Actual Temper

I tend to get annoyed at those who treat history as a blank canvas upon which they can create a chronology or, worse in my opinion, use events out of context to give the argument an air of authenticity. Unfortunately, my enjoyment of huge egos, public debate, speech and drama has lead toward the inevitable fascination with politics. Politics, naturally enough, tends to bastardize history in the ways that I described above. Given that I also enjoy history, I often end up highly pissed off.

Grr.

History does have the problem of being simultaneously objective and subjective. We try to avoid the subjective because that tends to bring in our own anachronistic biases and assumptions. Language is particularly dangerous. In the US constitution all men are supposedly equal under the law. If we read that today we assume that all men were supposed to be equal under the law. But back in the day a black man was not considered a 'man', and so would not have fallen under the said provisions. This explains the apparent contradiction of a somewhat egalitarian Jefferson being a slave owner. Also - think of how the meaning of the words 'gay' and 'faggot' have changed over the years.

Historians cannot achieve complete objectivity, in my opinion, and there are some projects by which it is harder to remain subjective. I think my thesis, examining the diary of a WWII POW is more prone to subjectivity than a number of others, simply because a)there is not much known about officers camps, and b) I am largely interpreting what Davis wrote. This tends to be at the more academic side of history, however, and this rarely appears in the political sphere. What normally happens is that politicians or their advisors misread and event or document out of naivety or realpolitik.

Take, for example, Brash's comments about Maori. David Miller has written a column about it for scoop and it is worth reading if you haven't heard much about the debate. I disagree with a number of things Brash is arguing about, an am not impressed over his grasp of history. That he is seen as being intelligent is doubly damaging because people will assume that what he said was accurate (contrast this with whenever Brownlee or Hide open their mouths). Do not make you facts fit your argument! Basic, basic logic that appears to be outside the grasp of some of our foremost problems.

But that is nothing compared with the incomparable Muriel Newman. She has recently reminded us that
"Leaders and academics that hark back to the pre-European days of Maori domination of New Zealand have driven this opportunism. They appear to conveniently forget that Maori violently conquered the Moriori, the original settlers, and their claims of tangata whenua status and demands for compensation for historical grievances appear to many to be ill informed."

Nice one, Muriel. That was, as Russel Brown has pointed out, discounted years ago (I think in the 1950's, if my memory has survived it's regular caffeine hits).

Brown was angry that an MP would publish something that was so blatantly wrong and foolish, and thus lend it some legitimacy. He should get used to it. As Miller pointed out, Brash was only trying to broaden his re-election prospects, and what Newman has done is only a ridiculous example of the norm.

Politics, it seems, is the graveyard of good history.