BothSides, Holocaust Edition (Florida, obvi)

[UNCjigga]

A high school principal in Florida has been removed from his position over his refusal to state that the Holocaust was a factual historical event, saying that he had to stay “politically neutral” about the World War II-era genocide of six million Jews.

“Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” the principal, William Latson of Spanish River Community High School in Boca Raton, Fla., wrote in an email exchange with an unidentified parent in April 2018. He said that the school offered an assembly and courses on the Holocaust, but that they were optional and could not be “forced upon” all students.

The emails were recently obtained and published by The Palm Beach Post.

“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Mr. Latson wrote, making a distinction between his personal beliefs about the Holocaust and his role as the leader of a public school. “I do allow information about the Holocaust to be presented and allow students and parents to make decisions about it accordingly. I do the same with information about slavery.”

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Wow...I guess teaching the Holocaust was fucking with his fascist feelings.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/us/spanish-river-william-latson-holocaust.html

 

[darkswordsman17]

Looks like someone trying to twist his personal belief into some "PC run amok" claim so he can act like its due to that. Unless someone higher up than him explicitly told him he couldn't for some reason, which then the onus falls on who told him that and why, and why he's using that phrasing ("not everyone believes the Holocaust happened"). Him adding slavery in seems like extra WTF.

But maybe he's some "champion of free speech" or some shit using this to highlight probably being forced to not teach evolution or climate change or some other shit.

 

[Commodus]

Whether or not he accepts that the Holocaust happened, it illustrates a problem with modern American society: you have a whole legion of people (mainly conservatives) who are convinced that they can ignore well-established facts that are 'inconvenient' to them. Climate change, vaccines, Trump's lies, even the Holocaust... if you don't want it to be true, you just pretend it isn't happening.

 

[Moonbeam]

What I see is a moral coward. He would rather pretend to be accommodating to people on the right who would ridicule and hate him for telling the truth and teaching it to their children than stand up to their ignorance. He should be fired from his job.

 

[zinfamous]

"politically neutral" about the holocaust.

see, this is the kind of absolute brain rot that happens when you convince already-helpless morons that "fair and balanced" is a thing and that "all stories have two or more sides."

It simply isn't fucking true. It never was. This is why this country is going to shit, because we tolerate the shameless ignorance of the proudly uneducated and dismiss the educated and the experts as "entitled elites."

This country simply can't stomach another decade of conservative thought. It simply can't. This disease needs to be lanced.

 

[soulcougher73]

Man, if only we had pictures and video as proof of the holocaust. Unlike god whom I would assume this idiot blindly believes in. Maybe he should stay religious-neutral as well.

 

[dainthomas]

Whether or not he accepts that the Holocaust happened, it illustrates a problem with modern American society: you have a whole legion of people (mainly conservatives) who are convinced that they can ignore well-established facts that are 'inconvenient' to them. Climate change, vaccines, Trump's lies, even the Holocaust... if you don't want it to be true, you just pretend it isn't happening.

Included in the legion are the people who think they don't have to do their jobs because of some weird belief. As an educator this guy's job is to make sure the kids learn established facts as defined by the curriculum. Not confuse them with conspiracy theories.

 

[nakedfrog]

I suppose the moon landing is next on the table? Or are we going to go straight to allowing flat earther kids to opt out of lessons?

 

[dawp]

I suppose the moon landing is next on the table? Or are we going to go straight to allowing flat earther kids to opt out of lessons?

they seem to have done it for evolution so a flat earth is not that far of a stretch.

 

[pmv]

It seems an odd coincidence this was in Florida, and in Palm Beach. That area has a large number of older Jewish residents no? Maybe a good few Holocaust survivors still?
(I couldn't read the article beyond a few lines - NYT says I've read too many pages already!).

Is it that this story only became so public _because_ there are many Jewish people there (in which case, there may be other teachers just as incompetent as he is, all over the country in regions where it doesn't attract attention because everyone else in the area is just as ignorant). Or is there some weird thing involved where he's doing this precisely _because_ there are a lot of Jewish people around? Is he _trying_ to be offensive?

 

[mikeymikec]

“I do allow information about the Holocaust to be presented and allow students and parents to make decisions about it accordingly. I do the same with information about slavery.”

So, if a student answers history exam questions on these topics saying they don't think either event happened, it gets marked as correct?

Is the US going to end up in a situation where the only school class officially labelled as providing factual content is Religious Studies?

 

[tweaker2]

Well we already have millions of folks living in an alternate reality because the facts of their political party's and their president's malfeasance and willful intent to dismantle/distort parts of the Constitution in order to create a nation-wide minority party rule will destroy their party the moment FOX becomes an honest to goodness real and factual news reporting agency and reports whose intterests their party's leadership actually represent and how the party's leadership have been playing their working class constituency for suckers since Saint Reagan preached his principles of trickle down economics bullshit.

So with Trump's not-so-disguised consent that the Repub Party's religious fundamentalists, evangelists, racists, isolationists, nativists and Nazi's have his backing to do as they will, I have now seen all manner of stupid crazy manifesting itself from those factions since Trump let them loose on the nation.

 

[UNCjigga]

It seems an odd coincidence this was in Florida, and in Palm Beach. That area has a large number of older Jewish residents no? Maybe a good few Holocaust survivors still?
(I couldn't read the article beyond a few lines - NYT says I've read too many pages already!).

Is it that this story only became so public _because_ there are many Jewish people there (in which case, there may be other teachers just as incompetent as he is, all over the country in regions where it doesn't attract attention because everyone else in the area is just as ignorant). Or is there some weird thing involved where he's doing this precisely _because_ there are a lot of Jewish people around? Is he _trying_ to be offensive?

According to the article, roughly 1/3 of the students at that high school district were Jewish background.

 

[pmv]

According to the article, roughly 1/3 of the students at that high school district were Jewish background.

Which leaves me baffled how he has he sustained his information-bubble for this long. Don't like to suggest he is an actual Nazi-sympathiser, but it seems like it's either that or he is almost heroically impervious to knowledge (which is not really a desirable quality in a teacher).

 

[Perknose]

I wonder what their stance on gravity was in Science class.

 

[thilanliyan]

Man, if only we had pictures and video as proof of the holocaust.

Fakes obviously...you can see Hillary in reflections if you look close enough.

 

[hal2kilo]

I wonder what their stance on gravity was in Science class.

Sort of a bad example. There are big arguments in advanced physics and costmology about what gravity really is and how it fits in the grand unified theory GUT. Not trying to be a pendant.

 

[nakedfrog]

Sort of a bad example. There are big arguments in advanced physics and costmology about what gravity really is and how it fits in the grand unified theory GUT. Not trying to be a pendant.

That's not generally primary-education level of science though, yeah?

 

[hal2kilo]

That's not generally primary-education level of science though, yeah?

Agreed. If you jump off a building, you will not float.

 

[Perknose]

Not trying to be a pendant [sic].

Which way would you swing if you were?

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

Which way would you swing if you were?

Low hanging fruit.

 

[DarthKyrie]

Agreed. If you jump off a building, you will not float.

Speak for yourself, I can fly.

Edit:

In my best Pennywise voice: We all float down here.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Which leaves me baffled how he has he sustained his information-bubble for this long. Don't like to suggest he is an actual Nazi-sympathiser, but it seems like it's either that or he is almost heroically impervious to knowledge (which is not really a desirable quality in a teacher).

I'm guessing that might have played a role in how he got to this point. Its not uncommon for people who had experiences with some people of a certain demographic to then label all of them a certain way, which will bias them. I doubt its terribly uncommon for someone being around high school kids to think they're kinda shitty. Maybe he got sick of having to deal with maybe even just one of kids' parents, or maybe he correlated complaints about the school to the Jewish parents and possibly students. And that led him to probably some right wing assholes on social media who were sympathetic and then whispered in his ear about how the Holocaust wasn't real and then sent him links to YouTube videos or other stuff that might've been persuasive to someone in the right mindset.

Or maybe some anti-Semitic wealthy donor to the school told him such and he didn't want to lose that funding so he pushed this narrative to try and cover his ass.

Tough to say. Its fucked up though.

 

[darkswordsman17]

Sort of a bad example. There are big arguments in advanced physics and costmology about what gravity really is and how it fits in the grand unified theory GUT. Not trying to be a pendant.

Reminds me of a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic. It was a physicist (I think?) watching two politicians and one was saying something about evolution being as true as gravity, and the physicist going "wait, is he saying we don't understand evolution?" because we don't understand gravity real well in absolute terms.

Ha, guess it wasn't as difficult to find as I thought:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2011-09-22