(via Deborah Lipstadt’s Blog)

French President Nicolas Sarkozy

dropped an intellectual bombshell this week, surprising the nation and touching off waves of protest with his revision of the school curriculum: beginning next fall, he said, every fifth grader will have to learn the life story of one of the 11,000 French children killed by the Nazis in the Holocaust
(New York Times)

Frankly I think this is a terrible idea. As a webmaster for shoa.de I was marginally involved in a school contest where students where asked to share their thoughts and ideas on the holocaust and holocaust remembrance. To our surprise one of the submissions (and eventual winners) came from third graders from an elementary school. So if somebody asks if nine or ten year old kids can understand and empathize with the lifestory of somebody who has been persecuted and cruelly killed then, based on what I’ve seen, my answer would be yes. I also would say that this is an not a good idea, even if it’s done with competent supervision (which seems rather unlikely if it’s done on such a large scale), because what have these children ever done to deserve such torture? Quite obviously I’m all for holocaust education, but why make it personal? I bet my pension fund (what there is of it) that these plans if carried out will raise a generation of traumatized kids that will blame the jews for their misplaced feeling of guilt.

Historian Serge Klarsfeld said that what children see on television [was] much worse than those stories of butchered children. If that is true it makes an excellent argument against television. It does not, however, in any way support Sarkozys idea.

To make even more an arse of himself Sarkozy misconstrued Nazism as a fundamentally atheist undertaking and stated that the

Nazi belief in a hierarchy of races “radically incompatible with Judeo-Christian monotheism.”
(New York Times)

Well, technically it is incompatible, since the christian lore states that man has been created in gods image (singular, not in a distinct image for each race), but one would be hard pressed to find an example where this has ever stopped somebody. And while I don’t think that the Nazis drew inspiration for the holocaust from christian sources (I do not think this is completely wrong, but I think as a monocausal explanantion it is so incomplete that it hinders understanding of the holocaust rather than helping it) it is certainly true that many christians embraced the “Third Reich”. After all in 1933 some 95% of the german population where christians (less than 1% where jews, some 4% from other religions and atheists) so, since practically everbody was at least christian in name we can assume that most Nazis where christian. So it just makes no sense to blame Nazism on the absence of god, or rather it makes sense only as an attack on the separation of church and state in France. In previous posts I have happily pointed a finger at religious nutters in the USA, but really things aren’t that much better in Europe (and frankly the fingerpointing doesn’t help, it simply stops us from engaging the religious nutters at home).

But then, this is happening in France. At any given moment in time folks there look as crazy as anybody else, but in the long run they’ve always known how to deal with dangerous people at the top of the state. I don’t have faith in any god, but then, sometimes I trust in human beings.