One history, many histories
in Close to Politics ·
Casey Robinson2 said:A group of authors put together a textbook regarding the American Civil War intended for elementary schools. In this version, they stop short of calling Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm "liberating actions"—and now critics are pointing out that after finishing the book, you're left completely clueless about who was actually attacking whom during the war.
The authors are defending themselves by claiming their only intention was to give students a look at the same events through multiple perspectives.
I honestly find myself wondering what drives people to cling so desperately to this policy of moral equivalence. What exactly is their end goal here?
An interesting trend... one could argue history is just repeating itself.
When I was a kid in school, we were taught that the Partisans, led by the Second Marshall, were practically sacred. They were the heroes, the patriots, the honorable ones—the true victors of WWII. We were told how those unarmed fighters crushed the foreign Nazi/fascist occupiers and the local traitors from the Axis-aligned state—the absolute worst kind of villains.
Then 1990 rolled around, and suddenly those same Partisans were branded as the ultimate criminals—just scum and a gang of liars. And the Axis-aligned state folks? Well, they just wanted an American-style sovereign state, so they fought for it however they could... and, well, they had their "good sides"—like participating in the assassination of King Alexander... and so on.
Later, we got our own heroes from the Homeland War who liberated our nation. Because of that, they were properly celebrated and praised by—for the most part—all the major politicians and basically all the media outlets.
But now here we are in 2008, right before joining the European Union, and suddenly nobody seems to know who actually liberated the country, who was doing the attacking, and so forth...