Beware of anachronisms. An anachronism in its broadest terms is an intentional or unintentional historical error in time. When you compare an idea or principle to persons or movements, make sure you correctly identify the idea or event in historical context of that person or movement. In other words do your research.
The first example of an anachronism is one of simple mistaken chronology:
- Be specific in historical critiques: I have received a fair amount of letters over the years (and recently) blaming President Richard Nixon almost exclusively for the Vietnam War. [See “Rumsfeld’s opression,” Dec. 9]. One letter (unprinted) blamed Dwight D. Eisenhower though he never sent in any troops. Here are the series of firsts that define the United States’ entrance into Vietnam and each president’s culpability for the war:
- Dwight Eisenhower first sent financial and military aid. John F. Kennedy first sent 400 Green Beret advisors to Vietnam to train South Vietnamese soldiers. Lyndon B. Johnson sent the first troops in during March 1965 and escalated the war greatly during his administration. Vietnam wasn’t exclusively Nixon’s war. He didn’t start it.
- So always check the chronologies of political movements, wars, eras or epochs (the Enlightenment, Romanticism) before you assign blame or make an assertion. Chronologies for anything you may want to write about abound on the Internet. Check them out before you hit the send button on your computer (Fact check dates at the same time too, please. Don’t rely on your memory).
Also be aware that anachronisms are sometimes used to try and build an emotional alliance with the reader by touting a well-known, liked person as representative of his or her cause – whether that person is a true historical example or not of the cause.
- This happens most often when a writer ascribes a contemporary idea or movement to a person who existed in an earlier era. For example, it is an anachronism when political revolutionaries try to describe Jesus Christ’s teaching on helping the poor as purely political (various modern-day liberation theologies) rather than steeped in the context of his own time period and culture. Marxism didn’t exist before Marx. Jesus didn’t live to preach Marxist economic theory centuries before Marxism even existed. Yes, there may be germs of ideas present at times between eras and people, but be wary whenever you see a historical figure wretched completely out of his or her historic context and painted with another epoch’s colors; it usually amounts to nothing more than political propaganda.
- For some fun film anachronisms see film babble: