Marnix Koolhaas van de VPRO 5

Marnix Koolhaas, tenslotte nog dit, je schrijft: 'Het is een leuk lijstje namen, dat destijds het oproer zo openlijk steunde.'

Je maakt een vergissing. En om je dat duidelijk te maken geef ik je deze wijze opmerking van de historicus Howard Zinn:

'From the start of my teaching and writing, I had no illusions about “objectivity,” if that meant avoiding a point of view. I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or any one telling a story) was forced to choose, from an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would reflect, whether consciously or not, the interests of the historian.

There is an insistence, among certain educators and politicians in the United States, that students must learn facts. I am reminded of the character in Charles Dickens’s book Hard Times, Gradgrind, who admonishes a younger teacher: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.” But there is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation. Behind every fact presented to the world–by a teacher, a writer, anyone–is a judgment. The judgment that has been made is that this fact is important, and that other facts are not important and so they are omitted from the presentation.'
From Voices of a People’s History of the Untied States, Introduction, p.25, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove.

Begrijp je Koolhaas? Zo niet, laat het me weten en ik zal proberen het je duidelijk te maken. En verdiep je ondertussen in de geschiedenis.