THE ‘HISTORY ANGLE’ TO CONFUSE CITIZENS: IT DIDN’T HAPPEN

The ‘history angle’ is not so much a disguise as an omission, of leaving things out.

Traffic on boomerpdx started coming in large numbers from China and Hong Kong, so I thought of ways to include them.

Write historical posts about the events banned in their country and address historical omissions gaining ground in America?

That’s one idea.

From Amnesty International:

 

The whole history of the Communist Party of China remains policed by the imperative to follow the orthodox positions set by the Party itself.

References to the Sino-Japanese war, the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen crackdown, all remain closely policed, with almost no publishing or academic freedom.

 

What is so important that it needs historical cover to hide?

 

In 2015, famed historian Yang Jisheng was blocked from leaving the country to receive a prestigious journalism award in recognition of his landmark book Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958-1962.

The book, which is banned in China, meticulously detailed how an estimated 36 million people died of starvation during Chairman Mao’s Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward”.

 

And here it is, available on AMAZON.

TOMBSTONE: THE GREAT CHINESE FAMINE 1958-1962

While customers find the content compelling, some find it difficult to read and tedious.

How many history books get the very same review?

‘All of them,’ is the wrong answer, but not too wrong.

 

‘Not In My Lifetime’ Is No Excuse

Are we off the history-hook for events that happened before we were born? Noooo.

The Soviets Union starved four million Ukrainians during the Holodomor.

 

At the height of the Holodomor in June of 1933, Ukrainians were dying at a rate of 28,000 people per day.

 

1940’s Germany killed six million in extermination camps.

 

The regime imprisoned millions of people in these camps. They used these detention sites for many purposes, including the imprisonment of real and perceived enemies and the mass murder of Jewish people.

 

Then China in the late 1950’s and early 60’s with thirty six million people dead from starvation.

That happened in my lifetime.

This didn’t.

From history.com.

 

But with the arrival of the first European settlers, waves of new diseases, along with warfare, slavery and other brutality would kill off around 56 million people, or around 90 percent of the indigenous population.

The key phrase is ‘other brutality’ along with war, enslavement, and deathly illness.

‘Other brutality’ is a different way of spelling starvation, the final death sentence.

Are any of these inhumane treatments of humans greater than the other?

While every nation has a culture of domestic dominance, why keep it dialed up so high?

 

The Law, To Breaking The Law, To ‘I Don’t Remember’

History is not the law. You won’t get arrested for not knowing.

There is no ‘ignorance of the law (or history) defense.

But there are certain rules we abide by.

One: If three people agree on one point, it’s history.

That’s it. Three people. Most often it’s hundreds, thousands, even millions.

Let’s start with three. Agreed?

Not one, not two, but three. This is not wikipedia.

The Association For Asian Studies has more than three people, and even if they don’t, their numbers match the rest of the research their narrative is based on.

 

From 1960–1962, an estimated thirty million people died of starvation in China, more than any other single famine in recorded human history. Most tragically, this disaster was largely preventable.

Too few Americans are aware of this epic disaster, and even among the Chinese, it is not well-understood. In the interest of informing a general readership of both the facts and lessons of the Great Leap Forward, the following article outlines the disaster, beginning with China’s successful, centralizing reforms of the early 1950s; Mao’s subsequent devolution into a paranoid despot as he purged critics and fostered a blind, fanatical devotion to his own naïve policies; and how this spiral ultimately ravaged the Chinese population.

 

Too many Americans want spoon-fed history one sweet story after another. George Washington’s ax, Abe Lincoln’s honesty.

How can anyone explain history in a compelling way?

Who is the next Ken Burns?

 

PS:

Too few Americans are aware of our own history.

 

Historian Lonnie Bunch, the Smithsonian’s current secretary, is the first African American to lead the institution. In an unrelated interview that aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Bunch said “the notion of being a more perfect union, not the perfect union, is really what motivates me.”

“I think what I want people to understand is that there is a responsibility to continue to make those aspirations available, accessible, meaningful to a whole range of people,” Bunch said. “And that, in essence, America’s greatest strength, it’s not running away from its history, but it’s understanding how that history shaped us and continues to shape us.”

PSS:

“There’s not one individual narrative that a president gets about our history,” Shapiro, a potential presidential prospect, said in an interview that aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“And any president should want to make sure that that full history is shared, that the American people are able to draw their own conclusions.”

 

Every citizen ought to feel confident enough in their own understanding of history to call out the points they know to be wrong, dead wrong, willfully wrong.

Go ahead and get started. Make the call for your history angle:

KENNY