Time & Perspective Quote by Simon Wiesenthal

Wiesenthal doesn’t flatter humanity here; he indicts it. “The history of man is the history of crimes” is blunt on purpose, a refusal of comforting narratives where progress naturally trends upward. Coming from a Holocaust survivor who later made it his life’s work to track Nazi perpetrators, the line carries the moral authority of someone who has seen what happens when societies decide certain people don’t count. The cynicism isn’t performative. It’s diagnostic.

Then comes the pivot: “history can repeat.” He isn’t talking about repetition as metaphor, the way we loosely compare every political scandal to a past one. He means recurrence in the literal sense: the same administrative machinery, the same excuses, the same public numbness, if left unchallenged. Wiesenthal’s key move is to treat memory as infrastructure. “Information is a defence” frames knowledge not as enlightenment or trivia, but as a protective barrier against organized forgetting. It’s also a warning about how repetition is enabled: not just by villains, but by gaps in record-keeping, willful ignorance, and the social permission that comes when crimes are buried or relativized.

The context is postwar Europe and the long, disappointing afterlife of atrocity: perpetrators reintegrated, archives contested, denial mutating into “moving on.” His insistence that “we must build” makes remembrance collective labor, not private grief. The subtext is almost prosecutorial: evidence matters, documentation matters, names and dates matter, because the future depends on what can be proven when society is tempted to look away.