Like most science fiction fans of my age, I grew up on a steady diet of the Tom Swift adventures. For the noncognoscenti, Tom Swift, then Tom Swift Jr, his son, were boy-genius inventors and adventurers. Beginning in 1910, the Tom Swifts had ripping adventures with everything from their Photo Telephone (1914), Atomic Earth Blaster (1954) and Repelatron Skyway (1963). It was all very ‘gee-whiz’ and endlessly fascinating for a young nerd.
More recently, Tom Swift was adapted for television. You guessed it: despite Tom being explicitly pictured and described as blond haired and blue eyed in the books, every single cast member is black (apart, of course, from the villain).
The ‘Netflix adaptation’ phenomenon, aka ‘blackwashing’, is just the tip of the Cultural Revolution that has ransacked Western culture in the past few decades, as the Long March through the Institutions triumphantly re-writes history. Frank Furedi’s The War Against the Past attempts to document the sack of the West’s history.
The vandalising of statues, the ‘decolonisation’ of institutions and curricula, the recasting of museums and the rearrangement of libraries are all symptoms of something more fundamental. Furedi argues that historical memory is the foundation of western identity and culture. The object of the campaigners is to discredit the West’s ideals and achievements. The result has been to persuade a generation of young people that our history and identity is something to be ashamed of and to dissolve the bonds of shared experience which make us a community.
This is an important book, which chronicles more fully than any other work that I know the gradual development of this rage against the past. It suffers from two main flaws. One is that Furedi is too angry to understand the mentality of those whom he is criticising. The other is that he tends to go off-piste to pursue other targets, such as gender-neutral vocabulary, trans ideology or dogmatic modernism, none of which has much to do with the discrediting of western culture.
Don’t they, though?
In fact, all three are simply salients in the Marxist assault on the West. Most especially trans ideology, which is just the Soviet New Man in lippy and a bad wig. All of it is wrapped up in an unspoken Party, which, as in 1984, systematically tries to erase the past in order to control the future.
As the campaigners see it, the object of their war against the past is to redress perceived inequalities, mainly of race, which they blame on the West’s sense of its own moral and cultural superiority. This, they argue, has marginalised racial minorities and whole nations outside Europe and America whose histories are equally valid but commonly ignored. In the process, their distinct identity has been suppressed.
Which begs the question of why they seem unable to produce any cultural artefacts based on this ‘distinct identity’. Instead, all they are able to do is steal the achievements of greater cultures than theirs and slap a layer of black greasepaint on it.
Slavery and colonialism, as the campaigners see it, are not just historical phenomena but symptoms of underlying attitudes whose persistence is held to be the main obstacle to the proper recognition of marginalised groups. Western societies must therefore be made to ‘confront’ these aspects of their past and feel suitably ashamed of them.
Yet, slavery and colonialism were hardly unique to the West. Indeed, it might be said that the West was the last to adopt either – and the first to dismantle both. The British indebted their people for centuries in order to forcibly stamp out slavery, against the violent resistance of African and Muslim despots especially, and voluntarily rescinded their empire in order to defeat the scourge of Nazism.
When have, say, the modern Māori ever been asked to apologise for genociding and enslaving the Moriori? Or Muslims to apologise for the massacre of Jews at Khaybar?
No rational person would make such a demand (though we should quite rightly be revolted by contemporary Muslims, as they so often do, bragging about Khaybar). Because such an anachronistic demand is rooted in ‘presentism’: judging the past solely by the moral lens of the present.
Their views about slavery, torture or cannibalism inevitably reflect their own moral standards rather than those of the people who once engaged in these practices. The real objection to what conservatives call ‘presentism’ is not that it is unpatriotic or anti-western, but that it often relies on bogus methodologies and the tendentious selection of material. The result is a presentation of the past which is fundamentally false. It is exemplified at its extremes by fantasies such as that the original inhabitants of Britain were black or that the Greek philosophers plagiarised their ideas from black Africa […]
The chief offence against historical truth is to take all the worst features of some historical phenomenon and then serve it up as if it were the whole. This is what has happened to the study of the British Empire. The Jamaican slave plantations, the near-extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, the Opium Wars and the Amritsar massacre were dark episodes. No one denies that. But Britain’s imperial history cannot be treated as if there were nothing else to it.
Again, no rational person would dismiss the entire sweep of Japanese culture and history solely because of the Burma Death March or the Rape of Nanking. We can recognise the value of Māori culture while deploring the cannabalism, slavery and endemic warfare of pre-colonial New Zealand.
Does it matter that large numbers of race-obsessed intellectuals wish to discredit [the West’s] legacy in ways that have very little basis in historical truth?
Absolutely. Not least because these vicious loons are firmly in control of an educational establishment which they run like a Maoist re-education camp.
Today, an older generation can laugh off the eccentricities of this movement. But to a younger age group they are not eccentricities. They are all that are being taught. A poll conducted in 2022 found that most 18- to 24-year-olds thought that Britain was ‘founded on racism’, a view shared by no other age group. These young people are the future. ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ ran the slogan of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell’s nightmare vision of a totalitarian world. They called it ‘reality control’.
So, I say again: home school your kids. And teach them the real history: the West is the Best.
