Tuesday, March 4, 2008
After reading this description at PJM of a pair of spots that are running on MTV to try to make the Holocaust "real" for the current generation, MTV and the Holocaust, I went over to YouTube to find them. Here's one:
Is it effective? Eh. One could argue various ways I guess. Here's a problem... Higher up on the search results, and sporting about three times the views, are these two videos entitled The Real Holocaust which appear to be made from the MTV spots but sport lovely alternative (and well produced) endings that manage to combine "pro-Palestinianism" with Holocaust denial.
And that's the real difficulty. Once we've gotten to the point of combating poor knowledge and lazy critical and moral thinking skills through the use of 30 second sound-bites, why, one slickly produced spot is as convincing as the next. Who's to decide which one's real?
There's already a distortion in this video. From what I remember reading, the trains that prisoners rode in on the way to Auschwitz and other camps were far worse than a subway train at rush hour, and the train shown here is a clean and not too crowded one at that.
In WWII, people were packed into cattle cars without an inch of space between them. There were certainly no seats, and no handles or poles for standing passengers to hold onto. Those who fainted were left standing because there was no space to fall. Anyone who was near a chink in the wall had the chance to catch a few whiffs of air, but for the others there was only stench and suffocation. After riding for a day or two with no break, they were forced to pee or defecate in their clothes. They had no food. Some died en route.
In order to make the point that the Holocaust happened to people like us, the video shows them at first having an experience that many of us have on a daily basis: commuting. But this only serves to banalize the reality, to make it seem tamer than it really was.
Maybe MTV is not the right venue for dealing with such a wrought and complicated history as that of the Holocaust. Those responsible for the video had good intentions, I'm sure, but that doesn't mean that this is a subject they should be tackling. No doubt, they probably thought this video was clever. But it only served to show how shallow such treatments of history can be.
I think you already covered the underlying issue here in an earlier post about Wikipedia. As in that case, an open forum is subject to the Tragedy of the Commons.
The question isn't whether these sorts of abuses will happen - of course they will - but how High Schools deal with them. If High Schools don't compete effectively for the kids' attention and respect, society will have lost the ability to teach history at all. Unfortunately, the people I know who are or have been High School teachers would be likely to try to incorporate these media channels in a desperate effort to stay relevant.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2004025648_wikipedia21.html
I think the message the video sends is true. The similarities of where we are today mirror the past, in that where we live in a bubble where these things just do not happen, so we let the little things slip by without protest. Yet crimes like this still persist through out the world. We all learned in school that history repeats itself so we shouldn't be surprised if it does. I know that in Canada these things should never take place but yet our Albertan Premier just formed teams of Secret Police last July. Secret Police by there very definition do not uphold the law but are historically used to maintain political power. Thumbs up to MTV.