Posted on 07/07/2019 4:07:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
There are some things that are just not up for debate. These aren’t political issues. What happened in Florida didn’t center on MAGA hats, flag burning, or the merits of tax cuts. We actually had a high school principal question whether the Holocaust was a “historical, factual” event. The Palm Beach Post has the story. A mother of a student tried for a year to reason with the school administration to, you know, actually teach kids about this terrible period in human history without the nonsense. She wondered how this was being taught at the school. The emails between the parent and Spanish River High School Principal William Latson were released and, well, it was not very good. Latson has since apologized for the wording in these emails, with the school district’s deputy schools superintendent saying that Latson was “counseled” on the exchanges, but not formally reprimanded. Now, Latson is not a Holocaust denier, but this nonsensical two sides position he took about this issue is a bit disturbing. There is no ‘two sides argument’ concerning the Holocaust (via Palm Beach Post):
A mother pushed for a year to address what she described as a school leader’s failure to separate truth from myth.
She sent off the email with few expectations — a routine question seeking a routine answer. How, the mother wondered, was the Holocaust being taught at Spanish River High School?
She wanted to make sure, she wrote to the principal, that her child’s school was making Holocaust education “a priority.” The response she received five days later, in April 2018, was anything but routine.
In an email reply, Principal William Latson assured her that the school had “a variety of activities” for Holocaust education.
But he explained that the lessons are “not forced upon individuals as we all have the same rights but not all the same beliefs.”
The mother, who asked not to be named to protect her child’s identity, was stunned. Was the principal of one of Palm Beach County’s largest public schools suggesting that the Holocaust was a belief rather than an actual event?
Thinking Latson simply had expressed himself poorly, she wrote back, asking him to clarify his comments. “The Holocaust is a factual, historical event,” she wrote. “It is not a right or a belief.”
She expected a chastened response. Instead, the veteran principal doubled down.
“Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” he wrote, according to email records obtained by The Palm Beach Post through a public records request. “And you have your thoughts, but we are a public school and not all of our parents have the same beliefs.”
He went on to say that as an educator he had “the role to be politically neutral but support all groups in the school.”
“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Latson wrote.
[…]
She didn’t doubt that Latson knew the Holocaust was real, she said in an interview, but she feared his reluctance to say so stemmed from a desire to avoid confronting parents who deny the Holocaust’s reality.
The publication adds that the other pushed for the mandatory reading of Elie Wiesel’s “Night “ for sophomores, along with assemblies on the Holocaust. The first suggestion was honored, but the assemblies were not held due to “time constraints.”
Maybe this is an unforced error. No, it was. Who cares about catering to the “holocaust denier” crowd? The point of an educator is that you don’t even dabble or give the myth-peddling crowd any platform or the light of day for that matter, especially on issues like the Holocaust. This is a ‘Florida man’ story for sure, those often humorous and often insane local stories from the Sunshine State, but this one takes a very dark turn indeed.
I would pull my child from that school so fast..
May those bones of those 6 million murdered Jews on that last day rise up so that you may count them and for each one you denied may a reckoning be written in the Book of Life on your name.
Documented historical fact....unbelievable.
Holocaust deniers call themselves Holocaust revisionists and their stuff is all over the internet. Basically they don’t contest that Jews were horribly persecuted and a great many died, rather they posit that the 6 million number is grossly inflated and that there is no credible evidence that gas chambers were used.
Personally it doesn’t matter to me as to the number of those who died or the particular method used, it was a terribe thing no matter what the case. But it should be noted that many highly reguarded Jewish scholars of the Holocaust consider Elie Wiesel to not be credible at all.
That certainly is one way to look at it.
I would say people are people no matter the ethnic group. Some will pick themselves up, make a new life, contribute to the economy, have families, help the next generations remember so they can be vigilant. Others of all ethnicites use the atrocities as an excuse. Pretense that one group is stoic and one group whines is intellectual dishonesty.
Thank you.
For what it is worth, most of the ideas in that post were taken from Christopher Dawson, a historian who was raised anglo-Catholic but crossed the Tiber in 1916 in his late 20’s.
Man is a social animal, so in the end I believe the answer is no. There is no such thing as a group of men in a state of nature, and no such thing can ever exist.
I would hold for the possibility of a revealed cult, that insofar as it is properly received, would not be a corrupting influence (insofar as it is improperly received it itself would need purification) but outside of a revealed cult, one is stuck doing the best that one can with what one has been given.
Disclaimer: I’m a professional theologian, but also trained in philosophy, so I can make a stab at presenting both sorts of arguments (arguments including revelation and arguments deliberately setting revelation aside), but I, like most everyone else, have limitations that I am not aware of.
I’ve read countless articles, story’s, seen pictures, movies, videos etc but THAT video was the most horrific thing i have ever seen.
When they had to pull out the bulldozers at the end...
Those poor people, the women and children..
oh my god
I’ve read countless articles, story’s, seen pictures, movies, videos etc but THAT video was the most horrific thing i have ever seen.
When they had to pull out the bulldozers at the end...
Those poor people, the women and children..
oh my god
It would be interesting to hear the school official’s response to being told “Glad to see you’re so open minded. I’m sure you will be similarly open-minded with respect to people who do not believe ‘trans women’ are women, who do not buy into ‘global warming’, and who believe that there are statistically-significant genetic differences between IQ between races?”
Bulldozers were at Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British Army.
“...Most of the people that died under Stalin starved and most emerged from the Gulags alive...the Death Camps were a whole ‘nother level...I find it odd to want to argue over which unspeakable crime against humanity is worse...” [JayGalt, post 59]
Don’t forget: New York Review of Books has long been committed to Far Left causes, and Soviet revisionism. Anything appearing there must be considered false until proven true. Anyone citing it in support on this forum must be considered either dimwitted, or intellectually dishonest.
Claims that the Soviets killed fewer than the Nazis did are untrue. Stalin himself conceded just after the war that it had cost the USSR dearly - but less dearly than the collectivization of agriculture.
One could argue that Nazis were “worse,” because they killed at far greater rates, over a shorter stretch of time, to reach their total.
But one could also argue that Soviet-style Communism was “worse,” because Bolshevik totalitarianism was applied over a much longer stretch of time, over a much wider area, to a far greater number of people: offenses less dire than the mass murder they also perpetrated, but somewhat more than trivial.
And - considering the many adherents and revisionists who still cling to the ineffably goofy notion of the Socialist Paradise under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat - it’s an idea that still gains traction, and is therefore still a threat. Present evils outmatch past evils.
The greatest feat of historical revisionism in the past 100 years is the transformation of our understanding of National Socialism, from being a movement of the Left, to a movement of the Right. It was a deliberate ploy, to permit supporters of Communism to play victim, and to legitimize the USSR: since it was the primary factor in the Allied defeat of Germany, everything else it did, or wanted to do, was also rendered legitimate. Or even desirable.
The same has been done with Fascism, which wasn’t the same as Nazism. Please recall that before World War One, Benito Mussolini was the leading socialist in Europe.
Might that be St. Andrews?
Not everyone believes two and two equals four...
Why should I believe anything the left believes in?
No
I find it facinating that almost 18 years after its publication the 2-volume work of 200 Years together written by the Nobel Prize winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who himself was imprisoned in the Gulags is still forbidden from being translated into an English language edition. It's still politically incorrect to mention the outsized role of Jews in that aspect of Russion history apparently even though Solzhenitsyn's essay itself blamed the Russian people themselves as much as he blamed the Jews. But the idea of banning an English translation of a Nobel Prize winning author's work is still rather mind blowing when you think about it. French, German, and Russian editions are available, but not any English language versions.
https://www.amazon.com/Hundred-Together-Complete-Volumes-Dvesti/product-reviews/5969707023
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I am neither dimwitted nor intellectually dishonest. While the NY Times is suspect in general this looked like a good article to me.
...I find it odd to want to argue over which unspeakable crime against humanity is worse...
I am certainly not climbing into this pit with you. It’s all dreadful; no life lost is insignificant. I don’t agree that the Jewish people are somehow deficient or whiny as suggest by the OP because the world refers to “The Holocaust” for the slaughter & torture at the death camps.
That was my point my only point. I tried to suggest why the choice of “The Holocaust” was made. I am suspicious when people single out Jews to attack especially in the present climate and I believe in speaking out against injustice least there be no one left to speak out for me in my turn.
“... the idea of banning an English translation of a Nobel Prize winning author’s work is still rather mind blowing when you think about it...” [jimwatx, post 116]
Sorry, but I cannot look on the lack of an English translation as anything especially upsetting - not above & beyond the worldwide mess prevailing.
Anyone who still thinks Nobel Prizes are awarded on anything related to excellence or salutary impact is mistaken...the Award Committees are as subject to politics (both the internal bureaucratic sort, and the international power-politics sort) as any other organizations now in existence.
There is also the matter of finding translators who are both sufficiently talented and sufficiently trustworthy. Translation is not a minor technical matter, nor is the daily practice of it as routine and simple as many Americans merely assume. The UN is in constant sate of muddle in part because real-time translation of verbal discourse is so difficult.
And all of this is true before one factors in the widespread corruption in the chattering classes, from which ranks translators must be drawn. The revolts being staged by “woke” PC workers at Starbucks, restaurants like like Lexington’s Red Hen, and Wayfair’s Boston-area plant are recent and on small scale compared to the “trahison des clercs” that has been going on in the ranks of real “clerks” (not mere intellectuals): low-level technical employees of security organizations whose job it is to translate documents (technical, policy, history, operations etc) from other languages. Severe shortages have occurred, and recruitment is unusually difficult. Even after vetting, background-checking, competence testing, they go bad at high rates. The backlog has been worsening for some years. It’s a problem of some concern in the defense & security establishments.
“...It’s all dreadful; no life lost is insignificant...” [JayGalt, post 117]
A great many folks - Americans included - cleave to this sort of moral absolutism, and deem themselves superior. Not to say that it’s wrong or invalid, but out in the real world, scarcely anyone believes it - and they prove so by their actions, not their words. On a practical quotidian basis, one immediately runs into problems, trying to apply it in life.
If all lives are infinitely valuable, then the loss of one life is indistinguishable from the loss of one hundred, or one million; infinity times one hundred is the same as infinity.
If we punish a perpetrator for killing one person, practicality suggests we must visit greater punishment on the killer of 100. Imbuing the arithmetic with real force indicates we ought to punish them to a level 100 times “worse” - a move that may not be physically possible. If we exact the death penalty for a single murder, we cannot execute the perp in our 100-murder example 100 times (can’t even do it ten times). We might consider various tortures, but our own moral code - imposed by self-appointed arbiters with no stake in any outcome - already throws roadblocks in our way, when it doesn’t ban such cruelties outright, a notion most of us agree with anyway.
The value of a single life cannot be defined in the absolute abstract sense. It always involves measurement and measurement is always and everywhere irreducibly relative.
Value, then, has to be defined in relation to the community. Any useful definition of “community” must includes some sense of its size - in a word, numbers. The loss of one person means more to a community of ten people, than a community of 100. Or of 1000. When the community (city, nation, whatever) reaches a size of one million, the death of one may not even be noticed by most of the other community members (indeed, when we achieve totals of a million or more, deaths - and births - are going on through natural processes every day). The sad fact of one murder may mean incalculable loss and dismal suffering to immediate family and close friends & colleagues, but citizens on the other side of town may not even learn of it, until someone else tells them.
It’s the same, inside large professional organizations. The death (by murder, or by enemy action) of one private soldier rocks his entire fire team, or even his platoon, but his division will not suffer any serious degradation to its operational capability. The mission will still get done.
Since the squabble over which group suffered the “worst” seldom refers to actual numbers, it gets carried out in moralistic terms rather than references to reality. Doubles the absurdity - if indeed such a numeric reference has any meaning here.
All lives have finite value which differs depending on earning power & years. Any insurance agency can give specifics (for their industry) of the worth of a particular life in case of accidental death and routinely set values on lives in the form of insurance. Juries set life worth in $ and in level of punishment. For each person and for the people who love them, their life value is invaluable and cannot be counted in $.
There are many ways to measure the value of a life but not to value and mourn each individual death we learn of, is to dehumanize ourselves. The tragedies we touched on earlier involve so many lives that our minds numb at the task of grasping the horror of the loss, the inhumanity that caused the loss, at the pain of those who dies and of those who loved them and at the lost potential.
The understanding of that level of loss is contained in your reply when you refer to the loss to the community. I am unable to really grasp the implications of any of those massive losses for more than a short time before turning away back to life. As you say, the numbers game is not a realistic way to measure an event such as the holocausts referred to earlier in this thread. The loss is measured in the effect on the community, the nation, the specific group of related individuals and on the world.
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