^^Title quote from 1984 by George Orwell
Chapter 6 made me mad.
It wasn’t just the forced labour, the hellish conditions for the Ostarbeiter, or the fact that I can count myself as part of one of the nationalities kidnapped and enslaved (as I am of French ancestry).
It’s the fact that nobody ever teaches these things to us when we’re in school.
We never even touched World War II in my US or World History classes. I went to a terrible high school, but even so. I knew nothing more than ‘Germany killed some Jews so America went to war’. There was no description of the atrocities, not even something like this book, which could be described as more PG-rated, I guess. I didn’t even know that my disabled brethren were killed. There were no opportunities to learn how Germany recovered from this war, or why we should not discriminate against them now.
I am only just barely learning about some of the most important parts of my country’s history, and my ‘language country’s’ history. And that infuriates me.
But if you learned in high school, what would be left for college?