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Historians: Stop Bush/Cheney From Destroying Presidential Records
Think Progress reports:
Thirty-two of the nation’s leading historians have sent letters to congressional leaders calling on them to stregthen the Presidential Records Act (PRA). The effort, led by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and joined by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Coalition for History, notes that while the PRA requires the administration to preserve presidential records, “it fails to provide an effective means of enforcing compliance with that requirement.”
The letters are available here and here. Given the Bush administration’s record of secrecy and deception, the preservation of presidential records is a crucial way to seal, in writing, concrete proof of their World-Historical malevolence: not necessarily for all of us who got the chance to live through Bush’s presidency, but for future generations who might be interested in the truth as opposed to some hypothetical white-washed narrative, the likes of which history so often succumbs.
Scarcity and Desire
Two related posts on scarcity and desire posted over at Larval Subjects. The discussion on contingency, necessity and scarcity in relation to After Finitude seems like a really interesting topic, as in history I think that people don’t do enough to emphasize not only the contingency of certain historical events, but the way in which their outcome shapes how we reflect on them retroactively. If history is to move beyond the economy of scarcity, and therefore beyond ideology and metaphysics, which attempt to establish the necessity of causality, then it should take up the task of locating what, within history, supersedes it, demonstrates its inherent deadlock / impasse.