GetReligion
Friday, April 04, 2025

China

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Impact of online confusion? Many, many young Americans just don't get the Holocaust

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Impact of online confusion? Many, many young Americans just don't get the Holocaust

It was the kind of open-ended question researchers ask when they want survey participants to have every possible chance to give a good answer.

Thus, a recent 50-state study of Millennials and younger "Generation Z" Americans included this: "During the Holocaust, Jews and many others were sent to concentration camps, death camps and ghettos. Can you name any concentration camps, death camps or ghettos you have heard of?"

Only 44% could remember hearing about Auschwitz and only 6% remembered Dachau, the first concentration camp. Only 1% mentioned Buchenwald, where Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel was a prisoner when the American Third Army arrived.

Another question: "How was the Holocaust carried out?" While 30% knew that there were concentration camps, only 13% remembered poison-gas chambers.

"That was truly shocking. I have always thought of Auschwitz as a symbol of evil for just about everyone. … It has always been the ultimate example of what hate can lead to if we don't find a way to stop it," said Gideon Taylor, president of the Conference of Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

It was a sobering "wake-up call," he added, to learn that half of the young Americans in this survey "couldn't name a single concentration camp. … It seems that we no longer have common Holocaust symbols in our culture, at least not among our younger generations."

Popular culture is crucial. It has, after all, been nearly 30 years since the release of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," so that landmark movie isn't a cultural reference point for many young people. And it's been 20 years since the original "X-Men" movie, which opens at the gates of Auschwitz, and almost a decade since "X-Men: First Class," which offered a variation on that concentration-camp imagery.

Old movies and school Holocaust-education materials, said Taylor, are clearly being buried in information from social media and Internet search engines.

"The world has changed so much in terms of how information is transmitted," he said, reached by telephone. "Obviously the Internet has transformed how young people take in stories and information. … Twenty years ago, we could assume that most students were being exposed to books by Elie Wiesel" in history classes or "movies like 'Schindler's List' or 'Sophie's Choice.' We cannot assume this anymore."


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New York Times considers free speech wars in Hong Kong, while ignoring religious issues

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The locals had few illusions, back in 1997, when I spent a week in Hong Kong during the days just before the handover ceremonies that put one of Asia’s most important cities under the control of Chinese authorities.

The purpose of my trip was to attend a conference about religion and the news (click here for the text of my presentation during that event), so it was understandable that participants talked to quite a few leaders in Hong Kong’s diverse and prominent religious community.

But that really didn’t matter. Secular human-rights people I met were saying the same things as the church leaders. They were all digging into the fine details of the new Special Administrative Region's Basic Law and seeing ominous loopholes.

Article 23, for example, was causing concern, with its language stating that Hong Kong's new leaders "shall enact laws ... to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition (or) subversion against the Central People's Government, ... to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies".”

Did that include the Vatican? Would Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans and others be allowed to maintain ties to their global fellowships or communions?

Global issues were sure to surface, activists told me. But that would not be the first place where the hammer would fall. Activists warned that free-speech issues would be the first war zone — free speech about politics, of course, but also about religion, an area of life that troubled government leaders.

This brings me to a recent New York Times feature — a mix of text and graphics — that ran under this headline: “What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong.” Surely this story about the impact of new laws in Hong Kong would address religious speech issues as well as politics? Here is a crucial summary:

The police have since arrested more than 20 people under the new law, which lays out political crimes punishable by life imprisonment in serious cases, and allows Beijing to intervene directly if it wants.

Hong Kong was once a bastion of free speech. It served as a base for the international news media and for rights groups, and as a haven for political refugees, including the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. Books on sensitive political topics that are banned in mainland China found a home in the city’s bookstores.


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Got bias? Pompeo gave a 'divisive' speech, which implies two kinds of insiders were divided

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Let’s just say that I saw — in social media and in personal emails — two very different kinds of comments about the recent speech that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered on the subject of human rights.

Quite a few people, as always, wanted to argue about the contents of the speech itself, especially its urgent emphasis on religious freedom. That’s understandable, in light of waves of images coming out of China of blindfolded Uighur Muslims being shipped off to training camps.

Others were upset about the nature of the relatively short New York Times report about the speech, which ran with this rather blunt lede:

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a divisive speech … calling for the United States to ground its human rights policy more prominently in religious liberty and property rights.

To cut to the chase, some folks were upset by the inclusion of the word “divisive,” saying that this was a loaded, biased word to use in a lede framing the contents of a hard-news story.

Meanwhile, I was actually intrigued by the word “divisive” for a rather different reason, one directly linked to debates about objectivity and fairness in journalism.

You see, if a speech is “divisive” that would imply that people who heard the speech were divided, in terms of their views of its contents. It’s hard to cover a “divisive” speech without presenting accurate, fair-minded content about the views of people on both sides of that divide. Does that make sense?

The problem with the Times peace — #DUH — is that it contains zero input from people who support the views presented by Pompeo and, thus, would be willing to provide information and input that would explain the speech from their point of view.

Maybe this is one of those cases in which there was only one point of view worth quoting, in terms of reacting to Sec. Pompeo’s words?


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Hong Kong's religious freedom crisis takes backseat to basic journalistic norms in USA

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It’s been quite a time in America — arguably unprecedented — with massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupting across the nation following the death in police custody of George Floyd. And all of it in the midst of a killer pandemic, economic upheaval and a frightening, and for many psychologically debilitating, uncertainty over what will happen next.

Importantly, the BLM protests have also popped up in many smaller cities in America’s hinterlands, communities not generally thought of as activist hot spots. Click here for a sampling of the coverage of how widespread this has been, care of USA Today, or here for The Washington Post.

There are many offshoots to this monumental story, the core of which is the state of race relations, policing injustices and the Donald Trump administration’s response to this national reckoning.

One sidebar (from The Washington Post, again) is the absurdly hypocritical response of some authoritarian nations — perhaps China above all — to America’s turmoil.

That’s the nature of international political maneuvering, isn’t it? Never miss an opportunity to blame your adversaries when they display problems — no matter how unequal the comparison —that they’ve pestered you about for years.

I’m reminded of the quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with — that is when he picks up a boomerang.”

I will pick on China — you would not be wrong to think, “What, again?” — because of its Hong Kong problem that has, understandably, largely been absent from American press coverage of late.

Why understandably? Because, as should be obvious, the first responsibility of American mainstream journalism is to cover important domestic stories. Moreover, I’d wager that few Americans currently give a hoot about Hong Kong’s concern, given what’s going on in their own lives and streets.

So even normally well-read GetReligion readers may have fallen behind on the crucial human-rights angles in the Hong Kong story.


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Clandestine masses and online funerals: Italy's newspapers covering virus through a religious lens

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Italian newspapers are known for their hyper-partisanship. The country has dozens of dailies and they have political allegiances that are tied to parties of either the left, right or center. It’s not unusual at all, of course, for newspapers in Europe to approach news and commentary from this partisan lens.

Hunger for information during the coronavirus pandemic — of which Italy has seen the world’s highest death toll when it surpassed 10,000 this past weekend — has led to some exceptional reporting. In the process, many Italian journalists have fallen ill from the virus while covering hard-hit areas like the northern Lombardy region.

While Italy’s newspapers have always covered news through a partisan lens, COVID-19 has led to lots of strong journalism as well as coverage of plenty of religious angles.

Newsrooms across Italy have closed — with editors working from home — while reporters in the field have reported on the national lockdown’s disruption of daily life and how the contagion has ravaged communities and families. I have been closely monitoring and reading several of Italy’s dailies even before the pandemic spread to the United States. How the deadly virus overwhelmed hospitals and led to the casualties of so many of its citizens (Italy has one of the world’s lowest birthrates and oldest populations) in such a short period of time is something truly grim and scary.

I examined several of Italy’s largest-circulation dailies — La Repubblica, Il Messaggero, La Stampa and Il Giornale — that span the political spectrum. La Repubblica (which leans left), Il Messaggero and La Stampa (which are both centrist) and Il Giornale (a right-wing outlet) all have one thing in common — all of them have included religion in their coverage. In fact, none of them have shied away from the subject in a country that is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.

While some Italians have been resentful of the church’s power and authority in the past, the pandemic has led to a religious revival of sorts.


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Big-think story: What does religious faith have to do with slumping global birth rates?

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“The End of Babies.”

That was the arresting headline on a hefty and significant lead article in The New York Times Sunday Review section for Nov. 17 about spreading international “reproductive malaise,” a.k.a what some are now calling the Baby Bust.

This is big stuff. Yes, there are religious implications here.

The Guy is old enough to remember apocalyptic journalism about a lethal “population explosion” heading our way. Now social analysts are issuing the opposite warning for some countries. Among other ills, when average ages rise this causes labor shortages, lack of children to care for aged parents and deficits in public and private pension funds with fewer younger wage-earners to carry the oldsters.

Government interventions to skew population can cause trouble.

China feared increasing hordes and long forced couples to have only one child. Combined with open abortion and gender favoritism, that has produced a dire shortage of marriageable women. David French of thedispatch.com notes the National Bureau of Economic Research found that California’s paid family leave, which you’d think would encourage more births, apparently reduced childbearing.

To keep the population from shrinking, a nation needs an average of 2.1 births per woman resident. Numbers fall well below that in e.g. Taiwan (1.13), Japan (1.42), Thailand (1.52), China (1.6), the United States (an all-time low of 1.7) and numerous well-off European nations like Denmark (also 1.7).

Denmark is a major puzzle in the Times piece by Anna Louie Sussman, working in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Affluent Danes are better able to cover the costs of child-rearing than parents in many countries. Denmark’s welfare state makes it as easy as possible to have children, with 12 months of family leave after birth, government funding for in vitrofertilization, and heavily subsidized day care.

So what gives?


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New York Times blockbuster uses leaked files to expose new horrors in China's war on Islam

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Early in my journalism career, a veteran investigative reporter gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten: The hotter the story, the more you want a document of some kind that you can verify and then show readers. This will build trust.

You can see this principal at work in the blockbuster religion story of the weekend — that New York Times foreign desk report about ongoing and even expanding efforts to lock up and, if need be, brainwash or execute a million or more Uighur Muslims in what can only be called reeducation or concentration camps.

The dramatic double-decker headline includes a nod to the document stash at the heart of it all:

‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims

More than 400 pages of internal Chinese documents provide an unprecedented inside look at the crackdown on ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang region.

As always, it’s good to tell readers as much as you can tell them about the sourcing, to hang on to as much trust as possible; Thus:

Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including [President Xi Jinping], from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.

This is a stunning, must-read story and it deserves the acclaim that it is getting.

However, I would like to note one religion-shaped hole. A theme running through the report is that Chinese officials are divided over whether or not they will be able to produce a safe, compromised, easy-to-control version of Islam — similar to their own state-sanctioned Christian churches.

The bottom line: It would have required only an extra line or two in this report to note that Chinese officials have also unleashed attacks on independent, underground churches, as well as the crusade against Uighur Muslims. As a rule “conservative” reports on persecuted Christians in China mention the horrors being inflicted on Muslims. Why not take a similar approach in this Times blockbuster?

But back to the crucial documents at the heart of this report.


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Unlike the media, Muslim leaders are downplaying China's persecution of their fellow believers

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Unlike the media, Muslim leaders are downplaying China's persecution of their fellow believers

The American media, and Muslim groups, remain vigilant in championing the safety and religious liberty of Islamic believers around the world.

But what about the large population of Muslims in China, where atheistic Communists are currently inflicting what’s probably the biggest program of religious persecution anywhere? Reports on the relentless campaign to suppress or “Sinicize” Islam say that a million or more Muslims of Uighur ethnicity have been shipped to re-education camps, amid reports of e.g. forcible pork-eating or renunciation of the faith.

Mainstream journalists have performed quite well on this, despite shrinking resources for foreign coverage and China’s efforts to bar reporters from Muslim regions. But what are Muslims and Muslim nations doing? GetReligion’s Ira Rifkin wrote a Feb. 12 post noting that China’s Muslims have “been largely abandoned by their powerful global co-religionists” due to “blatantly self-serving political considerations.”

Wall Street Journal Asia columnist Sadanand Dhume aims that same complaint (behind paywall) specifically at Pakistan. Prime Minister Imran Khan is quick to denounce “Islamopobia” in the West, he wrote October 4, but “China’s wholesale assault on Islam itself elicits only silence.” He explained, “Hardly any Muslim country wants to risk angering China’s touchy rulers by criticizing their policies.”

Journalists should be quizzing Muslim spokesmen, organizations, scholars and diplomats about this noteworthy anomaly. Such calculated silence, so much in contrast with Christian and Jewish activism on religious freedom, stands out because most Muslim nations fuse religion with state interests.


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BBC asks: What is the future of religion? Does organized religion have a future?

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BBC asks: What is the future of religion? Does organized religion have a future?

THE QUESTION:

This cosmic theme is raised by a British Broadcasting Corporation article under the headline, “Tomorrow’s Gods: What is the Future of Religion?”

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

In its early history the BBC (born in 1927, the year of the U.S. Radio Act) was nicknamed “Auntie” for its comforting, old-style tone. But The Beeb goes futuristic in a current online series that takes “the long view of humanity.” An August article offered the forecast about religion (click here).

Writer Sumit Paul-Choudhury, former editor-in-chief of the New Scientist magazine, notes that religions ebb and flow across eons.

The Parsees’ religion originated with Zarathustra (a.k.a. Zoroaster) in roughly the era of the ancient Old Testament prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. The faith had millions of followers in the Persian Empire’s heyday but today counts only 60,000. Christians began as a tiny Jewish sect, spread through the Roman Empire, and today are found most everywhere and practice the world’s largest religion.

Rather than seeing religions as providing spiritual truths and essential morality, Paul-Choudhury leans toward the “functionalist” theory by which creeds evolved to provide social cohesion. Think Karl Marx, who deemed religion the “opium of the masses.” As clans and tribes gave way to large and diverse nations, people were able to coexist through devotion to “Big Gods,” and so forth.

Importantly, this BBC writer foresees a bleak future. Growing numbers “say they have no religion at all. We obey laws made and enforced by governments, not by God. Secularism is on the rise, with science providing tools to understand and shape the world. Given all that, there’s a growing consensus that the future of religion is that it has no future.”

Thinkers have been promoting that same consensus since the 17th and 18th Century “Enlightenment.”

A special problem hampered religions during the past century, he briefly acknowledges. Nations like Soviet Russia and China “adopted atheism as state policy and frowned on even private religious expression.”

“Frowned”?


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