History.

[hester_prynne]

Believe me, I respect history. But it seems like a moot point.
I mean, what's history without hindsight? Without seeking.
What's history if it's just something that predictably repeats itself. I mean, what do you do with that except be oppressed by it?

It kinda pisses me off that history repeats itself so proudly, so grandly.
I want to scream, "what's the f'ing point!?
What are we supposed to learn from history? Dates, names, victories, gains, etc, or is there something more? Is that something more individual only, and not collective?

Here we are at war with Iraq and it's all very similar to the Vietnam war. It's history repeating itself. It's embarrassing and humiliating, at least to me. It makes me cringe at history, that it's so useless, yet so used.

Talk to me about history and why it is so important. I've forgotten the point of it. I want a reason to be interested in history. I feel i'm lacking in my disdain of it.........
H

[Lightning Rod]

The reason to be interested in history is because
IT'S A GREAT STORY

One of positive by-products of being locked up was that I had a lot of time on my hands. So I read.

I ordered Will Durant's eleven volume History of Civilization and read it cover to cover. If you stack the books up they are about three feet high. It was one of the greatest adventures of my life.

I passed my hours with Confucius and Alexander and Charlemaign and Diderot and Erasmus.

Durant spent his whole life writing it. It goes from paleolithic times and traces all the world's great civilizations up until just after the Napoleonic period. If you ever have about a year, read it.

[e_dog]

someone once said, those who forget (ignore?) history are doomed to repeat it.

the problem, hester, is not that history is so prevalent, but rather that it is ignored, or its significance is reduced in the present-tense frenzy of mediated propaganda that the powers-that-be serve to the public. history is not entertainment, as Lrod suggests, but rather a cold, bitter lesson in human exploitation, folly and suffering. but, we can learn from history, if we know how to read, or see, it clearly.

those concerned with U.S. power, and especially those unconcerned by it, would do well to study the history of the Roman empire, or the Napoleonic empire, or the rise of Fascism in the 1930s.


for another perspective check out the enigmatic, but truly profound Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History:

http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staf ... CEPT2.html

an excerpt: [thesis IX]
"A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. "

[Lightning Rod]

are we getting a bit nihilistic here, e dog?

Sure, history is littered with cruelty and exploitation and atrocity, but it is also the saga of how humans have overcome these things and written poetry and composed masterpeices and invented ways to overcome our helplessness before nature.

I think history is a most delicious entertainment.

[e_dog]

if i might be permitted to quote Walter Benjamin again:

"[...]The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain." [from Thesis VII]



but this view is not one of nihilism.

[Zlatko Waterman]

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken."

--James Joyce


Famous literary scholar and social historian Garry Wills

http://www.history.northwestern.edu/faculty/wills.htm

used to report that when he taught his students history, their inevitable reply was:


"Yeah? So what? All that stuff happened a long time ago!"


I can confirm what he reports in his more exalted sphere from my own classroom experiences.

My rejoinder was, "Yeah? But it's happening right now, too!"


But it's impossible, as Ezra Pound said, to have good thinking or writing without curiosity. Crazy as old Ez was, he at least understood that the Greeks had already swatted out many of our contemporary differences among themselves several centuries before us.



Zlatko

[e_dog]

Zlatko, it is not clear to me that Ezra Pound understood much of anything. he was the literary equivalent of the sociopath: a fascist antisemite clothed with imagist poetics. i suppose that's what you meant with the euphemistic reference to his "crazy"-ness?

Lrod:

Sure, history is littered with cruelty and exploitation and atrocity, but it is also the saga of how humans have overcome these things and written poetry and composed masterpeices and invented ways to overcome our helplessness before nature.

I think history is a most delicious entertainment.

the relation of literary and cultural history to socio-political history is analogous to the relation of funeral music to the funeral itself. poetry is like the kind words of condolence to the relatives of the deceased.

[hester_prynne]

so here's what I've garnered from reading your responses so far.

1. History is a story, it's entertainment, like tv is entertainment, only it's better entertainment than tv.

2. It's a glorification of winnings, without much notice as to how much the "winnings" or "rulers" paid for it, meaning lives lost, damages and human sufferings incurred. In other words, it's an account that is loaded with denial.

3. It's a nightmare we are all born stuck in.

So why wouldn't we want to learn from history what not to repeat?
Why doesn't history include hindsight?

Personally, I can relate to the Joyce quote the most, as to how I feel about history...

I hope there will be more insights here.

So far, I still think history is just a moot point, at least in the way it is presented to us.

Fact, I'm starting to think that History is really just a thinly disguised form of brainwashing, like tv is.

We don't use history to better the world. We use it to crow about what we "won" with no consideration given to the costs.
Which means, my history in the making right now currently is that I am the price of the current battle being fought. I'm a disposable, for someone else's percieved victory, that's my own legacy, in terms of history.
Whats yours?
H

[mtmynd]

History is written by the winners, and for every winner there are thousands if not millions of losers. Who has ever given a zebra's crap about the history of losers but only to compare the loser's mistakes against the winner's strategies?

Somehow we humans equate winners with favors from the gods, altho it has been written that even the gods fought in the heavens, so believing winners are god-endowed is a very questionable conclusion.

We cannot be fair to ourselves in chosing to believe in history if it is truth, and not fact, that we are seeking, for words are only opinions to be chosen or rejected... truth is found in the silence between every word.

[jimboloco]

click it to make it bigger
http://www.fagotten.org/grifter/bush/ww ... rg/453.jpg

My first reality dose was when, after coming back from Nam, I went with the VVAW to the university of New Hampshire for a protest-demo and we were accosted by some kids in their AFROTC uniforms, just like I was three short years before, unbelievable, I was startled into a reality that the river of socialised behavior was much stronger than my small person.

In 1960 when Kennedy won the presidency, he had help from the Chicago mob.
In 1963 he got shot. I was 16.
In 1969 I was getting laid in my bachelor officer's quarters while they walked on the moon. I was 22.
In 1972 I had returned from Vietnam and refused duty, became a rebel. I was 24.

Really, everything else in my life is an afterthought. I know how I was being used, and at least can set limits and protest.

So for me, being a part of history is also about waking up and seeing it from an outsider's perspective. My personal history as mutant being, it gives me hope to know that I am not alone.

Interesting maybe to read about social-political situations surrounding the various epochs of great art.

[hester_prynne]

wow! Cec a light went on. History is fact, not truth. War is based on fact and not truth. Facts are moot. War is the creation of more moot. So, history is moot. It's useless really. As is war.......

I'll stick with that silence between the words.
Is that written anywhere for folks like me? I'd love to see it in print, that silence.......hell i'd like to see it shouted from the rooftops!

Jimbo...great poster. Truth, and lies. ABsolutely no facts......er history even considered......nice one. The light is suddenly, like, making my brain squint....
oh boy!
H

[jimboloco]

http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/art ... sNovus.jpg

http://www.angelofhistory.com/

A Klee drawing named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin,

thanks for the link eclectic dog.

[Doreen Peri]

The problem with history is that it depends on whose telling it as to what gets told.

[hester_prynne]

Yes indeed, consider the source. Too true.
Mostly fact throwers.

Show me some history with guts.

H

[e_dog]

an example of historiography that doesn't just glorify the victors:

Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States.


news that isn't just propaganda:

www.democracynow.org