Where I Stand -- Brian Greenspun: Congressman teaches that peace is based on understanding

TOM LANTOS is the only survivor of the Holocaust to serve in the Congress of the United States of America.

To understand the significance of such a statement, one has to go back more than half a century to a time when the world had gone mad -- and also deaf and blind to the pleas of millions of innocent people who were sent to their deaths merely because they were somehow different from those in power.

One of the lucky ones was a young Hungarian named Tom Lantos. Even though he was saved a number of times from the Nazi killing machine, he chose to return to his homeland to fight rather than move on to safety. The story of how he and his wife, Annette, survived is a modern-day miracle.

This miracle has a name. It is Raoul Wallenberg.

Wallenberg was a young Swedish man who enjoyed everything in life that wealth, power and property could supply. He risked it all in an incredible quest to save the lives of more than 100,000 Jews. Tom and Annette Lantos are direct beneficiaries of the Wallenberg miracle.

It is no surprise, then, that Tom's entire adult life has been dedicated to the betterment of man and a desire to substitute knowledge in the place of ignorance, the only way to ultimately end intolerance and bigotry where it exists.

And don't be confused. Those two scourges of the human condition do exist, and they do so in a way that continues to threaten the path toward peaceful lives all over the globe, whether it be in the former and once beautiful Yugoslavia -- a country now laid to waste by years of horrific battles over who knows what kind of deep-seated hatreds -- or in Ireland -- a country so green and dreamlike that one wonders how such religion-based nightmares could ever be countenanced by people of goodwill and good cheer.

Tom Lantos is not only an expert on the human condition, he is the recognized leader in Congress on the issue of human rights and wrongs around the world. Sunday night, Las Vegans were privileged to hear his words and learn his lessons of intolerance, a gift to our city by the local office of the ADL.

There are few men of conscience in the Congress of the United States who have the depth and breadth of knowledge and understanding about these issues as Tom Lantos. There are fewer still who have the facility of language to communicate those truths in a way that normal people can comprehend.

There was no confusion Sunday night. Congressman Lantos spoke of a Yugoslavia that, while under the influence of the Communist regime during the Cold War, retained its beauty while its people lived side by side as neighbors. Within a few years after the fall of the Soviet Union and the freeing of its satellite countries, what was beautiful turned ugly and those who were neighbors turned monstrous. Murder, rape and pillage replaced creativity, industriousness and neighborliness.

During those same Cold War years, the Hungary where Tom Lantos was born turned cold and gray and ugly under the Communist regime. When the Berlin Wall came down, Hungary flourished. Where there was ugliness, there is beauty. Where there were tensions among its people, there is relative harmony.

The lesson to be learned, whether it be in Central or Eastern Europe or in the Middle East or the Irish Isle, is that ignorance must be eradicated before old fears and hatred can be overcome. No matter how thick the veneer of civilized society that appears to paper over the differences among people, it is never thick enough to withstand the deep-seated and often irrational differences that act to separate us rather than bring us together.

Congressman Lantos has lived through those hatreds. He has survived the worst that man can do to his fellow man. And his message is simple and very clear. No matter what the plan for peace in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Bosnia or a hundred other places across the globe where people continue to fight for reasons no one can really remember, without a change in what we know and how we learn, any peace will be forever fragile.

There are practical considerations for any plan for peace, we know. But beyond such considerations lies the long-term requirement that for neighbors to live, work and play at peace with one another, they have to have a better understanding of their differences.

Tom Lantos insists that must be the long-term goal for the only country in the world with the moral, military and economic authority to make it happen. It is a worthy goal for the United States of America.

archive