In Night, the memoir of his time spent in Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel offers up his impression of the horror of his first night in the camp:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed.

Never shall I forget that smoke.

Never shall I forget the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.

Never shall I forget those flames that consumed my faith for ever.

Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.

Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes.

Never shall I forget those things, even were I condemned to live as long as God Himself.

Never.

If you've seen the pictures, heard the interviews, watched the documentaries, you know that the atrocities perpetrated on human beings by other human beings in the Holocaust defy description.

People have attempted to wrap the horror in words, but a description—as crucial as that is—can never touch the depths of despair and darkness at the bottom of the abyss.

Because our words can never quite convey the depravity humans are capable of, we're always in danger of stumbling back into the darkness. And there's too much riding on it.

Viktor Frankl, himself a survivor of the Theresienstadt Camp, wrote:

“So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense.

Since Auschwitz, we know what man is capable of.

And since Hiroshima, we know what is at stake.”

But the holocaust and the attempted extermination of the Jews by the Nazis didn't come out of nowhere. Anti-Semitism had seethed beneath the surface of European culture for centuries. No matter how long a Jew had lived in a particular country, they were always considered somehow alien, somehow “other.”.

They were dehumanized, called vermin, and seen as a social disease to be eradicated. Their presence was viewed as an invasion. Reducing Jews to a pestilential plague made it much easier for ordinary, otherwise cultured people to collaborate in destroying the Jews—if not actively, then certainly by their silence.

Lately, we’ve seen the rise of political illiberalism in our country—a growing wave of people convinced that the country has fallen into ruins and must be saved from the gathering horde of the “other.”

The New York Times just printed a conversation between two longstanding and thoughtful conservatives, Brett Stephens and David Brooks, about their thoughts on the descent of their former political party into something they no longer recognize. They offer multiple theories for this decline—which, boiled down to their essence, amount to an increase in radical populism—a shift from the emphasis on the reform of government to an almost complete rejection of government (or at least a complete rejection of a government the populists believe has been stolen from them), which has resulted in multiple attempts to undermine and even overthrow state and national governments. They lament the loss of a proud conservative tradition and its proud intellectual tradition, with its emphasis on practical reform and maintaining institutions (like the senate and the office of the president), to what they both describe as a “cesspool” of “Nihilists” conducting their very own “clown show.”