Chris152":gugtco77 said:
It was the general sentiment of the post that I thought was good, Bob - not whether a detail like that was accurate. And tbh, while both my parents were alive in WW2, I haven't really got a clue how bad their experience of it was. For me, it was a few tales about doodlebugs and the sounds of bombs landing. And dad cruising about in the North Sea. They didn't talk about it much. I don't think most of us today, under or over 35, have much of a clue. Maybe that's just my experience tho.
With that you touch on one of the difficulties of how we deal with history. I think that one of the problems is that we tend to deal with it alsmost as a series of headlines. To do more than that requires either a professional or lay interest in the subject, direct experience of events of being close to someone who is prepared to relate those events.
Consider how we perceive the holocaust. From my teen years on I formally knew that it was a morally bad thing. However, my exposure to it was entirely from black and white images on the telly e.g. as part of
The World At War. Then when I was 19 I met a Jewish girl who I quite fancied (got nowhere though: she was far too well brought up). We never discussed the holocaust but the next time I saw the usual images of cattle trucks on the telly, it suddenly hit me that had she been born in the wrong place at the wrong time, she could have been amongst those people being shoved onto the trucks. That led to me reappraising and changing my views on the holocaust, something which, incidentally, led me to conclusions other than the simplistic ones which one often hears but that is another matter.
As another example, consider the state of the UK in the 70s: winter of discontent, miners' strike etc. Amazingly there are a lot of people who's ideas would inevitably lead us to walk that road again and that revolves around events that happened less than 50 years ago!
It's difficult to conclude what this all adds up to. FWIW my response is that there are a very few unbreakable principles according to which we should test the behaviour of others, both now and in the past. If we wish to go beyond that then we must be very careful with our sources i.e. the books for any one issue are written by people who are pro-, contra- or as even-handed as they can be. It seems to me that most folk, most of the time, take a relatively superficial interest in events (fair enough: they have lives to lead) and secondly tend not to weigh up views with which they currently disagree in a fair and balanced manner.
