The stunning power of historical imagination.

Miscellaneous General
1

Some examples.

The white marbled Greek statues are not meant to be austere colourless figures. The paint plastered on them has fallen off. If you ever actually saw a Greek sculpture with the paint still on it, it looks as loudly coloured as an Hindu idol.

The first settlers in the United States didn’t dress fancily with pointed hats and dark clothing, even when farming or constructing. What paintings assumed them to look like is based on British Pilgrims who stayed back home, not actual inhabitants of the New World.

The Vikings never wore horned helmets, nor were giant muscular men. That was just exaggeration, recounted by terrified Roman men.

Ancient people of India didn’t look one bit like how TV serials or paintings on the Mahabharat or the Ramayana depict them to be. Many of the supposed events that happened then had happened a few millenia back. A few centuries after they happened, some scholar wrote down what was passed down to him from memory and oral tradition. Then another millenia later, most of these writings were destroyed, with few copies still lasting in readable condition, picked up by medieval kings in the eastern part of the subcontinent. They translated them into the languages of the day, making assumptions on meaning of phrases, and the painters depicted clothing based on what medieval people of the day looked like and not what the original people of those times actually did.

But even those translated copies were lost or destroyed, with a few still remaining. When the Indian nationalist movement started in the colonial era, India was just a geographic region, and its loose inhabitants were in search of a common past or a culture. If they didn’t have any, it was necessary to invent one. Taking some of those scriptures, they attempted a rennaissance based on a whole new interpretation, and filling in the gaps as they saw fit. Thus, newspapers like Kesari and journalists like B. G. Tilak “revived” festivals that may never have existed before in India, like the sinking of Ganesh statues in the Bombay sea and Dusshera. In short, much of what is now called “Hindu culture” is actually an invention of 200 years ago, based on pure assumption and casuitry.

2

Yeah I had seen a special about the Greek statues on the Discovery Channel. It was pretty amazing and I must admit I was surprised to learn they were painted. Fascinating.

3

The puritans were so not creators of religious tolerance. They did wear more than black-colored clothes. Catholic Maryland actually had religious tolerance before any other colony (even rhode island).

We potentially know more about china than europe since the chinese have more printed sources. There were about 3 other cultures in china before the chinese shang dynasty.

Ancient cultures and civilizations (like egypt, sumeria, and the indus) lasted thousands of years. The egyptians were actually the first “civilization” in history (historians tend to call that which has a state a civilization but if we say that society=civilization then egypt was the first).

4

I like to try to imagine how the everyman lived in different times and places. It took a lot of capital to be able to afford to pay someone to learn to read and write and then sit around and record things, so the historical record overwhelmingly depicts the lives and times of the wealthy and powerful. It’s like if the only record of American civilization that were to survive was that of Hollywood and Washington, DC - hardly a representative picture of American culture.

I also like to try to reverse the modernist arrogance towards the past, where we view all past generations as “stupid” or “backward” simply because they didn’t have the technologies that we now have, thanks to them. I tend to believe that humans were a good deal cleverer than the modernist view of things admits. In fact, when you begin to confront today’s superstitions (benevolent, all-embracing, social-welfare government, inflationary central banks, safety through security theater and police state policies, etc.) it’s hard not to begin thinking that our ancestors were, in fact, cleverer than we are.

There was a movie made some time back called Timeline, based on the Crichton novel, where some modern humans get time-transported back to medieval times… sans their cell phones and other technology. They’re as helpless as newborn puppies and they have to receive a lot of help from the locals to accomplish even the most basic tasks.

I also enjoyed the 13th Warrior in this regard. Even if it isn’t historically accurate in any way, it helped me just visualize living in a time and place so remote and what life for the average person probably really looked like (it usually involved lots of mud). I liked the scene depicting treatment of a battle wound with distilled cow urine.

Did you know that Arab soldiers around the time of Muhammed would pack their swords in a mixture of camel dung and sand to preserve the metal?

History is fascinating. To be meaningful, it also requires a great deal of interpolation and imagination, even for recent events.

Clayton -

5

I learned most of that from Cracked.com. Really

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@fakename: You mentioned Egypt and that reminded me of the book Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization by Charles Adams, which I’m currently reading. He makes the point that tax records are an oft-neglected, yet very objective and, therefore, important part of the historical record. It’s boring sifting through them but you can learn a lot about the way things really were.

He discusses Egyptian taxation. They had a tax bureaucracy that would put the IRS to shame. Adams says that Egyptian taxmen would actually inspect the cooking areas of Egyptian housewives to ensure they were not using their own (untaxed) oil drippings to cook. Instead, you were required to purchase (taxed) cooking oil from the approved vendors. Those who do not learn history are damned to repeat it… and America doesn’t know history. But at least we know what the endgame is!

Clayton -

7

Yeah, but sometimes the imagination really skews the picture.

Look at war movies like Platoon, Apocalypse Now,.etc.

The Vietnam War was not fought by mixed regionalities of New Yorkers, Bostonians, Californians, and Marylanders. It was not fought by a mixture of rich people, poor people, middle class people. It was not fought by a mixture of races, be it black, Hispanic, Jewish, native American, Asian,.etc.

It was almost completely fought by very poor working class white people from one single and small section of the United States in the mountains of the Rocky Midwest.

Yes, the old Anglo-Celtic warriors - who used to inhabit the Scottish highlands, rural parts of Wales, Ireland, and England, who went to the New World where Londoners and other English and European groups still derided them as “crackers” and “rednecks” as they did back in the Old World, where they went back right to the kind of mountains they once used to inhabit - descended back from those mountains when the call of war came. We do not live in the past, but the past in us.

Same on the French side. There were no French people fighting Dien Bien Phu. There were Algerians, Morrocans, Syrians, Cambodians, and other colonial people and also German members of the French foreign legion who had just been released from Russian gulags for having fought in Stalingrad.

8

yet I don’t think his analysis would apply to the naqada culture or would it?

I mentioned this egyptian culture as important because of its extensive trade links and the relatively high quality goods which it produced and sold to the world -all without the need for a (obvious) state.

9

Yeah, one little misconception that we have constructed in our age is how trade/finance globalization is a new thing that is attacking the traditional nation.

The truth is that the modern nation-state was once a very radical thing, and we are far less globalized than we actually used to be. Before WWI, we had just reached the peak of globalization, where a man in Britain could use his New York financial intermediary to purchase Japanese industrial bonds. The famous 1905 war of Japan was credited to the industrial power of Japan financed by a single financial executive in New York who arranged funds from all across the world and gave it to the Japanese (I found it out from Ian Buruma’s columns).

John Maynard Keynes said that in the late 19th century, he could still purchase bonds for any municipality in any part of the world from a single phone call and a viewing of a catalog, and could import items by mail order across Germany, Italy, or even across continents with ease.

It was only when WWI broke out that the years after the war saw nations closing themselves to each other out of fear that they may let entry of undesirable foreign elements.

Conservatives often say that the nation-state is an embodiment of the historical and cultural character of a people. Only this is a lie. Most modern ethnonationalist creations are a fiction rationalized after the nation-state was created by force. The modern day nation of Macedon has absolutely nothing to do with the Macedonians under Philip; it’s a group of Bulgarian dictators who wanted a country for themselves. Same for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Libya, and others. In the past, there was no such thing as the Russian people. There was also no such thing as the German people or the Italian people. Let alone the Spanish people. That this is somehow used as a justification to stop practical daily matters of trade and business that go back to times before those nations were created is an example of how badly we distort the history under which we live.

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There’s evidence that Islam wasn’t founded until centuries after the “Muslim” conquests. Said conquests were thus Arab conquests, exploiting the power vacuum left by the disastrous war between the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires. Apparently the decision of the provinces to accept Arab rule had a lot to do with taxes, which the Arabs promised would be far lower under them.

The Hebrews may have been polytheistic all the way until the Babylonian Exile.

Most societies didn’t have anything recognizable as political rulers until relatively late in history. What they did have were religious leaders and (in times of warfare) military commanders.

The Ancient Greek akropoleis had their origin as places of clan/tribal refuge during blood feuds.

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Exactly. Go back and look at a political map of the Germanic area of Europe from, say, 500 years ago, let alone 1000 years ago. Several of the states in modern Germany were once ruled by a sovereign (e.g. Schleswig-Holstein) and those, too, were aggregates of older, smaller sovereign territories. What I find fascinating is how language, racial, religious, cultural and other similarities have been leveraged to create the modern nation state. These commonalities arose organically and were really variations on a theme. Look at the languages spoken in India. Northern Indian languages have more in common with one another than they have with Southern Indian languages. I’m sure anthropologists must have a word for the idea that geography dictates culture… where you live determines what you speak, how you dress, and so on, and if you and I live 10 miles from each other, our cultural similarities are probably greater than those between two people who live 100 miles from each other.

Clayton -

12

In the natural world, Greece used to have a population of native lions and wolves were much more common in britain.

The people of the old world never had potatoes, tomatoes, corn, etc. these are all new world creations. Bananas are from africa, the watermelon was developed in india and reached the mid-east in the middle ages, lemons are native to china.

Also, chemistry, magic, and alchemy were all intertwined intellectually till the 19th century -Issac Newton studied alchemy for 20 yrs. and Boyle considered his laws to have an alchemical basis.

the works of pythagoras about theology were burned by the romans and not a trace of them exists today. Atheism (probably as epicurean-atomism) was growing in late-republic rome.

There were woman philosophers -a small group but interesting nonetheless; some anticipated leibniz’s monadism.

13

To contribute something to the topic as intended: The French used to outnumber the Russians. And the English used to make up for only a portion of the French.

Some corrections:

**

It is true that in those years the foreign legion was heavily German. However extremely few German veterans of Stalingrad survived Soviet captivity so it was certainly not due to them. IIRC something like 10,000 out of 91,000 survived.

Naturally however, the Soviets captured Germans in other battles as well, most of those survived.

This is news to me. Those who fought were overwhelmingly poor yes, but that is it as far as valid generalisations go. I distincly remember reading that until 1968 the blacks were slightly over represented in Vietnam to them become slightly under represented. I may also point out that your geography is wrong. The Scotch-Irish hillbillies are characteristically to be found in the Appalachians. Not in the Rocky Mountains. And as far as the Midwest goes it is flat not rocky.

14

A point of contention:

I have noticed conservatives at Chronicles writting in these tones, but generally speaking there is no special correlation between conservatism and ethnonationalism. In fact when ethnonationalism came into existance it was among the burgher class and was aligned against the conservative (cosmopolitan) classes.

You are mixing apples and oranges. Macedonia, Syria, Iran etc are not ethnic nations (albeit Macedonians delude themselves that they are which in a sense then makes them into one, albeit one built on Communist era social engineering rather than on a distinct ethnic group). They are not national states. As such they do not serve to illustrate your point at all. Arab Nationalism does not strive for Libya or Iraq. It strives to push them aside to make way for a United Arab Republic.

Wrong in the case of the Germans, the Italians and the Russians. They are ethnic peoples. In their case the idea that they are kin and that this is important did not arise because it was supported by the state. It arose in opposition to the state as it then existed. German and Italian nationalisms deprived numerous small states of their legitimacy, ultimately destroying them. And all three nationalisms stood in opposition to the conservative order which divided people along class lines (aristocracy, burghers, peasants-serfs) which were decried as artificial state creations, unlike the naturally occuring folk language.

The very fact that German, Italian and to a point Russian nationalism came into existance before their respective national states serves to prove that it is not a state creation. Now if you want to continue to call such nations imaginary because they are not eternal but only awoken at a particular point in time that is your choice, however all culture is imaginary in this sense, and this is not something that ethnonationalists would deny in the first place. There is always a distinction between a self-aware people or a nation and a people that while ethnically distinct is not self-aware. That is the whole point of why the 18th and 19th century national riennesance luminaries and movements are given such prominence in the national historical narratives.

Also Spain does not actually claim to be an ethnic nation. Neither does France or the UK for example. On the contrary. “Exclusive” ethnonationalism is demonised in West Europe in favour of the supposedly more enlightened “inclusive” civic nationalism where nationality is determined by state borders and certificates of citizenship rather than by ancestry and self-identification as in Central and East Europe.

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Hmm, that is quite fascinating.

Yes, I mean that in the sense of people being self-aware, although my examples were badly chosen. A better example would have been central Asian tribals. A nomadic Uzbeki is suddenly told that he is a member of Kyrgyzstan and he is thus a subject to those people, because he supposedly shares a common history and culture, even though he does not.

@Clayton

Actually, we could be living 10 miles to each other and have cultures closer to people 100 miles away. If we were on both sides of a mountain range, and lived in coastal areas, it would be easier for us to take a boat to the next nearest region than to cross the mountain. For this reason, the Danes had a culture closer to the British than the Norwegians or Swedes. And for a more irrelevant example, I was playing Medieval II: Total War, and as Denmark, I had far more contacts with the regions of the Hanseatic League than I had with Poland, which was much closer.

16

Soviet nationality policies are a chapter all to themselves. In Central Asia specifically there was so little of any kind of ethno-national awarness (identites were social, religious and tribal) that when boxing in these people into categories they dealt with the Bolsheviks actually resorted to social differences to determine who is to be the member of what to-be-newly-aware nationality. Thus the poorer you were the more likely you were to be categorised a Kyrgyz, and the wealthier you were the more likely you would be categorised an Uzbek. This made up for a geographical curious Uzbek-Kyrgyz border where the floor of the fertile Ferghana Valley was given to Uzbekistan, but the slopes of the valley were given to Kyrgizia. Naturaly the people living on the slopes would be less wealthy and less advanced in way of lifestyle than people living in a flat area.

Anyway enough of off topic for now. Let me try to make an on topic contribution: The kilt, now considered an all Scottish symbol, was a part of Higlands garb and thus only ever worn by a culturally distinguishable minority of Scots.

17

Africans werent opposed to slavery. Actually a lot of black people owned slaves in Brazil and slavery was quite common among african kingdoms.

Martial arts are by no means an eastern-only thing. Actually two of the most practical martial arts are from the west: wrestling and boxing. Most of chinese kung-fu is considered obsolete and not really viable against an resisting opponent, except for modern sanda/sanshou.

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Now, I think it’s time for a little Clyde Wilson.

It’s not who Lincoln was, but what people thought he represented.

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Martial arts are by no means an eastern-only thing. Actually two of the most practical martial arts are from the west: wrestling and boxing. Most of chinese kung-fu is considered obsolete and not really viable against an resisting opponent, except for modern sanda/sanshou.

That’s actually true, and northern temple shaolin. Wing chun is great for competition fighting. Punching and kicking only go so far when someone’s really coming at you, the things to learn are akido, judo, wrestling, and other “body manipulation” techniques. That’s what Bruce came out about; telling people there is only one style, yours. Styles are not effective, you are.

Bodhidharma, the legendary creator of the fist (techniques) of shaolin, and zen buddhism, likely did not exist.