British historian condemns ‘moronic’ wokeness of US National Archives
Posted by admin978 on March 29, 2022 · Leave a Comment
British historian Andrew Roberts has ridiculed the US National Archives for its latest display of wokeness, after Washington officials placed a ‘trigger warning’ notice next to its historic copy of the 1776 Declaration of Independence.
‘Trigger warnings’ and ‘safe spaces’ have become commonplace in academic and public institutions in recent years as wokeness has taken over. The idea is that minority groups (or just people with ultra-woke ideas) might be offended by any contact with people or writings that convey different ideas, even in a historical context.
As Roberts (biographer of the wartime British Ambassador to Washington, Lord Halifax, and more recently of King George III against whom the Declaration was written) pointed out last weekend to an audience at the Oxford Literary Festival: “Anyone who thinks an 18th century document is not going to be outdated, biased and offensive is frankly a moron. When you go to see the Declaration, you read what it says about Native Americans and so on, you won’t be so offended that you can’t stand up.”
The really interesting thing about this row is what it tells us about American notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. While liberals like to parrot the Declaration’s phrases about “all men” being “created equal” with “inalienable rights”, they ignore that in practice this meant White men.
Hence the words that are now found objectionable, where the Declaration complains that King George:
“has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
Rather than focus their complaint on the word “savages”, the woke brigade might do better to reflect on what this tells us about American values than and now, and about the broader values of liberalism.
Red Indians – now known as Native Americans – supported the British Crown because they knew that the Empire offered them a better deal than they would get under liberal capitalism. The same applied half a century later to the British working-class, exploited as footsoldiers by the liberal middle-class in their campaign for ‘reform’, but then left worse off then ever under the ‘free’ capitalism of early and mid-Victorian England.
As for ‘racism’, Americans might find it uncomfortable to reflect on the fact that their famous Olympic athlete Jesse Owens was treated far better by Adolf Hitler in national-socialist Berlin in 1936 than he was by his fellow Americans!
And the American “rule of warfare” – despite the implication of their own Declaration of Independence, has turned out to be truly destructive “of all ages, sexes and conditions”, from Dresden to Hiroshima to Baghdad.
What this ridiculous fuss about ‘trigger warnings’ really tells us is that it is absurd to try to force history into our 21st century preconceptions. In Washington this absurdity takes the form of placing warning notices next to the Declaration of Independence, in modern Germany it takes the form of locking up 93-year-old Ursula Haverbeck for expressing forbidden historical opinions and daring to ask forbidden questions.
