While playing cards last night I mentioned that while I read an enormous amount of history I had never read much of anything about the history of Central and Eastern Europe. As I turned my attention that way during the night I can see why I must have initially resisted the idea of reading too much about it. Yes, a good deal of my reluctance comes from early years in education when the school libraries still contained massive amounts of first hand documentation about the Holocaust and the war in the East. I didn't want to read that.
Having done a little more reading and remembering too the ethnic cleansing of all Germans out of all Europe lying to the East of the Soviet Zone I don't wonder that anyone familiar with the history is rabid in their efforts to control it and stuff any ethnic discussions of European boundaries and hate into a bag and then drown it. The current unpleasantness in Ukraine is raising the ghosts that the apparatchiks running the EU thought they had buried with the founding of the EU. I think they were both wrong and misguided.
It does give one a real appreciation for how almost all History has been erased from American education. The socialists running public education want the little kids to feel sympathy only for the victims that the socialists want them to see and know anything about. They stamped out EVERYTHING having to do with the history of Eastern and Central Europe. It was never taught to me at any of the 8 schools I attended. The entire subject never came up at all in school systems ranging from Leavenworth, Kansas, Newport, Rhode Island, Huntsville, Alabama or any schools in between.
That's here in America. I suspect that the kids educated in Poland, Estonia, Russia and all the counties in Central and Eastern Europe outside the original NATO boundaries studied a lot of the history of the last century in their neighborhood and perhaps even the centuries before that. Here in America I studied the discovery and development of British civilization in New England, a little bit about the history of Alabama and the native tribes that lived there and very little else. That was the deliberate destruction of memory and history. I knew more about the City States of Ancient Greece then I did about the events leading to the Treaty of Westphalia or the Industrial Revolution and the events that coalesced Italy and Germany into Kingdoms of almost unrivaled size.
I can see why Europe wants to forget. Their traditional history of genocide didn't begin or end with the Jews in the Holocaust and they want everyone to forget it and all be good little EUsubjects but the Nationalists remember and they want to make you remember. It will be fascinating to watch the Splintering of Europe as it once again turns on itself and consumes itself with an idiotic passion not seen since......oh, the breakup of Yugoslavia. Remember that set of wars that turned neighbors into the most vicious and amoral killers you ever saw since the Red Army hit Berlin?
No wonder Russian novelists are such a dismal and awful read.
2 comments:
perhaps because history education is all about memorizing dates and events and the names of kings and nothing about the movement of people and the development of principalities into empires; perhaps because our history education is so anglo- and franco- oriented that no other country matters in world affairs - and perhaps that bias slants our current view of the world today
Precisely. They say that the winners write the history but all my life it's as if the losers suddenly became either the only writers of history or the only ones that publishers would buy and try to sell.
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