Originally published at: A Georgia school administrator feels an elementary school student's "Gay is OK" artwork is equivalent to flying a swastika | Boing Boing
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Weirdly, it was in my two years in a Texas elementary school where I first learned of the Holocaust. They were very matter of fact with what US and Soviet soldiers found in the death camps, and showed us footage of one of the camps as it was being liberated. That bit of education was seared into my mind, and I can never forget. Nor would I want to. Truth can be traumatic, but it is necessary for kids to understand just how depraved adults can collectively get.
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Not surprised that this happened in Athens… it’s sort of at the edge of the democratic stronghold across the center of our state (about an hour or slightly less from ATL). The area from Athens to ATL used to be strongly GOP and has dramatically shifted in the past 20 years as this part of the state gets more diverse. I suspect that part of why stuff like this keeps happening in places like this is because it IS getting more diverse and the white conservatives are afraid of being fully pushed out of power. There is currently an effort in my county to redraw the county districts to shift the power back towards the whiter, more Republican north of our county (they’ve already changed our congressional map to where the line for the 7th was pushed further south, and my part of the county is now in that district instead of in the 4th).
Yeah, having that in direct lived memory helps to keep it alive… but we’re losing the last generation of WW2 soldiers and holocaust survivors…
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Which is why the film footage and books like Maus and Night by Elie Wiesel are such an important part of public school curriculum.
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I mean… yeah? I’d go for Primo Levi, though. I, in fact, assign students to read a chapter of The Drowned and the Saved when I teach the modern world survey…
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If there’s one lesson we need to remember from the Holocaust it’s that we can’t ignore the danger of (checks notes) uh, accepting gay people as human beings??
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There’s someone behaving like a Nazi in this story, but it isn’t the kid.
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I think he might have missed the part of history where the nazis murdered gay people.
Years ago, I had a friend say he wanted to go to Wyoming because he pictured it to be full of happy, gay cowboys. He got that idea from watching Brokeback Mountain. I still can’t wrap my head around how he could miss the point so badly, but this gentleman seems to have emerged from his history lessons with even less of a reality-based mental image
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Yeah, that’s kind of the problem with depending on Hollywood to learn history - while some films do a great job dealing with the reality of the past, far too often, they flatten and simplify things to such a degree as to almost fully distort it. I think that’s largely true about American films about the Holocaust. Far too many people have the image in their minds that it was only Jewish people who were targeted, that it was very “efficient” and most of the deaths happened in the death camps, and that most Jews who were targeted did not fight back, and that no one knew about what was happening until after the war. In reailty, the first targets were Communists and Socialists, the LGBQT+ community, and then the disabled. Other groups were targeted (Roma and Sinti, Slavs, Afro-Germans, etc), and that much of the holocaust happened outside the camps, often outside of villages in mass graves… there was also a lot of resistance and uprisings against what was happening, and many Jewish people were a core part of the resistance - it’s just that many of those got recast as “Partisans” under the communist regimes after the war.
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He should have his certification revoked.
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But they undoubtedly support flying swastikas instead.
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The Evangelical groups, so favored by public officials in places like Georgia, support imprisonment and mass murder of gay people. Just like the Nazis.
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Because a message that shows acceptance of a minority is the same as a flag representing the eradication of several minorities?
Must be like that “new math” they were always trying to teach when I was a kid.
/s
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I’m embarrassed to say that I’m unfamiliar, but I’ll check it out.
ETA: None of my libraries had it digitally, but I just found his complete works. Thanks!
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Where’d he get the “happy” part from? Brokeback is one of the most beautiful and poignant love stories of all time, but happy it ain’t.
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Yeah, Primo Levi was amazing…
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Yeah, from everything I’ve been reading, that seems to be the trigger for producing Trumpers. Those are the kinds of areas that are producing the most, and the most extreme, Trump supporters.
Well, you see, that just shows how there are two sides to this, and since there are two sides, they must both be treated as equivalent in every way! It’s only fair! /ssssssssssssssssssssssss
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Another problem might be that we are more used to films being works of fiction. While immersion can be quite direct and strong, we have learned to distance our being from that immersion. We might feel touched for a moment. Sometimes images stay with us. But we learned to feel that this is not reality. We do not trust the feelings evoked by the immersion. And another level down, we know that a fictionalised history is just that: fiction. So, we can somehow compatmentize and thus forget.
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Because anything that stands in the way of Christianism’s ability to bully literally every other group into oblivion is oppression, and that’s only a Slippery Slope™ away from the actual literal Holocaust 
These are the most unintelligent people ever. And yet they think they, and not trained educators, should decide what their children learn.
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