Abstract: ‘History’ often is a tool for keeping power in the hands of the elite. The controversy over Confederate monuments points up the mendacious national narrative that has been spoon-fed to Americans.
> The historian Carl Becker wrote, “History is what the present chooses to remember about the past.” And as a nation founded on the pillars of genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements, savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist exploitation, we choose to remember very little. This historical amnesia, as James Baldwin never tired of pointing out, is very dangerous. It feeds self-delusion. It severs us from recognition of our propensity for violence. It sees us project on others—almost always the vulnerable—the unacknowledged evil that lies in our past and our hearts. It shuts down the voices of the oppressed, those who can tell us who we are and enable us through self-reflection and self-criticism to become a better people. “History does not merely refer to the past … history is literally present in all we do,” Baldwin wrote.
>It's all only about power structures and oppression Cultural Marxism sure is a hoax friendos
Bentley Lee
Boy I sure do love race-based marxism.
Ryder Clark
I am always horrified when a professional historian makes a public moral judgement about the past in a professional capacity
Cooper Fisher
> Historians are rewarded for buttressing the ruling social structure, producing heavy tomes on the ruling elites—usually powerful white men such as John D. Rockefeller or Theodore Roosevelt—and ignoring the underlying social movements and radicals that have been the true engines of cultural and political change in the United States. Or they retreat into arcane and irrelevant subjects of minor significance, becoming self-appointed specialists of the banal or the trivial. They ignore or minimize inconvenient facts and actions that tarnish the myth, including lethal suppression of groups, classes and civilizations and the plethora of lies told by the ruling elites, the mass media and powerful institutions to justify their grip on power. They eschew transcendental and moral issues, including class conflict, in the name of neutrality and objectivity. The mantra of disinterested scholarship and the obsession with data collection add up, as the historian Howard Zinn wrote, “to the fear that using our intelligence to further our moral ends is somehow improper.”
>Dude, your monuments are monuments to racism because they can only represent one thing, ever, to everyone, and you lack any free will to think about a subject individually and experience things differently from my stereotype of the collective I've applied to you >This isn't ironic at all Yeah the statue controversy is just damnatio memoriae on the part of neo-liberals
Luke Wood
It's true. After they tore down the monument I completely forgot who lost the American Civil War.
Oh wait, no I didn't, because all of that information is still available in textbooks, museums, and online.
John Murphy
>Liberals are so obsessed with themselves and the now that they can't even comprehend what it's like to be not them and what the effect of this will be on generations in the future Oh yes, why have museums when we can just teach kids about history through video games. Why preserve the knowledge and honor of our heritage to preserve the ideals of our civilization with them when I can embrace Huxley's worst nightmare?
Robert Rodriguez
Has there ever been a civilization that wasn't founded upon those things?
Camden Ross
I wouldn't call them civilization, but small amounts of people who never made it past the bronze age used to be fine with homosexuality.
>Fuck white people and fuck white "culture" Is the only logical conclusion
Evan Edwards
>literally tells me that everything I value is founded upon "pillars of genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements, savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist exploitation," >he expects me to take away from this that I should tear down my nation and be a "better person", and not come to the opposite conclusion that all those "bad" things are acually good and should be brought back as policy full force
Luis Morgan
>and not come to the opposite conclusion that all those "bad" things are acually good and should be brought back as policy full forc t. fascist
Cooper Moore
this, but unironically
Cameron Bailey
Literally yes. Civilizations that started and lasted a long time by doing those things and then stop tend to decline and collapse. It doesn't matter how "moral" your society is if it just collapses and either gets replaced by a less moral version of itself or gets conquered by peoples less moral than itself. In any scenario, the immoral policies occur, you just have to decide whether it'll be on your people's terms or someone else's.
Matthew Jones
>moral ends
great! and who gets do define our moral ends? whoever claims they speak for God? the president? or (most likely) people like the speaker who get to be the fountains not only of worldly fact but also good and evil.
Jordan Jackson
I never get this. Why are moral judgements out of place for history? Why can't we point out that certain structures in history or certain individuals had immoral traits?
Daniel Brooks
Because that's a question for religious leaders and philosophers.
Historians dont get to say whose philosophy is right, only what their philosophy was. Privately they could have such feelings about various figures but to put those into their lectures or papers would be unprofessional.
Thomas Martinez
desu don't get this either, especially when, as an example, there were people, groups and movements alive during the same time as G. Washington, or Lincoln who didn't believe that black people were subhuman, who believed in the equality of the sexes / races / etc, people who were supportive of most of the shit we uphold as people in the 21st century.
What's even more annoying is when people get butthurt and don't re-analyze their society and their history. Why is it so hard to accept that maybe Washington is an asshole and all contributions aside, maybe we should put up people who didn't own slaves or thought of black people as subhuman? Or the heroes who didn't weren't anti-democracy at the time? There's many of them, but for some reason we don't really teach shit about them.
I mean shit, we talk about Thomas Paine but only about the little bit he spoke on about in "Common Sense", never touching on the fact that he was legitimately a man of the people compared to the other founding fathers, died penniless, and had proto-Marxist analysis of society in his "Agrarian Justice".
You add on other discrepancies like pretending everyone was TOTALLY supportive of MLK back in the day and he would TOTALLY just be so unsupportive of BLM today, etc, and you realize most people don't give a fuck about history and the state uses it to craft its agenda.
Caleb Flores
People who complain about 'erasing history' almost never have a good grasp on it in the first place
John Davis
>And as a nation founded on the pillars of genocide, slavery, patriarchy, violent repression of popular movements, savage war crimes committed to expand the empire, and capitalist exploitation, we choose to remember very little. Why does this meme persist? There was a time when people were reluctant to acknowledge these things, but now everyone does and it seems like there's nothing liberals love to talk about more.
Carson Evans
I'll just go ahead and repeat myself since you seem to possess limited reading comprehension. All of the information is still available via textbooks, museums, and the internet.
>but muh culture and heritage Yeah none of that's going anywhere, dunno where you get this idea that because a statue was taken down, suddenly all evidence of the past ceases to exist everywhere else.
The statue was offensive, so it was removed. Fucking cry some more you dixieboo.
Brayden Williams
The problem is that we, at our moment in time, have no idea what our own blind spots are. Suppose, as a hypothetical example, that you do something that your children's generation finds meritorious. They build you statues, and you are put in all the history books for the very good things you did. You may also have some buildings or streets named after you. Several hundred years later, convention becomes eating meat is morally unacceptable, to the same degree that we now view the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. So, in the contemporary moral outrage, all of your statues are destroyed, your mention removed from any public space, and your reputation reduced to a flippant "well, you know he was an animal abuser", all over something that was insanely common and literally no big deal in your time, just as racism and racialized slavery were from the Enlightenment onwards. Even if you didn't eat meat, some might suggest that you were silent in the face of -- or benefited from -- the systemic cruelty to animals" or something like that. Now, you might be tempted to say that this is all part of the great march of moral progress. In the future we will be wiser, and we will have the knowledge and context to make such judgments, just as we now do with slavery and racism. The problem is that there is no good reason outside of Christian humanism to believe in such a thing as moral progress. Technological progress, sure. But moral progress? Not really. Slavery remains a massive, thriving institution today -- mostly in the form of young women and girls taken as sex slaves. Racism and racialism are still alive and well. The recent Pinker book on the decline in violence and war has been dismissed by many statisticians. We're still the same creatures we were 200, 2000 years ago. John Gray is a great source on the myth of progress.
Robert Young
frankly I don't see why we should do that to traitors like Lee or NBF. they should not be remembered as heroes for betraying their country in a half assed manner.
the statues should be taken down and redesigned to show them as older men, twisted/crippled with age, when many were attempting to reconcile.
