Our View: Are we burying our heads in the sand over Nazi behaviour?
The furore over photos of teenagers signalling Nazi salutes and their swastika handiwork around school property at Larnaca’s Vergina high school ten days ago died down over Christmas week but is likely to resume once the holidays are over.
Beyond the initial outrage, hysteria and panic, there is going to have to be a reckoning as this was not the first time it’s happened and it seems to be spreading. Some might suggest it’s just about teenagers acting out, making mischief. Others see the sky falling. Yet nothing seems to have been done since the last incident and if there was, clearly it didn’t work.
Either way this is something that can’t be fixed by merely hauling these boys in for a finger-wagging, expulsions or suspensions. Some of the boys undoubtedly go along with it due to peer pressure but obviously there exists a hard-core element that needs to be identified. Some students had travelled to Greece, to a location linked to extremist networks. That’s no joke.
Teenage boys who adopt this ideology are not to be easily persuaded to back down even when shown Nazi death camps. Either they will ultimately become older and belatedly wiser or remain on the fringes of society seething with resentment.
This is not just a problem for Cyprus, it’s evident across the West. The internet is filled with concerned parents asking what they can do because their child is a Hitler fan.
But what makes one child turn to Nazi ideology and another one not?
Embracing Nazi antisemitism and its cousins, racism and misogyny, does not come from nowhere. Children are not born bad and not all have bad parents either but something shapes them along the way. In the words of one American former neo-Nazi: “I found power at a time when I felt powerless, attention when I felt invisible and acceptance when I felt unlovable.”
What’s the excuse in Cyprus?
Does it come from a sense of entitlement that has no fear of punishment? Is it a lack of understanding of history, of empathy? Have they not been taught these things?
Is there a dearth of decent male role models? Are they experiencing a world where those who climb to the top of the heap do so by being narcissistic, greedy and corrupt without consequence?
Are their young minds scrambled by social media and the pursuit of constant attention? Is it that Gen Z boys do not care a fig for the norms of polite society and we’re seeing a generational shift, a counterculture to Gen Y’s perceived wokeness?
Or is it a combination of the above?
The subject of much discussion in the UK right now is the lack of male teachers and the resulting rise of misogyny towards young female teachers. In Cyprus also almost 85 per cent of primary teachers are women and in secondary schools it’s 70 per cent. This is not an issue of teaching skills and younger children do tend to do better with female teachers.
At secondary level, schools become wider social settings and contribute to character development and behaviours. If a boy comes from a broken home or lives with an unapproachable father figure, male teachers can often act as a role model and help them navigate masculinity. If they have no one to turn to for guidance, teenage boys tend to find bad male role models online such as Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.
Fuentes was recently interviewed by Piers Morgan whose MO was to try and shame him for his antisemitism, joking about the Holocaust, racism and misogyny. A defiant Fuentes owned up to every label. He didn’t care. Morgan didn’t understand that Fuentes and his Gen Z followers who are called Groypers, simply can’t be shamed into submission by societal expectations and won’t bow to its sacred cows.
The Vergina incident is giving off the same vibe.
If they don’t care about posting Nazi extremism online, they’re not going to care about being scolded. Anyone who has fear of punishment would not do that in the first place unless they were that ignorant they were unaware of the horrors of Nazism. In that case shame on the education system. If the boys were aware and did it anyway, it’s even worse.
A gender equality report released some days ago focusing on women and girls had a small nugget that no one picked up on because it was in the EU report but not in the local press release. Where it showed that 72 per cent of Cypriot girls were university graduates, only 56 per cent of boys had a degree. But no one seems to be asking why at least 16 per cent of boys are falling behind.
Are they failing to integrate into society or is society failing them in some way that makes some of them feel justified in lionising one of the biggest mass murderers in modern history? Nazism is the ultimate bogeyman – acting the worst way you can think of to give society the middle finger.
Whatever the reason, shouldn’t someone be trying to find out? Or will everyone bury their heads in the sand yet again?