The Price Of Forgetting
Was the flub at Michigan State inadvertent, or something more disturbing?
I didn’t have Hitler trivia at Michigan State on my 2023 bingo card. Did you?
This image appeared on Spartan Stadium’s scoreboard before last Saturday’s game between the Spartans and the visiting Wolverines of the University of Michigan.
All of the relevant officials at Michigan State have issued apologies, and the university employee who was responsible for running it on the scoreboard was put on paid leave pending the results of an internal investigation. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, the university claimed that an unnamed “third party source” was responsible for running the video, but the truth was a little more complicated.
The video in question was sourced from YouTube’s The Quiz Channel, and according to Floris van Pallandt, its creator, the university used it without permission. I’ve looked at the channel, and it’s mostly harmless pop culture — unless of course you decide to run a history quiz intended for viewing on a laptop and instead display it on a scoreboard before tens of thousands of people while the Middle East is on fire.
I hope that this incident is discovered to be a careless mistake. If anyone came to another conclusion, I wouldn’t blame them. Over my lifetime, World War II and the Holocaust have begun to pass from living memory and into the history books. Historical knowledge that many of us take for granted doesn’t seem to have the same impact on younger generations.
During World War II, my maternal grandfather and his brothers all served in the U.S. Army.1 My father’s parents spent the war in London working in an aircraft factory, as the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe battled in the skies above. One day, a bomb with a delayed timer exploded in front of my grandparents’ flat and sent my grandmother flying across her living room. Somehow, she escaped unscathed.
When memories like that are handed down, you don’t forget. I fear I’m seeing abundant evidence that our schools haven’t worked hard enough to reinforce the lessons that were parceled with those memories.
If we don’t course correct soon, we’ll pay a horrible price. Perhaps we already are.
My grandfather’s brothers, who I knew as Nelly (Emanuel) and Gianni, served in Patton’s Third Army and fought at The Battle of the Bulge before returning home via Operation Magic Carpet. I looked up my grandfather’s draft record once. He was inducted in 1943 and his record said he had an 8th grade education and was employed as a metal worker before the war. After completing basic training somewhere in California, he shipped north to Fort Lewis in Washington state, where he was going to train to join the Artillery. At Fort Lewis he suffered a punctured eardrum and was washed out of the service and sent home.
On the one hand ... we shouldn't cower in the corner at the sight of Hitler on a scoreboard (inadvertent flub or not). We're made of tougher stuff than that. On the other hand ... as we've seen in disgusting abundance the last couple of weeks, most colleges are havens of antisemitism, as they have been for a while. And the only way to eliminate it is to eliminate the enemy, which is hopefully what the IDF is currently doing. This is long overdue.
My goodness. I missed this story.
FWIW, my daughter said that very few kids in her high school are aware of the Holocaust. Her school is less than 8% white, so "European history" isn't a factor and few Jews are present to share our fraught history.