History is the most powerful knowledge a human being can possess. I am stating that despite my engineering background. Understanding history can be a powerful tool that literally unblocks your vision of the world, people, life. As such, it can also turn into one of the most dangerous tools in some people’s hands.
Historical knowledge may be useful or dangerous, constructive or catastrophic. It all depends on what one wants to do with it. It all depends on the objective each one of us has. If we all agree that the human being will not possibly be able to cover all time & space aspects of history in all its depth, then we see that history is a continuous and (alas!) neverending and eternally incomplete learning process.
History, just like any other acquired skill, follows the typical spiral of knowledge: Explore -> Comprehend -> Create -> Explore -> …. The spiral, as said above is neverending. How you decide to use this, how you decide to continue your learning and steer your learning spiral further into the time & space solely depends on what you want to achieve and what is primarily your drive and your goal.
There are patriots out there that easily turn to nationalism. Out of their love for country, they steer this learning process into the direction of what they want to find out and learn. They select their historical sources so that they hear what they want to hear, typically from national sources. They get deep (as opposed to wide) into their belief. This is not necessarily wrong yet, depending on how far you go. They explore the preferred sources, they comprehend (only) the national facette of their history, they create either stories, speeches, decisions or simply points of view, that they further use to magnetize people, seek and their approval, which in turn motivates them to learn further down this path. I will not give you examples of extremist views of super-intelligent people who I am sure loved their country, but they ended up in hurting other people during their creation stage.
My view on history is as objective as can be. I understand that the society in which we live now is a blend, it is a complex convolutional process (told you I have an engineering background…) in which in time, several spatial stimuli, some weak, some strong, influenced the course of history in a non-linear and recursive way. I am not trying to separate and cleanse history from the foreign stimuli. I am not trying to justify that the territory that I live in belonged to my country (which is little older than 150 years old by the time I am writing this) for centuries. I am not trying to seek the greatness of my people and justify or reason, ask for the lost land etc. I am embracing the life I am living, I respect the culture of the people around me, I am trying to understand where this blend comes from, by decomposing the centuries-old influences that I am reading about. But I am not de-convoluting what has been convoluted, I am not trying to desperately or nostalgically claim pure forms of historical expressions. Overall, I am not judgmental, as I fear this will cloud my understanding.
The objective historian that I want to be will not use processed forms of history lessons, expressed through the lenses of people with a subjective interest. He will search for (i) diversity and (ii) the purest forms of historical sources. Diversity means that if you need to read a book on an historical subject, you need to read at least some books, presenting the problem from all points of view. Interested in understanding history of Transilvania? Then read at least both an Hungarian and a Romanian book. Don’t criticize, just see what makes sense to your adult brain and strip down the facts from the propaganda. Use your own logic to connect the factual dots and comprehend.
But it is the pure forms of history (ii) that catch my attention. This is a powerful tool to use, though it requires time, passion and patience. The purest forms are art (visual arts, architecture, music, poetry), cuisine, language, old habits or sayings, fashion etc. These are vernacular expressions that, to some extent, we find untouched even today. Exploring them will not disclose how or when, but they will present an influence that will help the reader or the student comprehend. Then we can create, which is what this blog is attempting in its own way. Then, it forces us to explore some more. As we all know that the art lover would have to run a life quest just to be able to cover all the artifacts of historical architecture or paintings or…. This is how I choose to steer and spin my history knowledge spiral. And more often it calls for a broad and holistic approach to look at all aspects and all the pure forms discussed above.
One last thing… smearing the milk with dung is an irreversible process. It will be impossible anymore to tell the milk from the horse s**t. People who now try to bleach this tainted milk, in my view, are awfully wrong. In the majority of the countries we now live in, there is a steady state of peace and territorial claims today. There are exceptions to this statement, of course, that should be treated separately. Our grandparents did not have this luxury, they had to fight for their ideals, national identity or simply a land for their people. They fought with an ideal that, based on what I said above, was not 100% true or clean, but they had no other choice. They defeated some other people who had a similar belief, with their own arguments. They had to do that to survive in order for us to live. Now, we should put behind us all these differences. Whether what happened in the past was right or wrong, or ”righter” or ”wronger”, this should not matter now. Trolling the Internet with hatred, consumed energy on trying to put a fellow Facebook-er with his back against the wall, just because his grandfather defeated yours in a fair or unfair combat, proving him wrong and so on… to me it is pure nonsense. Keep the borders as they are, respect your society and your minorities, don’t try to change the past and launch new, unnecessary provocations (e.g. turning Agia Sofia into a mosque?). Rather maintain the fragile equilibrium of today’s history, move on and use your energy to understand the past and construct a better and smarter future. Don’t go back longing for those pure stimuli of history, but identify the changing process and how the present has taken form from it.
Loving your country means understanding its past, protecting its present and building its future.
sahnisi 