DK ACTIVISM THEN AND NOW PT II FIRST PARAGRAPH EXCERPT

"... Great historians, I often remark, do not argue with history, and while I have opposed many of the changes I will be discussing, I am not suggesting that they could suddenly be undone, or regretting specific great mistakes that allowed them to happen.  "It's useless to argue about the causes of great events," Zhivago remarks in the  midst of the Russian Revolution (in a passage that I have searching for in vain for weeks)--"they haven't any."  I would say rather than the causes are as profound as tectonic shifts in the earth's crust, but also as difficult to observe.  The earthquake that hit the nation in the 1960s must have been building up unseen for a long time.." DK.

Where to begin on this. I have already made some comments on this post that may hint at some things I may discuss.

I have said in the past that it is part of a historian's job, in my view, to try to somehow place themselves into past times they try to understand. 

For this interpretation of a historian's job, I still feel in relatively good but dwindling company, as time continues to pass. Butterfield and Collingwood were two who believed that. There have been others. Conrad Russell, I believe. 

Some of them are called revisionists, because frankly the effort to see clearly what was or had been at stake, for the historical actors themselves and their states, back in history, at whatever time, has always inevitably involved to some extent rethinking and revisiting the past at a deeper level and in its own bygone terms where feasible, than to rely on the mostly one sided accounts, (and what has been worse retrospective reinterpretative accounts based on later ways of thinking and acting,) that have tended to be passed down through history, and changed as they went along, for generations on end. 

In doing so, they immediately come into conflict with the arguments since made by those who wrote subsequently from the point of view often of those who had earlier prevailed, whether they had been right back then or wrong, good or bad, honest or dishonest.

Only one difficulty among many is that even the idea of revisionist history is filled with misinformation now. Historical Revisionism, Wikipedia.

Reading now Conyers Read's wonderful biography of William Cecil. Read was a historian for the OSS, and had an illustrious career. His account tries to capture, week by week, and month by month, amid power politics and the rolling out of the Reformation, Cecil's career as Principal Secretary to Elizabeth I.

Read agonizes over the veracity of his account, the validity of his cautious inferences,  and the paucity of his material in places on every other page.

I will just say this about the quote from Zhivago. Had not the German enemy decided to send a train with Lenin to Russia during WWI, it seems to me quite possible that there may never have been a Russian Bolshevik Revolutionary takeover of Russia at all. There may have been a milder thing that began anyway under the stress of the war. 

That is just one example of events in history that are not at all tectonic, unalterable, or subject to Calvinist predestination theory.

As I have argued, the earthquake that hit the nation had been built into its founding ideology and founding documents. Even a Lincoln could smell them out and espouse them. 

Speaking of Lincoln, there was nothing tectonic, inevitable, or predestined, about his whacko Trumplike decision to issue The Emancipation Proclamation, a document that betrayed his own constituency's hearts' desires to remove the negro slaves, not simply free them willy nilly as a war measure a la Lord Dunmore. 

With that, Lincoln became a marked man, similarly to how the Kennedys later double crossed the mob and Hoffa's teamsters, and it was only an accident of history, hardly tectonic, that a whacked out Southern sympathizer, Booth, shot him instead of one of his own betrayed and outraged Northern racist white followers.

This may not be the Zhivago quote DK was looking for.....maybe not. 

Russian novels are tricky like that. 

Frankly, it more closely resembles some of my remarks above than his sense of its meaning, but here it is:

“No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries. ”

https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/doctor-zhivago

To be continued.....

I will give you another example, the serendipity that Churchill remained alive long enough to be put in charge of British war efforts. 

The Conservative Party certainly intended for Hitler to attack Russia if his strength developed to that point. 

They never expected him to first attack West, which really was his big ideological mistake. 

Had he not done that, they would have gladly and willingly stood by, unarmed, having planned it that way, as he then struck East. 

Quigley gives a rather detailed account of the background among both the Liberals and Conservatives in Britain, The Anglo-American Establishment.