How will generations that didn't experience the Holocaust remember it?

[Igel]

3. It's not just the Holocaust.

Kids are surprised that I knew people that survived the Holocaust. Even more surprising, when I tell them those survivor's attitudes towards what happened, they can't understand it. How could the survivor-Jews not bear ill-will to Germans who weren't born at the time? Because for many, justice is group-based and collective, and ethnic guilt is like original sin, something that must forever be paid for while ethnic victimization is a perpetual privilege. "Gemans" didn't kill "Jews," some Germans killed some Jews.

If you were 1 year old when the camps were liberated, you'd be 76 now. For teens, it's ancient history and, well, was tied closely to those particular countries and those particular times.


It's the same with Vietnam. I've been told that Vietnam was the bloodiest war in US history. Ignoring the fact that the Americans killed in Vietnam were 1/10 the number from the Civil War, and still far, far less than WWII. But that's what their Boomer history teachers taught them--these were kids from public schools and private schools, from different states. The history they were taught has a political POV.

And it's the same with the USSR and the mass murder in the name of the proletariat and wealth redistribution and of settling scores with the rich, of ensuring that the right ideological views are the only ones that are taught with a view to fixing society in order to create perfect humans for a secular Millennium.