Every year on this day, I tell my kids the same thing--the history books are written by the victors. There are two sides to every story. We choose to send our kids to public school, and we LOVE the school theyre in, and their teachers are phenomenal. But this Columbus Day stuff--seriously, lets simmer down. It could be SUCH an opportunity in REAL education, about story, about the ripple effect of colonization, about violence and really, about peace. EVERY student knows the names of Columbus three ships. But who among them can tell you the names of the tribes he massacred? The great Howard Zinn: To emphasize the heroism of Columbus and his successors as navigators and discoverers, and to de-emphasize their genocide, is not a technical necessity but an ideological choice. It serves- unwittingly-to justify what was done. My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn 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.
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 02:04:47 +0000
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