The intersection between social psychology, history, and memory has always been a fascinating subject. Common sense would tell a person that psychology and memory are inextricably linked, but the question remains of how this relates to history? One interesting area of social psychology is Cognitive Authority. The theory of cognitive authority is helpful in elucidating why the troubling aspect of World War II memory called Holocaust Revisionism is more prominent than it really should be. In this paper, I will take a look at the tactics employed by the infamous and discredited historian, David Irving, which gained him a significant, underground movement and how these tactics relate to cognitive authority and World War II memory in general. To …show more content…
For example, the concept of cognitive authority can be used to comedic effects. This psychological aspect drives comedy bits such as Jimmy Kimmel’s “Lie Witness News” segments where a newscaster asks civilians on the street questions about fake news story. People generally implicitly trust journalists as cognitive authorities to give accurate information about news, and this creates irony to comedic effects. While this is just one example of the way in which cognitive authority can be used for lighthearted fun, it can also be abused to pernicious …show more content…
With this knowledge, they have learned how to pass themselves off as trustworthy institutions worthy of being a cognitive authority. The most prominent examples of this behavior comes from the Christian right. Large Christian organizations have tried passing themselves off as legitimate sources of scholarly debate. They fund their own studies and their lackeys use these studies as definitive, authoritative sources to support their religious arguments. Some try not to hide their motives much such as the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences and Answers in Genesis. Other organizations are much more nefarious. Organizations such as the Family Research Institute and the American College of Pediatricians create a facade of intellectualism with their own studies that provide legitimacy. When one digs below the surface, it becomes clear that these organizations simply abuse the trust people have in American scientific institutions in order to prop up their own biased opinions. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, these organizations are simply just religious, anti-gay, pseudo-scientific hate groups (Schlatter 2010). Just looking at their names, the common person would generally hold their opinion as having some sort of authority to it, but no credible source really takes them
The strong relationship created between history and memory is one of a vexing nature due to deliberate selection and emphasis. It does however result in a confluence of different representations, that is, personal stories (memory) and public stories (history). Mark Baker’s biography and autobiography ‘The Fiftieth Gate: A Journey Through Memory’, explores his parents’ memories which are both verified and contradicted by Baker’s historical findings, as each asserts their claim through these different theories of representation drawing on such established criteria as evidence, accuracy, authenticity, authority and detail. Steven Spielberg’s horror-psychological thriller film, ‘Schindler’s List’ shows how amongst the abhorrence of the Holocaust, one man can make a difference for the better and leave a legacy of his generosity but it is also a question of what else he did that wasn’t emphasised due to the context of the film. Lastly, the poem ‘The Send-Off’ by Wilfred Owen expresses Owen’s personal feelings towards war which is enunciated through his strong emotive language.
Goldhagen's book however, has the merit of opening up a new perspective on ways of viewing the Holocaust, and it is the first to raise crucial questions about the extent to which eliminationist anti-Semitism was present among the German population as a whole. Using extensive testimonies from the perpetrators themselves, it offers a chilling insight into the mental and cognitive structures of hundreds of Germans directly involved in the killing operations. Anti-Semitism plays a primary factor in the argument from Goldhagen, as it is within his belief that anti-Semitism "more or less governed the ideational life of civil society" in pre-Nazi Germany . Goldhagen stated that a
The events which have become to be known as The Holocaust have caused much debate and dispute among historians. Central to this varied dispute is the intentions and motives of the perpetrators, with a wide range of theories as to why such horrific events took place. The publication of Jonah Goldhagen’s controversial but bestselling book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” in many ways saw the reigniting of the debate and a flurry of scholarly and public interest. Central to Goldhagen’s disputed argument is the presentation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust as ordinary Germans who largely, willingly took part in the atrocities because of deeply held and violently strong anti-Semitic beliefs. This in many ways challenged earlier works like Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” which arguably gives a more complex explanation for the motives of the perpetrators placing the emphasis on circumstance and pressure to conform. These differing opinions on why the perpetrators did what they did during the Holocaust have led to them being presented in very different ways by each historian. To contrast this I have chosen to focus on the portrayal of one event both books focus on in detail; the mass shooting of around 1,500 Jews that took place in Jozefow, Poland on July 13th 1942 (Browning:2001:225). This example clearly highlights the way each historian presents the perpetrators in different ways through; the use of language, imagery, stylistic devices and quotations, as a way of backing up their own argument. To do this I will focus on how various aspects of the massacre are portrayed and the way in which this affects the presentation of the per...
Testimonies allow future generations to read, hear and learn from the people who experienced, witnessed, or perpetrated the genocidal policies and crimes of the Nazis and their collaborators. These testimonies are valuable resources which can enhance our understanding of the Holocaust and related issues. Oral testimonies provide listeners glimpses into the history of the Holocaust that cannot be obtained from documents or written records. While textual documents are essential for the study of the Holocaust, an individual’s testimony can supplement those document...
Gottfried, Ted. Deniers of the Holocaust: who they are, what they do, and why they do it. Brookfield , Connecticut : Twenty-First Century Books, 2001. Print.
Even in today’s modern society of advanced technologies and research methods, there are still people who believe that history has recounted the horrific genocide of over six million European Jews incorrectly. These deniers are known as Holocaust revisionists. Now, these people do not believe that the Holocaust simply did not happen. Instead, they believe that historians have hyperbolized the death toll and that they have morphed the extermination camps into something that they are not. Some even believe that Hitler has been portrayed wrongly as the villain. They think that Hitler was one of the Jewish peoples’ best friends and was a great aid to them. Also, revisionists have conjured up the outrageous idea that the Jewish people were the real antagonists. Revisionists state that the Jews wanted land in the Middle-east, so they seized the opportunity to scream to the world that they were being oppressed and discriminated against. As a result, they received what is now known as Israel for compensation. Now, the previous examples are only a small percentage of the total number of revisionist ideas of how the Holocaust really played out (Lipstadt). Holocaust revisionists strive to dispel the widely accepted idea of the Jewish genocide during World War Two. However, the plethora of proof which historians have uncovered through war trials, film evidence, and written evidence, makes it blatantly obvious that history has been recounted correctly.
Milgram arranged this experiment to find any justification of the acts of genocide by those accused at the Nuremberg War Criminal trials. He was intrigued because most of the defenses against the court was based on that they were simply just following the orders of their superiors. A year after Adolf Eichmann’s, a German Nazi SS officer that organized much of the holocaust, trial in 1960, Milgram constructed this examination to answer his question “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” (McLeod 1). His main focus point was to see how easily people were influenced during WWII to commit such atrocities.
Theoretical perspectives in the study of human behavior can easily be applied to cases in social work practice. The mental health field in particular lends itself to the application of different human behavior theories. Specifically, depression can be viewed through the lens of Social Cognitive Theory, or Social Cognitive Learning. There is one case of a woman with depression, whose name will be changed, that social cognitive theory can be applied to. Cheryl is a 58 year old woman who has been diagnosed with Major depressive disorder. She has had this diagnosis since she was 17 years old. Many of her symptoms and experiences can be viewed or explained in terms of social cognitive theory.
Most interpretations of history are to some extend based on an arbitrary selection of events influenced by ideology. Accordingly, they can easily assume a mythical character, which can function to legitimize social and political practices or mobilize action or identification with a cause through anchoring of the present in the past and actualization of the past in the present. Through this mythologization, nations, social groups or set of individuals produce its collective memory and establish their distinctive identity (Wistrich and Ohana 1995: ix). In order to understand how the Zionist movement creates their specific view on the Diaspora, and how Gordon uses this view to establish a distinct identity for the Jewish people, we must understand the mechanics of collective memory.
Gottfried, Ted, and Stephen Alcorn. Deniers of the Holocaust: Who They Are, What They Do, Why They Do It. Brookfield, CT: Twenty-First Century, 2001. Print.
Truth and facts should be relied on more in daily life, as many misunderstandings can be avoided with being truthful. We should hold ourselves accountable for staying truthful, however it is unreasonable to assume that everybody will follow suit. As such, it is incredibly important to search for the truth, evidence and fact within what we are told, holding not only ourselves accountable, but also those around us. If truthfulness were to become a commonplace habit, the world would certainly be a different place. Deborah Lipstadt and her team held Irving accountable for his lies. She stated “What we did is follow his footnotes back to his sources. And what did we find? Not in most cases, and not in the preponderance of cases, but in every single instance where he made some reference to the Holocaust, that his supposed evidence was distorted,half-truth, date-changed, sequence-changed, someone put at a meeting who wasn't there.”(TED Talk). In this case, they followed his evidence and were able to find the excessive and unreasonable holes within it.
When we encounter a Holocaust survivor, a lot of questions come to our mind. We start to wonder how did they manage to survive. We tend to assume that once the Holocaust was over, survivors began to reestablish their lives and their pain disappeared. However, Holocaust survivors suffered, and even after 70 years after the liberation, Holocaust survivors still experience difficulties on their day-to-day basis. In the years followed the Holocaust they struggled with their painful memories while attempting to renew their lives, most of them in new countries. The Holocaust was one of the greatest massacres against humanity. As time goes by, the Holocaust survivors’ memories start to fade. The obligation to remember is engraved on every Holocaust memorial, but even words “Never Forget” become wearing eventually. With the fear of future generations forgetting the Holocaust, these survivors bare witness in many ways. One of the ways Holocaust survivors bare witness was by literature and education.
Most narratives out of the Holocaust from the Nazis point of view are stories of soldiers or citizens who were forced to partake in the mass killings of the Jewish citizens. Theses people claim to have had no choice and potentially feared for their own lives if they did not follow orders. Neighbors, The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan T. Gross, shows a different account of people through their free will and motivations to kill their fellow Jewish Neighbors. Through Gross’s research, he discovers a complex account of a mass murder of roughly 1,600 Jews living in the town of Jedwabne Poland in 1941. What is captivating about this particular event was these Jews were murdered by friends, coworkers, and neighbors who lived in the same town of Jedwabne. Gross attempts to explain what motivated these neighbors to murder their fellow citizens of Jedwabne and how it was possible for them to move on with their lives like it had never happened.
Today - half a century after the conclusion of the Second World War - it would be fair to expect a less emotional environment, one in which historians, researchers and writers were free to examine the actual causes of the war as well as the atrocities committed by both sides in the conflict. However, those and other topics are more forbidden than ever with the greatest taboo surrounding analysis of the fate of Europe's Jews and others in what has come to be known as the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism reached to extreme levels beginning in 1939, when Polish Jews were regularly rounded up and shot by members of the SS. Though some of these SS men saw the arbitrary killing of Jews as a sport, many had to be lubricated with large quantities of alcohol before committing these atrocious acts. Mental trauma was not uncommon amongst those men who were ordered to murder Jews. The establishment of extermination camps therefore became the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question”, as well as a way to alleviate the mental trauma that grappled the minds of Nazi soldiers. The following essay will examine various primary and secondary sources to better illuminate the creation, evolution, practices and perpetrators of the extermination camps wherein the horrors of the Holocaust were conducted.