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Not Everyone Believes the Holocaust Happened
When we are discussing the Iranians or others in the Middle East, I understand their dismissing the Holocaust as a real event. It goes with the territory, so-to-speak.
But when I heard that a Boca Raton, FL principal wrote in a 2018 email to a parent that “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” my jaw dropped.
It appears that Laton Latson, principal at Spanish River High School, was determined to fulfill his understanding of “political correctness” to deal with the situation: the state has mandated since 1994 that the a Holocaust curriculum be taught, but Latson received pushback from some parents; a controversy about the teaching of the Holocaust curriculum at his school had developed. It looks like his idea of soft-pedaling the situation was by writing he needed to be “neutral” about the topic.
Mr. Latson has been moved from his position of principal to another position in the District, and at this writing, a petition to dismiss the principal was set up at change.org and had more than 6,000 signatures.
In addition, several organizations have offered providing additional education and training:
Several Jewish organizations are planning to offer additional Holocaust education to Spanish River and its teachers, including the Ruth & Norman Rales Jewish Family Services, which assists 400 Holocaust survivors in the Boca Raton area, said Danielle Hartman, chief executive officer.
‘We are planning on reaching out to Principal Latson to offer a Holocaust sensitivity training for the faculty and administration and to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust is never forgotten and never minimized,’ Hartman said.
More than 10,000 survivors are estimated to live in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade Counties, the second largest concentration in the United States after New York.
* * *
I’m surprised at my own reaction to this situation: I’m ambivalent about how it’s being handled.
- I think the man was foolish to write what he wrote, and should be counseled on how to address conflicts from students and parents regarding the teaching of the Holocaust; maybe he could even have been suspended for a period. But losing his job?
- Is the Holocaust curriculum adequate and age-appropriate? Does it explain to teachers and students the reasons it is taught in the Florida schools?
- I appreciate that organizations want to be sure that the curriculum is appropriate, but is Holocaust sensitivity training for the teachers and administrators necessary, because of Latson’s bad judgment? (The Jewish organizations “offered” the training, didn’t demand it.)
At a time when we keep seeing anti-Semitic activities everywhere, and with Boca Raton having a large Jewish community, I can understand why this situation caused such a stir. But how much of the curriculum should be spent on Holocaust education? Should parents be allowed to pull their children from class when the Holocaust is taught, for whatever reason? I also wonder if the District and local organizations’ responses will be helpful to the school and community.
A description of the Florida curriculum is here .
What are your thoughts?
Published in Education
It’s not. But when the stupidity of political correctness (and I’m pointing to the principal and his superiors), it gets more stupid, @ejhill.
My source was As We Forgive, by Catherine Claire Larson. It was difficult to get through, and nearly impossible to believe.
What I found most heartbreaking about Rwanda is that people who were friendly, were neighbors, turned on each other with machetes. I have to wonder with the viciousness and violence in our own country, how far are we from that kind of disaster?
I could see AOC and Ilhan Omar — together with their Antifa associates — orchestrate an atrocity of this kind. I see that AOC has over 4.6 million Twitter followers. That’s quite a following for someone as angry and hateful as she, a formidable Gestapo force.
I guess for me the question would be, how deeply does this sentiment of holocaust denying go? Is this guy in Florida representative of a tend or is he an outlier? You can find one or two percent of people who believe in almost anything. I was shocked to find that there is a small percentage of people – intelligent people – who disbelieve we really landed and walked on the moon, and that the Apollo missions were staged. There are websites on this and Wikipedia has an entry on these deniers.
I can tell you with the influx of Muslims into western countries, the holocaust deniers seem to have increased, not just from Muslims but because the more of a common thought in a population, the more it seems to be credible. I wonder if there is a poll on this question performed recently, both in the US and across western countries.
I dont think she’d actually have to orchestrate anything. They have such a collection of nuts that someone will take it on themselves to do something insane. They didnt tell James Hodgkinson what to do – but if he was successful the republican leadership of the house would have been lost. Let the nuts be nuts and be prepared to capitalize on the chaos.
They’ll form a pincer movement on the general public – antifa from the streets and the federal crackdown from the powerful. Just like they do after every shooting the proposed crackdowns are never aimed at the criminal element, but the general public.
All they really need is the white house – there are enough RINOs to compromise or who’ll be co-opted to pass almost anything.
Sadly, you may be right. The fecklessness of the Repubs. has been so discouraging. I wonder if there’s been any shift at all, with Trump’s performance factors?
Maybe. Look at the Kavanaugh confirmation. Brent Kavanaugh is the obvious republican nominee for the supreme court – any republican president would have nominated him. But only Donald Trump would’ve gotten him on the court – given the firestorm that the democrats created to stop his nomination – I cant imagine a single republican politician who wouldn’t have withdrawn the nomination.
Could this be the lesson that coalesces the creation of backbone?
Have you seen the
newjust recinded Facebook policy on threats of violence? It explicitlyallowsallowed threats of violence to anyone Facebook as deemed to be dangerous. See here. But this is funnier.George Will once remarked that one lesson of the Holocaust is that one should never persecute a highly literary people because it will never be justified or forgotten. The sheer volume of documentation and preserved evidence makes denial indicative of cognitive defect, malignant intention or both.
There is a separate issue,however, and that is mandatory attention to the Holocaust such as the Florida requirement. I have mixed feelings about that. Sometimes I get the feeling that when Jewish authors or academics address an audience of mostly gentiles they can’t decide whether they are speaking to allies or potential oppressors. Elie Wiesel often sounded to me like he expected some deference under penalty of being labelled an abettor of hate and genocide.
The famous row between Pat Buchanan and leading Jewish journalists over the Demjanjuk case was often reported as evidence of his anti-semitism. It was really more about his oppositional temperament. In the 1980s he thought that the US should be less deferential to Israel and more solicitous of the Arabs for Cold War strategic reasons. Debatable but not necessarily an outgrowth of antisemitism. He resented the hell out of being called antisemitic as a result (my brother used to run Buchanan’s newsletter and knew him well). And went out of his way to annoy his Jewish critics less out of antipathy but more as an act of defiance against what he regarded as false moral authority. Buchanan refused to accept the notion that a reference to the Holocaust and an implicit accusation of antisemitism was in and of itself a mike-drop moment in which the accused must then instantly concede all points of argument.
When he turned out to be right about the identity of Demjanjuk (the highest court in Israel to its immense credit reviewed the evidence in this highly charged case with emotional survivor testimony and, even though Demjanjuk has been a guard at a different camp, he was not the particular monster he was said to be and his conviction overturned.) Marty Peretz and Abe Rosenthal went ballistic and made a formal ex cathedra judgment about Buchanan’s antisemitism which caused Buchanan to double down on his oppositional tendencies and he was rather obnoxious about it (e.g., referring to the many ‘hundreds of thousands’ murdered by the Nazis which is technically mathematically accurate but clearly intended to annoy.)
Anyway,after this long digression, the Holocaust as memory can also be a celebration of an ongoing American triumph over racism and an abiding commitment to oppose racial hatred anywhere and anytime. But if the purpose of Holocaust remembrance is to somehow inoculate us against the latent Schutzstaffel tendencies we are suspected of harboring, then such an implicit accusation may have the opposite of its intended effect (especially for those with a Buchananesque temperament.).
Thank you so much for this rich comment, @oldbathos. I didn’t know the background of Pat Buchanan regarding anti-semitism, and it does sound pretty much the way the situation would have unfolded. We only need to look at our own President to know how these things happen. He’s a racist, dontcha know.
I, too, am torn about the Holocaust curriculum. (Of course, I can hardly be unbiased.) I think it needs to be included in modern history and part of WWII. I don’t think it will protect Jews necessarily, but hope that it will remind people that no matter how “sophisticated” we think we are, we can turn into monsters with the right conditions. But honestly, I don’t think a great deal of time should be spent on it. I would prefer seeing an effort to show history in at least a fair light, rather than a propagandistic light, where most of American history described in mostly derogatory terms. I guess I’m calling for balance and fairness.
In California, they teach about the holocaust of the Jews, but also about the holocaust of the Armenians, a big population group here, and the Native Americans, the Chinese who built railways, and American slavery. The Catholic missionaries are now treated like conquering slavemasters. I doubt many people think the Jews are getting special treatment.
Yes, we didn’t do much about the Tutsis. Nor could we.
Pat Buchanan is an old Nixon man, one of the longest term ones, which always wins him a little sympathy from me. But I can’t cut him slack when his obnoxiousness takes the lead, obscuring the truth in his point.
One of his controversial ideas was America deserves more credit for being in the European war, because despite Churchillian rhetoric, the US could have chosen to actually be neutral and sit that one out–no Atlantic Pact, no Lend-Lease. It was certainly what seemed popular in 1940. I’m not saying that wouldn’t have been a tragedy for the world, and neither is he.
Does Israel have an “amen corner” in the US, another hotly debated point? Sure it does, and I’m basically part of it; it’s not the Jews versus everyone else.
If it were just the Jews, Gary, and I versus everyone else, I’d say even if we didn’t have them outnumbered, we’d have them outclassed.
If this is the case, he is rightly removed.
If not, though, this was a semi-private email exchange with a probably angry parent. A principal is not obliged to teach in the first place and a parent is not a student – I want to give him a pass on not insisting on the reality of the Holocaust for that reason alone; not his job. Indeed, his job as Mealy-Mouther-in-Chief is to massage parents so they don’t sue the school. I don’t like it, you don’t like it and – regardless of his personal beliefs in the Holocaust – he generally doesn’t like it.
However, if he is actively selling the denial product, he is rightly flushed (I am keenly aware that this is what is said of professors who misgender).
Who cares if they sue the school? No, his job is not being mealy-mouther-in-chief. His job is to say, “We teach the Florida state curriculum” and let it go at that. Parents are “angry” about teaching the holocaust? Who? How many? And again, why should we care? If they’re angry about teaching the Moon landing, I’d tell them to pound sand.
EDIT: I just want to emphasize that I’m not criticizing TBA, who is probably accurate about what the guy might have thought he was doing.
The Holocaust is part of the story of the West, and as the US is part of the West it seems reasonable for US curriculums to have a greater focus on the Holocaust than on non-Western genocides. There should in general be a greater focus on Western history (than non-Western) because that is what made America what it is today. It is more relevant – though I wouldn’t advocate focusing on the West to the extent that it left students ignorant about the rest of the world. I’m honestly curious if the Holocaust is taught in the context of Europe’s historical issues with religious and racial identities (pogroms, reconquista, wars of religion, colonialism), because imho it can’t be understood at a systemic level without that.
Your point about propaganda is a good one but difficult to achieve – in some ways all countries teach propagandised history in High School, and moving away from that is likely to face resistance (or even a backlash). People like believing that their country/nation/people is unique and good – history classes are a good vehicle to achieve that, by curating what is covered or emphasised at the very least. (And the equivalent wrt shaping views of other countries and cultures also holds.)
I can’t quite articulate it, but the principal’s response seems linked to the valorisation of alternative facts as legitimately justifying different opinions. Or to put it another way: if the measure of a described event’s accuracy or significance is how it makes people feel, then we’ve just redefined accuracy and significance to serve emotional comfort. Which sort of links to propagandised history. ??
Did you ever get to the point where you learned that the relief agencies were enabling the further killing among the refugees and among the Tutsi outside Rwanda?
What I remember about this is once the Tutsi, with help from Uganda, gained the upper hand and stopped the massacres, many Hutu who perpetrated the killing fled to the bordering Congo where international humanitarian agencies established refugee camps. Ironically, most of what we saw in TV was these camps where many of the murderers were considered refugees and thus protected. Some of the Hutu launched raids from the camps back into Rwanda. Finally the reformed now Tutsi dominated Rwandan military invaded the Congo, dispersed the camp, with the result that large parts of the eastern Congo became involved in a long and deadly war.
Not sure you can have a national ethos without at least a dash of myth.
Sure, but teaching myth and calling it history is as educationally damaging as teaching creationism and calling it science.
Myth has its own natural space. (Hollywood for the US, Bollywood for India.)
And to clarify: some myths may well be true, but they are not provable [by us] or even necessarily strictly factual.
From my Western European perspective, I see the Holocaust,which is a huge justification for Zionism, having become a significant irritant to the Pro-Palestinian movement (which comprises just about the entire left). So it is rare to not hear a “what about?” comment about other victims of the Nazis or other genocides. Of course these should be acknowledged at all times but the clear purpose of the whataboutery is to diminish the Holocaust of the Jewish people. In the meantime it is perfectly acceptable in public and political discourse to say Israel is behaving “exactly” like the Nazis.
I remember a story regarding people who worked at the refugee camp coming to the realization that they were enabling the continuing genocide/murder spree by the Hutu refugees and deciding that the “refugees” still just needed food.
It was very enabling.
Yes. Women and children though. And sick and wounded (nevermind how they got wounded). When you walk away you turn your back on those people as well. My point isn’t that they should have kept feeding the killers so much as that each person involved would have a different ‘this is more wrong than it is right’ point and reaching a consensus on something like that would be challenging.
From a few days ago:
USA Today
Not everyone believes the world is a sphere, Its a school’s job to inform and correct the bad ideas that get can exist out in the wild. Not humor them.
Good point. The posture of neutrality adopted by humanitarian groups, as well as UN Peacekeeping Forces, raises many tough questions, and I’m not sure of the answers. In some cases is it better not to step in and stop the fighting on the theory that short, intense conflict bringing a conflict to a definitive end with a winning side is better than the punctuated rhythm of truce, low intensity warfare, with intermittent high intensity violence that continues for years? Or perhaps even better to intervene on one side to end the conflict quickly?
If the humanitarian groups had sought to try to distinguish between non-genocide perpetrators and participants, refusing aid to the latter, or at least asked for armed assistance in preventing those in the camp from raiding back into Rwanda, would it have prevented the Rwandan invasion which led to a multi-year war in the Congo and millions of additional deaths?
And many of the humanitarian groups have compounded the problem by trying to impose rules around military interventions that actually end up prolonging conflicts.
It’s an even bigger problem for the UN. In the former Yugoslavia, UN forces protected Muslims in Sbrenaica until Serb forces asked them to step aside. Because the UN forces were not directed to take sides and to avoid conflict their response was, “Sure. Where would you like us to stand?”.
In 1967 when Nasser requested the UN withdraw its peacekeeping forces from Egypt’s Sinai border with Israel, the UN quickly complied – the very act that triggered the Six Days War.
My own solution is for the US to withdraw from the UN. Return half of our annual contribution to the taxpayers and place the other half in a revolving fund to be used by humanitarian groups to hire mercenaries and buy arms so they can decide when intervention is appropriate which would also ensure such intervention is done in accordance with their own rules.
Mine is to relocate the UN to Bejing. Let the diplomats breathe polluted air until their governments get tired of it.
A very thoughtful comment, @zafar. Nowadays feelings seem often take priority over facts. Who cares about the truth anymore?
Precisely. That’s why they’re called myth! But some people think that the power of the mind can make them true. Sigh.
I hadn’t thought about how referencing other genocides could affect people’s perceptions about the Holocaust. That is something worth seriously thinking about. Thanks, @charlesmark.
Your entire comment illustrates the complications and tragedy of these conflicts. They make it nearly impossible to sort out and then try to do something “helpful”; people will always be hurt, left out, and even killed.
I very much like your suggestion about the UN!! I have difficulty imagining humanitarian groups arming mercenaries, but it would sure be a whole lot better than what’s going on now. Did you have some humanitarian groups in mind? Thanks @gumbymark.