From: (Nick)
Date: 22/08/03 03:06 GMT Daylight Time
Message-id:

-remove- (Mhoulsby) wrote in message
... (to Simon Spivack):
Simon Spivack wrote:
IMO, there are too many mavericks posting unorthodox, to put it politely,
views....
any dirt will do, even porky dirt

"In all the difficulties which attend a historian, there is none which is
greater than that of steering clear of offence."
--John Shebbeare (Lydia)

No bias in *your* view of history, then...
(don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of bias, since all historians are
biased... did you, for example, see "A History Of Britain" on the BBC
written by "porky" Simon Schama? That was full of "dirt" of all hues, and
was certainly biased, but not distorted.)

"'Yes, I am fond of history.'

'I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing
that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with
wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and
hardly any women at all--it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd
that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention. The
speeches that are put into the heroes' mouths, their thoughts and
designs--the
chief of all this must be invention, and invention is what delights me in
other books.'

'Historians, you think', said Miss Tilney, 'are not happy in their flights of
fancy. They display imagination without raising interest. I am fond of
history,
and am very well contented to take the false with the true....'

--Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

Dear Mr. Houlsby,

Here are the words of some diverse modern historians on what they do:

"I believe--these are the simple premises of my efforts--that present and
past are indissoluble, that life and work are hard to separate even if the
connections may remain obscure and partly unconscious. These are commonplaces
that have replaced the older notions of a J.B. Bury, who believed in history
as science, or a Fustel de Coulanges, who said--in genuine modesty, I
believe--"It is not I speaking, but history speaking through me." The
reckless subjectivity that has invaded our field in some areas might make one
regret the passing of the older austerity, exemplified in Leopold von Ranke's
wish to 'expunge the self', but I believe that only totalitarian societies
can extinguish the self. In all other situations, historians are unlikely to
escape their own times or their own complicated selves."
--Fritz Stern (Einstein's German World, pp. 200-1)

"In short, that there is no clear difference between fact and fiction.
But there is, and for historians, even for the most militantly antipositivist
ones among us, the ability to distinguish between the two is absolutely
fundamental."
--Eric Hobsbawm ('The New Threat to History' in the "New York Review of
Books"
16 December 1993, p. 63)

"I was attracted to history, in the first place, by reading Karl Marx.
I mean that Marx gave me the awareness that it is an instrument without which
we cannot understand what is happening to the world. I was persuaded by his
idea that history can be seen and analysed as a whole, and it has..I wouldn't
say laws because that is too reminiscent of old-style positivism; it has a
structure and a pattern, which are human society's story of evolution over a
long period of time....

In the ten years which followed the war, our generation learned its history
in regular seminars held by historian friends and members of the Communist
Party of Great Britain, the so-called Commmunist Historian Group: Christopher
Hill, Maurice Dobb, E.P. Thompson, the mediaevalist Rodney Hilton, myself,
and
others. Also after the war, there was a debate with historians, many of them
French, from other countries. I had a lot of sympathy for the Annales
School,
with one difference, however. They believed in a history that never changes,
in the permanent structures of history, while I, on the other hand, believe
in
history that changes.

Above all, a Marxist interpretation suggests that, in having understood that
a particular historical stage is not permanent, human society is a successful
structure because it is capable of change, and thus the present is not its
point of arrival. Second, one can study the modus operandi, the ways in
which
a particular social system functions, and why it generates or fails to
generate
the forces of change...That is why the history which interests me is
analytical;
that is to say, history attempts to analyse what happened rather than just
uncovering it. I don't mean that it can be used to understand exactly why
the
world developed in a certain manner, but it can tell us how various elements
coming together within a society serve to create a historical dynamic, or
conversely, fail to cause it."

--Eric Hobsbawm (On the Edge of the New Century, pp. 4-6)

"And conversely, we are constantly confronted by Western ideologists--
Mr. Fukuyama, the Doctor Pangloss of the 1990s, comes to mind--for whom the
rich world's superiority simply expresses its discovery of the best of all
possible designs for arranging human affairs, as demonstrated by its historic
triumph. In simpler words, these ideologists have the conviction that
Westerners know better--which is far from self-evident. As the tragic record
of Western economic advisors in post-Soviet Russia shows, it may be difficult
for intelligent and well-intentioned academics and consultants even to grasp
what is happening in environments so different from their own, and shaped by
such different histories and cultures.

Indeed, in a world filled with such inequalities, to live in the favoured
regions is to be virtually cut off from the experience, let alone the
reactions,
of people outside those regions. It takes an enormous effort of the
imagination,
as well as a great deal of knowledge, to break out of our comfortable,
protected, and self-absorbed enclaves and enter an uncomfortable and
unprotected
larger world inhabited by the majority of the human species."

--Eric Hobsbawm (On the Edge of the New Century, pp. 166-7)

Francis Fukuyama ('Doctor Pangloss' is a famous character in Voltaire's
novel,
'Candide') is an American neoconservative political theorist, who's most
known
for his dogmatic 1992 book, "The End of History and the Last Man", wherein,
employing Hegelian discourse, he contends that, in effect (not a quotation):
"History is over now, and the United States has won it."

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."
--Bertrand Russell

--Nick

Yes, quite......

Interestingly (or uninterestingly, if you're an adherent of the views expressed
through the medium of Ms. Austen's typically adept characterisation) Mr.
Spivack has been unable to substantiate his assertion that his namesake Mr.
Schama supports the contemporarily popular policy of appeasement pursued by Mr.
Chamberlain's administration of His Majesty's government.

Perhaps this was because I charged Mr. Spivack to "subtantiate" (sic) said
assertion. Mea culpa. I mist learn to typ.

No doubt Mr. Spivack might equally assert that because his namesake, Mr.
Schama, stated that after the resounding victory of Parliament's army in the
decisive battle of the English Civil War, at Naseby on June 14, 1645 "...God
was clearly on the side of Parliament", then Mr. Schama (who is Jewish) truly
believes that God is a Puritan... Hmmm......

Now, "appeasement", as Government Policy, of course, (while maintaining an
intrinsic similarity) meant something rather different at the time of, say,
Baldwin's government, from what it meant in Chamberlain's time.

In the latter case, here in Britain we were in the position of needing to
rearm, as quickly as possible. We had limited resources available to us. What
was not altogether clear was whether we should be concentrating upon preparing
for a desert war (in north Africa, against Italy) an air war (in northwestern
Europe, against Germany) or a naval war (in the Pacific, against Japan). This
dilemma perhaps goes some way towards explaining the reason why pursuing a
policy of appeasement (which bought time while the above question was beginning
to clarify) was considered, in late 1930s Great Britain, by the-powers-that-be,
not only to be expedient, but actually rather prudent.

Its popularity, by contrast, derived, in large measure, from the memory of the
terrible toll exacted by the 1914-18 conflict with Germany and its allies.

Of course, if it had not been for Mitchell, Royce and, perhaps most especially,
Turing, we would have lost WWII.

"Le voilà donc connu, ce secret plein d'horreur."

Voltaire


Mark