Nations, like peoples, make mistakes. The people who supported Hitler are dead, but many nations, organizations, and people groups that supported the Nazis in World War II are not. What about other evil-doers in history? How do these nations portray their involvement with villains? Many ignore it, hoping that people who know will forget or die and people that do not know will never learn. Others such as Germany persevere over it, endlessly apologizing and integrating permanent shame into their national psyche. A few admit their guilt, memorialize it in museums and textbooks to warn future generations, and balance sharing the good with the bad in their national or organizational life.
By Mark D. Harris
My family and I visited our family in Prague in the Czech Republic earlier this month. Along with family time, we caught some sites, of which many, due to our nerdy nature, were museums and battle sites. As a soldier and military historian, many military museums showed up on our list. White Mountain, the site of a seminal battle between Protestants and Catholics (1620), was little more than a cairn on a small rise in the ground. Vitkov Hill which marked a major Hussite victory over a Papist army, was a sizeable hill with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and a towering statue of Jan Zizka, the victorious Hussite commander on his mount. The ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and early modern history in the National Museum was spot on. The problem began with the 20th century.
Continue reading “Whitewashing History”
