It should be no surprise that the lesson of the Holocaust and the lesson of October 7 are the same: Man’s capacity to hate and impose horrific inhumanity on his fellows is without bound.

Although there is no question about this unbounded capacity to hate, the big question remains: How is this innate human instinct turned into actual hatred?

Simply observing the Jew-haters of the world, whether of home-grown or foreign origin, reveals the answer to this big question: Hatred is taught.

In his Outline of History, H.G. Wells explains the social dynamic that constitutes the engine of history:

All the things that men and nations do are the outcome of instinctive motives reacting upon the ideas which talk and books and newspapers and schoolmasters and so forth have put into people’s heads. Physical necessities, pestilences, changes of climate, and the like outer things may deflect and distort the growth of human history, but its living root is thought. All human history is fundamentally a history of ideas.

Rodgers & Hammerstein put it this way:

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught from year to year,

It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate—

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

So what are the children of our planet being taught?

It is well-known that substantial droves of the planet’s denizens daily teach their young to hate certain religions, races, or nationalities. We should take warning from the recent report that the most common baby name in the UK and Germany is “Muhammad.”

But what are our own students being taught right here in the USA? This past week’s return of the Nation’s Report Card warns that they are not being taught to read, write, and cipher.

While they’re not learning the basics, we know they are being taught large dollops of falsehood: that human sexuality is a spectrum, that the “climate crisis” threatens the planet, that American civilization is inherently bigoted, etc. Are they also being taught to be Jew-haters? The President’s recent launch of an anti-Semitism investigation into five major universities is a warning sign.

This is our time, and as we begin our time with a new but experienced president determined to undo the blunders of the past, let us resolve that our children will be reared without malice in their hearts toward any of their fellows with whom they will live in peace.

Racial teaching in Nazi Germany. Fair Use.