History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. – Winston Churchill
Today’s mandatory reading assignment: Vanderleun’s Clear History. Ahead of next week’s 4th of July celebration it provides a short history of the world, the role of our Declaration of Independence and Constitution in it, and the willingness of some to erase or ignore it.
This automatic ability to “Clear History” is a curious phenomenon. Something that is quite new.
Today’s “Clear History” is not the “Revisionism” common to the Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist of old, where history was remade with the destruction of texts, the alterations of photographs, the burning of books, and the issuing of the Party Line of the day to the faithful and the enslaved. “Clear History” is a complete and immediate blotting out of history en masse. It is accompanied by a careful retention of a fixed number of “historical facts” in a Curiosity Cabinet of Argument found in a dusty chamber filled with monuments to aged intellect; a go-to place where the only events of history worth keeping are those that buttress a reality that exists nowhere but must surely, in some future perfect day, come to exist everywhere…
Much of the current disunity seen in our politics arises between those who ran “Clear History” in November of 2000, and those who saw History return with a vengeance in September of 2001.
One group is determined to deny History, expunge the Declaration, and shred the Constitution in pursuit of a utopia that’s buried in a global network of mass graves. Another group is composed of those who believe in the American idea and are determined let this new birth of freedom work its way across the world. Absent a defining historical event of global significance, this twain shall not meet. There is, of course, a third group of people who want to merely get on with their happy world untroubled by History, either cleared or present as a clear and present danger.
As they say: Read the whole thing – because deleting history has consequences.
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