Norwegian Murderer

Where do you start with such a horrible weekend? Seventy-six people murdered in Norway by a man who, it seems, had rationalized what he was going to do over a number of years, and planned his actions in detail to be as devastating as possible.

It is very difficult to understand how someone could do what he did. It goes so far against human nature to deliberately kill another person that we cannot comprehend how a murderer  can detach themselves to such an extent, become so alienated, that they can look a person in the eyes and then shoot them. Most murders are crimes of passion, they are committed in anger and rage, when a person has lost control. We can almost understand that a person can react violently and cause death and injury that they did not with malice aforethought intend. But this man gathered children around him - they were drawn by the fact that, dressed as a policeman - he behaved as though he had their welfare at heart and wanted to help, but in fact he simply wanted to kill the largest number of them as he could.

Is this the equivalent of a suicide bomber  who finds the most crowded part of the market in in which to blow himself up?

Or is it more like the killers in Mumbai, India who methodically searched two hotels floor by floor looking for people to kill? They eventually killed 166 and injured more than 300.

The shared patriotic, religious and anti-government sentiments expressed by Breivik suggest a similarity with Timothy McVeigh, who, in bombing a US Government building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killed 168 and injured nearly 700.

We think we understand those attacks, we can grasp at a notion thay they were motivated by religious and political extremism mixed with ignorance, cowardliness and desperation. This may be because in cultural, geographic and historical terms, we have sufficient distance between us and them, between here and there and between then and now to allow a degree of supposed understanding derived from rational thought.  

But in Western Europe we are faced with the horror of an educated, seemingly intelligent man living in a mature democracy who can rationalise the mass murder of children in order to further his racist and nationalist aims. We have no distance in time, space or culture in which to process our feelings about what has happened, we are suffering a collective shock.

All we can do today is to feel the sadness and despair of survivors, express the sympathy and support we want to send to those who have lost loved ones and hope that at some point in the future we can learn something good from such a horrible episode.

Rational thought is of little use on days like these.

What is History?

History is the set of stories we tell about ourselves. The stories can be vast; from the dawn of creation to the last second of time; they can spread across continents even planets or be played out in a tiny attic room; they can survey the lives of millions over thousands of years or focus on 30 seconds in one life. They can be told by the most distinguished, ancient professor writing in a plush study surrounded by the finest set of history books ever collected in one place or they can be told by a ragged old drunk sat on a step shouting them out to no-one in particular.
History is not the record of what actually happened, 'facts' do not exist, and the 'truth' is constructed by the teller of the story.
We can be sure that something has probably happened, we can be fairly certain of when it happened, but as to how it really played out and why those events actually happened - that we cannot possibly know. All we can know, indeed all that we have to go on, is how that event is remembered. In the case of Medieval History we have chronicles, charters, and whole books that claim to be the true history of events, these are called 'primary sources' and they come to us in manuscripts, slips of parchment and rolled up records. They are written in the language of the time and place, in Western Europe, for example, they are usually in Latin, although large numbers of vernacular records also exist.
They form the best record we have of events, in part because they are closest in time and place to those events, but mostly because they are all we have. This means that nothing is certain, we have a primary source written down by someone who remembers those events in a particular way, who has contructed 'the truth' from what he or she remembers - or chooses to remember. But is that not the case in all things?
Reality is constructed by the individual as a way of making sense of the world, as a means of surviving its horrifying, stupid, beautiful and inspiring wonder. Once you embrace the fact that you create the reality of the world every day in your own head then you can start to shape the parts you have some control over to make it the way you want it to be.
The purpose of history is to provide you with the building blocks that enable you to construct that reality. The things you as an individual remember, the things we as a community of individuals remember, enable us to construct the house, the street, the town, the country, the continent and the world we live in every day when we wake up.
Without history we are without collective memory, without collective memory we cannot attempt to understand the world we live in, without trying to understanding the world we live in we are no better than a rock rolling through empty space.
Long Live History!!

Welcome to this Blog

Who knows how long this blog will last? Who knows how famous it will become? Will these be the first words in a long stream of well-informed, interesting and entertaining communications? Or will it be a brief and incoherent spluttering, rarely updated and potentially sleep-inducing? All i can say is that i will try.
But what will i try to do?
The title of the blog 'historymusicpolitics' embraces my three main interests. I am a historian, the 'Dr.' comes from a PhD in Medieval History from the University of Bristol. I have always loved music, one of my earliest memories as a child was seeing 'A Hard Days Night' in the Classic Cinema in Birkenhead on Merseyside. The moment when the four boys decide to escape the stifling confines of the theatre they are going to perform in and somehow find themselves at the top of a fire escape, free, young, energetic, happy and fun-loving they run out into a field to 'Can't Buy Me Love' - hooked on music from the age of 5. I am interested in politics and participate by supporting my local Labour Party - handing out leaflets, canvassing, writing letters and generally arguing the case for breaking down national barriers between people, encouraging a society in which hard working and talented people, from what ever background, are given all the help they need to succeed, and where the vulnerable and helpless are protected and supported.
I will be writing blogs drawing on these three themes - hoping they will be interesting, trying to make them so and awaiting responses from readers.