bluestreak said:
actually, let me take this back to hollis' bugbear and make it relevant. are the english rubbish at dealing with national failures, such as this event. is this why so few people know about cock ups like this. the germans, it appears through my own experience of having lived with five or six germans of my own generation, have dealt with the failures of history - but it doesn't get talked about. in a conversation with one of my housemates i was joking about how old people seem to latch on to me in pubs or family gatherings and tell me what they did during the war. the notion of a german pensioner doing such a thing was apparantly unheard of. is this denial, or acceptance and moving on? should we learn from that example and make as much of our failures as a nation as our successes or should we ignore the filures as being counterproductive to a sense of national pride. and is national pride (not to be confused with nationalism) even useful?
Well, I think it's always important to talk about and to teach the failures, the errors and the terrible things done in the name of your country. Anything else would be a fabrication to a greater or lesser extent, and any sense of national pride built on a refusal to think about or even believe them will be a warped one.
History as taught in school, for example. If you teach the history of imperialism or WWII in a British school, there will be events whose omission from the course would be strange to say the least, unless you wanted to suggest something by their omission, which in the cases of Amritsar or Dresden for example would have to be deliberate. A good course on either of those periods of history would have to include some kind of wider discussion of the moral issues involved I think. I'm not sure about the event that you talk about would necessarily find its way into lessons on WWII, but I guess there's no reason why it shouldn't. Of course, if we taught philosophy in schools like the French, you could take some of these historical topics and discuss them in those wider terms very easily
The comparison with Germany is interesting though. I think there is (perhaps more accurately
was) a big generation gap as far as discussion of the war is concerned, and a lot of the unrest in Germany in the 60s and 70s took the survival of the older generation in positions of power and their refusal to discuss the past as one of the starting points.
Moreover, one of the taboo subjects in Germany was always the suffering of Germans in WWII. There seems to be an upsurge in thinking about this in recent years afaics; I haven't read it yet but WG Sebald's On The Natural History Of Destruction is about the Allied bombings of Germany. I love Sebald and I'm sure he'll have some interesting things to say about these topics. The latest Grass takes a similar topic I think.
Is national pride useful? Tough one
For me, I'd replace it with a keen interest in my country's history and a vague feeing of contentment that I have English as a first language, but why pride in your country's historical achievements? We're all born by chance.
