With Further Comment

IN REGARD TO THE post-truth, moral relativism that refuses to do that first and most consequential act of moral behavior, choosing the clearly right side, practicing the most morally atrocious and repulsive of both-siderism, "teaching the controversy," etc.   This is exactly the kind of thing I warned was bound to happen fifteen years ago, a consequence of the witnesses to one of the most clear cut of genocides dying. 

Elliot FriedlandOctober 19, 2021

In the fallout from NBC News’ revelations that teachers in Texas were told to teach “opposing perspectives” about the Holocaust, many people are asking what teaching “opposing perspectives” of the Holocaust looks like. I know from personal experience, since I attended a Holocaust class that invited us to consider the Nazi perspective in middle school. The school was our local public school in Oxford, and the class in question occurred when I was in Year 6 (the equivalent of 5th grade) in the U.K.

The experience was enraging and humiliating.

The teacher started with raw video footage of the concentration camps. We sat on the floor cross-legged and watched a bulldozer shovel piles of naked, emaciated Jewish corpses into a pit, the way they dispose of trash at landfills.

The hopelessly age-inappropriate film without context was bad enough. But our teacher decided, for reasons I will never understand, to explore industrial genocide through the medium of interpretative dance.

We could play the role of either a Jew getting murdered or a Nazi guard doing the murdering. Our choice.

After explaining to us how Jews were rounded up on trains and herded into gas chambers, our teacher invited us to consider the perspective of the Nazi guards overseeing the operation.

After all, there was a war going on at the time, she explained. They had probably signed up to defend their country, just like British troops. Nazism was a totalitarian one-party state. Nazi soldiers had families and lives too. It would have been really dangerous to stick their necks out and defend the Jews. Sure, they sealed the doors and pressed the gas button, but might they not have done so as just a cog in a system much bigger than themselves?

Were they not just following orders?

She asked us to consider these emotions and express them when performing our individual dances.

Each child performed their dance individually. Around half the class chose to be Jews, and the other half chose to be Nazis.

I chose to be a Jew (obviously). When it was my turn, I mime-danced being shoved into a gas chamber, terrified. I pounded my fists against the doors slamming shut, trying to get out, and then dramatized choking to death on Zyklon B. Acting out the horrible fate of two-thirds of European Jewry impressed on me the reality of the Holocaust. I felt profoundly sad that so many Jews had died in this awful way, murdered simply for the crime of existing. I felt deeply uncomfortable, and yet totally unable to object to performing.

After being forced by my teacher to portray my own execution at the hands of the Third Reich in front of all my peers, I then had to sit respectfully, and watch them take their turn to be Nazis. Through dance.

The first thing that is troubling about this is that I have no problem believing it happened within the past sixty years.  It should be unbelievable to the extent where you'd have to have proof it happened to believe it.  Such is the result of free-speech absolutism in its fullest manifestation. 

There is no articulation of "free speech,"  "free-expression," "academic freedom," "even-handedness (yes, even even handedness between murderers and their victims) that would keep me from saying that idiot of a "teacher" should have been fired and banned from ever being part of the profession of influencing the minds of the young, along with any administrators or others who kept them on and enabled this to happen.   

I should probably have included  the ridiculous judicial extension of "speech" to include stripping in that list of absurdly created and asserted "rights."  No doubt it would have contributed to the "right" of this teacher to create such a dance in that school and the idiotic sense of virtue that defending such an atrocity would led to the "liberals" who supported the right of a teacher to do that without getting their ass fired.  Dance is about the stupidest of the art forms.  At least opera singers have to sing words that contain some level of denotative meaning.  I can think of nothing less likely to teach a child anything than to have them dance it. 

I wonder why they wouldn't insist that school children do the "both sides" thing on 9-11, Pearl Harbor, the Mexican war against the Americans bent on stealing Texas, etc.   One wonders how that would play with those who weren't bothered by this.