Some Historical Speculations Might be Evil, not ‘Just Banal’

The past, said Walter Benjamin, is heliotropic,

bygones of the dim and distant past the topic

that we discuss, although the summer sun has set

on them. Precisely in the same way we’ll forget

the sun that shines today, like every sun that shone

in yesterdays with light that has completely gone

away. Historians may attempt to guess what season

the past occurred in with no data, using reason

to deduce what happened, therefore going far

from facts revealed by no sun, and of course no star.

And yet, although unknown, dimensions of the nose

of Cleopatra once inspired the polymath, Blaise Pascal,

to make an aphorism every scholar knows,

proving speculation need not be banal,

unlike what’s not banal but evil, like the undisguised

contempt for Churchill when revisionistically rejected as imperial,

the hero who saved not just Britain but the Jews, despised

by woke historians when they focus on his history’s imperial material.

In “Ignorant armies: History as an ideological battleground,” TLS, 11/23/24, Niall Ferguson, reviewing The War Against the Past: Why the West must fight for its history by Frank Furedi, writes:

Most of The War Against the Past is a chronicle of this enterprise. We begin with the iconoclastic toppling of Abraham Lincoln’s statue on an “Indigenous Day of Rage” in Portland, Oregon in October 2020 – an event, Furedi suggests, not fundamentally different from the vandalizing of the ninth-century BC palace of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II by Islamic State in Nimrud, Iraq, in 2015. There is burning of books with “outdated content” in Ontario, the precedent for which hardly needs spelling out. There is violent language, too. Nikole Hannah-Jones led the New York Times’s 1619 Project, a tendentious attempt to redefine the US as founded on slavery, as opposed to a uniquely successful constitution. “The white race,” Furedi quotes her as saying, “is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world.”

When we turn to the UK there is slightly less fire and fury, and slightly more Pooter and Python. The war against the past in Britain often seems to manifest itself as prissy museum notes warning of the implicit racism of almost every eighteenth- or nineteenth-century artefact on display. Furedi encounters these at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Kew Gardens and practically every National Trust property. Here is the National Trust’s potted biography of Winston Churchill in its report on its properties’ links to colonialism and historic slavery:

Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), whose family home is Chartwell, served as Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1921 to 1922. He was Prime Minister during the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943, the British response to which has been heavily criticised. Churchill opposed the Government of India Act in 1935, which granted India a degree of self-governance. On 1 July 1947, he wrote to Prime Minister Clement Attlee (1883–1967), arguing that India should not gain independence.

It takes a perverse kind of zeal to summarize Churchill’s life without mentioning Britain’s victory in the Second World War.