No Past, No Future
Can we judge the past by the standards of the present? Many seem intent on proving not only that we can, but that we must. Social critic Douglas Murray doesn’t agree, and he explains why in this thought-provoking video.
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Script:
What kind of future do we have if we destroy our past?
Has anyone who has pulled down a statue of Churchill, Lincoln, or Columbus thought to ask themselves this question?
I doubt it.
The presumption that we can stand in perfect judgment over the lives of historical figures is not merely foolish and unfair, it’s dangerous.
Consider what the statue destroyers are, in effect, saying.
They are saying that people in history should have known what we know.
That’s tantamount to saying, they should have known the future.
This is, of course, absurd.
Yet more and more, people believe it.
Why?
Simple.
It’s what they are taught.
It is the fruit of an education system that long ago prioritized “empathy” over facts; that believes the ultimate point of history is not to learn lessons from it, but to judge it from the pre-ordained left-wing conclusions about such ill-defined concepts as social justice, equity, and tolerance.
Apart from breeding ignorance, this kind of education invites the student (the child, really) to be judge, jury, and executioner over issues that they (and increasingly their teachers) know little or nothing about.
Because no one has bothered to teach them the nuance, complexity, and context that is history.
It also breeds arrogance:
“I know things these people did not know. Therefore, I am better than they were. They have nothing to teach me. In fact, I must teach them.”
And down comes the statue.
A new, “better” history must take the place of the old one.
In America this impulse has culminated in The 1619 Project — an initiative started by The New York Times and now in schools everywhere — which attempts to make the arrival of the first African slaves into the American colonies the foundational date of the American republic.
1776? The American Revolution? In the new history that was just about protecting the Founders’ slave interests. These men — some of the most remarkable humans to have lived at any time — are to be understood simply by their attitude toward this one issue.
The 1619 Project seeks to portray America — the freest, most prosperous nation in world history — as exceptional only in one respect: insofar as being exceptionally bad.
This is a purposefully destructive view of history. It is one intended to pull down rather than build up.
A healthy, humane, and – in the truest sense – liberal mind does not view history as a mere playpen for our moral judgment. It recognizes that people in the past acted on the information they had, just as we do today.
Sure, it would have been nice if the Founders of America had abolished slavery in its Constitution. Some, in fact, tried very hard to do so. But had they been unwilling to compromise, there would be no Constitution and no United States. All the sacrifices of the Revolution would have been lost. So, a compromise balancing the interests of the northern states and the southern states was reached.
It would have been nice if the Japanese had surrendered before atom bombs were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they didn’t. President Truman had to make his decision based on the information he had at the time — that an Allied invasion of the Japanese home island would cost at least a million lives, both American and Japanese.
Of course, the woke mind abhors these subtleties. It knows that it is right and that everybody before our current age — year zero — should have known better. Anyway, they were all bigots. Why should we give them any benefit of the doubt, let alone admire them or learn from them?
Well, maybe because, like everyone else, the great figures of the past did the best they could under the circumstances in which they found themselves. That their efforts largely succeeded is why we are here.
For the complete script visit https://www.prageru.com/video/no-past-no-future
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"Ironically, thanks to the statue destroyers, the figures of the past have never looked greater."
Goddamn! Some British guy just took a shit all over our country. Nice to know how bigoted you are, Doug.
This guy justified slavery in 2 sentences
What's sad is both right and left wingers in the US talk a lot about history, neither of them learns anything from it always nitpicking from history whatever suits the purpose of undermining the other party and further divides the people.
I beg of you, watch these responses to this nonsense:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ay8z0abJ9A8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRq1Whpp3Uw
Confederate statues are the ultimate in revisionist history. They allow Confederate apologists to gaze lovingly at an idealized image of what the Confederacy stood for. Their image of brave soldiers in snazzy uniforms going out to face terrible odds for home and family is reinforced, and they come away thinking that they are appreciating history.
Now then, how many of those Confederate apologists will have read Alexander Stephen's cornerstone speech? How many will have read the Declarations of Causes for Secession and counted the number of times protecting slavery was mentioned as a cause? How many will have read to Constitution of the Confederacy and noted that it not only guarantees the protecting of slavery (in its first article) but also declares an intention to spread slavery to new territories?
The answer is roughly zero. Al of that is genuine history, and genuine history has NO place in the mind of the statue gazer. All they want is the historical myth which the statue conveys. Confederate apologists love statues because they do not challenge their audience, unlike real history.
Even for Prager U, this is a ridiculously fascicle video
Serious question – when discussing the founding fathers of America should the apparent contradiction between their belief in freedom and their owning of slaves (not all of them) be mentioned.
While, as Douglas says we can't expect people of the past to live by the same standards we in their future have, it seems quite easy to see that people of the past knew slavery was wrong. While I don't own a time machine I can say with a high degree of confidence that if you were to ask any slave owner "would you like to trade places with your slave"? they would almost certainly say "god, no. They're humans you can whip and rape with total impunity".
I totally agree with Murray on this. That's why I'd like his and all PragerU viewer to sign my petition for the statue of notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile restored in Glasgow in the UK.
How will people know that abusing children is bad unless we learn it from a statue – the ONLY way we learn history.
His British upper class accent is like nails down a chalk board to me. And I'm British.
Hes arguing non issues and being smarmy while doing it. No normal person wants to celebrate slave owners.
And if you're one of these "But how will we learn about history?!" Types, let me introduce you to this new invention called a book.
Statues are a glorification of an individual. Don't glorify bad people.
Also assuming the Founding Fathers were some of the greatest people who ever lived is pure opinion that PragerU treats as fact.
To me Genesis P'Orridge was greater than any of the founding fathers. PragerU videos are so easy to pick apart
I grew up with history I learned from it as a kid when I was three what I wanted to be was a reenactor historical reenactor and throughout life I wanted to do that and I did it so I could teach others in a fun and exciting way and show him what people went through I'm a US civil war reenactor and I want to teach people of what you can learn from the past this video helps teach of my knowledge only 18 I'm the one who wants to keep it history going I know there's going to be more people there.
The shell game they try to play on this issue is always amusing… And infuriating
you british fop, PLEASE give me the nuance, complexity, or context around Columbus deciding to genocide and enslave the native population for gold that makes that a cool thing to do and justifies keeping up a statue of the monster? Oh wait, you can't, there isn't any! Same question but for Churchills open and blatant white supremacy? His views on Indians after WW2 are indistinguishable from hitlers. Give me that context. Intellectually dishonest clown, you're not a historian, you're a storyteller. You don't want the nuance of history, you want to breeze over as much of it as possible. 0/10 try again
The only people erasing history are, ironically, the conservatives. Their Critical Race Theory culture war resulted in I have a dream and the condemnation of the KKK being cut out from the curriculum in various states.
Statues are a celebration of people. Not a single leftie advocates for the erasure of Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin or Churchill. Quite the contrary, we want more of their lives included in history books, including the racism and the slavery that they've perpetuated.
I think it's telling that you're protecting people that weren't woke enough for their time while fighting wokeness. I'd be able to respect that if PragerU were standing at the front of human rights. At this point, it looks like comradery between bigoted people.
Great video, I agree with DM here. But just one point. The Japanese 'were' trying to surrender. Throughout 1945 Japanese envoys were making overtures across Europe: they would surrender if they could keep their Emperor.
On July 18th 1945, the Emperor himself wrote a letter to the new President, Harry Truman, which was, in Truman's words "looking for peace."
But again the White House wasn't interested. They wanted to intimidate Stalin, show the world that they had a new all powerful weapon and use Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a testing ground.
Walter Brown, special assistant to Secretary of State James Byrnes at the time of the bombings wrote in his diary in August 1945, "Truman wanted to drop the bomb, but why?
To frighten Stalin, a suitable enemy for the US as it was about to metamorphose into a national security state at 'perpetual war' 'for perpetual peace'". The Japanese had been surrendering since the destruction of Tokyo by US bombers in May 1945.
"If we'd been told that the war could have been concluded by then," argues Gore Vidal, "I would have gone to work for the impeachment of a President who had wasted so many lives and destroyed so many cities in his power game with the Soviet Union, which led to half a century of unnecessary Cold War."
Some argue that killing 100,000s of Japanese civilians was n ecessary to end a world war, but instead it started a cold war – a world gripped with the fear that if the superpower leaders would be mad enough to drop the nukes once they could be mad enough to do it again.
Just about everything can be traced back to feminism and the dominance of females in academia . The men who brought math, science, philosophy, art and so much more are being pushed aside.
CCP's history teaching.
What hypocrisy! He's talking about the dangers of hiding historical truth while the right-wing attempts to whitewash the ugly truth about the racial injustice that has been present for the entire existence of our country.
Did he say that compromise is a good thing? The right-wing clearly doesn't believe in that today.
Why is Douglas Murray in a PragerU's video? Can someone explain it to me? It makes no sense for a reasonable person like him to associate with this silly university. Man, that's a disappointment.
History should NOT take SIDES. It should be taught AS IS, NOTthrough an IDEOLOGICAL LENSE.
History is something we should learn from. When it comes to statues of Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee, I think honoring them with a statue contradicts the love we have for America. Those two wanted to secede from the United States, and how can you honor someone who wanted to create their own country? Had the South won the Civil War, we would have a divided nation, one North and one South.
Talk about presentism!!!
After watching this video I can say for certain PragerU must be a clown college
This video did TERRIBLE!!!!!!