It is so refreshing when some book geek cracks open The Tome of the Ages and lets a waft of that dank stench of deathly air from the purposefully forgotten past pollute our current Monofantasy.
The favorite historic tragedy to forget or deny is the Taiping rebellion, which stands as the third bloodiest conflict in history behind WWII and the Mongol invasion of China—which was suffered by the ancestors of the people who died in the Taiping Rebellion. The mythology that only one set of assholes annihilated one set of people blinds us perfectly to the very real prospect that it can, and most likely will, happen again.
I really appreciate the balance Liddell used walking all over this touchy subject. One of my favorite movies was defiance, about Jewish criminals resisting the Nazis. But it still irks me that nobody cares about the legions of other peoples who have been nearly erased by others, and the more numerous legions of nations who have been erased.
European Jewry did, at least, survive, and did so vibrantly enough to kick the shit out of six neighboring nations from a strip of land that is a geographic nook on the world stage. That seems like an ethnic rebound if ever there was one. The people that lived where I now sit did not survive—not a one. They don't have grandsons and granddaughters to remind us. All they have is history, which we have thrown into a collective box we stand on to get a better look at some Armenian-American babe's rear end. For some reason, our aversion to understanding the human past—in all of its inhumanity—is so strong that the majority of us will only consider remembering a tragedy that had survivors, and who also have descendents that remain assertively among us.
In other words, nobody cares about the total genocides, only the occasional specific one that failed. It is refreshingly dank for Collin Liddell to remind us that history is not dead. Most insightful is Collin’s reminder that we, as a society, have largely abandoned ‘positive [proactive] memory’ concerning such tragedies, in favor of ‘negative [passive] memory.’
Check his work out at the link below.
Also the Chinese came in second in casualties in WW2 with an
estimated 15 million dead..The chip on that shoulder is going to be felt by all of us someday.
I give props to anyone who mentions the Taiping Rebellion, its amazing how no one knows of the third bloodiest conflict in history and it still did not beat down the chineses soul like WW1 did to European peoples.
“People who try to commit suicide — don't attempt to save them! . . . China is such a populous nation, it is not as if we cannot do without a few people. “– Mao ze Dong.
Good point James. But actually people in this country don’t care all that much about “THE" Holocaust either: Making out during “Schindler’s List” – Seinfeld. bing.com/videos/search?q=seinfeld+schindler's+list+episode&FORM=VIRE1#view=detail&mid=87FE9A281862D7C0557687FE9A281862D7C05576 People DO understand that one must pretend to care about the Holocaust. Other than that, most folks just consider it to be ancient history, like the Great Depression. What does any of that have to do with life today? Certainly most people today have a hard time imagining Jews as being “oppressed” or “disadvantaged” in any way. Whatever the Jews care about, all the rest of us will be made to care about. After all, Jews control the media. Larry David admitted as much: algemeiner.com/2012/07/03/jews-do-control-the-media. So it’s fairly obvious why we are to be reminded so frequently of the 20th Century Jewish Holocaust in preference to all the others in history. The Nazis are the monster that lives under the Jews’ bed. Besides that, they make such marvelous villains, with their sinister looking uniforms and wonder weapons and stuff. No one else seems quite as menacing; even today, 70 years after they were vanquished. Ironically a German diplomat and ardent Nazi, John Rabe, was the humanitarian hero during the Rape of Nanking. He helped save hundreds of thousands of Chinese from being murdered by the Japanese in 1937 (see "The Rape of Nanking-The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" by Iris Chang).