 Welcome to Think Tech on OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things in matter-to-tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fiedel. And I'm Christine Linders. And our show this time will attend a talk by history professor Peter Hoffenberg at the Harvard Club. Peter's talk was a look at anti-Semitism in the context of today's rising populism and nationalism both here and abroad. Peter is an associate professor of history at UH Manoa where he's taught for some 25 years. His courses include world history, modern Britain, the British Empire and modern Europe. He has published scholarly works on international exhibitions, the history of science, traditional Indian art and John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard's far less famous father. He's the faculty advisor for Hillale, Hawaii and the coordinator of the UH Fund for the promotion of Jewish life and studies. He's active in the local Jewish community and is the facilitator of the Jewish Community Relations Board. He is also one of the coordinators of the annual Yom HaShowa Holocaust Memorial Service. Peter has appeared on a number of talk shows on Think Tech, Hawaii, including shows on the importance of history, the Holocaust at Passover, is it being forgotten, the destruction of the temple in the Jewish community and Vilna, is anti-Semitism on the rise, the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, anti-Semitism in the time of the Tree of Life and the Pittsburgh attack, the status of anti-Semitism in America, and the American Jewish community and the Trump phenomenon. Here are segments from some of those shows. That goes back to our conversation about the book Anti-Semitism when we talked about before with the three open parentheses the journalists who had discovered this vast, not so underground anymore, social media connection. So let me make a few comments, none of which are very profound, but maybe can lead to more conversation. I would be very hesitant to have any restrictions on free speech by any means at all. I know that there are costs, there have always cost to free speech, but historically, historically, one's either the government or a company, and I'm not sure we want, you know, the company exercising restriction either. That's usually a slippery slope, and as Europeans say, the censor always strikes twice. So we may want a censor, and it becomes a very bad precedent to censor. All right, this is not so dissimilar than crises that have always erupted when some kind of textual or representational technology has taken off. In the middle of the 19th century, you had to worry about newspapers, right? Should you censor newspapers? Because there were graphic engravings, there was expression in editorials, which could have led to an action, right? Okay, so my response to you is that they probably should be monitored. Certainly, folks should know of them, but I am a strong, strong believer, and certainly really in an era where the Supreme Court has determined that a corporation has free speech, then certainly individuals have free speech. So that's my immediate response. My concern about identifying them basically as alienated potential mental health issues goes back to my previous discussion about what is a terror attack. So do we understand that a white kid going and sitting with AME parishioners and then murdering them is somehow alienated and disaffected and didn't like his parents, but the Muslim who shoots somebody is motivated by an ideology? Do you have any thoughts about why that happened, why it happened there, why it happened in such brutal fashion, why it happened where you lived in a town, the Jewish guy was your neighbor, and now you were slaughtering him in the cruelest way and his family and they were bayoneting children in Vilna, bayoneting children. Why could that happen? Well, it's a particularly poignant tragic example, which has a lot of characteristics, which are resonant elsewhere. So let me try to take each of your really important points and then we'll put it together at the end. So as Tim Snyder and others have reminded us, much of the killing was done in a non-industrial way. We have focused on Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other places for generally good historical reasons, but in doing so we've privileged that and forgotten about what occurred before and then of course even what occurred afterwards with long death marches when Jews and others who were moved from the camps as the Soviets or Americans were coming forward. So one important reminder and it's also historically an important reminder is you don't need an industrial system. From Rwanda they used machetes, Pol Pot's executioner took a hammer and hit every single prisoner behind the skull to kill them, so you don't need industry. Secondly, that area again revealed a kind of rich, painful tragedy which I think German Jews can very well understand. There was a thriving Jewish community, but there never were the institutional protections for that community, never the integration of that community. I think that and I'm a Litvok, so that is my heritage and Jews from that area would never think of themselves as Lithuanian. They would call themselves Litvok, same with Latvian or Estonian or Ukrainian, whereas German Jews usually use the adjective German Jews because the mythology of perhaps being integrated. So one is the evil that can be done by hand and personally, including people you know. There were pogroms and thefts after 1945 in Poland where some people came home. It amidst all this talk about American society disintegrating. I think any historian who spent more than one semester in a classroom will remind you that comparable to the American Civil War, comparable to the violence of reconstruction, I'm sure your parents, like my parents, live through the Great Depression. I know we have our difficulties, but actually the disintegration of society is not comparable to those and in a way that picture reminds us that the Vietnam War, colliding with civil rights, colliding with some rather horrific racial behavior in this country, did bring us pretty close in the late 60s and that of course the two assassinations. Yeah and Oliver Lee is really unchanged after all these years. Well I think it happens you know and my parents were unchanged by the Great Depression. I mean these are momentous affairs. I think much of what we're going through now will pass, will be changed, but I'm not so sure it's going to be quite as transformative as either those who want the transformation or those who want to stop the transformation will be. You know a fellow named Richard Hornick spoke at the China seminar maybe three weeks ago and he talked about mind control in China and little by little I have seen that seeping into the press and the worst aspect of it is that before say five years ago in China there was a kind of academic freedom in the universities. Xi Jinping is closing that down and you are penalized if you go off track when you speak or engage a class in China, any university right now and some universities are favorite universities for him because they only do the party line. But I wonder if you see that kind of process happening here. I mean what's the state of freedom of academic speech in your classes and on campus? Okay so again it's only my personal view and the personal view of knowing my colleagues and talking to my colleagues and to be honest with you at least in our university I have never experienced official repression in any way. So no dean, no chair, no administrator. I think like much of life colleagues and public opinion shape you much as much as the government. John Stuart Mill worried in the middle of the 19th century that what would suppress free speech would not be the government. It would be the need to get along or the need not to offend or the need to be accepted. Yes there are members of the Jewish community who see in perhaps not as much what they like about the Republican Party but have some concerns about the Democratic Party. Now what are those concerns? Again they're ones that are pretty long-standing but again things are just out in the open. So I don't think anybody will tell you that all Jews have always agreed about Israel. That's just not true. But it was more true before than it is now. Well what I think has changed is that we even if we disagreed about what Israel was doing Israel had a right to exist as a Jewish nation and a Jewish society and that's really what's at stake here and that's what we have to be very careful about. So if one believes right that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state and is surrounded by folks who would like to remove all Jews from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and there are people in the Democratic Party who seem to agree their old fears are going to come fruition. Now there is no way the United States even if Trump were not president would abandon Israel. Obama wasn't going to abandon Israel. Mrs. Clinton wouldn't abandon Israel. Biden wouldn't. I mean Israel is not going to be abandoned. The question would be should the U.S. assert influence in certain ways to make Israel more open and more democratic. I think the Palestinians, the tragedy of Palestinians is nobody treats them well which is not excuse Israel but the Saudis don't treat them well. The Palestinians were primarily in Jordan. They were kicked out. So those issues though which for Jewish voters they got to go in the booth and say well am I convinced that Trump moving the embassy is a good or a bad thing. Am I convinced that the current legislators would like to stomp down on BDS. Is that a good or a bad thing and you kind of have to weigh it. Peter has spoken at meetings of the Harvard club before. At the September meeting he provided historical perspective on contemporary anti-Semitic ideas policies and actions most particularly but not exclusively in the United States and Europe. Here are some segments from Peter's remarks at this meeting of the Harvard club. His comments just as his remarks in our talk shows do not represent the views of his department or of UH. They are his own. Arche asked me to talk about populism, nationalism and anti-Semitism and how that unholy trinity might or might not be connected both today and in the past. And as a professor when I ask a question like that again it's not a rhetorical exercise. I don't assume a connection in the past. I have to prove it. I don't assume necessarily contrary to a lot of the media. I don't necessarily assume a relationship even today. So we leave it as a question. The way Arche put it is are they coexisting and is that coexistence only a coincidence? As Arche asked me to think about. The quick answer is no. And now we can all enjoy lunch and I'll see you next time. It's not a coincidence today nor was it a coincidence in the past. And those two answers actually are not unconnected or coincidental because our sense of the past which is really the fundamental thing I want to talk about today is very much with us and our sense of the past distorts our ability to define and understand those terms and to define and understand how the present exhibition of those terms is connected to the past. If we as historians are really going to come to terms with the past and when I say really I mean any sincere scientific way and hope to assist others in that project then we have to start with the proposition which is contrary to most of the views today was that in fact the past was not of this time and it was not of this place. We seem to be obsessed as Faulkner was with the proximity of the past. I invite us to think exactly the opposite. The past is actually quite distant from us and the question really for us is not the distance it's the question why we obsess over its proximity. Why we obsess over memory, obsess over monuments and whether or not that really enables us to come to terms with the past in a way that we can actually emancipate or liberate ourselves from the past. The apparent lack of progress in many vital issues and again a political sense but not a partisan sense of many vital issues today and yesterday doesn't mean the lack of progress doesn't mean that today and yesterday are the same and sometimes we look at it that way if we as a society haven't moved from A to B then A and B must be the same that's a false kind of logic. It might mean that they seem to be the same that we need to make that similarity and we use that seductive similarity to justify all sorts and sides of our arguments. We can't comb the past through our own eyes with the predisposition to find answers to today's problems and that might sound odd as a story making that claim. This does not mean that everything is new and different but it also means with respect to Faulkner who certainly knew how to write a novel that the past is actually dead and it might be on life support but our goal is really not to revive the past. Now sure there was and is a rather long and disturbing relationship among anti-Semites, nationalists and populists that's you don't need a PhD to figure that out but it's not a fixed relationship and that's where historians need to come in and contemporary anger though is often couched in terms of that previous fixed relationship or the perpetuation of grievances from the past. There most certainly have been previous rains of racial and anti-Semitic terror fueled by a particular illiberal view of the nation and one type of populist anger. Again quite possible quite reasonable we wouldn't disagree with that and many folks today though want to draw a straight line from those previous times to ours but are those previous circumstances and developments or historical context really analogous to today? Are they the same as today? Is there an equivalency? Are they actually the sources for today's problems? I'm not so sure but I am sure the past is being mined for such answers I'm not sure that mining will do us much good in solving our present dilemmas in the way that we are embarking upon such excavations. Now I think there are two contemporary current examples of this and then I want to get to the nuts and bolts. You're probably familiar with the new series 1619 and the debate about the new series 1619. It's a pretty good indicator of the different ways that we can explore and understand the past and I'm not here to critique it I'm more interested in the reaction to it and in exploring understanding the past and why folks not only vehemently disagree about the past but even more fundamentally to quote the philosopher Adorno very famous German Jewish philosopher they disagree about how to come to terms with the past the Germans among many societies have had a battle with their past that'll make plenty of sense to you but they've also been upfront about having that battle for 25 30 years they were in fact historians who recognize they were part of history wars they didn't try to hide it and they were driven by Adorno's attempt to come to terms with the past it's no coincidence that a 20th century German Jewish philosopher would articulate that challenge and certainly you didn't come here to hear me explain why that's those are self-evident reasons we delight in arguing about the consequences of the past right so I read 1619 and some will say 1619 leads to segregation and others will argue that 1619 leads to some kind of equality that's the consequences of the past or the connections to the present but we do not delight in accepting Adorno's challenge that is actually coming to terms with what the past means the second one I know you're familiar with as well was the shouting match and everything's a shouting match these days over whether the migration and detention facilities at the u.s. Mexican border are quote unquote concentration camps or not as articulated by representative aOC and as things usually happen she said something and then Cheney's daughter in the republican national committee tweeted back and then the democrats got their underwear all out of order and felt they had to come back and what was really at stake I don't really care about the partisan politics but I care about is what it revealed about our relationship to the past it revealed about the fundamental psychological inability to understand that analogy is not equivalency so if X says like a concentration camp here she's not saying it is but that as far as logic gets warped and then of course there was the response that how dare you right how dare you compare anything to the Shoah or the Holocaust and the Holocaust museum said no analogies should be made and then 350 historians the most prominent historians but I have to tell you the prominent historians did not read the letter carefully because what the letter said was careless analogies nobody at the museum said you cannot compare all right so even historians right are not reading very carefully about the analogy but it suggests to us in our relationship to what populism or nationalism is right do we have an analogy with the past do we have an equivalency with the past or not Hawaii is a global beacon of diversity and tolerance that being the case we here in Hawaii may and should understand the need and benefits of those characteristics better than any other place we should be proud of that but we should also know where we stand in a world that is changing and some say devolving through less enlightened times we cannot afford to have or to tolerate these things to any degree or in any form express or implied in our close-knit island community this is critical to our multicultural origins our lives together here and our special identity as Hawaii we need to make sure that we do not accept or condone such things and to make sure that we condemn exclude and sanction hatred racism and religious bigotry wherever we find them including in Hawaii this will help all of us if you want to know more about peter hoffenberg google his name peter h hoffenberg and you'll see plenty if you want to know more about the harvard club see hc hawaii dot clubs dot harvard dot edu and now let's check out our think tech schedule of events going forward think tech broadcasts talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m to 5 p.m most weekdays then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends if you miss the show or if you want to replay or share our shows they're all archived on demand on think tech hawaii dot com and youtube and we post all of our shows as podcasts on itunes visit think tech hawaii dot com for our weekly calendar and live stream and youtube links or sign up on our email list and get our daily email advisories think tech has a high tech green screen studio in pioneer plaza if you want to see it or be part of our live audience or if you want to participate in our shows contact shows at think tech hawaii dot com go ahead give us a thumbs up on youtube or send us a tweet at think tech hi we'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in these islands and in this country we want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us let's think together we'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of think tech but first we want to thank our underwriters thanks to our think tech underwriters and grand tourists the atherton family foundation carol monlie and the friends of think tech the center for microbial oceanography research and education collateral analytics the cook foundation dwayne chorizo the hawaii community foundation the hawaii council of associations of apartment owners hawaii energy the hawaii energy policy forum hawaii an electric company integrated security technologies gail and hoe of bae systems kamehameha schools mw group the shidler family foundation the sydney stern memorial trust holo foundation urico j suki mora thanks so much to you all okay christine that wraps up this week's edition of think tech remember you can watch think tech on spectrum oc 16 several times every week for additional times check out oc 16 dot tv for lots more think tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on think tech visit think tech hawaii dot com be a guest or a host a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on hawaii thanks so much for being part of our think tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech energy diversification and global awareness and of course the ongoing search for innovation tolerance and social justice wherever we can find it you can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important think tech episode i'm jay fidel and i'm christine lenders aloha everyone