The crime of false history

The Fall of Western Civilization and the Rise of Multicultural World History

Acropolis of Athens

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By

James Pew

On Sunday I finally published the inaugural longform essay in a new series I first began hyping in January of this year – Fireside Chat Volume One: The Essentials Concerning Islam and the West. Although this first volume ended up being a little different than what I initially described in January, the spirit of the Fireside Chat form remained intact (it's somewhat of a conversational form that allows for digressions and advanced forms of pattern recognition that only those adept in Specialism Generalism can perform).

The Fireside Chat writings are the only essays which exist behind the Woke Watch Canada paywall. I was encouraged by the number of readers who opted to upgrade to the paid tier in order to access the first volume. Thank you to new and old subscribers who continue to finance the research and writing efforts involved with running this newsletter. I do hope more choose to upgrade so they can read the 8000 plus word Fireside Chat essay that covers essential history regarding political Islam, particularly its dealings with the West. The topics covered included Islam, Islamic Conquest, Slavery, Terrorism, the Crusades, the Fall of Constantinople and the Eastern Roman Empire.

The main theme, however, of Fireside Chat Volume One, was that “a vast historiographical crime has taken place in Western nations.” Citizens of majority white, majority Christian liberal democracies found throughout the Western world, have been fed a tainted batch of historical fare. This of course extends to Canada, perhaps even more so than other Western nations. Our children continue to be mislead by cherry-picked, random and out-of-sequence history lessons that always add up to the same basic sum: Westerners are uniquely villainous scoundrels who, throughout history and continuing to the present day, have done little other than plunder and oppress innocent non-Westerners, who are uniquely victimized by the scourge of Western institutions like colonization and white supremacy.

From Fireside Chat Volume One (referring to historian and author Raymond Ibrahim):

“In Ibrahim’s view this agenda means that any historical ‘Western venture that can be made to conform to the popular view that Europeans initiated hostilities against non-Europeans,’ is selected and emphasized for Western students. (Ibrahim, 2018. Pg. 14).

Indeed. This selectivity includes virtually all historical topics. Do you think you know about slavery? How could you when your entire life the Atlantic Slave Trade was the only historical slave trade your teachers ever examined? The Atlantic Slave Trade, as awful as it was, was not in the same universe of awful as the Arab Slave Trade. While the Atlantic Slave Trade lasted for a cruel three hundred years, Africans endured kidnapping, inhuman modes of transport, and ultimate enslavement in the Arab world for an endless fourteen centuries. During transport across the Atlantic it is estimated that as much as 10% of African slaves died. However, of the millions of kidnapped Africans who were marched across the desert, it is estimated that as much as 80% to 90% died enroute to the Arab world.

Further, while the majority of slaves shipped across the Atlantic ended up working in agriculture, the majority in the Arab slave trade were women and girls forced into harems as sex slaves and prostitutes. The majority of men enslaved in the Arab trade were castrated (which explains why there are few living descendents of Africans enslaved in the Arab world). And the majority of those castrated did not survive the brutal procedure. While it is easy to agree that there is no moral form of slavery, that all forms of slavery are abhorrent, it is also easy to see by the few facts listed above that those enslaved and taken to the Arab world endured far greater callousness from their enslavers, and far greater human suffering overall, than any of those enslaved and shipped to the southern United States.

Fireside Chat Volume One also covers the Crusades in a far different light than most Westerners are accustomed to. Regardless of what we may have been taught in a biased and selective fashion by thoroughly anti-Christian educational institutions, the Crusades were primarily a response to centuries of Islamic conquest and colonization. The West was initially referred to as Christendom, but it lost two thirds of its original geographic region to hordes of vicious Islamic invaders. This explains why to this day the Holy land remains colonized by intolerant Muslims. The Middle East, with the exception of Israel, is full of persecution and oppression of non-Muslims. This does not mean that everything about the Crusades was moral and proper by today’s standards, indeed some injustices were committed by Christians throughout history, and throughout the period of the Crusades in general. But to emphasize where the Christians went wrong, and ignore the historical ever-present threat of Islam, the prime motivation for engaging in Crusades, is just another example of the bias and selectivity which pervades modern historiography in the West. This is nothing short of a crime!

There is another great book which sheds some light on the issue of tainted history in and of the West. This one was not discussed in Fireside Chat Volume One. Specifically, it has one chapter relevant to my historiography concerns that I have been meaning to write about for at least as long as I had been meaning to publish the first Fireside Chat. Richard Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization published by Brill in 2011, examines the details of one way the historiographical crime mentioned above is perpetrated. Most readers will already know, or will correctly assume, that those responsible for crimes against history are the same activist types of the social justice left who are responsible for the rest of the anti-Christian / anti-Western propaganda that circulates throughout the Western world.

Chapter One of Duchesne’s book is called “The Fall of Western Civilization and the Rise of Multicultural World History.” Essentially Duchesne compares and examines world history books (textbooks and other academic works of world history) and the trends concerning the type of historiography that has pervaded the Western world since the big social justice New Left shift that occurred in the 1960s.

A strange idea began to take shape sometime in the mid-1950s, which by the early 1960s had taken hold and formed a new zeitgeist within historian circles. As Duchesne put it, world history and Western history had become “synonymous.” An attitude would soon form which branded world history as “Eurocentric” – if Western history and World history meant the same thing, you can see how the leap to calling world history “Eurocentric” was so easily made by authors and teachers of history, and so quickly adopted by readers and students of it.

Eventually this trend would lead to the termination of Western Civilization as a standard course of study throughout post-secondary institutions in the United States and across the Western world. However, according to Duchesne, “It would also be an oversimplification to view the Western Civilization requirements taught between World War I and the early 1960s as merely a way for American educators to instruct undergraduates in the belief that European history was the only world history that mattered, and that the United States was the sole legitimate heir of the European democratic tradition and protector of the free world.” (Duchesne, 2011. Pg. 4).

Yet for many who inhabit the ideas of the social justice left, this oversimplification which views traditional Western historians as little more than hagiographic flag-wavers is exactly the type of reductive and naive thinking that has pervaded the modern discourse on things like colonialism and the history of slavery. Yet even before Western history became inexorably associated with world history, the idea of progress had been folded into the then modern conception of world history. This then led to an arrogance among some scholars that progress was uniquely the domain of the Western world, thereby denigrating the contributions made to world history by the non-Western world. While there may be some truth to this, and Duchesne does provide examples of it – like William Swinton who wrote in his Outline of the World’s History, published in 1874, “We are fully authorized to say, that the Aryans are peculiarly the race of progress” – the notion was nevertheless pushed past the limits of its potential and reconfigured itself into senseless anti-Westernism.

Duchesne provides many examples of this anti-Euro trend which fashioned itself a social justice movement liberating historiography from the oppressive grasp of Eurocentrism. In the 1950s, Marshall Hodgson wrote that the teaching of world history was “amplified by a few unrelated chapters on other parts of the world.” As Duchesne writes:

“There was a triumphalist assumption that Western peoples were always the progressive ones, and that Asians contributed little to human amelioration after the first millennium BCE. Western European civilization, having inherited the Judeo Christian vision of a universal brotherhood of man, the Greek ideal of a free citizen, and the Roman legal tradition, was considered the ‘mainstream’ of world history.” (Duchesne, 2011. Pg. 2).

However, Duchesne points out that the study of world history was in its infancy in the 1950s when Hodgson wrote critically of what he felt was Western ethnocentrism, and further, a vast body of scholarship concerning the non-Western world was produced during this time primarily by Western scholars (and ever since that time). It appears then, as now, much of what people thought and wrote had more to do with emotions, biases, or politics, than with the objective reality of what was actually taking place in the world. It seems obvious, unnecessary, almost redundant to have to write sentences like the previous one, but they describe the source of a powerful frustration concerning these historical matters which compels one unrelentingly to find the nearest wall on which to bang one's head against. It is a harsh truth that the leftist social justice movement which rose up sometime in the 1960s has utterly transformed humans, generally speaking, into unthinking emotional wrecks unable to contend with complex subjects involving tangles of facts and evidence. History!? As a subject where scrutiny and empirical examination form a core ethic…forget about it! Instead, when we are told that someone is oppressed, treated unfairly, persecuted in any way for no fault of their own, we jump immediately to supporting the thing that opposes whatever social injustice the activists are using to manipulate us. History itself has been manipulated over a period of decades, and we have been lied to. We have all been propagandized into anti-Westernism, we barely know who we are and where we came from. Earlier this year, I wrote the seven-part essay series Deprogramming from Leftism for Anglo Canadians to discuss this in the Canadian context.

I have barely scratched the surface on this topic, or of Chapter One of Duchesne’s magisterial The Uniqueness of Western Civilization, which explores, examines and compares the trends found in world history texts from the beginning of the social justice paradigm. Since this is just a regular Woke Watch Canada essay, not a longform Fireside Chat or a Western Polemic style piece, I will have to take another crack at Duchesne’s analysis of world history texts on another day. Stay tuned.

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Thanks for reading. For more on this author, read The Hills I'm Dying On

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