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.)
