It’s such a strange expression — as if History could take sides. A decade ago, President Clinton used these words to scold the Chinese leadership, President Obama used the same phrase last week. There’s a a couple of things that trouble me about the sentiment. For one, it assumes a single track of historical progress. For another “History” in the service of competing claims in the here and now is a tricky ally, when it is used to forecast the future it can be even trickier. At the very least when history is remembered or enlisted to serve the present it requires the kind of gross simplification and eschewing of nuance that makes most historians cringe.
Today YJ and I were discussing for the 1000th time the Τιbetan question and I suggested that my disdain and distaste for the Party line (and its supporters and parrots at home and abroad) had little to do with their opinion or right to hold such an opinion, but rather that the claims this group tended to make were of a different intellectual tradition than my own. The “Τιbet always has been, always will be part of China” crowd are starting from a point of certainty