From the official United Nations website, a discussion paper that proposes using memory of the Holocaust to press for more multiculturalism and globalism.
The future of Holocaust memory and education lies in its ability to be relevant to the students of coming generations. While study about the Holocaust is important in and of itself, it is even more important to learn from the Holocaust in terms of promoting global citizenship, human rights, religious tolerance and multiculturalism to ensure that such evil does not occur again.
How does multiculturalism prevent genocide? It would seem commonsensical that the best way to prevent genocide of the Holocaustian flavor is to keep different peoples apart.
In many locations worldwide, the Holocaust has become a universal symbol of evil. Just as the story of the Exodus from Egypt from the Bible, and the catch cry “Let my people go” epitomises moving from slavery towards freedom, the Holocaust is now the defining symbol of the most terrible denial of basic human rights—an evil that we struggle to comprehend.
Paradoxically, we can transform teaching about the Holocaust from a subject of despair to a subject of hope. We can convey to our students the message that the option of preventing the next Holocaust is in our own hands. Our students can take specific steps to counter racism and hatred on a local, granular level and this will impact at the universal, international level.
In this way, adolescents can become agents of change. The most important educational message of tikun olam,repairing the world, is that we must not be indifferent, we must not be bystanders, because indifference is lethal.
Get them while they’re young. (Although, it’s a good bet [the special kids] don’t fall far from the olive tree.)
We have to act! We must be agents and facilitators against the evils of discrimination, prejudice, hatred and violence. All teachers need to equip their students with the intellectual and practical tools to deal with complex historical situations.
Why do [the special people] and UN apparatchiks (but I mostly repeat myself) feel the need to ACT? Act on what? Rejiggering human nature? Yeah, that won’t end yet again in an abattoir of the victims of failed universalist ideologies. /s
The growing strength of populist and far right groups in Europe must concern us all. The worldwide wave of anti-Semitism in which innocent Jews are attacked solely for being Jewish while walking the streets of Sydney, Melbourne, Brussels, Paris and Rome has to worry us.
Disingenuously left unstated is that most of those attacks are
a. by moslems and assorted vibrancy invited into those places by people like Zehavit Gross and
b. hate hoaxes by a sociopathic israeli-american 20yo
Over the past two decades, Holocaust awareness globally has become a new form of collective remembrance.
I’d call it a familiar form of collective indoctrination.
Holocaust education enables exploration of human rights literacy in different social contexts from cognitive, social and practical perspectives. It acknowledges the need to develop a new cosmopolitan consciousness transcending national boundaries: a memory connected not only to the past but also to the belief in a common future. The cosmopolitanization of Holocaust awareness and the need to avoid such a tragedy occurring again is connected to post-national processes.
Thus, educating about the dangers of racism and extreme nationalism can become an icon for a new cosmopolitan future.
“I didn’t sign up for this”
At the same time we must be careful. There can be no doubt that the transformation of the Holocaust into a universal symbol of evil has made it possible to address it in different cultural contexts. But there is a substantial, inherent risk that this approach can “normalise” the Holocaust and thus diminish it. Normalisation can lead to “soft” Holocaust denial. Not aggressive, explicit denial, but denial of its core Jewish elements.
“Hey hey let’s all remember who the primary victims are!”
Summarizing, the United Nations has implicitly endorsed, by allowing on its website, a call to exploit Holocaust remembrance to advance the goal of post-national multicultural cosmopolitanism.
*somberly shelves tinfoil hat* I won’t need you anymore, good friend. This is our reality, now.
[crypto-donation-box]
