A country isn’t something concrete, composed of intertwined individuals interlocked together. That’s absurd. A country is abstract, with some silly frilly flag and pomp and a song—a national anthem. But dust off the glitter, replace the flag, change the tune, and the people are still there, with their intertangled mesh of relationships that exist above and beyond mere country.
I remember Mitchell Sanders sitting quietly in the shade of an old banyan tree. He was using a thumbnail to pry off the body lice, working slowly, carefully depositing the lice in a blue USO envelope. His eyes were tired. It had been a long two weeks in the bush. After an hour or so he sealed up the envelope, wrote FREE in the upper right-hand corner, and addressed it to his draft board in Ohio.
La seule réplique possible est d'encourager la prudence, d'augmenter le nombre de ceux qui possèdent ce "sens historique" [...],c'est à dire la capacité à distinguer par soi-même entre le spécialiste et l'amateur, l'historien qui cherche les raisons des faits et l'idéologue qui cherche des faits pour se donner raison.
If we are considering the history of our own country, we write at length of the periods when our ancestors were prosperous and victorious, but we pass quickly over their shortcomings or their defeats. Our people are represented as patriotic heroes, their enemies as grasping imperialists, or subversive rebels. In other words, our national histories are propaganda, not well balanced investigation.
Sering kita menundukkan kepala karena sedih dan malu atas tragedy kemanusiaan sebagai akibat pertalutang (elit) politik 1965. Jutaan orang telah menjada korban pembunuhan, penyiksaan, pemenjaraan, dan peminggiran. Karen alas an politik pula mereka tidak diakui, apalagi dipulihkan kemanusiaannya. Menuliskan kesaksian tragedi itu menjadi repertoar adalah untuk melawan penumpulan nurani bangsa ini.
Such is the economy of nature," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken." When, as President, he dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to the Northwest, Jefferson hoped that they would come upon live mastodons roaming the region.
Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by a handful of surviving documents, seemed the greater disservice. I paid homage with my imagination, and hoped I might get visitors to do the same.
No one is a good historian of the patent, visible, striking, and public life of peoples, if he is not, at the same time, in a certain measure, the historian of their deep and hidden life; and no one is a good historian of the interior unless he understands how, at need, to be the historian of the exterior also...True history being a mixture of all things, the true historian mingles in everything.
Let that be a reminder to you that the past is one thing, but what we make of it, the conclusions we draw, is another. History can be many things, depending on how we read it, just as the future can be many things, depending on how we live it. There is no inevitability to any historical occurrence, only what people will allow to take place. And it is by dreaming first that we get to new realities.
Everything has happened before - not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called "the lessons of history," but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.
WWPP ('WODEA Witness Protection Programme') ni Programu Maalumu ya Ushahidi ya Tume ya Dunia ya kuwakinga mashahidi wa kihalifu kwa kuwapa makazi mapya, majina mapya, kazi mpya, historia mpya ya maisha, na sura mpya, kuwakinga na Sheria ya Kitalifa ya Kolonia Santita. Ukivunja Sheria ya Kitalifa ya Kiapo cha Swastika cha Kolonia Santita utauwawa, tena utauwawa kinyama, wewe na familia yako.
People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off. ... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.
But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with.
Kaum imperialis, perhatikan! Apabila dalam waktu yang tidak lama lagi Perang Pasifik menggeledek dan menyambar-nyambar membelah angkasa, apabila dalam waktu yang tidak lama lagi Samudera Pasifik menjadi merah oleh darah dan bumi disekitarnya bergetar oleh ledakan-ledakan bom dan dinamit, di saat itulah rakyat Indonesia akan melepaskan dirinya dari belenggu penjajahan dan menjadi bangsa yang merdeka.
...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.
