Recently, an assignment, designed by teachers and approved by an administrator, at Southern California’s Rialto School District sought to improve critical thinking skills of 2000 eighth graders by having them debate whether the Holocaust really happened or instead was “a plot” to falsify history. Now, Charles C. W. Cooke has made a case in the “National Review” that pressure to change the assignment was a symptom of narrow-minded political correctness, and that an opportunity has been missed to allow young teens to develop the argumentative skills of Oxford University debaters.

Summing up Holocaust victims’ worst fears, Terence des Pres quoted an inmate of Dachau: “The SS guards took pleasure in telling us that we had no chance in coming out alive, a point they emphasized with particular relish by insisting that after the war the rest of the world would not believe what happened; there would be rumors, speculations, but no clear evidence, and people would conclude that evil on such a scale was just not possible.”

Those Nazis were proven wrong. Their destruction of Europe’s Jews was and is the most documented crime in human history. Historians every day add to what we know about the Holocaust by working to uncover previously unknown facts. They debate the mechanics of the Holocaust—but not whether it happened any more than historians debate whether Nazi Germany Blitzkrieged Poland on September 1, 1939.

If a “debate” whether the Holocaust happened was needed, it came a decade ago when self-styled historian Clifford Irving sued for libel in a London Court scholar Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust Denier. During a protracted, expensive trial Lipstadt chose to rely on the testimony of historical experts—not Holocaust Survivors. Her lead witness, historian Richard Evans, systematically exposed Irving’s claims that there were no gas ovens at Auschwitz as premeditated lies and purposeful falsifications of the documented historical evidence. The Judge censured Irving in the harshest terms, and “the debate” over the Holocaust had been won.

By all means, eighth graders should be taught about the Holocaust in the context of World War II. In our Internet-dominated world, it is indeed necessary to promote critical thinking. Soon enough (if not already) eighth graders will be exposed to the ugly fact that even governments like Iran’s deny the Holocaust ever happened, while other bigots use websites to argue that black people exploited on Southern plantations were “contented slaves.” We must teach young people how to study history and learn the truth without making the classroom in a platform for legitimating pseudo-history and teaching hate. Jews aren’t promoting their “special version” of the Holocaust. It is teachers throughout Western Europe who are being pressured not to teach about the Holocaust, supposedly not to offend Muslim students. (more…)