Manufactured History

Since History has become too incendiary to remain a scholarly discipline, it is now to be done by "public consultation" -- a bureaucratic phrase which borders on meaninglessness yet is laden with shadowy signaling.  

So what does the consulted public think about history? Which parts of the public are being consulted? Who are they being consulted by? Whoever it is, history will go on being itself, already having been itself. We can't change it, we can only either know or not know it. (Are schools still doing anything about knowing it?)

The agendum behind "doing history by public consultation" is to change the "narrative". If once deemed exclusive, privileged or unjust, a slice of history must be suppressed or rearranged, the previous chroniclers fired and a new crew taken aboard.

How is History by public consultation done then?                                                         

First you censor inconvenient documents, removing them from Public Archives.   

Then you remove awkward memoirs, history books and historical novels from public libraries.

You knock down statues and take portraits off walls.                               

You turn heritage buildings and historic houses into convention centres for anti-racism training and corrective re-education.                                                     

You change the school curriculum so as to cover indigenous history, "marginalized" and ethnic history, but not European, Anglo-Saxon, Enlightenment, Age of Reason and industrialization history. Students are taught by influencers, identity groups and therapists from the "correct" segments of the population.                                                                                                              Finally, you change the names of towns, parks, and streets so as to create amnesia about the figures they were originally named after, and the accomplishments for which those figures were commemorated.   

(WARNING for traditional scholarly historians: if you advance alternative non-consultative theories of the past you be may charged with Hate Speech.)

Seriously, the most reliable source of knowledge of past eras is well-written memoir (i.e. written by the literate): the "I was there and this is what I saw" genre.

For example: Daniel Defoe's A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain" (1724-6) which meticulously described landscape and analyzed economic resources and social interaction, taking us there -- 18th century England. For example: 

"Dorchester is ... pleasant, agreeable ... the people seemed less divided into factions than in other places, for though not all of one mind, either as to religion or politics, yet did not separate with such animosity as in other places. I saw Church of England clergymen and the Dissenting minister drinking tea together, and conversing with civility and good neighbourhood ..."

Sounds like we today could learn a lot from their example ...

Too bad anyone recording today, and being read a hundred years from now, won't be able to say the same about our communities as Defoe said about Dorchester, riven as we are by identity politics and the desire not only to dispute the present but to re-package the past, fracturing it on the basis of rival "standpoints".

(Regarding the ancient past, as revealed in archaeology and text analysis, here's one example: the scholar Camille Jullian "devoted himself to classical antiquity and Roman Gaul. He reconstructed the history of this period by cross-referencing human geography, philology, numismatics, epigraphy and archaeology" and "strove to apply science and history to the teaching of the arts ... through thorough observation, research and analysis of anonymous archives.)  He lived 1859-1933. Does anyone still bother with those disciplines??

Camille Jullian (1859-1933) | Aux sources de l'Archéologie nationale (culture.fr) 

How to Standpoint-by-your-mandate in the Culture Wars

 The pool of contenders for Most Meaningless Phrase is large, but in it must be the phrase "historically marginalized". Can history (times past) have a margin? Being about time, not space, can it have a centre? The logical mind struggles, even though realizing that metaphorically the "centre" means centre stage, where the rich and famous in every age get attention because others give it to them.

Ideologues and social-redesigners mean something else though, using the phrase historically-marginalized to set up the future-privileged. They are not talking about historic groups that no longer exist (the Lagashians, say, or the Galatian Druids), they are talking about ethnic groups of the present who present themselves as marginalized retroactively, with the aim of harvesting future reparation. 

They need not be personally marginalized (this all being safely historic), but they can personally benefit from the reparations, such as land-gifts and exemption from sentencing in criminal courts.

It's a universal aspect of human psychology to feel yourself at the centre of your own life, in fact to be the centre of the world. To feel safe, people want their whole tribe to be there with them. Since everyone's at the centre of their own world, history is but the long shared tale of everyone behaving accordingly.

In today's socio-political environment, you can even take a Grievance Studies course on the topic. That way you learn how to standpoint-by-your-mandate in the culture wars -- and it's the disinterested study of History that's pushed off the edge of the table.

We can see this happening in the current re-shaping of the museum industry: SatiricalScene: What Is a Museum's Job?

(Hear a podcast on marginalization at: Historically Marginalized Is Forever | New Discourses Bullets, Ep.8 - New Discourses)

Muses File Complaint Against BC Museum

Royal BC Museum apologizes "we are not the museum we should be", after racism and discrimination complaint was filed (Times Colonist, June 29, 2021). In November, 2021 it vows to "decant" its galleries and "install" exhibitions of anti-colonial history around Victoria. May 13, 2022 it announces closure for cultural-sanitation for the next eight years.

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Responding to the filing of museum employees' human rights complaint, the nine classical Muses have accused the Museum of racist discrimination against THEIR heritage and culture: “As our home (“Seat of the Muses”), a Museum should be sheltering and protecting us, not throwing us to ethnic and identitarian wolves”, says Calliope, Chief of the Muses.

In a document crafted by Melpomene (Muse of Tragedy), Thalia (Comedy) and Polyhymnia (Rhetoric), the group charges that they are victims of hate speech and ethnic cleansing.

“Clio, Muse of History, is the particular target of hate speech." Many people have already claimed that “History Is Dead”, and now they wish also to eradicate History's mother, Mnemosyne (Memory).

Although Clio's enemies try to “disappear” her she keeps recurring. “History is what it was,” she assures supporters. She leaves a trail of documents, letters, songs, memoirs, statues, gravestones, globes and charts so that scholarly detectives can still trace her to places where her enemies have imprisoned her. These scholars often work under cover, secret-agent style.

The Muses, filing their complaint with the Rights Agency, have documented civil rights abuses by chapter and verse, confirms Euterpe, Muse of Verse.

“We will not let the judge dance around the issues,” vows Terpsichore, Muse of Dance.

“We'll sing our own praises,” add Erato and Melpomene (Song and Speech).

Their children (Orpheus and the Sirens) will with their world-music band of that name mark the launch of the Muses' Rights Complaint with a celebratory concert at Mount Olympus Park. The human race is invited to attend.