Chapter 9 was thoroughly interesting, mainly for the reason that I learned more about the Vietnam war in high school than Woodrow Wilson and Native Americans which were discussed in previous chapters.
Anyways, it was written in this chapter that textbooks tend to simplify matters by not giving further explanation or reasoning for students to not question details about a certain event. This reminded me so much about what Professor Tanaka(MCC) said during the retreat. He said 'The only way to solve the issues of today is to complicate matters that are already complicated.' At first, I did not agree with this point because personally I originally thought the problem lied in the fact that we complicate matters that are actually simple. However, after reading chapter 9, I finally understood what Professor Tanaka was trying to say. Nothing is simple in history, everything is controversial. If we ignore that fact and begin simplifying matters, we will not be able to question the obvious nor will we able to seek true peace for we will always be living in a 'pretend' world. In order to understand what happened during the Vietnam War, we need to question every detail that is being simplified in textbooks. 'War broke out' makes war seem like a natural disaster when it isn't. There has to be a couple hundred factors to start something that will eventually lead to the killing of innocent men. War DOES NOT simply BREAK OUT.
When Loewen started giving details about the Vietnam war, I immediately was reminded of the Iraq war which Loewen himself brought up later in the chapter. The US tends to give a supposedly 'logical' explanation to why they need to go to war when in reality, it's just an excuse. When there is a war, the countries involved are not all necessarily experiencing loss. The US is one of the biggest military countries. When there is war, they gain profits. Still, this is probably only one of the factors for why the US loves fighting so much.
EXTRA
During the retreat, Millie asked during the panel discussion the most epic question ever. She asked why ICU advocates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when all teachers at ICU have to be Christians. All 3 panelists were lost in words and totally butchered answering her question. I wish Rab could've seen this! It was EPIC and one of my highlights at retreat.
Yes that sounds like something I wish I'd seen. Who were the panelists? What did they say? And how many people were in the audience?
返信削除I remember Professor Sano panicking. He justified the ICU ways by claiming that ICU was a unit and especially because it's a private school these things tend to happen. His answer obviously wasn't answering the question so Millie asked a follow up but he just repeated saying the same thing. The teacher in the middle was from Hungary and said she couldn't answer the question because she'd only spent 4 years at ICU. The third and last panelist Professor Tanaka agreed with Millie and said it was certainly a contradiction but gave no further explanation.
返信削除What a sight that was...
oh and the room had about 60 people?ish
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