Choosing Ignorance

This falls under the heading of it started in my brain as a social media post but I didn't want to have that particular fight and it was going to be too long anyway. So it's NaNoWriMo, I need the words, and it is going to live here to be read or not but at least it won't just be in my brain.

This conversation started with a picture book I was telling Josh about when we went to school to pick up James today. The book is called Secret of the Dance by Andrea Spalding and Alfred Scow. Scow, who has passed on since the book was published, was a lawyer and a judge and a Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, indigenous people who lived in what is today British Columbia on and around what is now called Vancouver island. The book is based on Scow's experience as a child in the 1930s when he witnessed a secret potlach held by his family and community after dancing by indigenous people was banned by the Canadian government. The potlach he witnessed was the last such event his community would have for decades, but much later as a tribal elder he would wear regalia that had been packed away and saved when dancing was banned. In the early days of the ban, Scow writes in the note of the book, people caught dancing could either serve jail time or have their regalia burned. His family preserved the regalia he later danced in by serving jail time to protect it.

I was telling Josh this story and how absolutely heartbreaking it is to try and ban a culture and he said, "Huh. It's almost like America isn't the Big City on the Hill we all were taught it was." Well, this particular book takes place in Canada but the principe is the same. And it makes me sad about what is happening in education right now.

There's a concerted effort by conservative activists to fight "indoctrination" of children in schools. The way they are engineering this is to get a lot of people riled up by talking about Critical Race Theory and other things most people don't understand but are frightened of, and in a lot of cases the end result is they go after books. Books have been banned and challenged from school and classroom libraries and curriculum use...of course there's nothing new about that but these people are organized and they are launching new efforts with book lists and hiding behind this idea of parental involvement or parental oversight. Now, I'm a parent. I don't have any problem with parental involvement. But parental involvement is having a conversation with my kid about what he's reading, not demanding that I and other parents get lists of books our children have checked out from libraries released to us. That's not how parental involvement works. That's how violations of the First Amendment work. 

The lists of books they are targeting is chilling. A lot of books by and about LGBTQ people including simple storybooks. A lot of history including a picture book biography of Rosa Parks by Nikki Giovanni, an award-winning children's book author who knew Parks personally and well. The autobiography of Ruby Bridges, the little girl who was on the front lines of school integration in Little Rock. Jerry Craft's Newbery-award winning graphic novel about a Black kid navigating life at a mostly white elite school. Kelly Yang's Front Desk series about a girl whose family runs a hotel and makes homes for immigrant families in their community. Grace Lin's picture book about sweets at the Moon Festival. And many, many more. It's sickening and it's wrong and there seems to be a very specific and very intentional effort to make sure kids are taught a history that is white, straight, patriotic, and...not real.

This was chilling to me in particular this week because I've been reading so much about the history of World War I.

Stay with me...I know my obsession with World War I is weird...but I am going somewhere and it's not 1916, although someday I will write that book gosh darn it.

I think there's a reason that we don't learn so much about World War I...as Americans certainly but even in parts of the world where it had a much bigger impact on life it isn't taught or understood like World War II is. And that's not because it's further back in time or because we can't talk to the veterans of it...this is pretty much true of World War II now as well, although when I was a kid talking to the generation that had lived through the Depression and the War was pretty much standard in history classes, it's good we had those conversations because those folks are gone now. But I don't think that's the reason that beyond a quick paragraph in a history book about the Luisitania or whatever we don't get any World War I history really.

The reason is because there are no good guys.

As Americans, I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I can speak for Americans, we like our history to be framed this way. Good guys and bad guys. Lincoln freed the slaves. Eisenhower beat the Nazis. These are stories we can get behind and that's the history we like. So that's the history we get. That's why we don't know so much about the genocide of Native Americans and their culture within our own country. That's why we don't really understand this whole Reconstruction thing and how an army that had driven out the slaveholders was suddenly gone and those former slaves were forced to work under very similar conditions for another half century or longer. We don't like messy. We don't like when good guys act like bad guys or when it's hard to tell who is who. And that's World War I in a nutshell and on a tragic level. 

So for those of you who have little to no World War I history, here's the entire war in a nutshell: 40 million people died (and that's a conservative estimate not counting the postwar flu epidemic.) For NO REASON. 

Seriously. Basically no reason at all. Look it up. Try to find one. Yeah, the Germans marched into Belgium, who was supposed to be neutral. And that was bad. And the submarines sank the Luisitania and that was bad, too. But that was not worth 40 million military and civilian lives. It's not. And here's where it gets worse: the leaders knew.

Well, the military leaders knew. Most of them did, anyway. Whether or not the politicians they worked for (or who worked for them, in this era who is in charge gets confusing in a hurry) chose to ignore the fact is kind of on them. But those military leaders...they knew that mostly what they were doing was burning through the lives of soldiers in the hopes that their enemies would burn through soldiers' lives faster.

I'm not exaggerating. In places along the Russian front there weren't enough guns to go around. Soldiers were instructed to march next to other soldiers who had them and grab them when their neighbors fell. That's real. The major strategy for huge chunks of the war was to dig into trenches in the ground where it was harder to shoot at you and then at the appointed time a bunch of soldiers would leap out of the trenches at once and run at enemy lines, who were in their own trenches, and try to take them, while hoping their artillery would break through the barbed wire and sandbags. Literally running straight into machine gun and shell fire. They expected soldiers would be mowed down doing that and they were. The hope was enough would survive to keep going.

I'm not saying this, by the way, to diminish the bravery of those doing the fighting. The stories of World War I heroism aren't hard to find. There's a reason that many of the former British colonies, like Australia and New Zealand, get their national identities in part from this war. The stories of what those guys did against impossible odds are crazy. But that doesn't diminish the fact that they never should have been there.

What were they fighting over? Nationalism. Pride. Nation building. The petty grudges of emperors and dying civilizations. That sounds insane, like I'm making that up, but I'm not. Any war that starts with the assassination of an unliked nephew of a Balkan royal doesn't have great reasoning behind it. It was an act of terrorism that led to almost four years of carnage. upwards of 6 million Russian civilians died, mostly of starvation. Almost 5% of the total population of France died. The numbers are insane.

And oh, by the way, one of those combatants? Hitler. Some of the German military leaders got postwar life as Nazi politicians. Would fascism have been as strong if so many hadn't lived through that kind of trauma? Hard to say. Probably doesn't help. 

There weren't good guys. Everybody used gas, a weapon most armies will not use today because it is seen as that inhumane. And then again, everybody was a good guy. This war didn't have a Hitler. There was a genocide of Armenians in Turkey, so not everyone was a good guy. But the combatants in general? Mostly just wanted land and to settle old grudges.

So why didn't everyone mutiny and go home? Two words: ignorance and patriotism.

The propaganda machine in this war was huge and it was everywhere. Battles won were touted and lauded even if they in the end cost hundreds of thousands of lives and meant nothing. Men who refused to enlist in "voluntary" armies were bullied, often in public. Recruiting strategies encouraged men to join together in companies created from local jurisdictions or clubs, making it pretty awful when those battalions were wiped out en masse. Some pictures in the books I'm reading now weren't published until that book was in the 1960s. People back home were not told of the realities. Fierce patriotism and loyalty ruled the day.

It wasn't going to last. More soldiers towards the end of the war were walking away. When the Communists took over in Russia they did so by promising the starving civilian population peace and bread. When people back home started learning what was really going on the tide of public opinion was turning. But the censorship and the propaganda was real and that ignorance caused millions of men to enlist in an army that sent them overseas to die in a very calculated way. Ignorance has a very big price. 

I'm a post Vietnam era child. My experience with patriotism is that I've always grown up in a world where people question the politicians and the military...very publicly...about what real intentions and meanings and goals are. And that's good. We live in a free society that hasn't always been that free. Asking questions, having a debate, making room for the fact that our country doesn't always make the right choices...it might just save lives. I don't know. What I do no is NOT doing it is dangerous in a way that isn't just theoretical.

Tomorrow is Veteran's Day. The World War I scholar in me still thinks of it as Armistice Day. I wonder why as usual we have decided to do things the exact opposite of the rest of the world, as tomorrow is Remembrance Day in Canada and Armistice/Remembrance Day in other places. We have our Memorial Day in the spring and do tomorrow as a day to honor the living veterans but everything gets muddled and the veterans and active military folk understandably get annoyed when the celebrations become mixed and mushy and lose their meaning. And mostly we just argue about why we have to take the 11th off and why we can't do it on a Friday or a Monday. I understand there is desire to keep the commemoration on the 11th, to make it have that meaning, but it won't continue to have that meaning if we don't talk about and keep the meaning alive, which we don't. So the thing becomes a very typically American muddled mess. But these are the things that are on my mind as we go into it. I do not want to live in a country that glorifies ignorance, for our children or our adults. I'm not capable of fighting and winning that battle on my own. But I am willing to do my part.

So...in media consumption. I read a not great kids graphic novel yesterday in an effort to break this reading slump. I should not have bothered. Today I started the Firekeeper's Daughter which is my book group book, I've heard lots of great things about it. Good so far but still a slow reading day. Still binging lots of Golden Girls.

Today I'm grateful for learning history, talks with my husband, a good meeting with the doctor (just routine!), warm socks, my comfy bed, my life partner.