A Plea to the Center - Learn from History

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So we got it parallel threads on history and the left and history and the right.

The point is -

NOT gripe about history and how my Angle ancestors kicked my Breton ancestors out of Britain and my Norman ancestors enslaved them and THEIR descendants tyrannized my Irish ancestors and then my Puritan ancestors had to flee to North America where my ancestor Roger SWilliams had to leave town and my Yankee ancestors warred with my rebel ancestors - Gott im Himmel, where does it end?

NOR forget history and maybe there was a Revolutionary war and a civil war and a couple world wars and Muslims invading Spain and France and getting into Poland but we are all friebdsa now and should play sweetly and forget all those unpleasant owies.

BUT - LOOK at history and SEE what happened and just MAYBE learn someting and not repeat.

We do not need Did not - Did so - we need son;t let it happen again.

And when it's rewritten according to the political correctness or justification of the day? How do we learn when there are elements, whether left or right, who won't see the truth of what happened, only how it will affect them if one small element were altered. Say, if Elizabeth Gaskell were nothing more than stood-over wife who wrote when her husband, to whom she lovingly bore nine children, wasn't watching. Feminist orthodoxy in literature which changes the landscape in which Gaskell, and by extension Austen, who never married or had a lover, and Eliot, who did marry and lived in sin for twenty-five years with the man she loved but who couldn't obtain divorce from his wife, all wrote and clouds our judgement of what life was really like.

The Left will grandstand on our modernity, but will never accept that life in the 19th and 18th centuries was much as it is now. All that's changed is electricity and mass transit. Women could still obtain abortions with no questions asked. In many instances, they were encouraged to do so. But this was an oppression then. Now its a celebrated certainty. When throughout history, it has been nothing more than one man or woman's interpretation as juxtaposed against another.

What is history? This is the question being lost lately. It's more, how can a manipulate history to suit the current climate?

Rightly or wrongly, and this has been exploited by every leader at one stage or another during their reign, examples from history make it easier for people to swallow change. Like Climate Change, which isn't happening, and if it is, then it is only normalising after an Ice Age that ended only ten thousand years ago. Climate Epochs, look to history, last millions of years. But the Left look to history and what happened last year. Because last year was incrementally cooler than this year, look, warming, destory industries.

No.

There will never be a reconciliation of this point, I don't think.

Keep fighting, though. I wonder where this thread will venture...

PJW, I share your distaste for historical revisionism. But you seem to think the left is alone in this. Is that really a fair attitude? I don't even identify revisionism as particularly favoring left or right wing but is just part of politics, and politics is an entirely distasteful activity. People who engage in revisionism are not taken seriously by the historical community. Unfortunately I guess the general populace often falls for this, but I could point out the inaccurate and potentially harmful portrayal that the rightist Tea Party is making of the founding fathers of the United States. It's all garbage, the best thing one can do is just ignore it and do their own investigations

True. Very true.

My point, however, is when it applies to literature, literature, is that to a feminist Austen is nothing, Gaskell is a husband-server, and Eliot is the queen of womanhood. Here's the thing. Austen was independent, Gaskell knew she would write but had other things to do with her life before her writing, and Eliot, well, for her liberal education, she was the most conservative of the three. If you take literature above politics, which I do, then you have to assume that somewhere here, something was misrepresented. Gaskell was the most progressive, followed by Austen, with Eliot taking up the rear. Why do feminists see it the other way round?

Besides, when people are faced with the prospect of the purported, by both Left and Right I will admit, intellectual grind and esoteric nature of self-education, why would they do it when all they have to do is choose Right teat or Left teat and suckle for their whole live's worth?

Such is why communism is so enticing...

(No reflection on the Left, just a truism)

So maybe - just maybe - we should STOP rewriting it?

Yes, yes., I know.

I am JUST as pessimistic about the ability of the race as a whole to see sense and make sense and walk straight as anybody.

I KNOW that left or right, King in his purple or ephor in his ephod WILL apply Big Brother's revisionism for their own slimy ends.

But one can keep trying to speak truth to power, one does not need to buy into this one's myth or that one's manifesto.

There are positive and negative uses of the word SHOULD, like every other trans-positional word, I suppose.

The fact is, for all your positive use of the word should, someone will come along and pervert it for you, using should in a negatory aspect just to spite you.

Maybe this is all it is? Maybe it's just spite?

Political discord is nothing new. Political disharmony, however, we seem to be raising to an art form. This is what's dangerous. The problem is, however, the more conservative even Leftist politics becomes, the more liberal the humanities in universities become as a counter-balance. Which, given how liberal Australia's conservative Prime Ministers, with the exception of Howard, now look, means the humanities have lurched violently to the Left.

Where does it end when teachers make their students think what the teachers BELIEVE. Find a way to remove the belief systems of the philosophical persuasion of teaching history, and you will have found the solution. If you can, I will stand right behind you.

Until then, I guess we waste characters writing sermonising epistolary missives to one another...

I think its best if the Human race leaves the collective guilt of history to us historians It doesn't help to bring up the baggage every nation has. Its better if we just carry it together

Historiography is so open to abuse. One only has to look at the Flemish ports and World War 1 to see just how one small thing can make or break responsibility for a world war. I have seen the same fight take place over the Baghdad railway, the High Seas Fleet. So the battle over history is important to anyone with an interest.

As to learning from history, sometimes I am glad when people don't. I am glad for instance that Napoleon and Hitler never learned a thing from Charles XII of Sweeden. I am also glad that the Crown forces in the War of Independence never learned anything about united command and control, from all the other people who never did and were defeated.

PJW is correct, one day we may wake to find our ancestors universally condemned by history, I think this is unjust considering their many achievements. This does not mean I want them all canonized but when lefties start emphasizing the racist attitudes of western soldiers in the Pacific War, I think they fundamentally undermine our efforts to get the Japanese to realize just how badly behaved they really were.

91 -

That too. It is quite true that often those who DO look at history pick out the wrong things.

And that is another notation in the books in the throne room.

I remain that most pitiable of critters, the pessimistic idealist.

But then must not the heaven-yearning Christian march on whatever the odds look like before the boss opens our eyes?

I think what people are looking for are those golden nuggets, the meaningful moments in history that give a magic answer to now, and while they are realistically there in certain places, it often seems much more expedient for politicians to forge them. Its like the general public's attitude to science, most people could never stomach testing thousands of analogs of some chemical against another in solution or staring at a certain type of crystallization process under the microscope for years because they don't have that special interest but also don't have the other magic ingredient - a pay check. Hence, the 'Eureka!' moment of seemingly otherworldy polymers or semiconductor trains, etc. are what the general public live for, they live for the great revelations but could never find the time or desire to engage the tedium - they'd have to be doctors, musicians, moms, dads, little league coaches, AND full time historians and fact checkers. That's what makes it all so vile - people place trust in certain figures because they literally can't do the research without putting their lives on hold, there's just too much. That's the most frustrating thing about demogoguing - it'll happen from both sides and rather than the decision being based on good facts the argument gets buried under at least a mile of sedimentary BS to the point where they're almost forces to take a faith stance, ie. faith in the opinion of someone they agree with perhaps who they consider better informed than themselves, rather than having the resources to check it out.

Very true. I have a vested interest in knowing about history and I have few strong feelings in any direction. I find generalizations of history very frustrating. I think unfortunately, the person stating the information is often more important than what that information is. Thus we have all of this punditry going on. Perhaps I am alone in the opinion that the top executive should not be a part of any political party. The office of president was basically created with George Washington in mind, and he was almost universally admired for his impartiality and distaste for office. Not many Presidents have been that way since that time period... Though I am sure someone is going to argue with my interpretation

Well, you will get no argument there from me. Hear hear.

The more so now we seem to have moved to a phase where the Powers expect the president to be half mall-opening and campaigning constitutional monarch a la Madame la Reine and half puppet reading their agenda on TV. When they get someone like Mynheer Obama who will not stick to those roles, it gets fraught.

I fear and despise the Deconstructionists, but the practical use of history all too often behaves as they describe.

So perhaps part of the solution is for all of us to remember that an understanding of history should never be drawn from a single source. History is a human thing and people and states act for human reasons. It follows that what we view as naked and inexcusable agression, our aggressors view as a legitimate response to provocation.

Why do "lefties" focus on, say, the racism of troops during the Pacific War? Perhaps because earlier texts chose to omit that. There will, no doubt, be a reaction from the other side, which might characterize the racism of troops as isolated, justified or incidental to the conduct of the war. Research will continue, and interpretations of events will continue. It is our job, as consumers of these writings, to synthesize them into an understanding, rather than taking any of them as authoritative.