Tragically Forgotten: How Some of the Worst Events of the Twentieth Century Remain Unknown



Here's a strange fact. There are people out there who have never heard of the Holocaust. (Read more here.) It seems bizarre that someone could not know of the one of the biggest and most horrific events to occur during the twentieth century, but sometimes these things happen. Or, at least they happen to other people. People like me can safely blame a combination of lousy parenting, general ignorance and a poor education. Or I can go a step further and use my 'superior' knowledge to question the sources and the biases of those who conducted the survey and whether or not the publication who reported it has sensationalised the article at all.

Or, if I want a truly deeper understanding of how these things occur, I can turn and look within myself. Here's a bizarre fact: Until I was eighteen years old, I had never heard of the Chernobyl Nuclear Accident. And no, this wasn't due to some radical Soviet cover up. It was, if anything, a strange reflection of the times where, during the course of my schooling, the curriculum tended to focus heavily on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the nations who, one by one were gaining independence. Unsurprisingly, after I learned about the tragic events at Chernobyl, a number of jokes on The Simpsons made a lot more sense. 

Unfortunately, it is a big world we live in and often many tragic events occur, only to soon be forgotten. I was reading Yellow Notebook by Helen Garner recently, a book made up of diary entries written by the beloved Australian author recently when I stumbled on a short paragraph (on page 43 to be exact,) detailing a terrible motoring accident that had occurred in France in 1982. The event described sounded so horrible [[[trigger warning: no seriously, this is pretty awful and if you don't want to be horrified and then sad for the rest of the day stop reading now]]] where forty-four children were killed on their way to a summer camp when the two buses carrying them collided with several other vehicles. Petrol spilled from one of the vehicles and a spark caused a huge fire. Most of the children were only able to be identified through a careful checking of who had boarded the bus and matching them against the names of survivors. It remains the worst motoring accident in French history. Despite this, there are very few resources available in English that detail the event. (If you really want to know more, here is the Wikipedia article.) It is, I suppose, one those things that is simply too horrible to talk about. 

And that perhaps in that lies the answer of why things are forgotten. We don't want to spend our lives thinking about the events that have happened to scores of other people. Not only are they tragic in their own right, but it can remind us of our own vulnerabilities and how the same thing could easily happen to us. No one wants to be a newspaper headline, the person who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And perhaps these things are circular and it comes back to that we cannot stand to see others in the same, vulnerable position.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more