Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
No. Americans have little interest in history - theirs or anyone else's.
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Few people of any kind are interested in history at any depth. Most people get a sprinkling of it in school, and from then on get their understanding from popular entertainment, like movies about pirates, or romanticized books about exiled lairds of the Highlands pining for the love of innocent English maidens.
I personally don't take "Western guilt" as a serious thing - if you do have a relatively deep knowledge of history, you learn that every single culture lives on the bones of other cultures, and that there are no innocents and no victims who have not themselves been oppressors. There is a difference between understanding and acknowledging past injustice, and trying to do better than our ancestors did by empowering the oppressed right here and now - which I entirely and enthusiastically agree with - as opposed to shamefacedly picking over the scabs of wounds beyond living memory to let the blood flow freely again.
"Oh, but that's easy for you to say, you're a white male!" Well, my father's family were coal miners in Wales, and my mother's family were coal miners in (at the time) Austrian Poland, poor people from two nations under the dominion of foreigners. Should I still be bitter at the Habsburgs that conquered southern Poland and disenfranchised the petty nobility my family once was? Should I hate the Queen for being a Sassenach tyrant? I think it's better just to not be like my grandmother, cursing the Jews and the, uh, "negroes", and to recognize that virtue does not accrue automatically to those who feel themselves wronged by history, nor does evil weigh down generations who have rejected their ancestors' misdeeds.