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Scoop
13-06-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Clio: Whose Side Is 'History' On?
Is history binary? A judge of past behaviour with just two available options: thumbs-up, or thumbs-down? If you are not on the 'right side' of history, are you therefore on the 'wrong side'? Can there be a 'right side of history'? Given the contexts that we now proclaim to be the right or wrong sides of history, can we presume to evaluate future judgements of our behaviours as 'history'? And, if we can, is 'history' about morals, or momentum; or, prosaically, is she just about facts? Can you (or we) ride history, like a wave? Clio, in Greek mythology, is the muse of history. She is not a straightforward lady. Are politicians who support, by word or deed, fascists (or racists or any other obviously nasty 'ists') in another country 'on the wrong side of history' or could they be 'riding a historical wave'? I am reminded of the Hitler youth singing 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' in the musical cabaret. In Natacha Butler's report (Al Jazeera 10 June 2025, Europe's far-right leaders, hosted by Marine Le Pen, rally in France) she notes "the conviction [by 'far-right' protesters] that history is on their side". History as Momentum Whoever participates in a social or political movement believes that their movement will become sufficiently consequential for those in the future to believe that the movement affected the course of history. So, the Hitler youth were correct, in the sense that their movement made their tomorrow different to what it would otherwise have been. The Hitler youth, though, were expecting a favourable judgement by 'us' in 2025. Clearly, we judge their movement in highly unfavourable terms, while accepting that the world at the end of the twentieth century might have been a better world than the world would have been had Adolf Hitler been killed in combat in the Great World War in1918. Problematic, though, is the whole subjective idea of a 'better world'; better for whom? An important example of historicism, or alleged historical momentum, is the writings of Karl Marx. He thought he was writing scientific history, of 'historical materialism', and many people believed him; a few still do. Marx fused classical Ricardian economics – the intellectual ancestor of today's neoliberal macroeconomics – with the philosophical historicism of Georg Hegel. Josef Stalin, and others in his intellectually unaccommodating mould, killed people who spun different (or nuanced) stories of past or future history. History as a Judge From a judgment perspective, we place much weight on academic historians in the medium-term future to make (for all time) the correct verdict events in the present, immediate past, and immediate future. Whether or not Clio is qualified to judge as 'good' or 'bad' past events, people, or movements, we today can evaluate Clio today – or at least her mortal disciples – on her performance so far. Two of many issues we could look into are, first, Winston Churchill and the World War Two bombing campaigns by the 'Allies', and our present understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Was Neville Chamberlain on the wrong side of history? And Churchill on the right side? (See my Invoking Munich, 'Appeasement', and the 'Lessons of History', 13 Mar 2025.) Churchill, more than most political leaders, features in many separable stories in history. His role in pursuing the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 has generally been awarded a 'thumbs-down'. Likewise, his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, when he decided to fix the British pound to gold at the overvalued pre-war (1914) exchange rate; this decision was one of the key events that led the world into the Great Depression. However, most post-war judgement of Churchill has focussed on his role as an opponent of 'appeasement' in 1938, and on his role as Great Britain's leader for the majority of World War Two (though he had been removed as Britain's leader, in a landslide electoral defeat, by the time the atomic bombs fell on Japan). On the 'appeasement' matter, Neville Chamberlain continues to be the epitome of someone 'on the wrong side of history', with Churchill on the 'right side'. Churchill had his own personal political agenda in 1938; his lifelong pursuit of the glory of the British Empire. Churchill's principal strategic interest was to maintain the Mediterranean Sea as 'Britain's Lake'; substantially but not only because it represented Britain's sea passage to India. So many of his actions in World War Two can best be understood in terms of what he was fighting for, not what he was fighting against. In 1938, the alternatives to the 'appeasement' of Hitler were to abstain in the face of Nazi Germany's clear-and immediate-threat to East Europe (a part of the non-Mediterranean world that Churchill was not interested in), or to threaten to declare war against Germany knowing that Britain couldn't act on its threat and thereby risked revealing its weakness. (In the summer of 1939, Britain did reveal its weakness to Josef Stalin, who then relayed that information onto Hitler at the end of August, allowing Hitler to invade Poland in the sure knowledge that Britain had no military capacity to come to Poland's aid. Chamberlain's allowing that 'information leak' to happen was surely a bigger mistake than his 1938 Munich Accord with Hitler.) And we note that Churchill said that, rather than 'peace in our time', there "would be war". Churchill did not claim that any of the alternative choices that Chamberlain faced could or would have prevented war. Unless, that is, Chamberlain had been able to terrify Hitler into not going ahead with his military plans. (Hitler would have been more likely to liken threats by Chamberlain to 'being mauled by a mouse'; a famous if somewhat forgotten witticism of our own Robert Muldoon, speaking in reference to Opposition leader Bill Rowling.) Realistically, Hitler was never going to commit to putting his military toys away. I think that, in light of the alternatives, Chamberlain made the right call in 1938; he hoped that he had restricted Hitler's military ambitions to the acquisition of territory inhabited by German-speaking people. On the matter of the Allied bombing campaign, being willing to commit unspeakable aerial executions upon tens of millions of 'enemy' civilians, history has largely been silent; those (over a million) who were actually barbecued by the Allies fell well short of those who Churchill's 'scientific adviser' and onetime 'best friend' Friedrich Lindemann would have liked to have 'dehoused'. (See my Barbecued Hamburgers and Churchill's Bestie, 17 Apr 2025.) We cannot rely on academic historians to counter decades of myth; in part because we have too few competent historians, and in part because historians hunt in packs and are as liable to fall under the sway of the zeitgeists of their eras as are the rest of humanity's intellectual communities. Despite Churchill's firebombing efforts, most of which took place in the early months of 1945, it was American bombing specialist Curtis LeMay who became barbecuer-el-supremo. (See my Who Executed 100,000 Civilians in a Single Night?) In 1945, and mainly through his own initiative, he burned more Japanese civilians to death than those who died from the atomic bombs. Was Curtis LeMay on the right side of history? The Japanese ruling class thought so in 1964; LeMay had helped to make the new Japan possible. The Emperor had been saved, as an emperor without an empire. And Japan had been saved from Stalin's advances, advances that stopped at Korea, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. We note that the worst of the Allies' terror campaign took place towards the end of the war, when the 'evil' Axis was in no position to reciprocate. Inherently, such crimes – on the scale that 'we' perpetrated them – are asymmetric warfare. Killing your enemies' civilians seemingly grants your enemies a moral right to kill your civilians. I think that no party who commits those kinds of war crimes can ever be on 'the right side of history'; though some other people may take more convincing. To compound the criminality of the Allied bombing campaign, it was ineffective, because World War Two was already asymmetric; the main turning points were Hitler's foolish declaration of war against the United States, and the Battle of Stalingrad in the latter part of 1942. World War Two could have been ended much more quickly with carrot than with stick, by finding suitable ways for the retreating powers to 'save face'. Truth and reconciliation always trump vengeance. Yet so many horrendous "killings of civilians to [allegedly] save 'our' soldiers" remain either on the 'right side of history' or concealed from view, obviating the popular requirement to cast judgement. The Great Depression was still much in historical memory in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1930s, Josef Stalin and his comrades believed this was the beginning of the end of the capitalist world; and he executed any economists (eg Nikolai Kondratiev) who suggested otherwise. At the time, a number of progressive western economists (eg Alvin Hansen) to an extent agreed with Stalin. However, in the 1970s, a group of extremist 'Chicago' economists and economic historians – Milton Friedman would lay claim to being both an economist and a historian – successfully committed on the world an intellectual coup-d'etat which would distract the historical community from reality. Friedman's coupsters scapegoated the United States Federal Reserve Bank (on the basis of a few quite minor 'mistakes' in monetary policy in 1929 and 1930). The net result was that the real culprits, the fiscal conservatives, escaped the condemnation of history. The Friedmanites, and their 'intellectual' descendants, have claimed the 'right side of history'; claiming victories (without convincing counterfactuals) in the alleged titanic battle between the 'inflation monster' and the battlers of the 'lower middle classes'. These faux historians claimed that small "mistakes" in monetary policy in 2003/04 and 2021/22 have been the predominant causes of the 2008/09 'global financial crisis' and the 2022 to 2024 'cost of living' crisis. When it comes to macroeconomics and macroeconomic policy, this writing of consumable history is about as pathetic (as intellectual history) as the claims of the Holocaust-deniers, or of the people (such as Herr Hitler) who claimed that Germany was 'stabbed-in-the-back' by international Jewry in 1918. Saying Sayonara to Clio? In the meantime, Aotearoa New Zealand's political leaders – and their public service collaborators – are doing their best to deconstruct Clio, by shredding many many books held at the National Library. (See National Library to dispose of 500,000 books from overseas collection, OneNews, 12 Jun 2015; and Book dealer sickened by plan to destroy half a million books, RNZ 12 Jun 2015.) This purge is being justified as a nationalist purge of books written in another time, and therefore with another perspective, and not written in our little exceptionalist country. And also the possible loss of much of our historical memory, through the lack of support for Aotearoan memory banks such as Te Ara Encyclopaedia of NZ, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, NZHistory, and Te Akomanga. Jock Phillips, recently retired historian in chief, is disgusted. (see More cuts proposed at Ministry for Culture and Heritage, RNZ, 13 June 2025.) Clio is a muse to be loved and cultivated. She gives much, but rarely in simplistic right-wrong terms; and she changes her mind, in response to both new information and new zeitgeists. Whereas Hitler's Nazis burned the books they didn't like – and many other books besides – Aotearoa's fiscal conservatives are looking for a whimper – a tearless shredding – rather than a blaze. And our remaining unshredded public collections, our memories – our abilities to evaluate the rights and the wrongs and the waves of our national and international pasts – stand to depreciate, to wither. Note: Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
Yahoo
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Kennedy Center's Upcoming Performance (According to Steve Bannon) Deemed a 'Downgrade'
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts' upcoming performance (at least, according to Donald Trump's former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon) following Trump's presidential takeover has shocked many in the theater community. According to Bannon, the J6 Prison Choir — which is indeed made up of previously imprisoned individuals involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection — will potentially be added to the lineup, as he announced at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The news that "the J6ers," who were present at the event "from the medium-high security prisons to the U.S. penitentiaries," would possibly play the once-lauded venue in Washington, D.C., "for a night in honor of their families," was met with raucous applause from the audience. "Beautiful!" one attendee could be heard as Bannon paused to allow the news to sink in. He also shared his own idea for their potential performance, suggesting that they "invite all of the families they tried to destroy, the J6ers, and they get to sit in the boxes where the elites sit" while the "elites" are sent to the "D.C. gulag," shocking many internet users at home. Parade has reached out to the Kennedy Center for comment. "We're living in the upside down," one theater-lover mourned, referencing the horrifying alternate universe found in Netflix's Stranger Things. "So it begins," another lamented, bracing for whatever comes next, while another agreed, "Lord, what a downgrade." "I hear their rendition of 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me' is particularly chilling," someone else wrote, referencing the track from the musical Cabaret that is performed by young members of Hitler's regime. Another disappointed X (formerly Twitter) user called the move "DEI for terrorists," while someone else suggested calling the FBI "to report the second assassination of John F. Kennedy's memory." One even played on Trump's recent "honor" for "God Bless the U.S.A." songwriter Lee Greenwood, writing, "And I'm ashamed to be an American." "They can sing Amazing Disgrace," another quipped. CBS reported that Trump's intention was to put an end to the center's "woke culture" when he announced earlier this month that he'd be taking over the board. Shortly after the news, the Kennedy Center canceled the upcoming tour of the children's musical Finn, which "follows a young shark who realizes he may relate more to smaller, more gentler fishes," according to Playbill. The Kennedy Center claimed that the decision was financial in origin, but, per the publication, the musical could easily be seen as a metaphor for the LGBTQ+ experience, and the creators were "not surprised" by the move following "the events" that preceded the news. As a result, many previously scheduled performers have also pulled out of their events, including Issa Rae. "Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through mediums, I've decided to cancel my appearance at this venue," she explained in a statement, promising all ticketholders a refund. Next:
New York Times
08-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
To Obey or Not to Obey
In 1978, my parents went to Poland, the first foreign trip in each of their lives. When they returned to our home in Moscow, my mother couldn't stop talking about what they'd seen — not a place but a movie, Bob Fosse's 'Cabaret.' One scene in particular stayed with her. Three friends are returning from a weekend trip. Sleep-deprived, hung over and preoccupied with their sexual and romantic entanglements, they pull over at a roadside cafe. There, a teenager wearing a Hitler Youth uniform starts singing. He is both earnest and, in his brown pants tucked into white knee-high socks, puerile. But after a minute, other young people in uniform join in, and soon all but one customer are standing and singing. The protagonists duck out. They have been pushing Nazism out of their minds, but at this moment they realize that they are in the minority, that life as they've been living it is over. The song everyone around them is singing is 'Tomorrow Belongs to Me.' I was 11 when my mother couldn't stop talking about 'Cabaret,' and I was confused. I thought my parents had gone to an actual cabaret and somehow gained an insight into the nature of the Soviet regime. A few years later, after I'd seen the movie myself, I realized my mother was right: That scene is the single most vivid portrayal of what it feels like to live in a society that is falling in line before a totalitarian leader. I experienced this in real life as an adult, when Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia and my world suddenly felt like a chessboard from which an invisible hand was picking off pieces faster than I had thought was possible. Now, in Donald Trump's America, I am living through something similar, and it is moving at a faster rate still. For me, it began before the election, when the owners of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post decided to pull their papers' endorsements of Kamala Harris for president. It continued with Mark Zuckerberg remaking Meta to reflect what he called the 'cultural tipping point' that was the presidential election; with ABC News handing over millions of dollars in response to one of Trump's frivolous lawsuits and CBS considering doing the same; and most recently, with the great erasure: of records of trans care for minors provided by hospitals and of diversity-and-inclusion policies at many universities and corporations. Now some universities are quietly retooling their programming in hopes of conforming with expectations that have not yet been clearly laid out. I am talking not about deletions of pages from government websites, such as those of the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, presumably mandated by newly installed officials; I am talking about actions that individual people or private institutions took pre-emptively, with some measure of free will. The Yale historian Timothy Snyder has called this 'anticipatory obedience.' In his 2017 book 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,' lesson No. 1 was 'Do not obey in advance.' Those who anticipate the demands of a repressive government and submit to these demands before they are made, Snyder wrote, are 'teaching power what it can do.' Snyder is right, of course, but his admonition makes obeying in advance sound irrational. It is not. In my experience, most of the time, when people or institutions cede power voluntarily, they are acting not so much out of fear but rather on a set of apparently reasonable arguments. These arguments tend to fall into one or more of five categories. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
