history

I had to give up watching the history/nazi channel. I found instead the international history channel, with more bbc produced stuff. Covering Asia instead of Hitler seemed a bit more relevant to me nowadays (considering we skip those chapters in every history class in school). I could teach courses on WW2, but I still have SE Asia to figure out. Only one I liked recently was the carrier made of ice. That thing would have been insane.

Actually, I mostly have to give it up because it apparently bores the lady. There are things in history that interest us. But the fact that history is so totally consumed with the glory of warfare.. well, that's a bit overloaded. I'm not sure what she is watching over there though either. To me it seems that cooking shows are pretty much like history shows. They're all the same after a while. As the Nazi juggernaut rolled through the Russian frontier, they stopped to make a lovely strudel. Something like that. Anyone who cares to know, USSR lost so badly in the early stages because they were preparing to invade. No border patrols, no fortifications, mountains of artillery, etc.. what do you think they're doing? I guess obviously they were making mixed drinks with potatoes and ogling hot tennis players.

Back to history though. I'm guessing the reason we don't put emphasis on this is because we feel saturated by portions of it. The reality of studying history is the viewpoint of looking at events, seeing the interaction and getting to second guess people. Then realizing that it looks a lot different when it's going on right now. We learn from history that we do not learn from history, sure. But how hard is it to step back and see what sort of categorical errors are being repeated in the middle of a crisis situation. Most of us will never know because nobody trusts us with such things. Care to guess why. .well, hey, its because we don't know our history. I hate to harp on this so much, but if we expect our population to participate and understand the importance of the debate inherent to our society, how do we do that if all they know is how to read, write, add and subtract? Are we afraid that we'll hurt people's brains or something if we ask them to learn how to think for themselves?