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Whoppi Goldberg’s Holocaust Comments Show How Crucially Important Teaching History Is
A warning against complacency.
A few days ago, the Oscar winning actress — Whoppi Goldberg — made a comment that went down very badly and more to the point, demonstrated a profound degree of historical illiteracy, stupidity and all round complacency.
She said the following about the Holocaust:
Holocaust ‘was not about race’ because it involved ‘two groups of white people and instead was an example of ‘man’s inhumanity to man
These remarks were extraordinary to my mind, because we take it for granted that someone of her standing and age would have a decent enough grasp of history to know that the extermination of six million people was about all about hatred of a particular race.
But she isn’t the only one here.
I would wager that a vast majority of today’s college graduates know absolutely nothing about the Spanish inquisition, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to…