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Historian Frank Furedi warns that the West is waging a war against its own past, censoring books, rewriting history and severing future generations from their heritage.

The rewriting of history and the erasure of history are now in full swing in the woke West. This is all part of the radical left’s attempt to destroy the West and even memories about it. Both conservatives and Christians (often one and the same) know how vitally important history is, and the need to treasure what has gone before us.

Plenty of crucial volumes on these matters have been penned. General works on history from a Christian perspective include:

• D. W. Bebbington, Patterns in History: A Christian View (IVP, 1979)
• Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (Scribner, 1949)
• Christopher Dawson, The Dynamics of World History (Sheed and Ward, 1956)
• Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, Priests of History: Stewarding the Past in an Ahistoric Age (HarperCollins, 2025)
• Stephen Mansfield, More Than Dates & Dead People: Recovering a Christian View of History (Cumberland House, 2000)
• John Warwick Montgomery, History and Christianity (IVP, 1964)
• Roy Swanstrom, History in the Making (IVP, 1978)

There are also a number of important works on history in general that are penned by non-Christians, especially those that warn about how we are now in the process of seeking to erase history. All totalitarian states have practised this, but it is now commonplace in democracies throughout the West.

The West’s Growing War Against Its Own History

One key volume in this regard is The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History by Frank Furedi (Polity, 2024). Here I offer three quotes from it: two broad quotes that lay out the problem, sandwiching a worrying specific example of this.

In his Introduction, Furedi says this:

[H]ostility towards the past evolved slowly, and then all at once, its intensification occurring haphazardly without any serious long-term thought. The use of the term ‘war’ to account for the systematic pursuit of historical disinheritance is not simply metaphorical. In effect, this war leads to the diminishing of the authority of the past, to the discrediting of its legacy, and to the killing of the soul of communities whose way of life remains underpinned by European culture.

This book’s principal argument is that the main driver of the Culture Wars is an undeclared War Against the Past. At times, supporters of these Culture Wars against Western civilization behave as if this perilous territory continues to represent a menace to the contemporary world. Their constant targeting of the legacy of the past — its physical symbols, values, and achievements — resembles a frenetic moral crusade seeking to make people feel ashamed about their origins and who they are. Culture warriors have, in effect, opened up a second front to gain mastery over how the past is viewed.

The goal of cancelling the legacy of Western civilization is pursued through reorganizing society’s historical memory and disputing and delegitimizing its ideals and achievement. Activists seek to erase the temporal distinction between the present and the past to achieve this objective. There has never been a time in living memory when so much energy has been devoted to readjusting the past and questioning and criticizing historical figures and institutions. At times, it seems as if the boundary between the present and the past has disappeared as activists casually cross over it and seek to fix contemporary problems through readjusting what has already occurred.

The crusade against the past has proven remarkably successful in alienating society from its history. Public and private institutions ceaselessly paint their communities’ past in the darkest colours. There is no longer any need to prompt institutions of education and culture to apologize for just about everything that occurred in the past. Even the spectacular achievements of human civilization, from Greek philosophy to the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment to the scientific inventions of modernity, are now regularly indicted for their supposed association with exploitation and oppression. The representation of the past through a narrative that highlights its malevolent, oppressive, exploitative, and abusive dimension is not confined to a small number of headline-seeking historians. The frequency with which history is told as a tale of human degradation indicates that in popular culture the past now possesses the status of the ‘Bad Old Days’. (pp. 1-2)

Libraries As Instruments of Censorship

To bring these broad-brush remarks down to a more specific focus, consider what he says about libraries and cancel culture:

Libraries have also adopted the practice of protecting their readers from the language and attitudes of the past. In March 2023, it was reported that librarians in Devon decided to hide Enid Blyton books with ‘outdated’ language and place them in the ‘off-limits’ section of libraries. Documents issued to library staff state that ‘where popular books have language that is increasingly outdated’, libraries ‘continue to purchase new editions where publishers have updated the language within’. Updating language is a euphemism for censoring and rewriting classic texts such as Blyton’s Famous Five Series.

School libraries in Australia have removed ‘outdated and offensive books on colonialism’ from their collections. The purge of a school library in Melbourne was guided by Doctor Al Fricker, a Dja Wurrung Man, and expert in Indigenous education with Deakin University. In the course of auditing all 7,000 titles on its library shelves, Fricker justified removing books on the grounds that they were almost 50 years old and were ‘simply gathering dust anyway’. He stated that ‘we wouldn’t accept science books being that old in the library, so why do we accept other nonfiction books to be that old, because nothing is static’.

There is something truly disturbing about the idea that a library ought to rid itself of non-fiction books. In the discipline of sociology, for example, that would mean ridding themselves of the 19^th-century pioneers of the field. In effect, expunging old non-fiction books from libraries is a philistine annihilation of the intellectual legacy of the social sciences and the humanities. Once upon a time, old books were treasured and treated with care by libraries, not treated with suspicion.

In the United States, libraries have taken objection to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s depiction of Native Americans in her famous Little House on the Prairie novels. The American Library Association removed her name in 2018 from a lifetime achievement award it gives out annually, thereby retrospectively annulling her achievement. When books are cancelled by publishers, they are rendered totally invisible to future generations. In March 2021, Dr Seuss Enterprises announced that six Dr Seuss books, including And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street and If I Ran the Zoo, would no longer be published because they contained racist and insensitive imagery. (pp. 166-167)

A Nation That Forgets Its Past Has No Future

Some final words taken from his Conclusion are worth wrapping things up with. He states that “those who despise the past are trapped in a temporal quarantine of their own making.” He continues:

It is paradoxical that the grievance entrepreneurs, who are entirely comfortable with the temporal transmission of sins committed centuries ago are totally hostile to the continuing relevance of historical tradition. They forget that the traditions of the past cannot be easily rendered invisible because they are still alive within us, the language we use and the way we reason.

Throughout the previous chapters, we have questioned the attempt to represent the past as morally inferior to the practices and modes of behaviour of society today. Drawing a moral contrast between the present and the past is pointless. The past is not morally superior to the present, but nor should it be interpreted as a temporal era in need of our moral instruction. Historical societies like those of today should be assessed and understood in relation to the specific circumstances and context of their time. Our role is to learn and understand from the experience of the past and not to subject it to a retrospective ideological or political experiment.

The harm done by the vandalization of the past is all too evident in the contemporary world. Young people, growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them, are the human casualties of the War Against the Past. The imposition of the condition of historical amnesia contributes to the perpetuation of a mood of cultural malaise. Trapped in a presentist quagmire, Western society, which once prided itself in its orientation towards the future, has turned on itself. Winston Churchill was right when he stated that ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’.

To recognize this is also to recognize the existence of an additional virtue, the importance of which is most obvious when it is least present: the virtue of having a clear sense of the traditions to which one belongs. This virtue is not to be confused with any form of backward-looking antiquarianism; I am not recommending an uncritical embrace of tradition or the association of the past with a golden age. Instead, we must recognize that when we appreciate and understand tradition, we see how future possibilities might be grasped. The lessons of the past, learned in the present, enrich the future. Living traditions continue a not-yet-completed narrative and confront a future whose the determinate and determinable character derives from the past. (pp. 217-218)

George Orwell was quite right to say this in his dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Or as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it: “To destroy a people, you must first sever their roots.”

All the more reason to fiercely resist the left’s attempt to erase our history.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Unsplash.