Khrushchev fabrication

[Alina Israeli]

>My point is not that Khrushchev did or didn't pound his shoe, but where
>the image that we all "remember" of Khrushchev pounding his shoe came
>from.  I believe that it was nothing more than some footage of Khrushchev
>delivering a vigourous speech and that we all just assumed that this was
>film the shoe pounding incident.
>
>Now this whole thing should be fairly easy to resolve.  If someone can
>produce footage of Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the UN, I'll go away.



There are many things so outrageous that unless they happen no one
could have invented them. That is why some people deny they ever
happened or existed, be it in their own lives or in world history.
There is a movement called by their opponents "Holocaust denial",
"denial" is also a term used in (popular) psychology. Please note,
they deny the bad events they cannot face up, never the good ones.

Ask yourself: Do we have any other "outrageous fabrications" about
leaders of other countires? Is there a precedent? If it were a
fabrication, whom would it serve? The shoe story pales compared to
some outrageous behavior described by Khrushchev himself. And those
outrageous things were not done in the privacy of his dacha but at
foreign residences of his hosts. If those stories became public they
would have been much more damaging (and probably no one would have
believed them anyway, but we have his own word).

True, there are some non-dying myths, but they are usually on the
positive side, like the one about the King of Denmark who wore the
yellow star under the occupation. (Boris Xazanov wrote a very
touching "povest'" on the subject.) Those are born out of human
desire to believe in humanity, to find something positive. "Holocaust
denials" are actually their brothers, they don't want to believe in
bad things even when you do show them the footage.

If I told you something unbelievably good about Khrushchev, would you
believe me or ask for a footage or hand-written testimony? I tend to
think that you would have believed me. And why would that be? Isn't
there a positive-color filter (inside the pupil of your eye) that
filters out the bad stuff and keeps the good?

What's good for your friends is not necessarily good for history.
--
__________
Alina Israeli
LFS, American University
4400 Mass. Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20016

phone:  (202) 885-2387
fax:    (202) 885-1076

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