[lbo-talk] Germans should stop feeling Holocaust guilt:Ahmadinejad

[Sean Johnson Andrews]

>
> On Jun 2, 2006, at 3:08 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> A usable past
>
> Is a past supposed to be usable? That term always made me uneasy -  like 
> you're cherry-picking history for a tendentious purpose.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________

[Bracketing, of course, the question of what the past is used for, this 
seems pretty in line with the "Soviet Joke" "The future is certain, it is 
only the past that is unpredictable" with which Larry Levine frames his book 
"The Unpredictable Past."  In any case, it also reminded me of this passage 
from Charles Beard.]

'What, then, is this manifestation of omniscience called history? It
is, as Croce says, contemporary thought about the past. History as past
actuality includes, to be sure, all that has been done. said, felt, and
though by human beings on this planet since humanity began its long
career. History as record embraces the monuments, documents. and
symbols which provide such knowledge as we have or can find respecting
past actuality. But it is history as thought, not as actuality, record, or
specific knowledge, that is really meant when the term history is used In
its widest and most general significance. It is thought about past 
actuality,
instructed and delimited by history as record and knowledge--record
and knowledge authenticated by criticism and ordered with the help of
the scientific method. This is the final, positive, inescapable definition.
It contains all the exactness that is possible, and all the all the 
bewildering
problems inherent in the nature of thought and the relation of the thinker 
to
the thing thought about.

'Although this definition of history may appear, at first glance, 
distressing
to those who have been writing lightly about "the science of
history" and "the scientific method" in historical research and 
construction,
it is in fact in accordance with the most profound contemporary
thought about history, represented by Croce, Riezler, Karl Mannheim,
Mueller-Armack, and Heussi, for example. It is in keeping also with
the obvious and commonplace. Has it not been said for a century or
more that each historian who writes history is a product of his age, and
that his work reflects the spirit of the times, of a nation, race, group, 
class,
or section? No contemporary student of history really believes that
Bossuet, Gibbon, Mommsen, or Bancroft could be duplicated to-day.
Every student of history knows that his colleagues have been influenced
in their selection and ordering of materiais by their biases, prejudinces,
beliefs, affections, general upbringing, and experience, particularly social
and economic; and if he has a sense of propriety, to say nothing of
humor, he applies the canon to himself, leaving no exceptions to the
rule. The pallor of waning time, if not of death, rests upon the latest
volume of history, fresh from the roaring press.

'Why do we believe this to be true? The answer is that every written
history--of a village, town, county, state, nation, race, group, class, 
idea,
or the wide world--is a selection and arrangement of facts, of recorded
fragments of past actuality. And the selection and arrangement of facts--a
combined and complex intellectual operation--is an act of choice, 
conviction,
and interpretation respecting values, is an act of thought. Facts,
multitudinous and beyond calculation, are known, but they do not select
themselves or force themselves automatically into any fixed scheme of
arrangement in the mind of the historian. They are selected and ordered
by him as he thinks.'

Charles A. Beard. "Written History as an Act of Faith." The American 
Historical Review, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jan., 1934) p. 219-220.