Apologies to P-P Rubens, © 2008, UrbisMedia
Recently arrived in my email was an emotional message with many photos of the victims of the Holocaust (the one in which some 6 million Jews were victim). It had been prompted by the following allegation: “This week, the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it ‘offended’ the Muslim population which claims it never occurred.” This didn’t seem quite right to me and it didn’t take much Internet searching to determine that this was a gross exaggeration. [Google: Holocaust Education UK].
But behind it is a real concern about how, especially in multi-ethnic countries, do you teach the ugly parts of history without offending or alienating students who are from some of the offending cohorts. We may not want to coddle students with white-washed (oops, offended some people already) history, but the problem of being “fair and balanced” is always present. If you are going to wash some ethnicities’, nations’ or society’s dirty linen, maybe you should shove them all into the pedagogical Maytag. Maybe there should be a mandatory history course in all schools the world over called “The History of Dirty, Rotten Human Bastards,” or DRHB 101, for short. Forget that so-called “Western Civ” course, or “World Civ.” What wee need is a nice, forthright, course on the dark side that doesn’t give anybody a pass. (I can see this is going to be a rather misanthropic piece.)
It is somewhat ironic that the sensitivities of Muslims is the alleged reason for the concern about teaching the Holocaust in English schools. Last time I looked, the Muslims were sort of the number one candidate for DRHBs pretty much everywhere in the West. It wasn’t Laplanders that brought down the World Trade Center buildings. Anyway, it seems that the Muslims had little to do with Hitler’s holocaust; they just want to obliterate the Jews themselves, and they certainly do not want the Zionists to have any case for a return to their “homeland.” The Nazis probably didn’t have much affection for the non-Aryan Muslims either, except that they were in league with the Ottoman Turks, who were mostly Muslims. Since WWII the Germans have gastarbeit-ed a lot of Turks to supplement their industrial manpower, which raises some interesting speculations on the substitution they have made. And are such questions brought up in German schools these days, I wonder? It gets complicated, doesn’t it? Do German teachers treat the rather sordid history of the Turks, who have their own Armenian holocaust they officially deny, and then there was that business back in the early 1920s when they ran a lot of Greeks right into the sea at Smyrna (Izmir). The Turks qualify for the DRHB roster as well.
If one is going to be serious about the syllabus for DRHBs 101, one has to do their historical digging both wide and deep. The ugly little secret of human social development is that our species has always tended not only to dislike and distrust differences—the folks from the other side of the [tracks, road, hill, etc]—after all, they (might) have different gods and germs—so we usually selected genocidal tactics for them. This nasty DRHB gene is probably down deep in the DNA, and species wide.
I know, I know, you’re saying, “Oh my God, he’s so pessimistic, so misanthropic, so [fill in the blank]. See, you say, “Oh my God . . .”. You believe that we were made in the image of God and were taught to believe that he resembled Charlton Heston (who will finally meet him). So how could we be fundamentally bad. But that’s part of the reason we divide ourselves up into cultures, so we can justify what we regard as our inherent superiority to others, the way we have elevated ourselves about Nature in general.
So, for example, the Japanese in WWII regarded the Chinese as “sub human.” Imagine that. The Japanese would probably have had to come up with a written language on their own were it not for the Chinese, but they actually referred to Chinese prisoners, on whom they performed the most heinous crimes, as “logs,” so they could perform vivisections on them without regarding them as human at all. Or, when they slaughtered 300,000 Chinese in Nanking and raped and murdered 20,000 Chinese women. So, do the Japanese make the DRHB list? You betcha! But you won’t find it taught in their schools.
Maybe a case could be made that we should not tar entire cultures or peoples because some dirty, rotten political leaders and tyrants, like Tojo or Emperor Hirohito, have led them astray, or made them do bad things. That might be true here and there. But it might also be that these people become leaders and are able to take power because the represent the feelings of their people. Hitler didn’t invent anti-Semitism, and Milosivic didn’t invent the idea of exterminating villages of Muslim Kosovars and Albanians, although maybe Americans came up with the idea of wiping out the Indians, or Australians of exterminating aboriginals, on their own.
What about Africa. We hear a lot (deserved) blame being leveled at Europeans screwing up their societies with colonialism when Hutus are hacking up Tutsis, but these same Africans were also delivering their ethnic rivals to the slave ships not all that long ago. And don’t get me going on the Spanish and Portugese in Central and South America.
The very same Chinese who were regarded as “sub human” by the Japanese have often behaved rather badly towards their own. Mao managed to starve about 30 million of his own people and then unleash the Cultural Revolution on the remainder. It took more than one callous DRHB to pull that off. Even today, in the great economic ascendency of China, the exploitation of the four-fifths of the people who inhabit the countryside by cadres who overtax them and steal their produce is class warfare that is as dirty and rotten as what the “landlords” of the old order did to the peasantry. Cute pandas, pingpong and the Olympics are not enough to keep China off the list.
Not that the big boys don’t have competition for nastiness. How about Burma, a country that has an army whose primary purpose is to make war on its own people. In front of the entire world its political leadership would rather watch its people die of disease, injury and starvation, than accept international aid that might expose its meanness and incompetence. When they are not busy doing that they can practice genocide on indigenous tribes in the north of the country.
The Burmese junta also allows us to consider the religious factor in all of this. We already know of the bellicosity of the big Western religions. Their practitioners are adept at announcing they are faiths of peace and harmony—while they are forcing a cold knife though your vital organs. The Roman Catholic Inquisition probably taught modern authoritarian regimes most of their best torture techniques. Protestantism didn’t do much to change things for the better. And, well I don’t want to say anything about those over-sensitive Muslims for fear they’ll be “offended.” We wouldn’t want them to ah . . . blow up at us now, would we. The Jews are too few, and too much on the defensive to be in the same group with the biggies. But if you go back into the Old Testament you can see they were capable of some nasty doings, like sacking cities in which they left “no stone upon stone,” and wiping out the entire idolatrous population of goyim. The Burmese junta and its army is proof that Buddhism hasn’t made all of its adherents pacific seekers of enlightenment.
You probably have to go back a ways with some other peoples. Take those Scandinavians; they have been pretty well-behaved for some time. But there was a time when nobody wanted to see those longships coming over the horizon. These guys could rape and pillage with the best of them.
I am of Italian descent and I don’t like reminding myself that Italy was part of the Axis for (most of) World War II and, going back a bit further, was the place that was the origin of the word, “ghetto” because of a place in Venice where Jews were sequestered nearly 300 years, and that the so-called Pax Romana of even further back was achieved by Roman armies rolling over a lot of innocent people and by the widespread use of slavery. Then there’s the MAFIA. Geez, just leave us out of the history books, or maybe just mention Michelangelo and Marconi and get right on to those other DRHB’s, the . . . a . . . a, French. Yeah, the French, especially those Nazi-collaborators, the Vichy French who hunted down French Jews and sent them to Drancy. Yeah, lets offend some Froggy school kids today. “Hey Jean-Pierre, your grandfather might not have been in the Resistance after all. Deal with it.”
Pretty much every racial and ethnic group belongs on the DRHB list. Why? Because they’re human, that’s why. Rummage around in any group’s history and you’ll probably find some skeletons, usually of other people they didn’t like or felt superior to.
Oh, so you think the Swiss don’t belong on the DRHB list? Why would anybody want to get on the case of people who make coo-coo clocks, chocolate, cheese with holes and keep the gold that Nazis stole from the Jews secreted in their bank vaults (right beside the cash that drug dealers and other scum keep in their numbered accounts). Oh, but you say they haven’t attacked anybody in a long time. Right, they have learned to play the “Hey, were neutral” game better than anybody else. They’re like the guy in a bar that says he’ll hold the coats of two other guys who are about to fight. While they are fighting the Swiss guy goes through their pockets. Are the guys betting on a cockfight or a dogfight any less guilty? Wasn’t it Edmund Burke who said, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Put’em on the list.
Now, I hope that any races or ethnic groups I might have left off because this could go on at some length. If you are, then please send me an email tat you are offended in some way and I’ll give you a piece of my mind. This diatribe has made me feel a little better, but some DRHB is out there right now doing something dirty and rotten and then getting offended if we try to teach the next generation that it’s possible to be people who deserve to put a “e” on the end of “human.”
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© 2000, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.13.2008)