I'm currently reading a book called 'This is Not Propaganda' by Peter Pomeravntsev, and a paragraph jumped out at me with a truth that's just so well put.
"..Svetlana Boym saw nostalgia as a way of escaping the strictures of rationally ordered time. She contrasted two types. One, which is healthy, she called 'reflective' nostalgia: it looks at individual, often ironic stories from the past, tries to tease out the difference between the past and the present to formulate the future.
The other, harmful type she called 'restorative' nostalgia. This strives to rebuild lost homelands with 'paranoiac determination', thinks of itself as 'truth and tradition', obsesses over grand symbols and relinquishes critical thinking for emotional bonding. Unreflective nostalgia breeds monsters. Restorative nostalgia has taken hold from Moscow to Budapest to Washington DC. The last thing desired by those who purvey these phantom, fabricated pasts are facts."
I couldn't have put it better myself.
1 comment:
Indeed.
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