Advertisement for Russian cigarettes (1890s). No consumer item is too banal to wrap in images of nationalism, militarism, and empire. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been curated by standard claims of national destiny, and as one Russia scholar puts it, “A revitalized theory of Eurasian empire informs Mr. Putin’s every move.”
Our History
We invite you to listen in with Episode 55, and celebrate the 2-year anniversary of History Against the Grain. It’s been quite a trip, from quarantine beards to creeping agoraphobia, and through it all a real time accounting of life in the apocalypse. We may look a little scruffier after all this, but that’s just because we have saved our straight razors for the shaving of bad history. And in this episode we reflect on the many lessons unlearned as the world once again plays host to another state-sponsored war of destruction. Heart wrenching scenes of humanity bleed into the mediasphere, where banal and myopic commentary intones history with providential conviction. It seems the reports of History’s death back in the 90’s were greatly exaggerated. Triumphalist national narratives live on like history zombies amid the ashes of war, and in the endless deja vu of national sermonizing, the masters of war exonerate and convict each other as men of the same shared hypocrisy.
Click to hear …And No Lessons Were Learned
Sources Referenced and Items of Interest
Jane Burbank, “The Grand Theory Driving Putin to War,” The New York Times (March 22, 2022)
Simon Dolby, Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalisation, Empire, Environment and Critique Geography Compass (January 2007)
Tim Adams, “The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder review – chilling and unignorable,” a review of Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom,” The Guardian (April 15, 2018)
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But the greater problem is that “the West,” unified and committed to fighting authoritarianism as it claims to be, is itself showing signs of sharing Mr. Putin’s highly confected logic of civilizational identity and conflict.
Thomas Meany
History Against the Grain 