topic - rewriting (future) history....?

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Dear List

Whenever I consider "future history"-- that is, in the holy of 
holies of
"What-If" history, I remmber whenever I go to the local Thrift 
Store to peruse
the book section to see what has washed up on "The Skull 
Island" of the vast
Sargasso Sea of salvaged cargo of local book collections, 
I am reminded of the
futility of this. Racks and racks of books are to be 
found with such
super-sensational titles liek THE COMING FISCAL CRASY OF 
2007! (written in 2000)
or "THE COLLAPSE OF THE WESTERN WORLD (in 1992) etc. 
Now and then a bit of
treasure washes up (like a 1st edition of "The Waverly 
Tales" or a book on some
subject like games or backgammon or the like, but 
most of it is books that
really should never have been written.

I got 
my professional training and PhD in History late in life (as a labor of
love, 
not vocation) and I share the traditional disparagement of the 
"What-If."
History is far more complex than that, but it's fun to speculate. 
When you talk
about the future though you are into non-fiction novel land, 
and like any novel,
the characters do and say and feel what the author wishes 
them to.

It's fun so long as you don't believe a word of what you 
write.

Even worse to act in accordance with it. If you don't believe me, 
talk to the
guys who are terribly dissappointed they didn't get "raptured" 
this year.

Human character and human society is far too chaotic, and 
human minds are far
too irrational to be able to live up to any 
predictability with the "laws of
history" (of which I believe there is not 
one.)

You have to take into the conception the very, very very crooked 
timber of
humanity, which destroys all such analysis.

Let me give you 
an example.

If you could grab off your library William Shirer's Rise and 
Fall of the Third
Reich, or similar history that dealt with the full glimpse 
of the Nazi Horror
including the death camps, and then hopped into your time 
machine and went back
to 1880, and showed it to anyone, they would say that 
this was the obviously 
highly detailed but totally insane ravings of a 
diseased mind and could NEVER,
NEVER, happen. No one would ever admit, least 
of all the Jews themselves that
such a civilized nation as the Germans could 
EVER spawn such a horror.

Let me give you one more.

In 1996 I was 
in the American Historical Association conference attending one of
the panels 
because one of my instructors from the graduate program was
presenting a 
paper. All the leading lights of Soviet Studies were there, Tucker,
Swett, 
VonHagen, etc. etc., and the question came up on history and
predictions.
All 
of the doyens of Soviet History-- NOW can clearly see the path of
downfall
of 
the Soviet Union, but all of them admitted that at the time, just a few 
years
ago, had you come to them in 1988 and said to them how the Soviet Union 
was
going to collapse, they would have called you completely 
mad.

Interestingly as a follow on to this in 2003 I believe, I was at 
another AHA
conference and there was a panel of Russian Historians presenting 
on new
directions in Russian Hisoriography. It was very interesting. The 
presentations
were pretty harsh condemnations of the Soviet System and 
Communism in particular
and several American professors asked (some of them 
almost pleading with
emotionally charged voices, almost in tears, if the 
Russian Historians could not
find ANY positive accomplishments to the Soviet 
Regieme. I remembe rone pleading
"But surely, surely there must have been 
SOMETHING positive about the Soviet
Union! The grave men from the new Russian 
Academies shook their head and
demolished every point people tried to bring 
up.

The point is simple.

We predict at our peril and it is well to 
remember the words of Maceth--"All
Oracles Lie!"

Otto