Re: [Marxism] Saint Simon Schama's Must See TV

[Tom Cod <tcod@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think that overstates it, Schama has also done shows exposing the horrors
of English industrialization at home and colonialism abroad.  Moreover, his 
book "Rough Crossings", from what I've heard of it, does an excellent job
of exposing the racism in America during the revolution against Britain and the 
reactionary character of much of the independence movement in the American
South at the time.  Isn't it ironic, asked Dr. Johnson (whose executor was 
Frances
Barber, an Afro-Britain) that the loudest yelps for liberty come from the 
drivers of slaves etc. 
and the 3000 runaway slaves that joined Lord Dunmore's army in the Chesapeake 
after he issued his
emancipation proclamation.  Jefferson responded by ordering castration
for any of those caught.

Based on that and his recent interview with Bill Moyers, I would want to 
actually read Schama's book on the French
Revolution before I glibly denounce him as a reactionary hack.  For what its
worth, as far as I know, it actually is an uncontroverted fact that only 7 
people 
were incarcerated at the Bastille when it was stormed; that's nothing new. that 
he recites that 
fact or the face of ugly historical reality or seeks to puncture the balloons 
of myth and idealized history hardly means he is a partisan or apologist for 
royalist reactionaries or the Holy Alliance, 
particularly if he also recites the nefarious history of counter-revolutionary 
horrors during that era.  
For what it's worth, Schama is one of Ann Coulter's favorite punching bags.

A good book on the French Revolution that i read years ago was "The French 
Revolution: A
Concise History" by Norman Hansen.  In reading a different book on Dr. Johnson, 
it was 
ironic to see, given the reputation France has today for haute cuisine, have 
him in commenting on 
his visit to France in the late 1770s on what to him was the particularly bad 
food there
and the general conditions of destitution he saw there while the royal family 
lived in isolated
formalized grandeur worthy of the Chinese Emperor out at Versailles.  Thus when 
the first parliament was 
convened in 150 years, conditions for a social explosion were ripe, what did in 
fact
become a seminal event in human history.

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