Posted on 07/02/2007 7:47:36 AM PDT by ventanax5
Seemingly arcane historical disputes can often cast a powerful light on the state of our collective soul. It is for that reason that I like to read books on obscure subjects: they are often more illuminating than books that at first sight are more immediately relevant to our current situation. For, as Emily Dickinson put it, success in indirection lies.
In 2002, the Australian free-lance historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, published a book that created a controversy that has still not died down. Entitled ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,’ it sets out to destroy the idea that there had been a genocide of Tasmanian aborigines carried out by the early European settlers of the island.
(Excerpt) Read more at newenglishreview.org ...
Does this validate the military (espc = field-grade officers) doctrine that:
Indecision is the key to flexibility
????
Like all good liberal/dhimmocrats, these pointy-heads like genocide as long as it doesn’t happen to them.
If the current state was founded on genocide then, however superficially satisfactory it might appear at first sight, it is necessary to re-found it on a sounder, more ethical basis. And the architects and subsequent owner-managers will, of course, be the intelligentsia; for only they are qualified.
For if you are unhappy in a country like Australia, you have to consider the possibility that the problem lies with you rather than with the conditions that surround you.
This is a disagreeable thing, particularly for an intelligentsia, which is deprived by it of a providential role for itself. What does an intelligentsia do when a country is already as satisfactory in its political arrangements and social institutions as any country has ever been? Intelligentsias do not like the kind of small problems that day to day existence inevitably throws up, such as termites in the woodwork or conflict at work over desk-space: they like to get their intellectual teeth into weightier, meatier problems.
To coin a phrase, he's got the "intelligentsia" (worldwide) washed, dried, fluffed, folded, and packed neatly with mothballs.
Good Article!
While he is making the point that intellectuals like to fabricate genocide, Dalrymple should note that that only applies when they are not in power. When intellectuals gain power they like nothing better than to commit genocide.
Reasons they liek genocide:
1. It isn’t happening to them.
2. It is clean and fast, no need to wait.
3. These people are breathing air they could be breathing.
4. Reduces Gorbal warming.
5. Reduces foods costs.
6. Gives them something to fill their very boring lives with.
7. Is a nice past time, as in “Honey lets go shoot a few people today”.
8. Entertaining to watch.
/scarasm off (note, I had to put this in because some here do not recognize humor or scarasm, but they do correct spelling errors)
” free-lance historian”
I can see his sign now:
Will revise for food...
Applies in the US, too, with some notable exceptions.
Great article by Dalrymple. He’s one of the best.
It’s a genetic trait: being scarasm-impaired correlates with an eye for letter-patterns.
Sure does!
Great piece.
Duly noted on the “role” of academia and the “intellectuals”
We as the Australians should be just as skeptical.
Intellectuals come from the lower reaches and outsiders of our society. Once when a bunch of profesors were singing fight songs an observer noted that they were not the cheerleaders at their schools. Another time a history conference took us to see an ostentatious home at the U of KY. When I asked what we were looking at a hostess replied “oil money.” Then some eminent prof said he didn’t know why they painted the rec room. I thought, their interior designer told them to. They are often commenting on things they don’t understand, at all. So they denounce.
Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History
Keith Windschuttle
Lecture to NSW Higher School Certificate History Extension Conference
Tom Mann Theatre, Sydney
May 30 2007
http://www.sydneyline.com/Postmodernism%20and%20Fabrication.htm
History is an intellectual discipline that goes back to the ancient Greeks. The first real historian, Thucydides, did a remarkable thing. He set out to distance himself from his own political system and to write a work that examined critically what happened to Greece in the Peloponnesian Wars. He not only told of his own side’s virtues and victories but of its mistakes and disasters. Thucydides also distanced himself from his own culture and religion. Instead of the mythical tales that all previous human societies had used to affirm their place in the cosmos, he faced the fact that the Greek oracles could not foretell their future and that the Greek gods could not ensure their fortunes. In short, what was remarkable about Thucydides, and all those who have followed him, was that they made a clean break with myths and legends. Instead, they defined history as the pursuit of truth about the past.
The ability to stand outside your own political system, your own culture and your religion, to criticise your own society and to pursue the truth, is something we today take so much for granted that it is almost part of the air we breath. Without it, our idea of freedom of expression would not exist. We should recognise, however, that this is a distinctly Western phenomenon, that is, it is part of the cultural heritage of those countries — Europe, the Americas and Australasia — that have evolved out of Ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity. This idea was never produced by either Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam it had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. Rather than take the idea of history for granted, we should regard it as a rare and precious legacy that is our job to nurture and to pass on to future generations.
Until about fifty years ago, the overwhelming majority of the history books written in the West were about two subjects: politics and warfare. The main characters who bestrode the historical stage were those men who ruled the political systems and who commanded the armies and navies. The reason was that history was written largely as a narrative of causes and consequences. Readers wanted to know how kingdoms, empires and republics had come into being, and why many of them had subsequently gone out of existence. Historians saw the social life of ordinary people as something that could flourish only under organized systems of political authority. They also recognized that successful warfare could expand a particular form of social life well beyond its origins, as happened under the Roman Empire, but also that military defeat could snuff out a social system and a culture literally overnight. So the writing of history was largely about trying to understand the major causes that operated in the human world, and these major causes were seen as politics and warfare.
(snip)
Someone should ask the same question of the left in this country.
Or for that matter some on the right.
*bump*
bump
I agree with all your points!
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