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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

It's depressing to see how gullible some supposedly intelligent and educated people can be. Perhaps colleges need to add a new question on their admission applications: "Was the Holocaust a real event where the Nazis actually murdered over 6M innocent people? Yes/No.” And then anyone who answers No can be sent back for remedial history class.

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> sent back for remedial history class

Holocaust deniers aren't people that just haven't heard of the event because they weren't paying attention in nineth year. They believe that there's a global conspiracy to perpetuate a lie, and that that conspiracy is effective enough to fool most of the world (but not them!).

I don't think sending such a person to a lecture told by "them" is going to change their mind. It's much more likely to perpetuate their persecution complex.

Well, you can always have law punishing for that.

In a couple of countries you can go to prison for saying that the holocaust didn't happen. It's Germany, and Poland (where Germans made the biggest camps where they killed most over 3M Polish Judes).

The most funny thing is how uneducated journalists are. Or maybe that's made on purpose.

They still write "Polish Death Camps" while there were "German Death Camps in Poland". Also huge number of journalists write that there were Nazis, not Germans, despite the fact that the Germans chose Hitler in elections.

I agree that that such descriptions of the death camps in Poland is very misleading. Still, it’s worth bearing in mind that many of the SS guards stationed at the death camps in occupied Poland were not German citizens. Many were ethnic Germans from conquered territories (“Volksdeutsche”) and a number of camps (Bełżec, Treblinka, Sobibór) had a high proportion of guards from Ukraine, many of whom were trained for this role at the Trawniki concentration camp[1]. (Note: I’m not singling out Ukrainians in particular. Many more fought against the Nazis and died as prisoners in concentration camps).

Also, it doesn’t seem to be very well-known that the Nazi party never achieved a majority of the popular vote in the German republic. Hitler only got 30% of votes in the March 1932 presidential election. A few months later, the Nazi party reached their high point in the federal elections of July: they succeeded in getting 230 members elected to parliament, giving them 37% of the vote. No party could form a majority sustainable coalition government so this was followed by another federal election in November 1932. This time, the Nazi party actually lost 34 of their seats, giving them only 33% of the vote.

Unfortunately, the chancellors that had been appointed by von Hindenburg, the victor in the 1932 presidential election proved to be ineffectual and von Hindenburg eventually appointed Hitler as chancellor in early 1933. This was soon followed by the Reichstag fire which provided Hitler and the Nazis the opportunity to consolidate their power. The rest of this history is fairly well known.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trawniki_concentration_camp#Tr...

The distinction between Nazis and Germans in that era is important. Otherwise you lose sight of German opponents of Nazis, and things like Night of the Long Knives, which is critical for all sorts of reasons. Yes, Hitler was elected, but that doesn't explain away his consolidation of power. The slide into tyranny often happens precisely because it is gradual; tyrants sometimes obtain unchecked positions of power through democratic circumstance and then use that position to circumvent subsequent democratic process itself.

Or you know, they could take the opportunity to educate those students?

Yes, in the remedial history class.

Someone who failed to learn such a basic historical fact in high school isn't ready for college. It's akin to being illiterate or unable to do basic arithmetic.

Why would a fact mentioned in high school be considered automatically more reliable than a documentary? Both are secondary or tertiary sources.

To be ready for college, it's more important to have critical thinking skills, to understand that not everything you heard in high school is true.

Not every country (Islamic ones, for instance) actually teach kids about the Holocaust.

https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

The issue with this is that the "diet coke and mentos thing" is generally not a requirement to be taught at school, while the Holocaust is.

Not universally. We were taught in school but it was very brief, anyone that was off sick that day would not have learned about the holocaust (or several other WW2 atrocities) in school. It never featured on any tests.

Interesting. In California it appears to be part of the requirements for 10th grade history, and we had a unit on it at school.

That’s really not the point? It’s a metaphor.

That's a meaningless answer. So colleges should be taking in any student regardless of test scores or grades, because clearly poor performers need the education more?

Should Michelson and Morley have been kicked out college because they didn't trust in the existence of luminiferous Ether?

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Ether.html

False dichotomy there - luminiferous Ether wasn't backed by an overwhelming ton of evidence. It was a simple postulation, not really even a rigorous hypothesis.

In fact Michelson and Morley were amongst the first successful experiments around it - and fundamentally disproving it of course.

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