Theologian Richard L. Rubenstein writes of the Holocaust, why it
happened, why it happened when it did, and why it may happen again and
again.
"Few books possess the power to leave the reader with the feeling of
awareness that we call a sense of revelation. The Cunning of History
seems to me to be one of these . . . Rubenstein is forcing us to
reinterpret the meaning of Auschwitz--especially, though not
exclusively, from the standpoint of its existence as part of a continuum
of slavery that has been engrafted for centuries onto the very body of
Western civilization. Therefore, in the process of destroying the myth
and the preconception, he is making us see that that encampment of death
and suffering may have been more horrible than we had ever imagined. It
was slavery in its ultimate embodiment. He is making us understand that
the etiology of Auschwitz--to some, a diabolical, perhaps freakish
excrescence, which vanished from the face of the earth with the
destruction of the crematoria in 1945--is actually embedded deeply in a
cultural tradition that stretches back to the Middle Passage from the
coast of Africa, and beyond, to the enforced servitude in ancient Greece
and Rome. Rubenstein is saying that we ignore this linkage, and the
existence of the sleeping virus in the bloodstream of civilization, at
risk of our future." -- William Styron, from the Introduction.
