I’ve been feeling a bit sorry for the Auckland Grammar students who have been psychologically hammered and publically shamed and humiliated to the point of tears for their thoughtless tomfoolery in mocking the Auckland Museum’s Nazi display.
On countless occasions through my life, and of course especially in my teenage and early adult life, I’ve been unable to resist poking fun at the good and bad, the silly and the serious, and just acting the goat among friends. I love satire. Without trying, it seems, I look at the funny or quirky side of any issue as well as its serious facet. Age hasn’t dulled my instinct to think satirically (even about some things I think are quite important) although perhaps it has given me wisdom to choose time and place a little better.
If on every occasion I’d been hauled up in front of stern Keepers of Morals and others who believe “serious things should only be taken seriously”, I would have had all enjoyment of the complexities and ironies of life well and truly beaten out of me by now, and I’d like to think society would have been the poorer for it.
Sure, those schoolboys acted in poor taste. Certainly they should have kept the photos of their mock adulation of the swastika off the internet. Likewise for the Lincoln University students at their bad-taste Nazi party. But they were not seriously trying to make a point about German Nazism or the Holocaust. They were having fun, as teenagers will and do, and just going a step too far by publicising it.
In good time, today’s and tomorrow’s young people will learn about the horrors of that part of World War 2, which for them now is a generations-past event, the same way that the Boer War was for me when I was young. They will learn and absorb it in a more holistic fashion through normal educational events and adult social activities.
They do NOT need the public humiliation and shame visited upon them by those of my WW2-remembering generation who have a limited sense of humour and lack generosity of spirit.
The Holocaust was a blight on the 20th Century, one of several (including Rwanda and Vietnam) which showed the absolute worst our “civilised” humanity is capable of. But I believe that if we’re ever to move totally past it (and I hazard to suggest that we absolutely must sooner or later) we must stop demonising and shaming people who offer any sort of light-hearted take on it. Especially ebullient young people who are yet to understand all the subtleties underlying such issues.
Posted by David Armstrong 