Holocaust Indoctrination Via Television Shandler

While America Watches: Televising The Holocaust, by Jeffrey Shandler. 1999

The Crucial Role of Television in the Elevation of the Holocaust Over All WWII Events and Over All Other Genocides

This book provides a useful survey of Nazi crimes, as featured in American cinema and TV. It covers WWII through the mid-1990s.

CIN THE FIRST FEW DECADES AFTER WWII, GENOCIDE RECOGNITION EQUALITY REIGNED

Author Jeffrey Shandler almost laments the fact that, as the horrors of Nazi Germany were first being presented on American TV, the “Jews are special” mentality had not yet taken hold, the mystification of the Holocaust had not yet become practiced, and the Shoah had not yet assumed a dominant position over all the other genocides. He writes, (Quote) Beginning in the late 1940s American television did air a number of documentaries dealing with that has come to be known as the Holocaust. The nature of its presentation in those early broadcasts evinces the inchoate status of the Holocaust as a historical concept during the first postwar years. What would later be distinguished as a ‘separate war against the Jews’ was not yet codified as a discrete unit of human experience [Editorial comment: Wow!] with its own authoritative sources, narrative boundaries, vocabulary, historiography, and scholarly apparatus. Jews were not singled out as the quintessential victims of Nazi persecution [Editorial comment: Horror of horrors], nor were Jewish responses regarded as central to the postwar understanding of this chapter of history. Moreover, the Holocaust had not yet been distinguished as an event of ultimate or paradigmatic stature, against which other moral issues might be measured [Editorial comment: Holocaust idolatry]. (unquote). (p. 23).

THE PIVOTAL APRIL 1978 TELEVISION MINISERIES Holocaust

The HOLOCAUST miniseries has been called the “landmark of Holocaust consciousness in America.” (p. 155). It got a Nielsen national rating of 30.3 and 49 share, meaning that almost half of those watching television that night were watching HOLOCAUST. This comprised one-third of all Americans that owned a television. (p. 288).

THE DUBIOUS “HOLOCAUST CONSCIOUSNESS PREVENTS A REPETITION” CONSTRUCT

One rather clever rationalization for the preeminence of the Holocaust, in American life, is the one that it is necessary in order to prevent more genocides from taking place. This notion was decisively shattered by such things as the genocide in Bosnia, prompting Shandler to admit that, “Finally, the Bosnia/Holocaust analogy revealed the limits of media in facilitating Holocaust remembrance as a public moral touchstone…Regardless of well-meaning sentiments to the contrary, the presence of television in modern culture cannot prevent another Holocaust from happening.” (p. 256).

Of course, the prevention of genocide was never the reason in the first place. The real reason is not hard to deduce.

HOLOCAUST SUPREMACY NOW PERMEATES AMERICAN SOCIETY

Shandler comments, “Initiated largely by members of the Jewish community, the commitment to public remembrance of the Holocaust has been taken up by many other people, including those—especially in the United States—with no direct connection to this chapter of history. The impressive quantity, variety, and scale of Holocaust representations, as well as the number of people and amounts of time and money devoted to their realization, have become defining characteristics of Holocaust memory culture.” (p. 256).

They certainly have.

THE CULT OF THE HOLOCAUST IS BEING PROTECTED BY THOUGHT POLICE

It is not enough that Holocaust triumphalism already marginalizes all other genocides. The privileged monopoly of the Holocaust must itself be scrupulously protected. Along this line, Shandler quips, “Since the mid-1970s scholars have scrutinized a wide range of works—from revisionist histories to neo-Nazi propaganda, from avant-garde literature to pornography—with the intend of guarding the Holocaust against representations that are less than ‘proper’ and representers who are less than ‘qualified’.” (p. 213).

RIMINALIZATION OF UNWELCOME SPEECH CAN BACKFIRE

The discussion (in 1977-1978) of the attempted neo-Nazi march, in largely-Jewish Skokie, has relevance for today. The ACLU had decided to defend the marchers’ presence, and so many Jews in the ACLU quit the organization. (p. 184). Defenders of freedom of speech cited Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s injunction stating that “freedom of speech” is not the freedom of thought we agree with, but the freedom of thought we hate. (p. 185). There was also a strategic political objective: If these marchers could successfully be suppressed owing to the content of their speech, then so also could American Jews, African-American civil rights workers, etc. (p. 186).
This lesson is very timely. Nowadays, there are “speech codes” on campus, rampant political correctness, censorship of unwelcome speech on Facebook, repeated attempts to demonize and suppress conservative speech as hate speech, etc. This, too, can have untoward consequences.