The way historical events are described influences how they are understood and evaluated. The same facts can evoke different associations depending on the words used, the tone of the statement and the presence of evaluative language. This exercise helps students recognise that language is not a neutral tool of communication, but actively interprets and creates meaning in historical texts.
Objective
The aim of this task is to make students aware of the role of language in constructing historical narratives and to develop their skills in critical text analysis. Students learn to identify emotive and evaluative vocabulary, and then observe how replacing it with neutral expressions affects the reception of the text, its tone and the interpretation of the events described.
Instructions for the student
You will receive a short excerpt from a textbook.
Your task:
- underline evaluative and emotionally charged words;
- replace them with the most neutral terms possible;
- answer the question: what has changed?
- reflect on how the language we use influences the way historical events are understood.
Excerpt from the subsection ‘The Falsification of History’
The United States and the European Union has allocated vast sums to the development of special educational history programmes, so-called ‘textbooks’. No effort or resources were spared to ‘reset our minds’ (this is their professional term) and to convince us of the ‘eternal aggressiveness and colonial nature’ of Russia.
In a resolution adopted in 2019, the European Parliament spoke of the ‘shared responsibility’ of the USSR for the outbreak of the Second World War. The war was allegedly a ‘direct consequence of the infamous non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of 23 August 1939, according to which two totalitarian regimes, which had set themselves the goal of conquering the world, divided Europe into two spheres of influence’.
This is how history is falsified.
Since the 2010s a campaign to dismantle monuments to Soviet soldier-liberators has begun in Eastern European countries. In Poland alone, out of 561 monuments (including those located at soldiers’ cemeteries), only a few dozen remained in mid-2023. Reports of yet another monument being demolished are heard almost daily. In this way, the West ‘fights’ those who are no longer able to defend themselves, that is, the dead.
Dead allies. Those who died for the liberation of these countries, for saving those very Poles whom the Nazis had condemned to exterminate and destroy. Let us remember: 600,000 of our soldiers gave their lives for the freedom of Poland. Today, this corresponds to the entire adult male population of the Smolensk Oblast and Pskov Oblast.