Are you patriotic? What does being patriotic mean to you?
I try not to be patriotic. It is difficult. We are wired from birth to love the things we know, the things around us that make us the person we are, make us feel good, that define our comfort zone.
But that comfort zone makes us lack discretion. We work on what we feel, not on reality.
I have learned, that which we believe to be the truth is only a fraction of the story. I took just three historical events and reanalysed them in a methodical but imaginative way. The three moments in history I considered are Nazi Genocide, Bengal famines and strategic bombing by the RAF in WW2.
I did the analysis with short prose pieces around aspects of the topics. These pieces reflect that moment in time that something awful happened, rather than a historical truth.
There are 76 pieces in all, including German reworkings of the pieces.
This will stagger and depress you, but it needed to be done so that we understand how governments history-wash us and use our patriotism to deceive us.
We need to grasp the nettle, for it is still going on.
Finally, I provided an example of how history still treats a hero, whose profile no longer fits.
Ernst Thälmann – Hero of the opposition to the National Socialists, arrested 1933, spent 11 years in solitary confinement, beaten, tortured, betrayed by Joseph Stalin and Walter Ulbricht and shot on Hitler’s direct order in Buchenwald 1944. One thinks that despite torture and beatings, he never betrayed anyone.
There is a statue of this remarkable man, in Berlin, dating from DDR times.
That is the problem
The CDU want the statue removed. Why? Because he wasn’t one of them of course.
The Berlin Senate no longer pays to have the graffiti removed. It costs too much. Why would people want to graffiti it? The man was an absolute hero of anti-facism.
History-washing is alive and well. The hero has become the villain, simply because communists adopted him as a patriot and communism is a dirty word.
Maybe check out my book, Weasel Words – Ausflüchte.
Patriotism, like football, brings out the worst in us.
Clive La Pensée 