Queen Elizabeth and the End of History – spiked
Secondly, the crusade against the past is about controlling the present. Orwell knew. He who controls the past controls the future , he said. In depicting the past as essentially a criminal enterprise, and the future as an unknowable wasteland of a violently changed climate and automated market, the elites invite us, force us in fact, to live in a presentist purgatory. To live in their moral universe alone. In penning us into a constant present, in dislocating us from our own past and encouraging us to dread the future, they render us more isolated, and thus more pliable. Their morality comes to be the only one that counts. Not Cromwell s Commonwealth ideas; not Magna Carta, which was apparently the selfish accomplishment of greedy lords; not the ideals of the revolutionary United States of America, which is a foul, racist enterprise; not the pacifistic anti-colonialism of Gandhi, who has lately been problematised as racist ; and not even the service and forbearance of Queen Elizabeth II, who they defame as a Coloniser Queen whose image is likely to make vulnerable youths faint and weep. No, all that matters is what they believe and say. This is the tyrannical achievement of the elites crusade against the past: their unjointing of us from the ideas and visions of history allows them to subject us once again, subject being the operative word to the supreme vision of a new establishment that genuinely believes it is historically unique in its goodness.
This Brendan O’Neill is IMHO pretty good. Of course, much of the past is a criminal enterprise. What’s hilarious in its way is that we are therefore invited to initiate an even more transparently wicked enterprise, and by inflicting it on our neighbors think of ourselves as sainted. It must be an ancient trick of evil, for it certainly is obvious enough.