Year in Review: 1989, Then and Beyond
The first major assignment of the semester was the Year in Review Essay. The purpose of the essay was to select a year in American history between 1945 and 2000, and then characterize it based on five specific events that took place. That year would then serve as the basis for our subsequent assignments.
The Year in Review Essay was designed to use visual text as a lens through which to view American culture. The year I selected for analysis was 1989. 1989 was arguably the most important year of the post-World War II twentieth-century era. It is the year that marked the end of the Cold War, with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union from Eastern Europe, and the onset of Perestroika within its own borders.
The five major events that I selected to set in cultural and historical context were the fall of the Berlin Wall, the assassinations of Father Ignacio Ellacuria and five other Latin American priests along with their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador by U.S. trained and armed forces, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the appearance of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis, and the World Health Organization's decade review of the global "silent genocide" of starving people in the Third World.
My purpose was to present a critical interpretation of a single historical event and its conventional rendering; in this, the end of the Cold War and the onset of the so called "end of history," with the triumph of Good over Evil, Freedom over Tyranny, Capitalism over Communism, etc. Selective amnesia is a naturally useful device for maintaining control over the course of the future, as Orwell poignantly demonstrated. Doctrinal filters allow us to recall the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but not the brutal assassinations of six Catholic priests only a week later by U.S. trained forces; mere footnotes in a legacy of hundreds of thousands of corpses in Central America during the 1980s alone - 75,000 of which were piled just in El Salvador. Requisite odes to our own munificence and damning litanies of the inscrutable evil of the enemy is a universal feature of the history of nation-states and empires.
My reasoning was to put the doctrinal interpretation of 1989 in the context of other significant events which should have had far-reaching ramifications as well, but were basically ignored and cast aside to the ash heap of history. For example, imagine the reaction of the West if an Eastern European dissident intellectual like Vaclav Havel had been assassinated by Soviet-trained and armed forces. The brutal murder of Ignacio Ellacuria - a Catholic priest, no less - illicited nothing; at least not in the West, for reasons that are quite obvious. Or to take another case in point, the horrors of Communism are standard intellectual fare; from fiction to scholarship, from the commercial media to the academic world, vivid chronicles detailing the death tolls amassed by Communist regimes all across the world. A popular number is 100 million people killed by "Communism" (using the standard term, whatever it actually is); as it appears in the Black Book of Communism. Just out of morbid curiousity, we might be equally compelled to look for the Black Book detailing in grizzly lucidity the deaths of 11 million people every year in the Third World from mass starvation over the course of the 1980s - what the World Health Organization called a "silent genocide," brought about by the "unrelenting nightmare" of Capitalism. We would be disappointed to discover that no such book exists. There is no Black Book of Capitalism. The "unrelenting nightmare" continues to pile up tens of millions of corpses every year - with particular ferocity at present thanks to the 2008-2009 financial crisis and rising food prices. For those who have to ask why knowledge of these uncomfortable facts is relevant, no answer would suffice.
Overall, I am very satisfied with my final work. I feel I seized the oppurtunity to write about something in a comprehensive academic light that appealed to my socio-political-economic interests. Many of the sources I used were works that I personally own; thus, research was a rather easy feat, allowing me to allot more time to organizing and actually writing my essay. Throughout, I expressed a consistently formal and scholarly voice.
The Year in Review Essay was an assignment that I was happy to work on and complete. There were however many areas where I could have benefited from a different approach. For example, my prior knowledge of many of the events detailed in my essay discouraged me from seeking outside sources for research other than those I was already familiar with. As a result, I feel that I did not fully meet the research imperatives. I was discouraged from utilizing the Gale Virtual Reference Library. This seems to be an unfortunate result of being somewhat too knowledgeable of the subject matter, thus inducing a confidence in the legitimacy of sources already in possession, and not seeking out alternative forms of research.
Nevertheless, in the end, I was happy with my work.
Here is a link to view my finished essay:
Year in Review: 1989