R. D. Kushner

My new mantra is “Leisure as a habit, not a privilege.” That idea percolates through my mind and body with an effervescent tingling - sounding out to every extremity. Ideas and communication [on all levels, intimate or otherwise] with other human beings is the primary benefit of living. I have no enemies other than myself [and I can’t stay mad at myself for long].

I had an email exchange with a colleague of mine regarding a quote I sent him from a well known author that I have read. I will not reveal the name of the author of this quotation, because it is the nature of the human mind to have a predilection for ideas. If I tell you the quote is from Bill Gates you will think one thing, if I tell you the quote is from Trent Lott, Reverend Al Sharpton, Bill Clinton, Stephen King, Clint Eastwood, Jesse Ventura, Salman Rushdie, or Rudolph Giuliani, you will put the words in the context of the person the quote is attributed to and that will defeat the purpose. I want this information to stand independently as an idea:

"One of the questions asked in the study [conducted after the first Gulf War] was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam War? The average response on the part of the Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died during the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture? They leave that question unanswered, but you can pursue it. What does it tell us about our culture. It tells us quite a bit."

This friend of mine responded that this was a sad example of “Ignorance of history.” The conversation ended there, but it shouldn’t have.

The quote above is not simply a sad example of “Ignorance of history.” It’s so much bigger than that. That is a clichéd message, for a reality that is much more twisted and much more vile than a simple, “Oops I must have missed that history class in high school.”

The quote above, is about understanding a political culture which, over time, continues to dominate information in such a way that the ignorance about the magnitude of death in Vietnam is masked from the general population by a power system which benefits from people not knowing the real toll in human life. The questions of how and why that type of propaganda proliferates in a capitalist society is well documented and I won’t address it here. The fact is that this “misinformation” persists even though the real truth is available – it’s just that very few people actually know the real truth. This is a mass hallucination. An educated person might be interested in knowing how this has happened.

If the German people actually believed that only 300,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust, then we would seriously question the political and social structures in Germany that allowed such misinformation to be maintained. Most people would call this kind of ignorance anti-Semitism and there would be campaigns by Jewish groups and other civil rights groups around the world to pressure the German Government to remedy the situation. Some countries and organizations would go as far as sending representatives to the region to help influence educational and government institutions; other countries might perhaps impose sanctions.

We would want to know what their kids learn in schools, what their history books publish, whether or not there was any repression in the media, etc.; and more importantly, we would want to know why those forces existed, that made possible [i.e. contributed to] this mass hallucination. Why? There is always a “Why?.”

The fact is, this distorted view of Vietnam is a horrible ignorance. It’s worse than the fictitious example of the Germans, because the Vietnam example is actually true. An educated person might be interested in knowing how and why this has happened.

Making new ideas in the adult mind is not an easy task. I know this to be true from personal experience. Anyone who tells you any differently is not accepting of new ideas – I don’t care what they say. My resistance to new ideas which do not already fit into my idea of how the world works is relentless. And yet it is precisely the moments when I allow my entire world to be shaken by a new idea that I remember that new ideas are like good wine; they are intoxicating and delicious, but leave you with a headache in the morning.

If you don’t have a “headache” in the morning, you haven’t really been open-minded.