The "Genocidal Contradiction"*
The Historian As Κλειω, Or, History as a Religion
“We want every one to buy it, we want it to be a book that will be found on every table,” Kristen Stewart declared. “I understand that all lies in the plan, and that’s why I apply to you,” she concluded. She grew hot over it, and although her explanation was obscure and incomplete, Shatov began to understand.
“So it would amount to something with a political tendency, a selection of facts with a special tendency,” he muttered, still not raising his head.
“Not at all, we must not select with a particular bias, and we ought not to have any political tendency in it. Nothing but impartiality—that will be the only tendency.”
“But a tendency would be no harm,” said Shatov, with a slight movement, “and one can hardly avoid it if there is any selection at all. The very selection of facts will suggest how they are to be understood. Your idea is not a bad one.”
Dostoevsky, "The Possessed"
. "There is a popular
saying of Madame de Staël", he [Acton] writes, "that we forgive whatever we
really understand." The paradox has been judiciously pruned by her
descendant, the Duc de Broglie, in the words: "Beware of too much
explaining, lest we end by too much excusing"
Butterfield "Whig History"
[*Harvard, Winona LaDuke, a "Democracy Now" piece, “genocidal contradiction”]
"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
"The Red Nation" could not possibly, not possibly, not possibly, not possibly, not possibly exist, just as it is, without its history to which no one living has contributed anything. The Western star devours its children. Hegel is dead and 1933 has dawned in Weimar. “The White Man's Burden", the echo that sounded loudly within Mr. Kurtz "for he was hollow at the core", the historical work of Zinn and the professor C Wade Mills, various "tendencies" of "impartiality". The Red Nation. Now we extend our commitment to democracy. Nationalsozialistisches Handbuch für Recht und Gesetzgebung, National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation, Alles was dem Volke nützt, Recht, alles was ihm schadet ist Unrecht, Whatever is to the advantage of the people is lawful, whatever is harmful to the people is unlawful.
The tag "whig history" has taken on the trivial meaning of teleological optimism. Its substitute, in the academic usage, is "hope". I aim, here, from this time of general abuse of his notion, to awaken the question raised by Butterfield.
"He [the historian] may try to show how men came to
differ in religion, but he can no more adjudicate between religions
than he can adjudicate between systems of philosophy; and though he
might show that one religion has been more favourable in its
sociological consequences than another though even – which is much
more difficult – he might think he has shown that the one is bound to
be better in its ultimate consequences through time – still it is not for
him to beg the question of the assessment of material losses against
what might be considered spiritual and eternal gains. His role is to
describe; he stands impartial between Christian and Mohammedan; he
is interested in neither one religion nor the other except as they are
entangled in human lives."
The difficulty is that the establishment of knowledge about eternal values does not fall within the province of the historian, but the historian must have "imaginative sympathy" with his subject in order to make it intelligible. So that some negotiation between random and interpreted collections of facts and a full account of the right and wrong of all historical acts must be worked out by the historian. Did the barbarians conquer Rome? Did the conquistadors conquer Tenochtitlan? Are the romans the victims of a genocide? Is the white man the victim of genocide? Was he enslaved? How much did a white man sell for at the slave market in Tunisia? Various expressions of the wills of groups emerge to produce "narratives". Unless they have access to something absolute they can not be impartial.
From Herodotus until Gibbon the gentleman's investigations or histories controlled the market of history. Heinrich Karl Ludolf von Sybel and Frideriech Nietzche and Jakob Burckardt, within the first wave of professional historians, supervised by the State. John William Draper, a photographer and chemist, popularized the myth that Galileo was a martyr of the overall arc of the rise of Science out of the Cathoic darkness of medieval superstition and authority along with the myth that the earth was believed to be flat. The lies of history are manifold. Now here Clio pronounces her encouragements to the regimental historian with his glorious myths of heroes, and there to a pampered idiot scientist who declared that comets were "atmospheric phenomena" like rainbows against his colleagues while cursing them in crude language and claiming himself to be an experimentalist. This amidst the 30 years war while tens of millions were being slaughtered, sitting in comfortable rooms receiving visitors having been mildly rebuked by his personal friend the Pope for his irrational claims. And they were, make no mistake, irrational. But, history, make no mistake, favours the victor.
Butterfield shows that the gush, all hot with the latest thing, extends back into all times and draws a line of progress. If in the sixties MLK was generally regarded as taking up a tack that ill-behooves a civil man, stirring up violence (de facto) while, of course, declaiming on non-violent resistance he is now regarded as the hero of a progress. Each progress practises its jugglery in the past. Supposing the animal rights activists would win. Each one who brought an animal, thousands and thousands in a life of eating, pain, is forever guilty and must be excluded. P C Mahalanobis was compelled to remind his ambitious friend Nehru, amidst the grand and holy "Quit India" episode, that the British, with their capitalist armies under trade companies, had been regarded as saviours for a hundred years after the release of the grip of the maharajas was effected. Nehru, no underling,
was now in line to get his power from the white men. There might, chuckled, be yet still a small sequestered bit of ground for the British man in the public places. The difficulty of history begins to appear as the difficulty of an immense quantity of information to be used to draw lessons in the favor of any movement to be spread by rhetorical techne and sciences of schedules of conditioning.
Now this appears in theoretical terms as the use of facts to serve values. That is the simple account of the region called ideology. It follows on Simmel's settlement on the fact/value distinction (sic.). Dasein must now discover the animatedly obscure motive causes of this colossal muddle which constitutes Dasein.