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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer Chris Trotter.
Why the Woke Re-Write History
It would be fascinating to know what the Woke think the world was like before the Age of the Internet. Not that many of those born too late to remember the world before personal computers, the World Wide Web and smartphones are likely to give the matter much thought. For a truly alarming number of people under thirty, history is something you watch on a screen.
How many of the generations at the end of the alphabet possess the intellectual resources to know that the hugely popular Netflix series Bridgerton bears absolutely no resemblance to Regency England? Black dukes and duchesses did not exist in a nation whose ruling class supplemented its home grown income with the profits of the slave trade and by plundering the Indian sub-continent.
No matter. When challenged on the historical accuracy of his production, Brigerton’s creator, Chris Van Dusen, responded that the show “is a reimagined world, we’re not a history lesson, it’s not a documentary. What we’re really doing with the show is marrying history and fantasy in what I think is a very exciting way. One approach that we took to that is our approach to race.”
This is fine, so long as your audience knows just how violently you are twisting history out of shape. If they don’t, then “marrying history and fantasy” can be very dangerous. Just ask those on the receiving end of Vladimir Putin’s understanding of history.
The Woke’s antagonism towards history is born out of the past’s irritating habit of demonstrating the folly of attempting to establish Heaven on Earth. The Woke do not like to be reminded that one person’s Heaven is just as likely to be another person’s Hell. For most of us, the prospect of enduring Hell when we’re dead is one thing, the prospect of enduring it alive quite another!
The Woke’s relationship with history is further soured by the inescapable fact that so many of today’s injustices are rooted in yesterday’s ideas about who had the right to do what to whom – and why. That yesterday’s ideas have a depressing habit of manifesting themselves in the behaviour of human beings living in the present only hardens the Woke’s resolve to bend the historical record to their will. As George Orwell so rightly observed: “He who controls the present controls the past, and he who controls the past controls the future.”
The Woke’s conflicted relationship with history was on display only last week in a Stuff opinion piece entitled “How a loss of trust has fed the divisions in society”, penned by Marianne Elliot – co-director at The Workshop, a research, training and consultancy organisation.
The social divisions under Elliot’s scrutiny were those manifested in and to a worrying extent aggravated by “digital media”. She was alarmed at the role played by “disinformation” in the growth of the anti-vaccine and anti-mandate movements: “What we found was that misinformation and disinformation were undermining not only informed debate, but also public trust in all forms of information.”
Elliot’s proposed solutions were as predictable as they were problematic. To counteract the “online abuse, harassment and hate – particularly of women, people of colour, queer people, people with disabilities and people from minority religions,” she argued that, “governments needed to act together to regulate the handful of corporations controlling our means of communication and content being distributed – both core aspects of our democracy.”
Quite how the New Zealand parliament was going to rein-in Mark Zuckerberg was left unspecified.
Possibly in deference to her publisher, Stuff, Elliot was adamant that, “a vibrant and diverse media was crucial to democracy. It was in the public interest that public and philanthropic funding played a part in ensuring the survival of the organisations producing the news and current affairs reporting that is essential to a functioning democracy.”
The notion that “he who pays the piper calls the tune” was not considered worthy of examination.
Things only began to get a little hairy after Elliot’s observation: “One way of simplifying this puzzle is to look at the upstream causes that are contributing to a number of the harms and problems we can all see downstream.”
Ah, yes, she’s talking about History – but not in a good way. According to Elliot, it is people’s mistrust of “official institutions” that lays them open to the dangers of digital disinformation.
Not that she’s the least bit surprised at their lack of trust:
“Racism, sexism and ableism were built into the bones of the colonial institutions that are central to democracy in this country.
“The people who designed our government, legislature, judiciary, media and academia did not reflect the range of people they were supposed to serve. Many of them didn’t even think it was their job to represent or serve all of us.”
One can only imagine Chris Van Dusen’s enthusiasm for that statement. Elliot looks at the past from the perspective of the present and decides, passim Van Dusen, that it is in urgent need of “re-imagining”.
Except Elliot is not proposing a Netflix series in which Maori occupy key roles in New Zealand’s colonial government. Her ambitions are considerably greater than that. As far as Elliot is concerned the sins of New Zealand’s past must be expiated in the present – all the way up to and including the radical reformation of those official institutions in which “Maori, Pacific and disabled” were unwilling to repose their trust.
What will this look like? Elliot is not shy about spelling it out:
“In the long term that will look like fundamental shifts in who holds power in those institutions.
“In the shorter term, it might look like passing the microphone – and the resources that go with it – to people who are trusted to generate good information in forms that are accessible, useful and effective.”
Fanciful nonsense? Not a bit of it!
“I’m optimistic about social cohesion in Aotearoa,” says Elliot, “despite significant levels of division and inequity in our country.”
The grounds for Elliot’s optimism are, however, far from clear. When societies arrive in the present they do not do so in the manner of a railway train, entire and whole in itself, but like a river. Elliot herself, perhaps unwittingly, acknowledges that history is a continuous stream, from which the past and the present cannot be separated. If the entity we know as “New Zealand” was created violently and unfairly, then most assuredly it will be defended violently and unfairly.
As the American novelist William Faulkner wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.”
Those “fundamental shifts in who holds power” that Elliot foresees cannot be accomplished without dislodging whole classes of people from positions they are most unlikely to vacate voluntarily. What she is advocating is bloody revolution and civil war – she just isn’t willing to say so. Fair enough, I suppose. How many official institutions are going to admit to funding their own destruction?
And, no, securing funding from Netflix for a series showing a peaceful transition from colonial oppression to peaceful co-governance in Aotearoa will not make it happen in real life.
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