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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Workshops on Education / Workshop 3 on Education, "Facing Denial in Society and Education" / Presentation by Dr. Shimon Samuels | |||||||||
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Report from Workshop 3 on Education: "Facing denial in society and education" Presentation by Mr. Per Ahlmark Presentation by Mr. Stéphane Bruchfeld Presentation by Professor Irwin Cotler Presentation by Dr. Shimon Samuels Presentation by Professor Robert Jan van Pelt Presentation by Dr. Shimon Samuels Samuels, Shimon Presentation by Dr. Shimon Samuels We focus on the relevance of the Holocaust as a preventive instrument against its recurrence, i. e. a benchmark for minorities, a yardstick for contemporary atrocity, and an early-warning system for mass murder. Indeed, we hope to demonstrate that "denial of the Holocaust," or so-called "revisionism" (in French "négationnisme"), the "Auschwitz lie," "apologetics for genocide" and "the falsification of history" have had far-reaching deleterious effects for general society in both Western and Easter Europe. For the last twenty years, curricula development and research into the Holocaust have been accepted into mainstream academic programs in North America and Western Europe. Should we not now move the emphasis to defining, drawing and applying its lessons to a practical global agenda focussed upon, inter alia, language, memory, jurisprudence, restitution, and technology? A section on "Denial as Political Agenda and Psychological Relief - Role Reversal in Western Europe" demonstrates the dire consequences of media irresponsibility during the Lebanon war of 1982 in its use of Holocaust language to describe the State of Israel and Diaspora Jews. This semantic prejudice could be correlated to an exponential increase in antisemitic incidents and anti-Jewish terrorism. The paper then addresses "Denial as a Building Block of Absentee Antisemitism - Collective Amnesia in Easter Europe," as a diagnostic code to undemocratic conditions and behaviour and a threat for all minorities in the post-Communist empire. The obscenity of "memoricide" and the incremental applicability of memory are presented as the "cognitive dissonance" options in confronting opening archives, contradicting versions of history and the deconstruction of anchored myths. The consequences of painful crises of national collective memory can be: Negative: neurotic grappling to unreality, a search for scapegoats, further denials and an entrenchment of extreme positions; Positive: exposure of truths to lance a long-festering boil, thus allowing the pus to drain. The cleansing of the wounds is an act of catharsis and a rejection of revisionist escape-routes, which were constructed to assuage conscious or unconscious scars of guilt.Such transparent fine-tuning of the psychological underpinnings of national collective memory may be excuses for conflict resolution based directly upon the lessons of Holocaust denial. A final section addresses hi-tech denial and Holocaust computer games and their dissemination over the Internet, concluding with the hope that the lessons of the Holocaust may contribute programmatic codes of good practise and, in general, to an expanding moral pedagogy on human rights. >> Back to top |
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Introduction Opening Session: Messages and speeches Plenary Sessions: Messages and speeches Workshops, Panels and Seminars
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| For information about this production and the Stockholm International Forum Conference Series please go to www.humanrights.gov.se or contact Information Rosenbad, SE-103 33 Stockholm, Sweden | |||||||||