Read Online Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Margaret MacMillan
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Month, “to celebrate the many achievements and contributions of Black Canadians, who, throughout history, have done so much to make Canada the culturally diverse, compassionate and prosperous nation we know today.”
Today deaf activists, who argue that being deaf is not a disability but a distinguishing mark of separateness, are in the process of creating a Deaf Nation. They resist medical interventions, such as cochlear implants, or attempts to train deaf children to speak (“Oralism,” they say with contempt) and insist that sign language is a fully fledged language in its own right. Capitalizing the D in “Deaf” symbolizes the view that deafness is a culture and not simply the loss of hearing. Scholars give papers and teach courses on Deaf history and publish books with titles such as Deaf Heritage in Canada: A Distinctive, Diverse, and Enduring Culture or Britain’s Deaf Heritage. In 1984, an American professor named Harlan Lane started researching and publishing about the oppression of the deaf in the past. Although he himself can hear, he is learning sign language.
Today, those who count themselves Deaf often wear a blue ribbon because that is what the Nazis made the deaf wear. At aformal blue ribbon ceremony in Australia in 1999, seven Deaf narrators carrying candles spoke of their culture, their history, and their survival as a community. “We remember those Deaf people who were victims of Oralism in their education, denied their sign languages and Deaf teachers.” And, he went on, “we remember the constant attempts either to eliminate us or to prevent us from being born, by not allowing Deaf people to marry each other, through enforced sterilisation.” At a recent Deaf convention in the United Kingdom, Lane told his British audience that speech therapists and hearing-aid manufacturers in the United States have coalesced into a powerful lobby to grind the deaf minority down. Paddy Ladd, an equally impassioned British professor who is himself deaf, praises the nineteenth-century deaf French scholar Ferdinand Berthier, whose attempts to build an international deaf community, Ladd says, were thwarted by oral imperialists. There was an earlier, happier time, even a golden age, so Deaf history has it, when a venerable French priest set up a school for deaf children in the second half of the eighteenth century and understood that they must have their own sign language. Unfortunately, for the Deaf activists, the record shows that he intended signing to be not an end in itself but a stage on the way to teaching his pupils to lip-read and perhaps even speak.
Lost golden ages can be very effective tools for motivating people in the present. “Unity was and is the destiny of Italy,” Giuseppe Mazzini, the great nineteenth-century Italian nationalist, urged the divided peninsula. “The civil primacy, twice exercised by Italy—through the arms of the Caesars and the voice of the Popes—is destined to be held a third time by the people of Italy—the nation.” Mazzini was also a liberal who believed that a world filled by self-governing peoples would be a happy, democratic, and peaceful one, yet there was an ominous tone to his exhortations:“They who were unable forty years ago to perceive the signs of progress towards unity made in the successive periods of Italian life, were simply blind to the light of History. But should any in the face of the actual glorious manifestation of our people, endeavour to lead them back to ideas of confederations, and independent provincial liberty, they would deserve to be branded as traitors to their country.” A great past can be a promise, but it can also be a terrible burden. Mussolini promised the Italians a second Roman Empire and led them to disaster in World War II.
Greek nationalists in the early nineteenth century, and their supporters in Europe, took it for granted that they were freeing the heirs of classical Greek civilization from the Ottoman Empire. Surely
Today deaf activists, who argue that being deaf is not a disability but a distinguishing mark of separateness, are in the process of creating a Deaf Nation. They resist medical interventions, such as cochlear implants, or attempts to train deaf children to speak (“Oralism,” they say with contempt) and insist that sign language is a fully fledged language in its own right. Capitalizing the D in “Deaf” symbolizes the view that deafness is a culture and not simply the loss of hearing. Scholars give papers and teach courses on Deaf history and publish books with titles such as Deaf Heritage in Canada: A Distinctive, Diverse, and Enduring Culture or Britain’s Deaf Heritage. In 1984, an American professor named Harlan Lane started researching and publishing about the oppression of the deaf in the past. Although he himself can hear, he is learning sign language.
Today, those who count themselves Deaf often wear a blue ribbon because that is what the Nazis made the deaf wear. At aformal blue ribbon ceremony in Australia in 1999, seven Deaf narrators carrying candles spoke of their culture, their history, and their survival as a community. “We remember those Deaf people who were victims of Oralism in their education, denied their sign languages and Deaf teachers.” And, he went on, “we remember the constant attempts either to eliminate us or to prevent us from being born, by not allowing Deaf people to marry each other, through enforced sterilisation.” At a recent Deaf convention in the United Kingdom, Lane told his British audience that speech therapists and hearing-aid manufacturers in the United States have coalesced into a powerful lobby to grind the deaf minority down. Paddy Ladd, an equally impassioned British professor who is himself deaf, praises the nineteenth-century deaf French scholar Ferdinand Berthier, whose attempts to build an international deaf community, Ladd says, were thwarted by oral imperialists. There was an earlier, happier time, even a golden age, so Deaf history has it, when a venerable French priest set up a school for deaf children in the second half of the eighteenth century and understood that they must have their own sign language. Unfortunately, for the Deaf activists, the record shows that he intended signing to be not an end in itself but a stage on the way to teaching his pupils to lip-read and perhaps even speak.
Lost golden ages can be very effective tools for motivating people in the present. “Unity was and is the destiny of Italy,” Giuseppe Mazzini, the great nineteenth-century Italian nationalist, urged the divided peninsula. “The civil primacy, twice exercised by Italy—through the arms of the Caesars and the voice of the Popes—is destined to be held a third time by the people of Italy—the nation.” Mazzini was also a liberal who believed that a world filled by self-governing peoples would be a happy, democratic, and peaceful one, yet there was an ominous tone to his exhortations:“They who were unable forty years ago to perceive the signs of progress towards unity made in the successive periods of Italian life, were simply blind to the light of History. But should any in the face of the actual glorious manifestation of our people, endeavour to lead them back to ideas of confederations, and independent provincial liberty, they would deserve to be branded as traitors to their country.” A great past can be a promise, but it can also be a terrible burden. Mussolini promised the Italians a second Roman Empire and led them to disaster in World War II.
Greek nationalists in the early nineteenth century, and their supporters in Europe, took it for granted that they were freeing the heirs of classical Greek civilization from the Ottoman Empire. Surely
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