Taking down the past
The ahistoricism of Labour’s leaders is worse than ignorant. It is deliberate
As Goldfinger observed: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”. It is a good observational rule, not least to judge our political rulers by what they do rather than what they say.
Early in October 2024, Keir Starmer removed the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh from 10 Downing Street. Both were painted in the late sixteenth century, a handful of years after the defeat of Spain’s Philip II and his Great Armada.
Both were old hat. After all, fighting for England’s religious and cultural survival is rather reactionary and potentially “far right” now that hoisting your country’s flag on a pole in your own country could earn you a police visit.
The whole piece is quite short and well worth reading, if only because Labour Party ignorance is so easily dismissed as stupidity rather than a cover for yet another dose of totalitarian failure.
Knowledge, truth and their pursuit require cautious discernment and love of the subject; their absence demands revolution. We are faced by the latter, while yearning for the former. Being ahistorical means never taking responsibility for the devastation your ideology and its many permutations have left and will leave behind. Such certainty requires ignorance. It is a totalitarian shield, enabling politicians to bray mendacious and accusatory slogans without shame and to which to acknowledge popular sentiments to “turn the clocks back” is anti-progressive and anathema.
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