Debating the Holocaust*

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.

It was adults in the classroom and administration—not children—who thought up debating the Holocaust in Rialto. And it is journalists like Cooke reaching a wider audience who believe that it will benefit society to have such amoral thinking injected into the mainstream by mis-educating youth through having them debate whether or not Anne Frank’s Diary was “a forgery.”

Denying the Holocaust is evil, but it is also pornographic in its perversity. This is true of both outright Deniers like Iran’s former President Ahmadinejad and western prevaricators like David Irving who use obfuscations and lies to protect and project their world view that Hitler had nothing to do with the Shoah.
Recent studies show that debating topics—such as whether Princess Diana was murdered by a conspiracy of the royal family or that climate change is a lie promoted by deceitful scientists—do have an impact on adults as well as children. Daniel Jolley and Karen M. Douglas’ new study in the “British Journal of Psychology” found that exposing people to such conspiracy theories decreased their self-reported likelihood to vote, donate money to political groups, or wear campaign stickers. The unsettling truth is that, among those exposed to such propaganda, even those who reject it tend to emerge from exposure more disillusioned and less involved as citizens.

What’s at stake is not just the truths of history, but that words and ideas have consequences. We do our children when we fail to teach them basic norms to distinguish good from evil. This leaves them defenseless to protect themselves against the world’s next Boko Haram.

All 1960-plus eighth graders from the Rialto School District will visit the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to see and hear Holocaust Survivors, ask them questions, and perhaps to give a hug and get a selfie. Too soon, there won’t be any Survivors alive to pass on their personal witness. That’s when the ultimate challenge to truth will begin. Heaven help us all if we fail to provide young people with skills to know the difference between hate and history.

*This is a revised, expanded version of an op ed piece, coauthored by Rabbi Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on May 15.