History, with rose-tinted hindsight

[davidinalameda]

According to a newspaper report last week, the Russian authorities have recently gathered together a group of academics to draw up a school textbook that would present an approved version of the complex and controversial events that make up Russian history.

The aim is to play down the deplorable excesses of the Communist regime: the show trials, the purges, the gulags, the abuses of human rights and the denial of individual freedom.

Instead, the intention is to stress the positive contribution and the heroic achievements of the Russian people in defeating Hitler, and to build a new national identity on the basis of this selective and sanitised national narrative.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8762969.stm

[av8rdave]

1. THey must be working with the Texas school board!

[depakid]

9. They wouldn't need to do that!

The "standard" version taught to kids is already sanitized and romanticized to such a degree that it would rival anything the Russians could do.

[Taitertots]

2. Is there an equivalent to Zinn's people's history of US, for Russia? n/t

[lunatica]

3. We all grew up on that kind of history book

Very little of the dark side of our history is in our history books in schools.

[Warpy]

4. All countries do that, sanitize their histories.

Histories are always sanitized for children and geared toward instilling pride in country and obedience on the job. One only begins to learn the whole story when the college years are reached and then only if learning the whole story is appealing.

While it would be nice to see some sort of balance when they discuss this part of their history, if they did that they'd be the first.

[The Magistrate]

5. Some Possibilities There, Sir, For High Comedy....

"History is just one dammned thing after another."

"A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view of history and hatred for their neighbors."

[Speck Tater]

6. The best thing that could happen to the human race would be for them to forget history.

The Arabs and the Jews fight today because of their history.
The Irish bomb each other, and the British, over their history.
We have racial inequality and tension because of our history.
People kill each other because they can't agree about which historical self-proclaimed representative of God to follow.
Ethnic wars are about history: what their people did to our people (probably over 600 years ago!)
100 years from now people who haven't even been born yet will be killing each other because of their history. These children will not be born wanting to kill their neighbors.But as soon as they are old enough to understand what people are telling them they will be will told about "their" history, as if it had ANYTHING in the world to do with them!

They gather the children around the dinner table and tell them stories about "honoring our heritage and keeping alive the customs of our ancestor and our people." which really means "Come, gather around children. I will teach you whom to hate, and why we must always go on hating them."

I never kept slaves, but somehow I get blamed for slavery because it was "my people" and "my history."

I never marched in a "holy crusade" against the heathens, yet somehow I get blamed for it because it was "my people", and "my history."

Well fuck my history! I have no history. I want no history. I want what is here today, and what tomorrow may bring. Forget history. Forget "honoring traditions" and "keeping our culture alive." It's all bullshit that keeps us hating each other for what someone we never knew did hundreds of years ago. Forget "being proud of your heritage." It's not your fucking heritage. It's the legacy of some people you never knew who died before your parents were born. You didn't do it, so why be proud of it? It all happened before you even existed, so taking credit for it by "being proud of it" is just bullshit.

It's better we teach our children science, and music, and art, and athletics, and literature, and consign the study of "our history" to the long overdue scrap heap where it belongs. History is nothing more than the art of placing blame, making it stick, and systematically holding a grudge for generation after generation. We can live without it.

[Iterate]

8. Oh my, I hope you're being ironic.

Let me see if I have this right, your study of history has taught you that using a narrow view of history to generate continuous ethnic hatred and social strife is a bad idea. On the face of it, that seems likely to be true. It might even make a good read - "How People Who Write History Textbooks Use a Narrow View of History to Promote Religious and Ethnic Hatred".

But the other voice in your head would not have that published or taught in schools. A valuable lesson of history would not be passed on and we would return to year zero when we knew none of that.

But I don't want to go back to year zero, and not in science or literature either. It took too much heavy lifting to know what we know just to walk away from it.

[Speck Tater]

10. Those who don't learn from history...

are doomed to take it in summer school.

But even in summer school the best I do was a D+.

So, yes, my dislike of history goes back at least 50 years to my high school days.

But mostly I'm talking about the kind of history that the family and community passes down to the next generation as justification for hatred and conflict.

[moondust]

7. Unless they ban Solzhenitsyn

and a few others, the dark chapters will not be forgotten.

Russians, including especially the militarist Soviets, have always rapturously glorified the "Great Patriotic War" that defeated Hitler. But it's hard to blame them after the seige of Stalingrad and the enormous sacrifices made by the Russian people.