Lot of word there. Maybe I'll read them all someday. But a few comments on things I saw skimming the page:
'Lots of words' tend to be the norm in most serious discussions. Joined up thinking requires context and not cherrypicking issues. That's something denier chimps seem to have a problem with, of course.
1) Cite some sources for your opinions on Americans and the Theory of Evolution. They're seriously mistaken. All the kids I know today attending public schools are taught evolution. I don't know anybody attending private religious high schools so I can't comment on what they're taught. I was taught evolution in high school. All my friends who attended Catholic school were taught evolution. I also learned about creationism (as they called it when I was in school) and was given a supplementary handout that briefly summarized thirty different creation myths from various cultures around the world and throughout time. I never heard of any outcry by any parent who objected to religious beliefs being mocked so completely by public school biology teachers.
You seem to have missed the extensive reporting about textbooks being censored in
states like Texas in order to placate the fundamentalist lobby. There are numerous studies showing that evolution is being subtly downplayed in many US schools, sometimes because the teachers themselves do not really believe in the theory, sometimes because they wish to avoid causing controversy. Here is one
from January this year.
The manner in which evolution is downplayed in classrooms is repeatedly discussed in much of the literature on the controversy.
2) You yammer on about how I overestimate the number of holocaust museums and state that there are more dinosaur museums than holocaust museums in the United States. I don't know if you're just making up that statistic but it's not surprising if it's true. We have fossils in the United States. The holocaust didn't happen here. Americans weren't the perpetrators or the victims. We had a national holocaust museum before we had a nation WWII museum. The relevant metric isn't the number of dinosaur museums vs holocaust museums in the United States. It's the number of American black slavery museums vs holocaust museums. The number Native American genocide museums vs holocaust museums. The number of innocent Polish civilians killed during the war museums vs holocaust museums. The number of ethnic German minorities in eastern europe ethnic cleansing museums vs holocaust museums. The number of Gaza and West Bank museums vs holocaust museums. You get the picture.
Like Saggy you are very fond of moving the goalposts. The subject of our discussion was whether there was a disconnect between the public understanding of the Holocaust and the scholarly understanding.
You were the one who brought up museums because you were dumb enough to think there wasn't a museum on the Mall which deals with evolution. I showed you were entirely wrong about that.
Actually the number of museums on any topic isn't really a meaningful metric.
Anyone can set up a museum, and they can solicit funding for it like everyone else by rattling tins. That is precisely what the American Jewish community did starting really in the 1970s or so, with a few earlier outliers. Most of the Holocaust museums in the US are pretty small and clearly private institutions. There are 25 according to a global list of Holocaust museums I linked to above. There are a further 20 Jewish museums of various kinds listed in the Wikipedia category. I will allow for the possibility that some smaller ones are missed, but as we will see most of these museums are diddy little things and thus hardly worth the bilious ire of an internet denier, unless they are actually just a troll.
From a global perspective these figures add up to virtually nothing. Israel only just barely has a larger Jewish population than the United States and it
clearly has way more than 45 museums.
One of the 25 "American Holocaust museums" listed is
simply part of a particular synagogue in New York with roots in the Greek Sephardic Jewish community. Another,
CANDLES, is in Terre Haute, Indiana, and is only open from 1-4pm in the afternoons five days a week. Another, the Holocaust Resource Center in Buffalo, NY boasts of having
"over 500 books" and doesn't even mention any exhibitions. Clearly none of these institutions are getting any significant public funding. This would also apply to most of the other diddy little museums
like the one in Naples, Florida which grew out of a high school classroom exhibit.
Funnily enough the locations of many of these museums correlates pretty closely with areas of the States where there are larger Jewish communities. It makes perfect sense that there are 5 museums in New York state and 4 in Florida, out of 25 listed. There are none listed for the overwhelming majority of US states.
Nice try with the attempt to compare with the number of black slavery museums BTW. There is actually a pretty extensive network of African American Museums in the United States with their own
association. Looking at their institutional members for many US states I would say there are more African American museums in the US than there are Jewish and Holocaust museums. And yet the African American community is infinitely poorer and less able to fund-raise than the American Jewish community.
There are also
lots of Native American museums in the States, despite the very small size of the Native American population. Of course they have their
direct representation on the Mall, moving an already existing museum collection from New York.
Nice try also with the dodge that the Holocaust didn't happen in the US. No, but about 200,000 survivors (in the broad definition) came to the States in three waves, one up to 1941, one immediately after the war (ie proper 'camp survivors' and people who had survived in hiding) and one when Russian Jews emigrated. The US is a nation of immigrant communities and it is unsurprising that these communities set up museums, just as communities who have been around longer have also done. All of them have done so more extensively since the end of the melting pot and the increased emphasis on ethnic heritage which is a major issue in post-1960s American society.
There simply isn't a huge plethora of Holocaust museums dominating the landscapes of every single city in the US, as deniers like to pretend. What there are, is a bunch of small community museums rooted where one would generally expect them to be, just the same as there are large numbers of museums dedicated to the experiences of other minority groups in American society, founded by those minority groups but invariably serving to market them to the wider society.
The exception to all of this is USHMM. But if you're going to rant about USHMM then it's where you find the Americanization of the Holocaust at its height. And thus it reflects the cultural significance of the Holocaust as well as its linkage with civil rights, human rights, US achievements or lack thereof in WWII and subsequently, other genocides (USHMM was one of the most outspoken institutions on Darfur).
I mean, yeah, how terrible: USHMM gets founded as part of a tradeoff in the Camp David accords back at the end of the 70s and around the time the Khmer Rouge autogenocided Cambodia, and then ends up being built to coincide with Bosnia and Rwanda. Gosh, how utterly irrelevant the Holocaust museum must be.
3) You rail against us "deniers" for not being able to quantify the number of "survivors" currently on the holohorror lecture circuit. You are correct that there are not very many survivors left today. The ones that are still alive are probably too old to be able to tour the country giving lectures. Yet, they're there. Call the USHMM or the SWMOT and they can arrange a survivor to come out to talk to the community. If you're not anywhere near DC or LA/NY, you can find some local organizations who might be able to help you. The
holocaust speakers bureau in NC is one such source. If you're in Northern California, try the
Jewish Family and Children's Services. Live in Tennessee? Try
these guys. If you're Arizona and you're lucky, you might get good old
Fred to come in and spout out rubbish to your students.
I don't know where they are getting these "survivors." In some cases we have "second generation" survivors who come in to peddle their parent's angst as their own. But asking how many survivors are speaking to class rooms today is like asking how many heads the Hydra has.
No, it's not like asking how many heads the Hydra has. You simply do not provide any hard statistics of how many camp survivors might give lectures at schools or anywhere else. You just blithely assume, after conceding that the number is decreasing, that they are everywhere, and offer up idiotic remarks like:
I don't know where they are getting these "survivors."
Clearly, you haven't twigged that 10s of 1000s of camp survivors and Jews who had survived the war in hiding immigrated to the United States after 1945. You can easily search Google News Archive and find quite a lot of stories about the arrivals of these survivors. Search for 'Auschwitz' from 1947-49 or so and quite a lot of the stories relate to Czech and Hungarian Jews who survived deportation to Auschwitz in 1944 and then came to the US after sitting in Displaced Persons camps.
The majority of these camp survivors then rebuilt their lives, had families and careers, and unsurprisingly only started reflecting on the past when they reached retirement age, because that's what old people normally do. So then some of them started reminiscing about their experiences, and giving interviews to the Spielberg archive etc, and some of those then decided they would give talks to schools.
OK so let's look at who they have in Birmingham, Alabama in the Holocaust speakers bureau. They are in fact down to
five survivors and have three non-survivors who would talk about family or congregation members. Apparently there were a whopping 16 Holocaust survivors in one synagogue once upon a time. You have to
request these speakers, they aren't foisted on you.
So they get a number of calls on the old-fogey speaking circuit, which is waaay bigger than you think in most countries. Where I used to live, we had the Rotary Club, Women's Institute, Probus, University of the 3rd Age and god knows who else in one small town, and they had near-weekly meetings with speakers from the local area. So naturally they told each other a lot of war stories about their time in Burma and invited antiquarians who obsess over trains and flower arranging to babble about their obsessions. No Holocaust survivors, though. Not many around in the Cotswolds.
But I digress. So the five survivors all have familiar stories. One was deported to Transnistria by the Romanians, one was in the Warsaw ghetto and then was hidden in the Polish countryside, one was in hiding as a young teenager in the south of France, two were deported from Romanian territory annexed by Hungary to Auschwitz and were then selected for work, last seeing their families on thr ramp
The last guy generates
1,030 hits in Google for reports of his talks around Alabama. Max Steinmetz is pretty clearly one of the 25% of Hungarian Jews deported to Auschwitz from May to July 1944 who were selected for work. They numbered 110,000. Approximately 60% of those 110,000 survived the war, i.e. 65-70,000. The others died.
Newspaper articles on Max Steinmetz often state
he was never tattooed and give a number which is clearly a Dachau camp number (72041) which fits right in to the registration sequence known for Jews selected at Auschwitz, held in the Depot and sent to camps like Dachau.
The last time Max Steinmetz saw his mother and father and sister Esther was when they were taken to a German prison camp. Max and his brother Henry were sent to the right... his father Lewis, mother Ilona and sister Esther were sent to the left... to the left meant to the gas chambers...to the ovens. His younger brother Henry died in camp... starved to death.
Max Steinmetz has no idea where or if his family members were buried or incinerated. It's just one of so many questions he struggles with.
Naturally,
some denier trolls have tried to pick on Max Steinmetz's story, reported from another newspaper account, but seem unable to land any serious blows, so of course he's not going to become a poster-boy for the chimps like those survivors who believe in the Jewish soap myth.
I mean yeah, by all means whine and complain about stories like Max Steinmetz's. He says quite accurately he last saw 3/5ths of his family being dragged off in one direction and he watched the only other relative from his family die of hunger. He has a very typical story for someone deported to Auschwitz in 1944 who survived.
There is certainly no shortage of other people telling the same story, over and over and over again, because that's what happens when you select 110,000 people out of 420,000 and "disappear" the other 310,000, all just because they were Jewish and the Nazis had invaded a supposed ally, Hungary, and then you put the 110,000 you want as workers through the camps as forced labourers, so 40% of them die and that's why you get not more than 70,000 survivors out of the 420,000.
So the 70,000 survivors decide to disperse all over the world, and if like Max Steinmetz they lived in Transylvania they decide it's better not to live under communism in Romania once Transylvania has been handed back from Hungary to Romania, and decide to emigrate, which is what most Romanian born Jews did. They move to Israel or they move to America.
Clearly, there is a massive army of Max Steinmetzes out there, haunting Dogzilla and spooking him because local libraries and schools want to hear about the experiences of an old guy who happened to travel in his life all the way from provincial Romania to Alabama, via Auschwitz. And they want to hear about his experienes before he dies, since humans are just that respectful of the elderly, even Americans.
Tell you what: why don't you and your denier chums do the properly scientific thing and devise a genuinely representative sample of Holocaust survivor-speakers, you know, one that would stand up to proper methodological scrutiny. Say, about 1000 of them. If you can find that many (which you probably can) then you might be onto something as a major phenomenon.
But, and here's the kicker, you then have to demonstrate that they're all nuts, or a significant proportion of them are nuts. You have to show that of the 1000 survivor-speakers, 12% still mention 'Jewish soap' when frightening the kiddies, or that 20% describe ******** out diamonds, or that 15% are completely confused about what camp they were held in and babble nonsense.
And you have to then demonstrate that the percentages of wacko stories are higher than what one would reasonably expect from a cohort of pensioners who might be going slowly senile or otherwise regressing to a second childhood.
Until you or your chums do that, then no amount of nitpicking on this or that lone survivor is going to matter a damn. Because it didn't take me more than a couple of minutes to find Max Steinmetz's story, which fits perfectly into the accepted historical record.
4) The general gist of the rest of your rant is just a defense of the 'people are stupid so who cares if what they're taught is wrong' status quo. I can understand that position but I can't condone it. When the USHMM teaches disinformation about the holocaust,
And what disinformation would that be? You have twice now handwaved about USHMM being somehow dodgy without providing any examples.
it's not enough that the professors in the holocaust studies department at the university know the truth. I can't dismiss, as you do, with a wave of the hand, the testimony of fraudulent bigots like Fred Schliefler.
Why is Fred Schliefer a 'fraudulent bigot'? From what I can see his sin is to have fallen for the folk myth that the Nazis turned Jews into soap. This story is a "genuine myth" in the sense that the rumour mill worked overtime in the war, to the point where many survivors of the camps believed quite genuinely that the Nazis had done just that. Unless Fred Schliefer is claiming to have seen the Nazis make soap out of Jews, which I don't believe he does, then he is simply repeating hearsay and myth.
I refer you back to the proper methodological study of what Holocaust survivor-speakers say. Until you demonstrate that there are 120 Fred Schliefers out of 1000 speakers (12%) who have been active in the 2000s then there is nothing more than
one Fred Schliefer out of an unspecified number of Holocaust speaker-survivors.
I guess the Holocaust isn't allowed to have urban myths in your book. Does this campaign to extirpate urban myths extend to anything else in our culture, or is it as I suspect restricted to the Holocaust?
Teaching students to set aside critical thinking skills in favor of an amorphous emotive lesson plan is necessary when teaching the holocaust. That's the only way to go when facts aren't on your side. I get it. I understand. As I've said before, the facts don't matter when it comes to the holocaust. Say whatever you want to say as long as what you say sounds bad.
This sounds all very pretty but where is the
empirical evidence that all teaching of the Holocaust rests on emotive appeals and relies on Fred Schliefer to tell his urban myth about soap in every single school? This is a skeptics' forum, and you have just made a series of claims without substantiating them.
You're certainly right that there are some schools where the Holocaust will be taught in an overly emotive manner. But that fits with how education has evolved across the board. In the UK, the school-leaving certificate, GCSE, in history was not so long ago taught to 16 year olds by asking them to "empathise" with ordinary people in historical situations. "Imagine you are a soldier in the trenches during the First World War - what would you be feeling?". Or better still, "imagine you are Henry VIII - would you cut off Anne Boleyn's head?".
Such an approach was designed to get schoolkids to engage and identify with history by appealing to their emotions. There are similar approaches in US education in teaching slavery and god knows what else. Once again: unless you establish that the Holocaust is genuinely unique in how it is approached in schools, then you are doing little more than display your prejudices and bias.
It so happens that British A level students are not taught history using the 'empathy' approach, which seems to have subsided in this country somewhat since the 1990s. They are taught about the Holocaust in its proper historical context, usually as part of a curriculum about totalitarianism or about 20th Century Germany. They have to consider and confront a range of ideas which leave relatively little room for discussing the camps or 'Jewish soap'. In a year long curriculum they end up with a week or two on the Holocaust after considering the Weimar Republic, or Stalin. In such a course there's little time to emote and empathise when you are busy mastering facts and interpretations, just as you have for Stalin's atrocities a few weeks before.
Just from looking at the Facing History and Ourselves website I can see that there are similar 'hard' and 'historical' curricula available for American high schools which will teach about German history from Weimar to the Third Reich. Those poor schoolkids, they have to try to understand the Great Depression and the rise of the Nazis.
5) I'm sure there are other points that I didn't directly address but they've all been shot down before. I need to get back to work before the boss walks by my office again. Cheerio.
Simply saying that my other points have been shot down before is handwaving. Unless you actually demonstrate that I am wrong, then nobody needs to take you seriously when you claim that I am wrong.
