2020: The Historians' Verdict - HistoryExtra
"‘I think also what it shows is that what happens in America, the display of America's pathologies, and culture wars, remains the topic of obsessional interest to people in other countries, and perhaps particularly to English speaking countries. That all kinds of people have suffered terrible things this year. In a sense, the dog that hasn't barked in the night so far in this conversation is the suffering of the Uighers. A million people being rounded up into effectively concentration camps, women being sterilized, an entire culture being deliberately wiped out. And yet that has had no cut through at all.
And I think that's in part, picking up what [name] said, that we lack the images. There is no footage. They speak a language that most of us don't speak. But, but above all, it's it's it's- not American, and the ability of America to project its dramas remains kind of unrivaled. I do think that that what is different this time around, say from the civil rights movement. I think that the civil rights movement had a kind of greater cut through beyond the English speaking lands. I think that the ideals that were articulated in, in the civil rights movement really cut through and were kind of admired and, and were taken up.
I think that outside the English speaking world, as far as I can tell, attitudes towards Black Lives Matter, and more generally, the culture wars in America are kind of more ambivalent. There's, there's a sense of confusion. And one of the things that kind of brought this home to me was the kind of the cultural, mutual cultural misapprehension that has marked the way that American newspapers have covered the, the killing of the man who beheaded the French teacher, outside Paris, where the emphasis has been all about policemen killing someone, shooting them down, whereas for the French, of course, they're giving it a very different perspective.
Now, in a sense, what France in a way is kind of closer to Britain than than America is. Its experience of colonialism, its relationship to the legacy of colonialism is much closer. But in a sense, we, the impact that the beheading of that teacher and the shooting of the man who did him and the, the incredible kind of surge of, of agonizing that's going on in France and the way in which it's precipitating a kind of a massive standoff between Macron and Erdogan and Imran Khan. I mean, this is this is a massive, massive story. But it had, it simply lacks the news coverage. And it simply lacks the cut through here that America, that American stories do. And I think that that suggests that culturally, we in Britain, you know, we, we are part of the American cultural world. France to us seems more foreign, even though in so many ways it isn't. In so many ways France is much closer to our experience than America is.’...
'Black Lives Matter has never been a local organization. If you go back and look at the original sort of statements about themselves that were made. It's not, it's it's it's seeing police brutality, racism, as this global project, to argue that somehow is just kind of this what's happening in the Atlantic between the Anglo American world I mean, it's it's cutting out what's happening in terms of why is it that people in Nigeria who are fighting against SARS are proclaiming Black Lives Matter'...
‘I don't know what's going on in China or the Uighers. I just found about it. It probably wasn't happening until I found out about it, right. We are in a moment where the world and people who are protesting and challenging Empire and challenging racism and challenging the western political order, they're having these conversations, they they they they're the ones who are who are leading this, right? And so to have this idea that somehow, because I don't know about it, because the mainstream media hasn't covered them, that they don't exist. And as a historian, we know that that happens all the time. Right?
That you know, which is why it makes history fascinating, you know, you go to a moment in history, and somebody is claiming, you know, in 19 1899, that the King Leopold's atrocities that happened in the Belgian Congo were not existing, right? Well, we know that most people didn't believe that it was existing. Right. But we know that it was. So what does that moment teach us about how we should evaluate our own moment? Maybe the things that we believe, just like what, you know, many Belgians believed to be true about Congo in 1899, perhaps whatever it is that we think of as being true in 2020, is not true, and is not accurate. And there are, if we are still living in the shadow of Empire, it probably means that somewhere that Empire is doing things that empires have done in the past.’
‘You see, I think that one of the, one of the sources of privilege for English speakers has has, and perhaps particularly initially, for Britain, and more recently for America, is to assume that their agonies, their concerns are of universal import. Why is the name of George Floyd spoken on the streets of London, but not say the name of of Uigher or someone on the margins of Nigeria? It's because of the huge cultural hegemony that that America wields. Now, I think that 2020 will come to be seen as an age where the conceit of people in the West and perhaps particularly in America, that that their values, their concerns, their issues are universal, will, will come to be seen exactly as that, as a conceit. And I think that that there are other straws in the wind that have happened this year. That suggests that all kinds of values, all kinds of frameworks that we in the West have always taken for granted and have have rather assumed are not culturally distinctive, but I just part of of the mental furniture that everyone has, that that assumption has come under stress’...
‘I just take issue with the idea that, that the, that holding secularism as an ideal is a Western one. In the case of India, at least, I would say that it was fundamentally written into the Constitution of independent India and so, and, there's no incompatibility for, hasn't been incompatibility for Indians in being both religious and believing in secularism at a state level. What we're seeing now is changing that. It's changing the definition of what it means to be Indian. And it is obviously drawing on this intensely religious form of nationalism. So I just. I'm not sure that it's an imposition of the West so much as something that was, I mean, you could argue that many of those writing the Constitution of India in 1947 had been educated in the West, but I do feel that there there was something of, native to it as well as being something imposed’
‘But I think that the idea that there is something called the secular and that there are things called religions that exist that are removed the secular is a basically a kind of Protestant idea that the British took, and which India absorbed and the Indian Constitution, the secular constitution is a legacy of the Raj. And I think that that is absolutely what, what Modi is reacting against, in exactly the same way that Erdogan is reacting against the legacy of Ataturk, who again, was very consciously looking to a kind of European model to how to structure it’...
‘We've talked a lot about history and about politics. Do you think there are any dangers of history becoming too politicized?’
‘History is always political, I would say. Because I think that, as you can tell… there are people who kind of see history in a certain way. And that's going to be their prerogative. And it's like, counting out the people that existed and have existed for years out of the conversation. And then there are people who look and say, I want to get a fuller picture of this moment in time or this, this this period in time, and I'm going to look at all the primary sources that are available to me to get as many of the perspectives on that moment.
So I think history is always political. I think that anytime you start to argue that somehow having empires account for themselves is more political than having them not count for themselves. That's a danger, because you're, you know, both of those are political acts, both, that say, arguing that, for instance, you know, history has to take into account colonial and racial legacies and arguing that it doesn't. The the view that is saying it doesn't is just as political has just as much of an agenda has just as much as a purpose as the one who say that they that it is. So history is political, you can't argue with the primary sources and the research and what it is you're looking at, you can argue, you can kind of get in and kind of see what is an archive and that debate that is happening, particularly amongst among scholars, that is welcome. But you know, you can't argue with that somehow, there's political history, and then there's non politicized history.’"
This is a good way to refute claims that Black Lives Matter is justified because of US - or even global - police brutality, since it's an admission that it has a global agenda. That fact that it manifests in a black country just underlines how misleading its name is (even if we already knew that, since Black Lives lost to black violence don't matter)
Somehow I doubt Uigher woman doesn't question her Empire narrative
Claiming that history is always political doesn't mean it shouldn't be as objective as possible. That's like saying all men are mortal so there's no point trying to live longer - it's telling that the question was about it being too politicised, but the answer was about it being politicised (at all)
