It might be a slight exaggeration, but I suggested that human history is mostly the summation of the competition between people, groups of people, and most significantly, between those largest groups of people known as nations and civilizations. The history of the competition between nations and civilizations is the story of war, and this pretty much sums up most of human history. And as the old saying goes, the winners get to write this history.
This means that we should not take everything we learn about history as the truth, the whole truth, and nuttin’ but the truth, so help me. Because sometimes one side colors the story just a bit differently from the tale you might get from the other. And we don’t always get to hear both sides, particularly if the losers aren’t around anymore to tell their version.
We are supposed to learn from history, for not to learn from it leads to repetition. And it follows that lots of history really shouldn’t be repeated. So getting the whole story, the right story, is important
One of the reasons that I bought my Kindle, that convenient electronic holder of an infinite number of books, was the discovery that I could inexpensively pack it with the collected works of many of the authors I should have, but haven’t yet, read. For instance, I loaded in twenty-some Zane Gray novels, all for the princely sum of a buck and 99 cents, and I intend to read them all in sequence. I’m well into the first as we speak.
Now, “western” novels are not scholarly texts of history, but they may be the closest to this that a lot of folks have read. These, and the various movies and TV shows color the history of those European immigrants who “settled” America. They tended to gloss over the reality of the conflicts between them white folks and the previous owners of the land, them redskins. Let’s just say that most of these stories call the guys in the cowboy hats the “good guys”, and the native inhabitants were the nasty ones.
A character in this first book, a white guy, spends much of his time perniciously hunting down and killing those nasty natives, driven mostly by some anger left over from when the natives massacred his family. I haven’t nearly finished this book, but from how it’s going so far, he seems to be righteously portrayed, and I fully expect by the end of the book the white guys are gonna win and those nasty natives will be put into their proper place, ie dead.
I grew up with cowboys and Indian stories, so I knew all about how the West was settled. I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about the process. Of course, I found out later about some of the more regrettable aspects of this settling, all that stuff that makes some people call the process genocide, and thus sorta refutes the notion that those European immigrants were the good guys after all.
If you listen to my invisible friend, which thankfully most of you probably don’t have to, you will learn that the natives portrayed as nasty in the history written by us victors, really were universally nice and productive folks and they should have been left alone in their utopian lives. Oh, and those European immigrants, and their descendants, us, should feel really guilty over how we behaved. My invisible friend has this all figured out. It’s just SO typical of how America has behaved in the world.
She wasn’t at all interested in listening when I mentioned that the Native Americans, her good guys, weren’t actually a homogenous group of nice people, but in reality were many groups of pretty typical people, most of whom didn’t get along with their neighboring groups of people, and their history included wars, with the winners taking the wealth and ladies from the losers, and enslaving and killing off the rest of the conquered, pretty much how those nasty European immigrants did to them.
My invisible friend got a little squirmy over this notion, so I tried to make her feel better by suggesting that during the entire lifetime of the human race, this has pretty much been how we humans did things. So don’t feel so bad about finding out that the Native Americans were just as nasty as the European immigrants who defeated them. That’s just life on this rock.
So see, we Americans aren’t really as bad as all that.
“Oh Yeah??!!!?”
Well what about Hiroshima and Dresden and Iraq and Afghanistan and all that other? How do I justify that nastiness? And all this solely so Americans can sit around with smug satisfaction eating our Big Macs.
I had to point out that it was the Brits who fire bombed Dresden, so my invisible friend’s daughter could smugly drive her new Mini.
Duck
My invisible friend was with us when we visited Frankfurt, Germany last week. We walked through the busy, upscale shopping mall that is now thriving in the old city center. The gothic cathedral that dates back centuries towered nearby, as we walked along the cobbled square, looking up at the lovely reconstructed buildings. It was an idyllic setting.
I pointed out to my invisible friend that the entire area, block after city block, a massive expanse of real estate, was cobbled in old bricks. And those old bricks came from the buildings that once stood at this site, but were reduced to rubble during World War Two. You can purchase a photo of the area from a vender in the square, taken from the air in 1945, and it recalls the devastation from which this place was reborn. Frankfurt is, and was then, a banking center, and hub for transportation and shipping. This made it a target during that war. The place was flattened by aerial bombing in 1944.
My invisible friend was appalled at what the Americans did, and she stood silent for a moment and then grew angry. Damned Americans!
It didn’t help much when I pointed to the Cathedral and mentioned the complicated history of that whole area, the chaos and destruction dating back to before the Roman Empire, which this area had enjoyed. Roman legions conquered the Germanic tribes way back then, taking the wealth and ladies and killing or enslaving the losers. Religious wars came and went, some named simply after their length (they lasted a long time!).
Napoleon visited the area in a bad mood once. This was one of the many places on earth whose history is the history of war. And the taking of wealth and ladies, and killing and enslaving was how things went.
“Oh Yeah??!!?”
Well, America still shouldn’t have done this.
OK, fine.
On my Kindle, In addition to the fun reading, sits a book entitled, “Bloodlands”. It is not for the squeamish. To make a very long story short, it concerns the lands caught between Hitler and his Nazis on one side, and Stalin and his communists on the other, and the havoc they wrought there between 1933 and the end of the war in 1945. It’s all about stealing wealth and ladies, and killing and enslavement wrought big time. It brought my invisible friend to tears.
A significant part of that war raged in this “Bloodlands” area, with the usual death and destruction we have come to expect from war. But the book is not about this aspect of war, but instead it chronicles the toll taken by two versions of nasty people as they systematically and without remorse, deliberately set out, and accomplished, the murder of some 14,000,000 totally defenseless people. Stalin’s crew can claim about 4 million of these, and the Nazis the rest.
Read this book at your own peril, for if you still harbor any notion that there is good in all men, this just might change your mind.
My invisible friend was staggered, so I went in for the coup de grace. Nah, I didn’t kill her, but I did suggest that maybe, just maybe, the things that Americans did in that war that eventually stopped Hitler and his Nazis, and then later in the Cold War, that eventually stopped Stalin and his communists, just might have been worth it.
This argument is just that, an argument. In the end there are no good guys and bad guys. There is competition. Always has been. No reason to expect this will ever change. This is not about the average American or German or Russian. We enjoy our lives, or not. We are impacted by what others do. We are all very much alike.
Who can say if the world might not have ended up a better place if Hitler or Stalin, or our friends in Japan had won out over us. With this outcome, them losing and us winning, we will never know. I do think an argument can be made that we, us Americans, are better off for winning, and those folks losing. Some think this is a bad outcome. But that is competition, and the history of the world is about competition. And the winners get to write the history.
Are the German people better off because of this war’s outcome? Again, I cannot answer. For a while there they certainly weren’t. Surely, based upon walking the streets of Frankfurt now, they seem fine. Perhaps had Hitler won they would have been ever so much better.
I cannot ask any of those 14 million dead how they feel about all this. They don’t get to write the history.
My invisible friend still wonders if the how of winning a war could not have been gentler. This is a luxury she can afford. The competition continues in this world. The wars continue, for the same reasons they always have. Religion, wealth, power over another. Good for the winners and bad for the losers. Hasn’t changed. Will the world rejoice when the Americans are replaced at the top by say, China or those nice folks who claim to follow the Koran? I guess we will see.
Those nasty Americans won’t always come out ahead. Heck, we are fading fast. My invisible friend thinks maybe we should stop competing, and just take our chances. Certainly we should be more gentle about it, more polite. And I keep mentioning, that as horrible as fighting a war might be, the losing of a war tends to be worse. For the losers. So that first of all we should see to that. And as usual, she and I don’t see eye to eye.
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