Can't you keep my hand to yourself?!
Friday, September 1
Gotta love revisionist history!
Here's an interesting article about the Chinese cutting out some of the nastier aspects of their history. Funny how that works, eh?
When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.The new text mentions Mao only once? But he was such a loveable figure! posted by issek @ 12:21
Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette.
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Comments:
Yeah, it's unfortunate that governments always leave out the nasty parts of their history or deemphasize it in a way which tells the reader that it was not important.
As Howard Zinn wrote in his great book The People's History of the United States,
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an idealogical choice. It serves-unwittingly-to justify what was done.
My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condem Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly
So it's unfortunate, but at the same time people should never expect to learn history from the average classroom. It takes much more personal effort to do so.
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As Howard Zinn wrote in his great book The People's History of the United States,
To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to deemphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an idealogical choice. It serves-unwittingly-to justify what was done.
My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condem Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all)-that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth. We have learned to give them exactly the same proportion of attention that teachers and writers often give them in the most respectable of classrooms and textbooks. This learned sense of moral proportion, coming from the apparent objectivity of the scholar, is accepted more easily than when it comes from politicians at press conferences. It is therefore more deadly
So it's unfortunate, but at the same time people should never expect to learn history from the average classroom. It takes much more personal effort to do so.
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