I would say that some knowledge of the names of concentration camps would help take it from a vague “bad stuff happened” to a more concrete “bad stuff happened here”. This can help make it real.
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Must we blame old people? I’m not old, but I do see stats in my state that show property taxes have been going up faster than cost of living for decades now. The number one job of the sheriff in my county is putting old people out on the street. Why? Even if they manage to pay off the mortgage on their homes, non-payment of property taxes leads to liens, which leads to their homes being foreclosed on and sold at auction.
Old people are not the only ones who believe the property tax system is broken, and needs to be reformed. That doesn’t make them anti-education or anti-other people’s kids. It’s a financial breaking point for too many households in places where there’s an uneven system for collecting and distributing the tax money. So, let’s blame rich people and those who manipulate the system of property taxation for their own benefit.
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As @ChuckV impiles “Zedong” was Chairman Mao’s given name. Saying “Stalin and Zedong” is like saying “Churchill and Franklin.”
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I honestly think both are essential. A living memory really does provide a resource that an archive can’t, that of people who can teach to the needs of their students, children and audiences, who can relate their own memories directly to current and intervening events, and who can answer questions they wouldn’t have thought to write down in an archive. I think about how many people when answering the question who would you like to meet if you could meet any one person mention someone they probably already know a lot about because the more we learn often the more questions we have. I also see value in living memory as a curator to guide, index, annotate and contextually frame archival memory which is generally incomplete and far from immune to disinformation.
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Not convinced that’s the problem. I’d wager there’s a big overlap between “people who don’t know what the Holocaust was” and “people who don’t know that the American Civil War was fought over slavery.”
If anything, the Americans who actually have a well-rounded understanding of American history are the ones most likely to have a well-rounded understanding of history in general, because history is interconnected. If you want to understand the context for why the Mayflower pilgrims came here in 1620 you have to know the history of Puritanism in England. If you want to know why President Jefferson was able to get the Louisiana territory from France at such a good price you have to know about the Napoleonic wars. It’s not an either/or thing.
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Okay, my hope for Americans not being total monsters was not entirely dashed- this story is being mis-reported. Reading the questions, the bit that Americans weren’t sure about was how many Jews, specifically, were killed. When asked, straight out, “Did the Holocaust happen?” 96% said yes and only 1% said it was a hoax. (3% weren’t sure.) 11% thought the number of deaths had “been greatly exaggerated.” That’s still bad, but it’s not “the Holo-what?” bad.
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“History is bunk” said Henry Ford and that’s true for the rich. Past results are no guarantee of future performance, as the disclaimers say. Yet by ignoring the past, we can be pretty sure we’ll have to relive the worst of it. Yes, we’re doomed. Send me all your money.
The same people probably think that we were not allies with the Soviets and that they did little, when their contribution in Europe was what was decisive. 
Um… no. While I’m not names and dates in my classes, details DO matter to some extent.
Kind of hard to stop that if they don’t understand the basics of what they’re not repeating. There needs to be an emphasis on historical processes, cause and effect, how we establish what we do know, debates over the how and why - that’s what we need to teach, but we can’t do that until there is at least some ground work laid down on what some basic facts of history are.
Also, people should know how those bad things happened and that people were not just killed in mechanized, impersonal ways, but in massive pits outside of villages where soldiers would spend entire days shooting people.
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?!?!
Such a question.
Hopefully, an earnestly asked one.
Why bother calling a disease by its true name?
What could possibly be gained by putting names on things, making distinctions, keep track, building knowledge?
All disease = bad, health = good. That’s all people need to know, right?
No need to get all technical and specific?
Thank you. Yes. Genau.
Folks, various holiday seasons are upon us, or are nearly upon us.
Plenty of thoughtful gifts and thinky things available here:
Great thinky art to hang on the wall behind you in all those school- and work meetings on Zoom.
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Thanks for the German update. I don’t know if you are there now, but thank you all the same.
A period of history I am fascinated with; I have German cousins (The '68 Generation) who talk about those days.
Operation Paperclip comes to mind, in the States. Various U.S. agencies, like NASA and the rest of the U.S. military industrial complex owe much to the importation of highly skilled labor… [former, presumably] Nazis.
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As a person whose family was mostly destroyed in the camps, I hope that the complete context is taught-it was an important part of WWII.
I worked for a while with a young man who told me he had never met a Jew before he met me. When I mentioned that he probably had, but just didn’t realize it because we no longer had to wear yellow stars on our clothes he gave me a stare of complete incomprehension.
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Something tells me that these societies dedicated to economic education have proselytization on their minds.
I don’t doubt the finding as casual antisemitism appears to be on the rise. That said, I’m always suspicious of British publications that post stories on poll-driven findings. Inevitably, it is a commissioned poll acting as thinly veiled press releases, using a commissioned OnePoll survey as a news peg. Usually, it is about health supplements or something, but my inner skeptic worries that I might be swayed in this instance because it confirms my own biases.
Or the teacher explaining how she got the tattoo on her arm marking her for death when she was 10. Hard to forget the lesson when it comes from someone who suffered under it. Once those people are gone, it has no more relevance to a student than trying to remember which inbred aristocrat married which of their cousins 500 years ago.
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Once upon a time in the '80’s, I was sheltered in a suburb of Kansas City in Kansas and was educated in a district headed by a Jewish female superintendent. We were taught home economics, calculus, biology, computer science, sex education (including every form of birth control on the market), several levels of world languages, and the holocaust. Many of my classmates were descendants of holocaust survivors. Those are the facts. Unfortunately, since the value of education today is measured by the number of flat screens and iPads in the classroom–not to mention the devastation tax cuts have enacted, I am doubtful that I would return to find this educational system half of what it used to be.
Side note, while in high school, a friend of mine from a suburb of Missouri, whom I met via land line and modem, by the way, the daughter of a Christian pastor, let me borrow a book of hers called Maus that provided a new perspective on the holocaust. It’d be a great primer for that demographic.
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No it wasn’t or, at least, not solely.
…that was near the centre of enlightenment, education, industry, arts and culture even entertained the notion of murdering large portions of Europe’s population.
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Your point about living memory is incredibly important, I think. Because history never stops but human memory capacity never changes, it is quite natural for details of older events to become less and less known.
The average person likely knows more about WWII than WWI and I would be surprised if the a majority (at least in the Western countries that fought them) would be unable to state that there were exactly two of them. On the other hand, how many people can, without Googling, name the number of Crusades? The one in which Constantinople was sacked? Whether the Battle of Waterloo occurred during Napoleon’s first or second stint in power? Vague recollections of 4th-6th grade history gives would get me “more than three”; “third or fourth” and “probably second, but I might just as well flip a coin”, respectively.
Get down to specific statistics such as casualties, and things get even more difficult. Remembering high school history, I can probably semi-intelligently engage in basic conversation about the causes of WWI and its resolution at Versailles, but the number of dead? I just now hazarded a guess of 5 million and checked to see myself an order of magnitude off. But is this really such a failure of knowledge or disrespect to the dead?
A grasp of historical processes as demonstrated by specific examples of historical events is very valuable in our attempts to avoid repeating history. The choice of which particular events to teach is probably less important, and specific and detailed statistics or names even less so. While “we do not teach history well enough” is probably a reasonable conclusion to make, “how dare young people not know enough details about --selected period of history in region I personally care deeply about–” is poor evidence for the conclusion.
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Is this re-starting the “both parties are teh same / trump = clinton / vote for bernie now and always” train?
If so, next stop is the Sputnik twitter feed, so let me off, please.
Well, not quite. We mostly had a conservative government in Germany, and CSU and CDU were leaning so far to the right that there was big “market” for a Nazi party. Remember how we referred to black folks als “Neger” even in school books until around 1995? And graffiti like “Ausländer raus” was not a rare sight, and people who held that position were not referred to as Nazis back then. The more migrants we had in Germany, and the deeper we integrated into the EU, the more people understood that this is not so much of a problem, and they actually enrich society and economy. So that shit went slowly out of the mainstream.
That experience, however, was not shared by our new friends from East Germany, and the fact that we were never prepared to offer them a fair chance at economic participation and adequate political education, but instead treated them as slightly moronic descendants of a failed socialist state who can’t get anything done on their own, while selling the GDR’s assets for a couple of peanuts to West German investors, fostered a certain resentment towards the so-called “established” parties. The AfD hugely benefited from that. It doesn’t look like they will be able to attain the same number of votes next time, though, we we a slow and stable downward trend.
Which wasn’t necessary before, because there were already enough Nazis in secret service in the first place. And that means we would not even know about many things that were going on, because the secret service itself did never let it come out.
As I said, I think that is a misconception, these people felt part of the mainstream, and now there’s no more place for them in other parties, so they organized their own, and with the help of social media managed to trick a couple of other people into voting for them, leveraging the “refugee crisis”, which was always only a crisis in the heads of racists anyway. Now that it’s obvious that we’re fine, and most of the refugees already contribute substantially to our economy that as lost a bit of steam.
One clear indicator of the actual danger would be the number of people killed by fascists in Germany, there is an obvious downward trend here, 106 murders between 1990 and 1999, and 22 murders between 2010 and 2019. I would consider that a downward trend.
IMHO law, the curriculum, the museums and the monuments were never doing much anyway.
What has changed is the access to living memory, which has been pointed out already. However, that goes for both sides, because there was a fair share of real Nazis left over after the war who exposed their racist and authoritarian mindset to anyone who would listen, and of course those who actively proselytized had a certain credibility, because they were part of Germany’s “glorious days”, as opposed to the poor Neonazis, who had never been part of anything notable really. Those old wankers are mostly dead now, and thus unable to spread that bullshit anymore. And good riddance, too, because I’m really glad I probably will never have to hear the phrase “that would not have happened in Hitler’s Germany” ever again.
FWIW, since living memory obviously has a natural expiry date, and it is much more inspiring to have a concrete and positive vision, I think what will be really helpful for preventing the rise of fascism is fair economic and political participation for everyone. That would make fascism obsolete, because in that kind of society people would simply shake their head at fascists and ask them what they would want that kind of bullshit for anyway.
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This is probably a bitter lesson every generation of every human culture that ever existed has had to learn. Things do fade into history, and rather quickly, especially horrible things.
Two or three generations from now, the Nazi atrocities will likely be no different to the average person than the campaigns of Genghis Khan or any other historical terror regime or genocide.
If the Nazis has not been such a poster child of an evil empire and defeated by a country with the most advanced PR machine in history, they probably wouldn’t even have made it this far in collective memory.
Plenty of other events with similarly mind boggling death tolls and cruelty happened in the past 100 years that are all but forgotten to the average person.
It’s why history always repeats itself, and, since we now have the capacity to wipe ourselves from the face of the planet altogether, why there’s a good chance we won’t make it much further.
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