Times.konradturski.com – Political and Economic Commentary by a Postgrad in London

Israel warns of unleashing ‘Holocaust’ in Gaza if Rocket Attacks Continue

The possible nomination of a (half-) African-American to the Democratic party ticket in November has a lot of people quite riled up about the progress that this represents for the United States. I’m one of them.

But the dogging allegations that Obama is a Muslim, and the supposedly-immediate disqualification that this would imply, suggest quite the opposite. Has this country truly progressed when forty years after the civil rights movement, religion – a trait nearly as superficial as race, in that both are (always in the case of race, nearly always in the case of religion) inherited from family – is a legitimate scare tactic? Obama’s response – I never was a Muslim – is equally problematic because it reflects what he cannot say: it shouldn’t matter. Doing the latter might well spell the end of a lesser politician, and I fear that, given the state of America today, not even Obama would be able to win that fight.

The point is that the United States today resembles something more along the lines of a trained circus creature, unable or unwilling to grasp the tenets of liberalism and progressivism, by which discrimination based on race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion, or anything else, are wrong by definition. Instead, America has been taught civil rights through the McCarthy method – I won’t be racist, because it will ruin my career. Nowhere is this more clear than in some Americans’ inability to expand their civil liberalism to the countless other minorities that deserve full equality in the United States.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/25/america/25webcamp.php

Apparently the Hillary campaign has leaked photos of Obama dressed in African garb. All to reinforce my conviction, that by the time this campaign is finished, no matter who wins, no one will want to touch Hillary with a ten foot stick.

Spoiler: There Will be Blood is the secret sequel to Brokeback Mountain, except with even fewer women.

But more milkshakes!

No.

Back in 2005, a friendly professor of Japanese history gave me an unsatisfying mark on a paper I wrote about the Japan’s elaborate creation of a positive post-World War II narrative for itself (also known as “the good defeat”). Depressed, I shelved the essay and didn’t looked at it again until yesterday.

At which point I realized that I really liked it. There are some lines in particular that made me think, even today. In particular, I proposed (with a healthy dose of academic irony) that “better history-writing makes better history.” This is a point also argued by Tony Judt, among others, who has argued that it is as important to remember as it is to forget. And as I mentioned in another work of mine, which compared the evolutions of the Russian Revolution and Russian-Jewish Zionism, Historiography can be corrected, whereas history is too often a hodge-podge of chaotic Hobbesianism.

My essay went on to present the point that the vast amount of information that qualifies as history -in archives, libraries, millions of collective memories, and elsewhere – necessarily makes the historian a agent of destruction rather than creation; by selecting what makes history, you are in effect destroying the 99% of material that is redundant, contradictory, or simply besides the point. As I concluded, this necessarily makes every historian a revisionist of sorts (I say “of sorts” because, at least in theory, a ‘normal’ historian is only denying the narrative of a “minority,” whereas a true ‘revisionist’ historian is denying the historical narrative of the “majority”). Given that fact, the creation of a positive, progressive history is a choice (among others), not a transgression, for a historian.