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History is in the eye of the textbook holder

Published Friday, August 20, 2004 by seanlmccarthy | E-mail this post

Word from Russia says the new high-school history textbooks, History of Russia and the World in the 20th Century, fail to mention gulags, anti-Semitism and Stalin's somewhat repressive rule -- that is, if you consider the torture and death of millions of your own people as repressive. Hey, how come the U.S. never invaded the Soviet Union to get rid of that guy? Oh, right. Stalin did have weapons of mass destruction. At any rate, it's discomforting to know that ours t'aint the only country that tries to forget its past. Or haven't you heard everybody describing the 9/11 attacks and the Oklahoma City bombings as the only terrorist acts on U.S. soil? How quickly people forget about the Weather Underground bombings of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Are we trying desperately to forget things like that happened, or do we really suffer as a nation from historical memory loss?
Discuss.