Rewriting History (the need to)
International Day of Peace
On a day like this I think it is time to dethrone Alexander the Great - along with many other “great” rulers through all the ages.
Recently, there is a lot of talk of the end of an era.
Rule and rulers, politics and economy, nature and technology, science and belief,
Things change.
Things can be changed.
Today we ought to celebrate the International Day of Peace, but cannot.
We watch the 77th session of ?the General Assembly of the United Nations unfold, and counting back to years to 1946 one has to wonder, did we make any real progress at all?
“History is Written by Victors.”, certainly there is some truth to that. And it is clear that persons with power want to leave a legacy - and often try to write it themselves.
But, time can dismantle that, like it did with the statues of Michael Jackson's HIStory tour, how different the story goes when we look back.
We should, we need learn from history, and thanks to Frans de Waal (the primatologist) I do not want to believe that "Homo homini lupus est", roughly translate from Latin as "A man is a wolf to another man" is true. (and yes, the quote is incomplete).
And - just like with Alexander III of Macedon - when thinking of the Romans, we also need to be careful when it come to how we want to picture them and their rulers.
Since, if we continue to picture the rulers who - often mercilessly -conquered vast territories, as "Great" and ignore the death and destruction in their path, we might just put the very idea in the heads of the youth.
I understand that, in their lifetime, the very rulers insisted on titles and attributes of Greatness, but, should we, centuries later, still serve them?
Why do we still serve them?
Instead of attaching such labels of Greatness to rulers invading foreign territories, forcefully conscripting the locals of occupied and annexed territories and turning the mass of people into a death roller squishing and flatting any resistance out there and at home (it's not a new system, is it?) we could try to, for a change, to
attach those labels of Greatness and Praise to leaders who improve the quality of life of their people, but not at the expense of others.
领英推荐
Returning to Alexander (as an example). Still labeled as the Great, remember his "success"
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Yesterday we welcomed our new students in Krems.
Doing a little experiment (on focus and attention) I quickly read the first 9 articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to our new students.
Interestingly enough, none of the new students had read them before.
Such an important text, and - methinks - the most important rights document there is.
After all, it took us two World Wars and then some to develop a joint understanding of human rights.
Now, I am afraid, I mean I suppose - since I did not ask the students (but will do) - while they did not know much about Human Rights, all of them, however, have heard and do remember Alexander (as) the Great.
This is our education system. We teach this.
We should, we need to pay more attention how we picture things in school.
If we only have that one recipe for Greatness, we will not make any progress.
We might not even make the cut.
A good read for future leaders, I presume:
Nachhaltigkeit & Banking
2 年This is so true - we need to rewirebour brains. It‘s about the stories and histories we teach and believe in about the past that influence very much our values and beliefs nowadays!