Terry Eagleton Quotes
There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.
Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. Verso, 1981, p. 45.
While this statement is logically correct, there are many efforts at revisionist history for reasons other than conveying more accuracy. Most societies have some people who try to recast history, especially about themselves. The Russian Communists are famous for “changing history to reflect a Lennists-Marxist view of the world. The Turks have rewritten their history and text books to eliminate the Armenian Genocide. The Arabs have done the same with respect to the role and presence of Jews in Israel and Jerusalem. In America, during the latter part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, apologists for Slavery and the South rewrote many texts and media to reflect a fantasy era when slaves were well cared for and happy, the Civil War was fought for reasons other than slavery, and the KKK and other terrorists and murderers were upholding law, order and morality.
Terence Francis Eagleton FBA (born 1943) is a British literary theorist, critic, and public intellectual. He is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
