Why Indeed

 The other night in my Images of Fascism class we watched excerpts from Frank Capra's Prelude to War, the first installment in his Why We Fight US government propaganda series from World War II, and Claude Lanzmann's brilliant documentary about the holocaust, Shoah. They're both essential in different ways, but they also provided the challenge of how much to show so that the students could get the sense of the lesson but also leave enough time to let the students organically sort through the material (such is the life of a teacher). We ended up only watching around eleven minutes of Prelude to War (from around 6:42 to about 18:00, just about when there's around five minutes of marching), and I told the students that they should probably think of that eleven minute stretch as another text for the class.  In that section, Capra, and the US for that matter (it was a government sponsored film produced in the middle of the darkest chapter in American history), defined Fascism and what Fascists do to claim power. The students found it very sobering to watch the US government, in maybe its most assured dedication to the tenets of democracy, essentially defining the actions of our present US government as Fascist. Then we watched around an hour and a half out of Lanzmann's nine and a half hour documentary (that was a real challenge). However, we pulled out some powerful moments, including a Treblinka guard remembering the Jews being told that their skills would be valued at the camp, but first they had to take a quick delousing shower, before being led right into the gas chambers - and a death camp guard boisterously singing the Treblinka song they made all the Jewish workers sing (I swear I can still remember that scene, and I saw it once on public television in the 1980s). After the film, one of my female students, who had clearly been profoundly moved by Shoah, sadly commented, "I just don't know why we have to do all this again." Her statement alone might be the greatest teaching moment of the entire semester. Paraphrasing my daughter-in-law Ali, I guess this is why we have to do the work.