Don’t Know Much About History
The week of the the ill-named “Patriot Day” commemorating 9/11 seems like the perfect occasions to ponder the question of history.
In my days as a yoof, it seemed that history was one of the least liked subjects in school for many people. It was even less popular than math, my dreaded nemesis throughout my school years. Me? I loved history. As a kid I read Johnny Tremain and We Were There with Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys. Some of my favorite films were war movies like Patton, Tora! Tora! Tora! and A Bridge Too Far.
Most of the dislike of history has to do with the way history is taught in schools. While memorizing dates and people is important, if that is all you do it rapidly becomes boring. Knowing dates and people is necessary and foundational for studying history but it is not sufficient.
Learning dates, people and places is the beginning of the study of history, not the goal.
Of course in modern days, we don’t even bother to learn dates and people. Why should we when all of humankind’s collective knowledge is available on a tiny screen while sitting on the can? People screeching about fascism and LITERAL NAZIS! couldn’t tell you even an approximate timeframe for when World War II happened but they are sure fascism is bad and anything they don’t like is therefore fascism.
Public schooling, including most colleges and universities in that category, appears to be intentionally designed to turn people away from studying history. As a history lover and someone who minored in history as an undergraduate, I learned very little (basically nothing) of history from my formal studies, not even in my history classes which were completely forgettable. Everything I have learned has been post-graduate on my own. I am something of an autodidact anyway so that suits me fine but most people are not, and if we are being honest the vast majority of people are so intellectually lazy that they are bordering on retarded.
The easy access to information makes the lack of historical curiosity even more egregious and clearly intentional. You don’t even need to bother memorizing precise dates as that information is at your fingertips. Rather than encouraging people to seek more deeply, it has further driven people into intellectual apathy.
It has also made it significantly easier for Them to twist history. It seems with each passing day that more of history, especially Western history, is off limits for discussion. The events of September 11th are one obvious and pertinent example. It is not just the Big Conspiracy stuff like why did a building untouched by the planes still collapse but even asking if the events really played out like we are told is lumped into with “conspiracy theories” and followed by accusations of being unpatriotic. You know the rest of the list: the moon landing, the assassination of JFK (and RFK and MLK), Pearl Harbor and of course the Holocaust.
The flip side of banning anyone from questioning events is how some events are prioritized and emphasized at the expense of others. The Holocaust is another great example of this. As I said, I was something of a budding history buff as a kid and especially about World War II. The films of the decades following the War didn’t seem to make much mention of the Holocaust. We certainly were aware of it but it was more of a side note to the greater struggle. Then in 1993 two things happened that vaulted the Holocaust into the spotlight. One was the release of Schindler’s List, widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever released and winner of 7 Oscars. It was released in 1993, and the same year the Holocaust Museum opened in Washington D.C. An amazing coincidence, no? Schindler’s List was brutal in it’s depiction of Nazi treatment of Jews especially the figure of Amon Göth.
An interesting note from Wikipedia:
On 13 September 1944, Göth was relieved of his position and charged by the SS with theft of Jewish property (which belonged to the state, according to Nazi regulations), failure to provide adequate food to the prisoners under his charge, violation of concentration camp regulations regarding the treatment and punishment of prisoners, and allowing unauthorised access to camp personnel records by prisoners and non-commissioned officers.
https://archive.vn/IljSz
It certainly seems odd that a Nazi would have been relieved of duty and charged with criminal offenses for failing to provide adequate food to prisoners that were supposed to be executed anyway.
Eight years after Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg produced the HBO miniseries adaptation of Band of Brothers. I have watched the miniseries multiple times and read the book and as I pointed out in my D-Day post from June 6, 2021: D-Day 77 Years Later there was a weird change from the books to the miniseries. I wrote:
Something else interesting to note. In the BoB miniseries, one episode is titled ‘Why We Fight‘, a title taken from the name of a series of propaganda films produced to convince Americans to get involved in a war that wasn’t our business. Naming this episode after propaganda films turns out to be unintentionally very appropriate.
Much of the episode is taken up with the retelling of an actual historical event, the liberation of the Kaufering labor camp in Bavaria. I rewatched it and about 18 minutes of the episode, about a third of the actual non-credits run-time, is taken up with depictions of the labor camp, of starved Jews, of corpses in graves and of the German citizens of the nearby town who were forced to help clean up the camp. It is a portrayed as a significant event for Easy Company and the title implies that liberating these camps is one of the reason for why we fought World War II.
However in the book, the only mention of concentration camps comes in the very end of a chapter titled “Getting To Know The Enemy”, the same chapter I quoted from above to point out the respect the American paratroopers had for the German people. The camp they liberated warranted about a page of mention.
The actual passages on pages 262-263 make up less than 300 total words and certainly come across as a side-note rather than a significant event. The men of Easy Company had seen all sorts of horror in the war and the Kaufering camp was just another one. War is hell and there was horror to be seen from start to finish. Why would something that warrants almost no mention in the book the miniseries was based on be given a prominent role in the miniseries itself?
Asking that question is itself considered to be the same as denying the Holocaust.
My point is not to delve into the historical accuracy of the Holocaust narrative or the Warren Commission or the accepted story of 9/11. The issue is more one of a general lament that not only are most people woefully ignorant of history, those who are curious are often blocked from asking inconvenient questions or labeled as some sort of Thought Criminal if they do.
Simply knowing that Pearl Harbor took place on December 7, 1941 is one thing but being able to discuss and understand both the events that led up to the attack and the ramifications of those events is what the study of history is supposed to be about. The inability of most people to even consider this, not only not knowing the answers but not even knowing the questions, has led us to a place where we are the most historically illiterate Americans in our nation’s history while having all of human history available instantly for the asking. What history most people do know is so sanitized and manipulated that it is worse than knowing nothing at all. People “know” that the Nazis committed the Holocaust and the Holocaust was The Worst Thing Ever so therefore the people fighting the Nazis were the Good Guys. It is pretty convenient that the Good Guys have won every war in history…
Like many of my gripe sessions here at Dissident Thoughts, there isn’t much to be done about it. I can’t do anything to influence public school curricula to get them to encourage people to think, mostly because that is the precise opposite of what They want. My message then is mostly to you, the people. Get your hands on books that are older, physical if possible or electronic as long as you get them directly rather than through Amazon who can make your ebooks disappear. Find reputable people online who ask the difficult questions, even if you don’t agree with their conclusions. Ron Unz does a lot of this at The Unz Report because he is apparently wealthy and doesn’t care what people think about him.
For dissidents to know and understand what is happening now, you must know and understand what has come before and you certainly won’t find that out by relying on mainstream history. The truth is out there for those with the courage to seek it.