Friday, July 20, 2007
"This is YOUR war"
This "enemy propaganda" that Edelman mentioned -- can anyone quote an example?
I loved the bit at the end of Olbermann's statement, in which he references the examples of Burnside and Churchill. The latter citation must sting the most, since the neocons pretend to admire Churchill.
I must also admit that Olbermann is probably quite correct in his predictions of "future history." The moment American troops leave Iraq (leaving disaster in their wake), conservatives will do everything they can to proclaim a false notion of what really occurred. If it takes them ten, twenty, forty years, they will insure that a new generation of Americans comes to regard the Iraq misadventure as a noble cause. And even many current members Iraq Veterans Against the War will fall for the campaign to rewrite the past.
He who controls the past...
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It may be foolish of me, but I keep hoping that when the immediate Bush crisis has passed -- in a way that hopefully keeps all of us out of the detention camps and free to keep plowing along -- some substantial chunk of the energy that has been generated in left blogistan will be turned to recapturing the history of the left in America.
I've found over and over when attempting to check out some point of history from roughly the period of the Roosevelt administration that it just isn't there. The history of the right is lovingly preserved online. Even figures who were considered one inch short of being outright fascists are presented by their apologists rather than by their critics. But major figures and events of the left are missing altogether.
Our noxious copyright laws make this situation even worse -- there's a better representation of left-wing thought and history from before 1923 than since. But one way and another, a great chunk of our history has been stolen from us, and it is our duty to recapture it.
Beyond that, it isn't just events that have gone missing but the spin on events that has been twisted to match the agenda of the right. The history of the 20th century has been watered down into a fuzzy account of the triumph of democracy in such a way that the Bushites can graft their invasion of Iraq onto World War II and the Cold War and claim that it is all one inevitable process. But the actualities of the struggle against fascism and for peace and justice have been lost.
I'm old enough -- and my parents were a bit older than most parents of my generation of early boomers -- that I was able to learn much of this from my mother in the form of bedtime stories as I was growing up. (She was never much for fairy tales, but boy could she do 1930's politics.) If I hadn't, I wouldn't even have a clue of its existence.
Reclaiming the history of our past, I think, will be the key to holding onto the history of the future. Among other things, we need to get the bugaboo of communism off our backs and be able to paint the American wars of the post-World War II era -- from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq -- as a consistent series of struggles for control of resources by what in an earlier era was quaintly known as Wall Street. Our soldiers have been aware of this at every step, if only subconsciously, but ordinary Americans have been forbidden to acknowledge it.
Educating people as to what has really been going on for the last 60 years may not be as sexy as flag-waving jingoism, but it does seem to be our only hope. And since people really do like the feeling of being clued in and knowing something their neighbors don't, it may not be altogether impossible to achieve.
At least, that's my goal and my dedication.
star
I agree...if and when we get some democracy back, the best way to re-construct history is to go through secret government documents as they are released. Another way is to read other countries accounts of history in regards to the US. Having said that, true history is not usually taught in schools or made easily available, so one has to always dig for it. My mom had studied history and used to drag me to museums and talk my head off till she got me hooked on history and poetry. I am glad she did.
He who controls the past...is the same group that currently controls the present.
Given that, is it any wonder that 40% of the U.S. population still thinks WMD were found in Iraq - even though Mr. Bush himself has admitted otherwise?
The problem isn't so much that our history "will be disappeared" at some future date, it is that our history is being rewritten in the minds of the American people even as we speak.
There is no doubt that there is currently a concerted effort by republican politicians, especially those who are up for election in the next cycle, and their spinmeisters, to blame Democrats and the anti-war movement for the increasingly apparent failure to win the Iraq war/occupation.
It's not the bush administration's fault, or the fault of the people who support and supported the Iraq war/occupation and the bogus GWOT - both of whom were wrong in their predictions of just about everything - rather, it is the fault of the people who knew better. It is the fault of those who spoke out and said they were wrong from the get-go.
It's a Mad Mad Mad World for sure.
"Killing Hope" exposes the past 60 years of US foreign policy, so there is at least that bit of history available.
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