Henry Ford famously said: “History is bunk.” He wasn’t Swedish, but the Swedish educational establishment seems to have the same Fordian attitude towards history. Or, more precisely: You have your “history”; I have my “history”. If the two differ, who’s to say which one is correct, and which is incorrect?
I wonder what the Swedish word for “bunk” is…
The following incident took place at a Komvux school for adults in southern Sweden. The history-challenged student was probably a Muslim Arab — if he had been a neo-Nazi, the reporter would surely have mentioned it.
Ted Ekeroth has translated an article from Sydsvenskan about what happened. He includes the following comment:
Teachers are so politicized that when it comes to dealing with anything from other cultures, especially Muslim cultures, they don’t dare to tell the truth.
The translated article:
Teacher criticized for Holocaust discussion
A substitute teacher defended facts about the Holocaust during a sfi-lesson [SFI = svenska för invandrare, “Swedish for immigrants” — translator]. He was then told by a coordinator that “what is history for us is not history for others”. The problems at the Komvux school “Kärnan” continue.
During a sfi-lesson at Kärnan last week, the students listened to news items.
One was about the commemoration of the liberation of the concentration camp Auschwitz. The opinions on what happened next differs.
According to the substitute teacher running the class, one student questioned the Holocaust. The teacher explained that they cannot take up that discussion right now.
But the student insisted on loudly expressing his views on the Holocaust and Jews, according to the teacher. Eventually the teacher argued against him. and told the student that he had to leave the classroom if he couldn’t keep quiet.
The student, on the other hand, says that he only wanted to add some facts about the Holocaust and the concentration camps but that the teacher misunderstood.
A few days after the incident, which ended with the student leaving the classroom, the substitute teacher was called in to a meeting with the school’s regular teachers who are also coordinators.
The meeting was recorded and HD [newspaper] has heard the recording.
“The student talked to me and he said that he felt misunderstood and violated and singled out as a Holocaust denier and Nazi,” the coordinator says on the recording.
“What he said was Holocaust denial,” the substitute teacher replies.
“Yes, but he felt unfairly treated based on that he was singled out as one.”
“He hasn’t been singled out. I only told him that it’s not OK to say that the Jews are only lying.”
“But the classroom was the wrong forum for that discussion, because what you were doing was to listen to ‘klartext’ [clear text, a way to learn language — translator].”
The discussion continues. The coordinator tells him that the teachers must be careful when discussing, they have a linguistic advantage and cannot violate students.
The substitute teacher agrees and explains that he has used the same episode [the sound clip of the news item played in the classroom — translator] and it has always worked out well before.
The coordinator answers:
“You should also keep in mind that what we see as history is the history that we have learned. When we have other students who have learned from other history books, there is no point in discussing facts against facts.”
After the discussion the substitute teacher felt betrayed by the school’s leadership.
He felt he defended the values of the Swedish school regarding democracy, equal rights for all people and equality, but was only met with criticism.
“I was upset during the discussion, but I tried to put on a brave face. I am a substitute teacher and don’t want to be difficult. But when I thought about it afterwards, I think they acted wrongly. The Holocaust is an important question,” the substitute teacher says.
“what is history for us is not history for others”
When one reads such [redacted] ideas, one can only say the the Swedes are asking for trouble.
Not only the Swedes though. In Canada where I live, one of the “values” inculcated to the pupils taking “moral education”, is the “absolute respect of other religions”.
Where is critical reasoning in all this? Where is the enlightenment? Who decided that this was going to be a “value” to teach to the young generation?
“there is no point in discussing facts against facts.”
Since when were lies the same as facts? I could say, since radical subjectivism became the norm, but that would be like saying the jihadis are just “violent extremists” with no particular philosophy driving them.
The truth is that the whole “lies are facts” idea comes from “a lie told 1000 times becomes true” and other marxist religious beliefs. Any time someone tries to deny any objective reality like this, realize that this person is the ideological descendent of people like Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, etc.
Holocaust denial in a nutshell: The Holocaust never happened and the Jews had it coming to them.
Further denial:
And we should finish where Hitler left off.
Reminder
“Mein Kampf” is a bestseller in countries with major muslim populations
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our Founding Fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity… It’s up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.” ~Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Professor of Education and Psychiatry, Medicine and Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, address to the Association for Childhood Education International in Denver (1972)
I have no reference to the original of that speech, and often “quotes” relayed even by legitimate Web sources are inaccurate or misattributed, but it appears to be genuine and is included, among others, in a comprehensive source tracking the evolution of American education into a socialist brain-washing tool, molding the “new man”: http://www.crossroad.to/Excerpts/chronologies/nea.htm.
And if it’s so in America, imagine what it must be like in Sweden. Facts, history, survival itself matters not when you are engaged in the holy mission of creating the “new man.”
There are entire fields of intellectual endeavor, psychiatry, psychology, education, anthropology, social work etc. among them, that have shot off into a faraway orbit around the dwarf star Uber Loonistan, long, long ago. I don’t have his views on history, but consider what a major Canadian figure and head of World Health Organization, Dr. Brock Chisholm, wrote in the February 1946 issue of “Psychiatry”:
“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family tradition, national patriotism, and religious dogmas….We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests….The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking for faith in the certainties of old people, these are the belated objectives…for charting the changes in human behavior.”
History is chicken feed when you are creating the new Universal-Socialist (and Unitarian “Christian” in Chisholm’s case) Man.
I posed the above. Found a trojan in my computer “redirecting” my content to, possibly some enormous subterranean complex in a place like Utah, depite two virus detection programs I run. Cleaning the browser constantly also deletes my access to this website, and so I click sometimes not knowing that I am still in the ‘Anonymous’ stage.
The problem is of course, not simply the removal of all that “junk” from inside the minds of men, but the “reinterpretation” and “substitution” of new stuff. Looking around at the world as it is, the mind boggles at not only what is intended to be force-fed into these now blank minds, but at who is going to do all the reinterpretation and substitution… and how it is to be done.
The vapidity of the outcome of all this rubbish lurking in the minds of those who eagerly pursue this course of “education,” is, despite their apparently impressive credentials, staggering. Of course they have never ever engaged themselves in studying the idea of “Cosmic Homeostasis” – essentially the basis of all this “junk” – as Mr. Seiyo has humorously indicated in his recent essay. If they did, they would find that all that we accumulate in our minds is what provides color in this world; we all (to an extent) think differently. Nobody said, of course, that this “color” has to be beautiful; lets just call it “interesting”.
Objective teaching of history (so far as is possible) should be taken for granted. However the teaching of religion, and the teaching of the concept of right and wrong (even if derived from religion) are not the same thing, and the first is indoctrination, and has no place in schools.
You know Mark H. I appreciate your comments, I really do. But you have to get that chip off your shoulder about the Judeo-Christian religious history that has allowed you and your fellow travelers to be the descenters that you think you are.
Every time you lash out about the Judeo-Christian society that you still operate in I wonder how well you would fair in some other system.
While I very much appreciate your point of view, you don’t seem to present a rational alternative. Civilization abhors a vacuum. You seem to advocate that vacuum.
I really don’t have a problem with the history, Babs; indeed it should be taught- as an important part of our heritage, and even as part of courses on ethics and citizenship.
However, teaching impressionable young minds that one’s set of beliefs is uniquely true is for the parents or guardians alone, and if I could stop that I would. Baptisms, (male) circumcisions, confirmations, bar mitzvas etc. should be undertaken only when the individual is old enough to make up their own mind.
What came to mind with the first part of your post was Mr. Obama. There has been an extended discussion on the internet as of late about his world view and how it was formed. I think the discussion has come about because his foreign policy has been such an abject failure in the eyes of the western citizen that people are flailing about trying to justify it.
Looking back these many decades I can say that the first 10 years of my life were instrumental in forming the way I look at the world, religion, the family unit and my country. Why should it be different for other people?
I think all of us are incredibly molded by the first 10 years of our lives. Why else would totalitarian governments want so badly to direct your learning during this time?
George Santayana once said: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Consider the strange case of that famous science fiction writer, the late Arthur C. Clarke. In an 2008 interview with “Islam SciFi” when questioned about his views on Islam he responded:
Though I sometimes call myself a crypto-Buddhist, Buddhism is not a religion. Of those around at the moment, Islam is the only one that has any appeal to me. But, of course, Islam has been tainted by other influences. The Muslims are behaving like Christians, I’m afraid…
Historically, Islam had a great deal of tolerance for other views and offered the world its priceless wisdom in the form of astronomy and algebra. And, as you know, Islam helped rescue Western civilization from the Dark Ages by preserving classical texts and transmitting them to the West. We, on the other hand, burned the library at Alexandria. If Islam hadn’t fallen into internecine warfare and had gone on to conquer the rest of Europe, we’d have avoided a thousand years of Christian barbarism.
This is consistent with similar nonsense in his 1979 novel “Fountains of Paradise” in which he wrote:
Almost all the Alternative History computer simulations suggest that the Battle of Tours (AD 732) was one of the crucial disasters of mankind. Had Charles Martel been defeated, Islam might have resolved the internal differences that were tearing it apart and gone on to conquer Europe. Thus centuries of Christian barbarism would have been avoided, the Industrial Revolution would have started almost a thousand years earlier, and by now we would have reached the nearer stars instead of merely the further planets…
Judging by Clarke’s lunatic beliefs, the whitewashing of the Islamic record has had a very long and dishonourable history.
Santayana completely failed to address the problem that would arise if liars and fabulists gained and held complete control of the officially accepted historical record. Almost all people who hold academic degrees in history or journalism subscribe to the prevailing leftist political cultism and write their fantasy versions of the truth accordingly.
People like Diana West who are prepared to dig deeper into the historical record are a rarity and the situation is unlikely to improve. The situation is so bad that I would even favour a refusal to officially recognise any academic degree awarded for studies in history or journalism.
Just to round things off, Clarke’s quite hilarious concluding ruminations on Islam in his science fantasy novel continues:
But fate ruled otherwise, and the armies of the Prophet turned back into Africa. Islam lingered on, a fascinating fossil, until the end of the twentieth century. Then, abruptly, it was dissolved in oil…
When liberalism runs the show – objective truth is often the first casualty since it may interfere with the grand narrative promoted by the elites. Even at it’s best liberalism barely tolerates objective truth because it can become their enemy. So it prefers the beast of “subjectivisim” because it allows to them redefine truth and facts at a moments notice.
The drawback is that they will eventually be trapped by their lies and then destroyed by them because they will have thrown away the very tools that could have saved them.
You can see with the surrender of the school officials to the Muzzie student.
The point the administrator was trying to make was that these kids have been lied to all their lives and they think they have their facts straight, and that a language class is not the time or place to try to straighten them out on all that.
and it seems that the substitute teacher had advised that but the student persisted.
When, in your opinion, would be the time to “straighten out” incorrect history if not in a government funded class?
In a government funded class about history.
This particular class was dedicated to teaching these immigrants or children of immigrants the Swedish tongue. A class on history ought not get tangled up in a debate over physics or chemistry. Nor should a class in Swedish get tangled up in a debate over history. It matters little that the person taking the wrong side is wrong. Of course he’s wrong. But the whole debate is being held on the wrong stage.
Ig ar net kvinar. Ig ar m”an.
OK, it’s butchered. But that’s the topic. Stick to it.
In a Swedish-language class for immigrants, a student objected to a news item about Holocaust Commemoration Day that was used as a sample text. He said the Jews lied about the Holocaust.
Regardless of any other context, such behavior is completely unacceptable in a language class. The substitute teacher was correct to discipline him. If the school administration had any decency, it would have backed the teacher up.
And that IS the topic.