History never killed nobody.
There has been a whole lot of history, and yet, here we are, ya know? All of us Whigs, fat and sassy, ya know?
Mom belonged to the Book-of-the-Month Club, so I read Leon Uris's Mila 18 when it came out age 10. And Exodus before that. But at the time, I of course understood why the books were written, in order to change society and the hearts of people so that the Holocaust would never happen again.
People, individuals, exploit, torture, and kill each other every single day. People suck. Society keeps us from eating each other.
So I was a good little misanthropic casual socialist historical materialist, optimistic and hopeful, all my life until I was mugged by the second Bush administration, when the Right went barbaric and the Left let it happen.
History can't save us anymore.
I don't remember when that happened, but I do remember when the horror of Hiroshima really hit home to me. I had read lots about it and honestly shared the decent opinion of its horror, but it was only when I was in a tour bus in Hiroshima, driving in a crowded central area, and thought to myself, "The bomb would have killed everyone I'm looking at, destroyed every one of the buildings around me, in an instant," when I felt sick and queasy about it.
History has never felt very real to me. But then neither does the present.
3:Oh, h-g.
I came here directly from discussions (also at bluejo's at TOR) of Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To which put me in a mood, ya know?
(Waggish's last paragraph there hit a nerve, ya know? But do I even care?)
A Woody Allen in Manhattan mood, remembering the pieces of history that keep me going.
I think horror was one of my earliest feelings. I was very little when my parents started talking about the holocaust, and even smaller when I learned the truth about white settlement in the Great Plains. I was probably four when I had my first "OMG that's terrible" feeling about history.
"Take as directed" isn't a joke, bob.
By the time I reached middle school, I was preoccupied with the possibility of global thermonuclear war. (This was the Reagan era.) A visceral sense of the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a part of this.
Now that I'm a mature, reasonable, grown-up I know that history is one long tale of suffering and woe, and the horrors which await us are too numerous to count.
I watched the towers fall, from Dumbo, close to the foot of the bridge. After the first one, we went and got beer, and then went back and bought a Bunch of water bottles to give to people coming over the bridge. Not enough, but, well.
We drank the beer, predicting there would be a war, and really fucked up politics for our lifetime. Now, I want another beer.
Didn't mean to kill conversation, yo.
4
History has never felt very real to me. ...
Ditto. I find it difficult to care much about anything that happened before I was born.
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Molly and I are getting to the end of the Arrested Development complete DVD set, and I have to say, Justine Bateman is hysterical and looks great. The fact that her brother's career is going so much better than hers almost makes me think that Hollywood is unfair to older, female actors.
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History has always felt real to me.
Recently while taking a teenage niece around Washington, I borrowed Gonerill's neat example about John Tyler's grandsons (and yes they were still alive a few months ago) to illustrate how recent all this "ancient" history is. When I said that there are two men now in their early 90s whose grandfather was president in the 1840s, I could see it click for her. After all, her grandparents are within her knowledge. Then I added that when we add in their great-grandfather, who was born in 1747, we have a period that's longer than the nation has existed.
And on I checking I see that I aged them by a decade.
I don't think it's happened to me yet. For example, I'm reading a book about the Donner Party and it's more interesting than horrifying. But I will react very strongly when I read about animals being harmed. But I am very sympathetic to the needs of people I interact with, so it's not like I'm dead inside.
I liked Arrested Development better when they sang, _ Tennessee_.
I remember reading accounts of Holocaust survivors in a German class in college, short little interview excerpts and vignettes, and finding myself strangely unmoved. You have to ride in a train car for a few days? That sucks I guess. You're forced to walk through the woods? Okay. But soon thereafter I read an account in which the person said they were forced into a train car "like cattle", and I found myself horrified. Weird realization to have, that horror can hinge on a teeny simile.
I was watching The World at War with my dad when it hit me. I think it was about the convoy sailors during the worst of the submarine attacks.
From the time I was a tiny kid, I heard endless stories of the Holocaust related over Shabbat dinners. There were often disagreements: about where and when this or that relative had lived or died, about who had killed whom using what method, and about how the survivors had made it through by virtue of luck or guile. But none of it became at all real to me until, probably around the time I was in third grade, I asked my grandmother to see her wedding pictures. She burst into tears, which I had never seen her do before, and went into the other room to lie down.
Thinking about it, it's amazing how much I miss my grandmother, and how much her loss has severed me from my family's history.
This is reminding me of a history textbook website I was copyediting five or six years ago (so, in my mid thirties). I think I had some idea of the horrors of history before I read this, but it really hit me over the head. Ir contained a first hand account of a family with a mother and five young children in line for gas chambers that had me sobbing so hard that I couldn't work for a while. It wasn't until later that I realized that the account could only have been recounted by the nazi guards who were ushering the prisoners in.
I can't really remember a time when I didn't have a visceral fear of the holocaust. Not sure when I heard about it; most likely, preschool. I was also absolutely 100% convinced that we'd have another war of similar size to WWII against the USSR in the near future, and that the most likely result was nuclear annhilation of the earth. I suspect I'm among the absolute youngest cohort to grow up with the latter fear.
8 speaks for me, though the Reagan era, and fears of mutually assured destruction, were a bit later than middle school for me. High school.
Jesus' crucifixion made a big impression on me, as did the existence of Hell.
But like others on this thread, I'm still not sure I'm appropriately impressed with history, or with the horrors of the wider world today.
My eight-year-old son asked me today how many wars we're fighting. "Three," I said. He hadn't heard about the one in Libya, and wanted to know why we were fighting there. I mulled my possible answers, and told him it's because they have a lot of oil
"We want to steal their oil?"
"We want to make sure it keeps being produced."
I'm raising my son to also be insufficiently impressed by history and the wider world.
History has always been alive for me, but horror isn't really how I experience the awful things of the past. My earliest experience with WWII was knowing my grandfather was it. He was still in the Army in the 1960s, and while he likely experienced the period as including much tragedy and loss, that was long over by the time I was talking to him.
I honestly remember being afraid of the Russians. As I came aware of publics life as the 60s passed the midpoint, it was obvious that the people who were talking about dominoes and the like were deluded. Then there was that movie about the submarine.
I guess i'm in that lucky cohort too young to have experienced the Cuban missile crisis, and old enough to see the Reagan bullshit for exactly what it was.
I don't recall anyone with a personal relationship to the Holocaust talking to me about it before I was 30.
My longtime commitment to self-involvement precluded obsession with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. A cynic might attribute this, to one extent or another, to rebellion against one's mother's pronounced Mrs. Jellyby tendencies.
Further to 25, as I think about this, along about age 15 or so I read John Brunner (The Sheep Look Up, Stand on Zanzibar), and became truly properly concerned at the same time. The AIDS scare was big around then. Brunner, at least as I remember, combines geopolitics and environmental degradation: people become increasingly ill and the global community, rather than helping, hinders. That's the impact those books had on teen me, in any case. I might be misrepresenting the novels.
The Holocaust didn't register as a true horror, truly, until college, I'm afraid. Not only did I not meet or know many (any) Jews, but -- maybe the fact that my grandfather, who served in WW II, was constantly on about the Japs, but not the Germans, had something to do with it.
22: That sounds like that might be from Tadeusz Borowski's This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen*, in which case it was from the view of a non-Jewish concentration camp prisoners who were assigned to that task. It's a horrifying book, but worth reading.**
*The title says it all.
**Unless you quite understandably do not want to read in anymore detail about the Holocaust.
I don't think I can answer the question, not because I've always felt aware of horrors in the past, but because I can't remember any single moment of realization. I don't think my education - family, friends, schooling - did much discussion of things like the Holocaust in much detail beyond definitions until I was in high school, at which point we covered a lot of horrors. The exception, as you might guess, was American slavery, but even then once we were given to understand what it was, we seem to have spent more on resistance and anti-slavery, without getting too much into what the lived experiences were of slaves and slaveowners. Through Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry I probably had a more visceral sense of the discrimination in the South in the 30s than I did of slavery.
I think I recognized the heart-strings-tugging on an individual level first, and then began to understand scale later. It's certainly easier for me to answer the question in terms of books that made me cry, but that wasn't always from horror as we seem to be discussing it.
It is of course a sign of privilege that I cannot think of a personal experience, rather than things I "experienced" second(or more)hand.
I'm not sure I really grasp the horror of everything that's happened, even now. In terms of shock, certainly watching Roots inculcated me with a strong sense of the absolute depravity and repugnance of slavery, which was underscored by reading Beloved, but how do I know that I am really grasping the horror, you know?
As with many above, I certainly thought about nuclear war all the time during my 80s childhood. Mostly I just figured mpls was big enough, and I spent enough time in the central city, that I'd be instantly incinerated, along with most of the people in my life, so it was all that horrible to contemplate. The idea of wandering around a blasted landscape with pieces of your body sloughing off occasionally was what really freaked me out about Hiroshima.
I mean, I've lived a pretty privileged life by world and historical standards. Compared to my working class African-American former coworker who had lost over a dozen friends/family/acquaintances to violence by the time she finished high school, it seems like any suffering I've had to endure has been pretty fucking minimal. Given that the death of just one baby last year pushed me into a very deep depression that it took me months to get out from under, I'm thinking that I've never grasped any horror at all.
Roots got through to young me. Now that I think about it. Though it still didn't have that horrific edge.
I agree with 32.2 (and 32.3).
Oops. Italics tag should have closed after "Roots".
The exception, as you might guess, was American slavery, but even then once we were given to understand what it was, we seem to have spent more on resistance and anti-slavery, without getting too much into what the lived experiences were of slaves and slaveowners.
I hadn't put my finger on this before, but this was also my education K-12, and it does distance the horror.
Natilo: Something disturbing happened near you, and you were disturbed. If that says anything about the horrors of the world, it's about how disturbed many people are. Why think that it's your reaction, or maybe the amount of depression in your life, that's overstated, as opposed to thinking that the amount of depression in the rest of the population is understated?
Rereading the OP, I wonder what it would have been, and taken, for the young me to have more "actually felt" the horror of historical events, assuming the sort of baseline empathy that comes with the knowledge that one must die, like all the citizens of history. Perhaps just wider experience.
the only time i remember feeling horrified about anything was getting too freak out to sleep one night because i grasped the horrificness of eternity in hell.
not much else really phased me, i knew the economic or political rational about the same time as i first learned of events.
During my (recently concluded) cross-country road trip I went through the small town in Tennessee where one branch of my dad's family is from. The plantation they had in the antebellum period was actually a few miles south in Mississippi, but this was the nearest town, and after the war a lot of them moved into it and the surrounding area. Many of my distant relatives still live there, and we had a family reunion there when I was a teenager, so I had been there before. What struck me this time, though, and hadn't before, was seeing various black people there and realizing that there's a very good chance that their ancestors were slaves owned by my ancestors. That personal connection really made the reality of slavery hit me in a visceral way.
I was first upset by photos, not words: and -- oddly enough -- photos treated in a particular style, which was fashionable in the late 60s and early 70s, when cheap and stable colour printing was becoming widespread, and -- so that a publisher could demonstrate its colour skills with material that wasn't in colour -- black and white photos were given tinted underlays. I remember being very spooked by two books in particular: one was a book of 20th century history that was shelved right by my desk at school. wasn't studying history that year, but I often used to sneak it out during reading periods instead of whatever children's fiction I was reading -- and pore over the images, especially of the second world war and the death-camps. The second was the 1970 edition of the Guinness Book of Records, which you saw everywhere -- this compendium had been around since the 50s I believe but in or around 1970, they redesigned and remarketed it, and it became a big xmas and coffee-table hit, so that you saw this edition everywhere, in libraries and people's homes. Again, B/W images with underlays in olive, yellow- ochre and violet, and again, I read and reread the sections that spooked: the sad tale of the world's fattest man (dead at 28, had to be buried in a piano-case); the rumour of the world's worst climbing accident, a soviet attempt on Everest in which 40 died (this story is probably pure invention, the publishers of the GBR were notorious rightwing cranks); the grisly competition for worst murderer (at the time won by the shadowy 19th century Chicagoan H. H. Holmes). The colour-underlay device was of course shared by much more cheerful records -- world's most elaborate mustache, world's biggest turnip, countless sportng records -- but somehow the sense of dread that properly belonged to the unpleasant records bled through even into these; even to the -- otherwise delightful -- record for the world's shortest poem, which i learnt and often quoted.
the sense of dread that properly belonged to the unpleasant records bled through even into these; even to the -- otherwise delightful -- record for the world's shortest poem, which i learnt and often quoted.
I think you mean "had blod".
Toward a definition of Horror
1) Melodrama is when it is good guys vs bad guys, no matter who wins, and you identify and empathize with the good guys. This is not right, because it doesn't cover lightning strikes and the plague, but it does cover a death on Normandy Beach, which doesn't feel quite like horror. It is a sacrifice, a noble deed. To be continued.
1a) There is of course the horror of things like "monsters inside me" tapeworms and bot flies and getting the fly that lays an egg under your eyelid...just the physical disgust and fear. Plague. Pompeii. Oh 16-year-old remains of slave-girl at Pompeii, found with noble baby under her, being protected, but she had no teeth, because of the diet of stoney bread her masters fed her.
1b) Went looking but couldn't find, Digby posted a story about a California woman, quadraplegic, who is self-supporting by typing with a pencil in her mouth, but due to budget cuts is about to lose the two hours a day of home nursing that allows her independence. She wants to die. There is a horror at what the fuck kind of people are we I endure every fucking day. Jump to 4
2) Tragedy is when you identify and empathize with everybody, when bad things happen and there are no good guys and bad guys. Verdun
3) Horror is when you empathize with the victim and identify with the bad guy. "Well, after all it was you and me" Or even empathize with the "bad guy." What would I do? Jimmy Doolittle. Yasujiro Ozu, gentler little nerd momma's boy you'll never meet, at Nanjing.
4) History. What the fuck kind of people are we. The key to empathy and horror at stuff like Corcyra is seeing the possibility, probability, actuality (jump to 1b) of it whatever happening today around you to you by you all the time, in your neighbors and family. There is a horror for me of people telling themselves they wouldn't be laughing and cheering at the Colosseum. Yes we would. Look in your partner's eyes and see the Centurion, not the Christian martyr. Look in the mirror. History stares back at you.
The key to empathy and horror at stuff like Corcyra
is seeing the possibility, probability, actuality (jump
to 1b) of it whatever happening today around you
to you by you all the time, in your neighbors and
family.
Indeed. "History" was never so real to me as when I visited Dachau on a bitter day in the dead of winter. Reading about the Holocaust was sort of intellectually horrifying, for lack of a better way to say it. But personally seeing tangible parts of that history was a very different, much more visceral horror. Then reading the progression of Nazi propaganda in the museum and finding too much of it seeming too familiar. Then an asylum case with the opportunity to hear firsthand of ongoing horror in the world, and so much current history.
I really surprised by some of the responses here. I remember so many things affecting me deeply, starting at 9 when I saw Roots. (It's possible it started before that; I have a lousy memory.) Most of the sharpest moments are connected to books or TV: Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, Holocaust, Roots -- I still remember the horror I felt when they chopped off Kunta Kinte's toes -- a couple of novels about kids escaping the Nazis called Star of Danger and Escape from Warsaw, and British suffragists going on hunger strikes in prison and getting feeding tubes shoved down their nostrils in A Question of Courage. Scholastic Books has a lot to answer for.
In high school, I was afraid of nuclear war, not in a "the Russians are coming!" sort of way but of Reagan and the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (cue MAD bumper stickers).
When I was in a class in 8th grade and learned about apartheid in South Africa, I was all, "what the fuck do you mean this is going on right now and people know about it?! Why isn't anybody doing anything?!"
I don't know what any of this says about me or the people who've said they didn't (or don't) connect with the horrors of history. It's certainly not that any of you (except for Shearer) lack compassion. I do know that I don't have very much emotional insulation when it comes to these things.
Also, hello! Any chance I had of being around more was shot to hell by the Verizon strike. On the up side, the members of my union are awesome.
22
... It wasn't until later that I realized that the account could only have been recounted by the nazi guards who were ushering the prisoners in.
Another possibility of course is that the account was invented.
47: I was going to say that, on my end, I think I just feel things more deeply as I've gotten older. But that's not really true. More, I think, that as a little person, I had different, more immediate and personal things to feel deeply about and horrible things in books or on TV weren't real to me in the same way.
I still don't empathize with historical horrors or terrible things happening elsewhere in the world much -- when I do, actually putting myself in the place of someone who's in real immediate fear or physical suffering, it's too upsetting to manage for long. So I intellectualize my sympathy instead.
I don't associate a change in how I dealt with this sort of thing with any particular age -- I can't remember, e.g., suddenly realizing that distant horrors were real things happening to real people who were in pain in the same way I was in pain when I got hurt.
47
... It's certainly not that any of you (except for Shearer) lack compassion. ...
I was eight during the Cuban missile crisis and remember it as exciting rather than scary. So my feeling of distance from events outside my actual experience was not simply lack of compassion for other people but also a failure to entirely grasp that the headlines could affect me personally.
During the gulf war (when I was 10), my mom had me put together a scrap book of news about the war. She had done a similar thing during Vietnam and was expecting me to learn important lessons about the human toll of war and whatnot. But all I cared about was the cool technology in the planes and bombs.
Re: The Holocaust (which we are apparently now expected to go through incident by incident and re-verify for Shearer's benefit). It's always been something that motivated my politics, and there are aspects that have seemed more or less horrible, depending on where my thinking was about everything. I've always been confused about that idea that people couldn't grasp the enormity and awfulness of the Holocaust without reference to the specificity of individual experiences, a la Maus, Sophie's Choice, Diary of Anne Frank. Not that I think those works detract in any way, but it's kind of apples and oranges. And then there's the aspect of the Holocaust that is inspirational: The Resistance. Not just the violent resistence within WWII, which was, of course, great, but the ongoing resistance of Holocaust survivors, like the woman mentioned in Rache/ Shuk3rt's Have You No Shame?, where she's on a trip to Auschwitz, and Rachel is upset, and the old woman says "Look, you don't have to bear this burden." And Rachel is like "But isn't it horrific for you to be here?" And the old lady replies "Sure, it's terrible, but I'll tell you one thing: It's a lot better than the last time I was here!" So yeah, our revenge is the laughter of our children.
So yeah, our revenge is the laughter of our children.
Are the children the ones laughing in that anecdote?
55: Yes! That's exactly my point. Why go around moping and being oppressed by the horrors of the past when all your ancestors struggled and suffered so that you could eventually live a somewhat happier life than they did?
(Not that this line of thinking actually stops me from moping very often, but I have hopes that it will, eventually.)
Why go around moping and being oppressed by the horrors of the past when all your ancestors struggled and suffered so that you could eventually live a somewhat happier life than they did?
Doesn't that counterindicate letting the Holocaust (solely for example: substitute other genocide, annexation, displacement, occupation or lost cause as appropriate) motivate one's politics?
56: See 1.2, and maybe 1.5
"X" tragedy was not a learning experience, we are not so much better now thanks to 100 million dead in the 30s and 40s. History as "heightening the contradictions" can lead to bad habits of mind.
This false Spencerian Bernstein Darwinist, mass moral progress bullshit is exactly what a study of history and development of empathy and perspective is supposed to dispel. People do not learn and get better. Material conditions must be changed so as to limit human possibilities, nukes must be destroyed so we don't have to depend on the acquired wisdom of Michelle Bachman, Capitalsm must fall so the generosity of billionaires is not the independent variable.
Otherwise when it goes boom and burns, all you got is "Oops"
bob, remember your steps. One day at a time.
Incidentally, "the Civil War was all and only about the slavery" is ia critical essential part of American Exceptionalism, Whig-interpreting component. "And we fixed it!"
If you say the CW was about Industrialism versus Agrarianism, 1) you can be a little more humble since Industrialism has never been considered an unqualified good, and b) a little empathetic, since Agrarianism has usually been connected to various degrees of bondage (helots, serfs)
47: Coming out of lurking to say just this. I can't remember the exact moment when it started but I remember rejecting being in the room when my teacher was reading about the Titanic in Grade 3. Didn't everyone know how it turned out? That band that kept playing? How can you expect us to listen to this event? If I was there, I could yell and scream and get them on the boats but here? What am I going to do but burst into tears and embarrass myself in front of the whole class?
Ditto so many events (apartheid in high school, WWII in junior high, war generally).
Although I guess this disconnect between me and others might explain why people seem to 'enjoy' Holocaust movies or movies about war? Maybe people need the visuals to understand the horror. But to me the horror has always been there and watching it when I can't do anything is like torture.
Sorry, that was pretty personal.
Please don't apologize. I still haven't been willing to watch Schindler's List, for like reasons.
And looking at photos of lynchings in the American south is deeply painful (I have a tendency to cry about things), though I think it's necessary.
57: Well, perhaps I'm not explaining myself clearly. Of course, the Holocaust, and everything else, is horrifying. But you can choose to either wallow in the horror, or use it to motivate yourself to organize for change/revolution. Part of using it to motivate yourself is being able to differentiate between the comparative goodness of your life and the awfulness of people who came before you. Offer does not apply in Afghanistan, North Korea, Haiti, etc.
I don't think I really appreciate the horror of things like the Holocaust, although I do have a visceral response to specific incidents -- the last scene in the play about Anne Frank hit me pretty hard. But genocide as a whole is more of an abstract horror for me -- just knowing that it happened, and that it could certainly happen again. I think I only started to understand this after I finished college -- just how mean people can be for no reason, and how little you can count on the sympathy of strangers. (I suspect this last bit is partly due to my own regrettably cold personality, however.)
I've always been really bothered by the horrors of history and current events, from the earliest age that I can remember. (Also have lots of problems with animal death in films & books - stupid Where the Red Fern Grows). My step-father - and my real father, for that matter - were very into Native American history and learning about the depopulation of the Americas (at an extremely young age, before school) was perhaps the first time I understood horror on a scale so immense that I couldn't really, truly fathom it. As I've aged, I have found that I tend to intellectualize everything and go too far in the other direction. But, you know, sobbing in the classroom while lecturing on the trials of slavery - or heck, just losing every other kid to disease - isn't exactly the best technique.
One thing that I've had happen is getting too involved with my subjects, and then realizing that this vibrant person that I know through text is, in reality, dead. Then I have to take a moment to mourn them, which I suppose is a bit ridiculous, but there it is.
I was gonna say when the thread was fresh that I've never been emotionally affected by historical events, but this made me seethe briefly:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/17/dag-hammarskjold-un-secretary-general-crash