Posted: Jun 24, 2021 1:39 pm
Spearthrower wrote:Animavore wrote:
And it's not just Britain, many colonialists do this,...
Not to detract from any of the points you made, but I'd amend this to 'all nations do this'.
I've lived in a dozen or so countries over the years, and all of them have presented a highly curated form of their nation's history to children.
You wouldn't believe the bunk Thai kids are taught about magnificent Thailand.
Ditto Japan.
And from what I have been told by friends living in China, it is particularly egregious there.
One strategy that i have used in the past to try to break out of the usual well-rehearsed routines that cluster around these kinds of issues is as follows:
I will talk in frank terms about the crimes of Britain's colonial history...as far as my knowledge and reading allows. The opium wars and the destruction of the Summer Palace in China, the bloody suppression of the 1857 Indian uprising, the concentration camps in South Africa, the campaign against the Mau Mau, the settlement of Ulster and the potato famine in Ireland, to name a few. I then invite my interlocutor to talk in similarly frank and unvarnished terms about the crimes and misdeeds of whatever nation/culture/religion they align with.
It is pretty clear when someone is coming from a viewpoint of human rights culture or mote and beam ideology.
I recall the tearing down of the statue in Bristol last year and it got me thinking about the situation here in East Asia.
In Kyoto there is an old monument which is described as 'the least publicized and least known' of that city's many shrines. It is the Mimizuka https://www.japanvisitor.com/kyoto-districts/mimizuka-ear-mound
A mound built with the severed noses of Koreans killed in the Japanese invasions of Korea in the late 1500's.
Unsurprisingly, most Japanese are ignorant about this, but Korean visitors are often well-informed.
The Koreans have their own monument to the brutality of the Japanese in WW2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Peace. There is also a monument to the South Koreans who served in the Vietnam war, where they had a reputation for ferocity..i.e. doing to the Vietnamese what the Japanese did to them.
The South Koreans seem as slippery and evasive over this aspect of their history as the Japanese are about their own crimes.
Moving to another country, the Mongolians proudly display a huge equine statue of their national hero Genghiz Khan.
What the people of the countries devastated by his genocidal campaigns think about this is not clear, but the Mongolians seem pretty proud of their man.
From my knowledge of the way the CCP operates, expecting the Chinese to engage in any kind of self-criticism about their history is a slim hope.
Individuals here and there might be more reflective and knowledgeable about history in this part of the world, but generally speaking, burying the past, playing the victim and reacting negatively to any suggestion of wrongdoing seems to be the way of things right across the major nations of east Asia.