whitewashing

Earlier this week I railed against the postmodernist creed of social constructivism, which among other feats allows a traditional historical account to be replaced by another, ostensibly more enlightened and progressive than the first. This practice is not seen as dishonest by its advocates. On the contrary; for they maintain that truth is merely an emanation of social context, and hence that no account can be more valid than another. Nonetheless some narratives are still preferred, for reasons of political expediency: control of the received view entails control also of means to refashion society in pursuit of Progress.

Last Sunday Steven Den Beste laid bare an egregious example of the genre, a revisionist fantasy that portrayed President Reagan as an accommodating multilateralist dedicated to ending, though not winning, the Cold War. This pap is readily dismissed by anyone whose memory goes back a mere decade or two. Yet for those eager to claim (for instance) that the supposed misdeeds of George W. Bush are sui generis, such recontextualized accounts are eagerly embraced. The overarching goal of these social constructivists is to weave together a patchwork of revised narratives. If the illusion of coherence can be maintained, then perhaps the former history will be forgotten.

This process may well be irreversible, once it has fully run its course. And if such whitewashing is merely far advanced in the United States, then—as David Warren laments—it is nearly complete in his own Canada. (alternate link)

Tomorrow [1 July 2002] will be the 135th Dominion Day, for those of us who believe the Canadian state was founded in 1867; and the 20th Canada Day, for those who believe it was founded in 1982.

As I've grown older, and made my own adjustments to developments in my “home and native land,” I've come to recognize two nations. One is not English and the other French; rather, both are bilingual, and one of them is also bicultural. The other, to confuse the matter, is officially “multicultural” — which means, I think, that it has and intends to admit to no culture at all. […]

Two nations; deux nations. Not English and French, but rather, one nation by the grace of God, and the other by the grace of Pearson and Trudeau, occupying by chance the same territory. One founded upon deep truths, and the other on successive historical rewrites and a hotchpotch of pathetic little impostures. One with proud traditions of liberty and law going back through Confederation and Magna Carta to the wellsprings of the Gospels and the Greeks; the other a tawdry makeshift of the vanities of blackguard politicians.

I am a conservative, and hold that such creeping revisionism is an evil that must be resisted. Even so—loth though I am to admit it—there is a grain of truth to be found in the postmodernists' arguments. They are wrong in asserting that there is no real history apart from socially constructed narratives. But history is nearly always written by the winners, and inconvenient details are indeed often passed over or quickly forgotten.

Such as, for instance, some of the horrors of a war now commemorated.