Is Yesterday too Recent?: An attempt at explaining Recent History without heavy theory

by: Ricardo A. Serrano Denis

     This is not a conventional academic contemplation on history. This is an attempt to explain something made very complex in a, hopefully, simple way. The presence of recent history in our more specific dwellings on historical knowledge today makes necessary a sort of comment that tries to elevate its inner debates onto a broader stage. My definition of it goes like this: recent history refers to a past that still bears meaningful impact upon the activities and social configurations that make up identity today. Now, if the memory of the Second World War continues to bear meaningful impact on identity today, can it still be considered recent? What about the Civil War? Is its memory still recent if the nature of contemporary American politics continues to hold true to the North/South division that was initially defined in the 19th century? Or is it just better to scrap the whole idea of ‘recent’ and just accept everything now in past form as history so long as it is put into narrative? The point is to accept that nothing is out of bounds when it comes to creating knowledge, when its purpose is to inform people on the present problems that take up their experience.

     One cannot assume that temporal distance eases the passions of study and renders a more secure objective reasoning behind the making of history. Just look at the examples mentioned above: World War II and the Civil War. These two stories continue to inspire pop culture into using their history and infusing them into contemporary meanings of war and society. World War II has become most predominantly the main topic in the History Channel’s programming when it decides (and it is doing so less these days) to run historical documentaries. Its variations range from Hitler’s link to alien beings and how Nazis tried to use alien technology to win the war to reviving old videos in high definition form and broadcasting them as the ‘definitive’ way to experience the war.

      In the Civil War’s case we come to a crossroads that seems to be less pop in cultural terms than World War II but still manages to seep into the common knowledge areas through other motives. Take Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012). More a film about the abolition of slavery as a means to end the war, Lincoln makes the Civil War a more political source of historical activism that the memory of it originally catered to. The Civil War is most often set in a narrative that exposes the futility of conflict when it is waged between brothers, a metaphor that speaks to the war’s senseless slaughter of Americans by Americans. Spielberg’s signature close-ups (done to death in this film) pushed by the strings of an overtly sentimental John William’s score makes Lincoln appeal to movie-goers through nostalgia and a sense that politics had more moral weight in the past rather than today. By the end of a very long film, Lincoln has already made audiences care about the past as an example of what politics should be today, even if the presence of slavery is quite merely a tool ordered around to make sense out of politics first and slavery itself second.

      And yet, audiences supported the film. Lincoln’s domestic haul, according to boxofficemojo.com, steadied at $182,027,677. For a film without Captain America or Batman in it, Lincoln became its own superhero event movie. And this is relevant because it reveals just how much pull the Civil War and its main players still hold with cinema goers, for people who pay for entertainment in the hopes of getting educated, informed, in the process. We cannot kid ourselves with these types of movies. They are there to entertain and tell a story just as much as they are there to provide information about a past that still makes sense today, that strives to impact the contemporary experience. Does this make the Civil War recent history? Does a scene between the mythical President and his son arguing about war service too distant or too close (as is the case when Lincoln confronts his son Robert about not giving his life away to the probability of death in the battlefield)?

      Identity can be a tricky subject. We make up ourselves by that we think identifies us most with a shared past. Film can be too dangerous an agent in providing this. According to J. Hoberman, “a movie would be an idea successfully transformed into an industrially produced collective experience.” If we accept Hoberman’s argument, collective experiences that employ history as a narrative tool make temporal distance irrelevant when contemplating the recentness of the past, for no matter how close or distant the past may be it becomes almost entirely relevant to the way we view ourselves in the present time. It is like Eric Hobsbawm states, “Most human beings operate like historians: they only recognize the nature of their experience in retrospect.” But Hobsbawm never specifies how distant in time said exercise in retrospection should be. In fact, it can be argued that, so long as retrospection is taking place, distance becomes close to irrelevant so long as it is consumed as a legitimate part of historic experience. That is what makes history recent, when it becomes relevant in the process of making sense of the present.

      The situation in North Korea makes an excellent example in this final stretch of the argument. The most interesting thing about the whole North Korean situation still playing itself out (regardless of downsized media coverage…now ceded to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden) rests on the idea that its nuclear contingency is still functioning as a Cold War strategy that mistakenly thinks it is still effective. Kim Jong-Un, the son of previous North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, has intensified his antagonism with South Korea and the United States in what appears to be a random display of power he does not have. Claiming a strangling on North Korean economy through U.N. sanctions, the situation escalated when Kim Jong-Un ordered military exercises too close for comfort to South Korea, with instances of missiles flying close to specific zones of both civilian and military spaces.

     Now, the threat of nuclear destruction is what makes the situation so imbedded in mass media as newsworthy. Continued coverage has exposed North Korea as a nation looking for legitimacy in the context of a divided land that shares its narrative beginnings with South Korea in the historical playground of the Cold War. In fact, threats of nuclear annihilation seem out of place in today’s world, where drone strikes can be called upon in a matter of minutes and military superiority rests on technological readiness instead of mass mobilizations of military personnel as a reaction to aggression. As of April 5th, 2013, the United States’ stance on North Korea has been one of “strategic patience,” according to the Obama Administration as reported by The Guardian. By the end of March, defense secretary Chuck Hagel ordered America's most advanced plane, the B-2, known as the Stealth bomber, to fly over the Korean peninsula. The Stealth is invisible to radar and has nuclear capacity. The message to North Korea was intended by the Pentagon to be one not of provocation but deterrence: attack South Korea at your peril. The key word here might be deterrence given it being part of the Cold War jargon, but the focus should be that a single plane, almost imperceptible to the technological eye should it choose to be, can end the situation with the flick of a switch.

      Maybe the Cold War didn’t end for North Korea. The 38th parallel still stands as a reminder of that time and territorial disputes maintain their identity through it. In a sense, the Cold War is still recent history for the Koreas, as it can be for the United States (even if the Korean War, known as the forgotten war, came across as diminished in significance for American history). Still, North Korea just made its Cold War history recent. It gave meaning to conflict and inserted it in the 21st century sense of historical continuity.

      The whole point of history is to show, through the telling of researched stories, how humanity has lived throughout time and how it makes us the species we are today. Having said that, isn’t all history recent then? If we take the idea that recent history is that which still holds sway on the way we make up our identities contemporarily, does it not then make most of the past recent? Maybe it’s better to make away with these kinds of classifications and just stick with history as an outlet of knowledge that helps us understand, well, us, without regard on how far or how close the past really is.