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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31645 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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If even the Holocaust is turned into "boring reality," devoid of those more powerful and special qualities of narratives, reduced to another part of the "outdated" and "misinformed" story that conservative, religious boomers tell themselves about how America was great, and becoming a "race card" that Israel plays whenever it's criticized for whatever it did in Palestine on any given week, I suspect that not only will the Nazis be turned into "just another war-monging power" from an age few remember as anything but the boring, deadly past

If?

When.

The horrors of history always end up being mundane, and so it will end up too with the XXth century. It's only a question of time.

The horrors of history always end up being mundane, and so it will end up too with the XXth century. It's only a question of time.

I'm more pessimistic, I think ideology can buttress whatever gap the passage of time leaves. Anti-semites still hate Jews for things that happened in Biblical times (or Quranic(?) times), Irish nationalists were more militant against the British in the 1920s than they were in the 1840s.

On the other hand, the past can be scoured indefinitely long ago and reinterpreted to fit the current narrative. See how Columbus went from being a point of pride of Italo-Americans and that celebrations were held to commerorate the 500th anniversary of his discovery, to him now being vilified.

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