HAVING THE LAST PERSON I KNOW who was in the military during WWII die has brought back something I warned of early in my time blogging in regard to the Holocaust, I warned that as that generation passed from life that the terrible lessons they learned would recede as a cultural, political and legal influence in the future. Someday soon the last person who witnessed the evidence of the crimes of the Nazis and fascists, the Imperial Japanese military (and, yes, Stalin) will have died and the direct witness and experience of those enormous crimes of the modern, 20th century would be scientific dictators won't be here to add to that direct witness testimony which, as well, will pass from influence. The last person who saw the death camps will die and they will not vote for whoever is going to run things in the future.
Realizing that in the period of neo-Nazi, neo-fascist ascendacy under the patronage of the billionaire and multi-millionaire gangster class has made the death of my old friend especially chilling.
The witness of history is, of course, there, though it, as well, is of insufficent influence. If there is another thing I've learned in the period since started writing stuff online it is that history, like religion, has been swamped by the lies of the movies, TV, badly written and everything from badly researched to not researched at all fiction. Though I doubt books are nearly as damaging to the lessons of history as plays that lie about history and, worst of all, broadcast-cabloid-Hollywood movies and TV shows. A short list of things I've had to point out were wildly inaccurate yet commonly believed to be history here include:
The Crucible,
Inherit the Wind,
The Pony Express ("westerns" are another dangerously politically potent genre of lies),
virtually every movie or TV show made about and around Darwinism, the American Civil War. The same about the American Revolution, the framing of the Constitution (probably the most dangerous of all in an American context), the same about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution (both sides lie about that one) the Crusades, the Tudor dynasty, the Spartacus rebellion (if you can call the exclusively Roman aristocratic accounts of that, the only evidence we had that it happened, history).
I don't think any time I've fact checked a movie or TV show or "historical" novel for this blog or the consequences of widespread misidentification of those as historical reality, the show biz, entertainment side of things has shown itself to be nothing but a Trumpian lie - which is not surprising considering what forms his and his followers' imaginations of the significant and the insignificant past.
It was ever so about history, the pious, often regional mythology that gets taught in school about history is often not much better than the movies or TV or, heaven help us, the even worse record of most of the internet presentation of the such. And all such books are written by people with college-credentials in history or related topics who certainly know that they are telling lies. And those lies are politically and legally potent and ever dangerous.
It was another person of the WWII generation who first told me that during my first, Freshman history class in high school, a nice guy who must have found it really frustrating to try to knock a sense of history into the minds of a bunch of adolescent dolts. About the first thing he said was that someone once said that history was an agreed to lie, which was, I think, to point out that even the best and most honest of historical writing was the conscious selection of available information and the unfortunate practice of filling in missing content with interpretation that was only as honest and unbiased as the person doing the history. The farther back you go, the less primary evidence there is, the more of that kind of stuff. I don't think he, unlike some of my other history teachers, ever recommended that we watch a movie as if it would teach us something about history. He was, himself, about the opposite of show biz. He was tall and balding and homely with a dull monotone voice that tended to give the effect of droning even when what he was saying was compelling. If he had one fault it was that, trying to be a good teacher, he believed that psychology could tell him something about that. What would have made him more effective was vocal coaching, something I wouldn't know at the time because I had to get some bad vocal coaching to learn what good coaching could do for you.
These are just some ideas that came to me thinking about my last friend who was a witness to WWII and a reminder that he wasn't that much older than my cohort.
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