This Can't be Possible!
Someone please disprove this article:
Anyone in England? Help here!
This Can't be Possible!
Someone please disprove this article:
Anyone in England? Help here!
Originally posted by WindDancer
Why Ush? WWII happen in your backdoor? How can they not be aware?
WWII was on our doorstep because the Germans bombed the crap out of our cities and our guys personally fought in a lot of places. Auschwitz happened in Poland which is on the far side of Europe and was dealt with by the Russians.
The only reason Americans have heard of it at all is because of the powerful Jewish lobby there. Other than that it is part of history now and the majority of important historical events go over the head of the average person. So I am certainly not surprised- for most today the word has no relevance.
Originally posted by Ushgarak
WWII was on our doorstep because the Germans bombed the crap out of our cities and our guys personally fought in a lot of places. Auschwitz happened in Poland which is on the far side of Europe and was dealt with by the Russians.The only reason Americans have heard of it at all is because of the powerful Jewish lobby there. Other than that it is part of history now and the majority of important historical events go over the head of the average person. So I am certainly not surprised- for most today the word has no relevance.
That I can agree with Ush. Here in America our schools do get more into the Holocaust than the actual battles of WWII.
Originally posted by Ushgarak
The only reason Americans have heard of it at all is because of the powerful Jewish lobby there. Other than that it is part of history now and the majority of important historical events go over the head of the average person. So I am certainly not surprised- for most today the word has no relevance.
Ah!
This i can help with!
*gets history book with term plan*
Causes of ww1
*skip war*
The treaty of versailles
the league of nations/sucesses and failures
Causes of ww2
why america and the ussr became rivals 1945-1949
So as you can see, term one in a GCSE class skips events during the war, and covers events leading up to the war and post war actions....
Mostly English and West European. The reason it is taught more in your schools is because your nation was occupied by the Nazis and hence directly fed into the concept. We never were.
And furthermore, what is the context here? if you asked people if they had heard of the Holocaust, you would probably get a much bigger response. But Auschwitz is a name alone, and in isolation a lot of people without specific historical knowledge would not get the link. If you said "Auschwitz? You know, town in Poland, occupied by the Nazis, built a work camp there..." then suddenly a load more would say "Oooh yeah, isn't that where loads of Jews died?"
And why all this focus on Auschwitz? What's wrong with Dachau? Start going through the list of OTHER huge bastions of deaths and the reponse will be pretty low WHEREVER you went.
People don't know the specific names of all sorts of important historical places without prompting. People around here don't know about battles like Badajoz, San Sebastian, Salamanca, Toulouse, Crecy, Poitiers, even flipping Agincourt! Not even Nasbey! I mean, Naseby, it was in our own country and set the entire course of our future history!
With that in mind, why the heck should I expect the average person to know what Auschwitz is if simply given the name in isolation with no clues?
Before I go on, please this thread isn't to embarass or accuse anyone or any nation of anything. But what I want to understand is whats happening to history here? I don't expect everyone to know a specific place of WWII. Heck, I don't even know some of the towns of the war, and I'm pretty much your average joe on the street. What is happening here with History? Is it fading away?
Yup. Will always happen. People's interest in History is lamentably low. Auschwitz is passing out of living memory and into history alone. Knowledge of it has been fading, is fading and will continue to fade until it is the province of the scholar. The same will happen to 9/11 one day, though I dare say the media machien will keep it going for a long time- maybe even longer than the Holocaust, and what does that say? Though even then it will be remembered for that it did ("x, y and z all happened after 9/11..." is how people will see it) than for what it was.
I'm not too surprised...and I bet that there's a lot of Americans who don't know what Auschwitz or Dachau or Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald were, despite the fact that history classes here do focus more on the Holocaust than actual battles. Hell, when I had US History we did a HUGE unit on WWII and hardly learned anything more than the causes of the war, the Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, and dropping the bombs on Japan. Frankly, I learned more in my German class than in US and World History together.
And if we want to talk about clueless people...I read somewhere that about half of Americans don't know that Canada is a seperate country 😖 don't have a source for that, so it's probably not too accurate, but still...the average person is woefully clueless about the world around them. And it's quite sad.
yea, it's shocking how little a lot of people know about that stuff....
we read a newspaper article in school about that once, that a few didn't even know who hitler was... 😬
well, education is going down, we are going down,.... no reason to stop looking down on america for that 😊
we all have to look down on someone to feel better and discriminate other people to feel better
wow, how good are we?
cry
Originally posted by The Inkeeper
Why learn about old wars when we can worry about future ones 😊?
that is like sooo true 😐