History in the words of its makers

 Yesterday’s note was an argument for the value of short readings.

My father was drafted in World War II and fought in the Battle of the Bulge with one of Patton’s armored divisions. The division had liberated concentration camps. I do not remember a time when I did not know who Adolph Hitler was or the evil that he’d done.

But as a college student, I was shocked when I had to read a collection of Hitler’s speeches.

All my life I’d heard about Hitler. But I was stunned when I read him and confronted his ideas in his own words. It was the difference between being told about a criminal and meeting him.

Fifty years later, it seems to me that the world includes fewer saints and fewer monsters than I once imagined. I’ve come to see that people who do a great deal of good can and do have monstrous ideas. I also think that the best way to see that is to read people who have influenced history in their own words.

Here is an excerpt of Winston Churchill’s testimony to the Palestine Royal Commission in 1937:

I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger, even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

This short passage is now known as The Dog in the Manger Argument. It’s a network of confused notions: that that the idea of race makes sense, that it follows that some races are superior to others, that outrageous moral wrongs are OK when committed by those at the top against those at the bottom.

It’s the kind of thinking that justified the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants. It led to all kinds of crimes that have been bundled into the clumsy word “colonialism.”

Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who would like to be president, has been in the news as he tries to limit what can be taught in history courses. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, who would also like to be president, did the same thing earlier but was less successful in making headlines.

Both seem to think that history is something that can be controlled by the state.

I think one way to defeat that nonsense is to make the words of the people who made history readily available.

I think both governors would be surprised at how little help teenagers actually need in making up their own minds.