from Hacker News

One in five young Americans think the Holocaust is a myth

by tbdenney on 12/8/23, 12:13 PM with 13 comments

• by chiefalchemist on 12/8/23, 1:01 PM

  And it's likely [1]...

  - 1 in 5 believe the earth is flat.

  - 2 in 7 believe in the Easter Bunny.

  - 4 in 10 don't know that 4 of 10 is 40%

  - 3 in 8 have never left their own state.

  - 7 in 10 want to grow up to be online "influencers".

  - And so on...

  The point is, if you're looking for a factual but clickbait-ready headline just survey young Anericans. Why is The Economist dabbling is such LCD "journalism"?

  [1] These aren't factual. They're fictional and for effect.

• by simonblack on 12/9/23, 2:41 AM

  More accessible knowledge on the part of today's youth means that they see the Holocaust as 'nothing special'.

  Everything that the Germans did to the Jews in the Holocaust is no different from what the Jews are doing, and have been doing to others for decades. Hence 'nothing special' about the Holocaust.

  It took the Germans roughly a generation, about 30 years, to escape the conflation of Germans and 'Nazis'. It's taken the Russians a generation, roughly 30 years, to escape the conflation of Russians and 'Commies'. It will take at least 30 years for the Jews to escape the conflation of Jews and 'Israeli Zionists'.

• by ZeroGravitas on 12/8/23, 1:57 PM

  A quick google suggests this isn't particularly surprising or out of line with polling over the last decade, though other polls and reporting on them seem to lean heavier on young people simply not knowing anything about the Holocaust rather than actively disbelieving it e.g.

  > In perhaps one of the most disturbing revelations of this survey, 11 percent of U.S. Millennial and Gen Z respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust.

  https://www.claimscon.org/millennial-study/

• by bell-cot on 12/8/23, 1:19 PM

  What fraction of young Americans could even vaguely describe Joseph Stalin's 3-decade reign of terror (1922-1952), let alone have a sense of how many millions he killed? Or the Romani Holocaust? Or the horrors of King Leopold II's so-called Congo Free State? Or ...

  (Yes, it's interesting that the article calls the Holocaust "one of modern history’s greatest crimes" - but gives zero words to any of the others. And there's no hint that the poll asked about any of the others.)

  If your knowledge of history is pretty minimal, but you keep seeing "Because Holocaust!" used as some kinda magical rhetorical/moral trump card...then having serious doubts about that "Holocaust" thing is fairly reasonable, AS AN UNINFORMED EMOTIONAL REACTION. [Please re-read the shouty part there 3 times, before you angrily respond.]

  Vs. if you do know the history - the Holocaust's "special cultural/moral status" still really sticks out. My pet theory is that, from the PoV of well-educated, middle- and upper-class western whites, the Jewish Holocaust victims "look" like just-one-thing-different-from-me analogs. Vs. the poor Slavs, Romani, Black, etc. victims do not - so killing "their kind" in 7-or-so-digit quantities just doesn't push the same deep emotional buttons.