you about, at the same time there are Holocaust scholars, there are Holocaust experts, writers and philosophers, Jewish, many of them, who take the position that it's okay to use these terms. It's okay to refer to other comparable situations so that you make the emotional connection for people and that what's happening at the border is like a Holocaust, is like a concentration camp. And there's a dispute about this, there's a controversy happening right now. I know. And how do you answer that? But you used the term right when we started, linguistic evolution. Yes. And that to me is such an important piece of what is happening in Washington, in our own world, in our social media world. Linguistic evolution has allowed people to take words and terms, twist them a little bit, or get the spin on them that they want for their own political gain. I'm talking about Washington now. And I think it's both parties, Jay, I think both parties are terribly guilty of trying to push an agenda without looking at whether the other side has a decent idea. So we're looking at a situation where Cortez, for instance, she, excuse me, AOC Cortez, came out with a statement saying where she compared, it was so horrible. And I know it could have been a moment of just looking at a horrible situation where she comes out and says, this was like Nazi Germany's concentration camp. And she may not have meant it in the total words that we think. And some people have told me that I shouldn't say anything about it or blow over. I don't think so, Jay. I think it's important that we hold people accountable for the words and terms that they use. Now, I mean, President Trump, he's the king by far of lies and telling things that aren't true and falsehoods and gray area stuff and all that sort of stuff. But people are holding him accountable. And he's got to learn that if he is going to do something, he's going to have to make sure it's from a fact. It can't be a half truth or a lie, et cetera. So what Cortez has done, as bad as it is, it just gives us the ability to push harder for these people to do what's right, what's right in their community and for us as well. Yeah. But what troubles me about it, okay? Is that the use, the evolution of the linguistics here diminishes the power. The historical perspective of what happened in the 30s and the 40s. It's enough, the time goes by, we forget. Maybe we don't teach all the children. Maybe they forget about it, and if you tried this kind of distinction in say 1950 or 55 or 60, you would have been shouted down immediately. But people do not know. The same group in Congress are the ones who favor BDS and a boycott of Israel and the vestiture of anything Israeli in the name of anti-Zionism, but it's really anti-Semitism, what's happening. And what troubles me is that people, I mean a lot of people in the world, are ignorant about this. And the more ignorance there is about this, as you said before, the more likely it will be repeated. We cannot afford to confuse what happened in 1930s and 40s with anything else. It stands unique. It stands all by itself. How much do you agree with that? 100%. I think that the terminology of concentration camp, although used for other areas, and some people say it's not true, I think it has to be relegated to what happened in Nazi Germany. My sister in Montreal, Canada, is getting a law passed that they are going to teach genocide, the actual course on genocide in high schools in Quebec, both French and English, which will include the Holocaust and other genocide. And I had my arguments with her about, yeah, but I don't want to lose the importance of what happened in the Holocaust if it's tied into genocide. The worst of all genocide. Of course. But it has to be taught that way. So she is making sure that it's coming out that way. There are schools in Toronto, in Vancouver, in New York, in LA, Chicago. They call me and they ask me about my definition or they heard about what I'm doing in the schools here in Hawaii. And can I send them my reading list and all this kind of stuff? There are people that want to care. And I think thanks to people like Yad Vashem and the Holocaust. We have, I think it's 37 Holocaust centers in the United States now. And we have teachers who are very interested in making sure that their students are taught and they get lectures like me. How much longer can I do this, Jay? You and I know it's- That's what we want to put that to you. You know, you're doing this and I'm sure there are others that it would be hard to find, but I'm sure there are others and other places who are doing this, trying to educate high school kids and college kids, trying to- What happens after we're gone? Exactly, that's my question. What happens after you're gone? We have to get somebody else. We need to have not just the Shoah Foundation, you're familiar with that, Steven Spielberg's foundation that has 40,000 testimonies of Jewish survivors. But we need more people to look at kids in the eye when they're talking to them. Jay, if you've been to one of my lectures and there's not a dry eye from these kids when they see these pictures of what happened. When I read from my mother's book and I have the kids read about how she saw her mother shot right in front of her with blood dripping down the Germans boots he didn't care. And she saw that these kids are, they're touched by it. They understand how horrible it is, but they need that personal touch, not just a movie, not just a book. So my goal is to train somebody, my kids unfortunately are not the ones, but to train somebody to go after me. To be able to go out after me. I mean, first of all, you have to have the time. I go to 100 plus schools a year. That's a lot of lectures that I give. You have to have the time to do it. Very important work and I hope you're able to find somebody or find a lot of people hither and yon around around the world who will perpetuate the knowledge of what happened. Because otherwise, as Santiana said, we'll be doomed to repeat it. 100%. Never again, Seymour. Thank you very much. And thank you for allowing me to come and talk about this. I really appreciate it. You're welcome.