Does calling Nazi actions THE holocaust promote ignorance?

Great Debates
1

I recognize that WWII saw the greatest genocide in history, with the deaths of (my history is weak, but from what I could find) 6 to 10 times more people than any other genocide. I’m not trying to downplay the importance of recognizing this as among the worst atrocities in human history. However, none of my schooling included even a mention of other genocides. The closest I got to it was the American government slaughtering and relocating the natives which, while certainly also important, is nowhere near the scale of either Rwanda or Armenia.

Now, I recognize that my education had some serious gaps, and I’m starting this thread partly to find out if other people were more aware of these things than I was. My point is that I grew up (to a disturbingly old age) before knowing that what I had been thinking of as THE genocide or THE holocaust was not alone in history. I feel that if in the study of WWII and in Nazi action, the deaths had been referred to as the greatest/largest holocaust, or a genocide, or anything implying that there were other conflicts in history at least approaching the same scale, ignorance could be waylaid before it begins.

Was I alone in my ignorance?

2

Well, I learned about Mao’s starvations, Stalin’s purges and the Armenian Genocide in books on my own, not in school. In school we only learned about the Nazis and what the US & Spain did to the natives of the New World. Actually I should include the Potato Famine and the Roman destruction of Carthage and some of the Mongol atrocities.

Even today, I don’t know much African History outside of the devastation of the of the slave trade.

When did you go to school? I don’t know what they cover now.

Jim

3

Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.

4

Graduated HS in 2000, but it was private and there wasn’t a ton of required history (or other ways to get around it). I learned about feudalism and 1066 (which I loved) and Japanese history (which was also enjoyable), but not so much about modern times outside of America. College was the same-- think I took some history of film to fill that requirement.

Yeah, we did Carthage and Rome briefly as well, and Africa was pretty much limited to the slave trade. Sort of a sad state of affairs, huh?

5

[QUOTE=BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed]
Graduated HS in 2000, but it was private and there wasn’t a ton of required history (or other ways to get around it). I learned about feudalism and 1066 (which I loved) and Japanese history (which was also enjoyable), but not so much about modern times outside of America. College was the same-- think I took some history of film to fill that requirement.

Yeah, we did Carthage and Rome briefly as well, and Africa was pretty much limited to the slave trade. Sort of a sad state of affairs, huh?
[/QUOTE]

Well it was no better in the 70s and early 80s in my public school. However, in general, history gets a short shrift in school from what I recall. Memorize some dates, don’t actually try to understand anything and write some term papers.

Jim

6

[QUOTE=BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed]
I feel that if in the study of WWII and in Nazi action, the deaths had been referred to as the greatest/largest holocaust, or a genocide, or anything implying that there were other conflicts in history at least approaching the same scale, ignorance could be waylaid before it begins.
[/QUOTE]

The word holocaust itself means destruction by fire. It does not, absent its historical context, mean genocide of mass murder,* so there is not reason to call the actions of the Nazis “a holocaust.” That does not promote ignorance in my view. Since many Nazi victims had their bodies burned in crematoria, there is a specific reason to call that genocide “The Holocaust.” I find the term “Nazi Holocaust,” which you see once in a while, rather redundant for that reason.

American students hear more about Nazi atrocities than any other for a variety of reasons - Eurocentrism, America’s involvement in that war (compared to its lack of involvement in, say, Rwanda), the size and historical importance of WWII. Ignoring other atrocities is a failing of the schools, but I think that’s a separate problem from this question of terminology. I do think it would be good if students were made aware of other historical exterminations. It’s a very unpleasant lesson, but it’s a lesson about the human race that discourages stereotyping certain groups of people, for example.

*After looking at a dictionary, I found this might not be true. I’d need an OED, I guess, to see if the term was used to mean mass murder prior to World War II. But my understanding was always that it was “The Holocaust” specifically because of the cremations.

7

I would also include what the Japanese did to Asia during WWII, plus the Khmer Rouge, if we’re listing off various genocides.

However, I think Marley23’s comment about only learning about conflicts where America was actually involved seems to be the right reasoning for why most people in our part of the world call it ‘the’ Holocaust.

8

You can’t expect public schools to make the average student aware of 100% of everything that has happened in the course of humanity’s existence. Schools have to decide which parts of history to teach based on what’s the most relevant in the context of their own culture and national identity.

In America, stuff like the slave trade, native American persecution, World War 2, and the rise of Rome get a lot of attention because that’s what’s relevant to our cultural identity.

Back on topic, I don’t see anything wrong with calling largest genocide in history (several times over) THE Holocaust. It seems like a fitting term, to me.

9

[QUOTE=Mosier]
You can’t expect public schools to make the average student aware of 100% of everything that has happened in the course of humanity’s existence. Schools have to decide which parts of history to teach based on what’s the most relevant in the context of their own culture and national identity.

In America, stuff like the slave trade, native American persecution, World War 2, and the rise of Rome get a lot of attention because that’s what’s relevant to our cultural identity.

Back on topic, I don’t see anything wrong with calling largest genocide in history (several times over) THE Holocaust. It seems like a fitting term, to me.
[/QUOTE]

It’s clear that schools can’t teach everything (and I wasn’t just talking public schools-- I was in private and prep schools for my later schooling years). My issue is that they talk about it as if it’s the only genocide that has anything like that scale. 6 million plus deaths is far and away the largest, but genocides with more than a million deaths, or even ones with “only” several hundred thousand I think at least deserve some kind of mention. And if size is the only criteria, why don’t we just call WWII “The War.” WWI used to be The Great War, but since it had fewer deaths, maybe we shouldn’t talk about that anymore, either.

To me, it’s almost insulting or conceited, like how New York is The City.

10

Well I’ll speak as someone who has experienced many Sundays and a few weekday nights in Jewish religious school and have in the years since experienced many as a parent of four going through the same. Lots of Holocaust lesson plans in those years, lemme tell you. I make no claims to speak for anyone else with those experiences …

I think the “Never forget, never again” mantra loses its more important lesson when we Jews think of it as only “never forget what happened to us, never again to us.” It is easy to think of The Holocaust as an exceptional event committed by a unique evil outside of the course of normal history. It is also wrong. The atrocities committed during the Holocaust are part of human nature, part of the capacity that we all have. We can do great evils to any “other” in our midst. They aren’t quite human like “we” are after all. The Nazis may have been particularly devoted to genocide as a primary goal and particularly effective at bringing the most recent technological advances to its service, but that capacity has been part of us before then and continues to be part of us all.

I am less concerned about how well the histories of various genocides are taught in schools or rank ordering them in some way on a scale of evil, than I am that we somehow actually learn to make “never again” more than a nice catch phrase and into a reality, that we learn how to prevent genocides in the future. And I don’t think we have learned that. I don’t think we have a clue.

11

[QUOTE=BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed]
It’s clear that schools can’t teach everything (and I wasn’t just talking public schools-- I was in private and prep schools for my later schooling years). My issue is that they talk about it as if it’s the only genocide that has anything like that scale. 6 million plus deaths is far and away the largest, but genocides with more than a million deaths, or even ones with “only” several hundred thousand I think at least deserve some kind of mention. And if size is the only criteria, why don’t we just call WWII “The War.” WWI used to be The Great War, but since it had fewer deaths, maybe we shouldn’t talk about that anymore, either.

To me, it’s almost insulting or conceited, like how New York is The City.
[/QUOTE]

WWI isn’t “The Great War” anymore. As far as I know, it was only The Great War until we got into WW2.

There is a word for other genocides. It’s called “genocide”. Giving the worst genocide in history a distinguishing name doesn’t make Mao or Stalin suddenly nice guys.

Schools certainly do not talk about the Holocaust as the only genocide in history. We hear about Joseph Stalin and the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee all the time in schools, and Rwanda got excellent news coverage. “Ethnic cleansing” was a whole new term invented for what Milosevic did, and it was barely a crime when compared with the horror of the Holocaust.

I don’t think you can possibly overstate the evil of that particular act of genocide.

12

[QUOTE=Mosier]
WWI isn’t “The Great War” anymore. As far as I know, it was only The Great War until we got into WW2.

There is a word for other genocides. It’s called “genocide”. Giving the worst genocide in history a distinguishing name doesn’t make Mao or Stalin suddenly nice guys.

Schools certainly do not talk about the Holocaust as the only genocide in history. We hear about Joseph Stalin and the Trail of Tears and Wounded Knee all the time in schools, and Rwanda got excellent news coverage. “Ethnic cleansing” was a whole new term invented for what Milosevic did, and it was barely a crime when compared with the horror of the Holocaust.

I don’t think you can possibly overstate the evil of that particular act of genocide.
[/QUOTE]

I guess that’s partly what I was asking, because my school was certainly deficient in mentioning Stalin. And when we studied the Trail of Tears, it wasn’t referred to as a genocide or cleansing so much as saying that lots of Natives died during relocation. And I wasn’t even in HS during Rwanda being covered on TV, so I missed that boat.

I don’t know, maybe I’m misremembering my schooling a bit, or maybe I’m conflating it with how I’ve heard about it my whole life outside of school. It’s fine to have its own title, because it’s certainly a big enough event to warrant that, but again, it just seems like calling it “the” holocaust is too exclusive, and downplays the atrocities that other cultures have experienced. I mean, WWII has its own title as well, but it doesn’t make it out to be the only war, despite the fact that it has the highest death toll.

13

I agree that the Jewish Holocaust of WWII has overshadowed all other genocides and massacres in western popular consciousness (including high school curricula). Even in the context of WWII the millions of non-Jewish victims of the Nazi death camps and the tens of millions of victims of extermination campaigns on the Eastern front tend to be forgotten. So BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed I would say no, you’re not alone in your ignorance.

DSeid has already explained the risks of the ‘outside of history’ view of the Shoah better than I can. So although it’s understandable that ‘the’ holocaust has garnered so much attention, it’s also important to understand it as part of history, and part of human behavior.

14

I don’t really have too much to add except to say that the term THE HOLOCAUST to mean the Nazi treatment of the Jews exclusively was based on a famous TV mini-series from the late 1970’s. The term Holocaust previously had been used to refer to other events (including genocides).

Lets go to wiki - it’s never wrong :dubious: - but I don’t think it is right here

[QUOTE—]
(Names of the Holocaust - Wikipedia)
*By the late 1950s, documents translated from Hebrew sometimes used the word “Holocaust” to translate “Shoah”, and some scholars began to use the word with this meaning – usually with some qualification, such as “The Nazi Holocaust”. It was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified, and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period.[5] The 1978 television miniseries titled “Holocaust” and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture.[6] According to John Petrie “as an immediate consequence” of the broadcast “the capitalized and unmodified ‘Holocaust’ became the recognized referent to Hitler’s Judeocide in an American society newly sensitized to that tragedy.”[7]
*
Just some FYI. As to the larger question …as long as THE HOLOCAUST isn’t taken to mean THE ONLY GENOCIDE EVER, I think it is fine . Really I doubt people would learn about Armenians et al., if it weren’t for the Holocaust and people searching for historical context, comparisons, meaning and excuses for it. I think the holocaust probably lessens ignorance of other genocides.

15

If you tried to teach students about all the mass murders various military powers have committed, you’d never have time to study them all. There isn’t enough time in a regular school year, given that you have to do subjects other than history, to discuss all the genocides.

16

[QUOTE=jimmmy]
I don’t really have too much to add except to say that the term THE HOLOCAUST to mean the Nazi treatment of the Jews exclusively was based on a famous TV mini-series from the late 1970’s. The term Holocaust previously had been used to refer to other events (including genocides).

Just some FYI. As to the larger question …as long as THE HOLOCAUST isn’t taken to mean THE ONLY GENOCIDE EVER, I think it is fine . Really I doubt people would learn about Armenians et al., if it weren’t for the Holocaust and people searching for historical context, comparisons, meaning and excuses for it. I think the holocaust probably lessens ignorance of other genocides.
[/QUOTE]

Huh, I had no idea that a miniseries was responsible for the specificity of that term. And I think you’re probably right that people do become more aware of other genocides because of it, but my real issue is that they become aware of them eventually, usually through their own outside research. I mean, I guess it’s easier now (which I guess means it’s no longer a problem), because when you go to look up something for a school paper and go to the infallible source of wikipedia (I can’t tell you how many HS kids I tutored who would quote wikipedia and think that was good enough), once you type holocaust or genocide, you get disambiguation links. But I seem to recall looking in an encyclopedia and having the Nazis be the only thing mentioned under holocaust.

[QUOTE=RickJay]
If you tried to teach students about all the mass murders various military powers have committed, you’d never have time to study them all. There isn’t enough time in a regular school year, given that you have to do subjects other than history, to discuss all the genocides.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not asking them to teach everything. Obviously there’s only a limited time for a curriculum, and cultures have to teach the history that is most central to their own development. And while I know it’s probably a case of history teachers not mentioning other genocides in connection with WWII because they think it’s unnecessary, that everyone is aware of other genocides, I somehow think that teachers these days have to be aware of the overwhelming ignorance of their students. I subbed for 1 year (and if that didn’t kill my interest in teaching, nothing will), and encountered enough examples of raging ignorance that if I were teaching the history of WWII, I’d certainly want to give some context for the statistics. It could be something as simple as “The Holocaust saw ethnic cleansing on a scale at least 6 times more than any other genocide in history, such as the Armenians, Rwanda, the Khmer Rouge, etc etc.” I know that teachers are just trying to stay focused on what they’re teaching, but even something as simple as that one sentence would (ISTM) clear up a metric butt ton of ignorance.

17

[QUOTE=BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed]
My point is that I grew up (to a disturbingly old age) before knowing that what I had been thinking of as THE genocide or THE holocaust was not alone in history.
[/QUOTE]

The Nazi Genocide of the Jews (and others mind you) is “The Holocaust”. There are other genocides, of course.