Online: Anti-India hate goes mainstream?

Title: Another "Victory" Lap for the Elites While History Gets Sanitized?

Here we go again. Eighty years since Nuremberg, and Harvard's patting itself on the back for finally getting around to digitizing the trial records. A 25-year project? Seriously? Give me a break. We're supposed to be impressed by this glacial pace? In the age of instant everything?

The "Dawn of the Internet Era"? Please...

Paul Deschner, the guy who led this "groundbreaking" project, said the goal was to preserve the documents and make them accessible "in the dawn of the internet era." The dawn? The internet's practically old enough to drink, dude. We're talking about something that should've been a priority back when Al Gore was still inventing the damn thing.

And the reason it took so long? Staples and paperclips. Seriously?

It's always the same song and dance. Bureaucratic inertia disguised as some noble act of preservation. "Oh, the documents were disintegrating!" Yeah, no kidding. Maybe if you hadn't left them moldering in boxes for decades, they wouldn't be in such rough shape.

Whitewashing in 3...2...

Deschner claims this digital trove will help people "be on the lookout for the dynamics as they are portrayed in these archives." Oh, I'm sure it will. I'm sure it will be incredibly helpful for those who aren't already dyed-in-the-wool Holocaust deniers.

What I really want to know is how long before some "expert" starts using this archive to "contextualize" the Holocaust, to soften the edges, to explain away the inexplicable. It's already happening with Confederate statues, right? "Oh, they were men of their time..." Spare me.

And speaking of excuses, Deschner actually said the documents show how "comparatively innocuous things might have looked in the early 30s compared to just a few years later." Innocuous? Really? Kristallnacht was '38. The writing was on the freakin' wall.

I'm just saying, history is written by the victors, and it's constantly being rewritten to suit the narratives of those in power. I wonder how many "innocuous" things are happening right now that we'll all be "contextualizing" in eighty years.

Wait, there's more! The article mentions the "extensive documentary trail" behind each trial exhibit. "There’s a government document, of which a photostat is made, which is transcribed into German, of which a typescript version is made, which is translated into English, of which there is a one-page summary.” So, a game of telephone, but with potential evidence of crimes against humanity. What could possibly go wrong?

But Wait, There's a Linguistic Angle!

And get this: apparently, the linguistic side of the trials is an "entirely under-researched field of its own." Simultaneous translators, stenographers, typists… a "verbatim verbiage" vortex of interpretation. That actually sounds kinda interesting, I'll admit. It's like trying to understand a dream through five different filters.

Offcourse, I'm sure some academic will turn that into a 500-page dissertation arguing that the real tragedy of Nuremberg was the mistranslation of a single comma.

Amanda Watson from Harvard Law School's library spouts some platitude about making justice "visible" and "possible." As if digitizing documents is some kind of magic wand that eradicates evil. The digitization project, which took 25 years, is discussed in detail in "Nuremberg trial records made available online after painstaking 25-year project."

Maybe I'm being too cynical here. Maybe this is a genuine effort to preserve history and make it accessible to all. Maybe. Then again, maybe I should go back to bed and let the optimists run the show.

Another Brick in the Wall of Institutional Self-Congratulation