A Lesson in History: the Revolutionary War
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- Category: History: American
- Date Submitted: 09/01/2013 02:27 PM
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A Lesson in History: The Revolutionary War
England’s loss of the colonies in the Revolutionary War is a historically semantic matter that may or may not have been due to calculative reprisal in the stability of their once great Empire. America’s victory, however, is almost as certain as her blood is blue. Concomitant with its triumph is an insidious compilation of discursive practices that not only galvanized the victory of our founding fathers, but also retroactively posits America’s liberal democracy as the center of civilization and the “end of history”. In other words, America realized her victory with “thought” and did so in a way that ontologically prefigures horrific violence with existence so long as those agents remain indifferent to the metanarratives produced by “thought”.
The metanarrative, or “end of history” discourse, situates Asia at the beginning; confined in permanent barbarism, and America as the apex of civilization. This metaphysics (thought) of the Occident (“Western thought”) is manifest in America’s victorious birth while uniquely establishing framework for ensuing violence
From the beginning, the Occident’s (“Western”) panoptic view of infant America as "uninformed terra incognita" was and is a primary enabling notion in instrumentalist and technological thinking. As a permanent appendage of Europe, American deputies of democracy engaged in the same rhetoric of improvement as their English mother. As Spanos cites, America was "either self-doomed or appealing to the European to save them from themselves by way of imposing his peace on their wasteful strife." So, instead of asking “is it cool to destroy this new land”, linear history implicitly uses the guise of sociology to calculate America's birth and development—society is here and your deaths and enslavement are demographical numbers! Along these terms of Enlightenments' tropisms, unimproved space is seen as "darkness", not in a savage sense, but a "knowable and usable unknown."...
England’s loss of the colonies in the Revolutionary War is a historically semantic matter that may or may not have been due to calculative reprisal in the stability of their once great Empire. America’s victory, however, is almost as certain as her blood is blue. Concomitant with its triumph is an insidious compilation of discursive practices that not only galvanized the victory of our founding fathers, but also retroactively posits America’s liberal democracy as the center of civilization and the “end of history”. In other words, America realized her victory with “thought” and did so in a way that ontologically prefigures horrific violence with existence so long as those agents remain indifferent to the metanarratives produced by “thought”.
The metanarrative, or “end of history” discourse, situates Asia at the beginning; confined in permanent barbarism, and America as the apex of civilization. This metaphysics (thought) of the Occident (“Western thought”) is manifest in America’s victorious birth while uniquely establishing framework for ensuing violence
From the beginning, the Occident’s (“Western”) panoptic view of infant America as "uninformed terra incognita" was and is a primary enabling notion in instrumentalist and technological thinking. As a permanent appendage of Europe, American deputies of democracy engaged in the same rhetoric of improvement as their English mother. As Spanos cites, America was "either self-doomed or appealing to the European to save them from themselves by way of imposing his peace on their wasteful strife." So, instead of asking “is it cool to destroy this new land”, linear history implicitly uses the guise of sociology to calculate America's birth and development—society is here and your deaths and enslavement are demographical numbers! Along these terms of Enlightenments' tropisms, unimproved space is seen as "darkness", not in a savage sense, but a "knowable and usable unknown."...