INTERESTED PARTIES AND TALKING HEADS | 2007-08-24
I said before that no one would check out the Black Sea bottom because no one had an INTEREST on checking the Black Sea bottom. From Bible thumpers to social scientists to Political Correctness to Marxism, everybody likes history just the way it is, rooted in the Middle East.
BUT the guy who made millions locating the Titanic found this to be a great project. HE now has a vested interest in pushing the IMPORTANCE of history up around Mount Ararat which, in historical terms, is about as Middle Eastern as Mongolia today.
This is how things REALLY work, and it is impossible to explain to someoe who WANTS not to understand. Most people have a vested interest in seeing the world as they see it now.
But in the real world research is not done by abstract entities, it is done by PEOPLE. A PERSON has no incentive to go after truth. As I said, Futurology has nothing to do with the future. It has to do with trends in Futurology, getting grants and publicity in the field, TODAY.
I was just looking at a Time Magazine from November 21, 1932. In the International section, discussion of German politics was under Belgium. Belgium was up in arms over what the experts said was the certainty of the restoration of the Kaiser in Germany. Belgium, which had been invaded in 1914 and occupied by the Kaiser's Germany for four years, had parades in the streets against the restoration of the Kaiser.
In its report on the Munich Putsch in 1923, Time referred to Hitler as a "monarchist." World War I dominated their memory, and the Kaiser was NEWS in 1932, whereas Hitler was a nobody.
One talking head was quoted as saying," It is not a question of reestablishing the monarchy, the question is how it will be reestablished," in other words, would it be the still-living Kaiser Wilhelm II or his successor?
Kaiser Wilhelm II lived in exile in the Netherlands. When Hitler occupied that country in 1940, the former Kaiser was guarded from all contact by German troops. He died in 1941 under the Third Reich.
For someone making a living as a writer for Time, the readers had to be given something they recognized and loved or hated. That meant the Kaiser in 1932.