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history matters because you can’t know what way a rifle is pointing if you only look at the very end of the barrel.
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i used to not care about history. what mattered was action, and the theory being developed now, on the front lines, by those who also valued action.
then i started nerding out about history, but i saw it as just that, as nerding out. anarchist history as neat facts. as a source of inspiration, and a connection to those who came before us. maybe even a culture with a sense of its own past.
ive been alone a lot (read: all the time) since the pandemic started and ive had a lot of time to think. and... history matters. not “as much as the present” but in literally the same way as the present matters. the distinction now seems arbitrary and largely counterproductive.
patterns matter. when you want to know where a thrown object is going, you don’t just look at the point of release, you look at the windup. when you want to know what might happen, you need to understand the observable patterns.
every wave of the ocean is unique, yet by studying wave patterns we understand better what each unique wave is likely to do.
separating us from our history is done to render us powerless. if you purely understand LGBT struggle divorced from the riots, from our persecution, from nazis burning books about trans people, you might get suckered into thinking its a struggle based on electoral politics.
you might think that those letters in the acronym can be split out from one another. you might see progress as linear, instead of the complex spiraling forms our liberation has always taken and always will.
if you forget history, you can be convinced that colonialism doesn’t matter, that it isnt an ongoing project many of us are part of and complicit in.
if you forget history you can say ignorant things like “slavery was in the past” without understanding how, in addition to the ongoing oppression of Black people, the wealth of the white capitalist class was built from slavery and continues to this day.
things do change. its not that we live the same lives as those who came before us. but understanding the patterns of history is literally the only way to have a sense of what might come and how we might influence what might come.
historians, and history nerds, who treat the past like a dead thing do the same disservice as those (like younger me) who saw it as a nonissue. i think, though, that most people who study history know this.
