Anne Frank

Can You Guess Who “The Great Stupid,” The DEI Ethics Train Wreck And The Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck Are Ganging Up On In Germany?

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

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Yes, it’s come to this! In the town of Tangerhütte, about 2 hours east of Berlin, Germany, a daycare center that for decades has been named in honor of the most famous child murdered during the Holocaust in World War II, is removing Anne’s name. The Anne Frank Daycare Center will become the “World Explorers Daycare Center” because…wait for it!…the name makes some “migrant” parents feel “uncomfortable.” It isn’t welcoming enough, or something, now that Israel is at war with Gaza.

The daycare center’s director explains that the change from the center’s current name is now troubling “parents with migrant backgrounds” who complained that they found it “challenging” to explain Anne’s story to their children. Of course, the whole idea behind such honors is that succeeding generations remember important stories, like we remember the complex tragedy of the Civil War with statues of its many flawed participants…wait. Oops! Never mind.

City officials now insist the renaming is necessary “to celebrate the diversity” of the children attending the daycare center, as explained by Andreas Brohm, the mayor. Because of the large number of Hamas supporters in the town, Anne Frank no longer aligns with the “new focus on diversity,” Brohm said. Despite Germany’s strong support for Israel as part of its penance for launching the Holocaust under He Who Must Not Be Named, respecting diversity—Kill the Jews/ Don’t kill the Jews: Diversity! Equity! Inclusion!—elevates the feelings of many parents about the current name above “the global political situation.”

Writing at “Victory Girls,” Deanna Fisher muses,

[I]f her name comes off the daycare, where does it stop? How many schools all over the world carry her name? A lot. And how quickly will that change if the local population decides that having a school named after Anne Frank sends the “wrong” message about “diversity, equity, and inclusion”? Where does this end? Given the amount of ugly anti-Semitism we have seen this weekend, and what is promised to come, I am not sure where it ends. And I’m not sure that the West has the backbone to stop it, either.

Oh, I’m absolutely sure it doesn’t! After all, a life-time petty hood died of a drug overdose under the knee of a Minnesota cop three years ago, so of course Anne Frank’s name has to go. Come on! It makes perfect sense!

The Great Stupid is all-powerful, and its reach is infinite…

Another 7-11 Encounter: There Is Hope.

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

yankees-vs-red-sox

For over a decade, a cynical, destructive, dangerous and—let’s see, is there another good adjective? Yes!— unethical strategy has been pursued to strip away all trust between the races, to use racial guilt for profit and power, to make black Americans fear and hate white Americans and to cause white Americans to resent their blacks neighbors. This is, disgracefully, a deliberate choice by elements in our society and politics in order to achieve power. It is an existential threat to the United States, our society and our culture, and has never been more so than now.

I was running an errand for Grace to the local 7-11. As I got out of my car, wearing a black #*&!@#!! mask, my path intersected with that of another man on the way to the convenience store. All I could see were his eyes and his skin-color (he was African-American), and the rest was attire: a New York Yankees cap and a Yankees team jacket. I was one up on him: I was wearing my Red Sox cap, a Boston team jacked AND my Red Sox canvas deck shoes.

The stranger, who appeared to be around my age, froze dramatically as we came face to face about ten feet apart, extended his arms, and exclaimed, “What is this, a beer ad?” and laughed. I replied, “I think it has to be!,” and he followed me into the store. We stopped a few feet inside the door, and talked for 20 minutes about baseball, our teams, various players, baseball ethics (steroids and cheating), and life. He was such a friendly, smart and funny guy; I loved talking with him. Then he gave me a fist bump, and we parted. I never even got his name.

There was nothing in our interaction that day that involved race or anything else contentious. We were just two human beings and citizens of the United States who have a lot more in common and a lot more to talk about together than group identities and conflict. The encounter reminded me that the bonds that unite us as a nation are still stronger and more resilient than the enemies of democracy think they are.

And as I got back into my car, the most famous quote from Anne Frank’s diary suddenly popped into my head: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Not all people, certainly, but just maybe enough of them.

There is hope.

And Harvard’s Ethics Death Spiral Continues: The Lampoon’s Anne Frank “Gag”

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

Talk about ethics alarms malfunctioning.

Fortunately, I had already disavowed my Harvard degree before this surfaced, so I am only mortified rather than trying to figure out how to flush myself down the toilet.

Above is an allegedly  humorous gag from Harvard’s student-run humor magazine, which once gave us Robert Benchley, Al Franken, and “Animal House.”  [Full disclosure: I was rejected by the Lampoon when I competed to join the staff as a student. ] The magazine has often championed sophomoric humor as well as bad taste, but there are limits to everything. I’d say using the image and memory of a brave and iconic Jewish girl who died in a Nazi concentration camp for a cheap, spectacularly unfunny photoshop gag is over the line, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t just about anyone with an atom of common sense and decency?

Fortunately, some Harvard students erupted in anger over the photo of Frank’s head grafted on the body of a pumped-up busty bikini girl and the “ Add this to the list of  reasons the Holocaust  sucked” punch line. So did the New England branch of the Anti-Defamation League,  which condemned  the cartoon as a “vulgar, offensive & sexualized” meme that “denigrates [Anne Frank’s] memory & millions of Holocaust victims….Trivializing genocide plays into the hands of #antisemites & Holocaust deniers.” Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Emeritus: Miep Gies, 1909-2010

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Miep Gies, the last surviving participant in the inspiring story of Anne Frank, died last week, a month short of her 101st birthday.

One of the most important objectives of thinking about ethics, and challenging ourselves to find the most ethical courses in the dilemmas and conflicts we read and hear about every day, is to be ready if and when a time comes when lives depend on our ability to determine the right thing to do, and to have the courage do it. I have no idea how much or how often Miep Gies thought about ethics. But when her time came, she was ready. Continue reading →