20% of young people believe, to one extent or another, that the Holocaust was a “myth”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That sounds bad – and it is, but probably not for the reasons that jump out at you. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He also points out something that might be even worse: some kids doubts may be due to ignorance:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nA 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\u00a0doesn’t<\/em>\u00a0know what “Holocaust” means. But much evidence shows widespread public ignorance of basic facts of\u00a0history<\/a>,\u00a0science<\/a>,\u00a0politics<\/a>, and even\u00a0the basic structure of government<\/a>. A majority of Americans\u00a0can’t name the three branches of government<\/a>,\u00a0don’t know when the Civil War happened<\/a>, and\u00a0support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA<\/a>\u00a0(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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
“People in general are ignorant, and young people generally more so” is a pretty common, simple and accurate observation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The real <\/em>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 <\/em> the Holocaust:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\nThe point here is not to suggest that ignorance about the Holocaust is unimportant, or that the Great Leap Forward and other similar communist atrocities<\/a> were necessarily worse than the Holocaust\u2026. I lost several relatives in the Holocaust myself, and have no desire to somehow downgrade its importance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n