This semester is the first time I've actually read a textbook cover to cover. Other semesters have seen me skimming for vital parts of the text related to a professor's lecture or reading chapter summaries alone. This semester, though, my history class (World Civ II) was online with almost no interaction with the professor and text-intensive exams. So I read the text...mentally kicking and screaming the whole way. To begin with, it was badly arranged. I like my history told in chronological order because (oddly enough) that's how it happened. This text jumped around by region. I suppose that can't really be helped if you're covering world history. That's rather a broad scope.
What can be helped, though, are two very specific issues:
* the book's depressing conclusion, making it seem more like a persuasive treatise than objective compilation of facts
* its refusal to actually define terms
The book's last chapter discusses countries such as India, Japan, and South Korea. These countries have made some amazing leaps forward by changing some of their political methods to model what has generally been a western ideal of political pluralism.
The book concludes with:
"The efforts of these nations to find a way to accommodate traditional and modern, native and foreign, raise a final question. As we have seen, Mahatma Gandhi believed that materialism is ultimately a dead end. In light of contemporary concerns about the emptiness of life in the West and the self-destructiveness of material culture, can his message be ignored?
Gee whiz. It's awfully difficult to guess what the authors think the answer to that question is.
In chapter 25 of the text, discussing the Cold War, we find that:
"The United States and the Soviet Union were the heirs of that European tradition of power politics, and it should not surprise us that two such different systems would seek to textend their way of life ot the rest of the world. Because of its need to secure its western border, the Soviet Union was not prepared to give up the advantages it had gained in EAstern Europe from Germany's defeat. But neither were Western leaders prepared to accept without protest the establishment of a system of Soviet satellites that not only threatened the security of Western Europe but also deeply offended Western sensibilities because of its blatant disregard of the WEstern concept of human rights." (emphasis mine)
Right. It was power politics alone that led the West to not like the idea of its security being threatened.
Notice, too, that Western sensibilities were "offended." Over what, pray tell? That's not described until the next chapter so we'll have to wait a bit for that.
Now the book does say, "This does not necessarily mean that both sides bear equal responsibility for starting the Cold War" as it lists several reasons why the Soviet Union was overly aggressive...that Stalin was "probably prepared" to "advance Soviet power into Western Europe...once the next revolutionary wave arrived."
Yeah, that would offend my sensibilities. I don't know about you, but I kinda hope my government would be prepared to deal with this. Listen to what the text has to say about that, however:
"...a case can be made that in deciding to respond to the Soviet challenge in a primarily military manner, Western leaders overreacted to the situation and virutally guaranteed that the Cold War would be transformed into an arms race that could conceivably result in a new and uniquely destructive war."
So Stalin was getting ready to advance his power into Western Europe and Western leaders took it as a military threat...shame on them.
Let's get back to the Western ideal of human rights. Why *were* our sensibilities so offended? In the next chapter we read of forced labor camps, government controlled arts, tortures, and other pleasantries that seem awfully military to me.
(text quoted in this post is The Essential World History Volume II: Since 1400. Second Edition. Duiker and Spielvogel. After Friday I know where you can get a used copy for a fairly reasonable price ;-)
would be transformed into an arms race that could conceivably result in a new and uniquely destructive war.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to trivialize that possibility, but it bears mentioning that this experiment has been run exactly one time and that outcome occurred in 0% of the results. In other words, it could have happened, but it didn't, so this kind of hindsight second-guessing based on, "Well, that could have been dangerous" is somewhat misguided. History is generally judged by the results. In other words, the weight of history at the moment would seem to be that the risk was worth it because the outcome was positive. Perhaps if we can repeat the experiment again sometime we might get a different result, and that might lend more credibility to those who still want to wring their hands over alleged possible outcomes that never occurred because of decisions made decades ago.
What's really going on here is that the liberal elite based their entire politics for years on the idea that the United States was irresponsibly risking the End of the World due to Big, Bad Nukular Weapons (I'm a pacifist and don't see anything particularly more evil about nuclear weapons than any others). Having passed that period in history, the Left was unable to let go of that idea, because it had ceased to be a political idea and was instead an aspect of their psyches. So now we get history textbooks that say things like, "Well, the risk still means it wasn't worth it, so we were right after all." We also get goofball ideas like, "Hunting down Osama bin Laden, taking out terrorist regimes like the Taliban, and taking out regimes that threaten us like Baathist Iraq will only make the problem worse, because it makes the other side angry, and risks escalating the conflict."
Maybe all of our kids will get to do home-college to escape this baloney.