Treating history like shit

Jennifer Frances Armstrong

1 hr ·

What's weird is the way contemporary Westerners seem not to believe in history. But certainly they do believe in their own history. Its yours they don't believe in.

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  LeeAnne Hensley I don't think a lot of them even believe in their own history. That's why they now appropriate someone else's history and claim it is their own.

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  Jennifer Frances Armstrong Yeah, the fundamental Western weakness is in terms of the historical sense. I notice that now the historical sense even becomes pathologized (when convenient). It seems chic to say that if you make any reference to the past, you "live in the past". That is like saying a nuclear physicist lives in a nucleus. It really doesn't make sense and is a form of anti-intellectualism.

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  LeeAnne Hensley Or if you make observations about the past, and they include any event that happened that was less than joyous, you're suddenly accused of blaming someone else for your problems, and you're also accused of making excuses not to be better than your past. Which are both absurd claims. Because we cannot possibly expect to overcome things we've experienced in the past or transcend them without first acknowledging that they happened. And one can certainly speak of past events without trying to relive them over and over again.

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  Jennifer Frances Armstrong I was just listening to a video by a guy who went on and on through several videos complaining about people who "lived in the past". He then went on to narrate how at a tender age he was accosted by those who spoke of the past in a way that he felt put an unnatural burden on him. in explaining this, he repeated his own experience of his own past -- which, somehow we are supposed to take as relevant and important. Either everybody's pasts are important or nobody's pasts are important. This poor fellow felt traumatized by an older woman telling him of her experiences of the past.

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  Jennifer Frances Armstrong As for experiences being "less than joyous", I find the current crop of people automatically assume that if you are saying anything about the past it must be wholly negative

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