It was this comment (from the linked NBC article):
“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one teacher said in response.
“Believe me,” Peddy said. “That’s come up.”
To me, that sounds like she’s disgusted with the Nazi parents who show up and file complaints every time some teacher is talking about history. And by deadpanning the line about needing to keep a Nazi book on the shelves, she’s outing this law as the garbage it is.
I could be reading it totally wrong, but I think the public outrage is exactly the reaction she was hoping to create.
The link you provided was just the ISO standard press release saying “OMG we gotta cover our asses for even talking about this.” It doesn’t indicate that any specific person actually took the “we support nazis” position.
I agree it would have been simpler if she said something like “there aren’t two sides to every controversy, because there’s the documented facts, and then lying racist fucking nazis.” But that’s been said a million times and nobody’s done shit about it, and then the governor signed this shit into law so people can pretend CRT isn’t also teaching documented facts. I’m going to applaud anyone who fights this.
EDIT: I heard the audio, and you’re right, she only sounds like she’s trying to help teachers not violate the shitty law. She definitely knows better than to fight the politics, and has obviously done so before; now she’s just telling them to roll over if they end up in trouble. That way they can use the “just following orders” Nuremberg Defense. So yeah, not exactly a grand or noble gesture.
Still, it’s having a positive effect on exposing the Nazis for who they are, so there’s that.
This is really key. It’s the same with sexism, transphobia and other forms of bigotry (which I don’t want to name lest I speak too far outside my lived experience here). Very rarely anymore do people yell epithets at you and run you out of town. What they do is quietly not be your friend anymore, find a reason why you aren’t good at your job anymore, aren’t ready for that promotion, are too busy to help you, etc. It’s all subtle and you can’t confront anyone about it because they’ll gaslight you regardless. Plus they may not even be aware of their prejudice and would deny it in any case.
I know. It sucks. I don’t think me having a hardline on this guy being a nazi is doing that. This has nothing to do with YOU or others here on the spectrum. This has to do with someone abusing children. Because the ones he “saved” were deemed “useful”, meaning they most likely were in for some kind of abuse.
The more we ignore this sort of complicity, the more it will happen now. The entire nazi state was a death machine and people like him helped facilitate that. We don’t know if he felt he had no other choice. We don’t know if he felt that he was doing his part for the glory of the white race. We do know that while some were saved, others were in fact murdered. Those are the facts. He had choices. I suspect that many other nazis also “saved” some lives and thought themselves good people for doing so. They can also fuck right off.
But we live in an age where many people are willing to accept fascists ideas as part of our public discourse. This puts entire swaths of humanity at risk - POC, Jews, LGBQT+, folks on the spectrum, women, “liberals”… Not pointing out that people like this guy HAD alternatives, and choose this path anyway, puts us in danger of the same thing today.
The past is not even past, my friend. It’s right here haunting us.
Nobody was drafted to work in death camps or to perform inhumane experiments. Atrocities were done by volunteers. People who knew what they were doing and didn’t care. The common refrain at the Nuremberg trials was not “I had no choice” or “I was forced”. It was “I was following orders”.
Really sucks how bigotry and contempt for those who seem different than ourselves ends up leaving ALL marginalized people constantly feeling like Sisyphus while all the credit for social improvements seems to go to those at the top of the oppression chain who did the “least harm.”
I suspect that Texas was trying to find something, anything, that would allow them to refuse to teach the Holocaust, CRT, and Indigenous peoples’/First Nations history.
One of my history teachers was graduated from Ole Miss.
His teacher of Civil War history would hold classes up until the siege of Vicksburg. At that point, he would cancel classes for the rest of the term. Apparently Texas likens the liberation of the death camps to the demise of the Confederacy.
A better solution would be to return Texas to its First Nation occupants and let them teach about all of the genocides that white Texans are trying to cover up in their smelly sandbox schools.
One of the most widely cited “weeding policies” used by public libraries comes from the Texas State Library. Maybe this scheme should be picked over with a fine toothed comb,
Silberman muddied the water when he wrote ‘Neurotribes’. For some reason he decided he needed a hero and a villain, so Kanner became the derivative plagiarist, while Asperger became the valiant hero saving children from Aktion-T4 by pointing out the usefulness of their savant skills (which may be true but there is no evidence for it). Then the pendulum swung the other way and turned Asperger into a unregenerate Nazi eugenist (again, may be true but the evidence is pretty shonky).
Well sure. I’ve been sexually assaulted twice for being trans and had a trans slur yelled at me by a coworker in the middle of a company party, for example. Good times.
But my point was that those things are a drop in the bucket compared to how much daily lower grade passive-aggressive discrimination all marginalized people get. The latter is very hard to explain to cishet white men because it isn’t immediately visible but these days is much more damaging as a population whole.
Someone smarter than me said (paraphrasing) “the problem is that people think racism is hatred”.
There are plenty of people who were not “unregenerate nazi eugenists” who were still guilty of participating in the holocaust. They were human beings who found it easier or better for themselves to go along with events rather than oppose them. We should very much understand the banality of evil concept that Hannah Arendt proposed, because then we understand that it CAN happen again and does not need to stem from cartoonish evil. It stems from laziness, fear, and an embrace of ideology that sorts us into “us” and “them”. We’re experiencing some of that right this moment, as some of our friends, neighbors, and family members are being manipulated into believing they are the “good” guys and those of us who are vaxxed and vote for the Democrats are the cartoonish evil.
The power of the fascist world view is not in it’s complexity or in how effective it’s propaganda is. It’s in it’s ability to simplify the complexity of the world into these categories that makes the member feel whole and connected to something bigger than themselves - which is something that human beings actually NEED, because it’s how we survived to become what we are. Facsism is the weaponizing of human need for the purposes of ensuring that a few are kept in power.
