Monday, October 23, 2006
A funny story for all you history nerds.
Try to get a hold of the Punch magazine cartoon "At Last", and all my jumbled nonsense will make more sense.
I started off thinking, “ok, this must be a Marxist cartoon, since the role of the masses, represented by the big hand, is emphasised. Done! Then I got around to thinking, “but where is Lenin, and where are the Bolsheviks”? They aren’t anywhere to be seen! Doesn’t the Soviet view always try to emphasise the role of Lenin? So maybe this is a revisionist cartoon, the revisionists focus on the role of the masses as well, except unlike the Marxists who see Lenin and the Bolsheviks as guiding and shaping the reactions of the masses, they see the uprising of the workers and peasants as being quite spontaneous. Futhermore, don’t they talk about the collapse of autocracy under its own weight? This cartoon is a marvellous revisionist depiction. But then, I got around to thinking, “but hey, didn’t the revisionist view only emerge in the 1970s”? This cartoon was published in Feb/March 1917, as the revolution was happening! No time for 60 years to pass to develop a revisionist view drawing on previous historiographical viewpoints! This was on the spur. “Not Liberal”, I think, because Pipes would scoff that the masses were a uniformly passive grey blob with no capacity to take the intiative to overthrow the Tsar. The proximity of the throne to the edge of the cliff suggests a degree of inevitability about the collapse of Tsarism, something Pipes would disagree with. I went on to the internet, tried to do a bit of research on the different historiographical viewpoints of the Russian revolution, somehow made up my mind that the cartoon was libertarian, then realised that the libertarian viewpoint emerged post Vietnam-war; plus we didn’t really talk about the libertarian viewpoint in class. “Oh my,” I thought. “I’m going to have to go with Marxist.”
I started off thinking, “ok, this must be a Marxist cartoon, since the role of the masses, represented by the big hand, is emphasised. Done! Then I got around to thinking, “but where is Lenin, and where are the Bolsheviks”? They aren’t anywhere to be seen! Doesn’t the Soviet view always try to emphasise the role of Lenin? So maybe this is a revisionist cartoon, the revisionists focus on the role of the masses as well, except unlike the Marxists who see Lenin and the Bolsheviks as guiding and shaping the reactions of the masses, they see the uprising of the workers and peasants as being quite spontaneous. Futhermore, don’t they talk about the collapse of autocracy under its own weight? This cartoon is a marvellous revisionist depiction. But then, I got around to thinking, “but hey, didn’t the revisionist view only emerge in the 1970s”? This cartoon was published in Feb/March 1917, as the revolution was happening! No time for 60 years to pass to develop a revisionist view drawing on previous historiographical viewpoints! This was on the spur. “Not Liberal”, I think, because Pipes would scoff that the masses were a uniformly passive grey blob with no capacity to take the intiative to overthrow the Tsar. The proximity of the throne to the edge of the cliff suggests a degree of inevitability about the collapse of Tsarism, something Pipes would disagree with. I went on to the internet, tried to do a bit of research on the different historiographical viewpoints of the Russian revolution, somehow made up my mind that the cartoon was libertarian, then realised that the libertarian viewpoint emerged post Vietnam-war; plus we didn’t really talk about the libertarian viewpoint in class. “Oh my,” I thought. “I’m going to have to go with Marxist.”
# posted by me lah @ 9:13 am 
