ABSTRACT
Since the time of the Great French Revolution of 1789, political democracy has been associated with universal human ideals. In the understanding of the late eighteenth century, liberty, equality, fraternity were not just the ideals of France; they were the ideals of all mankind. But in the twentieth century, in the 1930s and 1940s, political democracy, in all its different shapes and sizes around the world, sustained a great moral failure when it turned a blind eye toward the fate of the Jews, pretending not to see, not to hear, and not to know. It demonstrated great creativity in only one area: the production of alibis and excuses. In her fine book dealing with the American Press’ response to the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt concluded that both the Final Solution and the bystanders’ equanimity were beyond belief. One of the most important preconditions of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution in the 1940s was the availability of the victims to the executioner.
