Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mauvehaus | Hacker News Reader

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> Overall it feels like there's a drive to remove "inappropriate" materials from society, instead of leaving them accessible as living proof of the mistakes that were made, and to provide backstory, context, and the "appropriate" contemporary view.

I share this view, but I also recognize that as a white dude, what is to me a learning opportunity about the things that folks (who mostly look like me) have done in the past isn't necessarily seen that way by everyone.

Unfortunately, even if you get a whole mess of folks of different backgrounds to have an honest and meaningful conversation about what to do about these many things, you aren't going to please everybody. The easiest solution is to just remove the materials rather than having to continuously justify leaving them available and reinterpret the historical context for them from a contemporary standpoint.

  The easiest solution is to just remove the materials

And so doom us to repeat the mistakes of our forebears and bring violent racisim back into fashion?

It is racists, more than anyone, who wish to hide the historical roots of racism. That we might find it impossible to recognise it's impending revival.

Perhaps, I should clarify: I'm not suggesting that it's a good solution, merely that it holds a certain appeal to some people in the short term.

In 1960s Germany, students where so outraged by the absence of Nazism from their history curriculum that they turned violent. They rioted, bombed, and killed because they felt they where being denied their right to learn their recent history. And they blamed this on the fact that their teachers and parents had been Nazis, and thought they where trying to erase their crimes. In a flash of cruel irony, the state's desire to shelter the students from political violence ignited it again in the streets and in the hearts of their students.

>And so doom us to repeat the mistakes of our forebears and bring violent racisim back into fashion?

Society has larger problems if a few kids books and some statues were all that was preventing a slide into violent racism.

1. This is happening across society and not solely in kids books and statues.

2. Mao stated himself in his revolutionary speech that they would indoctrinate the next generation if the current one was unwilling, and this is a perfect example of that applied.

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