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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!
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To: Father Terrence who wrote (42398)6/28/1999 8:51:00 AM
From: Dayuhan  Read Replies (2) of 108807
 
I read the history books written close to the actual events in history and the biographies of men who lived through what today is "history". Not the revised and Orwellian "history" texts of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

The nature of the distortions may have changed, but the Orwellian nature of history books has not. I have seen history books from the '50's that recounted the Anglo-British campaigns of WWII in Europe in minute and loving detail, without a single mention of the fact that twice as many Nazis were fighting against the Russians. No reference to the eastern front, no mention that we and the Russians fought on the same side. Later they appeared in Eastern Europe, as if by black magic. World history was presented from a position so Eurocentric that students might reasonably have wondered if any civilization ever existed outside Europe and North America. Colonialism was offered as a heroic struggle on the part of good white people to bring enlightenment and Christianity to the heathen darkies. No wonder the generation raised on those books botched our relations with the developing world so badly.

Those "America-is-perfect" history texts from the old days are every bit as distorted as the ones you deplore. Hardly a unique syndrome; I read an essay by Ryszard Kapuscinski in which he described history books written by Belgian colonists for use in the Congo. Reading them, he said, you would have thought that Belgium was the only country in the world.

Is the idea of presenting views other than ours, or even acknowledging that they exist, really so subversive?
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