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How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge?

In a radio address in 1966 the prominent German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, declared his dissatisfaction with the state of Holocaust consciousness. He claimed that ignorance of the barbarity of the Holocaust is “itself a symptom of the continuing potential for its recurrence as far as peoples’ conscious and unconscious is concerned.” (Adorno, Education After Auschwitz). It is for this reason that he envisioned education as the institution which would be most responsible for instilling values in the masses so that they have the agency to oppose barbarism.  Adorno spoke not only of education in childhood, but “then the general enlightenment that provides an intellectual, cultural, and social climate in which a recurrence would no longer be possible.” Almost 40 years later, the Holocaust education is still important, not only to combat another genocide but also to provide a consciousness of human rights necessary in a world where such standards are becoming commonplace. Holocaust education is in a state of constant evolution. As generations grow up and new ones are born, as distance from the Holocaust increases, it is necessary to reform the methods in which its history is taught. As survivors die and the third generation slowly drifts out of the Holocaust’s shadow, education must be buttressed with an understanding of the applicable lessons and principles that may derive from the Holocaust. For this education to have any meaning, those mechanisms that allowed the Holocaust to take place must be fully understood. History must empower pupils with the understanding of various choices they must make and their ultimate impact on society. 

"Ignoring our history doesn’t make it go away. It always ends up bubbling back up to the top at some point," Allen said. "It may be squished down for a while but it will always come up in different ways."

This  move prompted new academic programs at the university and, according to at least one advocate, served as a tipping point in the national trend toward confronting shameful pasts.

AMERICANS and Europeans stand out from the rest of the world for our sense of ourselves as individuals. We like to think of ourselves as unique, autonomous, self-motivated, self-made. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz observed, this is a peculiar idea.People in the rest of the world are more likely to understand themselves as interwoven with other people — as interdependent, not independent. In such social worlds, your goal is to fit in and adjust yourself to others, not to stand out. People imagine themselves as part of a larger whole — threads in a web, not lone horsemen on the frontier. In America, we say that the squeaky wheel gets the grease. In Japan, people say that the nail that stands up gets hammered down.

One of the few Palestinians who has tried to teach the Holocaust, Muhammad S. Dajani Daoudi, included it in a course at Al Quds University, in Jerusalem, and took twenty-seven Palestinian students to visit Auschwitz last year. He was vilified and hounded into resigning.

A series of studies suggests that, while a product’s ethics may influence purchasing decisions, many shoppers choose simply not to know whether something was ethically made. That includes shoppers who care about social responsibility. And shoppers who ignore ethical matters can even develop a negative opinion about people who do express ethical concerns—which makes them even less likely to pay attention to ethical issues in the future.

“You feel badly that you were not ethical when someone else was,” Rebecca Reczek, a professor of marketing at Ohio State University and one of the study’s authors, told NPR about the results. “It’s a threat to your sense of self, to your identity. So to recover from that, you put the other person down.”

International supply chains, she points out, are notoriously opaque, and the free market doesn’t have any good way to deal with the way this system stifles information. It might be best, she says, if these matters were regulated before the products even reached consumers, taking ethical dilemmas out of the shopping equation. Of the unethical choice, like a polluting car or a shirt made with exploited labor, she suggests: “Maybe we just shouldn’t have it available.”