Never Again –> Probably Soon
By Mitch Berg
20% of young people believe, to one extent or another, that the Holocaust was a “myth”.
That sounds bad – and it is, but probably not for the reasons that jump out at you.
As Ilya Somin at Volokh points out, part of it is an artifact of the survey question: While 8% of Americans between 18 and 29 “strongly agree” that the Holocaust is just a scary story, 12% indicated they “tended to agree” that it was a myth – which, Somin points out, could many anything from strong doubts down to nit-picking the numbers.
He also points out something that might be even worse: some kids doubts may be due to ignorance:
A second relevant ambiguity is that the question doesn’t distinguish between people who know what the term “Holocaust” refers to and those who don’t. The latter may seem implausible. Who doesn’t know what “Holocaust” means. But much evidence shows widespread public ignorance of basic facts of history, science, politics, and even the basic structure of government. A majority of Americans can’t name the three branches of government, don’t know when the Civil War happened, and support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA (the latter probably because they don’t understand what DNA). And most surveys of political and historical knowledge find that it is inversely correlated with age; that is, younger people tend to know less than older ones. The latter phenomenon isn’t confined to the present generation of young people. Survey researchers found the same thing with previous generations when they were young.
“People in general are ignorant, and young people generally more so” is a pretty common, simple and accurate observation.
The real problem isn’t just ignorance of the Holocaust, so much as complete ignorance of all of Big State’s atrocities over the past century – the Great Leap Forward, the Gulag and the Holocaust:
The point here is not to suggest that ignorance about the Holocaust is unimportant, or that the Great Leap Forward and other similar communist atrocities were necessarily worse than the Holocaust…. I lost several relatives in the Holocaust myself, and have no desire to somehow downgrade its importance.
Rather, the point is that ignorance about the Holocaust is part of a broader pattern. Any solution to the problem probably cannot focus on the Holocaust alone, but must consider the broader issue of historical and political ignorance, as well. For reasons elaborated in my book, Democracy and Political Ignorance, increasing public knowledge of politics and history is likely to prove a much tougher challenge than some imagine it to be. In the meantime, public ignorance about the Holocaust, communist mass murders, and other historical events makes it more likely that we will fail to learn the lessons of these tragic events, and thus be at greater risk of repeating them.
Our society has had a couple of generations of not having to fight against nature or other humans for its very existence. I suspect that that fact alone has caused a degrading of the nation’s aggregate intelligence.
December 12th, 2023 at 1:46 pm
The distance in time from today’s students back to the holocaust is nearly as long as the distance from the civil rights act back to the end of slavery. After 80-100 years or so, unless you’re one of the people whose lives were impacted, nobody cares because it’s not a big problem anymore, just dates in the history book, no more relevant than the Whigs or Merovingian kings or knowing which Caesar came before who.
We got problems of our own.
December 12th, 2023 at 1:54 pm
We’ve got problems of our own.
And one of them is human nature.
And it’s in that nature to periodically massacre each other.
Which brings up the hope that mankind can maybe just once look at one horrific extreme relatively recent example and maybe do better.
December 12th, 2023 at 3:11 pm
Absolutely. Which is why I deplore history taught as names and dates rather than trends and lessons.
X happened. Yeah. So? So don’t do what those people did to cause it, do this instead.
Which is oddly relevant to the earlier thread by the “insane” person who criticized DeSantis for wanting to enact the economic policies of Coolidge rather than learning from his failures.
December 13th, 2023 at 4:33 am
History is a record of applied philosophy, mostly a record of philosophical system failures. However History is seldom presented in that context.
December 13th, 2023 at 7:41 am
Growing up, I was taught about the Holocaust in the mid 1990s during Social Studies class by the same teacher that spent a day complaining about the GOP caused government shutdown because that teacher’s husband was a USPS worker.
I learned about Soviet mass incarceration in an English class because we read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Unfortunately, that teacher taught middle school English and Religion classes, not Social Studies.
As for learning about China, a couple of terms were rattled off as having happened post WWII. I don’t remember ever having an actual lesson on things like The Great Leap Forward. I do remember some translated version of a story about a Chinese worker being berated for spitting on the sidewalk and begging to not include his work unit as part of his public shaming.
December 13th, 2023 at 12:09 pm
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