the danger of easy memory

everyone fears forgetting the judeocide, and rightly so. but what about a memory so practiced, so ritualized, it becomes a kind of forgetting itself? we speak of lessons learned, but do we truly confront the terrifying normalcy of how it happened, the collapse of judgment, the surrender of thought? a cheap remembering, a collective nod to 'never again' without piercing the banality of evil, offers no protection. it merely substitutes a hollow virtue for the arduous task of understanding. this poverty is a double bind: an inability to truly grasp what was, and thus a profound inability to prevent what might yet be.