In Holocaust Education, Re-Emphasize Allied Apathy

When teaching children about racism and genocide, educators often focus on individual biases as the source of systematic racism and anti-Semitism.  For example, at my synagogue, teachers often ask their students to put themselves in the shoes of Christian German civilians during the Holocaust and consider whether they, as non-Jews, would have simply shrugged off anti-Semitic slurs and the sight of innocent people in yarmulkes being attacked by policemen.  Questions like this spark a discussion of bullying and anti-bullying in American schools today.  In the process, “racism” becomes a dysfunctional interpersonal phenomenon, and the Holocaust, as a result, becomes a simple amalgamation of millions of acts by individual racists who allowed their prejudices to get out of hand.  By the end of a course on the subject, many students assume that the only way to save Hitler’s victims would have been to speak out against incidental anti-Semitism before it escalated into genocide.  As the Anti-Defamation League notes, “challenging belittling jokes” and not “accepting stereotypes” are good ways to prevent a society from escalating into acts of prejudice, discrimination, violence, and then genocide.

Combatting individual prejudices certainly can help stop mass atrocities, but, in an educational context, this truism is incomplete because it ignores the systematic mobilization of hatred and violence by governmental authority.  Even though many German schoolchildren were too reticent in the face of schoolyard anti-Semitism and could have spoken up, we must not overstate the practical impact that several more German dissidents could have had once the genocide was actually underway, nor should we pretend that the world was helpless to stop the Holocaust once Germans’ prejudices had spiraled so murderously out of control.

In our case, American students today must know that our government, even without changing the hearts of individual anti-Semitic Germans, could have saved many more of Hitler’s victims and that fighting prejudice, though immeasurably valuable, would not have been enough to compensate for the Allies’ failure to intervene on the victims’ behalf.

The US government’s shameful policy of proroguing on the Holocaust was underway by December of 1942 when President Roosevelt met with a Jewish delegation imploring him to stop the genocide. Although Roosevelt intimated at the meeting that his administration “shall do all in our power to be of service to your people in this tragic moment,” the proceeding few months panned out much differently.

In February of 1943, the Rumanian government suggested that it would transport 70,000 Jews into Allied territory in exchange for roughly 130 dollars per refugee. Though such a proposal probably would have required further examination and negotiation, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles simply dismissed it out of hand, lambasting it as a hoax of “the German propaganda machine” to “create confusion and doubt within the United Nations.” The Nuremberg trials elucidated, however, that the offer was sincere and that, with only a little bit of extra research, the State Department would have known to capitalize on the offer.

With that in mind, perhaps we should be asking students what their forbears in the United States could have done to pressure their government to act on the Rumanian proposal.  When organizations pushing the United States to accept Rumania’s offer were denigrated as inflammatory and overdramatic, how could our forbears have normalized the struggle for genocide victims and defended the efforts of those who were advocating positive action?

It is no exaggeration to say that the Allies’ “efforts” at saving Hitler’s victims were laced with unconcern and faux-outrage at most key turns thereafter.  To the world, our leaders were “devastated” by what was happening to European Jewry, but, in private, they were much more insouciant about the matter. In fact, to absolutely no objection, British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden once said outright in a 1943 meeting with President Roosevelt that “we should move very cautiously about offering to take all Jews out of a country like Bulgaria.  If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany.”  When Eden expressed concern that “Hitler might take us up on any such offer” and that the Allied Powers would have to find new homes for Jewish refugees, he was greeted with nonchalance and tacit agreement.

Today, students of the Holocaust or any other systemic atrocity should not ask themselves only how more people could have acted individually to condemn incidental bigotry, as important as that question is; they should ask how thousands upon thousands of people could have acted in tandem to pressure their governments to save thousands upon thousands of victims.  We should remember that the Holocaust was not only an exercise of individual prejudice but also an exercise of systemic governmental apathy and an exhibition of societies’ unfortunate tendency to shrug their proverbial shoulders amidst large-scale suffering.

 

The Creation of ‘Black Crime’

This article was originally posted at goodmenproject.com and tommyraskin.org.

The laziest pundits in this country would have us believe that there are two types of crime: crime and black crime. Odious media outlets’ coverage of the recent “knockout” phenomenon is evidence of this faulty distinction’s widespread promulgation.

Reporters have started covering the national string of random “knockout” attacks perpetrated against unsuspecting pedestrians. The quick and brutal attacks conclude with the offending bands of young rapscallions scurrying and laughing away. Any decent human being who sees video footage of these onslaughts is immediately appalled.

But Michael Savage and Bill O’Reilly and Bernard Goldberg  and Colin Flaherty and Thomas Sowell and American Thinker, here and here, and Richard Swier and a whole host of others insist that denouncing these crimes as “crimes” is insufficient. These black crimes committed against white people apparently require a special type of repudiation.

What’s the difference between a crime and a black crime? Simple. A crime reflects a moral failing of the individual who commits it, whereas a black crime (necessarily committed by a black person) reveals a moral failing of the entire black community.

Mainstream acceptance of this distinction means that more than 49,936 individual white people can commit murder between 2000 and 2010 in the United States without so much as a peep from pundits about “diabolical pathologies” in the white community. It means that white people, who are “almost six times more likely to be killed by another White person than by a Black person,” never hear about an “intra-racial” war being waged within the white community. It means that the Sandy Hook and Columbine and Aurora shooters are called “troubled kids” and not “troubled white kids,” that there isn’t a proselytization of the white community whenever a stupid person with white skin stabs someone vindictively, and that we mustn’t abide lectures about the white family’s “deterioration” every stinkin’ time some Timothy McVeigh-look-a-like decides to shoot up a public area.

Conversely, when a black crime is committed, Bill O’Reilly takes the opportunity to enumerate for black people all of the things they’re doing wrong. He contends that the “knockout” phenomenon “goes back to an alienation of young black men in this country for a number of reasons, but primarily they’re angry that they didn’t have a family and their father abandoned them” and that “they’re sold a bill of goods by the civil rights people—that white society is at fault—that because you’re unhappy, it’s the whites doing it to you.” Never mind that no more than 0.017% of black children in fatherless homes have participated in one of these knockout sessions and that only about 0.7% of African-Americans violently attack a white person each year. For some reason, pundits still warn us that “this thing could really get out of control” and that folks pushing for racial equality are actually provoking feral black-on-white hatred.

Because some Americans still haven’t connected the dots, I will, in the simplest of terms, explain what these gross media distortions demonstrate: these “journalists” have a political agenda. Nothing that they’re saying about the “knockout” phenomenon is an outright lie, but it certainly isn’t the whole truth. When a pundit like O’Reilly, with 2,831,000 viewers, spends more than 5 minutes on his show reviling “young black Americans” for “committing senseless crimes” against white people—without iterating how aberrant and antithetical such attacks are to the sensibilities of most black folks, without mentioning that less than 0.3% of white people are violently victimized by blacks every year, without stating that fewer than 1 in 250,000 white people is killed by a black person annually, without discussing the anti-crime initiatives of so-called “race-baiting” civil rights activists—he is pushing a paranoid racial agenda. No question.

To his credit, Bernard Goldberg recently told O’Reilly, “most black kids aren’t doing this,” but went on to say that “a disproportionate number are either doing that or are walking into stores and hauling entire racks of clothing out onto the street.” Goldberg loves to argue that if white people were committing the crimes that black people commit so frequently, “there would be an outcry among the media.” The fact that not every news outlet has picked up on this story indicates, in Goldberg’s view, that the mainstream media are antagonistic towards white people.

Does such a widespread anti-white bias really exist though? If it did, then every arrest of a young white male drunk driver would spark a national discussion about how “young white Americans” are being neglected by their parents and brainwashed by their leaders to disrespect the laws of our land. Such claims would be corroborated with real statistics proving that white adolescents are more likely to drive drunk than their black counterparts. For good measure, some pundits would probably mention the fact that “white students are more than twice as likely as non-white students to use illicit drugs including marijuana and ecstasy,” and for that reason, are in dire need of “better role models.”

We can start talking about a media bias against whites once major news outlets make a habit out of dissecting “white crime” in this fashion. Until then, let’s not lose sight of the real bias that abounds.