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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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Historical injustice depends a lot on where you start the clock.

I'll try to keep this mostly general, because much of history is under debate, especially about culture war issues, and litigating ancient history for current politics is a fool's game (if potentially entertaining). This phenomenon is not relegated to any particular side, it is rather the method by which fact and fiction become myth. It is how partially-understood history becomes dogma, and drives our current politics and society.

The history of humanity is a history of injustice, conflict and strife. When we look to history to explain our modern world and inform our modern politics, much of the divide between us can be discerned by where we start our "clocks". One notices that, for instance, in the Jewish/Palestinian arguments, one side likes to start the clock in the 1970s and one starts it in the 1930s. Real history, of course, is not divided artificially. Every conflict leads to the next, every injustice to the next. Progress happens on a long enough timeline, but there are enough reverses along the way to outlive any of us.

This is something to watch in ourselves, as much as in others. To think about where we're starting the clock, and whether something important might have happened before that to produce that situation.

To take a silly hobby-horse theory/hot take of mine as example, I think the british fought on the right side of WW2, but the wrong side of WW1. I think the historical context WW2 is completely dependent on WW1, and that of WW1 is inextricable from the Franco-Prussian war, the countries, borders and alliances it produced, and thus the clock should start in 1870 rather than 1913. Anyone who starts the clock in 1913 is a Francophile.

One of my favorite hobby horses: Start the "Colonialism" clock in 1492 to claim European colonization of the Americas was wrong, but start it in 1452 and Istanbul should be part of Greece (or rather Greece should be ruled from Constantinople).

Quite so. Who was colonizing who was pretty different only fifty years before, there was still a muslim caliphate in Spain then, and the Ottomans were invading Hungary, and had colonized most of the Balkans.

Honestly with Asian history there's a ton of hilarity if you expand the 'who's colonizing who' slightly further.

Most of Vietnam as we know it was carved out less than 500 years ago from a bunch of locals who were subjugated, eradicated and generally mollywhopped but ask them and they've been in charge since time immemorial.