Monday, May 16, 2005

History Carnival #8

Saint Nate did a nice job on the latest semi-monthly History roundup, and I'm not just saying that because he linked to one of my posts. Apparently I haven't quite gotten this Ahistoricality thing down yet. Particularly worth noting, I think, is Saint Nate's own post on remembering the Roma (gypsy) victims of the Holocaust. In a sense, the Roma are deeply ahistorical in most of the senses that we understand history today: histories of place, of progress, of integration and process. Not to over-romanticise them, but there is something about them quite beyond the bounds of history, and their victimization by Nazis (and in lesser ways, by so many other "modern" societies) is a testimony to our tragic inability to accept difference in modernity.

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