By Jerry Riley

I’ve always been fascinated by the history of the Titanic, so when I saw a movie on the History Channel named Nazi Titanic and, intrigued, I watched it.

It had to do with propaganda movies, and propaganda in general. The first thing that hit me was the Nazis planned to rewrite German history, casting the Jews as villains, so Germany’s population would hate them and accept the concentration and death camps.

Some educators, and some government agencies, now want to rewrite the United States history and leave out the Civil War. I suppose because it wasn’t politically correct. Of course it wasn’t! It was a war! If we rewrite history and forget about the holocaust in Germany or the Civil War in the United States, we run the risk of future generations not having our bad examples to learn from, so they may relive the past.

History is the human version of the WOPR in WarGames, the computer that spent all its time thinking about war and fighting the wars in cyber space.

A human, like a computer, can only act on the information it has, or has been given. We know the bad, along with the good, to make informed decisions. People, sometimes have their minds made up, and look only for facts that support their goal, and, yes, what a revoltin’ development this is!

We can NOT allow our desire to look good in the history books overshadow our responsibility to keep history accurate for future generations.

Jerry Riley comments for the News Bulletin. He is a retired telecommunications supervisor.