Many Years Later, Another Marxian Rephrased This

Nations Without A Past Are Contradictions In Terms. What Makes A Nation Is The Past, What Justifies One Nation Against Others Is The Past, And Historians Are The People Who Produce It.

The Greatest Cruelties Of Our Century Have Been The Impersonal Cruelties Of Remote Decision, Of System And Routine, Especially When They Could Be Justified As Regrettable Operational Necessity.

He[napoleon] Had Destroyed Only One Thing: The Jacobin Revolution, The Dream Of Equality, Liberty And Fraternity, And Of The People Rising In Its Majesty To Shake Off Oppression. It Was A More Powerful Myth Than His, For After His Fall It Was This, And Not His Memory, Which Inspired The Revolutions Of The Nineteenth Century, Even In His Own Country.

Historians Are To Nationalism What Poppy-growers In Pakistan Are To Heroin-addicts: We Supply The Essential Raw Material For The Market.

It Is One Of The Ironies Of This Strange Century That The Most Lasting Results Of The October Revolution, Whose Object Was The Global Overthrow Of Capitalism, Was To Save Its Antagonist, Both In War And In Peace - That Is To Say, By Providing It With The Incentive, Fear, To Reform Itself After The Second World War, And, By Establishing The Popularity Of Economic Planning, Furnishing It With Some Of The Procedures For Its Reform