Joan Wallach ScottReseñas
Autor de Gender and the Politics of History
Reseñas
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She picked the Nuremburg Trials, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the current attempts to wring reparations for blacks out of the US government. In every case, history has been twisted, abused, ignored and sometimes just plain sidelined. The results are always disappointing. Both of history and of this book.
In Nuremburg, allied lawyers spent countless days slicing and dicing words and concepts, as lawyers always do. They questioned whether Germany was actually a nation-state and whether the National Socialists were actually a political party. They of course pontificated on the morals or lack thereof in a genocide of Jews, without the slightest sense of irony or hypocrisy, because all of their countries had done something similar, if not to Jews then to natives or other ethnics or homsexuals. But history is written by the victors, and history’s “judgment” is therefore quite worthless.
In South Africa, the TRC became a self-purge of guilt under the commission’s leadership of Bishop Desmond Tutu. It was designed to be a national, collective self-reckoning, but degenerated into lurid confessions by individuals to ask forgiveness from other individuals. No one was prosecuted and no new laws were born from its loins. Did the nation heal from all this bleating? Many think not.
And in the USA, calls for reparations for hundreds of years of slavery followed by hundreds of years of discrimination have led precisely nowhere, as blacks are still far behind in social and economic terms. New generations of blacks are discovering their more recent ancestors also called for reparations, as they suffered similar indignations and insults, not to mention discrimination and death. White supremacy is still on the right side of history, it seems.
So history is not the truth filter many like to claim, and it is just a cop-out, a way to avoid dealing with a crime, a rogue, a bigot or a criminal. Barack Obama in particular, should be ashamed.
Scott’s book is a written version of a lecture series she gave. She is a historian of renown, but the book is sadly flat and uninspiring, often just snippets of quotes from her research. I could find no great insights of hers to repeat, and nothing quotable to impress readers here. What she says has to be self-evident to students of history. For the rest of us, it is pretty obvious anyway.
David Wineberg