This is not a joke: John Broich, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University, published an opinion article in The Washington Post on Tuesday titled, “Allied leaders were anti-Nazi, but not anti-racist. We’re now paying
This is not a joke: John Broich, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University, published an opinion article in The Washington Post on Tuesday titled, “Allied leaders were anti-Nazi, but not anti-racist. We’re now paying the price for their failure.”
Broich writes: “While Allied countries opposed the Nazis and Allied troops defeated them, the leaders of the United States and Britain rarely attacked the core tenet of Nazism: the belief in a master race.” He continues:
The Allied leadership did not fight the war over fascist race-nationalism. That was the historical path not taken. As it’s once again on the ascent across the globe, this historian imagines where we might be today had the Allies fought on the basis of eliminating the racial supremacy of the Germans (and, in their variation, the Japanese). What if that principle had been, through the greatest global struggle of humankind, woven into our social DNA? And how can we make that principle central to our societies today?
All this I might well expect from a pundit or a columnist in a college newspaper. But it’s a particular disappointment for this to have been authored by a professor of history.
What, after all, is the reason it matters that young people study history? By “study history” I don’t mean majoring in history in college, or getting a master’s or PhD. I am referring instead to serious instruction in high school, non-majors selecting history electives in college, and the decision to read books, or even watch relevant YouTube videos, outside the classroom.
What’s Limiting about Trying to Understand Root Causes
Yes, part of the benefit of studying history is to understand the long-term roots of current woes. But that’s a very limiting approach, and sometimes even gives us the wrong answers to questions. What explains the present-day woes of a given minority group in the United States, or an impoverished developing country? The “understand long-term roots” lens risks seeing present-day situations so much through past causes as to leave individuals without agency, powerless to remedy their problems.
This “approach” certainly suggests that going back too far in time is fairly useless. What effect did the particulars of the world of the Ancient Greeks have on our day? The democracy of Athens has no real continuity to our own time, however fondly we speak of it as the first democracy. Certainly studying the world of the Spartans or such stories as the battle of Thermopylae can’t be justified by some notion of understanding the causes of our present world.
Instead, studying history, even of the fairly distant past, teaches that decisions have consequences, sometimes quite unintended consequences that couldn’t have been at all foreseen at the time. The Persian War, the cause of all the trouble at Thermopylae, was, as described in this documentary, the consequence of Darius, and then his son Xerxes seeking revenge for the Athenians having aided rebellious Greek cities at the edge of the Persian Empire. Oops.
It’s reasonably well-known that the Romans invited var