The Will to Disbelieve

The predisposition to believe or to disbelieve in accounts of experience around us depends on the fit between those accounts, eyewitness reports, personal testimony, whatever, and all the other things that we believe to be true and untrue. Again and again in our century the will to disbelieve in the horrible has overwhelmed our sense of reality and left us unable to take prudent precautions. The will to disbelieve the reality of the Nazis' genocidal intentions afflicted Germany's Jews and most of the non-Jewish world as well. The will to disbelieve that they were victims of the greatest extermination project in human history sometimes lasted to the very doors of the crematoria. In Israel, the museum and monument to the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, stands as a massive barrier to the denial of the terrible, incredible event, the Holocaust, denying Israel's Jews, at least, the opportunity to disbelieve in the reality of deportation, starvation, and murder on a mass scale.