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Bangkok Post, Thailand
April 26 2005
To each their own version of events
The huge protests in China and South Korea have focused new attention
on history and how it is preserved
By ALAN DAWSON
This week is the anniversary of the American invasion and failed
colonisation of Canada. Military forces of the 38-year-old United
States had earlier attacked and burned the Canadian capital city,
York (later renamed Toronto). Sixteen months later, Canadian armed
forces under the British General Robert Ross entered Washington, DC
and immediately torched the capital of the new nation. They burnt the
White House to the ground with particular glee.
A funny thing has happened 192 years after these mutually marauding
raids. School textbooks in Canada teach every child the glories of
the punitive raid into Washington. US textbooks teach that the
Americans defeated the British at New Orleans two years later and won
the war. Nothing happened in Washington.
A funnier thing: Canadians have never taken to the streets to protest
these self-serving US school textbooks (although they seldom miss an
opportunity to ask Americans how they like their new White House).
This illustrates why it is difficult for so many people to grasp why
millions of Chinese and Koreans seem so outraged about a few
paragraphs in the world's most universally boring literature _ the
high school history textbook.
Of course, it is all part of the often convenient package of allowing
pent-up domestic rage to channel to ``those foreigners''. No nation
is innocent of this, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The
Chinese-language reference to outsiders as barbarians and the very
name of the Middle Kingdom speaks loudly.
Cambodians hate yuan (Vietnamese), the strongest word in Khmer
describing foreigners. Similarly, although the American labour
movement attacks companies for out-sourcing work, these attacks are
as clearly anti-foreigner as the ``Japanese only'' signs on the Soi
Thaniya karaoke bars.
But the demand by huge numbers of Chinese and Korean civic leaders
and common people to police the schoolbooks of two generations of
Japanese children is unique.
Not that textbook disputes themselves are unusual. Earlier this year,
German educators debated a phrase in a sentence in a chapter about
the 1915-16 Turkish-Armenian clash, anguishing over whether to let
stand the reference to ``the genocide of the Armenian population of
Anatolia''. They cut it out.
But textbooks are always under discussion, and often heated debate.
But the dispute is almost always over national textbooks, not those
of nearby countries. And even heated debate is different from huge
demonstrations in multiple cities over it.
It is an interesting idea that the neighbours should write each
others' textbooks.
One wonders, though, just what Thai students would learn if the
Burmese and Cambodians wrote history. Just a guess, but the chapters
on Nakorn Wat (Angkor Wat) and Ayutthaya might look a little
different from today's texts.
Certainly, the Khmer have just a little different view of history
than the Vietnamese. If five million Cambodians got the power,
Vietnamese school children would be taking exams on their country's
rapacious seizure of Saigon _ called Prey Nokor when it was a Khmer
river settlement until the mid-17th century. Vietnamese high school
history textbooks written by Cambodians probably would have a chapter
on the unquenchable lust for territorial expansion by Vietnamese
emperors, and the actual rape of a Cambodian princess by the Nguyen
Dynasty emperor who would do anything to grab more land and power.
Today's actual history textbooks by Vietnamese usually have a
paragraph on a royal wedding which showed how Cambodians and
Vietnamese of the Nguyen Dynasty co-existed closely.
But then the Vietnamese have a different take on China than the
current Chinese textbooks.
If there were textbook protests in Vietnam, they would demand that
Beijing recognise that Chinese emperors spent 1,200 years trying
unsuccessfully to crush the Vietnamese, who did not have a generation
of peace over the millennium starting 200 years BC.
Mythical Vietnamese protesters would also insert a chapter about the
1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam, a scorched-earth raid that China
conducted for no other reason than it could _ to ``punish'' Vietnam
for liberating Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge. Chinese textbooks,
after all, make no mention of these events, which went a long way to
shaping Vietnam in all important ways.
Thai educators have enough trouble trying to present history to young
minds. There are still textbooks around that claim the Thai
originated in Mongolia _ a mere piffle of a dispute compared with how
to present the 1973, 1976 and 1992 democracy revolutions. Come to
think of it, maybe it would be easier to let outsiders write Thai
textbooks.
But that brings up the point that no neighbours want to. Thais are
not on the streets demanding that Laos, say, revise its lesson plan
for Mathayom 2 students to stop calling the Thai expeditionary aid
force to Laos ``mercenary invaders''.
Chinese and Koreans, though, are not just on the streets but tolerant
of hotheads and thugs who beat up Japanese students, trash
Japanese-owned businesses and throw huge pavement stones at local
drivers in their Japanese-brand (locally made) cars. Banners say
``Japanese dwarfs'' and ``Japanese devils''. So these are not all
thoughtful people asking Japan to reconsider its past.
They say, or rather scream that this is over a sentence in a
paragraph in a textbook that might be seen by 1% of Japanese high
school students.
The sentence describes the well-named Rape of Nanking (Nanjing) as an
``incident''. Of course, the murderous, six-week conquest was among
the worst atrocities of modern warfare. But that is why hundreds of
textbooks, dozens of history books and scores of film and video
documentaries so carefully study this episode. Not even a cloistered
Japanese high school student can really escape the extremely public
facts about the Nanjing massacre.
Yet it seems beyond doubt the mostly young demonstrators in China and
Korea, whose parents probably were not alive at the time, are
entirely sincere in their almost incoherent rage about the failed
Japanese textbook. Yes, it is a symptom of a general perception that
the Japanese will never clear their guilt for colonial and wartime
brutality, but the demand to edit the textbooks is specific.
Many people must think this is seriously weird. Mexico and America
have almost contrasting views of the often bloody 19th century wars
that finally formed their border, but even a 10-person protest
against the high school textbooks would be newsworthy. Millions of
French people might love to write textbooks for German schools, but
they are not on the streets demanding that right. Poles write entire
jokebooks about the Russians, but do not protest the Moscow high
school lessons.
The British are outraged when Canadians claim credit for razing
President James Madison's White House, but they don't want their
former colony to rewrite the textbooks about it.
When Canadian ambassador Fred Bild went to Hanoi to present his
credentials a few years after the communist victory, his hosts took
him on a tour of the Vietnam Military Museum and informed him
proudly: ``We are the first nation in history to defeat the United
States.'' Mr Bild was delighted to set the record straight that
actually, no, Canada had been there, done that 160 years before _ and
burnt the White House to boot.
The Vietnamese were stricken. One official was so upset it seemed for
a couple of minutes there might be a diplomatic incident. Maybe the
Vietnamese should revise their textbooks over it.
April 26 2005
To each their own version of events
The huge protests in China and South Korea have focused new attention
on history and how it is preserved
By ALAN DAWSON
This week is the anniversary of the American invasion and failed
colonisation of Canada. Military forces of the 38-year-old United
States had earlier attacked and burned the Canadian capital city,
York (later renamed Toronto). Sixteen months later, Canadian armed
forces under the British General Robert Ross entered Washington, DC
and immediately torched the capital of the new nation. They burnt the
White House to the ground with particular glee.
A funny thing has happened 192 years after these mutually marauding
raids. School textbooks in Canada teach every child the glories of
the punitive raid into Washington. US textbooks teach that the
Americans defeated the British at New Orleans two years later and won
the war. Nothing happened in Washington.
A funnier thing: Canadians have never taken to the streets to protest
these self-serving US school textbooks (although they seldom miss an
opportunity to ask Americans how they like their new White House).
This illustrates why it is difficult for so many people to grasp why
millions of Chinese and Koreans seem so outraged about a few
paragraphs in the world's most universally boring literature _ the
high school history textbook.
Of course, it is all part of the often convenient package of allowing
pent-up domestic rage to channel to ``those foreigners''. No nation
is innocent of this, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The
Chinese-language reference to outsiders as barbarians and the very
name of the Middle Kingdom speaks loudly.
Cambodians hate yuan (Vietnamese), the strongest word in Khmer
describing foreigners. Similarly, although the American labour
movement attacks companies for out-sourcing work, these attacks are
as clearly anti-foreigner as the ``Japanese only'' signs on the Soi
Thaniya karaoke bars.
But the demand by huge numbers of Chinese and Korean civic leaders
and common people to police the schoolbooks of two generations of
Japanese children is unique.
Not that textbook disputes themselves are unusual. Earlier this year,
German educators debated a phrase in a sentence in a chapter about
the 1915-16 Turkish-Armenian clash, anguishing over whether to let
stand the reference to ``the genocide of the Armenian population of
Anatolia''. They cut it out.
But textbooks are always under discussion, and often heated debate.
But the dispute is almost always over national textbooks, not those
of nearby countries. And even heated debate is different from huge
demonstrations in multiple cities over it.
It is an interesting idea that the neighbours should write each
others' textbooks.
One wonders, though, just what Thai students would learn if the
Burmese and Cambodians wrote history. Just a guess, but the chapters
on Nakorn Wat (Angkor Wat) and Ayutthaya might look a little
different from today's texts.
Certainly, the Khmer have just a little different view of history
than the Vietnamese. If five million Cambodians got the power,
Vietnamese school children would be taking exams on their country's
rapacious seizure of Saigon _ called Prey Nokor when it was a Khmer
river settlement until the mid-17th century. Vietnamese high school
history textbooks written by Cambodians probably would have a chapter
on the unquenchable lust for territorial expansion by Vietnamese
emperors, and the actual rape of a Cambodian princess by the Nguyen
Dynasty emperor who would do anything to grab more land and power.
Today's actual history textbooks by Vietnamese usually have a
paragraph on a royal wedding which showed how Cambodians and
Vietnamese of the Nguyen Dynasty co-existed closely.
But then the Vietnamese have a different take on China than the
current Chinese textbooks.
If there were textbook protests in Vietnam, they would demand that
Beijing recognise that Chinese emperors spent 1,200 years trying
unsuccessfully to crush the Vietnamese, who did not have a generation
of peace over the millennium starting 200 years BC.
Mythical Vietnamese protesters would also insert a chapter about the
1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam, a scorched-earth raid that China
conducted for no other reason than it could _ to ``punish'' Vietnam
for liberating Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge. Chinese textbooks,
after all, make no mention of these events, which went a long way to
shaping Vietnam in all important ways.
Thai educators have enough trouble trying to present history to young
minds. There are still textbooks around that claim the Thai
originated in Mongolia _ a mere piffle of a dispute compared with how
to present the 1973, 1976 and 1992 democracy revolutions. Come to
think of it, maybe it would be easier to let outsiders write Thai
textbooks.
But that brings up the point that no neighbours want to. Thais are
not on the streets demanding that Laos, say, revise its lesson plan
for Mathayom 2 students to stop calling the Thai expeditionary aid
force to Laos ``mercenary invaders''.
Chinese and Koreans, though, are not just on the streets but tolerant
of hotheads and thugs who beat up Japanese students, trash
Japanese-owned businesses and throw huge pavement stones at local
drivers in their Japanese-brand (locally made) cars. Banners say
``Japanese dwarfs'' and ``Japanese devils''. So these are not all
thoughtful people asking Japan to reconsider its past.
They say, or rather scream that this is over a sentence in a
paragraph in a textbook that might be seen by 1% of Japanese high
school students.
The sentence describes the well-named Rape of Nanking (Nanjing) as an
``incident''. Of course, the murderous, six-week conquest was among
the worst atrocities of modern warfare. But that is why hundreds of
textbooks, dozens of history books and scores of film and video
documentaries so carefully study this episode. Not even a cloistered
Japanese high school student can really escape the extremely public
facts about the Nanjing massacre.
Yet it seems beyond doubt the mostly young demonstrators in China and
Korea, whose parents probably were not alive at the time, are
entirely sincere in their almost incoherent rage about the failed
Japanese textbook. Yes, it is a symptom of a general perception that
the Japanese will never clear their guilt for colonial and wartime
brutality, but the demand to edit the textbooks is specific.
Many people must think this is seriously weird. Mexico and America
have almost contrasting views of the often bloody 19th century wars
that finally formed their border, but even a 10-person protest
against the high school textbooks would be newsworthy. Millions of
French people might love to write textbooks for German schools, but
they are not on the streets demanding that right. Poles write entire
jokebooks about the Russians, but do not protest the Moscow high
school lessons.
The British are outraged when Canadians claim credit for razing
President James Madison's White House, but they don't want their
former colony to rewrite the textbooks about it.
When Canadian ambassador Fred Bild went to Hanoi to present his
credentials a few years after the communist victory, his hosts took
him on a tour of the Vietnam Military Museum and informed him
proudly: ``We are the first nation in history to defeat the United
States.'' Mr Bild was delighted to set the record straight that
actually, no, Canada had been there, done that 160 years before _ and
burnt the White House to boot.
The Vietnamese were stricken. One official was so upset it seemed for
a couple of minutes there might be a diplomatic incident. Maybe the
Vietnamese should revise their textbooks over it.