Dr. Rohan Price

This text argues that Nietzsche's idea of invalid policy that is believed to be valid and Heidegger's concept of doubt as the reason for a representation are essentially the same idea. Using this insight, the text investigates vignettes from colonial occupation in southeast Asia and its protest occupations to contend that untruth, covered in camouflages of constancy and morality, has been a powerful force in Asian history. The Nietzschean inflections applied here include Superhumanity, the eternal return of trauma, the critiques of morality, and the moralization of guilt. Many ideas familiar to the Heideggerian repertoire are used including the struggle for individual validity amidst the debasement and imbalance of Dasein. Thrownness, and the remnant cultural power of Christianity, are also deployed in a searching expos of colonial practices. The book gives detailed treatment to post-colonial Malaya, Japanese occupied Hong Kong, the tussle with communism in Cold War Singapore and Malaya and the question of Kuomintang KMT validity in Hong Kong and British Malaya. The book explains the old struggles for freedom and identity in the Hong Kong protest movement by showing how economic distortion caused by landlordism has been covered by aspirations for freedom.

Provocative and disconcerting, The False Past confronts what many generations hold near and dear about their memorials. What if everything we know about colonial history is wrong? What if history is driven by vanity and unexamined moral claims? What if fabrication and corruption are so integral to history that it must be written anew? These questions, posed by Nietzsche, are answered in this exciting new work. The False Past takes a disturbing escapade through Australia’s colonial past. Using a Nietzschean evaluation of how the eternal recurrence of suffering worked in practice, it announces a fresh vision for frontier history. And in the finest Nietzschean tradition, Price reveals the uncaring absurdity and inconsistency of settlers in the pioneer past as their supreme failing because it produces contemporary trauma. The False Past evaluates claims to colonial nobility, too. Who were the souls aiming beyond humanity who rose up Down Under? Was its Übermensch a dark and moody genius with a taste for conquest, a supreme talent in pastoral profiteering, an Indigenous exemplar, or a cunning bushranger out on a mission? Awkward and confronting, bold and experimental, this book often says the unsayable. The False Past lays siege to nostalgia, piety, vanity and nihilism to explain how unfounded exceptionalism has come to rule our lives. A revisionist assault on settled history, The False Past promises to spark debate among readers for many years to come.