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April 14, 2005

Southern Slaves, Japanese Atrocities: Is it Wrong to Teach Kids to Admire Their Ancestors?

In the American South today, it's still traditional to emphasize the positive aspect of Southern resistance in the Civil War -- that most Southern soldiers owned no slaves and fought not for money or power but to defend their fellow (white) citizens' self-government from power-seizing Northern outsiders. It's traditional to spend as little time as possible on the negative aspect: the fact that, as proclaimed in South Carolina's declaration of secession, the Southern political leaders' immediate motive for secession was to guarantee that 4 million of the men and women in the South, the ones who happened to have black skin, could be kept as slaves to be bought and used and sold by the other 8 million. Both aspects are real; many Southerners prefer to think about the uplifting aspect and not the chilling one. Is that wrong? There are still racists around, but no one prominent seems to be advocating slavery any more. You could argue that Southern kids should be taught a version of their history that will serve as an inspiring moral example, even if it underplays the wrongs of slavery or the extraordinary determination of Southern political leaders to preserve it. Are the "positive history of the South" teachers doing wrong?

In Japan today, students are taught a version of Japanese history that leaves out what Japan's leaders and soldiers did in the 1930's and 40's, when they set to carve out a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" founded on Japanese rule over China, Korea, and the rest of Pacific Asia -- a Japanese rule that included treating non-Japanese Asians as close to subhuman. Between 20,00 and 300,000 Korean women were forced to be prostitutes for the benefit of local Japanese occupiers. Chinese were subjected to orgies of loot, rape and slaughter, up to hundreds of thousands killed at a time, when Japanese generals thought the local population needed to be properly intimidated. Japan's behavior in the years leading up to World War II was not as bad as that of Nazi Germany's, whose facism they were in many ways imitating, but it was still horrible. Japanese textbooks today mostly just leave out Japan's behavior toward foreigners in the 30's and 40's, and leave their students knowing nothing about what Japan did in the 20th century except that there was a war that ended with atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaski. Is that wrong?

Now South Korea and China are lobbying against Japan getting a permanent seat on the Security Council, and a big part of the reason is that they feel that Japan can't be trusted, because it doesn't sufficiently acknowledge its past misdeeds, whitewashes its textbooks, and treats its dead soldiers from World War II as simple heroes. You notice far less antagonism toward Germany from France, Belgium, Poland and Ukraine, even though the Nazi occupations of those countries was often brutal. The tensions are real but much less. Is that because postwar Germany made a greater though still uneasy commitment to treating Hitler's reign as an evil to acknowledge and atone for? Is it because fifty years of the Cold War gave European countries reason to worry about America and Russia instead of each other? And is there really a difference between Germans today and Japanese today -- would one group be more trustworthy with power over other nations than the other?

Does the way we teach kids their history matter?

Posted by danielstarr at April 14, 2005 07:15 PM

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