Everyone knows Hitler is a towering colossus of evil, but hardly anyone can remember why. The very people calling everyone a ‘fascist’ know almost nothing about the Holocaust.
You’d think the evil deeds he did were an important element in that story, right?
We’re doing a piss-poor job of keeping that promise we made when we pledged ‘Never Again’. How can a generation prevent something they don’t even know happened?
Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.
According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.
Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.
More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online. —Guardian
These are some damning statistics, unearthing some alarming ignorance.
Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.
According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.
Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.
More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online.–Guardian
For anyone paying attention, there is evidence that the numbers we THINK we know about the Hitlerian genocides are actually lowballing a real figure higher than we even dared to imagine. As one researcher studying the frenetic pace of the Nazi train schedules has concluded:
In the space of around three months – roughly August to October 1942 – the train records reveal what Stone calls a “pulse of death”: an extreme phase of “hyperintense killing” in which the slaughter rate spiked for some 100 days.
During this gruesome window, the data suggest over 1.47 million Jews – more than a quarter of all the Jews killed during the six years of World War II – were killed by a frenetic ramp-up of ruthlessly coordinated train transports and gas chamber executions.
According to Stone’s analysis, the resulting kill rates – approximately 15,000 murders every day – are significantly higher than more recent genocides to which the Holocaust is often compared (including the Rwandan genocide), “and roughly 10 times higher than commonly believed”, based on previous Holocaust estimates.
This clinical, merciless operation – likened by researchers to the first-ever genocide by assembly line – couldn’t maintain its operations indefinitely, however, for a stark, sobering reason.
“The Nazis’ extremely efficient extermination machine presumably could have continued to run smoothly for many more months at the kill rates identified here had there been a continuous supply of victims in the GG [German-occupied Poland],” Stone writes.
“Instead, the enormous pulse of death … consumed the large majority of possible Jewish victims. The subsequent rapid plunge in the death rate … simply reflects that there were very few Jewish victims left alive to murder by this stage in the GG.” — ScienceAlert
With the gap between the data we know and the gross ignorance of the public, suddenly, those ‘Everything-I-Hate-Is-Hitler’ attacks against all their political opponents makes more sense.
That can account for the profound and obvious ignorance behind so many such attacks. It also accounts for the baseless habit of calling anything even slightly to the right of Mao ‘Fascist’.
A whole generation has been growing up to become literal know-nothings.
This means the Holocaust-denying NYTimes has an enormous talent pool to draw from.
It also means that the BDS movement has plenty of ignorance to prey upon as well.
Our educators have work to do. Either that or we need to conclude that the Public School system as it now exists is a failing project that must be replaced by something far less political.
