Context, TVAA, context.**
And in terms of raw, stark numbers as well as the central goals of Nazism, it is.
This is turning into a hijack and so I will not go further on the subject than to say this: I think you are wrong in implying that Jews ignore all other victims of the Holocaust. It is well to remember the entire scope of this tragedy - but your resentments appear to me both misplaced (in terms of this thread) and inappropriate.
This is simply appalling. Speaking for myself, I could not maintain a civil relationship with people I knew held this outrageous and indefensible belief.
ammo52, I think your first concern should be for your daughter. Give her a copy of Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things (and read it yourself if you haven’t). It’s got a long section about Holocaust denial, but beyond that the whole subject of the book is how people manage to convince themselves to buy into alternate realities that rational people recognize are obviously bunk. So rather than just educating your daughter about the specific subject, it will be useful to understand the general mindset that permits such insanity.
If your daughter chooses to share the book with her friend, that’s her business; I don’t recommend you encourage her to do so. But I think your top priority is making certain your daughter (a) is well-armed to defend herself from being polluted by their nonsense, and (b) understands where this idiocy comes from. This allows her to interact with her schoolmate without risking giving even an ounce of credence to the family’s denial, while simultaneously not hating her for it.
As far as your future interaction with her parents, I don’t have any good suggestions. It’s probably a personal failing, but I recognize I wouldn’t be able to be even remotely objective about it; I’d rant and rave and kick them out of my house and as they’re leaving I’d tell them they’re deluded, credulous assholes and that they are never to come back or speak to me again until they had Liquid Plumr’d all that shit out of their skulls.
Contact the local media and have them do a piece on “Holocaust deniers stop girl from reading Anne Frank”.
You think that is bad.
I dated a girl and it was getting serious. She took me to meet her mom and, during the course of the evening, found out her mom was a holocaust denier. First one I ever met.
I was polite and when we left I couldn’t help but voice my disapproval. Turns out my girlfriend also had the same belief.
Damn, she was cute to.
We shouldn’t even call them “Holocaust Deniers.” It makes it sound like this is just an opinion you can have, as opposed to a damned lie.
But wait, it gets worse…
After school today, I asked my daughter if once again A. was absent from English class, and of course she was. I wondered how she was going to be graded for this week-long block of study, or if she’d just get (as I think would be fair) a big fat zero for the final “test” over this material, which is to administered on Friday.
Turns out the teacher has given her another story to read, and will **test and grade her separately on this material on Friday. ** I asked my daughter what the book was, and she didn’t know for sure, saying it was “about some Japanese girl.”
Now I can see how the school, not wanting to ruffle feathers and all that, could honor a parents request, even one as ignorant as this. Not saying at all that I agree with it, just that I can see it from their viewpoint. What I can’t see is “rewarding” A. with a separate track and a chance to earn the same points, etc, as the kids who learned the real lesson.
She should get a big fat zero. The parents would “get their way”-- but the school could tell them that their daughter forefeited her grade as a result.
What a pathetic deal, all the way around.
Sure would be funny if it were a Japanese textbook about how the Rape of Nanking really wasn’t that bad.
“Funny” as in “making you want to vomit with horror at the stupidity of the human race.”
Suggest to them a vacation in Canada. Your problems will be solved after they drive off the edge of the world.
I would not seek their company but if I were in a social situation with them I would try and keep to the high ground (keep my mouth shut). You are not going to convince them of anything except by example. Their daughter will figure it out soon enough. All the sadder for them. Maybe she will marry a nice Jewish boy.
Hmmm… maybe this curricular unit is NOT evaluated primarily as lessons about the Holocaust, but as lessons in female coming-of-age literature.
In which case I’d give them even less standing to object. I, too, would like to know what ARE the limits as to how much can a parent object out of.
The danger in these huge numbers is that they rise almost to the point of unfathomability. “Unimagineable” is definitely the right word you use.
When I was young I simply could not imagine how that many people could be killed over a 3-4 year span, it just didn’t seem possible on an intuitive level. My birth-town had 60,000 people in it, and about a quarter million in the entire Quad Cities, so imagining 30-40 times that many people killed I found the claim incredible. Even today, having read Ordinary Men, I can envision the town-to-town killings of a couple thousand at a time, but still have no real way to comprehend the killing of millions. I know from the thorough records that so many people were in fact killed, but even now it just boggles my mind trying to wrap around the notion of numbers that large.
To a young kid, something like that must seem just bizarre, the stuff of dystopic fiction. Frankly, I don’t know how you really can effectively teach that in comprehensible terms, short of showing that French film, and that’s barely viewable by adults, kids would have nightmares for months.
Ammo, how would it actually accomplish anything for the school to punish the child for the actions of the parents? What you’re advocating there is that the girl be actively denied the chance to learn anything and earn a grade on it during this time.
The thing is, the parents have a right to keep her out of school altogether if they choose, and home-school. They have a right to put her into any private education venue they choose. I do believe that kids have a right to an education and adults have a responsibility to provide that for them, but the perameters of that education vary so much that it is nearly impossible to say that she’s being denied an education by being given an alternate learning experience at this time. There is nothing that says that a good education requires learning about the holocaust in middle school. I didn’t even have world history in junior high, and that didn’t stop me from learning about it later.
I’d be very careful trying to determine in what circumstances the state has a right to run roughshod over the rights of parents to make decisions about their children. This is not a matter of life or health.
I’d say give your daughter enough information to refute any arguments that might come up, and let it go. It will be over by Friday, and they will move on.
I think the school should call the parents’ bluff. Insist that the girl read the book, and let them raise a stink if they want. If they want their names splattered all over the papers as holocaust deniers, that’s their choice. Eventually they may win their case, but at their own cost. I don’t think the school needs to facilitate their horrifying fantasies absent a court order to do so.
It’s almost certainly about a young Japanese girl’s experiences growing up in the American internment camps. I read the book when I was in junior high school… wish I remembered the title.
I would think it’s almost certainly Farewell to Manzanar. An appropriate substitute, for what it’s worth, but certainly it shouldn’t have been needed in the first place.
Er, no, that isn’t reassuring at all. That ‘Anne’s father wrote the book’ is precisely what David Irving and his fans claim. (Actually, pinning down exactly what Irving does claim on this particular issue is rather difficult as he keeps shifting his position for legal reasons, but he is on record as implying that it’s a forgery and as saying that it ‘testifies as much to the business sense of her father as to the intrinsic evilness of the Nazis’.) I suppose that the parents might have read a sensible account (such as Cecil’s) of the diary’s rather complicated publication history and got a little confused. But it is very much more likely that they’re regurgitating neo-Nazi/anti-Semitic/white-supremacist nonsense direct.
What has the teacher told the rest of the class? Has A.'s absences been explained to them? Do they have questions about what A. has been saying? The mistake would be to leave those questions unanswered and for the classmates to wonder whether A. might know something they don’t.
*“All there is to know about Adolph Eichman”:
EYES - Medium
HAIR - Medium
WEIGHT - Medium
HEIGHT - Medium
DISTINGUISHING FEATURES - None
NUMBER OF FINGERS - Ten
NUMBER OF TOES - Ten
INTELLIGENCE - Medium
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
Leonard Cohen*
I like sqweels’s idea.
“The parents refuse to comment”.
Left Hand said, "That right is limited, isn’t it? I mean, there ARE truancy laws and child labor laws, laws against child abuse both physical and mental. Society DOES dictate that certain child-rearing philosophies and methods are unacceptable.
I believe that parents should be allowed to tell their kids that the Holocaust doesn’t exist – but they should NOT be allowed to prevent schoolteachers and other government officials from correcting their lies."
Well, kids are misinformed every day in matters of religion, and the government ENCOURAGES that. I agree with you that the teacher should not have excused the kid from class, but the parents still have a right to be ignoramuses and to try to pass that ignorance on to their children.
Exactly: context. Mentioning the six million Jewish deaths without keeping them in the context of the 10-11 million total deaths sends a message that we don’t want to send.
** Reality check: the Holocaust was about destroying people the Nazis viewed as inherently inferior. That includes Jews, the Roma, homosexuals, people with mental or physical disabilities, etc. There were more Jews than there were people from the other groups around, and thus Jews were killed in greater numbers, but to suggest that the Nazi plan was all about the Jews is naive at best and suggestive of an agenda at worst.
I would argue that they are neither misplaced nor inappropriate. I will, however, note that there are quite a few people who view any criticism of the way the Holocaust is dealt with, or anything done by Jewish people regarding the treatment of the Holocaust, as “inappropriate”. These are the same sorts of people who insist that repressed minorities can’t be racists.
I reccomend this book heartily. Read it twice before you do anything. Don’t be pushy with people, but simply remind them of the evidence. You may also want to give them a copy.