Don't Let The Woke Re-Write History

Are We On The Pathway To An Orwellian Future?

George Orwell wrote: "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." We've made this all too easy in Canada by our acceptance of the postmodern ideas of postcolonialism. 

Critical Race Theory, though it is superficially focused on uncovering societal injustices based on identity characteristics, also takes aim at the legitimacy of Western Civilization as a whole. Indeed, as British historian Andrew Roberts wrote, "a deep malaise in our cultural self-confidence" is being exploited and exacerbated.

The word colonialism has been transformed into something uniquely Western and weaponized into vaguely defined terms such as "de-colonize." Colonialism refers to the building of trade outposts in foreign territories sometimes through conquest and sometimes through negotiated agreement. Within the context of "The Colonial Exchange" in the Americas, often trade was accompanied by conquest, disease and settlement. Even so, it is wrong to view these actions as uniquely European. They are the legacy of a violent human past. Not some societies, but the vast majority participated in internecine violence and war.  The act of conquest and settlement is part of human history.

War and colonization have shaped the contours of maps, so long as there have been maps, but the colonizers are myriad and diverse: Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Spanish, English, Japanese, Zulu, Iroquois, Cree, Mughals, Persians and French. This list does not begin to encompass the ebb and flow of centuries of war and settlement on this human orb. But hopefully it is enough to make the point that colonization is not a uniquely European phenomenon. 

The history of Western Civilization is no more brutal than that of other civilizations.  In his book War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Lawrence Keeley details rates of violence among state and non-state societies and found that in some non-state societies the chances of dying due to violence was over 50%. Compare this with today's United States where the chances are well under 1%. "The total rate of violent death adds up to 0.008, or eight-tenths of a percentage as a whole" (Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature). Contrary to commonly distorted perceptions around conditions of tribal societies, they include greater frequency of both homicide and war. And this was true in all of the world's inhabited continents. 

This reality is not permitted to prevent the "work" of "de-colonizing society". The truth simply doesn’t seem to matter to the ideologues chasing utopia. Like many terms used by today's neo-Marxist Critical Theorists, “de-colonize” is a vague and open to interpretation. Does it mean making space for other interpretations of history, cultures and narratives, or does it mean a sustained attack on only Western societies? Or at its most malevolent, does it mean ethnic cleansing? Critical Theorists must acknowledge that our history in the West has been no more terrible than that of the rest of the world. 

We have seen this before. In the Soviet Union and in Maoist China, attacks were made to uproot and destroy history and tradition. The "4 olds" as Mao termed them. Old ideas, customs, culture and habits of mind were ridiculed with lethal effect during The Cultural Revolution. In the words of Michael Wood:  “The Cultural Revolution was another bitter time for the Chinese people, for the deliberate destruction of their past meant the severance of deep emotional attachments to what it had meant to be Chinese.” 

The systematic destruction of thousands of monuments, graves, libraries and religious sites came in the hellish wake of Mao's Great Famine which had starved to death some 45 million people. Culture and tradition was "de-colonized" from the minds of millions of Chinese and replaced with the spiritually empty and shape-shifting Marxist ideology. 

The wheel turns, and we find ourselves once more in a time of great uncertainty. Where history and tradition, rather than being used to sustain and comfort, are being attacked by Critical Theorists in educational settings across Canada, The United States and Great Britain. Marxist thinking has once again been allowed to re-invent itself, but much of the strategy remains unchanged. We are the inheritors of millennia of history and culture. It is the legacy of all those who came before us, and no person or ideology has the right to deny it to others whether living or yet unborn. The legacy of Western Civilization, along with that of all others, is ours only to educate and inspire us until at last we must pass it to those who will take our place. "For as Churchill knew as the bombs were falling and London was burning in December 1940, it is worth fighting for." (Andrew Roberts)

This post was written by an anonymous supporter of Woke Watch Canada.