Issues

Tough T-Shirt truths on holocaust memorial day, January 27th

At the age of 18, I spent a year working as a language assistant in Berchtesgaden in Bavaria, West Germany.  There was nothing then in the bookstores or on the news stands about the Nazi complex at Obersalzberg just 3kms away.

intro_obersalz_terasse_g

It was mentioned now and again but I don’t remember trying to talk about it to anyone, in 1975 it felt kind of taboo. It’s different now. 5 years later I visited Buchenwald concentration camp, 8kms from Weimar famous for Goethe and Schiller and Bauhaus,  and for the first time in my life was directly confronted with the  horrors of the Nazi regime.

buchenwald2

We had an official 4 hour visit with a group and I even found myself returning the following day to take it all in on my own and in my own time, such was the impact it made on me.  It was later that year in July that I came back to England by train and  ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. On the Harwich to London train I remember seeing somebody wearing a Hitler’s European tour T-Shirt, very similar to this one.

hitlereuropeantour1939-45_1_106840_white_l

The writing on the T Shirt was:

  • September 1939 Poland
  • April 1940 Norway
  • May 1940 Luxembourg
  • May 1940 Holland
  • May 1940 Belgium
  • June 1940 France
  • September 1940 England Cancelled
  • April 1941 Yugoslavia
  • May 1941 Greece
  • June 1941 Crete
  • August 1942 Russia Cancelled
  • July 1945 Berlin Bunker.

I remember being totally shocked at seeing a guy wearing this T-shirt and couldn’t believe that it was not illegal in Britain to wear a T-Shirt like that, particulary after studying fascism and the denazification of Germany for the previous 6 months in Rostock on the Baltic coast in the German Democratic Republic. A few years later I  read about  one instance when a person wearing the “Adolf Hitler European Tour” T-shirt was asked to leave by Michael Stipe at one of REM’s European concerts. I wonder if  any other rock singers have asked people to remove T-Shirts at their concerts:) In fact you can still buy the T-Shirt at a “Buy Offensive  T-Shirts” website where you can also find the following comments:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAAHAHAHAH
good old hitler

I so want this!

LOL!

that made me laugh so hard i almost pissed myself. i wouldnt wear it in case i got punched but if i saw someone wearing it i’d have to shake their hand

it’s great u should have more of the hardcore offensive t-shirts

that is disgusting why would u sell such a t-shirt?

this is the best t shirt i have ever had. It’s taken me so long to find a new 1 so i have orderd 2 it is so fun. but it upsets a few people but who cares they should read it first. lol glad to get a new 1 many thanks

WOW! I’ve been looking for a hitler t shirt, cos I’ve been wondering if anybody still did them, y’know to shock. And this is AWESOME!!!! I want one, it’s brill. I also want one of hitler pretending to be marilyn monroe. It came to me and now i want one.

i think its a great t-shirt and anyone who has the time to complain about it needs to get a life! i`ll be buying one asap and wearing it down the pub!

around the world.

controversial but not vulgar. witty yet risky…. i like it.

So cool, would love being able to wear it, but I’m afraid people might think I’m a neo-nazi.  They might not get close enough, have time or interest in reading the whole thing  and might just see the picture of Hitler and his name, so I think i’ll skip this one 🙁

25 years later I was in a small town in Hungary near Lake Balaton and just outside the railway station there was a kiosk full of books like this in the window, glamourising famous Nazi figures and turning them into adventure stories.

hitlerbormanbook

I found myself similarly shocked by this. On Holocaust memorial day, today, I wondered if anyone else felt that things like this should be banned at all.  In the late seventies, I went on many anti-fascist demonstrations and discussed over and over again whether these things should be banned or not, friends of mine always used to say if you ban it, it will only go underground.

RAR_carnival_78_poster

We need to be able to study these things and therefore to have access to Nazi writings, Ian Kershaw has done some fantastic scholarly work on the whole phenomenon,  but there is  a time and place for everything, isn’t there?   The windows of  a  news stand in a small Hungarian town in a country where anti-semitism is far from dead might not be the appropriate  place. I  feel that we, as educators, have a responsibility to discuss these issues in classrooms across the curriculum and  that this should go hand in hand with banning any Nazi activity in whatever form it takes.    I have since visited Auschwitz 3 times, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen 3 times and  feel the same as I did on that train from Harwich to London 30 years ago. What do you think?

Finally, on a human rights and English language teaching course in Sinaia in Romania in 2003 we discussed ways in which to use this famous quote below, attibuted to Pastor Niemoller, himself imprisoned  first in Sachsenhausen and then Dachau. It is one I still use and one I always remember on Holocaust Memorial Day.  This date, January 27th, was chosen as it is the anniversary of the day in 1945 on which the Soviet Army liberated the largest Nazi concentration camp – Auschwitz-Birkenau.

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me–
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

This is another version of it which I had on the wall of my bedroom when I was at university.

niemoller

and which you can now get as a T-Shirt too. I know which T-Shirt I prefer!

first_they_came_for_the_communiststshirt

Open your eyes, time to wake up, enough is enough is enough is enough!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY_n2BtvKIE

24 thoughts on “Issues

  1. Thanks for an interesting read, Mark! I didn’t know that you had a blog.

    I spent my high school years in a Finnish city then known as the unofficial neo-Nazi capital of Finland. Those “Hitler: European Tour 1939-1945” shirts were quite frequently seen back then, and to be honest they didn’t really seem that bad considering that we also had groups of bald-headed teenagers walking the streets wearing black boots and army jackets decorated with swastikas and Finnish flags, stopping harmless long-haired humanists like myself to question their choices of clothing and hair style.

    (I perhaps make it sound worse than it actually was — most of these Hitler-wannabes were really quite harmless, as long as you steered clear of certain areas after midnight. The local pizzeria owner, whose shop window was smashed into pieces at least once a month, might of course disagree with me here. He was a refugee from some Middle Eastern country, if I remember correctly.)

    I remember that when I first saw one of those “Hitler: European Tour” shirts (worn by a couple of school friends, I think), I thought that they were kind of funny, even clever. And I’m not sure if I would consider the shirt inherently offensive even today. There is room for interpretation there. Then again, I wouldn’t wear one then, wouldn’t wear one now, and I would certainly feel uncomfortable if in a group with someone wearing one.

    In any case, I wouldn’t go about banning freedom of expression. I believe that by making Nazism and Hitler taboo subjects (as they still are today), we only make them more interesting for those who are lured in by the danger, rebellion and mystery that they can offer. If we ban everything Nazi related, the end result is a situation where we cannot really properly discuss these subjects because we have already outlawed the opposing side and their views. That’s not a proper discussion.

    A more productive approach in my view is one where these things are very openly discussed without trying to demonise Hitler or his followers. As someone who grew up in Finland, a country that fought on the side of the Axis but not necessarily for the Axis, I was taught to believe that WW2 was not quite as black and white as your standard Hollywood films would make you understand. There were no devils in WW2, only people. Which of course makes it all the more depressing.

    Anyway, back in my high school days, I had several rather interesting discussions with many neo-Nazis, and while I cannot claim to have talked anyone out of their beliefs, I think that those discussions did function as eye-openers, both for my discussion partners and myself. The thing is, far-right activists tend not to accept or even understand something that is different from what they are. If you can sit down and discuss these issues with them as equals, and show them that the “other” is really not so different and dangerous that they may have thought, you are already doing something. As far as I am concerned, neo-Nazis are perfectly entitled to their particular world views, as long as they practice their ideology within the rules agreed on by the society in which they live.

    I also remember that some of our best history lessons in high school were about the Second World War, with our history teacher giving the resident neo-Nazis in the classroom fairly open floor to air their views and interpretations of history. We discussed these views and the views offered by the more “mainstream” historians. There were debates, and far more unresolved issues than ones that the different sides could agree on, but looking back, I think that it worked very well in terms of our education.

  2. Dear Mark,
    I am the member of your Literature SIG and I’m happy to write to you.
    Talking about these things is sad. First I met the word “Jew” when I was about six or seven, spending my summer holiday in a very small Hungarian village, next to Nyíregyháza, when during a nice walk with my grandma, we passed a very nice building but in ruins. She started talking about Jews, who used to live there and were forced to abandon this house with some belongings and their whole family. I think I was too small to understand it but later I found a war book with photos and illustrations. I was so shocked that I had to put it down and -fortunately- I could not find it for a long time. I had lots of questions but I was told not to speak about things that had already passed.
    Some years later I went to ELTE University, Budapest and it had a teacher training college in Kazinczy utca, Budapest. I had a friend, she was a wonderful person, now she lives in Munich, Germany, but we write emails regularly. One day she invited me to her home, which was only five minutes from the school in Dob utca. And there… A room with a wall full of photos and letters and lovely little memories. And candles, fresh flowers every day…I understood everything in a minute. I got answers to all my questions and I just stood there, shocked, hurt and could not say a word.
    Her Mum started to speak. She smiled and told me horror….about the forty-two members of her family who all died in Auswitz. She was a small girl hiding at relatives in the country. She survived, the only one. And she gave me cookies and juice.
    Two years later I went to Auswitz with my husband. And we put flowers there. I have no more questions and need no more answers…

    Being teachers, we have to speak about that.In our school there are exhibitions on that day and special history lessons.
    And I always use Anna Frank’s Diary during the English lessons. It works! Everybody should try it! Thanks, Mark!

  3. Although I find every kind of extreme ideology somewhat repulsive, I don’t think censorship is the right solution. I completely agree with Vili in that banning things would actually make them more appealing to some people, especially to teenagers, who tend to like forbidden things.

    I used to go to a Catholic secondary School, the kind of school, which, I have to say are hotbeds of the far rightist Hungarian youth, so I knew quite a few people wearing such T-shirts. In my experience, if you condemn them with their ideas flat out, you aren’t likely to influence their way of thinking much. However, if you let them talk about their views, you give the impression that you accept them as persons even if you disagree with them and you can make more of an impact like that. Some kids just do it to provoke you anyway.

    So, I guess the bottom line is, not surprisingly, that the best way to tackle these issues is to deal with them in schools…

  4. thanks Tunde, Balint and Vili for contributing to the discussion. And thanks Tunde for sharing your very moving story with us. It’s great that in your school you have exhibitions and special history lessons to make students aware of these things.

    Vili, good to hear from you and thanks for relating all the school stories. I think debating these things in class is always good. I’ve been wondering how I would deal with somebody in one of my classes wearing a Nazi T-Shirt. I think if somebody walked into class wearing one I would want to discuss it with the whole group to first hear other people’s opinions about it and then discuss it further to get people to think about it more. If the majority view was then that the person should not wear it for whatever reasons they had come up with, then I would ask the person not to come to the class in it any more. If they came in it again I would then want to talk to other teachers and the headteacher about it to discuss it further. If the student continued to wear it and insisted on wearing it I would want to discuss forbidding them to wear it. There are a number of things which are not allowed in schools, is it too much to ask to include the wearing of Nazi clothes in this?

    Shocked to hear Balint that you think that Catholic schools in Hungary contain far-right opinions. If it’s true, why do you think that is? What kind of T-Shirts were they wearing, by the way?

    This looks like an interesting organisation wanting to deal with Jewish history in Hungary more openly http://www.centropa.hu (and an English version is available in the top right hand corner of the website)

    Anyway, thanks to all of you for voicing your opinions. It’s a difficult area, I know banning things is not ideal but Vili, maybe your pizzaria owner did suffer by not clamping down harder on the neo-nazis you mention.

    One other thing, as a process of denazification, wasn’t it important after 1945 in Germany to use legal means to suppress fascism?

  5. Hello Mark,
    good to hear from you again, it has been quite some time since our “Kiste” reunion in Rostock.
    As for the nazi topic, I agree with the previous debutants that making nazi ideology and symbols illegal cannot solve the problem of neo-naziism. However, this might be true for any country but Germany. German national-socialist ideology, symbols, signs etc. are illegal here, as you probably all know. So wearing a T-shirt like the ones you describe in the opening article of your blog would be pursued and punished as a criminal offence. This seems plausible as well as responsible – in the country whose political-military-economic complex and large parts of its population of that time stand for WW2 and the genocide called holocaust.
    Today, i.e. 65 years after WW2, I am not quite sure what to say whether owning or reading nazi literature and wearing symbols of the German national-socialist regime should be illegal any longer. As you say by yourself, Mark – it will only go underground, and it has here in Germany. A part of the badly-educated, often younger population have already founded groups of clearly fascist characters acting more or less secretly. Others whose political minds are less openly fascist but rather far- right wing vote for parties like DVU (Deutsche Volksunion), which is a legal one here – yet on a secret service watch and being on the cancellation list.
    “Denazification” is, IMHO, only a word denoting a process that it can only describe very vaguely. It is commonly used, or should I say: used by left wing people who tend to simplify things and then do not much less than generalize about them or even omit important aspects of the subject. Remember: Had there not been three Western and one Eastern zones of occupation the process often called “denazification” would probably have developed into another kind of extermination, this time under a so-called socialist symbol or ideology – and it partly did so. What, I have been asking myself and discussing with my parents, what would Stalin have done with hundreds of thousands of former nazi officials (judges, military officers of middle or lower rank, teachers, medical doctors and others more) had they not fled into the bi-zone? So the problem of inheriting the generation of nazi activists and fellow-runners resolved more or less automatically in the Soviet zone, the later “German Democratic Republic”. There have been cases revealed according to which former nazis held political office even in the GDR, by the way.
    As you say, Mark, it is a difficult area – nevertheless important to discuss. I am very happy that I am now allowed, have the freedom to do so. I had not been in the first thirty years of my life as a GDR citizen.
    Keep on blogging!

  6. First of all, maybe my statement about Catholic schools might have been a bit blunt. Obviously, I didn’t mean that all people there sympathise with ideas of the far right, though I do believe that those ideas are more common there I remember quite a few people in my school who wore T-shirts with symbols used by the far right (e.g.: Justice for Hungary T-shirts, árpádsáv, turul, or on some occasions vaskereszt, nyilaskereszt). They painted schwastikas all all over the place, listened to skinhead music and were constantly going on about jews, gypsies and all sorts of conspiracy theories.
    I think groups played a crucial role in all this. In classes where norm enforcer students had nationalist/neo-nazi ideas, the whole class got influenced by them, whereas other groups resisted this trend and extremist people became isolated.
    Why especially in Catholic schools? Maybe families with far right political views prefer Catholic schools; patriotism promoted by such schools turns into nationalism; nostalgia for pre WW1 Hungary and the Horthy-era; !boy classes (there are less of them nowadays but I had the misfortune of spending 6 years of my life in one of them); along with general factors such as the lack of proper history teaching, teachers not knowing what’s going on among students.
    I think I ought to emphasise that the above does not apply to all students in those schools, and in the cases when it does it is often a stupid youth-trend, though still harmful. Few people believe in those things seriously, albeit that’s still too many.

  7. There’s no point in arguing with Nazis. An open and intelligent exchange of views might seem to be the answer to many problems but it doesn’t work here because you need to have at least a minimum level of common ground for it, which doesn’t exist between Nazis and non-Nazis. They will never accept facts or even the most evident notions. By arguing with somebody, you actually accept the legitimacy of their viewpoints, even when you fully disagree with them. This I will never do with these people.
    Luckily, I’ve never had to face this exact issue in my classroom; it’s bad enough that I’ve had to deal with quite a lot of racist opinions (not much better, eh? same trash, really). I had a rather harsh method. I told them I was willing to discuss these issues with them until they turn 18 – from then on they’re fully responsible for all their actions. Once you’re 18 and still hold racist views, you immediately forfeit your right to a discussion with me. When those who were over 18 demanded their right to speak citing freedom of speech I told them that those who want to use a tool granted by democracy must first accept that democracy is based on the idea that all men are created equal – if you don’t accept this, you’re not entitled to the privilegies democracy provides; you must make a choice.
    I told you I was harsh.

  8. “I feel that we, as educators, have a responsibility to discuss these issues in classrooms across the curriculum and that this should go hand in hand with banning any Nazi activity in whatever form it takes. ”

    Dear old mate, blogger , tweeter , what next!?

    Please define for me “Nazi activity in what ever form it takes” – so I understand what exactly you propose to ban

    PS – just back from China and struggling with the time – speak soon

    M
    x

  9. Hi Mark, thanks for pointing out your new blog to us–and kudos for having gone through with it. I’m still stuck in the planning period! 🙂
    This is indeed a tough call. I talked to a politician of the Austrian Green party not too long ago, and he said he believed in the strength of our democracy. This is how he put it: “Our democracy, like any developed one, is strong enough to cope with idiots.” In other words, he believed it would be justifiable to abolish those laws that ban idiots from voicing their opinions and ideas.
    But I’m not sure I agree. Personally, I’m glad those T-shirts can’t be worn here in Austria. And I’m glad there are certain rules that establish a certain minimum consensus on how to view these issues. Austria is famous for handling nearly all areas of life with a “Laissez-faire” approach. In this case, that would be bad. The political hygiene is in a deplorable state. One of the presidents of our parliament openly sympathizes with far-right ideas, as does the leader of the largest opposition party, which was in the government until 2007. The cordon sanitaire has largely vanished. So we do seem to need rules that clearly state to aforementioned idiots that here’s where repulsive ends and criminal begins.

  10. First of all thanks Michael and Gregor for giving us a perspective from Germany and Austria, the two countries in the world which probably have the strictest laws against Nazi activity. This isn’t surprising and you would probably find more people there than in Britain who would support banning of all Nazi activity, this is different from not allowing you to discuss these things which you said, Michael, was not allowed in the GDR.

    With the fragile situation in Austria Gregor, I agree with you that abolition of these laws would give the green light to neo-nazis not only in Austria but throughout the world. I don’t think that these things can be discussed in a kind of vacuum, there are important historical reasons why these laws exist and these two countries have a responsibility to lead the way.

    Mick, you say what kind of Nazi activity would I ban? Well in Austria and Germany, definitely Nazi parties and marches and the wearing of fascist symbols, as is the case there. In Britain with our political culture, one could argue that we have the luxury to allow parties like the BNP to exist because it is not seen as a descendent of German Nazi parties. I disagree, I think the act of campaigning for the banning of fascist parties and discussing what fascist might mean in a 2010 context would be an important contribution to getting people to think harder about these things even if the dominant political culture remained against any prohibition.

    I know that banning cannot in itself solve socio-economic problems that help to create the conditions for neo-nazism to flourish, but laws forbidding Nazi activities in Britain would be a sign that we are serious about making sure that those who argue for white supremacy will not be tolerated. I think therefore that any party that advocates anything which argues for racial supremacy and any march which does the same should be banned.

    It is our historical responsibility after Auschwitz and everything that Auschwitz stood for. I wonder whether my views are shaped and influenced by visiting several concentrations camps. I just feel we owe it to those who died there and their families to do all we can to prevent this happening again in any form whatsoever.

    Elek, you say that you would discuss these things at school up to the age of 18 and I agree with you that this should happen alongside all the other anti- racist education which often does take place of the kind that Tunde described. You also say: “ By arguing with somebody, you actually accept the legitimacy of their viewpoints, even when you fully disagree with them. This I will never do with these people” There would also be a very important reason why it might be unwise to argue with these people and that would be one’s own personal safety. Neo-nazis are not people who I would actively seek out to go for a drink with.

    In Hungary there has been an upsurge in fascist, nationalist and far-right organisations.
    The rise in the number of such organisations has led to a rise in racist violence and attacks against the Roma and property owned by Jews and Jewish organisations which has resulted in a number of Roma homes and Jewish property being attacked.

    All of this and the fact that I have lived much of my life in countries which were ruled by or occupied by Nazis has influenced my absolute zero tolerance for anything Nazi.

    As an educator, of course I see the need for more than just banning. Discussion is important but I can’t help thinking that the freedom of speech for Nazis comes at a very high price for those people against which their beliefs are directed. As Gregor said: “One of the presidents of our parliament openly sympathizes with far-right ideas, as does the leader of the largest opposition party, which was in the government until 2007. The cordon sanitaire has largely vanished. So we do seem to need rules that clearly state to aforementioned idiots that here’s where repulsive ends and criminal begins.”

    Thanks to everybody for the comments and as this blog is particularly focused on the classroom. If anybody has any experiences from any country about dealing with this in schools it would be good to hear from you. I know if I was head of a school, anti-racist education would be a key part of its ethos.

  11. Hi all!

    Thanks a lot for the interesting reads and thanks Mark fro bringing up an interesting topic. I teach at a Catholic school in Austria. So what is my point of view:
    I clearly am in favour of banning any fascist or Nazi activities, symbols or propaganda. As someone said earlier, it is impossible to discuss rationally with people who are extremists (there is a pretty good book by an Austrian philosopher: “Wie man mit Fundementalisten diskutiert ohne den Verstand zu verlieren.”) Real discussions are only possible with people who want to talk about facts and are ready to trash their views if there are too many facts that are in contradiction with their ideas. If someone just discusses to force his/her ideas on others, there is no point. You cannot reason with extremists and you cannot use ethical views they do not share to persuade them. Thus, if you want to minimize these kinds of activities, there is no way but to ban them.

    I do believe that democracy is not about having everyone say what they want and choose who they want to rule. It is about preventing dictatorships (and, ultimately, bloodshed). It is about being able to get rid of bad rulers without having to kill them. This is how open and closed societies can be distinguished (K.R. Popper). So a democracy also has the right to hinder those who would install a dictatorship or make the society a (more) closed one. The common ground here are the Human Rights. Everyone is required to keep to these standards. So, I believe, democratic societies (and not only Austria and Germany!) have the duty to monitor, and prevent activities that would damage and undermine the human rights. Thus I think it is right that, say, downloading Nazi music would be punishable with a prison sentence (here in Austria it might be up to 20 years, though sentences in reality are never so harsh).

    I guess in Austria, there is a small minority of Nazis who feel nostalgia towards times long past. The much bigger problem is that there are more and more people, especially young ones, who say human rights are too lenient with migrants and that Austria should be much stricter with immigrants. While openly using Nazi ideas is frowned upon, blatant, unreflected and populist criticism of foreigners, especially Muslims is en vogue, at least with up to 20-25% of the population if not more. While any culture can (and should?) be criticized factually, it is my opinion that this tendency is pretty disturbing and somewhat frightening.

    School and Teaching: This is also the case in my school. We have mostly girls and while there is a wide variety of opinions, I feel that anti-immigrant opinions are on the rise. In my lessons I try to raise awareness of other cultures, eg. by reading “Desert Flower”. Once I invited someone from “SOS Menschenrechte” an organization that cares for asylum-seekers (also teenage ones) and the expert explained the Austrian system to the students and gave them some facts. Hopefully one or two (of the 22) have now started thinking more – you tend to become humble as a teacher…

  12. Joining the previous comments: thanks, Mark for starting this discussion. Sorry for not having written earlier, I may just have too many thoughts on the subject to organize them into something sensible. Will give it a try, though.

    Banning or not banning extremist symbols is indeed a very controversial issue. For while it is true that banning often backfires, because the forbidden is always exciting, I also agree that letting racist voices be heard and advertised means ridiculing democracy.

    What I feel whenever the media deals with the extreme rightist parties and movements in Hungary is that these organizations are getting exactly what they want by this. They want publicity, they want attention, and they want to seem bigger than they are. By getting all this, they eventually manage to reach all those who are disillusioned, miserable, badly educated or just simply angry at the world, and there seem to be far too many such people here in Hungary.
    Were these groups given less publicity, I’m convinced that they’d have much less followers, and would cause much less damage.

    In the current state, however, they are in the spotlight, weaving in all those who can be manipulated, and terrifying most of the rest. They are organizing huge demonstrations at central public locations in Budapest, dressed in all black, often carrying weapons of some kind and displaying racist symbols. I can’t help but shudder at the sight of them, and shake my head in disbelief: Today? in 2010? In Hungary??

    However, this is just a small (even though growing) percent of the society. What I find more disturbing and exasperating is the ignorance and lack of tolerance displayed by “regular” citizens. I started a program of tolerance-teaching in a high school, and I’m astonished by clever 19-20 year old students repeatedly uttering racist remarks (about the Roma, the Chinese, the Jews, the Afro-Americans and the homosexuals), very often without noticing, or without understanding what’s wrong with what they said.

    Also, just yesterday, I visited an institution dealing with people with physical or mental handicap, a kind of a “theme park”, where visitors can experience how these people live their lives – an institute meant to advance tolerance – and was shocked by the discriminative words a hearing impaired used to refer to homosexuals, and by the even more offensive sign he used for them. And all this in order to amuse the youth…

    It seems to me that as long as tolerance-teaching is not spread and cohesive, is not incorporated into education in more than one subject, and as long as human rights organizations and tolerance-educators don’t learn to cooperate, no development should be expected. A shift towards tolerance won’t be able to start from above, it has to start from where everyone can be reached: school.

    One last thought: while I agree that the most extreme of the lot is probably not reachable through communication, I do believe in the efficiency of a dialogue between extreme rightists and leftists. I personally know of civilized debates being held between civilian intellectuals from both groups, where both parties are allowed to express their views and arguments, which are then discussed. After all, the first step towards understanding the other is to understand their motives. On both sides. And once a nationalist starts on ranting about the importance of preserving traditions, what could come more naturally than nodding enthusiastically, and then adding: “Exactly! And that’s why I preserve my Jewish/Roma/etc. traditions….” For sometimes there is more common ground than one would think.
    I believe that communication is a powerful and effective tool in developing tolerance and empathy, and hope never to think otherwise.

  13. thought about you today when I was at the Holocaust museum again with my methodology group and a group of secondary school students and their teacher. We want to develop this together and am interested in what happens in class next.

    Agree with you completely that educators in these fields should come together and there should be a lot of projects in schools. Great what you are doing with your work, am looking forward to seeing the results.

    And yeah, great to emphasise the Roma and Jewish traditions here in Hungary when people talk about the importance of traditions.

    Definitely agree with you that giving radical right groups the oxygen of publicity helps them. One of the 16-year-olds today thought that the Jobbik (the radical right wing group here in Hungary) might get over 20% in the next election). Frightening that she should think that this might even be possible.

    Keep up the good work with the tolerance/empathy classes!

    • Hi ,
      I would be interested in the result of the visit to the Holocaust museum and the lesson afterwards. Nowadays I have been struggling with growing antisemitism in my classes and I am thinking of giving up the fight as attacks on me personally are growing and unfortunately I feel the same from some colleagues ay well.

      RecentlyI’ve taken some pictures to class I have brought from Auschwitz and a little booklet with facts relevant of the issue as some of my students expressed they didn’t think there was such a thing as Holocaust at all.
      These students referred to sources they accept as authentic about these issues and among them there was one boy who had come with me to Norway to an intercultural meeting …

      So now I feel depressed and I know I should go on dealing with the issue but I don’t think I can change some of my colleagues’
      attitude.
      I am happy I found this discussion because I would really need some back up in my struggle.

  14. will let you know Zsuzsa, my students are all going to write lesson plans based on today’s visit, imagining how they would work with students on these issues. It’s so important in Hungary these days. If anyone is reading this from Slovakia, Romania, Serbia or Croatia and has anything to add from classroom experiences or school experiences about these issues it would be good to hear from you. We’ve already had some contributions from Austria and Germany.

    And Zsuzsa on Friday 19th March at 3pm we are planning on having an IATEFL event on empathy and tolerance, would you be interested in contributing something? I could get a couple of my students to come as well and talk about their experiences of going to the holocaust museum

    How many students said that there wasn’t a holocaust? Where do they get those ideas from?

    Glad you are happy to have found this discussion and you can be sure that there are other people working on doing something about these awful things going on at the moment.
    Just one last question, what kind of attacks are you subjected to…if you feel like talking about it? I remember 10 years ago on our course in Esztergom-Kertvaros when you got some strength from our workshops on identity. Thanks for commenting and good to hear from you.

  15. As for the holocaust negation it happened in more than one class.
    I’ll just mention one of them. I asked the students to send a postcard form a place they would like to stay for a time and then a boy answered he would send it from Auschwitz. When I told him it is not really good to joke about a place where half a million Hungarian jews were sent into gas chambers he answered it didn’t happen at all, he said that’s what he’d read somewhere.

    It was the first time I had experienced such a reaction in class so I was simply flabbergasted and since then it has happened in another class as well in another context. One can be interested in the reaction of the other students.

    Well, there was just one boy who began to argue against this statement, the others were just silent.
    Now I really don’t feel very safe so I don’t know what the best thing to do is. I felt much safer 10 years ago in Esztergom because I was sure that I was safe among teachers who are interested in intercultural issues. Nowadays I don’t feel the same…

  16. Mark, it has been interesting to read the comments on your blog.

    The persistent attraction to Nazism and the persistent prejudice doesn’t really surprise me–perhaps because I have taught courses on the Holocaust, on American Slavery, and on Race Relations in America, I am sometimes too conscious that this kind of behavior points to something radically wrong in many human beings that we have to control and fight all the time. I remember being in Bratislava a couple of months after the Velvet Revolution, and seeing anti-Semitic slurs on walls, even though the city had very few Jews left. It was a kind of wild outburst of anger leveled at what? A kind of hatred that was flailing at phantoms while waiting for more concrete objects to hate–probably because such anger was inside of these violent people who deeply hated themselves and had to project their inner messiness outward.

    I know that to curb this in some way is why many people teach–at least in part. The Holocaust has taught us many lessons about how we need to treat people with more respect, how we need to fight the terrible means by which people are educated to hate, how we cannot let our guard down. And it has also sadly taught too many people that such killing on a mass scale is very, very possible in a mass society–and these people, as the past 70 years have show, have learned this terrible knowledge all too well. So we must keep fighting these “dark” learners because they have such great energy. So blogs like this are good. And classes on the Holocaust , on genocide, and on the nature of prejudice are good. And putting pressure on politicians is good, as has been done in Germany.

    Teaching the Holocaust made me doubt every belief I had. It throws everything in shadow. For example, how can one account for millions of children dying? Where was the human race while it happened? Where was God? What in humanity could let this kind of hatred thrive enough so that it would have any chance to act? For me, the knowledge of those children threaten every kind of meaning I know. At the same time, it forces a person to go on fighting such prejudice.

    Mark, thanks for asking me to write here. Jim

    • thanks Jim

      I too remember going to Brecht’s grave in East Berlin in June 1990 and seeing “sau Jude” (pig Jew) painted on the gravestone. I was totally shocked and remember saying that this was also what 1989 was about. 20 years on, of course, it’s much worse. On the train coming back from Slovakia this week I saw a young skinhead teenage guy in a nazi type T Shirt, and black boots and thought: “Where have we failed”

      The econmic conditions in Hungary are such at the moment that the extreme right is growing and looks to blame Jewish people as they blamed Jews for the carve up of Hungary at Trianon in 1920. They also look to scapegoat the Roma population.
      You are right Jim, we have to teach about the holocaust, we have to blog about the holocaust and we “cannot let our guard down”. This certainly underpins my teaching, as well as everything else I try to teach.

      Thanks for contributing and let me share with you and everybody else an extract from an article by the Candadian journalist Anna Porter (http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/holocaust/) which she wrote last year.

      ” TATÁRSZENTGYÖRGY, HUNGARY — With its cream-coloured houses, red tile roofs, white church and spring flowers, Tatárszentgyörgy has all the trappings of a bucolic village.

      But at the far end of the cemetery, on the outskirts of town, there is a freshly dug grave covered with plastic flowers and a few wilting lilies. Beneath a large wreath of white silk roses, a simple marker reads: “Csorba Robert 1981-2009; Csorba Robert Jr. 2004-2009: Rest in Peace.”

      Father and son lie together – just as they died together.

      On the evening of Feb. 23, the community of 1,200 about 50 kilometres south of Budapest was the scene of a deadly attack on members of Hungary’s Roma minority.

      It wasn’t the first – there have been at least 18 assaults with seven lives lost in the past year – and others have died since. But the killing of Robert Csorba and his five-year-old son have made the village a symbol of evil in a country that, in the same year little “Robika” was born, joined the European Union with high hopes for a bright, post-communist future.

      I have come to Tatárszentgyörgy because I am writing a book about what Europe has become in the 20 years since the Iron Curtain parted and members of the former Soviet bloc welcomed democracy. The new freedom, I have found, has brought something that its proponents never anticipated: public demonstrations of spite, racism and intolerance.

      The dark forces of hatred have been embraced by people so unhappy with what that future has brought, they’ve gone looking for someone to blame.

      Now, the world is awakening: This week, Hungary called in the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to help track down the killers, and raised the reward for their capture to more than $250,000.

      The great Polish intellectual Adam Michnik says that “Central Europe came as a messenger not only of freedom and tolerance, but also of hatred and intolerance. It is here that the last two world wars began.”

      It is also here that the Holocaust was perpetrated.

      Researching Kasztner’s Train, my 2007 book on the wartime fate of Hungary’s Jewish community, was a horrific reminder of how easily nations can slip into carnage. But the war ended in 1945. Who would have thought that less than 65 years later, the ghosts of that demonic past would come crawling out of their graves?”

  17. After some hesitation I decided to share my experience which happened a couple of years ago.
    We organised a so called ‘intercultural’ competition in my school where students attended so called ‘stations’ in groups of five or six
    to solve interesting game like tasks all in connection with culture .
    The students had a kind of passport in which they collected their scores giving a funny name for themselves so that we could easily identify them later.
    There were about ten stations and in the end I had to collect the passports to see who the winner was. To my utmost astonishment
    one of the teams went through all the stations with the name ‘genocide’ and nobody noticed it. I suggested we should disqualify the team but didn’t understand how it could happen they could reach the end of the game with this name.
    After some investigation it turned out which member of the team was the inventor of the name and the others admitted they didn’t even know what it meant exactly.
    Sadly nobody thought then it would be worth dealing with this issue in depth so life just went on without any consequence…

  18. “I found myself similarly shocked by this. On Holocaust memorial day”

    Yes I found myself shocked also, when I see a people with “red star”, “communism writings” and young boys using Che Guevara t-shirts, bacause, 2 of my grandfathers dies in Siberia, killed under the name of “communism”, but we know that 95% of the communist where jeews. My father and other millions of people from eastern europe died under the communism, witch was leaded by jeews.
    What do you think then, we should love the Jews???

    “with banning any Nazi activity in whatever form it takes.”

    Will you bann the communism, the left-wing activity also? I don’t think so, because Hitler is the biggest enemy in your mainstream mind, Lenin is acceptable.

    There are two options: or you are a jew, or you are a braniwashed acamdemical, that knows about the word, just reading books, that were written by the victors of the second war.

    If you talk about nazism anywhere, on a blog or in the community, never forget talking about millions of people died under the communist jews before the 2. war, under the 2. war and after the 2. war also, otherwise you are meaningful, so don’t talk about such thinks.

    Please do not be unilaterally, and write also about the more-more biggest pain of the millions all around the world, caused by Lenin and Stalin

    If you delete, my comment, it proves that I am right.

    • I condemn the horrors of Stalinism as well as the horrors of fascism.

      The blogpost was written to commemorate holocaust day and there is an issue today about how we deal with racism on all levels. As a teacher there is a responsibility to deal with racism and that was the motivation for writing about these things. I am unsure about how to deal with it as I know it is a very complex issue. As we have seen in the replies, teachers in Austria and Germany have said that Nazi symbols are banned in their countries as symbols of racism and I was interested in knowing how teachers feel about these things and how it should be dealt with in schools.

      I studied Eastern European Studies at university and am well aware of the dreadful things that were done in the Soviet Union under Stalin, I also lived together with Polish people who all suffered in various ways as a result of what happened in the Soviet Union.

      Best Wishes
      Mark

  19. Dear Mark

    The roots of the facism and nationalism have nothing to do with Hitler or Mussolini. My opinion is, there is no sense using the current mainstream, denying a generation, a nation, the germans for their natural feelings.
    Just read the bible Mark – the old testament – written by jews 3 thousand years ago, is the most racist book in the word. Jews 3 thousand a year ago, talks in the old testament about their masacre over other natinos, and gives the impression that this is good.
    The whole atmosphere of the old testamet, is that the Jews are all over the other nations, the Jews are superior. So here is the source of the facism.
    What happend in the first half of the 20th century, its just a small episod, in the history, my opionion is, rather caused by the Jews than the Germans.
    Laws against the Jews were in all over the history of the word, everywhere. There were cities and countrys from Spain through France up to Moscow in the last 1000 years, which had no let Jews to live there, or they have laws against them.
    What do you think Mark, why was this? The whole Europe was racist?
    No Mark, no they don’t because, the european nations never make so serious laws against each other, like they made against Jews.
    You don not have to understand Hitler and the nazism, you should study this so important parts of the history, and the nazism and facism will be a natural event in the history. The facism wasn’t invented by Mussolini or Hitler, it was just a natural reaction of a nation, such of the other nation’s was before.
    I read that nowadays, the Holocaust industry “wants to expleain” to British people also, that in the deepth of his heart, he is also racist, and hate Jews. Yes Mark, because Churchill also hated the Jews, like so many other leaders from all over the world.
    Jews just caused wars in the history. Now we see in Palestine also. The world is in the eve of the 3 World War, why Mark? Due to the Palestinian people??? Do not be stupid.

  20. Dear Mark!

    I know it’s an old post but I am delighted that you have written a post on this issue! The holocaust is indeed one of the most (if not the most) important phenomena in European history.

    The fact is that even though the happening of the Holocaust has certainly changed Europe’s soul we have yet to understand it, and without proper education we never will. The Holocaust itself isn’t taught properly in contemporary Hungarian education. And even worse, Hungary’s part of this genocide isn’t taught at all. It isn’t a surprise that the majority just wants to bury their heads in the sand ,but if we do not face it and do not try to understand, it will lead to things like you have mentioned in your post.

    If you don’t answer the questions of the masses for when? how? and more importantly why? The obvious reaction to the feelings of shame and guilt will be anger and frustration. And I think this is where antisemitism begins.

    I was lucky enough that I wasn’t born into these horrible and inhuman times, therefore the sight of someone wearing a swastika, arrowcross, red star or the hammer and the sickle does not invoke fear in me. The feeling I can only think of is ignorance and stupidity. If someone’s wants to project this image of him/herself than so be it, at least we know what type of a person we are dealing with.

    As much as Anti-Nazi laws were justified in Germany during the fifties (think about it, the men and women who took part in the Nazi movement were still around and active), I think these same laws in these times hold us back just as much. You cannot achieve understanding through force. Hitler and Stalin tried to ban art they found dangerous and labelled them as “Entartete Kunst” or “Counter Revolutionist”. They were right in a sense, freedom of speech is indeed dangerous, but if we sacrifice our freedom for safety and give in to terror how are we different than they were? “Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird.”-as Nietzsche said.

    As for the gentleman above. I can tell you that racism isn’t nation specific and it’s universal. The racism and violence you can find in the Old Covenant is the racism you can find in Mein Kampf. A nation after being defeated in a war trying to find a scapegoat instead of trying to learn from it (it’s easier and it had been an integral part of every culture that sprang from an Abrahamic religion the goat in scape goat is of course not accidental [Leviticus 16.]).

    Again the reason why antisemitism became so big in Europe during the middle ages is not because of their religion or their customs it’s because of scapegoatism. The European Crusader army during the Third Crusade was beaten mercilessly by Saladin. So other than accepting the fact that they had lost, they found somebody to blame. The only group of people who had a different religion in Europe were the Jews at that time. As they did not want to mess with the Islamic world again, they easily found a scapegoat which could take all the blame instead of themselves.

    Sorry if I was a bit long or off. I just found your post relevant and interesting.

  21. Hello Mark,

    I first saw this shirt in a booth in central London’s tourist area, and by coincidence a Russian couple were in the same shop, and also noticed the shirt – the Russian man burst out laughing and bought it, noticed me looking and chuckling as well, and said something along the lines of “We showed him who’s boss, no?” with a big smile. I doubt he was a Nazi, rather he was just a guy who could appreciate a joke and had some pride that his country helped to beat one of the most evil regimes in human history.

    I think that you and the other commenters have misunderstood the t-shirt – it’s actually a pro-UK/Russia anti-nazi shirt. The point is to show that Hitler got his arse kicked by the Brits and the Russians (obviously others were involved as well – but it’s a joke shirt not a political manifesto), and to do so in a way that makes people laugh.

    As for banning fascist symbols – any law should be evaluated in two ways. How well does it achieve what it intends to do. And is its intention more good than bad.

    Example: US prohibition of alcohol. Its intention was good – to reduce the deaths and illness from alcohol, which are huge. Millions die each year because of booze. Rapes, child abuse, job absenteeism, fraud, car crashes, murders, beatings all are higher when people are drunk out of their mind. However, it was illiberal – responsible drinkers were victimised just as much as alcoholics. But that was not why it was repealed. It was repealed for two very simple reasons – one, it created a violent criminal black market in alcohol. Two, it simply failed to stop drinking. Any law that fails to achieve its aim is a bad law, no matter how well-intentioned.

    So the first test for these Nazi ban laws is – do they work? Do they reduce Nazism, racism, and so on? A quick look at incidences of Nazism in places without these laws, e.g. UK, Ireland, Spain, shows that these laws don’t make the slightest bit of difference. Germany and Austria haven’t reduced Nazism to below the levels of these other countries by using these bans. The laws therefore fail the first test – they simply aren’t effective at all. Since laws cost time and money to enforce (police arrests, investigations, trials, prison time), all ineffective laws should be totally abolished.

    Secondly, is the intention more good than bad? Well we know the good – trying to discourage a horrible belief. What about the bad?

    The first problem is that it is illiberal – people have the right to think what they want (until they start to act on it in a way that harms others). Banning it brings us down to their level – Nazi Germany also banned things they disagreed with, and burned books they disliked. It also gives them publicity, and lets them play the victim card “Oh, look how the Jews and the Establishment are conspiring to ban us!”.

    A more serious objection is that it sets a dangerous precedent and gives excessive power to the state – the power to regulate expression of beliefs. Although the government is correct that Nazism is wrong, having the power to ban it means that they also have the power to ban other ‘offensive’ ideologies – and the next one they ban may not be wrong, it may just be controversial or ahead of its time. Remember socialism was once banned, so was homosexuality, so was atheism and blasphemy, so was the idea that the earth revolved around the sun, so was Christianity. Giving the government the right to ban expression of objectionable views means they have the power to ban reasonable views as well as unreasonable ones. The state is simply not trustworthy enough or smart enough to tell the difference reliably. It is better to stick to our principles of liberty and put up with the slight inconvenience of having to let objectionable views be promoted by a tiny minority of deluded fools, rather than try to crush them at the cost of losing our freedom of thought and expression in EVERY controversial or unpopular view. Freedom is too valuable and endangered a principle to sacrifice for such a tiny gain.

    People who understand liberty, like John Stuart Mill, Noam Chomsky or Voltaire, realise that creating a category of thought crime is inherently illiberal, and so they all opposed laws that banned ideas or publications. Just like you can’t bomb for peace, you can’t censor for freedom. Free speech is meaningless if it is only for speech you agree with – even Hitler was in favour of speech he agreed with. By definition, free speech means freedom for others to promote those ideas you find most horribly objectionable.

    Mill also made the excellent point that law is not the only sanction on behaviour. There is also the very powerful tool of social disapproval. In the UK an openly Nazi person has vastly diminished job prospects, a poor social reputation, and will be shunned by most of civilised society. That by itself is sufficient to show anyone tempted by Nazi views that they will suffer a very high cost if they openly promote it. And it works – most Nazis here (there are not many) are closet Nazis, they don’t dare to say what they think. Also, by allowing the views to be heard, neutral observers can see them demolished in debate, they have no ‘taboo’ allure, and we don’t waste money pointlessly hauling broke morons through the already overcrowded and clogged criminal justice system. Imagine being a judge or lawyer, having to waste time prosecuting such trivial cases, when there are rapists, child abusers, murderers to deal with – i.e. REAL criminals who have actually ruined victims lives with violent acts.

    It’s like a policeman who uses an illegal tactic to jail a true criminal. This time it could be argued it was ‘good’ – he got the right result but with a bad method, by breaking the rules. But it means in future he and others will use that same bad method and sometimes it will result in the wrong innocent person being set up. It is almost always a bad idea to use a bad method to get one good result. Maybe if national survival or millions of lives were at stake, it would be an arguably acceptable necessity as a one-off. But for something which there is no consequential difference? Countries without these laws don’t have worse Nazi problems. So it is a bad precedent and illiberal, and pointless – therefore these laws should themselves be banned.

    Another problem is that you can’t access the source material. Why did people flock to Hitler? What parts of his message did they like? Well, the logical place to start is to read Hitler’s political manifesto – except you can’t, it’s banned. How can you understand why otherwise normal people would follow a psychopath, if you don’t see his methods of appealing to them? How can you critique his arguments if you don’t know what they were? How can you educate the young to see the flaws in Hitler’s arguments, if they can’t study the text? If some neo-Nazi defends Hitler and says he was misunderstood, how can you overturn that argument by quoting some nasty thing Hitler said in his book, if you aren’t allowed to read the book.

    It is obvious why these laws exist – so that Austrians and Germans can feel a bit less guilty about what happened under their ancestors; and so they can avoid the embarrassment of having to cough uncomfortably when a few morons wear Nazi regalia in their midst. Sacrificing liberty to make Germans have it a bit easier in remembering their history is bad on both sides. If we are going to use force to deter Nazi beliefs, then there should be a swastika in every German and Austrian town’s museum so people remember better what happened and how those societies turned a blind eye to industrialised mass murder, genocide, and conquest.

    Banning these publications is an infantile piece of gesture-politics, and it is an insult to every adult citizen to assume they are so moronic that one glance at a Nazi symbol will turn them into a murderous racist. It would be better if German and Austria spent a bit more time educating their police force on not being racist to dark-skinned immigrants, or removing the legal obligation to show your ‘papers’ to the authorities for just walking around in public. Those are the real modern-day ‘neo-nazi’ threats that actually exist and harm members of the public – not a few idiots drunkenly Zeig Heiling at their local neo-nazi clubhouse.

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