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Manuscripts Don T Burn Essay

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If you could erase one person from human history, who would it be? Why? - 83 “Manuscripts don’t burn.” – The Devil, “Master and Margarita”. This quote most aptly summarizes the point I will be defending in this essay. History is shaped not by people, but by manuscripts – by ideas. These can’t develop independently – they are shaped by the world around them, by the trends and forces of history. If one considers all factors at play, their formation is a foregone conclusion. Martin Luther did not singlehandedly create Protestantism, the systemic failures of the church did. One can’t destroy the idea by erasing the man who wrote the popular book on it – one will just create another writer. People burn, ideas don’t. The best one can do is …show more content…

Along with the progress achieved by the Labour movement in Britain this would lead to a shift towards social democracy and the idea that socialism should develop naturally, as is the case in modern day Scandinavia. In a world without Lenin, socialism would not have the negative connotations of the Gulags, and would return to its humanistic roots. Moreover, this exercise in remodeling history does not exist in a vacuum. It gives us a principle which should be adopted the real world as well. The stakeholders in this are not only the millions now hypothetically not dead as a result of Leninism or the better-off poor of an alternative universe; but real people, made of flesh and blood, which are dying as a result of misinterpreted ideas. We topple oppressive governments and kill tyrants like Gadhafi, but this only turns them into martyrs, and fails to show where they went wrong with their ideas. I am not advocating to leave them be, instead we should do the only thing we as humans can against the tides of history and discredit their ideas from within – deny

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