Such a quote - it comes from the top news item on Bing about Kate Middleton requiring the insertion of "some recollections may vary" into their statement on the accusation by Harry of racist questions over their baby to be.
Do we rewrite past facts into different historical stories? Are facts of history reported incorrectly at the time? Are there egregious acts or false reports of events at the time that need correcting? That seems the case for the Pandemic where many heads of state made false assertions over its risk level.
I was looking for a notion of history filtering and reviewing things in the past to come up with a balanced view in the present. But that's not what I found. I found Time Magazine's article. It takes on the notion of doing the right thing at the right time as "being on the right side of history" - not hoping that the future will come up with a vindication. One area this applies to is Trump where there was a "consolation attitude" that historians in the future would look back and judge him an abysmal president. The notion is that "history will do justice."
The Times' article is scathing in its opposition to leaving things as they are and they'll all work out. It gives a long list of such behaviours by heads of state/countries. It outlines how this was a foundational element of "history" in the recent past. Here's a small excerpt:
"But modern history is strewn with harmful acts justified as serving some higher historical purpose. Everything from luxury to war to slavery itself has been rationalized as a “necessary evil” with a part to play in history’s divinely guided unfolding. For example, the British knowingly resigned themselves to imperialism’s destructive effects precisely out of faith in its providential role. “It is by its…unintended influence that the British power metamorphoses and dissolves the ideas and societal forms underneath it,” explained the historian and jurist Henry Maine after the British brutally crushed an Indian rebellion in 1857. “Nor is there any expedient by which it can escape the duty of rebuilding upon its own principles that which it unwillingly destroys.”
A damning example is Winston Churchill who took the view that history led to a preordained future: “I do not admit…that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia…by the fact that a stronger race…has come in and taken their place,” he insisted in 1937."
That is shocking, isn't it? It seems to me that we've been trained and taught that history is written because it gives a more balanced view of past events. That "history" is a justification for current behaviours - this is worrisome in the moral realm.
I had no sense of this aspect of the formalisms of history - of some preordained evolutionary tale directed by a god above. Progress towards whatever that is in the future justifies anything and everything.
There are many more fun things to write about each day. It does seem that the Kate Middleton story has a significance. "History will judge them." What evolutionary path does she think that the Royal Family is on to avoid the ethical accountability of the racist remarks in the here and now?
Most curious indeed. Here'sthe Time article - it is written by Priya Satia, author of Time's Monster: How History Makes History.
This is the neighbour's garden diagonally across the street - another beautiful garden in Grimsby.
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