George Santayana is famous for saying that those who do not learn from hstory are condemned to repeat it. To this must be added that those who have only a minimal, or superficial, knowledge of history are condemned to misunderstand, or worse, to distort it.
A sad example of this can be found on Damian Penny's excellent blog, where he brings Noam Chomsky's false claim that the worst casualty rate of a pogrom was 49. There are more examples of this belief in the Comments section of the post. The reason for this is not malice, but rather ignorance. Most people have heard of the infamous Kishinev pogrom, which indeed had a "relatively" low body count, but which made waves throughout the world. Fewer have heard of the Ukranian pogroms against the Jews in the 17th century (known as Gezerot Tach Ve'Tat among Jews), or the mass slaughter of Jews during the Russian Civil War. The death toll in both was in the tens of thousands at minimum. A good summary of the pogroms can be found here and here. (BTW, Noam Chomsky's pal, Israel Shahak, considers the Ukranian pogroms to be a progressive event. It would be nice to know Chomsky's opinion on the matter.)Let this be a lesson - to truly know history, one must know it in its entirety, not just snippets and slogans.
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