Michael Steinlauf about counterculture
Michael C. Steinlauf "Never Again?" In Paul Cronin, ed., A Time to Stir, Columbia University Press, 2018
Twenty years, I now know, is not a long time. In 1968 World War II had ended just twenty years previously. But for us college students the war seemed like ancient history. Many of our fathers had fought and defeated the enemy to win good jobs and new homes in the various Levittowns of America. Christians and Jews now lived in apparent harmony. If you stayed up late watching TV, at about 3AM the stations would sign off, but not before the "sermonette,"fifteen minutes of uplift by equal turns from a priest, a minister or a rabbi. Things occasionally broke through nevertheless. Some movies: The Pawnbroker, Judgment at Nuremberg. Those documentaries some of us had the misfortune to watch, the ones with bulldozers shoving skeletal bodies into piles. And then there was the Eichmann trial. Eichmann was a vigorous middle-aged man, so what he had done could not have happened so very long ago. And some of us, mainly Jewish kids, but not only, learned a phrase. "Never again" was in some corner of our minds when years later we watched those screaming naked children running down the road fleeing napalm, or the prisoner with a gun held to his ear by a South Vietnamese official about to pull the trigger.
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