traddoeshistory

[traddoeshistory]

There is a history of Singapore that is taken as a straightforward truth by millions of people in the world. According to this narrative, up until 2004 the city-state was an unliveable hellscape where violent crime, drug trafficking, terrorism, murder, and corruption ran rampant. Women were practically raped on sight, the streets were strewn with garbage, and traffic was insolubly chaotic.

All of this changed that year, when the new prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, instituted the death penalty for all violent criminals, drug traffickers, and corrupt officials. As a result, the prison population was reduced from 500,000 to 50 within six months (presumably through mass executions). Moreover, in what appears to have been a matter of weeks, crime vanished, Singapore became an economic powerhouse, its universities shot up in the world rankings, and its citizens became trilingual. The draconian use of capital punishment, according to this narrative, is the secret to having a peaceful, developed country.

This narrative was popularised on the Spanish-speaking internet through a postauthored by a Cuban pastor based in Honduras named Mario Fumero. Fumero’s blog, United Against Apostasy, published a series of articles extolling Singapore’s purported crime-reducing policies. Fumero suggests that all Latin American countries should emulate Singapore’s example and exterminate all offenders (either through judicial or extrajudicial means), so that Latin Americans will promptly reach the desired development that Singapore now enjoys.

To get a sense of ​​how widespread this narrative is, Fumero himself comments that these articles on Singapore are by far the most popular posts on his blog, a blog which has attracted over 20 million views. The actual reach of this particular article, however, goes much further. Its text has been copied or paraphrased in various YouTube videos that, taken together, add up to hundreds of thousands of views. It has been reproduced on several posts on Taringa! (an extremely popular Spanish-language “community knowledge” website), and reposted on countless blogs and forums. Its contents have even been copied in printed newspapers (with evidently poor fact-checking standards), and they have been cited as the basis of numerous editorials published throughout Latin America.

The number of Spanish speakers who have been exposed to this narrative through social media can probably be estimated in the millions; for many of them, this portrait of Singapore is axiomatic by virtue of its ubiquity. Few people have sufficient familiarity with Singaporean history to challenge this narrative.

Keep reading

[traddoeshistory]

There is a history of Singapore that is taken as a straightforward truth by millions of people in the world. According to this narrative, up until 2004 the city-state was an unliveable hellscape where violent crime, drug trafficking, terrorism, murder, and corruption ran rampant. Women were practically raped on sight, the streets were strewn with garbage, and traffic was insolubly chaotic.

All of this changed that year, when the new prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, instituted the death penalty for all violent criminals, drug traffickers, and corrupt officials. As a result, the prison population was reduced from 500,000 to 50 within six months (presumably through mass executions). Moreover, in what appears to have been a matter of weeks, crime vanished, Singapore became an economic powerhouse, its universities shot up in the world rankings, and its citizens became trilingual. The draconian use of capital punishment, according to this narrative, is the secret to having a peaceful, developed country.

This narrative was popularised on the Spanish-speaking internet through a postauthored by a Cuban pastor based in Honduras named Mario Fumero. Fumero’s blog, United Against Apostasy, published a series of articles extolling Singapore’s purported crime-reducing policies. Fumero suggests that all Latin American countries should emulate Singapore’s example and exterminate all offenders (either through judicial or extrajudicial means), so that Latin Americans will promptly reach the desired development that Singapore now enjoys.

To get a sense of ​​how widespread this narrative is, Fumero himself comments that these articles on Singapore are by far the most popular posts on his blog, a blog which has attracted over 20 million views. The actual reach of this particular article, however, goes much further. Its text has been copied or paraphrased in various YouTube videos that, taken together, add up to hundreds of thousands of views. It has been reproduced on several posts on Taringa! (an extremely popular Spanish-language “community knowledge” website), and reposted on countless blogs and forums. Its contents have even been copied in printed newspapers (with evidently poor fact-checking standards), and they have been cited as the basis of numerous editorials published throughout Latin America.

The number of Spanish speakers who have been exposed to this narrative through social media can probably be estimated in the millions; for many of them, this portrait of Singapore is axiomatic by virtue of its ubiquity. Few people have sufficient familiarity with Singaporean history to challenge this narrative.

Keep reading

[traddoeshistory]

It's been really hectic today, but the past two weeks on Age of Discovery we had lectures about gender in the early modern period. Today, in particular was about children, and yes, I know, but given the fact that the historiography of children and gender came from the historiography of women, it's easier to lump them together in the same sentence. Or something. I've been pouring my soul out of another essay, god damn it to hell.

Masculinity and femininity in the early modern period was rather strict and hierarchical. This is a generalisation at best, really, because as with all things related to society, there are certain subtleties, even within so-called 'case studies'. But one can't deny that hierarchy was a very prominent aspect of daily life, especially with the concept of divine right of kings being floated around. Protestantism too made things a bit more tougher, since it denied scant possibility of escape from the hierarchy that Catholic celibacy allowed.

The early modern family was patriarchal, or in theory, according to the (mostly male) writers of the time. Men were the head of the household, with women (and the children they cared for) underneath them. This concept was rooted in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, and also was supported by what went as medical during the time: that women were just men who grew wrongly, etc. Hence they should be subservient to men and meet all their needs while never stepping out in the public sphere.

But things like this never always work out, because if everyone listened to people telling them what to do then no one would ever get any work done. Women had some degree of power: family accounts, childbearing and some degree of household strategizing were in their repertoire. Working class women were expected to work to some degree in order to lessen the burden of dowry on their family. Women of the aristocratic class, on the other hand, did not sully their hands at rough work. What they functioned as were somewhat of a community mediator and diplomats of the family (as shown in the Lisle letters), cultivating a networking system and encouraging patronage of the arts.

Women still had it rough in general. Don't get the wrong idea. Getting abused, physically and emotionally, could possibly be common, though unreported.

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #10: Women and Gender History

Aaaand the final one! That’s the last of the entries. I’m tired, I have an essay to finish now.

    Final lecture! Final entry! Final bout of Monday confusion! And now that’s twenty-six words out of the way, let’s get to the meat of the entry.

   Today’s lecture touched on gender history and its development from women’s history, which in turn rose from the disaffection that came from Marxist theoretical frameworks. That’s not to say that only women or even gender were parts of this large fragmentation – I’m sure family and children’s history were also subjects that devolved from this disagreement on what marginalised areas should be given focus. While the goal of gender history is obviously intriguing by itself: to investigate how gender has been subjected to historical processes, I feel that it should be considered more holistically alongside other subjects such as sexuality and class, or maybe language, as the history of (self-)perception in general. Or is that already social/cultural history already?

   With today’s political climate, however, gender and women’s history has certainly come to the fore and it is quite tinged with political concerns. Personally I’d argue that such things should be separated from history as a whole, given that it allows certain agendas to screech about how the past supported their viewpoint and hence it is the correct one; however, it is undeniable that politics and history go hand in hand, with each using the other as a tool to support their own stances. But to what extent is the collusion between the two acceptable, or is there no line at all? And there’s an issue of bias. Experiences. Whatever you like to call it, it will undeniably affect the writings of every historian, from that progressive slant Herbert Butterfield dislikes to Butterfield’s own religiosity affecting the corpus of his work. But it does make for a great narrative, since history-writing is its own artform.

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #9: Foucault

   It’s essay writing time; I’m trying to write an essay on the historian’s supposed duty to tell the truth. My vague strategy right now is to talk about the types of truth (factual and moral), discuss the implications of those, and the way truth itself has been sacrificed on the altar of agenda, be it nationalist or for some disgusting reason like Holocaust denial. If I can cram in some more words then perhaps a discussion on the measures of truth would also be given, such as the impact of postmodernism and ‘narratives’.

   Speaking of postmodernism, Michel Foucault was on the table for this week and though labelled a postmodernist – in fact, I’m sure that he is considered a founding father – his theories were not considered as such, though aspects of the philosophy such as scepticism of the narrative do crop up (e.g. discourse analysis). What intrigues me is the concept of power-knowledge, however, as it gives name to a phenomenon much seen: the fact that what is defined as knowledge is considered so by the apparatus of authority, be it Confucian classics or ‘‘‘‘Sejarah’’’’. I can’t help but feel that this view is a bit childish, however, since there’s some mutual exchange between the ignorant and authority as to what defines knowledge, and neither is the former a complete ignoramus or the latter some omniscient being.

   Foucault does, however, point out that governments do reach down to people through the process of rationalisation. We’re all resources towards some nebulous goal of sustaining the government, as if it’s some modern-day corporation in its own right. I suspect that this might have been a commentary about the nature of Cold-War government, either about the McCarthy era or the USSR itself – all the same, a good narrative for deeper research.

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #8: Structuralism and Postmodernism

   Structuralism refers to the view that everything clambers around a certain structure; subsequent phenomena arising can be understood by their interrelations, manifest in language. In short: language is key to understanding how things are structured. The truths of this is undeniable: language is not static, (however much we’d like it to be), with meanings constantly changing, and what a word might mean in its early days has undergone some permutations, giving rise to several false friends.

    History is undeniably quite fetishtic towards language. Structuralism provides a view of history which considers the evolution of language, and by extension, emphasises the need to consider what a person is truly saying behind the mask of his language and values. There is something akin to the translation of the Pali Canon here; due to a discrepancy of the structures the Buddha and modern-day people worked in, wholly accurate translations are near-impossible but we can create a facsimile of Buddhist structure within our structure to try and grasp meaning.

   Postmodernism was also discussed, and my understanding of it was basically: “reality is basically what you tell it to be”. It’s seems a pessimistic backlash during the times of Foucault, since it tries to deny some rather harsh metanarratives and truths of the world – the failings of capitalism and globalisation, and the rough transition towards an equal nation for example. And by denying truth it also runs the risk of denying empiric truths. But it doesn’t mean that it’s a complete “dead-end” since it does suggest that all historians write are competing narratives. That itself is correct, but it doesn’t mean that they are valueless and certainly gives one food for thought: what picture of the past are we trying to present? What are the hidden agendas that are unknown to even the writers of such histories?

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #7: Marx

    Marx was the topic of discussion, and where Hegel made use of dialectical idealism, Marx rooted it more into reality with dialectical materialism, where class struggles from the exploitation of labour (i.e. the working class) resulted in what we know as history. I don’t have a very positive outlook of Marx and the various theories that developed from his works such as Maoism and Leninism, and I do feel that he concentrates far too much on the economic factors as the catalyst for change, given that there are several other factors such as climate, culture and political that play an equally influential role.

    Both Marx and Hegel had a general theory of history as ‘progress’. Though progress can be measured it’s rather arguable as what counts for such – our sense of progress might be considered as stagnation or even decline when compared to the ideals and context of the current time. Furthermore, Marx’s and Hegel’s theories were all formed partly by the times they found themselves in; Marx being exposed to the excesses of the Industrial Revolution and Hegel’s theories can be said as marrying the two and taking a rather ambiguously optimistic view of the future.

    Though there was suggestion throughout the lecture that Marx viewed his model of progression as a blueprint and thus, each stage HAS to be experienced by a society before it reaches communism, the reading contradicts it. Engels and Marx make clear that it’s not a blueprint, but rather a Dummies’ Guide of sorts to the final goal of communism. It is rather interesting to note how Communist regimes have tried to claim both legitimacy and establish a plan to progress to their so-called next stage in the Communist plan and the arguments that have sprung up in response to that.

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #6: Hegel

I still don’t like Hegel too much come to think about it.

   Hegel. I don’t think I like Hegel too much, with his insistent aim that ‘freedom’ is the end goal of history. Some people find the yoke of authority to be a more pleasing thing, but that could also be ‘freedom’ of a sort, wouldn’t it? Though that’s a bit of semantics, and who can define freedom for every individual? And it’s quite an undeniable claim, which I suppose is the main thing that irks me – you can’t disprove it, and it’s something a bit impossible to nitpick. It’s rather obvious how Hegel’s ideas have persisted for so long.

   And furthermore, the Hegelian ideal that history is a narrative of progress towards freedom I don’t exactly like. Firstly, there have been abuses of this notion of progressive history, detailed in the lecture: genocides, wars, and other evils were justified using this ‘in the end it’s all worth the means’. Conflict does advance history, is a part of history. But it is not something that should be used. To be fair, this is not exactly Hegel’s fault; people love to corrupt ideals for their selfish purposes. Secondly, I sound rather pessimistic, but I find history to be more cyclical: as we progress, even more chances to delve into darkness arise, and for some reason we all choose to take the plunge quite often. There is progress, yes, but it balances out. There’s a bit of Eurocentrism with his theories, too – der Geist advancing from Asia to Europe, ignoring future developments in Asia and notably Africa? Shabby thinking.

   The idea that historians do shape, and yet are part of history is undeniable. That I’ll accede to. I can’t recall concrete examples to hand right now, but nationalist histories do play a strong part in forming the modern state.

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #5: Renaissance Humanism Electric Boogaloo

   The impact of Renaissance humanism was discussed today, on how it challenged the status quo with the various practices and developments introduced: source criticism, for one. Eventually the humanistic focus moved towards early Christianity, however, especially during the Reformation when religious divisions exacerbated, with both Protestants and Catholics trying to claim legitimacy over spiritual matters.

    But the cases they both present as being the ‘true’ continuation of the early Church(and regarding the basis of law and politics) seems to quail under one argument: source criticism doesn’t exactly support the case of just one ‘correct’ viewpoint – it is still an interpretation of facts and events to give legitimacy to one argument. Though it is necessary, there are some aspects of it that means that some conclusions need to be examined; it does have a subjective part to it, since a simple fact, or a Bible passage can be interpreted so many ways.

     There was also discussion on the ‘shape of history’, regarding the perspectives that people took when they studied history. For a sizeable amount of Western history, the general shape was to adopt an approach of divine providence at work and traces of it still crop up today, though stripped of religious meaning in the form of ‘progress’ from the primitive to the modern. It seems to be the general way to teach history in schools, too, which does have some unfortunate implications as to how we are shaping the future to think about the past – instead of judging them on their own terms and values, we’re making them try to fit our sense of ‘normal’ and ‘correct’. It is interesting to note, though, how this ‘shape’ changed over time, from Providence to the nation’s development and philosophic history. Its influence is also something to take note of, too.

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #4: Renaissance Humanism

The sass never ends.

   The lecture was a bit of a refresher, but did cover history from the medieval era to the Renaissance. There was a bit of a stark line drawn between the two periods, despite it being something more akin to a gradual flow. It was interesting to note, however, the ways that medieval people could memorialise and record the past which were ridiculously diverse, and also included hagiography, and biblical record; it did set me wondering as to why there was such deep religiosity amongst people back then. Did it have something to do with their belief of living in the final age of the world? What caused it to arise?

   Renaissance humanism saw a more committed return to the Graeco-Roman sensibilities, and one important aspect developed from this: the recognition of anachronisms, shown most strikingly in the evolution of art, especially the clothing depicted. But it wasn’t limited to just art – literary genres, too were also seeing this change (if history could be considered a genre) to recognise anachronisms. It wasn’t a total purge, however, since some writers and artists still made use of conventions (even more so now, with Greco-Roman ones) which involved falsifying speeches in the name of rhetoric, and those were definitely influenced by the standards of their time.

     This rise in humanism was a bit of a double-edged sword, since it also encouraged the creation of more well-crafted forgeries, such as the Donation of Constantine. To craft something akin to that definitely requires an understanding of the contexts of the past, but it was somewhat fortunate that the forger(s) left some gaps and contradictions. Otherwise who knows when it would have been caught out?

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #3: Religious Historiography

    Medieval Christian historiography was the topic for today and the lecture touched on moral history. Its prevalence during that time is especially noted, especially within Eusebius’ works regarding Constantine and the apologetic St. Augustine of Hippo; it cannot be limited to just Christianity, however – the Jews did use moral history in the Old Testament and the Muslims, too picked up the tradition.

    Moral history demands a division between right and wrong, which can be arbitrary to the modern eyes at times. For example, the Abrahamic religions insist a divide between heathens and believers, casting the former as perpetually in the wrong and ascribing them less-than-human qualities and actions such as child sacrifice and murder. It’s obvious how the insistence on such a divide can serve to obscure truths and facts, to the point where an entire culture has been hijacked as a byword for evil. But those were the values then in the times after the fall of the Western Roman empire (and they have not exactly faded, to be fair) so it’s important to consider how they affected the viewpoints of historians during that time.

    The division is not exactly something outmoded in this era, however. Given the increased prevalence of atrocities in the past, there is a clear sense of what is evil and what is good, though with our increasingly secularized society we have different definitions of what that dichotomy represents: genocide, human rights shunted aside… and sometimes no clear reasoning as to why things happen. If medieval historians did have an advantage, it’d be that they could describe such events as a trial sent by God, to test the resolve and faith of those and pave the way for rewards. But we simply cannot attribute such things to divine providence, otherwise what analysis would there be?

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #2: Origins and Sima Qian

So I got a bit...prideful about my culture here. In my defense, no history classes here analyse classical Asian historiography, so someone had to do it.

    We dove into the origin of the Western historical discipline, which began around the Graeco-Roman world and centred around a triumvirate, though its principal players were separated by time: Herodotus, Livy and Thucydides.

   I kept thinking about Sima Qian, a Chinese historian throughout the readings and the lecture. I kept noticing similarities; Dr Gwynn summarised the aims of Herodotus and his like with the acronym P(reserve), E(ntertain), and T(each), though I find the acronym lacking with a C(riticise). It’s rather obvious in Livy’s case, where he speaks about “the process of our [Rome’s] moral decline...” in his history of Rome, and very apparent with Sima regarding Emperor Wudi, however circumspect he tried to be about it. Granted, it could come under the heading of Teach, yet I feel that this needs to be uniquely identified, since historians then and now  do make use of their craft to “touch upon” contemporary matters, from morality’s decline to foreign policy.

    Are moral judgements suitable for the historian? I’m on the side of avoiding moral judgements as much as possible, since the discipline is supposed to be objective. But making interpretations is always affected by experiences and that can require moral judgements to be made about history. No one sensible can claim that the Holocaust or the current Rohingya extermination is a good thing! We’re invariably making moral judgements about issues to some degree, but rarely is an issue so blatantly dualistic. Take colonialism: it is definitely something exploitative, with insinuations that any native people cannot have the sense to govern themselves, and yet we cannot deny that it has certainly brought some benefits such as improved infrastructure, and technologies. It is a dark grey area but we cannot deny that it has both helped and hindered people.

[traddoeshistory]

History and Meanings #1: Leopold Von Ranke

Right. So History and Meanings [History of...History] had us write a journal entry (which was assessed, dear god) after every lecture. I’ll stagger these posts a bit. I think I got a 75 or a 65 for this.

  The lecture for this week was introductory but it did pose some questions about history that if anything, were rather interesting. What struck me was the fact that there arose a movement that tried to push the discipline to adopt a more empirical method based on its sources - Rankean historiography - as I was under the impression that such a method had been adopted with varying success along the course of the discipline's history.

   On first thought, this empirical view should instinctively be considered as the best form of studying the past. Factual, objective facts are what any argument should be based of from, and history can be considered as debating the past, ergo, the Rankean method should be employed.  But even in this statement a weakness of Ranke is apparent: it is impossible to write history without colouring it with your own views and experiences. Arguments are based on pushing a hypothesis influenced by these experiences and hence this cheapens Ranke’s viewpoint.

   There’s also the fact that Rankean historiography seems to demand only objective facts which can be as dry as dust without a personal twist given to them. It feels no better than just memorising and regurgitating list of bullet points for an exam.

   But just throwing away the empirical nature of Ranke is wrong. There’s several areas where studying the past in such an impassioned, detached manner is rather rewarding, since as mentioned before, arguments should be based on objective facts, given some editing and personal interpretation on what these facts present. Ranke’s emphasis on primary sources should be applauded, given this point.

   In conclusion, it’s a give and take situation, and I suspect that to be the case for these three years. I’m looking forward to that.

[traddoeshistory]

Also, if you’re wondering what my avatar is, it comes from this seminar handout I got for AoD. 

It’s a depiction of a marital duel. Not MAR-TIAL, MA-RI-TAL. It’s a trial by combat of a sort from the early 15th century. I’m told that it was common in Germany.

It’s a form of couples therapy, with a lot of aspects of ritualized violence. In such duels, an arguing couple would be dressed up and given weapons. The man would be given a disadvantage, because “men are stronger” etc, giving the woman a better chance to dash his brains out. 

The outfits and blunted weapons did not mean that injuries were not common, however. You still could do quite a bit of harm - the woman in the picture has her leg cut, and unless you have a lot of padding, having a sack filled with chaff slammed against your head repeatedly can still hurt.

[traddoeshistory]

Hello, World.

     That’s what you put for the first post of a new blog, right? Or is there a hip new thing going on now?

     Jokes aside, I’ve been actually pondering doing this blog for a while now. It’s supposed to be something regarding my life in Royal Holloway, but I never did have the time, which I spend on studying, finishing essays and also procrastinating. I have never procrastinated so hard before. You will not believe the amount time I spent playing Bayonetta instead of working.

     But I digress - this blog is supposed to be charting stuff about history that I find interesting, and my work too. It’s nothing really major, just sass and chronic regurgitation really but for some reason my lecturers/tutors seem to like it so I guess I’m doing something right. It’s not going to delve too much into “pastel photos” territory because I have no patience for that, seeing as I’m more of a typist and a wordsy person. Yeah. Not busy playing Bayonetta, I swear.

   Now that’s the purpose of this blog out of the way, I’ll talk about myself. I’ll try to keep it simple.

   My name is Trad, or Xian. I’m 20 years old, in my second term of my first year (started late, I know) into a History BA. This was a rather...odd choice for future uni students where I come from, really, but the only other person I knew who wanted to do History is currently at Cambridge so societal pressure can go suck a fat one. 

   Currently my modules include: Doing History [How to Analyse Sources], Public History [History in the Public Imagination], Age of Discovery [European Early Modern Period], Mao to Mandela [Non-Western Leaders in the 20th Century]. I’ve chosen my second year modules, but I won’t know if I got them until next term.

    I swear a bit too much, but everyone knows this and has gotten used to it at this rate. I also occasionally draw quite a bit, and speak three languages.

   And that’s pretty much it. I’m going to upload a bit more content soon (a journal assignment), with any luck.