Current Events > One in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/07/one-in-five-young-americans-thinks-the-holocaust-is-a-myth

<img src="https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=1424,quality=80,format=auto/content-assets/images/20231209_USC666.png">

Do you agree or disagree with the zoomers?

That's disturbing

I mean, it was so long ago they've probably never even met a person who served during WW2, let alone a survivor of the camps combined with a certain side of the political spectrum actively trying to memory hole the facts it even happened. It's not really surprising.

Fuck, that's bad. If it keeps increasing at that rate, Alpha will be like 50/50 on it.

Scary.

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Yeah, it's a huge and sadly unavoidable gap in contemporary education that little to no Holocaust survivors are still able to do school lectures. I know not every student took it to heart, but I sure did. The one story I remember the most (though I'm fuzzy on the details at this point) was from a woman who after being liberated found herself in small town with some other survivors and started attacking a German woman in fit of rage. The way she described the fear and confusion in the German woman's eyes - as in, 'why are you doing this to me, I've done nothing wrong to you, I have no idea why you're attacking me' - really stuck with me.

Tik Tok brain

$5 says they're all in the southern states, and a few midwest ones and has it pounded into their heads by racist ignorant family members and teachers.

Agree.

With the majority obviously. 4/5 aren't holocaust deniers.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it

Either the schools are failing exceptionally hard or more nazis are raising kids in the USA, probably a combination of both.

While a child who hid during the holocaust came to my junior high to speak, my classmates and I didnt need to hear them to know that the holocaust happened.

Literally everyone that thinks this deserves to get their ass kicked and then forced to watch the entirety of this playlist (covers other WWII atrocities, too):

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsIk0qF0R1j4cwI-ZuDoBLxVEV3egWKoM&si=NvbacWaxqCOejbid

Staggering detail from a recent video. When Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, one of the horrifying things that they discovered was a 7-ton pile of human hair.

Worthless shit heads. They deserve a major ass whooping for being stupid and uncaring.

None of these statistics should be surprising given that more than half of US adults read at below the 6th grade level.

A similar survey found 1 in 10 people under forty had never even heard the term Holocaust before.

The reason older people know so much about the Holocaust is because there was a time when people believed it was extremely important to show how awful it is so it could never happen again.

Somehow, many of those who were taught about it who are now in high level school system and education department positions, are people who think the youth should not have this knowledge.

Venixon posted...

Worthless shit heads. They deserve a major ass whooping for being stupid and uncaring.

This is probably the wrong reaction for most of them. They may outright not have had a chance to know better yet. These polls raising awareness of it present an opportunity to change that.

While we're at it we should teach others beside the Holocaust too. I'm 23 and in middle school we learned about Rwanda for example. People should know it can happen anywhere by anyone.

Americans are poorly educated about world history in general and legislators have actively worked to make it more difficult to teach history that includes things like genocide and state sponsored racism.

Therefore, a statement like the one in the title is hardly unbelievable.

I did not know this but I find it more disturbing that few Americans know Woodrow Wilson was trying to deport political activists.

History became legend.

Legend became myth.

CobraGT posted...

I did not know this but I find it more disturbing that few Americans know Woodrow Wilson was trying to deport political activists.

All they taught us about Woodrow Wilson was how he 'saved WWI' and built the league of nations and did all these reforms. Didn't mention his effect on minorities or that he showed Birth of a Nation at the White House >_>

Americans' love of patriotism causes them to glorify historical figures too much and outright ignore not only bad things they might have done but the effect those things had. We gotta learn to accept our history as human and multifaceted.

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@totalnerdken
https://archive.ph/iRdKu

CobraGT posted...

I did not know this but I find it more disturbing that few Americans know Woodrow Wilson was trying to deport political activists.

when I was in high school (early 2010s, in Ohio at that), I did learn about the Holocaust, but yeah the extent of Wilson being brought up was his first election and him getting America into WW1

Nothing about his racism that was extreme even for the time was mentioned

Well that's... not good.

Was the civil war a myth too?

Honestly, that's not too surprising. I imagine that it's so long ago, that a lot of young people struggle believing that something like that could have happened. I'm sure there's got to be a name for the phenomenon, but you can see it with Civil Rights, as well; despite still being within the span of living memory, the world of Civil Rights is so different from now, that it barely feels real for younger people who are less likely to have met people who actually marched & protested. With WW2, almost everyone old enough to have any significant memory of that time is dead, & the only proof of it is whatever you find in history books/documentaries/etc.

And they're all fucking idiots

El_Marsh posted...

Americans are poorly educated about world history in general and legislators have actively worked to make it more difficult to teach history that includes things like genocide and state sponsored racism.

Therefore, a statement like the one in the title is hardly unbelievable.

I suppose nowadays that is true. We did learn both world history, current events and our own history. Some states keep trying to worsen the education standards for some reason. Why? I don't really understand it.

Kai_Laguna posted...

I mean, it was so long ago they've probably never even met a person who served during WW2, let alone a survivor of the camps combined with a certain side of the political spectrum actively trying to memory hole the facts it even happened. It's not really surprising.

Im 40 and neither have I. You dont need to meet a WW2 veteran to not be ignorant of the holocaust.

Kai_Laguna posted...

I mean, it was so long ago they've probably never even met a person who served during WW2, let alone a survivor of the camps combined with a certain side of the political spectrum actively trying to memory hole the facts it even happened. It's not really surprising.

What's that got to do with anything? Have you ever met cave men, or people from the medieval ages, or seen real live dinosaurs? You learned about them though.

Venixon posted...

Why?

Easy: so they can do it again without anybody realizing it.

Instead of saying "That's insulting to Holocaust survivors!" when you call something a genocide, chuds will start going "Now you're just making up fake history. What do you mean I cannot see?"

I mean we have the same young people seeing an uncommon cloud and legitimately saying the government is creating them to spread illegal things because they never saw a cloud like that before

SHRlKE posted...

Im 40 and neither have I. You dont need to meet a WW2 veteran to not be ignorant of the holocaust.

Venixon posted...

What's that got to do with anything? Have you ever met cave men, or people from the medieval ages, or seen real live dinosaurs? You know about them though.

It really helps the message stick in young, impressionable minds when you can hear a firsthand account of someone who lived through something so unimaginably horrible. Like I said earlier, it's not a guarantee that it'll stick with everyone, but being able to hear and empathize with these stories puts the message on a different level than memorizing a list of facts out of a history book.

While there are a multitude of other factors at play here, I really don't think it's a coincidence that Holocaust denial and fascism in general are taking a sudden uptick right around the same time that the few living Holocaust survivors are getting too old to visit schools. Sometimes it feels like those fascist fucks were just biding their time until they all died off.

bnui_ransder posted...

I mean we have the same young people seeing an uncommon cloud and legitimately saying the government is creating them to spread illegal things because they never saw a cloud like that before

There are only two possibilities when I don't understand something: God or the Deep State

bnui_ransder posted...

I mean we have the same young people seeing an uncommon cloud and legitimately saying the government is creating them to spread illegal things because they never saw a cloud like that before

Why are we pretending like this is unique or even especially apparent among young people rather than just being what all uneducated human beings do?

I wonder if there's a correlation during Covid and the increased remote teaching or homeschooling.

Worth noting that homeschooling has been on the rise with right wingers who are against the "LGBTQ doctrines" in public schools

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This, plus the right wing getting their claws into them online and radicalizing them.

bnui_ransder posted...

I mean we have the same young people seeing an uncommon cloud and legitimately saying the government is creating them to spread illegal things because they never saw a cloud like that before

It's not usually young people who buy into that crap.

Trumble posted...

It's not usually young people who buy into that crap.

I've seen a rise in posts on social media about random natural events they don't understand or never heard of

And they always attribute it to government or we shifted timelines

I'm just hoping it's satire

Look at the Lost Cause movement for the US civil war.

In another 50-100 years people will be arguing that "the Holocaust either didn't exist or had nothing to do with Jews." is just an interpretion of history.

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It's the same study from nearly half a year ago: it's Enlightened Centrists who automatically distrust everything resembling "the authority" when it comes to facts. They are immune to education.

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The loosening of academic standards has to play a part. It's not wild conjecture to think that the system that is graduating high schoolers who can't read, write, do math, or have any grasp of the basics of civics is probably not producing students proficient in world history either.

Edit: Spectacular grammar failure

We've had a rise in people insisting Earth is flat, despite it not only being known to be round for thousands of years but it being easy to prove to ourselves that it's round. We're living in a misinformation/disinformation age where the most clueless people get a soap box to preach from and people prefer deliberate ignorance.

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak up..