New York high school apologizes for Hitler quotes in yearbook

(Northport, NY-AP) June 13, 2006 - A New York high school is apologizing for Adolf Hitler quotations appearing in its yearbook.

Two students at Northport High chose quotes from Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" to appear under their senior pictures. One says "Strength lies not in defense, but in attack." The other reads "The great masses of people...will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."

The principal says the school "failed miserably" in not catching the quotes.

Northport is sending parents a written apology and considering whether to reprint part of the yearbook or offer special tape to people who want to cover the quotes.

http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=5022986

The kids have a lasting momento of their RW fascist leanings.

:evilgrin:

RW fascists?--Maybe they were 'rads' being ironic about the RW fascistic country they are living in?

they were plagerizing from dumbaya's playbook. Big no-no!

WTF were these two thinking, anyway?

Kids. Go figure.

- as

As I understand it (and maybe I'm wrong) the students chose their quotes. And there's nothing blatantly offensive in the words themselves, regardless of their source. What's the big deal here?

I realize I'm far too young and ignorant to have any authority on this issue, but I think our society has taken the wrong tack in the way we view Adolf Hitler's legacy. Instead of critically examining his works and words, we seek to demonize and/or silence any invocation of him.

Now, don't get me wrong; I am not defending Hitler here. Absolutely, he said and did many horrible, disgusting things. But as long as we treat him like some kind of bogeyman instead of what he truly was, a human being whose hatred and fear drove him to unprecedented extremes of madness and brutality, then not only does he get the last laugh, but we lose a valuable cautionary example. And when the next Hitler comes along, we won't see him, because we won't be watching for him.

Those quotes could just as well apply to GW and company as that is how their foreign policy works.

How the school could catch those quotes is ridiculous, especially being that the editors of yearbooks tend to be students anyway.

The things we waste time on.

Yeah, that's it, spend a bunch of taxpayer money to shield people from words. What idiots.

I graduated in the year Columbine happened; my group of friends was a fringe group of geeks, A/V guys and roleplayers. Lotta black trenchcoats, etc. For the most part the crowd was utterly harmless, though. When we got our yearbooks after graduation, I found out that the school and/or student council carefully edited the thing to remove any reference to us as a group, including deleting our yearbook entries and replacing them with incredibly vacuous replacements. Because, after all, we were all potential murderers.

So yeah. I'm a little bitter still about schools being idiots about yearbook entries. Methinks they need to spend some time teaching coping mechanisms.

violated the American High School Faux Society Prime Directive: Do not do or say anything that would destroy the ridiculous illusion of unreality that is pushed by the school system. Didn't they know they were supposed to be praising IMPORTANT things like the football team, the cheerleaders, and what a magical night the prom was?

Quoting from Hitler strikes me as the sort of "look how radical I am!" thing that teenagers do -- precisely because the whole topic of Hitler is semi-taboo.

The students were supposed to only learn that Hitler was a bad man and that America taught him a lesson. The truth, i.e., that a communist nation was really the one who "got him" is only sort of mentioned as a footnote. Heaven forbid that the students should dig any deeper into anything.

HS yearbooks are propaganda exercises. People like them because they are presented as a semi-sweet documentation of those troubled coming of age years. Shattering the desired illusion is forbidden. And so, taxes will be spent to censor a school publication.

Does anyone know when HS yearbooks started to be produced? Is this a post-WWII phenomenon?

BH

so it's not a post-ww2 phenomenon.

I have a feeling that the reason that the reason the yearbook looks obsolete to modern viewers is that people will be going to college is generally assumed in our soceity. When reading the 1930 year book, not only did the students look like they were entering the adult world (suits, receding hairlines, etc.) but their profiles usually indicated that they had lined up a profession. As such their books served much more as a commemoration of the end of their educations and the beginning of their adult lives.

With a far larger share of students going to college now (as opposed to the 1930's), the high school version of the "student experience" today seems to be almost a rehearsal for college days, rather than a true coming of age commemoration.

My impression is that a lot of what is considered standard fare in high schools now started in the 1950's, when strong conservatism was imprinted into the nation's soul. 'Course, I'm no fan of Eisenhower, either. I think the country would have been better off had he simply retired as a general and run a ranch in Kansas.

Perhaps your comment on the perceived lack of relevance of the HS year book is why some HS students treat it like a joke.

BH

An additional gloss: weirdly enough, the students may have found in the Hitler bits something that resonated with popular post-911 narratives and experience.

"Strength lies not in defense, but in attack" sounds like a paraphrase of every neocon assertion about invading Iraq.

Similarly, "The great masses of people...will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one" is no less than a summation of the WMD scare.

How ironic if it turns out these kids, raised on FOX News and militaristic video games, governed by maniacs and liars, have unconsciously internalized the parallels between Nazism and Bushish!

If so, something like this could certainly spoil the future market for WWII nostalgia. Imagine the difficulty a future Brokaw or Spielberg will have peddling Greatest Generationism if the kids keep noticing that the fulminating of the old fart with the square mustache sounds oddly familiar...

maybe the Great Generationists will just have to swing the popular eye over to the fascist generation of those days. ("Look how clean and dedicated those Hitler Youth appear!" - BARF - )

The students have no doubt internalized the hypocrisy on display here. Whether they choose to be attracted to such behavior or repelled by it is another thing.

Butter, not guns.

BH

I heard of someone catching the Clap on Prom night

the quotes are usually dead on accurate.

Especially true to the events surrounding the occupation of the White House over the last 6 years. This line could not resound any closer to the truth:

"The great masses of people...will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."

9/11, The Patriot Act, Iraq War...all lies in order to affect great masses of people into false senses of security for the corporatist who occupy Big Government.

Who would approve a yearbook with quotes from Hitler in it? Probably some RW holocaust denying ideologue who masturbates to the sounds of hatemonger radio.

had no idea who made the statements. :shrug:

And desire more alert censors? What else should they "disapprove?"

I would have recognized them as from some Fascist ideology, but one of my majors was history, and I'm a WWII buff, so...

my senior quote was revised at least 20 times by myself because the faculty advisor thought
my choice of source material was "objectionable and borderline satanic" quotes from metal bands..... :eyes:

then again i did go to a catholic high school in what i have come to learn is a VERY red part of wisconsin...

even 15 years later that quote stuck with me, because this was one of my favorite teachers that i thought
was pretty cool, compared to some of the fundy nutjobs they had teaching there at the time.

This quote makes me think about Iraq's WMD and the links between Saddam and Bin Laden:
"The great masses of people...will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."

Even if Hitler was the first person to say it, in the context of 2006 it sounds like a fair and balanced comment on the Bush Administration's (with the corporate media) Modus Operandi.

But it's also true that by choosing to quote Hitler you are sending our the message that you take inspiration from his ideas. But it wouldn't be the first time that teenage boys decided it would be cool to present themselves as Nazi sympathizers. Isn't that how most Republicans start out?

going to support doing those things, it points out that the folks who do those things are following the playbook of the most infamous dictator in the world. That is why the right-wing would oppose the quotes and why this newspaper portrays them in this untruthful manner.

and insightful. God forbid we learn anything from the "bad" guys. Simply ad hominem attacks...just because he's Hitler doesn't mean everything out of his mouth was worthless - he did manage to take over a world power.

I put down "police department or national guard." They knew I was being sarcastic, but jeez...seems to me to be a noble ambition. Snicker.

They missed my UAWMF Award, however. I guess they thought it had something to do with the United Auto Workers, I guess. It stands, of course, for "up against the wall, motherfucker."

Completely compatible with the current Administration's 'philosophy'; would it be okay if it were a KKKarl Rove quote?

The guy wasn't a Nazi but thought it would be funny to get a gym full of people cheering and clapping to Hitler.

The great masses of people...will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one."

Describes the US sheeple exactly!!