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More recently, the OED has defined nostalgia as a “sentimental longing for the past,” although this definition is imperfect and allows considerable latitude for the negative. After all, a sentimental longing for the past has variously given us Brexit, resurgent right-wing nationalism in Europe and the US, and a Russian presidency that has more than a whiff of tsardom about it.
For some, the past may be not only a nice place to visit but also to live. It is, perhaps, the difference between personal nostalgia, which draws on significant memories of family, friends, spouses, even pets, and a more generalized, dangerous nostalgia that peddles idealized fantasies of yesteryear, of a better past that didn’t even exist at the time. Culture as much as politics has a part to play in this, an example being the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, whose opening title crawl celebrated “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields,” a “pretty world” where “gallantry took its last bow,” which required one to ignore the 3,500,000 slaves held in the South by 1860, a situation that meant nine out of ten Black Americans were in a state of involuntary servitude. The title crawl did at least manage to acknowledge the existence of slavery, but only in a somewhat wistful manner: “Here,” it told us, “was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and Slave… A Civilization gone with the wind…”
In 2020, when the South Korean film Parasite won the Academy Award for Best Picture, much to the annoyance of U.S. president Donald Trump, it was to Gone With The Wind that Trump turned.
"Can we get, like, Gone With The Wind back, please" he implored at a rally in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on the 20th of February 2020. One could argue that what he was seeking was the revived celebration of epic filmmaking of a particularly American stripe. But while correlation does not imply causation, by 2023-2024 slavery denial had become a theme of Republican party presidential primaries.
At a town hall meeting in Berlin, New Hampshire, on the 27th of December 2023, Nikki Haley, former governer of South Carolina, replied to a question about the cause of the Civil War by mentioning only "how government was run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn't do." Including, presumably, owning slaves, though she didn't specify that.
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