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These numbers are truly shameful!
Recent polls suggested that far too many Americans are ignorant about a very important chapter in history.
Indeed, according to these polls, fully 41 percent of Americans were not aware of what Auschwitz was, and a similar number could not name a single death camp.
Worse than that, perhaps - 31 percent of Americans believed that fewer than two million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
The numbers revealing this astonishing ignorance are more than a little alarming. 37 percent of Americans were not aware that Poland was a country where the Holocaust took place. Some 22 percent of American millennials, and 11 percent of all Americans overall, had either not heard of, or otherwise were not sure of what the Holocaust was. More than half of Americans polled believed that Hitler had come to power using force, and were not aware that he was, in fact, democratically elected.
These rather alarming numbers evidenced by a recent poll come at a time when hate crimes have spiked upwards, as has a resurgence of generally xenophobic sentiments. President Trump has repeatedly targeted minority groups, entrenching a certain hatred of immigrants, of Muslims, and of blacks and other minorities. He had repeatedly tried to set a ban on Muslims from entering the country, and even desired setting up a registry of Muslims within the United States, although that idea did not hold up to the standards of the Constitution. Many people feel that Trump and his supporters have been far more divisive than unifying, and the wave of hatred that the Trump era has unleashed has been a frightening force for many people.
Many comparisons between Trump and Hitler have been made, and certainly for now, I personally do not think that such comparisons are warranted. We must remember that Hitler and the Nazis are rightly seen as the low bar standard for human behavior in a modern society. Never before had humanity seen anything like the organized, bureaucratic brutality and systematic killing of millions of people because of their religion, or their nationality, or their political beliefs, or their sexual orientation. So far, Nazi Germany remains the only nation in history to have built huge camps with the specific intent of killing mass numbers of them, of trying to literally exterminate a whole race of people out of existence. Never before had horrible people been given such free rein to make the lives of people completely miserable. I remember seeing horrendous images of a scientist bending and torturing a child, and most of us have heard horror stories of some of the other experiments that supposed scientists conducted in these camps. Also, let us remember that Hitler invaded and brutally occupied several nations. He built a war machine, and unleashed it upon the world, starting a war that would kill tens of millions of people.
So while I think that Trump is generally a horrendous person and a dangerous man to have at the helm, Hitler he is not.
However, the collective amnesia and, let's face it, general disinterest and indifference of far too many Americans towards all that is going on in the world, and the knowledge of what has happened in the past, is alarming when there is an increase in hatred and outright violence right here within the United States. No, Trump is not Hitler. Yet, his rise came simultaneously as a wave of violent xenophobic reactions, sentiments, and actions began to take hold within the country, and indeed, many people have connected the dots and feel that this was specifically caused by Trump and his hateful, manipulative, scapegoating rhetoric. Nazis were marching on American streets last year, white nationalists feel more emboldened than they have in many decades, and many are noticing that there is a disturbing trend of resegregation within the United States.
In short, at a time when we should be paying more attention, far too many Americans are showing the same old same old indifference and seeming immunity. These numbers concerning the Holocaust bear this out, and they are more than a little troubling.
After World War II, there was a sentiment that rang out. Many people - particularly those who survived the Holocaust, kept urging people to "Never again." They insisted that the crimes perpetrated on them by the Nazis should never again be allowed to happen again. To that end, they kept reiterating how important it was to learn our lessons from the past, and to never forget.
However, Holocausts of sorts have happened since. Maybe they do not have official titles like the Holocaust, but unspeakable horrors have been inflicted on massive numbers of people in the Soviet Union during the days of Stalin in the 1940's and early 1950's, following the end of World War II, and the "Great Leap Forward" and disastrous changes that Mao brought to China in the 1960's that killed potentially tens of millions. Additionally, there have been horrific incidents on an epic scale in Nigeria in the 1960's, and on Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970's, on Rwandans in the 1990's, in Karfur in the 2000's, and on Syrians and in Yemen in the present day. There have been episodes of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia shortly after the fall of communism there.
So, it has happened again. Maybe not with the same bureaucratic precision and indifference seen in Germany in the 1940's, but that can happen again, too. When people forget the lessons of history, it makes it all the more plausible that something like that could indeed happen once again. And with the wave of anger and hatred, including hate crimes, that we have seen in the United States since the rise of Trump, we might want to pay a bit closer attention, lest we see an escalation in that kind of hatred and violence that could make such horrific chapters possible in the future, as well.
These are the links to the following articles which I used in writing this particular blog entry:
Why we’re forgetting the Holocaust by Karol Markowicz April 15, 2018:
Survey: Holocaust Is Fading From American Memory 3:52 Download Transcript April 15, 20184:50 PM ET Heard on All Things Considered
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, a reminder that we're forgetting the world's worst genocide Ryan W. Miller, USA TODAY Published 3:16 p.m. ET April 12, 2018
Some Americans haven't heard of the
Holocaust; how do Australians compare?
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/some-americans-haven-t-heard-of-the-holocaust-how-do-australians-compare
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