Last
Friday, following the official opening ceremonies at the Canadian
Museum for Human Rights, the Winnipeg Free Press, the propaganda arm of
the museum, updated with video and slideshow many of the stories it had
published in the run up to the opening.
One of these was a column by "professional journalist" Dan Lett that appeared Aug. 1st.
Something he wrote stuck in our craws back then and the update gives us an opportunity to remind Lett - he's entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. He wrote:
"(The Holocaust) gallery, as promised, focuses not on the atrocity per se, but on how the Nazis used legal means to galvanize their genocidal policies. And how the Holocaust directly resulted in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights, the first attempt to codify in international law the principle that no country can pass laws to dehumanize any group of citizens.
Er, no.
We reported more than a year ago that that canard had been dispelled. We quoted an interview Dr. Clint Curle, the former curator of the Holocaust gallery, gave to the Winnipeg Jewish Review:
http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2013/04/another-of-gail-aspers-human-rights.html
http://blackrod.blogspot.com/2013/04/another-of-gail-aspers-human-rights.html
Dr. Curle: The
organizational framework for the museum has evolved over time. One of
our challenges has been to conceptually locate the Holocaust and the UN
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in the Museum. The historical
proximity of these two events suggested an inspiring relationship
between violation and response. As content development moved forward,
the Museum, with the input of experts in this area, realized that this
relationship oversimplified both the history of the Holocaust and the
history of the Universal Declaration, and exaggerated the actual
historical connections between the two. In
its present conceptual articulation the Museum has de-linked a direct
causal relationship between the Holocaust and the Universal
Declaration."
Added Curle:
"Taking the Holocaust on its own terms in this way speaks powerfully to broader human rights concerns regarding the power of the modern state, the vulnerabilities of civil society to become an instrument of oppression, and the controversial relationship between war and human rights protection, but does not instrumentalize the Holocaust to tell a creation myth about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."