Lil, Judging by your recent comments, I highly suggest you reevaluate why you have resentment to an entire peopel simply because you had to learn about them in high school. btw 7-12th grade is not high school. anyone who's had an american education, as you have had 16 years of it, would know that. again, your right to voice your opinion is welcome, but your posts smacks of pure exxaggeration to anyone who's ever went though the American public school system.
I think you have to just understand that you are in America and we will probably focus more what effected us most directly. My grandfather as an American WWII soldier invaded Germany and rescued Holocaust survivors in Poland. It is part of our justification of war and our sacrifice. We celebrate that we ended it. He wasn't in Taiwan. Take a look at the WWII memorial http://www.wwiimemorial.com/. The impact of that war in American culture can not be underestiamted. And the cultural influence of Judaism/Christianity in America would seem pretty evident also. Just at how many movies abut fighting Nazis and how many movies about the old testament have been made. I don't know what else you would expect here.
Lil's account sounds sort of exagerated but it wouldn't surprise me if its true. That said though I don't feel bitter or victimized by having to learn about the Holocaust. While there have been many genocides the Holocaust was unprecendented in terms of it being a systematic and industrialized genocide. Nothing like it has happened before or sense. The Rwanda genocides are terrible but they were largely a disorganized chaotic slaughter. For the Holocaust to be comparable would be if a current G-8 country harnessed the power of information technology to identify and track down a specific ethnicity and then used ontime delivery methods to ship them to killing factories and recycled their bodies into usable commodities. In other words harnessing the most advanced technologies to the goal of eradicating a whole people. To prevent something like that from being repeated I think its important to learn about it. I think to what extent is always going to be debatable which goes for pretty much any part of history. For instance should we spend more time learning about the rise of the Caliphates and the Crusades since those have implications for what's going on today? What about the denudation of Easter Island by humans to learn about how resource depletion and over population can destroy a limited ecology? What about the history of wars in Afghanistan from Alexander to the Soviets to understand what we are up against there? A case can be made for studying the history of almost anything further indepth. Don't forget though that many Americans fought in the Pacific Theatre and I believe the number of US casualties is actually higher in the Pacific than in the European Theatre. In fact since WWII we've fought four wars in Asia and other than the Balkans none in Europe. At the moment the greatest threats to American hegemony come from Asia and not Europe.
I spent age 7 to 18 in the New York City Public School System. new York City, in case some of you don't know, is joked by Jewish people themselves to be the capital of Israel sometimes. Every single principal I've had was Jewish. There was neevr any Holocaust week in any of my years in the NYC public school system. And considering that I lived in NYC, I can't do anything else but put it down as a form of exxageration.
The reason the Holocaust is more of a focus here is because there was a large influx of Jews to the US escaping what happened and they wanted to spread awareness about it and they have used their community links to do things to spread that awareness. Overall - it's a net positive to help educate Americans about the dangers of extreme thinking leading to this type of behavior. You don't hear about what happened to China because the Chinese have come much later and have not assimilated into American culture the way Jews have until recently. Also, there are not many Chinese holocaust survivors here in the U.S. lobbying for awareness of what happened. So I think that's the underlying reason. I mean, we fought wars against both Japan and German, and liberated people from concentration camps in both theatres of war. However, i think there is another difference in that the Jews were left by themselves. They weren't a nation. Not like China. They didn't have anything to fight with, no guns. No chance of resistence. No one fighting for their liberation. They were simply captured for being Jewish and then exterminated. Not the first time that's happened, but it was the first time the world saw it - and thankfully, was horrified by it. Maybe that's why we focus on remembering it more than anything else. It's because it really did shock the world more than anything. Not sure if what the Japanese did to Chinese was to the same level - even if it was on a similar scale. But no doubt - Jews have done more to spread awareness - for obvious reasons. Their population was cut to one-third or something, they faced extinction. Not sure China was in the same boat.
