I like my stories as complex and mundane as life, thank you. And true. I like them true.
But I was in the news business in the U.S. for far too long to believe that that's what we usually get. Which is one reason I love the internet and credible people to find me nuggets like this:
One thing nobody reflected on much back in 2003, when neo-cons were arguing that we built a democracy in postwar Germany so why not Iraq: as Tony Judt writes in Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, the postwar settlement in Europe involved vast amounts of ethnic cleansing, which left the states the US (and USSR) proposed to rebuild neatly settled on linguistic and ethnic lines. Czechoslovakia and Poland expelled millions of Germans. Yugoslavia expelled Italians. Hungary expelled Rumanians and vice versa. And of course the Jews were dead, and those that weren’t soon left for Palestine. The map of Central and Eastern Europe was sorted of most of its troublesome Austro-Hungarian complexity. And as it turns out it’s much easier to build a nation when its population doesn’t have murderous long-running internal religious and ethnic differences.
They didn't tell you that in your high school history class, did they? That is, if you ever made it all the way to WWII. (I argue we should teach history backwards, starting with Iraq and ending with the Pilgrims, but that's for another day.)
No comments:
Post a Comment