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I was just thinking about this today; we may think of discrete events like 9/11 or the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as triggers for severe social upheaval, but the tensions that led to those events were already building long before they actually occurred. It's just easier to label them as reference points when looking back. And we've certainly got a whole hell of a lot of tension embedded in our society right now. I cracked open British historian CV Wedgwood's book on the 30 Years' War tonight, and she starts off making the point that in societies before mass media, it wasn't even always clear to the people involved when they had passed a point of no return. This passage in the first chapter stuck out: quote:May 23rd 1618 was the date of the revolt in Prague; it is the date traditionally assigned to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. But it was not clear until seventeen months later, even to the leading men in the countries most deeply concerned, that this revolt rather than any other incident in that stormy time had lighted the fire. During the intervening months the affairs of Bohemia became slowly identified with the problems of the European situation. That situation itself brought forth the war. Even in WWII and WWI, there was mass media in place to inform everyone that some intolerable act had taken place and we were now at war. Even with mass media more widespread and embedded in everyone's consciousness than ever, I kind of wonder if we might still be able to miss the points of no return. The attacks on power substations recently were the sort of indirect mass violence/terrorism I'd been fearing for a long time, even if the one in Washington turned out to be a couple of tweakers who didn't really know what they were doing. Will those stand out in retrospect as when those tactics became acceptable to violent supremacists?
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Jan 24, 2023 06:28
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 01:43 |
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