The Truth of History
...and bled to death” (Zinn 4). Hardly the sort of person we want our future generations to idolize, and yet we have a day in his honor. Far from making friends with the indigenous peoples of North America, Columbus committed genocide. If we knew of the brutal acts of Columbus, perhaps there would be fewer genocides and acts of cruelty on a racial level in the world today. Another advantage of telling the whole truth of history is perspective. I, for one, often feel daunted by what our heroes of the past have done. However, as rather aptly stated by defender of freedom W.E.B du Bois, “One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner…and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy, is that history loses its value as an incentive and an example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth” (Loewen 1). History as it is taught to current generations is highly censored. It does not let us know that everyone is not perfect. Instead, it shows us incredibly heroic people defeating impossible odds. Yet real people are rarely like that, and to teach our future generations to try to be perfect like supposedly perfect men of the past is immoral. There are down sides to telling the whole truth, however. Although we will be sharing the truth of horrific events with the intent of learning from our forefathers’ mistakes, we may just be giving future terrorists ideas. I am sure that half the horrible acts in history are based on some previous, if obscure, atrocity of similar stature. Human beings in general are hardly creative creatures; therefore most of the Hitler’s of the world must have had something to go by, right? If these monsters of the past had never learned of the previous acts of cruelty that history depicts, would they have gone so bad? Another bad point to letting everyone learn the truth is that sometimes the truth is best hidden. For example, if you teach a fourth-grader of the atrocities of Columbus to the Arawanak people, you may desensitize them to further violence. After all, they are at an impressionable age...