June 30, 2002
Libraries, but books? Fous!
Libraries, but books? Fous!
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| Cold War collection. 29 Juin. |
So I was pleased by how helpful they were to an etudiant etranger at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme. Wrongly. They don't have any books. The only vaguely me-related journal they had was Cognition which is fair enough but geez.
Anyway, they did have the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. In volume 6, I found the entry on Germany. "State that existed until 1945." Long discussions of a string of capitalist crises, monopoly capitalism, "Junker capitalism", and other fine-grained Marxist-historian categories of analysis for pre-war Germany.
Then WW2: "German fascist campaign for world domination". Mentions the UK/French declaration of war in response to Germany's invasion of Poland, but then derides their efforts as "completely unable to help their ally". Does not mention USSR policy at all--except to say that Germany finally broke the non-aggression pact. No mention at all of Soviet complicity with Hitler theretofore (remember Churchill's "Russia is a mystery wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery" or whatever).
Mentions the USA a single time, to say "From 1940, Germany was also at war with the USA." Absolutely no further mention of the US role in WW2, and in the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. Then again, how much do you know about the USSR's role in defeating Germany? You know the US met the USSR in Berlin, but what about how they got there?
I wonder if non-communist history has been much more even-handed than the state-administered variety.
Posted by amol at June 30, 2002 09:00 PM