And here we see Dogzilla's populist rage and resentment on display, yet again. Frankly, the more you do this, the more obvious your biases become, and the more contradictory your argument gets. There are innumerable conflations in your reply above, as well as several apples and oranges comparisons. Your original whine was this:
It was then pointed out that there is a disconnect for every academic subject, thus the Holocaust is no different to other topics in this regard. The rejection of the theory of evolution was mentioned and this then prompted you to try and counterattack by conflating museums, universities, popular speakers and fake memoirs in a totally undifferentiated manner.
So let's unpick all of this properly. It is pretty hard to complain about inaccurate knowledge of the Holocaust or popular misconceptions when
one third of Americans could not even locate one of their own states on a map and 60% could not locate Iraq. Similar public opinion surveys and surveys of students have revealed that
many British schoolkids in the age range when they were being taught about the Holocaust in the national curriculum thought Auschwitz was anything from a type of beer to a country next door to Germany.
We can move on, to remind everyone that about 25% of the US population currently thinks that Obama wasn't born in the US despite massive amounts of evidence being presented to prove he was, and that
60% of the US population rejects the theory of evolution, with 40% self-identifying as creationists.
Your whine was essentially an argumentum ad populum. But these survey results show that no argumentum ad populum can ever be considered a rational response, as despite the absolute best efforts of society, many of its members prefer to go through life in an utterly ignorant state.
In the case of the theory of evolution, we find that public opinion in the US is skewed heavily against because Protestant fundamentalists have created a climate in which it is very hard to teach about evolution at high school level because 'concerned parents' object violently, or decide to homeschool their children.
Yet on the other hand, there are countless natural history museums in the US and the
National Museum of Natural History on the Mall attracts 7.4 million visitors a year. The
American Museum of Natural History in New York pulls in 4 million visitors a year. There are, in fact, nearly 40 museums or theme parks listed under '
dinosaur museums in the United States'.
Museums and theme parks dealing with dinosaurs are actually more numerous than Holocaust museums in the US. They are better attended and better funded. There are actually
far fewer Holocaust museums in the US than you seem to believe, and looking at their Wiki pages they are hardly very substantial institutions in most cases.
USHMM is no different to other research-driven museums on the other side of the mall in that it is run by people who consult with academics and it houses a small research centre. The AMNH in NY has 200 full time researchers and USHMM has its Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. The Smithsonian's Natural History museum hosted the following visiting scholars in
FY 2009:
[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
For FY '09 there were a total of 525 Academic Appointments administered by the National Museum of Natural History. [/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
The counts include four different appointment types[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
: Research Collaborator (167), Research Associate (261), Adjunct Scientis[/FONT][FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
t (42) and Research Student (55). [/FONT]
This was in addition to the in-house scientific employees. And this is hardly the only such museum which offers academic opportunities. Whereas there is just one such museum in the States which does so for the Holocaust, USHMM.
So your jibe about how evolution needs a museum on the Mall is actually pretty hilarious. There is one already, and it's very much part of the US government's commitment to funding research into natural science.
All that effort and still 60% of Americans don't believe in the theory of evolution. That's because many of them - especially the 40% who identify themselves as creationists - spend much of their time immersed in a totally separate subculture which has its own media, films, music, fiction, sports teams, social events, clubs, schools, colleges and universities. A fundamentalist Christian lives in their own alternate, 'pillarised' reality, just like German social democracts used to in the 19th Century.
A fundamentalist Christian is bombarded far more often with messages reinforcing his or her disbelief in evolution than anyone attending school is ever likely to be taught about the Holocaust, much less encounter a Holocaust survivor.
There's a touching assumption on the part of denier chimps that there is a vast army of Holocaust survivors on an all-encompassing lecture circuit. Yet they never, ever provide any figures to show how many there might be. The number of survivors has been diminishing significantly and thus there are fewer and fewer who
could go on speaking tours since someone who was 20 in 1944 will be 87 today, a 15 year old who was lucky to be selected at Auschwitz in the same year would be now 82.
It is doubtful that there have ever been more than a few thousand such survivors who went round talking to schools and community groups, and of those, there have been only a tiny handful who have talked absolute nonsense, and even fewer who were outright frauds. The chances of someone encountering a survivor in this manner are fairly slim and only growing more slim, as a matter of absolute actuarial certainty.
The way in which denier chimps harp on about the handful of fake survivor memoirs is an outrage to anyone who can manage fractions and percentages. It is an especial outrage because
fraudulent autobiographies have become a wider phenomenon in the last couple of decades. The phenomeon of fake Vietnam vets is sufficiently well known that Congress has legislated against claiming medals that were not won and become the subject of extensive media attention. There are numerous cases, including ironically David Duke, who tried to pass himself off as a Vietnam vet in a late-80s election campaign.
It isn't even very convincing to whine that frauds slip through the net or to express incredulity that tall tales might be lapped up. Since the First World War we have seen the emergence of a genre of personal recollections which can be expressed either as fiction or as autobiography, or both. Henri Barbusse and Erich Maria Remarque were trashing the dividing line between novel and memoir over 90 years ago. Every single war and upheaval has produced a plethora of novels written by veterans/survivors as well as a great many memoirs which are thoroughly embellished. Guy Sajer's
The Forgotten Soldier is one of the better known examples of a supposed autobiography which is highly dubious factually, yet it is on the recommended reading lists issued by the USMC.
The mainstream media has been complicit in many of these frauds. The NYT has praised several fake memoirs while Oprah has done the same. In both cases there have been Holocaust and non-Holocaust related fakes.
Defonseca's "memoir" was actually sold on the basis that it was an "amazing" and "unbelievable" story. How many books have been marketed as "unbelievable but true" stories. Hundreds. They are not consumed and read as if they were factual memoirs of politicians or generals or key eyewitnesses. They are read as stories. And when they are exposed as fakes, invariably someone says, ah well it may not be true but it's a great story!
It's not even as if the
feral child motif isn't repeatedly explored in fiction as well as 'true story' genres. Moreover, Francophone culture has fallen for similar fakes before.
Notice the time-lag there? It's even longer than the Defonseca case. So where's the beef?
Whining about this only makes deniers look monumentally biased because there are clearly so many other examples of the same phenomenon not related to the Holocaust. They are the product of the 'confessional' culture of eyewitnesses which has dominated the western public sphere since WWI at the latest, and which has become an all-consuming facet of American culture since the postwar era. It was a practical inevitability that in the 1990s, at the peak of interest in the Holocaust, a number of people would try to cash in by inventing fictional stories of survival. That they have been usually, non-Jews pretending to be Jewish child survivors (Wilkomirski, Defonseca) does not exactly say very much about the testimonies of Jews from previous decades.
Your final rant about 'six million gassed' is similarly idiotic, I'm afraid. If a third of Americans cannot locate Louisiana on a map then whining about popular misconceptions about numbers of dead and methods is simply pathetic. There is a
widespread meme that
"Stalin killed twenty million people" which is considerably wide of the actual mark.
Somehow I doubt that schoolkids are taught only about the camps and gassing when they are taught about the Holocaust. If some of them, as they undoubtedly do, come away thinking all victims were gassed or with a very shaky grasp of the difference between concentration camps and extermination camps, then it's not for want of explanation. These things have been explained over and over and over and over again since the 1940s.
And hey, you might even be right that Holocaust education is often couched in emotive terms. But it's put in those terms as part of inculcating civic values, in tandem with teaching about racism in history and talking about other genocides. That's pretty obviously how Facing History and Ourselves do it, and they're probably the leading exponent of the 'emotive' approach in Holocaust education in the US. Feel free to object violently to schoolkids being taught racism is bad, and make yourself seem like even more of a bigot.
In the end, there's a massive contradiction in the kind of populist whining we see from deniers. You guys complain that the 'man on the street' is misinformed but you whine about anything to do with the Holocaust full stop. Given the well-documented propensity for the "man on the street" to absorb his schooling incorrectly, the only logical answer has to be more schooling, yet you complain about that also.
You know, we get it. We get it that you will find absolutely any excuse to complain and whine about a subject on which you know really very little. And we get it that you have little understanding or grasp of how education, the public sphere, academia or popular culture actually work. We especially get it that you cannot rise above the fallacy of hasty generalisation and constantly rely on a sample of one for your 'arguments' against the thing you know so little about. Those are just more reasons why you guys are laughing-stocks.
