Opposing views of the Holocaust
ATexas school district has written a new chapter in the ugly history of Holocaust denial. An administrator at Caroll Independent School District in South Lake told teachers to include books that present "opposing views" of the Holocaust. "Make sure that if you have a book on the Holocaust, that you have one that has opposing, that has other perspectives," executive director of curriculum and instruction Gina Peddy told a group of disbelieving educators.
The only other "perspective" on the Holocaust is denial. The demand to include it as a legitimate point of view is part of a larger effort to rewrite history to please those who fear the growing diversity of the United States.
Holocaust denial is nothing new. It began as soon as the camps were liberated. General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied Forces in Europe, anticipated such denial might occur. "I made the visit [to a concentration camp] deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence . . .if ever in future there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda," he explained. His fears were soon realized. Deniers claim either that the genocide never happened or that the numbers killed were grossly exaggerated.
The Texas episode adds a new insidious twist to this old lie. Rather than openly denying the murder of 6 million people, it labels the genocide as a subject for debate rather than an established fact. The call for opposing points of view sounds reasonable. Why not expose students to different interpretations? That argument works for genuinely disputed issues but not verified events. Historians continue to debate the causes of WWI, but no legitimate scholar questions what the Nazis did to the Jews. Not every issue has two sides deserving of equal time.
The Holocaust is not the only genocide being denied. The Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge the Armenian genocide of 1915. Bosnian Serbs nationalists deny that the 1995 massacre of approximately 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces was genocide. The government of Myanmar makes the same claim about the slaughter and forced expulsion of Rohingya in 2016-17 and the government of Sudan has denied the genocide in Darfur (2003-present).
Holocaust denial is part of a broader effort to create a celebratory version not only of U.S. history but of Western civilization. Its proponents embrace American exceptionalism, believe in manifest destiny, excuse the removal of Native Americans, and play down slavery and Jim Crow. Holocaust denial fits well into this narrative. The United States did not perpetrate the genocide, but it has a history of antisemitism, which has increased in recent years. "Make America great again" proponents who express pride in their "European heritage" (a euphemism for white supremacy) have no trouble minimizing or denying what white Christians in Germany did to Jews.
At the center of the battle over American history is critical race theory, a legal argument from the 1980s that maintains systemic racism continued to oppress African Americans long after the passage of civil rights legislation. The 1619 Project commemorating the 400-year anniversary of the arrival of the first African slaves in what would become the United States sparked renewed interest in this issue. The collection of essays published by the New York Times called for teaching a more inclusive view of U.S. history that acknowledged the prevalence of racism.