Clipmarks | pascual's 'history' clips

the myth of nation-state

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:08:45 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: syndicate

This fall, thousands of college students will be taught a myth presented as fact. It is a myth that has helped fuel wars and may hinder finding solutions to the world’s biggest problems. Though the origin of this myth is cloudy, science has proven its falsity, and a globalized world has rendered it anachronistic. I am talking about the nation-state.

Tags: politics, history, psychology

East vs West

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:50:43 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: globalist

Clip Source: www.theglobalist.com

Between 1598 and 1894, there were only three brief wars that involved China — the 1659-60 and the 1767-71 wars with Burma, and the 1788-89 war with Vietnam, as well as two wars that did not involve China — the Siamese-Burmese wars of 1607-18 and of 1660-62.

Indeed, insofar as China is concerned, we should speak of a 500 years’ peace since, in the 200 years preceding the 1592 Japanese invasion of Korea, China was at war with other East Asian states only during the invasion of Vietnam in 1406-28 to restore the Tran dynasty.

Tags: history

globalization 1.0

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:44:14 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: globalist

Clip Source: www.theglobalist.com

Asian world, 500-1500 CE, was a place of great empires and large capital cities. In Southeast Asia were the kingdoms of Srivajaya, Pagan, Angkor, Champa and Dai Viet.

China went through dynastic changes but was strongly linked to the rest of Asia. India had empires as well — the Kushans, the sultanates and the Mughals based at Delhi — as well as the Cholas and Vijayanagara in the south.

Tags: economy, history, globalization

on nationalism

Thu, 01 May 2008 19:24:57 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: yaleglobal

Clip Source: yaleglobal.yale.edu

f course, in many of these countries the ideology of the nation state with its homogenizing and aggrandizing propensities was an import from the West. Western history is littered with the devastation at home and abroad caused by the overbearing nation state. The memory of colonial oppression and defeat by the West and the longstanding reality of its international economic and military domination add fuel to the ultra-nationalism in Asia, both on the chauvinist right and the anti-imperialist left. The misdeeds and the ambiguity of a country’s own history do not deter the nationalist zeal and myth-making. As the 19th-century French philosopher, Ernst Renan, famously said, part of being a nation is to get its history wrong.

Tags: globalization, society, identity

lessons from the 20th century

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 00:48:16 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: nyreviewbooks

Clip Source: www.nybooks.com

The twentieth century is hardly behind us but already its quarrels and its achievements, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory. In the West we have made haste to dispense whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do likewise. In the wake of 1989, with boundless confidence and insufficient reflection, we put the twentieth century behind us and strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the unipolar Ameri-can moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and the free market.

Tags: history, society

being polyglot

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:25:57 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: eco

Clip Source: www.economist.com

Still, differences in idiom do teach us about culture and history. Where an English-speaker says “the die is cast”, a Mexican says “the rice is cooked”. The proverb “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” becomes, in Russian, “When there are no fish, even a crab is a fish,” which reveals a surprising amount about what survival once entailed for the typical Russian peasant.

Tags: society, history, language

the second world

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 03:09:31 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: iht

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

As the historian Arnold Toynbee observed half a century ago, Western imperialism united the globe, but it did not assure that the West would dominate forever — materially or morally. Despite the “mirage of immortality” that afflicts global empires, the only reliable rule of history is its cycles of imperial rise and decline, and as Toynbee also pithily noted, the only direction to go from the apogee of power is down.

Tags: globalization

stretching the mind

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 23:37:32 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: edge

Clip Source: edge.org

Certainty feels good and is a powerful force in leadership. The challenge, as Bertrand Russell puts it in The History of Western Philosophy, is "To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation".

Tags: philosophy

the influence of 1905

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 19:47:17 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: globalist

Clip Source: www.theglobalist.com

But every attempt to explain human beings made them yet more incomprehensible, revealing mankind’s contradictions in all their starkness. Good and evil came from the same source, and inhumanity was part and parcel of human nature.

Tags: history

the future of US imperialism

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 22:13:19 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: latimes

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

The alternative is to go the route of the British before 1914 and imagine that because a certain set of political arrangements seems best to us, they must also be best for the world -- and destined to endure indefinitely. The real choice that confronts us is not between a second American century and anarchy but between a multipolar world in which we will play an important role and an anti-American century.

Tags: globalization, history

on death

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:04:47 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: edge

Clip Source: edge.org

I'm optimistic about death. For the first time in the history of life on Earth, it is possible—not easy, but possible—for conscious animals like us to have a good death. A good death is a great triumph, and something to be sought, accepted, and cherished. Indeed, a good death should be recorded and broadcast as a moral example to us all.

Tags: ethics

immigration to the usa

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 03:15:05 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: globalist

Clip Source: www.theglobalist.com

The U.S. population has doubled as a result of migration since the country's founding. The flow of immigration — including highs and lows — is directly correlated to the events taking place in history at the time.

Tags: globalization

retrospective distorsion in history

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 19:45:36 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: LA Times

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

YET IT IS Taleb's assault on traditional historiography that is most relevant here. Since Thucydides, it is true, historians have encouraged us to explain low-probability calamities (like wars) after the fact. Such storytelling helps us to make sense of a random disaster. It also enables us to apportion blame. Generations of historians have toiled in this way to explain the origins of such great calamities as, say, World War I, constructing elegant narrative chains of causes and effects, heaping opprobrium on this or that statesman.

Tags: history

history teaching

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:44:56 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: eco

Clip Source: economist.com

Many states still see history teaching, and the inculcation of foundation myths, as a strategic imperative; others see it as an exercise in teaching children to think for themselves. And the experience of several countries suggests that, whatever educators and politicians might want, there is a limit to how far history lessons can diverge in their tone from society as a whole.

Tags: society, education

on slavery

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 19:35:23 GMT

clipped by: pascual

Clip Source: www.economist.com

Yaw Bedwa of the University of Ghana says there has been a “general amnesia in Ghana about slavery”. The role of the chiefs is particularly sensitive, as they still play a big role in Ghana. “We don't discuss slavery,” says Barima Kwame Nkye XII, a paramount chief in the town of Assin Mauso. He defends domestic slavery in the past as a generally benevolent institution, and insists that the chiefs had little to do with the slave trade.

Tags: history slavery