Societies become historical by reinterpreting the past as memorial, not merely by having one

Evidence

One June 9, 2020, protestors chopped off the head of the Columbus statue in Boston, and in the coming days, sought to demystify the history of lies that it stood atop. Columbus, like the rows of statues raised across the country, embodied an “invented past.” A past, in the words of James Baldwin, an American founding father who has yet to have a statue erected in his honor, “cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1104 (#expands, via linked claim)

The late President Sukarno always spoke with complete sincerity of the 350 years of colonialism that his ‘Indonesia’ had endured, although the very concept ‘Indonesia’ is a twentieth-century invention, and most of today’s Indonesia was only conquered by the Dutch between 1850 and 1910. Preeminent among contemporary Indonesia’s national heroes is the early nineteenth-century Javanese Prince Diponegoro, although the Prince’s own memoirs show that he intended to ‘conquer [not liberate!] Java,’ rather than expel ‘the Dutch.’ Indeed, he clearly had no concept of ‘the Dutch’ as a collectivity. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 118 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Monuments embody invented pasts that crack under present pressures — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1104; Societies falsify history through planned amnesia and evidence destruction; Nationalist memory retroactively invents the very nations it claims to remember — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 118 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Monuments embody invented pasts that crack under present pressures #expands (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1104
• Nationalist memory retroactively invents the very nations it claims to remember #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 118
• Societies falsify history through planned amnesia and evidence destruction #contradicts (0.72)