[ Nostalgia is frequently invoked by the reactionary right, but it
has its uses on the left. We must reach towards the stars without
forgetting all that remains buried in the ground beneath our feet.]
[[link removed]]

ANCHORS FOR HOPE: THE BENEFITS OF LEFT NOSTALGIA  
[[link removed]]


 

Siobhan McGuirk
September 1, 2023
Red Pepper
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Nostalgia is frequently invoked by the reactionary right, but it
has its uses on the left. We must reach towards the stars without
forgetting all that remains buried in the ground beneath our feet. _

Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in Middlesbrough during the 2019 general
election campaign, (Credit: Jeremy Corbyn via Wikimedia Commons)

 

Do you remember your first protest or rally? The first movement
meeting that transformed your worldview? Who was there? How did it
make you feel? If such recollections leave you smiling yet wistful,
nostalgia is kicking into gear. It is a powerful, even necessary,
emotion – a ‘self-regulatory tool we use to remind ourselves that
we matter’, says psychological scientist Clay Routledge. It is a
response leveraged by politicians, advertisers and storytellers alike
because that complex blend of memory, feeling, connection and
deeply-held sense of what was good in the past propels action in the
present.

Nostalgia cultivated through distortions of history
[[link removed]] can
lead to destructive, repressive ends. Often banally expressed
through flags, flowers and other nationalist symbols
[[link removed]],
these imaginaries are not products of selective remembrance and
mythologising alone. They demand erasure, express denial of
counter-claims.

In this context, interventions against collective amnesia – wilful
or not – can prevent nostalgia being transformed into the official
record. James W Loewen’s _Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your
American History Textbook Got Wrong_
[[link removed]] attempted
this feat in 1995. In the 2018 Loewen decried the new curricula
producing ‘adult Americans who think Donald Trump can solve their
problems’. Supremacist fictions, foundational to the nation state,
are not easily dislodged. History repeats the lies it tells about
itself.

Correctives that fetishise ‘truth’, however, risk closing down
debate. We must uncover histories suppressed while still understanding
memory and nostalgia, anchors for hope, as useful to the left.
Campaigner Harry Leslie Smith, born a century ago this year,
understood this complexity. His 2014 defence of the welfare
state, _Harry’s Last Stand_
[[link removed]] pitted
history against austerity.

The title intentionally gestures to his WWII service. In it, he
recalls the great depression and being on picket lines with his dad at
the 1926 general strike. His childhood was spent in poverty and his
sister Marion died painfully, aged 10, before the NHS existed. These
memories fuelled his activism. He writes: ‘Sometimes I try to think
how I might explain to Marion how we built these beautiful structures
in our society – which protected the poor, which kept them safe at
work, healthy in their lives, supported them when they were down on
their luck – only to watch them be destroyed within a few short
generations.’ Jeremy Corbyn echoed his sentiment during the 2017
election – described by Fintan O’Toole as ‘saturated with
nostalgia
[[link removed]]’
from both sides.

Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman suggests that we cannot avoid
engaging with history and nostalgia as intertwined. He has spent his
career grappling with popular legacies and memories of the Pinochet
dictatorship, as they fracture and fade. His 2010
documentary _Nostalgia for the Light_
[[link removed]] explores unexpected parallels
between astrologers seeking universal truths in the stars from their
Atacama desert base and the families still searching for the remains
of relatives ‘disappeared’ in the same arid terrain. Guzman
opposes creeping nostalgia for the right while valuing collectively
felt longing for the Chile that could have been under elected
socialist president Salvador Allende. His films remind us we must
reach towards the stars without forgetting all that remains buried in
the ground beneath our feet.

_THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN ISSUE #240, SUMMER 2023, DEBT. 
 Subscribe to Red Pepper – you choose how much to pay.
[[link removed]]_

_Red Pepper is a quarterly magazine and website of left politics and
culture. We’re a socialist publication drawing on feminist, green
and anti-racist politics. We seek to be a space for debate on the
left, a resource for movements for social justice, and a home for
open-minded anti-capitalists._

* History
[[link removed]]
* Culture
[[link removed]]
* UK
[[link removed]]
* Chile
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]