Those who forget the past...

Recently one of my classes met at the Cohen Centre for Holocaust Studies at Keene, where we were treated to a presentation by the director of the centre. Without going into any specifics, the class revolved around how to teach the Holocaust in American high school history classes. It was a fascinating, thought-provoking discussion which I may share more details of at a later date. There were things I agreed with, but some which I found more contentious. But never mind all that.

Inevitably, the subject of Holocaust denial – and how to handle it in the classroom – was raised, and it turns out that this, tragically, is an issue that comes up all-too frequently in New Hampshire schools, which on first thought is awfully surprising, but on second, not so much. Again, a sensitive topic for a later discussion, perhaps.

I thought this was an apt time to pluck out an old, festering post I put together whilst in Bishkek. In the interests of transparency, I’m providing this disclaimer, and I’ve decided to include it, more or less unedited, below. I wrote about 95% of it in Bishkek and then struggled with a fitting conclusion, which I haven’t tried to rectify now. Conclusions have always been a weakness of mine, and though I’m not too happy that it ends somewhat abruptly without a heartfelt wrap-up, I will leave it as is and offer up a light-hearted epilogue in lieu of.

This was originally composed sometime in March 2009:


Political [in]correctness gone mad?

Although I’ve promised myself – in order to maintain my sanity – not to delve into too many stories regarding my teaching, this one is just too good to pass up. It is also quite shocking and tragic and has left me bitter in so many ways.

The last thing I want to be accused of us naivety. I’ve been to a few places around the globe and have encountered prejudice and racism in many different guises. Most of the time I attribute it to ignorance or bad education, but after some time a pattern emerges and one comes to realise that this truly is an endemic phenomenon all over the world.

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy theorist, though I did go through a brief phase where I doubted the truth behind the moon landings. Thankfully I’m well past that, and am now happy to toe the party line when it comes to accepting historical events.

No myth

It was in Riga where I first encountered the overwhelming reluctance to accept the official version of the events of 9/11. Most readers are undoubtedly aware of the various conspiracy theories that have been bandied about, but I have to admit that until I went to Riga I had never actually met someone who fell for any of these. But then some of my students – all Russian admittedly – asked me whether I actually believed 9/11 had happened as had been reported and I thought to myself, ‘uh oh, where is this going?’ Sure enough, I was soon facing a barrage of questions and accusations: how could I be so gullible, how could I be so naïve, how could I not see that the whole thing was fabricated by the government/the Jews/aliens/whomever? Not in Nigeria, not in Ukraine and not in Spain had I encountered such antagonism, such an onslaught of questioning as I then faced in Latvia. And again, not to sound like a Russophobe, but it was only the Russians who attacked me on this point. My Latvian students were staunchly pro-American and merely sat in quiet disbelief as their classmates sallied forth with a torrent of abuse and sheer disdain for my opinion on the matter. I was stunned, a bit flustered and deeply mortified.

I could go on with this point, but it came up just a few days ago in one of my classes here. I should have known better than to say, ‘You know, some of my students in Latvia actually believe 9/11 was a massive conspiracy perpetrated by the American gov-’ ‘YES, YES, IT IS TRUE, IT IS TRUE…’ chorused half the class in raucous approval of their Russian cohorts thousands of miles away. Damn these fringes of the former Soviet Union! I quickly dropped this line of thought and moved on.

But this is not the source of my recent angst. What happened the other day was, in my opinion, far worse, far more disturbing and is unfortunately all too widespread an occurrence all over the world. It will no doubt be offensive to some, but I am choosing to report it all the same.

Every Wednesday, the school runs what is called Talking Club, and once a month two teachers get to sacrifice their day off to spend 3 hours running conversational lessons. Myriad topics are on offer, and last Wednesday another teacher and I ran a session with the topic of ‘Politically Incorrect Jokes’. After my colleague’s opening 20 minute monologue where he proceeded to list every known racial epithet that existed in the English language, we turned the floor over to the students to discuss, in small groups, whether it was ever acceptable to tell jokes making fun of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc. You can see where this one was headed. It got ugly fast.

‘The solution would be to have slavery again…it would be better that way’

Yes, that line was uttered by a student. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Another argued that there was nothing wrong with ‘porch monkey’. Another suggested that if they can call each other n------ then so can we. When I explained the racist origins of this word, I was told that ‘we should go back to the slavery days then so that we can use that word without getting into trouble’. I heard many more that I did my best to vanquish from my head as soon as the class was over. In all fairness, in a class of some 25 students, only a handful (4-5) were forthright in their opinions, and there were plenty as aghast as I with these statements.

A wee while later, the topic was off-limits jokes. In other words, what subjects are completely taboo? Funnily enough, not many; in fact, none that I can remember. Now, the object of these talking clubs is to initiate discussion, so it was my job to provide some talking points, warmers, a bit of bait even. So I asked one particular group of university-age women whether any of the following topics were no-go’s:

“Communism?”
“No, that’s okay, we can laugh about Communism.”
“Other ethnicities, like Russians, Estonians, Kazakhs?”
“No, that’s okay also, we like these jokes.”
“Mother-in-law jokes” (a popular one amongst Russians which I like)
“Oh no, those are funny, those are okay.”
“Jokes about other religions?”
“No, those are fine, no problems with those.”
“Even the Holocaust?”
“No, of course that’s okay, it’s not real anyway, it didn’t even happen.”

!!!

This never fails to flummox me. I just never know what to say in response. Needless to say I was flabbergasted, but the next few minutes are somewhat of an incoherent blur. I tried to reason and rationalise with them in as diplomatic a way as possible, but in the past I have lost my temper a bit and I was determined not to this time. When I realised I was up against it, and there was no winning this argument, I bit my tongue, conceded defeat, and moved onto another group. Thankfully Holocaust denial didn’t come up this time, but then I didn’t give it the opportunity.

I can’t think of a way to end this. Saying ‘this bothers me’ just isn’t nearly strong enough.

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Epilogue, 14 December 2009:

I’m currently reading Hammer & Tickle: A History of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes (by Ben Lewis, who is Jewish), which I’d heartily recommend. There are so many gems inside, and I thought I’d share with you a couple that really made me chuckle:

One day Jacob, a Russian Jew, slipped on the wet river bank and fell into the water. Unfortunately, he could not swim and was in serious danger of drowning. Two Tsarist policemen heard cries for help and rushed over. But when they saw that it was a Jew, they laughed and just stood there watching him drown.
‘Help, I can’t swim,’ shouted Jacob.
‘Then you will just have to drown,’ they replied.
Suddenly Jacob shouted out with his last breath: ‘Down with the Tsar!’
The policemen immediately rushed into the river, pulled him out, and arrested him for troublemaking.

I’ll end it with an encore.

What do freedom of speech and oral sex have in common? One slip of the tongue and you get it in the arse.