People forget history so easily. We don't teach the parts that are embarrassing in school. I bet most people escape from not only high school, but also college, without learning about things like interning the Japanese americans during WW II, for example.
I think we turned a corner in the right direction with this recent election, but I don't really have a hard time imagining something similar happening to Arabs here or in Western Europe. And we don't worry about guarding against it because the holocaust was an isolated insanity.
I got a dual major in college, one of which was in German. We had to take a German history class as part of the degree requirements, taught by an American professor. He didn't cover WW II and the holocaust at all. Simply wrote "1939-1945: Barbarism" on the board and moved on. (And yes, the man was a terrible professor in other ways too. If you saw the first Ghostbusters movie, the guy from the EPA was him to a T. He even looked like him. Made the movie for me).
Interestingly the native German perspective was quite different. My german teacher in high school had served in the German Army (mostly on the Eastern front) before coming to the US after the war. He didn't talk a lot about it, but I remember him saying once that he and his family had heard rumors about what was going on with the Jews, but they weren't near any of the places it was actually happening, and they didn't believe that it could be anything but exaggerated rumor, until they saw evidence later. He was a decent person, and he just couldn't comprehend that so many people could do such horrible things.
That's why we need to be vigilant - it's easy for the people who would be most likely to rise up and say "No" to just not believe it's happening if they don't pay attention, because it's something they'd never consider doing.
no subject
I think we turned a corner in the right direction with this recent election, but I don't really have a hard time imagining something similar happening to Arabs here or in Western Europe. And we don't worry about guarding against it because the holocaust was an isolated insanity.
I got a dual major in college, one of which was in German. We had to take a German history class as part of the degree requirements, taught by an American professor. He didn't cover WW II and the holocaust at all. Simply wrote "1939-1945: Barbarism" on the board and moved on. (And yes, the man was a terrible professor in other ways too. If you saw the first Ghostbusters movie, the guy from the EPA was him to a T. He even looked like him. Made the movie for me).
Interestingly the native German perspective was quite different. My german teacher in high school had served in the German Army (mostly on the Eastern front) before coming to the US after the war. He didn't talk a lot about it, but I remember him saying once that he and his family had heard rumors about what was going on with the Jews, but they weren't near any of the places it was actually happening, and they didn't believe that it could be anything but exaggerated rumor, until they saw evidence later. He was a decent person, and he just couldn't comprehend that so many people could do such horrible things.
That's why we need to be vigilant - it's easy for the people who would be most likely to rise up and say "No" to just not believe it's happening if they don't pay attention, because it's something they'd never consider doing.