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Who gets to write history? Victors or the victims?

For most of history, the victors controlled the narrative of what happened and who did what. Since fall of Communism in 1989, that narrative has changed. We’ve taken our prosperity and relative peace, as an opportunity re-write history from the victims perspective.
Every grievance, every ethnic atrocity, every death, every genocide of all sizes shapes and type is now memorized. Each one as important to the group memorialized as the next and on and on and on. We are making sure every pain is examined. Every hurt is reviewed. Every stone unturned and reviewed.
The problem with it is how do we handle which is more important than the other? Is slavery worse than the Holocaust? Is children in cages worse than sectarian violence in Ireland? Is the Rwandan slaughter more gruesome than the Arminian genocide by the Turks? Is the treatment of Korean sex-workers during World War II more important than the labour abuses that led to the Triangle Waistcoat factory fire?
This is not in any way meant to diminish any of this terrible events for the individual victims, but more to shine a light that no one owns the horror humanity. No one has the monopoly on doom and pain. We shouldn’t have to rank these things and no, they aren’t equivalent to each other – (slavery, semitism span centuries) Merely to show that everyone feels aggrieved, everyone has a pain that you may not understand or know about – without even dealing with the normal pains of the human condition outside of systematic terrors and horrors.
Humanity has a track record of doing the worst things you can think of, then pushing past that to a new level of depravity. We are getting better but it is still a work in progress.

By Laurent Courtines

I'm here and I am ready to go. Been doing my homework and I have things to say.

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