Revisionist History
How I feel about revisionist historians is a paraphrase of how Jake Blues felt about Illinois Nazis…
“Revisionist historians. I hate revisionist historians.”
Minor background info: I like History. I was a History major as an undergrad, and I wrote my Senior Thesis (or SIP for those of you familiar with the K-Plan) on American foreign policy re: Germany, and how it changed from 1941 to 1948 — how we went from having the Morgenthau Plan be our blueprint for dealing with post-war Germany, to our being willing to undertake the Berlin Airlift. I spent 6 months in West Germany (Sept. 1987 - Feb. 1988) living with a German family (whose husband/father had avoided being trapped in his native East Berlin only because he was working in Vienna the summer that the Berlin Wall went up…) for my Junior Year Foreign Study part of the K-Plan. I met a lot of good people, who remembered what the Allies had done for them, and who appreciated it. They had lived through the repercussions of the vindictive settlement of WWI, and were thus grateful that America had taken a tack based on the Marshall Plan instead of one based on the Treaty of Versailles.
I was there during what is now seen as the end years of the Cold War. While the (IMO) majority of Germans understood the true role the U.S. played in protecting West Germany from the ravages of Soviet Communism — protection that enabled West Germany to rise from the ashes of WWII — looking back, I also see the building of a not insignificant strain of resentment. It was/is a resentment borne of knowledge (in those who lived through the war & post-war, but who were growing tired of the continued American presence) and of ignorance (in those who hadn’t lived through the war & post-war events and who, thus, couldn’t appreciate all that had gone into getting West Germany to where it was.
Unfortunately, the nascent resentment of the late 1980’s has grown into the ugly, full-blown resentful anti-American rage of the present day. It is a rage that fuels a hateful & dishonest historical revisionism, wherein American efforts to rebuild & protect (West) Germany are at best glossed over, and at worst erased. TheAttackMachine has a great post on this, where the author poignantly decries this rising tide of revisionism. Highly recommended!
[HT: WMB:BlogWatch]
-ghp
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