{"id":57,"date":"2012-05-16T11:58:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T11:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/05\/violence-children-and-history\/"},"modified":"2017-03-09T17:15:40","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T22:15:40","slug":"violence-children-and-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/05\/violence-children-and-history.html","title":{"rendered":"Violence, Children, and History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
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The most common parenting issue I find myself disagreeing with friends and family about is whether or not children should be exposed to anything violent. We let our daughters, 3 and 6, watch the animated Justice League <\/i>movies. One of our favorite family films is Miyazaki\u2019s Spirited Away, <\/i>which is both violent and, in the words of my mother, \u201ccreepy and weird\u201d. I took Sienna to see John Carter <\/i>even though I was warned it was too violent, and I\u2019m glad I did; I didn\u2019t find it too violent for her (although a lot of credit for that goes to the unreality of the blue-blooded aliens\u2026had the blood been red and the aliens been humans, it might have been a different story). We\u2019re not cavalier about violence, though, however it may seem; rather, we probably pay closer attention to violence in its various forms than most parents who place a de facto <\/i>ban on violence in books and movies. The reason for that is simple. Human beings are capable of committing violent acts, both in defense of good and in service of evil. To ignore or deny that facet of human nature is dishonest. \u00a0 \u00a0 <\/p>\n

This morning, Mrs. Darwin<\/a> directed my attention via facebook to a story about a French priest who is racing against time to try and bring to light the truth about yet more hidden Nazi atrocities<\/a>. The generation who witnessed the mobile Nazi death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, slaughter hundreds of thousands of Jews and Gypsies in the Soviet Union is dying out, and Fr. Patrick Desbois is desperately trying to record their stories before it\u2019s too late.\u00a0<\/span>

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You really ought to read the article. It\u2019s fascinating, in the same horrific way that all the tales of those atrocities are fascinating. I have less trouble understanding the willing submission of the victims in the Soviet Union than I do in Western Europe, because the Jews and Gypsies had been subjected to pogroms in Eastern Europe for centuries. I don\u2019t even have trouble swallowing the cooperation of the townspeople, even going so far as to dig the graves and watch in silence for days <\/i>as those buried alive struggled beneath the fresh earth, because what choice did they have? As I understand it, life in Eastern Europe, particularly those remote villages of the Soviet Union, was unimaginably bleak and cruel, due to both the government and the weather. These were not a people accustomed to anything other than trying to survive. (This is not to say that there weren\u2019t heroic acts of self-sacrifice; I\u2019m sure there were, I just understand why they weren\u2019t the norm.) What I truly cannot fathom, though, is why no one said anything after the war, or after the oppression of the Stalinist regime had lifted. Were they afraid? Were they trying to forget? Did they think it didn\u2019t matter, that the past was the past? Why did no one think that these atrocities needed to be recorded, the victims remembered, and history set straight?\u00a0<\/span>

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After enduring the horrors of the Nazis and Stalin during their lives, the villagers have never posed themselves the kind of questions of guilt and complicity that so often bedevil the conscience of the wealthier and more privileged, believes Father Desbois<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I can accept that explanation, that questions of guilt and complicity have been pushed out of the minds of the villagers in the desperate struggle to simply survive. But I can\u2019t understand why they didn\u2019t think the victims ought to be remembered, and the atrocities recorded so that future generations would know.<\/p>\n

Holocaust deniers are incomprehensible to me. I cannot understand people willingly ignoring vast swathes of evidence for the purpose of a political or religious agenda, or because they cannot comprehend and accept the depths of evil that humans are capable of. I\u2019m so grateful that Eisenhower foresaw the possibility of future generations dismissing the Holocaust as \u201cpropoganda\u201d and ordered meticulous photographic records to be made of each camp. And I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment of Fr. Desbois:<\/p>\n

As for those who question the existence of the Holocaust, whether they are politicians or within his own church, he sees them as the direct inheritors of Himmler and Heydrich. They are, he says, the \u201cdeniers of the inferno\u201d. <\/i><\/p>\n

Not too long ago, I had an altercation in my comment box <\/a>with a reader who was horrified that I, as a Christian, would read The Hunger Games. <\/i>She saw it as promoting gratuitous violence. I see no such thing. The violence in The Hunger Games <\/i>is horrific and destructive. It destroys everyone involved. No one comes out unscathed, or even remotely normal, let alone happy.<\/p>\n

I understand shielding our children from depictions of gratuitous violence, but I think we as a culture have begun to lose sight of when depictions of violence are gratuitous and when they serve a purpose. My husband thinks the movie Platoon <\/i>is an important movie, one that our children should see at some point in their teenage years. I couldn\u2019t even finish the movie because I was so sickened by the violence, and for years I fought him about showing it to our kids. But now I\u2019m starting to understand why it\u2019s important. It\u2019s important for the same reason that telling our children about the Holocaust is important, really telling them, not glossing over it but making sure they understand the depth and breadth of the horror. Future generations must <\/i>understand what humans are capable of. We must not allow the generations of the future to insist that such things could not happen, that humans would not have done such a thing, because that\u2019s exactly when it will happen again. The US and Britain has at least some reports of the concentration camps well before they entered the war, but they didn\u2019t act because they didn\u2019t believe it could be true. How many lives could have been saved if our governments hadn\u2019t been lulled into a false sense of security about the capabilities of human beings to commit evil against each other?\u00a0 (He objects to my mention of Platoon<\/i> because the argument for that movie is more complicated than I\u2019m allowing at the moment)<\/p>\n

The tricky part, I guess, is figuring out when our children are mature enough to hear it and understand. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s too difficult to untangle which depictions of violence are gratuitous and which are not, but it is going to be difficult to decide when each child is ready to hear and see and to bear them. I believe it needs to happen before the kids go to college, probably well before, when they\u2019re still ready and willing to listen. But I truly think that one of the worst disservices we can do to our children is to shield them from the reality of violence. If they don\u2019t know what humans are capable of, they will never learn how to guard against it, both in others and in themselves. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The most common parenting issue I find myself disagreeing with friends and family about is whether or not children should be exposed to anything violent. We let our daughters, 3 and 6, watch the animated Justice League movies. One of our favorite family films is Miyazaki\u2019s Spirited Away, which is both violent and, in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nViolence, Children, and History<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The most common parenting issue I find myself disagreeing with friends and family about is whether or not children should be exposed to anything violent.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/05\/violence-children-and-history.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta 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