fallacious objectivity II

"...patrizi, at the turn of the century, declares that all history ultimately rests on eye-witness evidence: and argues that those present are likely to involved in the issues and are therefore likely to be partisan..." isaiah berlin. "the divorce between the sciences and humanities"...one more nail in the coffin of objective history...since history is made up of multiple and obviously partisan viewpoints, written to support and propagate those views there are no "true" questions in history because there is no one answer that is immutable as there is in mathematics, physics, biology, or other sciences...well...since history is an accounting of human affairs how could one expect objectivity...one cannot...but does that invalidate its recounting? i heard an interview with an air force drone pilot on the bbc this past week...he said he was part of missions in afghanistan and the "tribal regions" of pakistan...he discussed how being a video gamer throughout his adolescence prepared him for drone piloting and some of the more routine aspects of the "job"...he also went on to recount why he left the air force when his first enlistment was up...he was part of a mission that was supposed to kill suspected terrorists in afghanistan in a compound where he was assured women and children were sleeping in one building and the "bad guys" in another...as he fired the hellfire missiles he saw a figure he though was a child run from one building to the next just as the projectiles exploded...when he reported what he had seen he was told it was "a dog" and not to worry about it...dissatisfied he bumped it up a notch on the chain of command ( "when your chain of command fails they tell you to skip a link" )...there he was told not to worry about it and to shut up about it, "it was a dog"...he said that at that point he began to question the validity of every order he was given and that he left the military as soon as possible thereafter...that child went down the official "memory hole" and he couldn't stomach that...leave it to the military to awaken and enhance an ethical sense in the grunts who do the killing and dying and make them want to talk about it...a subjective viewpoint no doubt...and history too...the lack of what his former superiors and the freaks in the cia and nsa would call "objectivity" and a sense of "the broader picture" certainly leap out in it...it does not invalidate the content or the questions it raises..."objective" or not, it is still valid.

fallacious objectivity

in "as i please 10" ( 4 february 1944 orwell laments the lack of objectivity in contemporary history. he maintains that in the past objective, factual history was possible but with the advent of the mass of wartime propaganda, presaged by fascist and soviet distortions of events during the spanish civil war, any history of the world war or following events could not possibly be objective: "in no one case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true. in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. history is written by the winners."...well...all history has an agenda...it's true that in any struggle the winners get to write the first history...but the losers never disappear ( have a look at wolfgang shivelbush's "the culture of defeat" )...was there ever a bourbon history of the french revolution? or a bonapartist view of the battle of waterloo? would one view that victory by wellington as the result of superior generalship of a better army or as a loss to treachery and overwhelming numbers? the south in the u s civil war had the "lost cause" and post world war I germany had the "stab in the back" to assuage the loss...those myths did great disservice to many but were part and parcel of an alternative view of the winner's history...w g sebald's "on the natural history of destruction" is one of the first attempts to recount the deaths of german civilians at the hands of allied bomber command as the were pursuing "military targets"...civilians are always "military targets", professionalism non-withstanding...and surely japanese accounts of hiroshima and nagaski run counter to the consensus view of the "greatest generation", not to mention gar alperowitz "the decision to use the atomic bomb" which puts the lie to that consensus...history is never objective...even thucydides had an axe to grind...he just said he didn't...honest historian admit their biases...dishonest ones distort fact to fit theory...either way objectivity is elusive at best.

scabs

back in october i posted about my union publishing the names of workers at trane who had opted out of paying union dues under the aegis of the current "right to work" legislation here in hoosierland...they're at it again with the names prominently printed in boldface with the same exhortation to their peers at trane to "persuade" them to become "good" dues-paying unionists again...they've taken adding the nifty little "no scabs" graphic as well...leave it to a craft union...jurisdictional squabbles aren't enough...nothing quite like dividing workers against themselves to promote a sense of solidarity with the union in the face of a concerted political effort to do any sort of effective workers' representation in...this simply screams out "business unionism" and shows the union's primary interest is in its cash flow and not in any sort of advocacy for workers and their needs and interests...as the roll call of members who have opted out drains the local of black ink to print their names in they will become more shrill in their recriminations...they are working hard to alienate membership and are succeeding beyond their fondest hopes in that endeavor..i am still a third generation union member...my disgust still knows no bounds.