Hi Ringisei,

Thanks for this interesting review of the movie. Actually, it really makes me wonder whether history is truly written by the winners. No matter how the winners can effectively block out some parts of the history, the other stakeholders (who may also be in the losers group) still manage to keep a fragment such that it adds color to the other side of the conflict.

Han Sanyuan is a fan of Hegel, quoting a line which says that all that happens in history is in accord with reason, that which is not will disappear. (I do not know whether this is from Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History and would appreciate it if someone could enlighten me.)

The line I can think of is from the Preface to the Philosophy of Right. Roughly: That which is rational is real and that which is real is rational. (Was vernunftig ist, das ist wirklich, während was wirklich ist, das ist vernunftig; I think) There might be similar lines elsewhere in his writing though.

Note that if Hegel is taken at face value, there can't be anything that which is not in accord with reason that will disappear. Everything that is, is rational--even though human beings may not appreciate the rationale until the owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk, i.e., until they are able to see it, given hindsight, from the standpoint of History Completed.

BL, this is quite a Hegelian point (I think). Just as the social institution of slavery cannot exist without the opposing binaries of master/servant, winners are also constituted by losers. Thus if one erases or denigrates the losers, the magnitude of one's own victory will be correspondingly reduced when it is looked back upon with hindsight. Do catch the film!

Huichieh, many thanks! I've managed to get a PDF copy of S.W. Dyde's translation of the Philosophy of Right - would appreciate your opinion of which translation would be the best way to approach the text. The thing about Hegel is that sometimes I have no idea whether to take him at face value or not. :P

Problem is that I'm no Hegel scholar. Nonetheless, I suppose the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought edition (blue cover) should be good. One of the better recent studies (according to more knowledgeable friends) would be the one by Charles Taylor. On a different note, I think you will enjoy my new (old) piece.

One more thing: there might be some pages in G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence that are useful re: Hegel's conception of history. I remember finding the book very clear. Unlike Hegel.

You made a good point about Chinese whispers.

Chinese are historians by nature, the traditional chinese education places much emphasis on learning history. When Chinese schools were closed, what we lost was not only the medium of teaching, but the methodology of learning.

In a multi-lingual society such as Singapore, can we claim to be preserving our history if we only value history that is archived in English and not history archived in other languages?

Recently, during its 21st anniversary, Raffles City in Singapore dropped its Chinese name 莱佛士 to adopt a more "commercially attractive name" 来福士

http://victorkoo.blogspot.com/2007/10/our-founder-has-change-of-name.html

While there had been many changes to names of places of historical importance in the past, it is the first time anyone had altered the name of our founder Raffles.
Though it retains its English name, one wonders if its historical links are truly be preserved after it threw away its Chinese equivalent.

"The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history." - Hegel

The Raffles thing may not be a good example of a failure to preserve an essentially Chinese medium history since Raffles did not have a Chinese name. And strictly speaking, "莱佛士" is not a *translation* of "Raffles" if some sort of *semantic* equivalence is part of translation.

Rather, there is a traditional/conventional way of rendering his name--an English name--into Chinese characters: 莱佛士; just as there are often traditional/conventional ways of rendering a ton of frequently recurring foreign names of all sorts of languages into Chinese characters. (Good dictionaries will have some; e.g., there is a long list appended to the 《辞海》)

There is *nothing* intrinsically right from the purely linguistic point of view about 莱佛士 and nothing intrinsically wrong about 来福士--they both do the job of representing how the "barbarian" name *sounds*; except for convention/tradition.

Incidentally, many names--including that of G. W. Bush--are rendered in different ways depending on whether it is the Mainland Chinese, or Singaporean Chinese, or Taiwanese, or HK'er, etc. who's writing, and in what time period. (Throw in the Kanji and Hanja and we get potentially at least two more.)

This is not to say that professional translators do not try to find characters that both given the right sound and also the right semantic meaning--but for obvious reasons, this can only be done on an ad hoc basis. What more often happens is that characters with positive connotations are picked--assuming that the person doing the first translation is at least not unfriendly. And the reverse can happened too. For instance, there are Tang era translations of Nestorian Christian texts in which "Jesus" is rendered as 移鼠--the suspicion is that hostile (or naughty) native translators are involved.

(Chinese is hardly the only language with these sorts of transliteration problems--try convincing those who prefer to render the Classical Greek names as "Achilles" and "Pericles", to switch to "Akhilles" and "Perikles" and vice versa. And for that matter, the varieties of ways to render Chinese into Roman letters--Pinyin vs. Wade-Giles vs. whatnot...)