Examples

History

When you're asked to reflect on the nature of history or to draw examples from historical sources to support your arguments, you tend very quickly to point to the Second World War and the atrocities committed by those infamous dictators of the time, especially that very familiar one, Adolf Hitler.

Now, the Germans have pushed themselves through over sixty years of guilt for their recent past, quite rightly many may argue, and only recently has their most important news journal, Der Spiegel, stopped printing articles on the consequences of the last World War. In order to enhance your essays and presentations, however, try to think of other relevant examples to support your historical arguments or counter-arguments.

Take for example, the massacre at the Golden Temple, Amritsar in 1919, where British troops fired on the thousands of people who had gathered to commemorate the start of the Sikh New Year. The scene was filmed dramatically in Sir Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi:

Watching this clip makes you rethink your whole understanding of what terrorism means and the atrocities that are carried out in the struggle to assert so-called 'democracy' upon citizens.

This is not to minimise the impact of the Second World War, but to make ourselves more keenly aware of what is happening (and has happened) under our very noses. So make the most of your freedom and research into this area for yourselves.

Think about what the Russians did to the Afghanistanis; what the North Americans did to the indigenous Indian tribes and what the Australians did to the Aborigines...