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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 19 Dec 2021

Taken: 19 Dec 2021

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Useful Delusions •
Shankar Vedantam •
Bill Mesler •
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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Of course, the needs and priorities of nations change over time. So it should hardly be surprising that the stories of nations also change. Abraham Lincoln was progressive for his time, but he didn’t believe in the equality of the races, and once said he would keep every slave a slave if it was necessary to save the Union. His initial ideas about emancipation should a lot like immigration hard-liners today -- Lincoln wanted to free slaves by deporting them “to Liberia, to their own native land.” After the Civil War -- and his assassination -- Lincoln morphed into the “Great Emancipator.” Is this whitewashing hsitory? Maybe. But this new story about Lincoln helped the civil rights movement make radical changes in the 1960s, and helped all American embrace what Lincoln once called “the better angels of our nature.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., chose to give his famous “I have a dream” speech in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. Barak Obama chose Springfield, Illinois -- the birth place of Lincoln -- to launch his historic campaign to become the first African American president of the United States. Whenever the modern Republican Party gets accused of racism, partly stalwarts remind people that they belong to the “the Party of Lincoln.”

National myths can be semi-truths or outright lies. They can be versions of invented or imagined reality. But once invented -- and one millions of people collectively believe in them -- they become real. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has said of these kinds of big, collective lies, “If everything is fake, this fake, precisely insofar as we know it’s a fake, tells us so much about the social reality in which we live. Even if it didn’t happen, it’s true.” ~ Page 159

Useful Delusions
3 years ago. Edited 3 years ago.

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