Folkloric history is like the mythical being that is there
but is not there. It is not there because history is an event that has come and
gone. But the event is also there because people mention it all the time to
make of it what they wish. They look at a slice of the event they imagine is
still there, and recreate around it a mythology that helps them draw the
conclusions they wish to draw.
True history, on the other hand, is a lot more complicated
than that. It is made of layers of events superimposed on top of each other
with the occasional moment when a break happens in some of the layers, and
pieces from them intertwine with each other. Serious historians who seek to
find the truth are never satisfied with the work they do till they ascertain
that they dug into the events as deeply as the deepest layer, and have
uncovered every loose end that has intertwined with another.
There was a time in North America
when journalism played the role of first drafter of history seriously, and
fulfilled that role professionally. The press did the best that it could to
interpret the past, and assess the current events in a manner that reflected
true history and not the folkloric version of it, no matter how interesting the
folklore may have sounded. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case for, it is
a time when a new version of history and of current events are written to suit
the occasion if only to make a point, however false the whole undertaking may
sound to everyone, even to its author.
For example, you now have people who run around promoting
the idea that if the current President of the United
States would emulate the late Ronald Reagan and said to
Putin: Mr. Putin get out of Crimea, the Russian invasion into the Peninsula
would evaporate as fast as the Berlin
wall came down. But like they used to say in the old Soviet
Union : “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us,” it can now
be paraphrased that in the West: “we echo fake borrowed ideas, and they pay us
with real borrowed money.”
You can see what construct can be erected with that kind of
approach to journalism when you study the editorial that appeared in the Wall
Street Journal under the title: “Putin Invades, Obama Dismantles” and the
subtitle: “The U.S. rushes
to obey a nuclear arms treaty while Russia cheats.” It was published on
April 9, 2014. The idea behind it being that the President can pull a Reagan
and make all evil evaporate, they searched for something that Reagan may have
done which may resemble the current situation but discovered none. And so, they
found themselves compelled to mention the most unlikely President whose name
alone had been anathema for them to pronounce. Are you ready, my friend? They
mentioned Jimmy Carter.
What they did to get to that point was to cite a litany of
questionable activities they accused the Russians of committing, making such
activities sound like violations of treaties that Russia signed with the United
States or with the West. The editors called on the Congress to summon the under
secretary of state for arms control “to explain what the Administration knew,
and what it disclosed.” Puzzled by this request, you want to know: What's that
about? But all you get in response is that the under secretary perhaps “knew
[that] New Start would never have won a two-thirds Senate majority if Russia 's
cheating had been widely known.” What? Must something as important as Russian
cheating on arms control be widely known for the Senate of the United State
Still, the editors go on to fault the President for
complying with the “New Start” treaty, and cutting on nuclear forces before the
compliance deadline. They accuse President Obama of “maneuvering the U.S. closer to a position of absolute nuclear
inferiority to Russia .”
They go further and lament that “It's fashionable in the West to dismiss this
as 'Cold War thinking,'” but guess loudly that Putin appears not to have given
up on such thinking.
Then they do the proverbial stuffing of the foot in the
mouth. Speaking of the recent events, they say this: “They offered the grim
lesson that nations that forsake their nuclear deterrent, as Ukraine did, do
so at considerable peril [to themselves].” This is no doubt an open apology to Iran , urging the Ayatollahs there never to give
up on the quest to make Iran
a nuclear nation.