In October 2011 Insight Labs convened a session with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The big question on the table was what great new project might be possible now that the museum had completed its initial goals of establishing itself on the National Mall and widely educating Americans about the Holocaust.

In discussing the effect the museum has on its visitors, the Lab reached a substantial idea. Museums – particularly deeply moving museums like this one – now have the power not just to curate their exhibitions, but to curate collective action that occurs in response to them. The Holocaust Museum had already recognized “active agents” who have taken what they learned there and applied it in their own lives. One Lab participant suggested that the institution’s next big goal should be to create six million “active agents” – that is, to curate collective actions for good in the world that would be on the scale of the Holocaust itself.

Among the participants in the Lab was Toby Moffett. A U.S. House representative from Connecticut from 1975 to 1983, he currently chairs the Moffett Group, a political consulting firm that has represented several African and Middle Eastern nations in Washington. The group also lobbies on behalf of many environmental causes. We spoke with Moffett about the ideas that came out of the session and what they could mean for the Holocaust Museum’s presence on the global stage.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: What do you think was the most significant idea that came out of the Lab?

Toby Moffett: Clearly it was the “six million active agents” idea, the idea of organizing six million people throughout the world to work against genocide in the name of those who died in the Holocaust. It would be a gigantic undertaking. They would have to reach people in Mumbai and Moscow and St. Petersburg and Sao Paulo. That was the big idea for me.

ABN: Let’s investigate this a bit more. “Active agent” was a term that the Holocaust Museum staff brought into the room, using it to refer to a certain group of people and the relationship they already have with the museum. Then people in the Lab suggested scaling it to six million, potentially changing the definition as well. Based on the discussion, how would you define an “active agent”?

TM: That’s a good question. There’s a huge amount of room for definition, and how you define them would of course say something about what your goals are.

If you define them like Peace Corps volunteers – full-time people doing some kind of work in a foreign environment – that would be a spectacularly massive undertaking, financially or otherwise. If you define them as people who are associated with the idea of stopping genocide or stopping violence, but are not engaged in that in a full-time way, that is a bit more manageable.

ABN: How would you say this idea addressed the problems or challenges the museum came in with at the beginning of the session?

TM: The quandary that was on the table was whether they are a museum about the Holocaust in the narrowest sense, or whether they want to address broader questions in world history. The active agents idea stands firm with the notion and assertion that this is a memorial – they are not going to allow the world to forget the Holocaust – but to the memory of this thing they could add a living memorial, one that will keep the memory of the Holocaust alive because it will be out there, in action, for people to see.

Though it remains to be seen how it could actually be done, conceptually it deals perfectly with the problem they walked in the door with. In addition to that, it also gives them a glimpse of how they might address things like fundraising challenges.

ABN: To speak to that last piece, I think one interesting thing about this idea is that it takes a lot of interesting things the museum is already doing and makes them even more compatible and consistent with their core mission than they were before.

TM: I hope they will not lose the idea, as formidable as it is. Imagine the ways their fundraising base could change. It would be mind-blowing to work with organizations that, to put it mildly, would not have been interested in the Holocaust Museum before, say, the Qatar Foundation.

ABN: What are some specific international problems that you think this idea could help address?

TM: There is a lot of research going on around post-conflict situations and how to deal with them. I think it could be very helpful there.

ABN: It’s interesting – when we were talking about the ways in which the lessons of the Holocaust could be applied to other situations, I was thinking that that was one of the difficulties one would face. A lot of the parameters that are key to understanding these post-conflict situations and how to deal with them did not apply to the World War II period.

TM: But it could still help people now to focus on the tough questions – what is it that led us to do this? What is it that allowed some of those among us to do this? 

Let’s put funding aside for a moment. Look at a globe and think about some of the most significant post-conflict situations we face. What can the Holocaust Museum offer to people in those places? To officials in those places? That’s how to look at it.

The Museum’s director, Sara Bloomfeld, said during the session that in the long run the Museum needed to think about how to reach people in places like China and Russia. I think she was absolutely right about that. They’re not the first places you think about when you say “conflict,” but there are armed conflicts there.

ABN: Sure, like the situation between the Uyghurs and Han Chinese in western China.

TM: Right, or Chechnya. … The experience of the Holocaust could help people to ultimately make sense of what was going on in those situations.

ABN: You know, that makes me think that another interesting kind of expertise that the museum has developed that would be useful in post-conflict situations is how to responsibly gather the stories of bystanders and perpetrators.

TM: Absolutely. They can learn things about the kind of culture that allows this sort of thing to happen.

There is something I tried to articulate in a careful way near the beginning of the Lab. There is an extent to which the museum suffers in the eyes of some non-Jews who think they are saying, “It’s all about us, it’s all about us.” That’s partly because it’s true, because it was a unique historical event in terms of the horror of it. Part of it is also anti-Jewish sentiment.

But part of it is also that the world is so screwed up. So many people are suffering. So many people are being oppressed. There is so much violence. If you’re talking with someone in Gaza or the Blue Nile in Sudan, and you say you want to talk about the Holocaust Museum, they may very well say that they have their own Holocaust right there.

So to be a fountain of know-how and information and technical assistance, while at the same time not relinquishing the main idea of the Holocaust as history’s greatest case study – I think it’s very exciting. I’ve talked to several people about it since, and it’s incredible the excitement that it generates.

ABN: So let’s say this works and the museum successfully activates millions of people to use the story of the Holocaust to fight genocide worldwide. What do you think the effect would be on, say, the Arab world?

TM: I can speak pretty directly to specific places. Egypt is hugely ripe for something like this. Granted, we’re still at the beginning of a process, but they are going to have a new government and democracy. For better or worse, the big division a year from now will be secular versus religious. But there would be amazing receptivity to this sort of thing if it were done in the right way.

How about Lebanon? I spend a lot of time thinking about Lebanon, since I’m full-blooded Lebanese.  Talk about a laboratory for this idea. My group represents Morocco – I think they would be extremely receptive. Or Tunisia. If you look at the long list of mostly not successful (but interesting) partnerships across the line between Israel and neighboring countries, there may be a framework there.

The problem is that lurking over the whole thing you have Tehran. The game is not quite on the level. But the region is definitely ripe for this sort of thing.

Though it couldn’t be a purely Holocaust Museum-led effort – not that in that part of the world, and in other parts of the world, too. It’s a difficult balancing act. They would need to preserve their traditional mission, reassure their long-time, traditional Jewish funders, but at the same time move into more multi-national, multi-cultural partnerships.

But the simple embracing by Arabs, Muslims, Africans of the six million number – that should not be underestimated. What if we could wave a magic wand and get Hamas and Hezbollah sympathizers – heretofore quasi-deniers of the Holocaust – to embrace that six million number?

ABN: Or to even know what it signifies.

TM: Right.

ABN: Of course, that’s not the number. It’s the number of Jews, perhaps – there’s scholarship to suggest there were more. Then it’s an even bigger number when you include gays, Poles, Roma, etc.

TM: But the number is out there.

ABN: Sure. So do you think participating in this Lab will bring a different perspective to the work you do at the Moffett Group?

TM: Well, this is not exactly profound, but the world we live in is such that too many of us are slumped over our desks starting at the computer screen all day.This reinforced the importance of having actual conversations, of actually being in a room with people.

But if somebody said to me, “Do you want to go work on this for the museum?” I would say, “Absolutely.” If they embarked on this, they could generate overnight such immense interest in Congress, among Republicans and Democrats.

ABN: That raises the questions of how you handle people who may have fairly divergent ideological reactions to the story of the Holocaust. I mean, you could very well have someone who sees this story of state-sponsored violence and they say, “Well, clearly the problem is the existence of the state.” How do you handle that?

TM: I actually don’t think it’s likely to work if you leave it open-ended or too general. I think there has to be clear focus and training of people.

Let’s suppose you find yourself in Zimbabwe and you are meeting with my friend Morgan Tsvangirai, their prime minister who has to meet with Robert Mugabe every Friday afternoon for tea. You say to Morgan, “We want 100 active agents in Zimbabwe. We’ll train them and they’ll be able to ask tough questions as events unfold and be the conscience of the country.”

ABN: Sure, that might be what 100 active agents looks like for Zimbabwe. One hundred active agents in Idaho might be very different.

TM: That’s true, but you have to have three or four pillars that are the same, like being against hatred.

So I think something has been hit upon here. I think it needs to be played out. If the Holocaust Museum doesn’t do it, I think there would still be a need for it. But they would bring an incredibly unique contribution. I think it would be a shame if they aren’t in the middle of it.

Though who knows if they would be open to taking money from someone like the Qatar Foundation? You might ultimately need an independent consortium. Some of their big contributors now may not want to fund this thing. If you want them to be the majority funders, forget about it.

But that’s part of the beauty of the thing. Wouldn’t you like to write that story? Wouldn’t you like to tell the story of, say, the Qatar Foundation and the Holocaust Museum and Brazil and whoever else joining together to set up seed funding to launch something? It would make a lot of people I know in Washington who have never been to the Holocaust Museum go to the Holocaust Museum.

Will they have a lot of conservative Jews who react to that sort of thing by saying they’ve lost their minds? I don’t think so.

If I care about the Holocaust Museum more than anything else, and then I hear that Arabs and Muslims are mouthing the six million number, and that everyone everywhere has bought into the Holocaust as a historical case study, and they’ve taken global action – boy oh boy. That’s Ahmadinejad’s worst nightmare.