Thanks for that link. I had not seen that. It’s a well-done presentation and so true.
I’ve got a small group of middle-schoolers who are going to be working on analytical skills. I want them to understand the whole idea of a philosophical argument and how you test the soundness of a philosophical argument. We’re also going to be working on understanding how the German people were able to accept the Holocaust. Because it’s a public school setting I’d have to leave out the part about salvation (a shame that the part that can help them most of all is off-limits for me to give them in that setting).
The one gal who talked about the futility of one person refusing to bury the live Jews when others would just do it anyway - how everybody needed to stand up together in order to be effective - really gets at how the Holocaust happened. And then to point out how what Hitler did was LEGAL because he changed the law to say that Jews were not legal persons (just like SCOTUS rewrote the Constitution in Roe v Wade by defining pre-born children out of “legal personhood”) - makes a person realize that it doesn’t work morally to say that we should just overlook abortion because after all it’s legal. It never should have been legal, just like the extermination of the Jews (and other “undesireables”) should never have been legal.
The comparison between the Holocaust and abortion highlights the rationalizations that were made to accept both, in their day. And it shows that people who can accept abortion but not the Holocaust have a philosophical contradiction that doesn’t make sense. Seeing the video would help the kids to see how to deconstruct a philosophical argument so that people can see the inconsistencies in their own thinking - in a non-offensive way.
My fear is that the parents will get mad and call it a political move if I have the kids watch the Holocaust-abortion part of this video. But it would serve some of the very academic purposes the group is about - specifically how to do philosophical analysis and debate AND the roots of what really allowed the Holocaust, particularly how we want to “mind our own business” and not stick our necks out for something so widespread and entrenched - no matter how repulsive it is.
This gives me a lot to think about.