Have you forgotten?

[??????????]

That's not really something to be glad about.

[angus]

That's not really something to be glad about.

No, it's not.

In a 2009 poll, five percent of British children think Adolf Hitler was Germany's national football coach, while six percent believe the Holocaust was a celebration at the end of World War II.  In the same poll, an impressive twenty percent also mixed up Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels with Anne Frank.

Meanwhile, back on the ranch...

18% of American grown-ups think Barack Obama is a Muslim, 41% think Saddam Hussein was directly involved with the September 11, 2001 attacks, and 31% of American schoolchildren think that in World War II Germany was allied with the United States against the Soviet Union.

In ten years?  Sure, I wouldn't be surprised if people talk about how Saddam bin Laden made that hurricane happen in Los Angeles and that's why we got into a war with Pakistan in the first place.

[tpfkaw]

The thing with those types of polls is that people will tend to give "joke" answers to "joke" questions, since they find them annoying.

[Vepres]

Of course not! I'm insulted you would think I forgot about the ending of The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest

[angus]

The thing with those types of polls is that people will tend to give "joke" answers to "joke" questions, since they find them annoying.

According to The Vorlon (and other pollsters I've talked to), all people lie in all polls, and that is apparently taken into account.  Script readers are also instructed to press for an answer if it's "don't know" or "don't care," and random samples are hardly random.  I've been called by pollsters myself and ask to give simple yes or no answers to complex questions that really don't lend themselves to that sort of succinct answer, and it's a bit off-putting, which leads me to just give them whatever answer pops into my head since I"m really not paying much attention anyway.  And, yes, there are also the jokers.  Some pollsters have algorithmic ways of trying to deal with this as well.  Still, I've had enough conversations with enough grown-ups all over the world to know that ignorance is fairly common.  What's sad is that in counties that spend so much on education the levels of ignorance is so high.  But some of it, I also recognize, is willful ignorance.  I also think that some folks are going to say Obama's a Muslim just because they want to say he's a Muslim, and it has less to do with ignorance than with disapproval.  And that some just assume Saddam must have been involved with the WTC/Pentagon attacks because he's such a mean sonofabitch.

But none of that means that you ignore all polling data.  Apparently there is some confusion out there, even if we have no good way to quantify it exactly.

[k-onmmunist]

eh. Something like 15% of the American public supported exterminating the Japanese race in 1941 IIRC. Numbers don't mean much.

[King]

Forgotten what?

[angus]

eh. Something like 15% of the American public supported exterminating the Japanese race in 1941 IIRC. Numbers don't mean much.

Actually, that's an interesting point tangential to the thread.  Probably more relevant in the islamophobia thread.  But some scholars have pointed out that anti-German sentiment in 1917 and anti-Japanese sentiment in 1942 was far worse than anti-arab or ant-hamitosemitic or even anti-muslim sentiment is now.  And some numbers, not only polling data, but frequencies of vandalism or assault have been used to support this idea.  Thus, while we're experiencing some islamophobia, it doesn't rise to the former levels of Teutonophobia or Nipophobia or whatever that we have seen in past wars.  There are some problems with this analysis, I think.  For one thing, we were actually at war against Germany in 1917 and we were actually at war against Japan in 1942.  We are not, I hope, in an actual war against Islam now, so the comparison lacks perspective.