Last week, a Texas school administrator was caught on audio saying that, in complying with a Texas law, opposing viewpoints about the Holocaust should be taught.
While the outrage is understandable, it is misguided.
Yes, there is no denying that the Holocaust happened. But in teaching one of history’s darkest hours and the most tragic moment in Jewish history, the story of both the victim and perpetrator must be taught.
That means it is crucial to teach both The Diary of Anne Frank and Mein Kampf. The former tells the frightening but hopeful story of a young girl hiding from the Nazis with her family and friends in an attic in Amsterdam. The latter is Hitler’s manifesto. It became reality as 11 million people, including 6 million Jews, fell victim to genocide as a world suffered a terrible war.
It is important to research primary sources, including those that came from history’s most notorious people. Here are three quotes from Mein Kampf that exemplify Hitler’s mission to annihilate the Jews and subjugate those who weren’t Aryan.
- “The scream of the twelve-inch shrapnel is more penetrating than the hiss from a thousand Jewish newspaper vipers. Therefore let them go on with their hissing.”
- “The application of force alone, without support based on a spiritual concept, can never bring about the destruction of an idea or arrest the propagation of it, unless one is ready and able to ruthlessly to exterminate the last upholders of that idea even to a man, and also wipe out any tradition which it may tend to leave behind.”
- “[Jews] become the ‘ferment of decomposition’ among nations and races and, in a broad sense, the wreckers of human civilization.”
History has modern relevance. These quotes, after all, bear a striking similarity to comments made by Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He says that “the fake Zionist regime will disappear from the landscape of geography.” Khamenei also says that “the Zionist regime is a cancerous tumor that must be removed, and God willing it will be.”
There is a difference between censorship and awareness. Censoring primary content from the classroom does a disservice to students. It restricts their ability to understand the history of an event. Moreover, allowing unsavory material to be taught with the focus on educating, not brainwashing, is also crucial.
Deception and brainwashing are the goals of those who seek to deny whether the Holocaust ever occurred. It did. Had more people paid closer attention to Mein Kampf in the 1930s, perhaps a world war would have been avoided. And perhaps 6 million Jews might have lived out their lives.
Jackson Richman is a journalist in Washington, D.C. Follow him @jacksonrichman.
