Abstract
Holocaust and genocide education are important components of leadership education for civilians and service members alike. The paper describes the US Coast Guard Academy’s Holocaust symposium as an example of leadership education for service members that is equally applicable to other contexts of secondary and tertiary education (particularly in nations relying on volunteer militaries). The important lessons the symposium conveys include: 1) genocide is a threat to all humanity, and the loss of one group is a loss to all; 2) a bystander makes an active choice that may result in escalating harm to others; 3) prejudice has had a long history but it is still alive today; and 4) blind obedience to authority and leaders is dangerous. These experiences should lead students to not only recognize the social, political, and military antecedents to atrocity-producing situations, but help develop in them the moral judgment and courage to identify and prevent these conditions at home and abroad.
Highlights
ON THE U.S Coast Guard Academy (USCGA)While the USCGA may seem like an odd place to combine Holocaust education and human rights education, its mission, its students, and its focus on educating leaders of character make it perfectly suited for such an undertaking
The Symposium focused on lessons from the Holocaust, its emphasis was on how those lessons can help us figure out how to respond to the Paris attacks and the Syrian refugee crisis, how to stop the ongoing genocidal campaigns in Iraq, Equatorial Africa, and Myanmar, and to reverse these and other conditions that have proven conducive to the growth of terror recruitment
Without Holocaust education, human rights education remains completely abstract; we cannot fully understand the importance of human rights until we look at the disastrous consequences that result from asserting that certain groups are less than fully human, and do not have any human rights
Summary
”The Holocaust provides us with awareness that democratic institutions and values are not automatically sustained, and that the Holocaust occurred because individuals, organizations and governments made a choice which legalized discrimination and permitted hatred and murder to occur.” (Milton, 2000). While individuals in most human societies have engaged in the systematic killing of other humans in civil, ideological, and international wars, there was a post-Cold War hope that the turn of the twenty-first century represented a departure from its predecessor - the bloodiest on record (Pinker, 2011) Keeping this hope alive requires that humanity must remember and apply the lessons of twentieth century conflict - how prejudice and disinformation can lead citizens of developed societies with broadly democratic institutions to justify and even participate in mass atrocity. The Symposium focused on lessons from the Holocaust, its emphasis was on how those lessons can help us figure out how to respond to the Paris attacks and the Syrian refugee crisis, how to stop the ongoing genocidal campaigns in Iraq, Equatorial Africa, and Myanmar, and to reverse these and other conditions that have proven conducive to the growth of terror recruitment. The result of the 2015 ASAP Symposium was a unique educational event in which history and current events combined to illuminate each other and to enrich the experiences of participants in the program
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