The Auschwitz Fiasco

Something really does have to be said about this. The papers and the blogs are up in arms about Cameron’s having described trips to Auschwitz as a gimmick. In my view it was that and worse.

I am a middle aged man; I was born ten years after the end of World War II. In my childhood the War was all consuming. My comics would be of the racially stereotyped casual but brave Englishman/dogged but pigheaded German, Achtung Spitfeuer sort of stuff. We played war games on the street. When people came to the house, the man would be assessed by what sort of war he had had. We were over-fed because the previous generation had gone without, but they wanted you to know they had: any attempt at not eating or throwing away food resulted in ‘We’d have been grateful for that in the War’. The previous generation had shown character and wanted to point out one’s own lack of it; feckless youths on the street, rock and roll, that’s not why I fought Hitler. Unfortunately the chance of bravely defending my country was not open to me so I felt guilty. The War was an all-pervasive thing in which I had been unable to take part and was looked down on for it.

I’d like subsequent generations to have things different.

I think we still have too much of the Second World War and am appalled at attempts to lock up eighty year old men on flimsy identification. And by the way none of them are ever Germans or Japanese – have you noticed that? I do not think it is necessarily a good idea for our children to visit the Auschwitz Museum; I do not think that Auschwitz is the way to teach them what went on in the war; I think teaching them not to be afraid of people who are different is better than teaching them that Germans used to be evil. Let them spend the time learning German.

And I do think this was a gimmick. They weren’t sending all the children to the Auschwitz museum, just two from each class, who presumably would be the cleverer ones (I suppose some formal reporting back world be necessary) who needed the educational point less than others. And the Government weren’t paying for it all anyway. It is clear to a complete schweinhund that this was a sop to the bien pensant left to make up for having allowed the tax break to non domiciles. It was messing around with kids’ education to avoid a difficult headline in the New Statesman or the Guardian.

It was a cynical cheap effort by Labour and the Tories were right to expose it. Let’s educate our children, not force feed them with what they should be thinking.