Quote:
Originally Posted by kendo65
Yeah - to me it seems to be a classic post-modern take on events - perspectiveless.
Unfortunately national perspective counts for a lot. That's what people have been arguing about for the last 37 pages.
In my opinion this whole thread is rather sad.
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In my opinion it's sad that in 2011 we
still can't have an objective approach to historical events without someone taking the national perspective.
What you call "classic post-modern" (?) and "perspectiveless" is the only take a historian can afford to take on events. While at uni we studied propaganda a lot, but to understand the phenomenon itself, not as a search of truth.
In this thread I've been called names, I've been insulted by people that just popped by to have a go at the "high school kid", I've been accused of being anti-British, while all I did was motivating a point that isn't only mine, but of experts, historians and people of the time as well.
I'm not expecting everyone joining in a conversation to produce their qualifications (especially because we can all lie here), but one's preparation and cultural level easily emerges from what one writes, and frankly I felt a bit in the middle of a silly patriotic turmoil, but the wrong kind of patriotism, the one that sparks up only when some "old enemy" or someone else (read any foreigner) questions the pillars of your "culture". Britons are very protective of their heritage, and much rightly so, but are rarely capable of objective hindsight on it, there's a basic fear that someone somewhere is trying to deprive them of their achievements, and are ready to justify
anything they say or do (or that the Kingdom says or does) regardless of it making sense or not. It's a very empire-like mentality, and if the old fashioned concept of empire has long gone, the mentality is still all there. I've heard many here celebrating the glories of the past and moaning about the lack of glory in the present, and rolling in and out of that nostalgia for the past it's what's left for many. I don't find this wrong, but it should still allow for some common sense and objectiveness.
My intention is not to deprive anyone with anything, brave people will be brave people forever, but western culture has been so biased in the portrayal of WW2 over the years that things have taken a very wrong shape. This is very dangerous, because it doesn't allow for an objective and unbiased judgement of history. This doesn't mean to me that the Nazis shouldn't be condemned as evil, but the Allies too committed questionable crimes and forced denial afterwards, so much that in a history talk meeting I attended some months ago, a gentleman arrived to define the city bombings during the Blitz as "not a war crime" simply to justify the actions of Bomber Harris and the drop of
two atomic bombs over Japan, while there's no justification or theory in the world that will change the fact that these attacks were deliberate and a war crime as much as the German ones, so much that the 1949 Geneva Convention was all about human rights of civilians.
I've heard horrific explanations here "because it was getting boring" on which I deliberately did not comment, because it shows what little respect and objectiveness there is for the subject.
My take on Bungay is because in the world of academia he isn't (yet) considered worth mentioning, and even if my ideas seem to agree more with him than with James Holland (but then again it was semantics, Dutch or whoever it was picked strategically short sentences and put them out of context), I still don't repute his approach an academic one.