High School History - May 6 2024

 

High School History

May 6 2024

In high school history

it all made sense.

The dates were set in stone

and we tried to remember them,

because not only were we told

how important they were,

they were on the test.

It was self-evident

that events happened in order

as if according to some cosmic plan,

intended to lead to us

in the here and now;

the end of history

and the beginning of kumbaya.

Although the biggest lesson I learned

was how short-sighted they were,

depleting the resources

they depended on,

fighting stupid wars,

submitting to tyranny.

Now, older and more cynical

I know what history really is for.

How it’s used

to serve the powers that be,

so whoever controls the narrative

controls what we think.

As well as how easily we forget;

of even the history

we ourselves lived through

a few short years ago.

If progress

is two steps forward, one step back

I can live with disappointment.

But it feels we’re not gaining ground

just losing it,

not only regressing

but pleased to go back;

fighting the same old wars,

dying of diseases

we thought needles had solved,

and happy to distract ourselves

while madmen rule.

We study history

so as not to repeat it.

But who’s to say

the textbook isn’t glib

simplistic,

superficial;

a version of a larger truth

we may never know.

I try hard to avoid poetry as political as this. Because prose works so much better for ideas, while poetry is more suited to feelings, moods, impressions. But I’m more head than heart. And sometimes, too annoyed to contain myself. So against my better judgment, I occasionally indulge.

I was reading Anne Applebaum’s recent piece in the Atlantic about the sophisticated and extremely well-resourced propaganda from China, Russia, and other autocratic nations that is not only intended to engender apathy and cynical disengagement among their own citizens, but is busy rewriting history (even while it’s happening!), attempting to discredit the democracies as corrupt and ineffective, and assiduously brainwashing the people of 3rd world countries who are poorly served by their own media. Most ominously, how the propagandists’ domestic enablers (such as Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene) use social media and their own bully pulpits to amplify and legitimate these patent falsehoods.

I was also thinking of Trump. How his relentless barrage of scandal, outright lies, outlandish discourse, and radical departures from the political norms (such as demonizing the media; threatening to weaponize the Dept. of Justice, politicize the military, and prosecute his political opponents; and labelling any dissenter or disloyalist as a hater of America and existential threat) numbs us to the next depravity and makes us forget the last one. How our memories are so short his followers actually believe his utterly disastrous Presidency was a triumph.

Not to mention how history textbooks are superficial, parochially Western in their worldview, and guilty of “presentism”. And how, above all, they present history as neat, fixed, and decided; while history is complicated, messy, open to interpretation, and never fully understood. Because history is an ongoing debate, not a chronological litany of accepted facts.

In 1984, George Orwell said everything there is to say about the weaponization of history:

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/06/china-russia-republican-party-relations/678271/