The Past As A Dark Age

For John, BLUF:  Odds of understanding the past are going down.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Mr Ed Driscoll, writing at the InstaPundit, give us:

WILL HISTORY ONLY REMEMBER THE FOUNDERS AS SLAVEOWNERS?

Whig history, and the variation of it that I was taught in school, in which all of history led to the glories of FDR, JFK, and midcentury liberalism was built around the notion that people in past centuries were far from perfect, but we need to study them carefully to understand how all of history led to today’s Wondrous Age.  Black Armband History, as it was dubbed in 1993 by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey to differentiate it from the Whiggish “Three Cheers” schools of history, implies that the essence of history is racism, colonialism, imperialism, and oppression in general.  The people made famous by history are by their very nature nasty old evil racist oppressors and can be safely airbrushed out of history entirely, with the exception of a few flawed but benighted revolutionary souls such as Marx, Che and Castro.

You can’t “Start From Zero,” as Tom Wolfe would say, until the great PC cleanup is complete – at which point, 2+2 can equal five should the state wish it to be so, and “a 5’10″ white man can tell you he’s a 6’5″ Chinese girl,” as Ace writes, “and you are required to believe him because each person constructs his own quantum reality moment by moment, it’s no difficult thing to also accept that killing the kulaks and putting the farms under inefficient state rule will result in a greater grain harvest.”

I see the point, since, my Aunt Edra notwithstanding, I have thought of myself as a Black Japanese Jew for decades.♠

Can't we learn and then move on?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  Somewhere back there I had a Grandmother or Great-Grandmother who was a foundling, or so my Father told me.  Think how freeing that is.