Usually a Better Way

Ivor Roberts

"Yet appeasement has continued to get a bad press and this has infected the political thinking of those born too young to have fought in wars and too ignorant of history to absorb its lessons."

This is a delightful article. It never quite comes out and makes too many points though. Historians tend to be much too diplomatic and water down their content accordingly. How would they ever get published if they didn't?

The phrase 'too ignorant of history' rang some bells for me. To misquote a wise man, something about perhaps 'too ignorant of history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past'.

Howard Zinn , a historian/activist, someone who practiced what they preached, in his seminal and highly readable "Peoples' History of the United States" points out the failings of history, how things can be left out or barely mentioned, or coloured and stressed differently, so 'ignorant of history' will also mean those who know all about 'history', meaning history as approved by the dominant ideology only.

When I went through school Christopher Columbus was a hero, a groundbreaking far-sighted genious who took his heart in his hands and set out into the unknown on the promise of what we would now call rumour, not a ruthless scammer who duped the monarchs of Spain into backing him financially time and again on the promise of dubious loot and pillage and then cruelly conquered vast swathes of the planet killing and stealing as he went.

In Australia you just never heard of massacres of aboriginals. The truth was so well burried that you would have had to go back to original source documents and eye-witness accounts to find it. Even then you wouldn't know who to believe as reputable people contradicted this information at every turn.

As a policy 'appeasement' did not exist to appease, but to buy time to rearm in the face of superior military strength. 'The war to end all wars'; 'The war that ended peace' had ensnared the world's leader in their own lies, causing them to think it was then OK to drop their guard permanently and disarm.

The truth is always in the middle.