History musings

Certain things stick in history. They can be framed in the moment as defining of a time and place. A singular flash-bang event, or maybe a powerful individual, a monumental struggle, a movement. Things can also gain historical status after the fact thanks to later occurrences, having initially been not so obviously deserving of space in the pantheon of the human story. Only in hindsight may the pieces of a larger picture come to the fore.

I've been reading a collection of short writings by Hunter S. Thompson a few entries at a time. They're consistently filled with creative insults and sardonic insights on the world of the 1980s. 

At the time Thompson was deep in the Beltway covering politics even though he lived in the mountains of Colorado. A big topic he writes on for months in the late 80s, during the run-up to the 1988 GOP Nomination, is the Iran-Contra Affair. Thompson describes the scandal as equal or more damning to Reagan, his legacy, and his party, as Watergate was to its perpetrator, Richard Nixon. 

Now we know Iran-Contra had nowhere near the impact to Reagan that Watergate did to his sleazy precursor. At the time, though, it seems people misjudged the Reagan scandal as more historically significant than it has turned out to be (at least, so far). Today, Iran-Contra hardly makes high school history textbooks, much less general knowledge. And Reagan's reputation is definitely not tarnished by it. 

In case you don't know about Iran-Contra, it's basically this: 

The Reagan administration was secretly selling weapons to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran (who, by the way, we opposed in the horrific Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 by selling weapons to his opponent, Saddam Hussein in Iraq (the one we later killed to bring freedom and peace to the Middle East), but only for a bit, because we could make even more of a killing (haha get it) selling weapons to both Iraq AND Iran), a country which we had an active embargo against, using Israel as the go-between money-for-missiles launderer, which is a country definitely not recognized as legitimate by the Iranian Revolutionary government, to fund a gang of human-rights-abusing Nicaraguans called the Contras who were rampaging across the land with American-taxpayer-funded assault rifles to destroy the Sandinistas, a Leninist group of human-rights-abusers that took power from the dynastic dictatorship of the Somoza family (don't worry, also human-rights-abusers) in 1979 in the shitshow that was 20th century politics in Central America. Classic Cold War America stuff.

It's complicated. Brown has a good database on the whole thing if you really want to get into it. I digress. 

I was recently reminded by this Ted talk on confirmation bias of another event that has taken a roundabout route to infamy: The Dreyfus Affair. It was taught in my school as a sign of the ingrained European anti-Semitism and continent-wide persecution, oppression, and inequality of Jews that continued past the Industrial Revolution. 

 

(I'm not going to get into the details of this one. One rant per post is my self-imposed limit).

At the time of it happening in the late 19th century, the trial of Alfred Dreyfus was big news in France, and probably some other countries too. Big enough for Emile Zola to publish a letter about it that got him some jail time. 

But the Holocaust is the headliner in history that the Dreyfus Affair is a piece of context for. That's the reason teenagers in Texas are taught about it 120 years later; a genocide that happened decades after, an event that, like everything in the future, could not have been predicted with precision, defines The Dreyfus Affair in historiography. 

This makes me wonder whether something like Iran-Contra could become a more notable historical marker because of some future event. Or maybe the future event has already happened, but only later will people deem it important enough to highlight. It almost makes me want to place no historical judgement on anything. 

Then, I guess, I would be isolated from the process of creating history. That seems fundamentally un-human. Despite the ever-changing content of our remembered past, it still has to be a rock for society. I'm just curious how it will look long after I'm gone.