Argument is the whole point of history
Science is not a belief system we can opt in and out of depending on our ideological or political points of view.
The science former glory rested on actions based on real evidence. In today's debates, science doesn't matter and it is something we should not allow.
"If the science doesn't suit your argument, ignore it." It is an advice of many politicians who care not for evidence, but, it seems, for publicity.
Contrary to science, history is based on interpretations of facts and often, it is a matter of received opinion not evidence...
...what we remember and take from our first history lessons. The first sentence my history teacher said to me I never forget.
" Life has to be learnt backwards but live forward." This is what she said.
I am one of those people who likes to look back, on all those changes around happening in my own lifetime...'my own little history'
In the 60ties when I was born there was enthusiastic revival and idealistic growth two decades after the war.
In the 70ties when I attended my compulsory schooling the growth stopped.
I will always remember the excessive 80ties, my teenager's years, the time of the excessive growth...
people really started to like the idea to borrow to have more...and more...and more...
From that time on the most people start to live on borrowed time...
Not everyone, there are people who have not anything, there are people who have their own and then there are those...living on borrowed time.
With so much borrowing and not enough people paying their debts back, money were pushed to extreme and there is no confidence in money any more...
Economic growth comes to the end, it is up to us to make the right choices.
On one of our school excursion to see one of the ancient castle our history walked over the ruins commenting: "Humans are exceptional on the natural scale that they are able to make their own choices, but many times they choose the wrong ones..
...people in the past have used and failed. We never seem to learn from history."
I attended my favourite history teacher funeral that celebrated her incredible life and lasting legacy. The last words she has spoken to me are very actual in our today's world.
'THERE IS ENOUGH IN THE WORLD TO MEET MAN'S NEEDS BUT NO MAN'S GREED.'
Nearly old as me, fifty years ago, the Berlin Wall was born. Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union's leader allowed to erect a barrier between East and West Berlin...
to ensure the survival of communism in the entire Soviet bloc. By that point, three million people sneaked on the other Western democratic side...my Father climbed the wall risking to be shot...
in a search for better and free life...leaving his family including me behind.
20 years ago, when I was free to cross the border of my country for the first time in my life, the hardliners in the Soviet government attempted to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev,
who two years after US president Ronald Reagan memorably called on him to "tear down this wall" had done just that.
Somewhat miraculously, a reformer who wanted Russians to be part of the democratic West had come to power in the Kremlin. This was the historic moment I was lucky enough to live through.
Gorbachev's hardline Politburo adversaries were determined to preserve the decrepit system that the Wall symbolised. In August 1991 ordinary Muscovites stood their ground.
They defied the coup-makers, and in the end carried with them much of the Russian army. With their defiance the coup was doomed and democracy finally won in the entire Soviet bloc.
Gorbachev remembers how Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's dictator, called him to request that tanks be sent into Berlin to preserve the Wall.
But Gorbachev, though still a believer in communism, refused to maintain the Soviet empire at the barrel of a gun.
Him and ordinary Russian's sudden unexpected defence of their newfound freedoms together with the putschist's sheer incompetence defeated the effort to restore totalitarian rule.
Had the Wall bot been built in 1961, would communism have collapsed sooner? Had Gorbachev responded to Ceausescu's plea and sent troops to defend the Wall, would communism in Europe ever have collapsed?
These are unanswerable questions. The questions that could help to start one of those memorable history discussions ...
My argument is that Gorbachev refused to use force anywhere to preserve the Soviet's East European empire...
the idea that he would do so to preserve the Wall seems preposterous.
What does seem clear is, in the end, no wall can hold back democracy.
The suspicious West finally came to believe that Gorbachev and his reforms were genuine.
For me, Gorbachev is our 'knight on a white horse' who finally brought us freedom and democracy.
For pro-communist hardliners and some patriotic Russians he is 'the weak link' who took the powerful Russia with himself down...
Argument is the whole point of history. Disagreement. My word against yours, this evidence against that...
If there were such a thing as absolute truth the debate would loose its lustre.
The moment the Russian Eastern European empire, where I was forced to live, broke down, was the moment I discovered...
..that history was not a matter of received opinion. And yet, history is all in our mind, just like our past...the confection of facts and fantasy, that is how we know the world....
MOON TIGER by Penelope Lively
One night I dreamed a dream
I was lying on a hammock
made out of branches
in a secret place
somewhere in Egypt.
Across the dark sky
flashed scenes from
Claudia Hampton's life.
An unconventional historian,
writer,
a war correspondent
during World War II
dying of cancer
in hospital bed
forced living inward
she moves randomly
across time and place.
When the last scene of her life
shot before my eyes,
I realised this novel is about the ways
in which lives are moulded
by personal memory
and collective past.
Her reflections leave traces
in the air,
long after,
she has died and there was nothing more
to write about...
As a child she always ached
to go higher,
faster,
further
just to find out
that she reached
again
the starting point.
Throughout the life
we move in circles
coming back,
when time comes,
to our beginnings.
She stood out,
with her height,
unruly long hair
and turbulence of mind.
She was 13
learning about Tudors at school
and discovered
that history
was not a matter
of received opinion:
' Henry VIII was not a good king,
Queen Elizabeth was great,
ruling firmly,
cutting off the head of Mary Queen of Scots.'
“Did the Catholics think she was right to cut off Mary's head?”
She asked her teacher who just advised her
to put down what is on the board.
“I will not,”
She answered,
ready for an argument,
my words against yours,
this evidence against that.
There is no such thing
as absolute truth.
She didn't pass her history exam,
and yet she gained more that she has lost.
Truth is tied to words,
the testimony of the page,
moments shower away,
the days of our lives vanish utterly,
fiction can seem more enduring than reality.
From that time on
she concentrated her historical eye
upon years,
places
and most of all
people's arguments,
the whole point of history.
People give power to words,
words give form to dreams,
dreams preserve us for eternity
and yet in life
as in history
the unexpected lies
waiting,
only with hindsight we are wise
and our choices are scrutinised.
She was 19 years old,
climbing a hillside
on the Orkney Island
from which you can look down on
to a neolithic chambered tomb,
there,
they discussed
with her brother,
the Third Reich and the incoming war.
'...from the wrath of the Northmen,
o Lord deliver us...'
a poor monk wrote
these words
sometimes in the 9th century
just before
a chunk of Viking iron
had cut his throat.
She had a race
at Lindisfarne beach,
the place of Viking raids,
with her brother,
before they embarked
on their separate journeys
on the other sides of the world.
She arrived in Cairo,
smelling of the heat,
dung and dust
and kerosene.
The sun rising
from the desert
of the east
reflected on pyramids,
in their shadows,
passing khaki convoys
of 1942
the babbling streets
full of people,
carts and animals
surviving the war years.
“What is like out there?”
She asked one of the soldiers
passing by:
“...the war...being at the front line...”
He looks intently at her:
“It's so many different things,
boring, uncomfortable,
terrifying, exhilarating...”
“You are making history,”
she exclaimed proudly.
“History,” the soldier says.
“I used to be rather keen
on it,
right now,
I feel
rather differently.
Now it is brought
uncomfortably
home to me
that history is true
and that unfortunately
I am part of it.”
The next day the soldier died.
He was just 23.
The aftermath of the war,
disorder,
the struggle to set straight,
everything,
what went wrong,
the counting of living
and the dead.
The drift of the dispossessed
back to their homelands,
national boundaries
make no more sense,
the landscape
has an impersonality
and uniformity
of nowhere,
scuffed about by armies
over and over,
it is a wasteland,
full of survivors,
their faces
grey and scraggy
looking for answers,
that never came,
lost opportunity
of guilt
and blame,
once it is all written down,
we know
what really happened.
The snow, the twenty degrees
below zero of the winter 1941.
The furnace of Stalingrad,
the million dead in Leningrad,
The three million labour slaves...
the two million prisoners of war...
left to die
in the frozen landscape
anonymous grey face,
crouched over shot bodies.
It is in these words
that reality survives.
The twenty millions
misplaced
lost
never really found.
The skeletal buildings,
the bodies chewed by frost,
the screaming faces of wounded men,
this is the record,
this is what history
comes down to
in the end,
this is the language of war.
The war ended
and she reached maturity,
she survived,
busy with prosaic matters
of everyday,
preoccupied with personal gain,
seized by restlessness
and thirsty for fame,
her mind on anything
but destiny.
She wrote Mexico book
out of incredulity,
Hernando Cortez cannot be true.
How could anyone be so greedy,
fanatical and unimaginative
to lead a few hundred men
into alien continent
swarming with a race
devoted to the slaughter of foreigners,
and succeeded.
And when driven out,
set to and built thirteen vessels of war
and carry them across the mountains,
because the only way you can take
a city in the middle of a lake
is with superior shipping
and succeeded again.
Some people thought him the mirror of his time.
It was one of the most extraordinary
confrontations
of people and of cultures
there has ever been.
And also a dark hint of the world to come,
according to Claudia,
a polemical, opinionated, independent
Englishwoman of 1954.
Civilisation came to Mexico.
The victory is one mythology
over another.
The Aztecs, who sacrificed captives
by carving their living hearts
from their bodies,
were deeply shocked
by the Spanish custom
of burning transgressors at the stake.
Cruelty lies in the eye of the beholder...
That is what Claudia had learnt.
She gave long lectures about
'the conflict of evidence'.
Her 'Mexico book' told the tale.
In her dreams
lying
dying
in her hospital bed
the loss
of
civilisation
was heard
in her head.
Loss of an Indian language
of which we have no notion
against the chanting
of the Latin mass.
Loss of human lives
day after day after day...
Loss of the Emperor Charles V
in Madrid
who wants to control
the whole of the New World
not only part of it.
Howl of the mass of humanity
Spaniards and Indians
men, women, children
who died
unfortunate enough
to be around
at a climatic moment in history.
“ And what does
that moment in history
have to do with me?”
Claudia asked herself
and straight away replied:
“Like everything else,
it enlarges me,
it frees me from the prison
of my experience,
it also resonates within that experience.”
Him and her.
She lies looking at him.
“He is more inaccessible
than anyone in the world,”
she thinks:
“..more intensely known
and more inaccessible.”
He stands up and goes to the window.
It occurs to him
she is both
closer to and further from him
than anyone else,
he wishes it were otherwise.
He looks at her
for a moment
with the eyes of then,
she looks back.
Neither wishes to return there,
both celebrate,
in silence,
what will never be lost.
He died five years ago.
She is separated from him now.
No day passes she doesn't think of him,
but she does it
with detachment.
He is complete,
he has beginning and end.
The times in which they were together are complete.
She doesn't mourn him any the less,
but she had to move away,
there is no choice,
he was her sense of identity,
her mirror,
her critic,
judge and ally.
Without him she is diminished.
She has to go back
to her 'childhood history'
In the beginning there was herself
simply her and not her
the egotism of infancy
and when she became a child
she was the centre of all things
she looked at the world through herself
the world of others
observed but not apprehended
a landscape that existed only at her whim
when it ceased to interest her
it no longer existed
and eventually
she grew up
and saw herself
in the awful context of time and place:
everything and nothing.
She started to write 'history books'
that explain
why the war happened
how it evolved
and what its effect had been.
And yet
she forgot
about her soldier's experience-
raw and untreated
that didn't seem to contribute
to any of that.
Suddenly
she couldn't
analyse
dissect
draw conclusion
construct arguments
of it.
It is all clearer to her
than any chronicle of events
but
she can not make sense of it,
perhaps
because
there is none to be made.
She knows
the past is true
unless she is part of everything
she is nothing.
“I have grown old with the century,”
Claudia sighed,
“There is not much left of either of us.”
The century of war.
All history is the history of wars,
but this hundred years,
has excelled itself,
how many million shot, maimed, burned, gassed, starved, frozen, drowned...
She has been on the fringes of two
and shan't see the next,
hopefully,
neither of us do...
Beliefs are relative,
just as our connection with reality.
Tampering with the physical world
is what we do,
extremely well,
in the end,
perhaps,
we shall achieve it definitely.
Finish.
And history will indeed come to an end.
Penelope Lively
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