‘The West has forgotten where it came from’

Statues are toppled. Museums are emptied of their artefacts. National heroes are smeared as racists and criminals. From universities to primary schools, from museums to local councils, the institutions trusted with preserving and passing on historical memory are instead waging a war on it. Today’s elites have turned decisively against the gains of Western civilisation and seek to paint its legacy as toxic.

In his new book, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight For Its History, Frank Furedi explores the key drivers of this anti-civilisational turn and why it is so dangerous. He returned last week to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss this and more. What follows is an edited extract from Frank and Brendan’s conversation. You can listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: How long has the war against the past been going on for?

Frank Furedi: Ever since the 1970s, there’s been a cumulative process whereby Western society – particularly in the Anglo-American world – has become more and more distant from its own past. Of course, there’s always been a trend for people to criticise history. But from the early 1980s onwards, these attacks were rarely resisted by the cultural and political elites.

Historically, the establishment might have defended the importance of preserving its legacy and taking it seriously. Now even the elites are increasingly disenchanted and estranged from history. What we have is this very one-sided war against the past with very little pushback.

It began as a quite specific, targeted attack on things like slavery in America or how the British Empire behaved in the 19th or early 20th century. Then suddenly every dimension of the Western experience was rendered toxic. It’s almost as if activists are trying to quarantine that legacy of the past – to suggest that there is no redeeming feature, that this is a story of shame. That obviously escalated in 2020, but it’s been a long time coming. The ground had been prepared for that over the previous decade.

O’Neill: Is this hostility toward history distorting the truth about the past?

Furedi: In my book I talk about the emergence of historical amnesia. Through detaching society from its past and in doing everything possible to turn the past into a kind of no-go area, people are forgetting some very important experiences.

Although things are written down, people begin to have alternative memories of, for example, the Holocaust. This can be very different from the events of the real Holocaust. The identitarian version of the Holocaust is one where Jewish people play a fairly minor, undistinguished part. Instead you have all kinds of identity groups suffering to a much greater extent than anybody else did. The Holocaust then becomes this ensemble, where different groups can claim that they were its principal victims. We see this in the weird attempt to ‘queer’ the Holocaust.

There is a struggle for historical memory here. In the course of erasing important achievements of the past, what you’re doing is encouraging people to forget what the past was really all about. There’s that famous quote from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which a man from the Ministry of Truth makes the point that, by 2050, people will no longer remember who Shakespeare was. They will no longer remember who all the important philosophers were. People will simply not know the writings and the arguments of all these great figures from the past.

We’re actually running ahead of that schedule by a good 20 or 25 years. Already we have a situation in which people no longer remember who the real Aristotle is, because we’re told that he was this founder of white supremacy. Kids going to school today might be told that Churchill was a war criminal. When you have such a warped vision of one of the greatest icons of 20th-century British history, then you can’t remember very much about where you’ve come from.

O’Neill: What happens to politics when we are detached from the past?

Furedi: Under these circumstances, politics runs on empty. It becomes an entirely technocratic, procedurally oriented enterprise. You make rules about everything, but you’re not really giving people any substantial choices. You’re certainly not providing people with ideals that can inspire them, particularly the younger generation. We’re moving into a situation where politics gets flattened out, to the point where it ceases to have any kind of meaning.

Elections then become a kind of ritual. They’re about getting votes, rather than about a genuine clash of opinions. The only antidote to this is to somehow bring back an understanding of the importance of connecting to what preceded us. One of the ways we can do this is by trying to promote a more sovereigntist, nation-building approach. Because the moment you talk about the nation, sovereignty and democracy, invariably you have to make references to where those ideals come from. You cannot have a sense of nation in the abstract. It needs to be built upon something that preceded it.

Through the promotion of these kinds of ideals and the symbols they’re associated with, you can begin to more effectively counter the contemporary trend. I think this is a realistic possibility. A lot of young people who feel lost would respond positively if they were exposed to how remarkable the journey of human civilisation has been. There’s a lot to fight for.

Frank Furedi was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: