IDEALISED VISION OF PAST
Folly of wanting return of good old days
Trying to claw our way back through history would not be quite so bad if we had a sober conception of what life was like back then, writes Jonny Steinberg
In the 1960s, few people thought they were living through humanity’s halcyon days. Latin America was beset with coups as a generation of military dictators came to power. In Africa, the heroes of the anticolonial movements were sullied one after the other as their followers watched them mishandle the states they had inherited. As for the US, the country that World War Two had made rich beyond measure — there, the young went to battle with their elders over Vietnam and whites attacked blacks in the streets to stop them from getting their civil rights. Half-a-century later, we have forgotten the blood and the tears. An idealised version of the 1960s fills our imaginations and dominates our fantasies. Pretty much everybody who has acquired power of late has done so on the back of a promise to bring back those days. In the US, Donald Trump conjures a time when working men had jobs for life, neighbourhoods were lily white and the US was muscular and strong.Promising to unspool decades of...
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