Acceptance: the Case of Jim Keegstra

(from Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century)

Accepting implausible beliefs does not always reflect deep emotional needs. Nor does it always require a whole society like Nazi Germany, with emotionally powerful propaganda and strong pressures to conform. People have a disposition to believe what they are told, especially when they are told it by someone in authority. There is also a disposition towards scepticism, but this depends on education or experiences which correct credulity. The disposition to believe starts early. In a few years, children have to learn an enormous amount about the world. They are not born knowing how to test claims against evidence, and to test everything would take far too long. Adults give them more true information than false, so the disposition to accept most of what they are told is useful, but it does make children vulnerable to propaganda. The disposition and the associated vulnerability last beyond childhood. A demonstration of the vulnerability of teenagers to Nazi propaganda comes, surprisingly, from Canada in the 1970s and 1980s. Jim Keegstra taught a class in the High School in Eckville, Alberta. He was a Biblereader and a member of the Diamond Valley Full Gospel Church. He decided that Jews, by denying that Christ was God, were calling God a liar. Mr Keegstra's outlook influenced his teenage class. One young woman wrote in her essay: 'Hitler was one of the most successful people in the world ever to go against the Jews. If people would have been listening, he could have rid the world of Jews forever. It's funny how people never want to hear the truth.' Mr Keegstra added the comment: 'But the Jews control the press, mass media and the propaganda.' One young man wrote a paper about the Jewish plots for world government, to abolish marriage and confiscate private property, and the Jewish assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Another student wrote that Jewish-controlled thugs rode around in packs, bashing in children's heads, raping and drowning women, and cutting open men's stomachs so they would bleed to death. The writer suggested, 'In my opinion, this must come to a dead halt. . . We must get rid of every Jew in existence so we may live in peace and freedom.' Some parents complained and Keegstra's teaching was stopped. His replacement, Dick Hoeksema, found the students kept asserting Keegstra's

point of view. Hoeksema raised this with other teachers and found that Keegstra had persuaded many of them. 'I would say World War Two started because Hitler invaded Poland and they'd say, "No, Hitler liberated Poland." I was starting to think that I was crazy. That I was the only person who thought that way.' The school library had many books supporting Keegstra's view. When Hoeksema took into class a book with pictures from the Nazi camps, they were dismissed as fakes. Evidence from other books was rejected because all textbooks were censored by Jews. Keegstra's removal was further evidence of the conspiracy. One member of Keegstra's class had his mind changed by a trip to Dachau paid for by a Calgary businessman, but for some this was more evidence that the Jews were determined to eradicate knowledge of their conspiracy. The Keegstra case shows how, in a society utterly different from Nazi Germany, people can be persuaded to accept anti-Semitic beliefs verging on paranoia. There was the authority of the teacher, together with his apparent command of a large body of'evidence'. There was the support of the books he had put in the library. And there was the holistic character of a belief system. This parallels the way some members of the Central Committee of the British Communist Party in 1939 had faith in the Soviet Union as the rigid point and preserved this by making whatever adjustments were necessary to other parts of their system. For his followers, belief in Keegstra's Tightness about the Jewish conspiracy was the fixed point. To preserve this, they made adjustments to beliefs about the reliability of textbooks and so on to discredit countervailing evidence.