Teaching the Holocaust (Part 2)

Some time ago, I committed in this blog to continuing some thoughts about teaching the holocaust to our students. Although I haven't been timely about it, I haven't forgotten. (Fortunately, one of the local high school students responded to the guy in the paper in a reasonable amount of time.) The first sentence below has been sitting there since before that commitment, waiting for completion. . .

We've all heard the saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." -- As soon as I write that, I can imagine the groans from the gentleman who was against teaching the holocaust in our schools. Perhaps I do his knowledge of our own history a disservice, but in my imagined groans he's saying, "We didn't perpetrate the holocaust. We didn't forcibly relocate people into camps and slaughter them by the thousands. So why should we teach our children about it?"

I've done a little research into two things I vaguely knew happened, but never really learned about in history classes. Unfortunately, I think they answer the above question.

He and I both live in southeast Idaho, so let's start with a look at forcible relocation to camps. Not far from here is the Minidoka Internment National Monument -- the site of one of 10 camps where over 110,000 Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens were forcibly relocated during WWII. Minidoka housed 7,000 people. These were not camps where people were sent to be slaughtered, but they were places where people were forcibly relocated due to the fears of some authorities. I repeat, SOME. . . Official military reports commissioned at the time concluded that most Japanese nationals and essentially all Japanese-Americans were loyal to the US. However, the reports didn't suit some politicians, for whom fear of the "enemy" was a way to maintain power. German-Americans were also imprisoned by the government during WWI and WWII.

Although these actions are now largely condemned as having been racially motivated rather than based on the available evidence at the time, it is difficult to believe that this past is being remembered. "Many people are concerned that Arabs or Muslims in the US could be subject to internment in the future, given the significant public support for such a practice and the enactment of legislation similar to the Alien Registration Act of 1940" in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (I wish I could relocate the source of this quote.)

"But these internment camps were not death camps like those of the Nazis," my imagined gentleman counters.

This is true.

The Konzentrationslager came about relatively late in the Nazi regime, the culmination of eugenics and racial hygiene ideals in which not only Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals, and others were killed en masse. Earlier eugnenics policies in the Nazi government included compulsory euthanasia for institutionalized disabled people, and before that, the compulsory sterilization of thousands of mentally and physically unfit.

The Nazi policies were not implemented until the Nazis were in power, after the conclusion of WWI. What does this have to do with US history? The Nazis modelled their early eugenics policies on those of another nation, which in the end would have only the second largest eugenics movement. The Nazis performed over 450,000 sterilizations in their decade in power; the United States took five and a half decades to forcibly sterilize over 64,000 under individual state laws. But it is telling that the Nazi extremes ended public support for eugenics in the US.

This last little tidbit of US history, our own eugenics programs, never made it into the classes I took in high school. And while the internment camps were mentioned in those classes, they were treated as a fairly trivial detail. However, the holocaust was prominently discussed. So, to answer the gentleman: We should teach the holocaust because we are all too willing to avoid talking about our own, similar mistakes. We have already seen politicians willing to ignore reason and to demonize others for their own gain. At a time when we are ostensibly at "war" with an enemy characterized by nationality and religion, these lessons should be remembered.

The gentleman is not persuaded. His mind was already made up. But even the open-minded should not be persuaded without looking into it themselves. I recommend starting at: Wikipedia, Eugenics and Wikipedia, Japanese Internment.

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