| | Okay, thank goodness we're done with that Corsica trip because I have more interesting things (in my opinion) to write about. I have the type of brain that likes to aggregate ideas and themes, and come up with a vaguely interesting intellectual quest. I had a thing about tunnels, for instance, which I won't go into now. But I also have the type of personal motivation that does not allow me to do this because I am too busy doing other, more meaningless things. Like today, I googled whether you could use "probate" as a verb, a question prompted by a CNN anchor's use of it as one earlier today. (You can, but it is rarely done.)
So, I have a new thought process I will share with you.
The other night, I was watching the old version of The Women, which was filmed or released in 1939. It was already interesting, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it was re-released and I can't imagine any of "today's" actresses playing those roles. It was also interesting in that it included a tirade asserting that women "today" (i.e., in 1939) are now equal to men, which is pretty ballsy/delusional, given the circumstances.
But more importantly for this post, 1939 is a big year in world history! And that didn't really come through in that movie. In fact, it was jarring to me that one of the women in the film said she liked to sleep "spread out like a swastika" in her bed. Obviously, to anyone who knows what happens after 1939, that is a really jarring statement. You can just use the word swastika? Without any moral ties? Just as a kind of joke? A normal noun?
And that got me to thinking about the set of 1939 Encyclopedias Brittanica (is that how you do the plural?) in the pub in my old village, Hebden Bridge. It was obviously compiled a while before 1939, given even modern publishing schedules, but it writes about Hitler as if he was a little bit racist and right-win, but a basically normal guy (the way the Guardian would write about contemporary northern European politics, really). And when defining race, it discusses the various types of race, ultimately assuming there is a heirarchy of races (guess who comes out on top), and if I remember correctly, asserting the usefulness of eugenics. I don't have my notes from it here.
Similarly, under "Evolution, organic," it writes:
"The triumph of the human race over the lower organism and again of the higher races over the lower, has been brought about through mutual help, cooperation, self-sacrifice and subordination of the individual."
Higher races over the lower, huh? Sound a little bit like a famous world history figure from 1939?
Relatedly, my boyfriend David wrote in response that he had encountered something like a Peace Yearbook from 1940, and "it was weird because it discussed a lot of conflicts, like colonial conflicts, that you wouldn't have thought people were too concerned about at that point." It is strange to us from here because obviously at that point you might know how big of a deal it was going to be - you wouldn't have called it WWII yet, obviously.
Basically, I find this whole thing interesting because of the following:
- Not surprising, most of the ideas that led up to and made the whole Hitler/holocaust thing possible were known about, justified and/or accepted as normal by, um, everyone else (i.e., UK and US), but no one knew they would go wrong. That's true all the time, I guess. There are lots of ideas in any given historical time that could explode into something nasty, if they are taken to the extreme, but it's interesting to see ideas that are now offlimits intellectually being treated seriously.
- Mostly, I think it's just weird to watch all these people not knowing something huge was about to happen in their lives. Reading their encyclopedias. Watching them on TV. They have no idea. It's like all these articles published the week of or right after the Soviet Union's dissolution, saying it would be around another 15 years and was an extremely strong system. Really we have no idea, and that ignorance is fascinating to me. It's not like the obvious comparison to how big world events change us instantly (i.e., how things were before and after 9/11 - a really mundane comparison), but more how we are not changed by what turn out to be huge events. It's basically the opposite of the 1960s, where everyone is conscious of a change
Obviously, you can assume that means that at any given historical time period, something huge is about to happen, and you can get paranoid about it, as many people do. I am not really interested in any paranoid or conspiracy theories about the likelihood we are currently like those people in the TV or those encyclopedia editors.
(But, I mean, we kind of are. We're all human, and we all have no idea. And that's fine.)
Anyway, enough philosophizing. I'm just interested to see if anyone else has any similar examples, like from 1939-40, or another parallel (i.e., before WWI as well - Thunder at Twilight is an interesting book a little about this)? I think it is a really interesting historical moment - oblivion.
Next up: Fascism and the American Right-Wing Opposition. As homework, some of you may want to look up the definition of "fascism," as an understanding of this word appears to be lacking.
|
| | Posted 6/30/2009 6:19 PM - 34 Views - 2 eProps - 2 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
