Why have we allowed the woke elites to declare war on history, our values – and on America itself, asks FRANK FUREDI… We must fight to teach our children the truth about the past

It was almost 9pm in Portland, Oregon, when the police department warned that a mob was gathering on a corner of Southwest Park Avenue.

This was October 2020, and American streets were still ablaze from the Black Lives Matter rioting that followed the murder of George Floyd.

‘Some are trying to pull down a statue with a chain,’ said a tweet from the authorities. And quite a statue it proved to be.

Within an hour, the revered figure of Abraham Lincoln, the founding father of modern America, had been hauled from his plinth – assassinated for a second time.

A telling new low in the culture wars that today engulf America and the west, this mindless act of vandalism was, for me, the moment that crystalized the terrible danger we now face.

The past itself is under attack.

We are witnessing nothing short of a war on history, a moral crusade which seeks to make people ashamed of their origins and who they are.

Nowhere is this crusade more aggressively ignored than in the United States of America and nowhere are the consequences more wide-reaching and destructive. The tentacles have reached into every corner of education and public life, as I explain in my new book.

The importance of Lincoln in all this can hardly be overstated.

Born in a log cabin in Kentucky, he rose to become not just the 16th President but among the most consequential of all to hold that office.

It was Lincoln who invoked ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ in his Gettysburg address.

A prominent opponent of slavery (for which he was gunned down), Lincoln is a hero, surely, to all reasonable Americans who believe that black lives matter.

Yet not, it seems, to the rioters who desecrated his memory and not to their fellow travelers among the liberal elite.

Today, it’s these cultural commissioners – those who dominate the seats of learning and the media – who drive this narrative of hate against America’s achievements and its legacy.

Often, they do so through the pages of their favorite mouthpiece, The New York Times.

It is the Times which sponsors, the 1619 Project, for example, a program instructing children that the American Revolution was not so much a war of independence as an act of great selfishness to preserve the racial oppression of exploited peoples.

Taking its name from the year the first recorded slave ship arrived in Virginia, the project is enthusiastically endorsed by online influencers, by the leaders of America’s cultural industry and by celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.

The power of such people helps explain why so many children have been brainwashed through anti-American indoctrination.

Books that remind children of the positive features of history have been taken off school shelves. So have masterpieces including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Libraries have taken objection to Laura Ingalls Wilder’s depiction of native Americans in her Little House on the Prairie books. In 2018, the American Library Association retrospectively canceled its lifetime achievement award.

These are no mere details. When books are canceled by libraries, they are rendered invisible to future generations.

Instead, our past is relentlessly demonized as a story of shame. Inspiring human achievements are routinely downplayed or called into question – part of what the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has called the ‘Black Armband’ view of history, invoking a past haunted by abuse and exploitation. History, in this view, is malevolent and the hold it exerts perpetuates oppression and misery.

Academics such as Professor Robert Meister of the University of California, Santa Cruz, have stated it directly: the ‘past is evil’.

If attacking the memory of Lincoln was egregious, an official decision to smear the 1776 Declaration of Independence is bewildering.

Executives from Washington’s National Archives, where the document is displayed, are critical of the language used to describe the indigenous population of the time.

So, it’s been disfigured by a trigger warning telling visitors that views expressed in the Declaration are ‘outdated, biased and offensive’.

This might seem unnecessary, bizarre even, as almost anything produced in the 18th century is likely to be outdated. But it’s worse than that. This sour commentary is misleading and destructive.

The Declaration of Independence was way ahead of its time, a document that would inspire independence movements for centuries to come.

Written mainly by Thomas Jefferson and famous for its insistence that ‘all men are created equal and possess certain inalienable rights’, it is, arguably, the foundation document of America itself. A blow for liberty around the world. Far from being outdated, the Declaration retains its relevance today.

By treating its content as ‘biased and offensive’, America’s official National Archives imply that the very creation of the United States was flawed. Everything that has followed since must, presumably, bear the same sinister hallmark.

And, yes, that is very much the view of those now trying to tear down America and the West.

The harm done by vandalizing the past in this way is all too evident. Young people, the human casualties, are growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them.

We must remember how to learn from those whose footsteps we are following and embrace their achievements – if we are not to lose an entire generation to ignorance and falsehood.

We must counter this malevolent crusade, this war on history.

And we should take note of Winston Churchill’s previous warning: ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’.

Frank Furedi is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent.