The value of history

From Deutschland, staying with my family and I for the next nine months, is our 15-year-old foreign exchange student, Anika. I truly find hope in knowing that there are more young people in Europe like her. For two years, through the eighth and ninth grade, German students are taught the history of their nation from World War I through World War II, the kind of stuff I had to take special classes in college to learn. And what these young teens are taught before they are given the right to vote, may come as a surprise to you. The German people take full responsibility for their acts of national aggression, unlike their former 1940s allies, the Japanese (In 2002, the Japanese government distributed to their high schools a new history text covering the same years. The text essentially says, “What war?”…much to the horror of America’s growing “economic” adversary, the Chinese) Young German students today study the World War years not only from the impact that they had on their homeland, but Germany’s impact on the nations whose rights they temporarily usurped. Good God!, how gloriously wonderful for a nation of people to admit to their children the mistakes of their fathers. The reason should be evident. Americans may have won the war but have we suffered well the peace? I was particularly moved by Anika’s comments about Germany’s national day of mourning and reflection. What, in her words, she compares to American’s “Thanksgiving.” What we would call ” Crystal Night.” On the night of Nov. 9, 1938, 10 months before America intervened in the war in Europe, Nazi storm troopers (then known as the Brown Shirts or S.A.), for the first time, openly torched and looted Jewish homes and businesses, making a point of breaking windows and mirrors. Thus the name “Crystal night or “Reichskristall nacht.” As history then unfolded, there were of course no reprisals. That day marked the beginning of the horrors that we now know as the Holocaust. The year 2005 will mark yet another “turning point”—the 60th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs over Hiroshima then Nagasaki. A good friend of mine, businessman Paul Zak, attended this year’s “day of mourning” in Hiroshima on Aug. 9. At exactly 3:15pm each year, a bell tolls over the epicenter. A roll call of the dead is read. It is indeed, representative of a horror of unimaginable and unparalleled human suffering. This year’s celebratory memorial was, however, somewhat unique. There was a large contingent of Iraqis in attendance. Japanese dignitary after dignitary spoke, denouncing America’s “act of aggression.” All received resounding applause from the approximate 70,000 (in total) in attendance. All, that is, but one. He was the Mayor of Hiroshima. He spoke, saying in effect that the bomb killed 100,000 but saved the lives of 20 million Japanese. There was dead silence when he existed the stage. No applause. Last month, I was asked to chair the U.S national fundraising event by the Mayor of Tinian Island, from whence the nuclear age was launched. I named the event, The Turning Point. Instead of the standard pity party that is thrown each year by the Japanese in their cities, Paul Zak, historian Don Farrell, and many of my other friends wanted it to be a celebration of the freedom from yet another global war that the dawning of the nuclear age had brought mankind for 60 years. We were encouraging an emphasis on an American-Chinese reunion of former comrades in arms. Afraid of offending the Japanese, my idea was shelved. I declined the mayor’s gracious offer. It appears to me that in the field of human understanding and advancing the recognition of the cause of mankind’s suffering, Americans and our so-called allies, the Japanese, can learn much from those who already have, the German people. Thanks for listening

Ken Moore

P.S. I asked Anika to read this work when I was done. She was thrilled. I thought it necessary, for some reason thereafter, to explain to her where Tinian was and what a B-29 is. She looked at me very strangely saying, “But of course, I know these things.” Might there be a reason that America is on the endangered species list?