Price's Remarks at the North Carolina Holocaust Observance Ceremony at Meredith College

Price's Remarks at the North Carolina Holocaust Observance Ceremony at Meredith College

Raleigh, Apr 17 - "... Take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children's children...." (Deuteronomy 4:9)

On this day of remembrance we confront stark, unmitigated evil, evil that could impose and did impose starvation, torture, unimaginable cruelty, and-for six million human beings-death. We also confront the evil that let this happen, the evil of indifference. It is indifference that Elie Weisel describes as the "epitome of evil." "The opposite of love is not hate," he says, "it is indifference ... The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference."

It was indifference that enabled millions to avert their gaze as the Nazis undertook genocide on a scale never before imagined. Remembrance of the Holocaust affects us deeply as we empathize with the victims and what they endured but also as we recognize: the scourge of indifference, the temptation to indifference, are all too familiar to us today.

Indifference often prevents us from expressing love, achieving justice, or realizing community. And it still operates on a global scale. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has termed the failure of the United States and other nations to intervene to prevent the genocidal massacres of 1994 in Rwanda as her "deepest regret" from her years of public service. I tell my colleagues that every public servant should see Hotel Rwanda; in fact, I think every citizen should see the film, which drives home painfully the effects of the world's indifference.

And now researchers at the Holocaust Museum in Washington have issued a Genocide Emergency for Darfur in western Sudan, where some 300,000 people have died at the hands of violent men, or from the devastation left in their wake, in the past two years. Indeed the Holocaust-and the indifference and inaction that permitted the Holocaust-have been frequently invoked as Congress has struggled to shape our country's response. "Simply saying 'never again' does not save lives," one colleague wrote recently. Our country's diplomatic efforts and the initiatives of the United Nations and the African Union have thus far fallen woefully short. The international community needs to impose far more stringent economic and diplomatic sanctions on Sudan and to muster a much larger peacekeeping force-and our country needs to invest a great deal more in getting this done. In this connection, I commend to you Nicholas Kristoff's column in this morning's New York Times.

Today is a solemn day of remembrance. But given the persistence of evil and the perils our world faces, it must also be a day of resolve and action. We keep faith with those we remember by vowing "Never again" and not stopping at that, but overcoming the indifference and inaction that would allow unmitigated evil-the ultimate atrocity of genocide-to continue.

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