The Boiling Frog

Americans do not seem to understand how perilous this moment in history really is.

by Ben Cohen

I remember the first time I learnt about the Holocaust in school in the UK. I was 12 years old and my knowledge of history had been confined to the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, how ancient Britons used to live (no baths, and houses built from wattle and daub) the Tudors, and Henry the VIIIth’s wives (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived!).

We had spent some time looking at the Victorian era and World War 1, but my memory of those subjects — at least from back then — is rather hazy. My memory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the catastrophic events that led to World War II however is not.

This is, I am certain, almost entirely due to the photographs of Jews in death camps who looked exactly like my family, and Anne Frank, who looked very much like my grandmother as a child.

I struggled to come to terms with how anyone could hate another group of people so much that they would gas them to death in industrial warehouses. I was also painfully aware that…