Dusty curmudgeon shakes fist

That's my headline. Maybe I should have said "wags finger." That befits a cultural dinosaur like me.

The BBC was shocked to learn that nearly half of Britons polled had never heard of Auschwitz:

Among women and people younger than 35, 60 percent had never heard of Auschwitz, despite the recent popularity of films such as "Schindler's List," "Life is Beautiful" and "The Pianist," which depict the atrocities of the Holocaust.

"The name Auschwitz is quite rightly a byword for horror, but the problem with thinking about horror is that we naturally turn away from it," Rees said.

The rape of education in the west by politically correct 'studies' programs and legions of literary theorists hell-bent on eliminating the lie of 'history' and 'certainty' surely has nothing to do with that.

If we had fewer courses devoted to redressing the imbalances of sexual ideology through ecofeminist theory and deconstruction, and had more courses about, oh, I don't know, HISTORY, we wouldn't need the BBC to catch us up on the things that matter.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm late for a graduate course exploring the theme of maidenhood in the western imaginary. Today we talk about our personal experiences, and I'm woefully unprepared.

posted by Dennis on 12.04.04 at 12:08 PM





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That's frightening, and I have no doubt that number will increase as the generation that actually experienced World War II dies off and the young get all their knowledge (such as it is) from movies. The Holocaust is becoming as remote in the memories of today's generation as World War I was to my own. World War I?: "Snoopy and the Red Baron" The Rumanian tyrant known as Vlad the Impaler became Count Dracula who became a Halloween costume and Count Chocula on a cereal box. "Nazi" or "fascist" becomes "anybody I don't like". Hitler becomes "a really bad dude, almost as bad as a politician I don't like". And boys think Hitler was "cool". How long before Hitler's face is on a cereal box?

"Those who will not remember history are condemned to repeat it."
-George Santayana

"The only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from history."
-G. W. F. Hegel

All it takes for someone to learn history is to have ONE good teacher in that subject. Because one good teacher will spark the interest enough that the student will start looking things up herself. I've had three - sadly, the middle one, while fascinating, also had a beautiful baritone voice that invariably put me to sleep, it was so soothing and I was so overtired.

It's a shame about not knowing Auschwitz. People should know about that, and about places like Chelmno, which are largely forgotten because they were not concentration camps but death factories. (Chelmno - Kulmhof - had a grand total of four survivors.)

B. Durbin   ·  December 5, 2004 09:00 PM


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