In March 2016, award-winning anthropologist Alex Hinton, faced off with a genocidal extremist, Pol Pot’s “Brother Number Two,” while serving as an expert witness at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia. A year and half later, white power extremists wreaked havoc in the streets of Charlottesville. Professor Hinton’s talk will bring these two events into conversation to answer the question asked about both: why? -- as well the question that began to be asked in the U.S., could it happen here? In each situation, key issues of our time – truth and denial, human dignity, hate, moral choice, and extremism – were at stake.

As illustrated by the recent Southern Border “concentration camp” controversy, people sometimes question the use of Holocaust analogies or “lessons from the past.” Dr. Hinton’s talk will argue for the value of both, arguing that the genocidal past provides a moral compass to guide us in difficult times and avoid paths leading to suffering, violence, and ruin. It is a compass that is urgently needed during dangerous times when the Trump administration plays on white nationalist fears and makes dog whistles that extremists hear loud and clear.