Having passed the age of fifty, I’m now at an age where I can’t assume that most people share or even understand my perspective on certain things that I’ve always taken as a given. My father was a little too young to serve in World War Two or the Korean War, but he was in the army in Germany when my oldest brother was born. He worked with war veterans. One of his closest friends fought in Africa and up the boot of Italy. There wasn’t any question in my generation that Nazis were bad. And not just bad, but singularly bad.
I didn’t need my public school teachers to tell me this because I had access to people who fought the Nazis, or in my father’s case who served in the postwar occupation force. Still, my public teachers were completely unapologetic and unambiguous about imparting the downside of the Third Reich and all it stood for.
The World War Two veterans are all dead now, so people of my generation are the best access younger people have to their firsthand experience with fascism. I’m hear to tell you that Nazis were bad and that you can’t let Nazis accumulate power or you’ll have no choice but to kill them. I think this is something important to know and that it should be taught in schools.
But the consensus on this is eroding because the Republican Party has been overrun with white supremacists who do not value the traditional norms of representative democracy. So, you see the GOP enacting laws aimed at preventing teachers from making negative value judgements about slavery, Jim Crow, and even Nazisim. I’m not kidding.
The following is part of a Twitter thread from a teacher who testified before the Indiana State Senate about a bill aimed at preventing teachers from instructing students in a way designed to elicit emotional responses on divisive subjects. The teacher points out that teaching that Nazis are bad is part of their job and is told by an elected officeholder that teachers should remain impartial on the subject.
https://twitter.com/MrBTheTeach/status/1479221391971033089To be fair, the senator also includes Marxism as a subject for neutrality. He says the Marxism, fascism and Naziism should be taught impartially and that it’s up to kids to decide whether or not they’re good or bad. And, of course, his argument requires us to think about where a proper line should be drawn in discussing political ideology. Are we going to assume all Marxist ideology is inextricably and necessarily intertwined with the body counts of Mao and Stalin? Where does the line between socialism and totalitarianism really lie, and are teachers qualified to make this distinction?
But Naziism is very specific. And even the broader idea of fascism is definitionally inconsistent with American constitutional rights. This isn’t about legislatures debating the right level of taxation or provision of health care. It’s about having systems in place that prevent totalitarianism whether it’s fascist or Marxist or something else.
People need to understand how bad things can get if they don’t vigilantly protect their rights and their system of government. That’s biased in favor of what has traditionally been great about America or in favor of what has stood for progress in America.
Ending slavery was progress. Ending Jim Crow was progress. We should be able to teach this without apologizing for taking a stand. We certainly shouldn’t be punished for eliciting a strong emotional response against the Holocaust or violence-backed white supremacy.
But I guess the people with direct experience with Nazis died out and their kids got old, and now we have a resurgence of bad ideas. You know, we fought the Nazis with a segregated army. At the time, we were an Apartheid state. As a nation, we really only learned how wrong these ideas were when we saw the death camps in Europe and learned the full implications of racial hate. And it still took us a couple more decades to get a consensus in Congress that we should become an enlightened country.
But we’re not enlightened anymore. We can’t be enlightened when the GOP is going around pulling all the plugs on the lighting fixtures.
My Uncle fought the Nazis in North Africa and ended up in Dachau. He even had a photo of him and Patton. Anyway, even as a young kid I understood you dare not say anything remotely nice about the Nazis to him. His son carried it forward for him until his death a few years ago. Imagine how I feel about the White Supremacists today, you know those nice people on both sides in a small parade in Virginia.
Many people say that WWII was a war to end fascism but they forget that two fascist regimes — Franco’s Falange regime in Spain and Salazar’s Estado Novo regime in Portugal — survived the war. In the postwar era, the US was happy to let bygones be bygones and operate military bases in Spain and Portugal. Franco’s regime lingered on until 1975.
So the children are supposed to make up their own minds. Based on what system of morality and fairness? What social values should the children consider – universal franchise or limited, women as chattel or as free persons? You can’t make up your mind about these things without having developed a mental system that incorporates certain values. Where are children supposed to learn these values if everything is presented in a totally neutral way. Which, by the way, will never quite be possible anymore than totally objective journalism.
Now he’s walking back his remarks.