In My World, History is King

My choice of leisure reading has on occasion caused comment, most recently after I'd remarked that I had indulged myself in reading an article about the operation of the state judicial system in Nazi Germany and its interactions with the Gestapo and Nazi policies. A few weeks later I got quite a few jokes at work for the subject of the book I'd been reading on my break - Ian Kershaw's excellent biography of Hitler (which is tremendous in its scope and depth, which is also why I've never yet finished reading it). People find my predilection for reading about Nazis odd. People find my predilection for reading it as a leisure activity even odder, it seems.

I found a big part of the explanation of this, though, put into words in the preface to Ernst Nolte's Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism, National Socialism. To wit: "... the fascist era claimed more victims than any era in history, and for this very reason demands the utmost intellectual effort at understanding." I believe it's necessary for humanity to understand how fascism, and, yes, Nazism in particular, came to happen, because if we don't know how it happened the first time we won't necessarily be able to stop it happening again.

I think to a certain extent modern culture, with its focus on the ephemeral and the way it ignores the past (and, a lot of the time, the future), is something of a sickness. The world is crazy. The mass media are certainly insane, and the culture of celebrity and its trappings and the incredibly sick excess of that is the visible signifier; lost children like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan are a sign of a culture that's lost the plot. When millions of people know that people who are, pretty much, children are in dire need of help to correct their lives' downward spiral, and those people watch avidly and no-one does anything to fix it... there's something deeply wrong. And it's incredibly pervasive. The fucked-up and famous are just the noticeable symptoms. (Australia, for now, is still marginally healthier than America and England, but only marginally, and the way Australia panders slavishly to America is twisted, considering that, collectively, we seem also to think that America is crazy.)

In the past, people maintained the awareness of their past. And that's important. People need roots, need background. It's hard to develop a strong sense of where you are and should be going when you don't know where you're coming from. Society has broken down and is cruising, it seems, largely on the momentum of the minority who do maintain that sense of history.

Progress isn't coming from the people who obsess over the ephemeral trivia that obsesses the mass media (and, judging by the blogosphere, a hideously large proportion of the population). The people who work at NASA are at the cutting edge of the future still, but they have a grasp on the past. That's why they still name stuff after people like Galileo, when it seems like most people nowadays wouldn't have a clue who Galileo was if you asked them. They don't think history matters, when it really, really does. Not just because, as the saying goes, those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it; because the present is meaningless without the context of the past.

Liberals and conservatives wrangle without really knowing where the words come from or what they mean. People who fight for the Left or the Right don't know why they're called that. People claim, for example, that the United States of America is a country founded on Christian principles when it absolutely was not; it was founded by deists and atheists and post-Enlightenment rationalists who wanted more than anything else to establish the separation of Church and State.

None of them, it seems, realise that the battles they're fighting have been fought before. A hundred years on and we're still caught up in the Dreyfus Affair and the people doing that don't even know what the Dreyfus Affair was or why it matters, why one Jewish captain mattered that much then, let alone now. Hell, we're still caught up in the repercussions of the French Revolution. Not enough people understand why. Not enough people even know that; know why it happened, why it changed the world. Not enough people are willing to accept that, whatever the modern-day moral judgment of the era of European imperialism may be, until the end of the Second World War, the history of Europe is the history of the world. American history is only relevant because American history before the World Wars affects America beyond the World Wars.

Or at least, it used to, but you know, Independence, the American Constitution, the principles of the Founding Fathers, the good intentions and the importation of slaves, the violent and horrific abuse of the Native Americans, the buildup to and reasons for the Civil War (no, it wasn't "about slavery")... none of this means jack shit any more because no-one pays attention to it, and that's why America is flailing and unstable and prone to wild fits on a national level. American history would, no doubt, be hard to come to terms with. Even a light study of it, which is all I've really done, brings one into contact with elements to which the only real reaction can be revulsion. I still feel an automatic horror and loathing when I read the words, "Texas Ranger," and I'm not even an American trying to come to terms with my own history. But unless America manages to deal with that, acknowledge it all, it's not going to be able to overcome it, and it'll still be nationally crazy.

Australia has the same problem, although trying to fix it has gained greater prominence and momentum. We've tried to come to terms with Australia's less salutary areas of history, but it's been rejected by some people and, unfortunately, by people like Howard, so it hasn't worked, and funnily enough Australia is getting to be a bit crazy too. It's cognitive dissonance on a mass level, and it's sickening society.