As Anne Laurie highlighted for everyone this morning, today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is separate from Holocaust Remembrance/Memorial Day, which is known as Yom HaShoah (day of the Holocaust) in Hebrew and will be observed from sundown 27 April through sundown 28 April this year. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is also on the …
Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, in partnership w/ @AuschwitzMuseum, commemorates the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by launching an educational program for U.S. high school teachers. #Auschwitz77 #AuschwitzEducation #AuschwitzLegacy https://t.co/hDcEPfFPYl pic.twitter.com/NU77JIsdH0
— Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation (@ABMFusa) January 27, 2022
As we learned last night, this educational initiative is needed now more than ever. As almost anyone with any amount of sense predicted, the moral panic created by Chris Rufo – because he failed to get elected when he ran for a local political office and was essentially unemployed and decided that he could create a lucrative grift out of thin air, which he has now been handsomely rewarded for – around education in the US involving issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation would never stay confined to a white Christian panic about issues of race, gender, sexual orientation as taught in history, English, and social studies curriculum. It would, as we’ve now seen happen, move into anti-Semitism as well. It is unfortunate, but the simple reality is these things either start as anti-Semitism and then pull in other religious minorities, then racial and ethnic minorities, and then LGBTQ people or they start with racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, and/or religious minorities that aren’t Jewish and then progress to anti-Semitism. There are, of course, some Jews who fail to recognize this unfortunate reality and decide to take their bigotry out for a walk on a regular basis. They are a shonda.
I hate to draw attention to this troll because attention is what he craves. But now that @GeorgetownLaw has hired him, I feel an obligation to condemn his overt and nauseating racism, which has been a matter of public record for some time. I am deeply ashamed of my alma mater. pic.twitter.com/OQaHPzZ8gK
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) January 27, 2022
As are the Jews who then cover for them:
Mark Joseph Stern is paid to provide accurate information and analysis to his audience.
Here, he’s deliberately misleading in order to try to get someone fired. Bad at his job, mouse of a man. https://t.co/4auSFteiNT
— Isaac Schorr (@isaac_schorr) January 27, 2022
I’ve actually read the full transcripts of the minutes from the McMinn County Board of Education meeting about Maus and they are worse than the excerpts printed in the reporting. These are the thoughts and deliberations of the men and women we are constantly told are the real, authentic Americans living in real, authentic America. What they actually are are the thoughts of the marginally educated, incurious, parochial, small minded and bigoted. And when I say bigoted here I mean the casually bigoted. The bigots that don’t even know enough to be properly bigoted. That aren’t self aware enough to even understand what it is they are doing and that they are bigots even if they don’t intend to be. One of the principle objections to the book was the depiction of violence done by the NAZIs to, primarily, Jewish children. 1.5 million of the 6 million Jews slaughtered by the NAZIs during the Holocaust were children. Every day the Auschwitz Museum twitter feed tweets out the details of several of these children’s fate. A fate that was always death. Whether they were teens or toddlers.
27 January 1928 | A German Jewish girl, Marion Ehrlich, was born in Berlin.
In November 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz. She did not survive. pic.twitter.com/cCQ250Bhc5
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 27, 2022
27 January 1939 | A Dutch Jewish girl, Margaretha Beatrice Swartberg, was born in Groningen.
In October 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz with her mother Maria Sara and younger sister Judith Josephine. Most probably they were murdered together in a gas chamber after selection. pic.twitter.com/70R3wxCw26
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 27, 2022
26 January 1942 | A Dutch Jewish girl, Alida Baruch, was born in Amsterdam.
In July 1942 she was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber after selection. pic.twitter.com/vTRRTIpM0q
— Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum) January 26, 2022
If they could die brutal, needless deaths at the hands of the NAZIs, American 8th graders can handle reading about it. Especially as the trauma experienced at the hands of the NAZIs produced genetic changes in the survivors’s children.
As I write this, there are other genocides ongoing. Such as what the PRC is doing to the Uighurs. The Russian psychological operations campaign currently aimed at Ukraine, as well as useful idiots in the US and elsewhere, is itself a type of informational genocide designed to rhetorically erase Ukraine and Ukrainians. Specifically that Ukraine was never Ukraine, that Ukrainians never were Ukrainians, rather Ukraine has always been Russia and, therefore, Ukrainians have always been Russians. This is, of course, a lie. What the McMinn County School Board has done, which is right in line with Rufo’s intentions when he brewed up this bullshit moral panic around education for his own personal and professional gain, is to make it so that no one learns about any of this in school. Or at least not anything substantive, accurate, and useful. Not the Holocaust, not the Holdomor, not the Armenian genocide, not the Killing Fields, not the Trail of Tears, not the Long Walk, not the Atlantic slave trade, not the slave revolts in the US and the Caribbean, not the Banana Wars, nor the Indian schools, etc. Which makes it all the more likely that sooner or later all of them will happen again. Either here or elsewhere. And when they do we won’t know enough to do anything about it because far too few of us will have the necessary context to understand what is going on and what needs to be done to stop it.
Update at 6:55 PM EST:
And the McMinn County School Board decides to continue digging:
School board issues statement about the removal of Maus. https://t.co/ftrt5woNxh pic.twitter.com/OdxYe29rAb
— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) January 27, 2022
Open thread!