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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia | |
| Rewriting history. Who needs a new school textbook | |
| 2023-08-09 | |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Petr Akopov [REGNUM] The presentation of a new history textbook for high school students caused a strong reaction - history is being rewritten in Russia again! Moreover, Vladimir Medinsky , who led the textbook creation project, himself said that the sections on the 70-90s of the last century, as well as the zero ones, were "completely rewritten." Liberals are expected to be sarcastic about "a country with an unpredictable past", and the German Bild generally called the textbook "crazy". And this despite the fact that so far only photographs of several pages from the textbook have been published - so it is impossible to analyze its content. The noise and indignation are understandable - the struggle for the minds of the younger generation is the most important front of the ideological war. The war that we are now waging not only with the departed liberal cosmopolitans (who hope to return not only to the country, but also to power - and for this they need to defeat Putin not only on the battlefield, but also in the heads of future generations), but also the most collective West, armed with the only true doctrine of good and evil in history in general and in the history of Russia in particular. That is why the new textbook is so important - it sets a new, truly patriotic matrix of Russian history. It is clear that our children receive primary knowledge about the history of their own country not so much from a textbook, and not even from history books, and not even from bloggers' articles, but from videos on social networks (the generation of visuals has grown). But still, the textbook is of great importance - both for children and adults. For children, as it gives them a certain canon of understanding of the history of Russia by adults, that is, it acquaints them not only with how our country was formed and developed, but also with what it is. The current textbook says not only that Russia is the successor of the USSR, which, in turn, is the successor of the Russian Empire, and that of the Muscovy and Ancient Rus', but also that “the Russian Federation is the current form of the state of our civilization.” This is a huge progress - after all, even before 2014, even we had attempts to single out an almost autonomous history of “Kievan Rus”. And if in Soviet or tsarist times the term “Kyiv” itself did not contain any separatist connotation, then after 1991 it began to be used to prove the existence of various Russian states, and as a maximum to justify the right to the existence of “historical Ukraine”.
The Russian people must realize and know, understand their unity - and then they will restore it again. And to understand this unity, history textbooks are needed, that is, the very history of this people, written by them. Not according to other people's patterns, as it was in the 90s, not through the prism of the class struggle (as it was in the early Soviet years), but through the blood and sweat of one's own awareness of one's own history. Bloody and great, heavy and heroic - but dear and beloved. All the talk that the "ideological textbook" interferes with the objective perception of history, distorts and simplifies it - from the evil one. Historical education is the most important part of the education of not just a citizen, but also a person who feels his belonging to his people, knows his history and loves him. It is impossible to educate a Russian patriot without instilling in him the knowledge and love for his native history, no matter what the times are in the yard during the years of his formation, nothing justifies the contempt or oblivion of one's own roots and the historical path of one's people. In the generation of consumers raised after the collapse of the USSR in the same Moscow and among the wealthy strata of society, there were so many cosmopolitan relocators precisely because they, at best, simply did not know the history of their own country, and at worst, they learned its Russophobic version: no longer " prison of peoples”, but “a country of slaves and thieves”, “the lost daughter of European civilization”. Naturally, a school textbook on its own will not educate a patriot - the most correct words written in it must be supported by everything else: university education (including the training of school history teachers, in shaping the worldview of which not even university textbooks, but teachers play a huge role, and just among them we had a lot of carriers of the liberal-cosmopolitan idea of Russian history), works of mass culture dedicated to history (from serials to novels on historical topics), state propaganda on historical topics, and many others. All this should not be either bureaucratically urapatriotic or Russophobic derogatory and revealing. And if the second leaves together with those who chose "relocation", then the first will always remain a real threat. The patriotic presentation of Russian history is not at all doomed to be a fairy tale about “our great righteous ancestors” - we need to talk about all the events of our history, including tragic ones. But they can and should be presented in such a way that an understanding of their causes and context comes, and not cause contempt and disrespect for one's own history. Any, even the most critical, view of certain pages of native history is appropriate and justified if it is based on love for it, the desire to understand one's ancestors, and not the detached view of an "enlightened Russian European" on "Asian atrocities and barbarism." The past does not just determine our future - the attitude to our own history determines what future we consider correct, what we strive for. If we really know and love our history, it will be easier for us to formulate and build a sustainable state and socio-economic system that meets our values. Russian civilization does not end with us, but it is on us that its success in the coming decades depends. Having broken two forms of our existence in the last century, we are only now embarking on the meaningful construction of a third. Not temporary, transitional, but stable. To draw a competent drawing of it, we need to learn well the plans of previous great but failed projects. And only those who know the history of Russia will be able to read the drawings of their ancestors. | |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 Kiev was Russia till the Mongols showed up. Then it had other landlords. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2023-08-09 05:17 |
