{"id":16802,"date":"2024-09-10T12:15:47","date_gmt":"2024-09-10T11:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=16802"},"modified":"2024-09-10T12:15:47","modified_gmt":"2024-09-10T11:15:47","slug":"substituting-memory-for-history-in-the-misinformation-age","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2024\/09\/10\/substituting-memory-for-history-in-the-misinformation-age\/","title":{"rendered":"Substituting Memory for History in the (Mis)information Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
\n<\/em>James Joyce, in \u2018Nestor\u2019, from Ulysses<\/em> (1922)<\/span><\/p>\n

If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.<\/em>\u2019
\nJoseph Brodsky, in \u2018Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary\u2019, from Less Than One: Selected Essays<\/em> (1986)<\/p>\n

One of the more contentious trends in contemporary historiography, and philosophy of history, is the weird juxtaposing of memory and history, with the latter being privileged (perhaps unsurprisingly, by professional historians) as somehow superior, or more objective. This is evident, for example, in the work of Roy Foster (e.g. \u2018Sorry is not enough\u2019, London Independent<\/em>, 17\/07\/1999), and of David Reiff (\u2018The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good\u2019, The Guardian<\/em>, 02\/03\/2016). This tendency may have partly originated in a reaction against the work of French historian Pierre Nora, who, in his efforts to define what constitutes a \u2018true\u2019 history, instigated this opposition between history and memory. Because outright political agitation and national imperatives dominate readings of history, he argued (see Realms of Memory<\/em> (1996\/1998), therefore there is no objective truth to be found there. However, he went further, adopting the nihilistic perspective that because memory, although preferable, is also selective, there is, effectively, no such thing as a recoverable past. In his somewhat opaque attempt to reconcile Marxist dialectics with an underpinning theology, \u2018Theses on the Philosophy of History\u2019 (1940), Walter Benjamin took a more measured, if equally audacious approach. In Thesis VI he wrote:<\/p>\n

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it <\/em>the way it really was\u2019 (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory <\/em>as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes <\/em>to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man<\/em> singled out by history at a moment of danger.<\/em><\/p>\n

But how <\/em>exactly has memory come to be viewed as the poor relation of history? For what else is history, ultimately, but the product of memory? Or, at the very least, a consequence of the urge to memorialise? If only because Memory (Mnemosyne) is the mother of History (Clio), as she is of all the muses.<\/p>\n

This shift in status is compounded by the current fearmongering panic and paranoia about the threat to humanity and the humanities by the dreaded Artificial Intelligence. While AI is NOT nothing to worry about, it should be remembered that narratives of conflict in contested spaces have always been distorted by misinformation: it is known as \u2018the fog of war\u2019 or, more commonly, \u2018propaganda\u2019. All that has improved (or disimproved, because of the uses to which it is put) is the technology. As the great Irish essayist Hubert Butler wrote in \u2018The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue\u2019:<\/p>\n

Speed of communication has increased, and we are expected to have strong<\/em> feelings about an infinite series of remote events. But our powers of understanding <\/em>and sympathy have not correspondingly increased. In an atmosphere of artificially <\/em>heated emotionalism truth simply dissolves into expediency.<\/em><\/p>\n

That was in 1956. It was ever thus. Whatever the contemporary concerns about manipulation by A.I., data harvesting, algorithms and bots, it seems to me that digitally native under-30s are more than capable of dealing with the vagaries of the media with which they have grown up and are therefore adept at handling because of easy familiarity. When it comes to being duped online, the kids are savvy enough. It is the supposed adults in the room you have to fear for and keep an eye on.<\/p>\n

Perplexity as to the status of historiography as a somehow tainted literary representation or a scientific unbiased recounting is nothing new, with E. H. Carr\u2019s What Is History?<\/em> (1961) provoking fierce responses like that of Geoffrey Elton\u2019s The Practice of History <\/em>(1967), because of Carr\u2019s relativism and his rejection of contingency as an important factor in historical analysis; that is, his almost proto-Baudrillardian notion of history as a partisan pursuit, a simulacrum written by the winners, or at least by those whose relative perspectives are skewed by vested interests or their own agendas. Elton, on the other hand, was a strong defender of traditional modi operandi<\/em> and was appalled by postmodernism and multi-narrative histories, seeing the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analysing it.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Thucydides Mosaic from Jerash, Jordan, Roman, 3rd century AD at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Herodotus vis-\u00e0-vis Thucydides<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Carr\/Elton debate can be seen as a more recent reenactment of a controversy which has reoccurred throughout (as it were) history, for example in relation to perceptions surrounding the virtues and drawbacks of Herodotus vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> Thucydides as historians of Ancient Greece, or of Suetonius in contrast to Tacitus of Ancient Rome, the methodology espoused by each echoing the practice of their predecessors. Thucydides and Tacitus may be more analytical and less anecdotal than Herodotus and Suetonius, but their histories are still based on interviews with participants and eye witnesses, and then drawing their own conclusions. How do we know if these interviewees were telling the truth, or if their memories were accurate or faulty? They could be deliberately lying, or accidentally misremembering. Plus, these informants are rarely named. Then there is the question of how much bias effects the reliability of Herodotus\u2019 Histories<\/em> and Tacitus\u2019 Annals of Imperial Rome<\/em>, given their respective Athenian and Roman sympathies, which they freely admit. Herodotus may have been accorded the accolade the \u2018Father of History\u2019 by Cicero, but at least as early as Plutarch\u2019s pamphlet On The Malignity of Herodotus<\/em>, he has also been known as the \u2018Father of Lies\u2019. When introducing his English translation of the Annals<\/em>, Michael Grant even refers to Tacitus\u2019 \u2018mask of austere impartiality\u2019. Meanwhile, much of Plutarch is pure entertaining hearsay. Furthermore, it is worth remembering that the Greek word \u0399\u03c3\u03c4\u03bf\u03c1\u03af\u03b1<\/em> (historia), from which our own specialised meaning is derived, meant \u2018research\u2019 or \u2018inquiry\u2019, rather than the definitive account, and is how Herodotus\u2019 titled his work.<\/p>\n

So, while from an early twenty-first century perspective, Herodotus may seem more like a chronicler rather than an analyser, it is important to remember history\u2019s origins in storytelling, and the influence of Homer\u2019s Iliad<\/em> and Odyssey \u2013<\/em> the stories from both of which were recited orally long before they were ever written down \u2013 on Herodotus\u2019 mindset and methodology. Indeed, in an echo of those tales told around a campfire, which rhymed to facilitate ease of memorisation, it is believed that Herodotus would have given public readings from his Histories<\/em> in Athens. For this reason, we may find it more understandable that he is nebulous about the differences between tradition and history, and that he did not always realise that eye witness accounts of the same event can vary. If literature is what is written, and Herodotus was writing history, we should not forget the debt both literature and history owe to the oral tradition.<\/p>\n

Of course, professional historians will argue that historiography has come a long way since antiquity, especially through the use of documentary evidence \u2013 inscriptions, manuscripts, treaties, newspaper and (latterly) television and radio reports, court records, archival material and archaeological discoveries, etc. But all of these (un)reliable sources are, finally, human products and personal artifacts, and thus subject to the fallibility of the species \u2013 certainly in their interpretation if not equally so in their inception. Just because something is written down does not make it true, or even representative. What pressures were being exerted on those doing the writing and signing, and what did they stand to lose or gain by their acts of scrivening \u2013 their Oaths of Allegiance and their Declarations of War? How far can we even rely on those who observed them, or who claim to have done so? Indeed, overreliance on these constituent parts privileges literacy over the oral tradition, one which Herodotus (influenced as he was by the Homeric epics) came out of and which historians have always relied upon \u2013 however unreliable it, in turn, may be, based as it is on folk memory. To favour the written over the spoken word does a great disservice to so-called \u2018ordinary\u2019 people, and smacks of a \u2018made by great men\u2019 approach to historiography. In this prejudice originates the elevation of History over Memory.<\/p>\n

\"\"
History Faculty building on the Sidgewick Site of the University of Cambridge.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Worthwhile Academic Pursuit<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

None of the foregoing is intended to denigrate the study of History as a worthwhile academic pursuit. But one has only to trace the history of nationalist, revisionist and counter-revisionist narratives of past events on our own island over the preceding century or so to glean an inkling of the fluctuations of fashion in how history is done and disseminated, and to be aware that all readings of history, whatever the original sources or new evidence which come to light, are necessarily provisional. Plays by Brian Friel like Translations<\/em> and Making History <\/em>engage with how this history has been made, and remade. The presentation of the past, whether in memory or history (or historical memory), and the relation of both forms of presentation to the ideal of an unmediated past \u2013 that is, to an account of the past not distorted by the medium in which it is presented \u2013 is illusory. In this regard, every form of (re)presenting the past is a construction and an attempt to pass on something that is already forever lost.<\/p>\n

The concept of historiography as representation, which can easily shade into fiction, while being presented as factual truth, has correlatives in our own time. Herodotus\u2019 treatment of the Persian invasions under Darius and Xerxes implies an underlying conflict between the absolutism of the East and the allegedly free institutions of the West, between Persian monarchy and Athenian democracy. The fact that we have no Persian record of the Persian Wars is down to the fact that Persia was an oral culture, and their version has been lost in the mists of time. In this case, written words would have proven useful. Herodotus\u2019 contention that democracy was the cornerstone of Athenian superiority, and his praise of it as responsible for Athens\u2019 pre-eminent position, might make us mindful of the justifications invoked for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and Britain. While bringing the benefits of democracy and freedom to a former dictatorship was the general goal of the invasion, the proximate goad was the supposed presence of weapons of mass destruction within the jurisdiction of that regime, a piece of \u2018intelligence\u2019 which was subsequently exposed as a faulty, if enabling, fiction. However, that the reason for going to war ultimately proved to be another instance of imaginative invention, every bit as much a representation (or spin) as elements of Herodotus\u2019 Histories<\/em>, did not bother the advocates of that invasion unduly after it was discovered, evidence that people are still as enthralled by mythic embroidery masquerading as objective fact as they ever were.<\/p>\n

To be sure, in Herodotus\u2019 day it was the Persian Empire which was the aggressor, looking to colonise Greece, and the united city-states, including Athens, were merely defending themselves. The notable difference in our day is that it is the democrats who are doing the invading, with the sanctioning intention of toppling an absolute ruler, or eradicating terrorism. Again, how often today do we hear the sound bite, employed not only in defence of Israel\u2019s right to defend itself, but also in support of its continued existence, that it is \u2018the only democracy in the region\u2019? Without too much of a stretch, it could be argued that Herodotus was indulging in an early version of what Edward Said subsequently termed, in the title of his masterly book which almost single-handedly founded postcolonial studies, Orientalism<\/em> (1978). Having initiated the debate, Said developed it further in Culture and Imperialism<\/em> (1993), sensitising the average western reader to this strange and sinister colonialism of culture. Sadly, these tropes will not cease, for obscurantism is not the sole prerogative of any epoch, or political grouping.<\/p>\n

Said\u2019s originality was evident in the way he defined the subject of his book.\u00a0 Orientalism is, first, an academic specialisation: a topic studied by archaeologists, historians, theologians and others in the West who are concerned with Middle Eastern and North African cultures. But Said added two further meanings to the term. Orientalism is also something more general, something that has shaped Western thought since the Greeks: namely, a way of dividing up the world between the West and the East. What appears to be a simple geographical fact is, says Said, actually an idea. The division of the world into these two parts is not a natural state of affairs, but an intellectual choice made by the West in order to define itself. The third meaning for Orientalism is more historically specific. Since the latter part of the eighteenth century, when European colonialism in the Middle East developed most fully, Orientalism has been a means of domination, a part of the colonial enterprise. Said argues that colonialism is not only about the physical acts of taking land, or of subjugating people, but is also about intellectual acts. The academic study of the Orient is unthinkable outside its colonial context and vice versa. So, rather than just an innocent scholarly topic, Orientalism is a general way of imagining the world\u2019s divisions and a specific mechanism for furthering the colonial quest.<\/p>\n

Following Foucault, Said describes the Orient as a product of discourse; that is, not as something in the world that is discovered and analysed, but as something created by Western institutions and ideas. The definition of the Orient is a means of regulating it; the apparent truths discovered are in fact ideas circulated and accepted as part of Western colonial activity in the Middle East. The sense of the Orient as a discursive construct, in turn, enables Said to make one of his most important and striking arguments: what the West believed it had discovered about the East tells us little about the colonised cultures, but much about the coloniser\u2019s. The texts and disciplines that comprise Orientalism \u2013 historical narratives like that of Herodotus, analyses of religion, travel writing, etc \u2013 reveal the values and preconceptions of the West, of the way people in Washington or Paris or London, or indeed fifth century Athens, wanted to see themselves, their fears and ambitions and prejudices. In particular, the image created of the East is used as a means of constructing one\u2019s own identity. The picture of the East functions as a distorting mirror image, enabling the West to say that whatever they<\/em> are, we<\/em> are not. This emphasises the way in which a duality, often referred to as a dyad, is set up: West and East, us and them.<\/p>\n

In spite of the growing influence of Asian nations and the recent \u2018Easternisation\u2019 of international politics and trade, such exclusively Western- or Euro-centric readings still predominate our understanding of global history. This is a mindset which has been challenged, in what can be seen as a continuation of the Orientalism project, by Peter Frankopan, in his The Silk Roads: A New History of the World<\/em> (2015), and The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World<\/em> (2018). One would do well also to have a look at Palestinian-American Rashid Khalidi\u2019s books Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness<\/em> (1997) and The Hundred Years\u2019 War on Palestine<\/em> (2017), in which he depicts Israel as a settler-colonial state, and argues that the modern history of Palestine can best be understood as \u2018a colonial war against the indigenous population\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Bakhmut_during_the_battle_(2023-04-05).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Proxy Wars<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Both of the ongoing international conflicts which dominate the news cycle in these times, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Israeli-Hamas hostilities, are in truth complex proxy wars. Appeasement, or its more recent first cousin, conflict management, does not work. As Professor Yossi Mekelberg, of the venerable Chatham House Think Tank, has written:<\/p>\n

One conclusion from the collapse of the status quo between Israel and the <\/em>Palestinians is that conflict management is a fallacy that has failed time and again. <\/em>As a long-term instrument it at best buys time until the next round of violence begins. <\/em>More than 75 years of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians have seen <\/em>periodic outbreaks of hostilities and periodic efforts to bring peace based on a <\/em>two-state solution. For most of this time the focus has been on managing the conflict. <\/em>This exposes a lack of belief that a peace agreement laying to rest the differences <\/em>between the two peoples can be reached. It also shows that the international collective <\/em>security mechanism set up after the Second World War has failed in its mission to <\/em>peacefully settle conflicts.<\/em>This conflict does not need management, it needs its root causes to be addressed.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Northern Ireland Peace Process, which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (\u2018Sunningdale for slow learners\u2019), provides some hope that reconciliation is possible in \u2018lost cause\u2019 situations, even if underlying tensions still persist. At least it put an end to what were euphemistically termed \u2018The Troubles\u2019, with their violence and loss of life. A United Ireland will happen sooner or later, and it will be an economic problem, much as the reunification of Germany was: Britain does not want to continue footing the bill for the statelet, and the Republic of Ireland is charry of taking it on. Meanwhile, most of those resident in the territory \u2013 from whatever side of the Unionist\/Nationalist sectarian divide \u2013 are more preoccupied about having to pay for G.P. visits and prescriptions, should they find themselves in a New Republic.<\/p>\n

The Russian\/Ukrainian stalemate might be resolved if Putinistas were to be purged of their nostalgia for the Russian Empire and the former reach of the U.S.S.R., and had their fears over N.A.T.O. encroachment addressed; and if Zelenskyyites were not so ardent in their pursuit of N.A.T.O. membership. The Russian invasion was not, as is routinely heard in Western governmental and media discourse, entirely \u2018unprovoked\u2019. As Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs of Colombia University has written<\/a><\/span>:<\/p>\n

A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with <\/em>Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism <\/em>and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely <\/em>opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would <\/em>likely have been effective. [\u2026] The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations<\/em> based on Ukraine\u2019s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement.<\/em><\/p>\n

As for the seemingly intractable Israeli\/Palestinian conflict, with its attendant apartheid, ethnic-cleansing and genocide on the part of the more powerful and well-resourced combatant: if Israel were suddenly left to fend for itself, without being massively underwritten by the U.S. and the E.U., it would soon have to start behaving itself, and acting in a civilised manner with its neighbours \u2013 just as a reduction in Iranian (bankrolled by Russia), Qatari and Yemeni support for Hamas would greatly alleviate tensions in the zone. Alas, this is not going to happen, given the North American imperative for a strategic foothold in the region and Zionist funding of their politicians through AIPAC, coupled with German Holocaust guilt, and the onus on oppositional sympathisers to provide some sort of counterforce. The only difference between the I.D.F.\u2019s war crimes and those of Hamas is that the latter lacks the technology to do as much extensive damage, because the former enjoys such disproportionately huge investment, and impunity.<\/p>\n

History makes no mistakes because it has no purpose \u2013 that much Hubert Butler <\/em>must have known by that time (1930s and 40s) if only because at Oxford he read <\/em>the Greek and Roman classics. In any case, the dishonesty, self-deception and <\/em>self-aggrandizement of those evoking history to pull the trigger didn\u2019t escape him, <\/em>not did their utter humanness. His knowledge of Russian\u2026and of Serbo-Croatian,<\/em>not to mention his French and his German, helped him along the line, no doubt, <\/em>enormously. The detection of humanness in those whose words and deeds obscure <\/em>it is, however, his own feat. On the other hand, this must have been easier for him, <\/em>an Irishman, since schizophrenic uncertainty is humanness\u2019 integral part. <\/em><\/p>\n

So wrote the great Nobel Prize-winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in \u2018On Hubert Butler\u2019 (1994). In what could be read as a corrective to the notion of this blind, ahistorical history, he also gave this insight in his essay on the work of the great Greek pre-Modernist poet, Constantine Cavafy, \u2018Pendulum\u2019s Song\u2019 (1975): \u2018The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory that makes Cavafy so distinctive.\u2019 However, if the school principal in the \u2018Nestor\u2019 episode of Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>, Mr. Deasy, is blatantly antisemitic in his exchanges with Stephen Dedalus, Brodsky, in another essay, \u2018Flight from Byzantium\u2019 (1985), is patently Islamophobic, displaying a smug ignorance and revulsion of \u2018the East\u2019. Indeed, so vitriolic is his repugnance, it is tempting to speculate that he is intentionally verging into parody:<\/p>\n

The delirium and horror of the East.\u00a0 The dusty catastrophe of Asia.<\/em> Green only on the banner of the Prophet.\u00a0 Nothing grows here except<\/em> moustaches. A black-eyed, overgrown-with-stubble-before-supper<\/em>\u00a0part of the world.\u00a0 Bonfire embers doused with urine.\u00a0 That smell!<\/em> A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped <\/em>around loins like another turban.\u00a0 Racism?\u00a0 But isn\u2019t it only a form <\/em>of misanthropy?\u00a0 And that ubiquitous grit flying in your muzzle even in <\/em>the city, poking the world out of your eyes \u2013 and yet one feels grateful <\/em>even for that.\u00a0 Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the colour <\/em>of an upturned grave.\u00a0 Ah, all that nearsighted scum \u2013 Corbusier, Mondrian, <\/em>Gropius \u2013 who mutilated the world more effectively than any Luftwaffe!<\/em> Snobbery?\u00a0 But it\u2019s only a form of despair.\u00a0 The local population in a state <\/em>of total stupor whirling its time away in squalid snack bars, tilting its heads <\/em>as in a namaz in reverse toward the television screen, where somebody <\/em>is permanently beating somebody else up.\u00a0 Or else they\u2019re dealing out <\/em>cards, whose jacks and nines are the sole accessible abstractions, the single <\/em>means of concentration.\u00a0 Misanthropy?\u00a0 Despair?\u00a0 Yet what else could <\/em>be expected from one who has outlived the apotheosis of the linear principle? <\/em>From a man who has nowhere to go back to?\u00a0 From a great turdologist,<\/em>\u00a0sacrophage, and the possible author of Sadomachia? <\/em><\/p>\n

Brodsky even goes on to argue that: \u2018By divorcing Byzantium, Western Christianity consigned the East to non-existence, and thus reduced its own notion of human negative potential to a considerable, perhaps even a perilous, degree.\u2019 He also implies that: \u2018\u2026the anti-individualistic notion that human life is essentially nothing \u2013 i.e., the absence of the idea that human life is sacred, if only because each life is unique\u2019, originates in the East, and that Western Christianity\u2019s neglecting the experience supplied by Byzantium is the reason why college campus killers are classed as mentally ill, and presumably suicide bombers are labelled religious fanatics, as opposed to just plain evil. If supposedly enlightened classical humanists can harbour such sentiments, what hope can there be for reconciliation and mutual understanding?<\/p>\n

Interestingly, in \u2018A Man Must Not Be Too Moslem\u2019 (1953), Paul Bowles (while admittedly, no friend of Said – See Hisham Aidi, \u2018So Why Did I Defend Paul Bowles?\u2019, New York Review of Books<\/em>, 20\/12\/2019) took entirely the opposite tack, and was so prescient that the ideas contained therein could have been ripped from today\u2019s headlines. He wrote:<\/p>\n

Rationalizing words like \u2018progress\u2019, \u2018modernization\u2019, or \u2018democracy\u2019\u00a0<\/em> mean nothing because, even if they are used sincerely, the imposition <\/em>of such concepts by force from above cancels whatever value they <\/em>otherwise have. There is little doubt that by having been made indifferent <\/em> Moslems, the younger generation in Turkey has become more like our idea <\/em>of what people living in the 20th century should be. The old helplessness <\/em>in the face of mektoub (it is written) is gone, and in its place is a passionate <\/em>belief in man\u2019s ability to alter his destiny. That is the greatest step of all; <\/em>once it has been made, anything, unfortunately, can happen.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt (‘Forcibly pulled out of bunkers’)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Victims of Oppression go on to Oppress<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

It can be argued that what Israel is doing in Gaza, and has done to the countries which surround it since its foundation, partakes of the classic pattern of abusive behaviour, on a national rather than an individual level. \u2018Those to whom evil is done\/Do evil in return\u2019 as W. H. Auden had it in \u2018September 1, 1939\u2019. It is not unheard of that victims of oppression go on to oppress even more. The Jewish people, who were victims of a genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during the Second World War, are now themselves perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinian people. Perhaps Brodsky\u2019s Jewish ancestry accounts for his self-advertised blindspot: he was merely conforming to stereotype. But the Children of Gaza by now far outnumber Butler\u2019s \u2018The Children of Drancy\u2019 (1968\/78) \u2013 with the added developmental difference that now the whole world is watching their slaughter. Yet the majority of Western leaders persist in standing staunchly by Israel and its policies, paying mere lip service to popular calls for a ceasefire while continuing to supply the weapons used for the razing of Gaza and the annihilation of its people. The last thing our planet needs in this day and age is the continued endorsement and maintenance of yet another theocratic ethno-state. We in Ireland should know this all too well. George Santayana\u2019s famous aphorism is usually misquoted as \u2018Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it\u2019, but in its original form read, \u2018Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.\u2019 Unfortunately, no one learns any lessons from history, and remembers only what suits them, which is why it constantly repeats itself \u2013 first as tragedy and then as farce.<\/p>\n

Bad things undoubtedly follow when any ethnic or national or religious grouping (often a toxic concoction of all three) claim to have all the answers, and so start getting notions that they are The Master Race, or The Chosen People, or undertake Crusades against the Heathen or Jihad against the Infidel, or any convenient Evil Other. Note that I include here such secular religions as Fascism and Communism, which too frequently manifest as latter-day utopian belief systems which can be used to sponsor mass murder.<\/p>\n

All wars are, at root, economic. The geopolitical importance, the religion and the patriotism, the toppling of tyrants and establishing of democracy, are just the attendant window dressing. (Doubtless, all those anti-materialists who would prefer to forget, or only remember in an approved way, will here dismiss my arguments with the classic cheap insult of \u2018vulgar Marxist\u2019 \u2013 incidentally, a phrase Foster has appropriated from Benjamin\u2019s Theses<\/em>, although used there in an entirely different context. Apparently, there exist kosher, refined Marxists, and objectionable, vulgar Marxists. Thus, E. P. Thompson is deemed acceptable within the academy, despite the fact that he expressed sentiments such as, \u2018so great has been the reaction in our time against Whig or Marxist interpretations of history, that some scholars have propagated a ridiculous reversal of historical roles: the persecuted are seen as forerunners of oppression, and the oppressors as victims of persecution\u2019 (from The Making of the English Working Class<\/em> (Penguin, 1978).) Yet all wars also end eventually, if only for longer or shorter periods, either through disengagement, conquest, de facto surrender, formal surrender or negotiated peace agreement. The means of disseminating misinformation may be more covert, efficient and persuasive, but what does not change is human nature. The apportioning of blame, who has right (or God) on their side, is in most conflicts a question of \u2018How far back would you like to go?\u2019 (which is, in turn, a slightly more grown-up rendering of the childish playground staple, \u2018You started it\u2019). Would that be the first incursion or the latest atrocity, or any point on the calendar in-between?<\/p>\n

At some point, the origin of the primordial offence recedes from history into myth \u2013 found in sacred books and the stories people tell. Sometimes it is even, conveniently, the Word of God (be it Yahweh or Allah). Arguably, memory is more historically accurate than lots of competing histories. Indeed, as has been demonstrated, many of those histories, official and unofficial alike, are based on recollections after the fact. Ultimately, history is nothing more or less than memory. Yet memory fades, unless it is recorded \u2013 however rigorously or haphazardly \u2013 in history. We currently stand as helpless as we ever were when The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters<\/em>, as Goya had it, and Voltaire\u2019s admonition, \u2018Whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities\u2019 is still, sadly, applicable.<\/p>\n

Feature Image Otto Dix<\/a>, Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor<\/a><\/i> (\u201cStormtroopers Advance Under a Gas Attack\u201d), 1924.<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. James Joyce, in \u2018Nestor\u2019, from Ulysses (1922) If there is any substitute for love, it is memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy.\u2019 Joseph Brodsky, in \u2018Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) An Obituary\u2019, from Less Than One: Selected Essays (1986) One of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":16778,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[88,333,1402,2432,2763,3197,3398,3660,4073,4107,4221,4828,5028,6067,6382,6919,7130,7294,7640,8727,8728,8744,8836,8922,9235,9408,10039,10267],"class_list":["post-16802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history-2","tag-misinformation","tag-age","tag-cassandra-voices-history","tag-desmond-traynor","tag-e-h-carr","tag-father-of-history","tag-for","tag-geoffrey-elton","tag-herodotus","tag-history","tag-hubert-butler","tag-jeffrey-sachs","tag-joseph-brodsky","tag-memory","tag-nadezhda-mandelstam","tag-otto-dix","tag-peter-frankopan","tag-plutarch","tag-rashid-khalidi","tag-substituting","tag-substituting-memory-for-history","tag-sunningdale-for-slow-learners","tag-tacitus","tag-the","tag-the-practice-of-history","tag-thucydides","tag-what-is-history","tag-yossi-mekelberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}