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Ideas Matter Podcast is home to talks from leading contemporary thinkers on the most important political and cultural issues and intellectual trends of our times. Many were recorded at or reflect the topics discussed at Ideas Matter events, including Living Freedom summer school, The Academy residential weekend and Debating Matters schools debating competition.
Episodes

Tuesday Jun 24, 2025
Why the holocaust MUST be remembered | Sabine Beppler-Spahl | Academy 2024
Tuesday Jun 24, 2025
Tuesday Jun 24, 2025
Primo Levi is the modern conscience of Europe. Yet our culture warriors downgrade his searing witness to Auschwitz into just another lesson in victimhood or, worse, try and downplay the significance of the holocaust into one of many.
This lecture we restores Levi’s grim brilliance – and expose today’s relativists who would rather talk about “systems” than evil.
📖 Topics Covered
• Why Levi, aged 25, wrote If This Is a Man at break-neck speed – he feared we’d forget
• Auschwitz as a laboratory in total domination – Hannah Arendt’s warning brought to life
• Greek, Italian and French solidarity versus German barbarism – a civilisation stress-test
• How post-war publishers mangled the title into Survival in Auschwitz – and why that ruins the point
• The poverty of modern Holocaust education – classrooms that churn out relativist drivel
• What is lost when we treat genocide as just another case study in “trauma studies”
🎙️ Quote to remember “Consider if this is a man… carve it in your hearts.” – Levi turns the Shema into a moral bayonet.
🔥 Takeaway This talk is not a weepy exercise in guilt-mongering. It is a defence of civilisation – and a challenge to those who prefer moral fog to moral clarity.
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