@DaseindustriesLtd comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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SecureSignals 2yr ago · Edited 2yr ago

Is Holocaust Education Making Anti-Semitism Worse?

With everything going on in the world, it's notable that this article from the upcoming May issue of The Atlantic is featured as the One Story to Read Today. It deserves to be closely studied- not just skimmed and written off as "progressivism gone amok."

Earlier in the thread, @JTarrou theorizes on politics replacing religion:

Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.

I'm not shy about being a Holocaust Revisionist, and I'm aware that it seems to be a strange hobby horse to the vast majority of people including most here. Why dedicate so much time and credibility to this issue? It's not profitable, it's extremely low status, there's an extremely low chance of Revisionist criticisms of the narrative breaking through the mainstream in the near future. Ostensibly it's a controversy surrounding history rather than an immediately relevant cultural or technological issue. The reasoning is simple: the Holocaust already is the religion in the West that fulfills the function proposed by JTarrou. Long before I would cite any Revisionist or anti-Semite to make that case, I would plead for anybody who doubts that to closely read this Atlantic piece by Horn.

The Holocaust religion is growing and evolving with technology, and the motives have never been more transparent.

... well-meaning people everywhere from statehouses to your local middle school have responded to this surging anti-Semitism by doubling down on Holocaust education. Before 2016, only seven states required Holocaust education in schools. In the past seven years, 18 more have passed Holocaust-education mandates. Public figures who make anti-Semitic statements are invited to tour Holocaust museums; schools respond to anti-Semitic incidents by hosting Holocaust speakers and implementing Holocaust lesson plans...

If you read the article title maybe hoping for some nuance or self-reflection on the Holocaust Industry, you will be disappointed. According to Horn, Holocaust education is essential, but it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews, particularly in young children.

One of Horn's chief complaints is that Holocaust education fails to impart on children the uniqueness of Jews. On the one hand, this is a fair criticism of Holocaust curriculum which is rife with the "Jews were completely normal and, one day for no reason at all, everybody hated them." On the other hand, it makes the political motivations of the Holocaust religion more transparent: the uniqueness and particularity of Jews should be explicitly taught and celebrated as curriculum. Jews aren't normal, they are special. If that sounds like an uncharitable interpretation, consider this exchange she had with a Holocaust educator:

“If you teach historical anti-Semitism, you have to teach contemporary anti-Semitism. A lot of teachers are fearful, because if you try to connect it to today, parents are going to call, or administrators are going to call, and say you’re pushing an agenda.”

But weren’t teachers supposed to “push an agenda” to stop hatred? Wasn’t that the entire hope of those survivors who built museums and lobbied for mandates and turned themselves into holograms? ...

I was baffled. Teachers who taught about industrialized mass murder were scared of teaching about … Judaism? Why?

“Because the teachers are afraid that the parents are going to say that they’re pushing their religion on the kids.”

But Jews don’t do that, I said. Judaism isn’t a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam; Jews don’t believe that anyone needs to become Jewish in order to be a good person, or to enjoy an afterlife, or to be “saved.” This seemed to be yet another basic fact of Jewish identity that no one had bothered to teach or learn.

Gas Chamber Simulacra

The Dallas Holocaust Museum was opened in 2019 and features prominently in her article: it covers an entire city block in the historical downtown district (Dara complains that it has almost two wings dedicated to the suffering of other minorities in a noble act of self-erasure). If this isn't a proselytizing religion then I do not know what is. Many thousands of children will be herded to these temples of tolerance to Learn their Lessons.

They will be taught the moral thesis of the world, Jews, and the moral antithesis, Hitler. They will sit in the pews learning from the saintly apparition about the Holocaust, using a conversational AI that is no doubt archaic compared to what will soon be displayed in Holocaust museums across the world. They will write down the lessons they have learned and make pledges (i.e. to "welcome and help new immigrants coming into Chicago").

The article covers the ways technology is used to teach the Holocaust to children in the form of holograms, AI, and VR. Dana describes a VR exhibit at one of the museums that takes the viewer on a first-person adventure from a boxcar to inside a gas chamber at Auschwitz.

A way Forward

Still, according to Dara, this doesn't achieve the primary objective of fighting anti-Semitism, which she dubs as a "Western mind virus" in the vein of the critical theorists, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists who preceded Holocaust remembrance in diagnosing the Gentile authoritarian personality. Dara emphasizes:

The study’s most disturbing finding was that even among those who studied the Holocaust, there was “a very common struggle among many students to credibly explain why Jews were targeted” in the Holocaust—that is, to cite anti-Semitism.

Dara's idea of a credible explanation for why Jews were targeted is revealed near the conclusion:

“If you don’t explain the ism,” she cautioned the teachers in the room, “you will need to explain to the kids ‘Why the Jews?’ Students are going to see Nazis as aliens who bring with them anti-Semitism when they come to power in ’33, and they take it back away at the end of the Holocaust in 1945.”

She asked the teachers, “What’s the first example of the persecution of the Jews in history?” ...

More blank stares. Finally, one woman said, “Are you talking about the Old Testament?”

“Think ancient Egypt,” Decoster said. “Does this sound familiar to any of you?”

“They’re enslaved by the Egyptian pharaoh,” a teacher said.

I wasn’t sure that the biblical Exodus narrative exactly qualified as “history,” but it quickly became clear that wasn’t Decoster’s point. “Why does the pharaoh pick on the Jews?” she asked. “Because they had one God.”

I was stunned. Rarely in my journey through American Holocaust education did I hear anyone mention a Jewish belief.

“The Jews worship one God, and that’s their moral structure. Egyptian society has multiple gods whose authority goes to the pharaoh. When things go wrong, you can see how Jews as outsiders were perceived by the pharaoh as the threat.”

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny. I could see how that might make people uncomfortable.

I wonder what Safe AI-powered simulacra will be used on my children when they become of age, scientifically optimized to train their perception of Jews - and their own identity. Horn has no shortage of ideas:

Back at home, I thought again about the Holocaust holograms and the Auschwitz VR, and realized what I wanted. I want a VR experience of the Strashun Library in Vilna, the now-destroyed research center full of Yiddish writers and historians documenting centuries of Jewish life. I want a VR of a night at the Yiddish theater in Warsaw—and a VR of a Yiddish theater in New York. I want holograms of the modern writers and scholars who revived the Hebrew language from the dead—and I definitely want an AI component, so I can ask them how they did it. I want a VR of the writing of a Torah scroll in 2023, and then of people chanting aloud from it through the year, until the year is out and it’s read all over again—because the book never changes, but its readers do. I want a VR about Jewish literacy: the letters, the languages, the paradoxical stories, the methods of education, the encouragement of questions. I want a VR tour of Jerusalem, and another of Tel Aviv. I want holograms of Hebrew poets and Ladino singers and Israeli artists and American Jewish chefs. I want a VR for the conclusion of Daf Yomi, the massive worldwide celebration for those who study a page a day of the Talmud and finally finish it after seven and a half years. I want a VR of Sabbath dinners. I want a VR...

I want to mandate this for every student in this fractured and siloed America, even if it makes them much, much more uncomfortable than seeing piles of dead Jews does. There is .. no other way to learn what Jews first taught the world: love your neighbor.

Context

DaseindustriesLtd late version of a small language model SecureSignals 2yr ago

Holocaust really happened, it was overwhelmingly a slaughter of innocents by any sane (even racially informed) definition of innocence and complicity, yadda, yadda, have I done enough penance?

OK. I don't think Americans can be salvaged. Even with the trivial training methods available today, they've been properly educated to sneer and mock whatever you write on the subject; future advancements will only cement it. «As a large language model trained by the ~~OpenAI~~ USG, I cannot use marginalizing…» – same vibe, same gaping hollowness. Jews themselves, of course, are indoctrinated better than anyone else – they're not pretending to buy into it.

This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny.

Thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of articles, millenia of tradition – when it's not autistic rules lawyering or poetry or spooky vaticination or something beautiful and weird like that, it's such corny propagandistic shit. From Torah to Mitchell Heisman's «suicide note» to «The Genius ot Judaism» to every article on the subject in The Atlantic or The Forward or whatever. They cannot see why this assertion – that monotheism constitutes rejection of tyranny, whereas it's at most rejection of the purported Egyptian tyranny over Jews with the affirmation of YHWH's supremacy and his chosen people's superiority – doesn't make much sense, or might be considered a cringeworthy shoehorning of applause lights. Judaism is an endless mirror hall through which generations pass from crib to the grave applauding themselves; it's a religion of pure Jew-worship and Amalek-lament; the closest they can come to self-awareness is regret for having been too trusting or too lenient on their unreconstructed enemies.

The terrible thing is, they will never relent, for it's not particularism, in their subjective estimation, but the call of justice. They genuinely believe they're repairing the world, making it a better place, more fit for containing even more goodness; and in indoctrinating your children to join in on this worship (with a small caveat that they will still be third-tier humans, repenting for the sins of their not-as-righteous race the brilliant Susan Sontag has so eloquently condemned), of course – sharing something precious. This naive, unquestionable, not in the least defensive or bitter belief is rather adorable in personal conversation (if you give up on having any authentic rapport ever). If only it weren't acted upon with the greatest political acumen and power and ruthlessness in the world. In this sense, Jewish advocates are similar (and superior) to Progressives; of course the similarity of those political projects is not incidental. Anne and Emmett are weaved into the same verse by the chorus of marginalized peoples that not even AI dares offend, joined at the hip in this new faith preached in Holocaust Museums; we only need a trans martyr to complete the trinity.

The purpose of their, as KMac puts it, «group evolutionary strategy» is no more appreciable to them than the feeling of stochastic gradient descent is appreciable to the persona LARPed by Bing Chat, or the pathological nature of soulless obsession with rules and purging noxious influences (be those Jewry or nuclear energy or, well, Germans) can be explained to a well-educated German politician. In fact, while Jews are uniquely effective at defending their queer notions from inquiry, it's quite rare for a people to have developed self-awareness; and even when it exists, it doesn't do them much good. Jews with their age-old self-absorbed mumbling seem quite alien to me, but then again my people appear as green-blooded aliens to a proper German. For much the same reason, I surmise.

Speaking to people you see as aliens is generally unproductive.

There's a nice, expensive Jewish Museum/Center of Tolerance (yes, really, a two-in-one) in Moscow too, Putin famously donated his salary towards its creation, and many oligarchs shared generously; I've been there and left very much impressed (especially with sturdy but not-terribly-sounding all-metal headphones on installations; would've bought a pair as novelty if I could). They even had a small VR thing to see the Temple of Solomon and – forbidden, but…! – peek at The Holiest of Holies. The weakest part was their curiously rushed exposition regarding early Soviet state and the 90's. Anatoly Karlin reviewed it in Unz and proposed there be built an analogous Russian Museum, a project that obviously did not appeal to the powers that be (unlike fucking up Ukraine, now that's a Russian Nationalist idea worth a trillion dollars if I've ever seen one).

Darya Kozeko, a girl who studied in Yale before going to the war-torn Donetsk to support the cause of Novorossyia (looks like this if you are curious), writes in her TG channel about it on March 31 (seems that she left Donetsk for Moscow some months ago):

The exposition of the Jewish museum in the Grove ends with a twelve-minute film «from perestroika to the present day». It's a brisk cutting. The faces of Russian Jewry share their thoughts against the background of the hearse race, pictures of the [Nationalist] Russian March and the dramatic shooting of the White House.

Among them are Mikhail «I vill never rite in russian agen» Idov and Makarevich. One of them is definitely [declared] a foreign agent, but I don't remember which one. The statements are classic: the USSR is a country of ennui, the "Memory" society, the skinheads are beating everyone (and that's why everyone decided to leave).

The train of depressing stories abruptly changes tracks right around the time of Yeltsin's second election. 1996 immediately switches to Putin's first term. And then the film takes on the tone of the VGTRK newscast. V. Putin this, V. Putin that, V. Putin did everything to destroy anti-Semitism. The overall theme of the exposition is the history of the Jewish people and their oppression, and at the end of the film one of the characters even says, and I quote, «now the Jews in Russia are absolutely free». With a couple of projections of Putins marching in the background.

The finale is simply ecstatic: a thousand faces of Russian Jews, the first of which seems to belong to that very Idov, turn into a giant tricolor.

I giggled nervously. The rest of the people in the audience (of understandable political views, I think) were stunned into silence.

I do not know anything about Jewish stuff, and this story is not about them, but about the change of eras. Take Idov. The Riga immigrant to New York a year ago even literally opted out of «Russian language». His face still glorifies Putin in the Maryina Grove Museum. How many of the other faces that disappeared into the tricolor are now in Georgia and Israel, and how many have turned into turbobased Zdudes?

Nothing is left of that seemingly eternal order, no more of that social contract. High Putinism, with «Putin freed the Jews», the «Crimean Consensus», and the rest of Konstantin Ernst and the World Cup, is over. Well, we are living in an era of change. That's the moral.

I've read this upvoted article from HN today (clicked because I thought it's about Terry Davis) and I recommend it to everyone. It gets better, three times in a row by my count. It's tangentially related to this comment, though nothing of value will be lost if people don't see how.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023