UPDATE:
Read HERE how DeSantis and Florida officials are deflecting criticism of the new “Standards for Black History” by characterizing such criticism as “dishonest and a political stunt perpetrated by Democrats like Vice President Kamala Harris to tarnish Florida.”
Original Post:
Note: The author does not intend to, by rhetorical comparison, satire or other, trivialize or minimize the horrors of the Holocaust or other tragic events.
Some, by stretching the truth, decency and humanity to a breaking point, might find a sliver of redeeming value in even the worst tragedy.
Thus, some might claim that the “medical” atrocities carried out by Joseph Mengele et al in the Nazi concentration camps might have had some scientific value, in particular for the health of the Volk, or [Aryan] race.
Perhaps, some could say that the American Prisoners of War in Japanese torture camps during World War II picked up some railway construction skills…before they were worked to death.
Let’s take the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study where four hundred black men were infected with syphilis in order to determine “whether blacks react to syphilis in the same way as whites, and to determine how long a human being can live with untreated syphilis.” While “researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane…”, the “sliver” here might be that, at least, the study “participants” were “helped with transportation to the clinic, free meals, even burials.”
A former Fox commentator managed to find more than a sliver of “redeeming value” in Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine. Tucker Carlson found a slab of it and generously slapped it onto the Russian pig’s grotesque lips when he defended Putin’s aggression and attacked Ukraine and its leader.
Others might contend that the barrier of huge buoys in the middle of the Rio Grande, along with the “mile after mile after mile” of flesh-ripping concertina razor wire “proudly” strung along our southern border by Texas Governor Abbott, are giving those migrants who manage to tackle them some valuable survival skills.
Now, Ron de Santis’ Florida Department of Education has managed to find that sliver of “redeeming value” in one of America’s darkest chapters in its history.
In the latest rewrite of Florida’s African American history standards — Florida’s “State Academic Standards – Social Studies, 2023” — one of its African American history strands “clarifies” that “Instruction [should include] how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
There has been a torrent of criticism “…from politicians, educators and historians, who called the state’s guidelines a sanitized version of history.”
During a visit to Florida on Friday, the first African American and Asian American vice president, Kamala Harris, said “How is it that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?”
Dan Rather and Elliot Kirshner write in “Teach the truth”:
A system that brutalized, raped, and killed human beings while stealing their freedom and denying their humanity is rotten to its core. That enslaved people were able to find resilience and build lives in some form is a testament to their courage and spirit. There is no “other side” to the story of slavery.
Or, as U.S. Army Ret. Lt. Col. Allen West is credited with saying:
History is not there for you to like or dislike;
It’s there for you to learn from.
And if it offends you, even better, because then you are less likely to repeat it.
It’s not yours to erase;
It belongs to all of us.
