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The war on the past, with Frank Furedi
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There are many things that are depressing about the modern culture wars, but none more so than the war on the past. There is a concerted, fierce and increasingly successful effort to not just make us ashamed of our history, but to disconnect us from it entirely.
How did this war start, and more importantly, how can it be won by defenders of Western civilisation? To answer these questions, Will is joined by sociologist, author, and commentator Frank Furedi. Frank’s new book is titled, “The War on the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History.”
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Promotion
00:00:19
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston. If for some reason you are not already following the show on a streaming service, you can find us everywhere from Spotify to Apple Podcasts to YouTube. If you like what you hear here, please consider giving us a glowing 5 star review. If you don't like what you hear here, please forget I said anything.
The Shift from Truth to Identity
00:00:45
Speaker
There are many things that depress me about the modern culture wars. The shift from the truth to my truth. the obsession with identity over merit and character, the self-flagellation for sins that we had nothing to do with. But if there's one thing that makes me more sad and more angry than any other, it is the war against the past. There is a concerted, fierce, and increasingly successful effort to not just make us ashamed of our history, but to disconnect us from it entirely.
00:01:17
Speaker
And it goes much, much deeper than a few loonies tearing down statues.
Frank Faridi on 'The War on the Past'
00:01:21
Speaker
It's an impulse that is embedded across almost every Western institution. How did this war start? And more importantly, how can it be won by defenders of Western civilization? To help me with those questions, I'm joined by sociologist, author, and commentator Frank Faridi. Frank's new book is titled The War on the Past by the West Must Fight for its History. Frank, welcome to Fire at Will. Pleasure. Nice talking to you. Let's start with
00:01:50
Speaker
the way that I just framed the war on the past. So you actually don't frame it as being part of the culture wars, as perhaps I just did. You frame it as being the primary driver of the culture wars. Talk me through how that works. Well, I think the way that it works is that although the culture wars is about issues to do with identity politics, you know, ideas about gender, about race, about decolonization. What underpins a lot of this?
00:02:19
Speaker
our ideas about who we are, where we come from, what we're about. And in many respects, the culture war, since its inception in the late 1970s, has always tried to challenge and delegitimate ah the past, and delegitimate the language of the past, the ideals of the past,
00:02:39
Speaker
the civilizational accomplishments of Western society. So right from the outset, in in a kind of semi-conscious way, it's always targeted these these features of the past. And that has become much more systematic in the last 10 years, when virtually every every episode that one ought to be proud of in terms of Western civilization has been flipped over and represented in a negative light, demonized
Demonization of Western History
00:03:09
Speaker
fairly systematically. And I think that that underpinning is really quite important to understand because if you only deal with the symptoms of the culture war, we'll never be able to deal with the issue very effectively.
00:03:21
Speaker
You mentioned that we can point to the 1970s, the early 1970s as an origin point for the modern culture wars, but I'm curious as to whether this is a unique phenomena over the last 50 odd years or whether there is something innate in us that looks to to the past and looks to tear it down. Were the ancient Egyptians looking to the past to try and tear down their ancestors? Were the ancient Romans doing this or is this something which is very much unique to our times?
00:03:45
Speaker
Well, yeah there's always instances of people being critical of their past and targeting certain dimensions of the past. So that's not particularly new. But what is different about today is that today we're not simply attacking this or that episode in the past. But we literally, some people are trying to annihilate the past altogether to destroy it. Basically to suggest that there's nothing remotely positive or redeeming ah about what the Western world has
Comparisons with Past Destructive Movements
00:04:16
Speaker
achieved. And that's very, very new. Because even if you look at regimes like Soviet Union under Lenin or look at Marxist philosophers who didn't like many aspects of what happened before their generation, they could nevertheless say that there were some positive things
00:04:34
Speaker
you know So even someone like Gramsci would basically talk about the importance of classical education. The Greeks and the Romans would see those things as as as very important for his generation to understand and learn. Whereas to- today, the Greeks and the Romans are cast into the role of white supremacists, racists, all kinds of negative features are attributed to them.
00:04:57
Speaker
And that's that is what is new. It's a complete cutting off the past from
Rise of Identity Politics and Decline of Traditional Values
00:05:01
Speaker
the present, and regarding the past is contaminating us, and therefore we've got to guard against the past, insulate ourselves against it. Okay. Well, before we go into that impulse and how it can be how can we described in more detail, I just want to understand the potted history from that moment in, say, the 1970s. How did we get here? What's what's been the the series of steps that have brought us to this current moment?
00:05:26
Speaker
I think theyre there's a number of important developments. I think the first thing is that in the 1970s, we have the end of ideology. That's really when communism disintegrates, liberalism unfolds, even conservatism becomes paralyzed. And as the old ideologies unravel, so you have new new kind of ideals emerging, identity politics gains tremendous strength.
00:05:52
Speaker
and environmentalism, which is a form of identity politics, also becomes very powerful and is is ascendant. And as that occurs, so increasingly the political and cultural elites that ran Western societies at that point, begin to lose faith and begin to lose belief in the values into which they were socialized. So they
University Influence on Ideological Spread
00:06:16
Speaker
have a situation where increasingly they no longer believe in the outlook of their parents, grandparents, and their ancestors. And they themselves begin to convert to these anti-civilizational sentiments and what you have. And this is the most important development.
00:06:35
Speaker
ah in the mid-80s is they begin to open the door to virtually any kind of attack, any kind of criticism to their past. They they don't fight back. they don't ah Even the conservatives at that point are kind of unaware of what's happening. They're they're not really in a position to challenge the attacks on on on conserving values. And suddenly they have this kind of one-sided culture war emerging.
00:07:01
Speaker
where nobody is fighting back and they're allowing all this new ideas to sweep all the cultural institutions and the people that run our world, people that run our institutions themselves become quite sympathetic to these anti-civilization sentiments. Do you see the universities as being the origin point from which this new ideology then spreads to other institutions?
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah, I think the universities is where the ah the theories and the more systematic formulations are invented. But very, very swiftly, it begins to move outwards. And this is what a lot of people didn't really understand. People said, well, this is just academics being troublemakers. They didn't realize that universities were quite influential. They were educating the elites of those societies, so the courts the ah schools and all the institutions to do with culture begin to get influenced. To the point by the time we get to the 21st century, even business schools, you know where people go to get their MBAs, have a curriculum which is entirely wedded to these new notions. So I can think of almost no institutions, not even the military anymore, that has somehow managed to keep this out. And of course, some societies are more susceptible than others.
Cultural Shifts and California's Role
00:08:24
Speaker
For example, the Anglo-American societies are most enveloped by this, whereas in Southern Europe or in Central Europe, you haven't got the same kind of impact. But nevertheless, these values spread throughout the world and and gradually begin to have a dominant hegemonic position in society. Why is it that the Anglosphere is uniquely susceptible to this particular to this particular new ideology? I think there are two reasons. There are ah places like Australia and Canada, which yeah were always ambivalent about what it meant to be Australian, what it meant to be Canadian, and their identity was always insecure, and therefore they were more hospitable to ideas that called into question the legitimacy of their past. But I think more importantly, I think there are certain places where this really takes up
00:09:21
Speaker
where it originates, California, i I always call these California values because it's there that you have the media and the yeah ah film industry and all these cultural institutions that ah begin to formulate them and gradually from California, it's much easier to spread those sentiments in English speaking countries.
00:09:42
Speaker
and But of course what happens is that as it spreads from California to the eastern seaboard of the United States, then to Britain, it's only a matter of time before it goes to Northern Europe, to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland.
Religion and Modern Cultural Shifts
00:09:55
Speaker
So there is a kind of dynamic that that that gets created. And it is unfortunate that some societies are more captured by this than others.
00:10:05
Speaker
there was one form of ideology that you didn't mention that was on the decline in the 1970s that created a vacuum and that was the decline in organized religion, which has been on the decline for the last 50 years in across the West, in the US a bit slower than everywhere else, but but nonetheless, the decline is is there. Do you see a relationship between the decline in organized religion and the war on the past? I don't. I think a lot of people do, but you have to remember that religion has been in decline since
00:10:36
Speaker
the 18th century. And there were other sentiments and ideas that emerged that, you know, like science, for example, and you very future-oriented ideals that meant that there was no need to attack the past in that kind of a way. I think that religion is only important insofar as that it's integral to the traditions of the West.
00:11:00
Speaker
Christianity, for example, is very closely linked to the kind of outlook of ah Western civilization. And insofar as the whole package has been called into question, it's it's you know it's its decline is quite important. But I think every aspect of that tradition gradually fell apart. I think you also have to remember that by the time we get to the 1950s, religion itself, Christianity, for example, Christianity Judaism,
00:11:30
Speaker
had begun to integrate many of these sentiments. So if you look at the Anglican Church in in England, in Great Britain, it is it is as woke as it comes. And and you know if you go to church on a Sunday, you'll see you know almost all the placards in the bulletin boards talk about you know the importance of LGBTQ disrespecting this identity group or that.
Identity Politics in the Culture War
00:11:54
Speaker
And in many respects, today they play quite an important role in promoting many of these sentiments. Yeah, I agree. I was walking through St Paul's Cathedral on the weekend and I can confirm that that is precisely what you see on the bulletin boards when you walk in St Paul's. Help me understand the combatants in the war in the past. So in most wars, the combatants are pretty easy to identify. In the book, you correctly call out that this isn't the case here. Some people would think that this again is just a few
00:12:25
Speaker
nutar university students tearing down statues. On the other end of the spectrum, some people think that there is a massive globalist left-wing conspiracy at play, and I don't and i think you you would say that neither of those characterizations are correct. How should we understand who the combatants are in this war? Who is driving it? It's difficult. I mean, I call i call the sentiments that are embodied here an ideology without a name.
00:12:49
Speaker
And the reason for that is because these ideas have very many different streams that kind of come together. And it's not the case that ah you know that there's a kind of coherent political outlook that kind of gradually moves forward and and goes from strength to strength. But rather you have, first of all, I think very um something that's always underestimated is the co collapse of the of those elites that historically defend their own history. i mean If they disintegrate and they refuse to defend you know the values that their ancestors stood for,
00:13:30
Speaker
then basically you don't need very many combatants because there isn't anything to combat against. its There's no kind of institutional resistance or very minimal institutional resistance you know that takes place. But I think what happens is that gradually what what occurs is that the the people that run our institutions get re-educated. They lose their link with the past they and ah and the ideals of the past. they get they're They're gradually made to feel ashamed.
00:14:00
Speaker
or embarrassed about who they are and where they kind of come from. And at a certain point, especially when identity politics begins to kick in, they then ah acquire a more hostile, you know sort of aggressive approach towards this and therefore what you have is this kind of seamless experience where there's no clarity about who's in the forefront. All that you can say is that, for example, the key moment in our era is the decolonization movement.
00:14:32
Speaker
But the decolonization movement cannot just be blamed on Black Lives Matter or any specific group, because the very minute that Black Lives Matter you know sort of emerges and gains definition, you have all these people literally jumping on the bandwagon and just kind of pushing that forward. And it's almost as if they were waiting. They're almost like they were waiting for somebody to say that it's not OK to be white.
00:14:59
Speaker
You know, that being white is a bearer of of a cultural disease. That, you know, white privilege is imminent. It's an original sin that you cannot cure or you cannot sort of sore ass. So it's almost as if people have been waiting to embrace this kind of sentiment. And that's why, in a sense, the combatants are diffused and unclear. You can see certain individuals who personified this here and there, but by and large,
00:15:27
Speaker
And this is what makes it so difficult for people to see and recognize as ah as a coherent war, rather than just simply a few conflicts here
Radical Movements and the Toxic Past
00:15:36
Speaker
and there. It's just because of its diffuse and nebulous character. And even the language they use to promote their cause is opaque and full of euphemism. So yeah even the words they use that that kind of promotes their ideas requires a ah lot of thought to untangle and interpret.
00:15:54
Speaker
Yes, and of course, you've got a chapter on the importance of language in this movement, which we'll get to in a bit. You mentioned the decolonization movement and it's been on my mind recently because the yeah UK has just announced that it will cede the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. And it's an interesting insight in that.
00:16:12
Speaker
This war in the past isn't an abstract theoretical debate. There are real world consequences of this ideology then taking hold in government, for example. I don't think anyone would argue that this form of decolonisation, anti-Western sentiment is a big driving force in that decision by this current ah UK government. This is not something which is in the abstract. This is something which actually has very practical consequences for how we live our lives and for the governance of countries like the UK today, isn't it?
00:16:39
Speaker
It does, and in many respects, people don't realize that geopolitics has become immersed in this cultural outlook, that increasingly the way that battles are fought out, there are geopolitical battles, are to some extent influenced. So the policymakers in Western societies have also adopted this standpoint. That's, for example, clearest in relation to the war in Gaza against Israel.
00:17:08
Speaker
where Israel is regarded by and large as somehow guilty for for for existing. And you almost get the impression that policymakers in Britain and elsewhere would rather Israel didn't exist. They don't say that because rhetorically, they still got to demonstrate a degree of sympathy for what's happened there. But by and large, when you talk to policymakers, they actually think that the Israelis had it coming and that they somehow, Jews in Israel,
00:17:38
Speaker
are not just white, yeah which is bad enough, but they're like hyper white. you know So because they are apparently more privileged and more powerful than the average white person is. So as you say, this has got very real consequences in terms of the way that conflicts, which are potentially quite dangerous and explosive, are regarded and but in the Western world.
00:18:02
Speaker
Let's drill down into some of the key characteristics on the war and the past that you identify. One is the ideology of year zero, which is this belief that the the the past is toxic, is evil, and the world needs to start anew. There are, of course, some very dark historical connotations with the term year zero. Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Khmer Rouge both come to mind.
00:18:27
Speaker
Did you deliberately want to associate what we are seeing in the West today with some of those radical movements of the 20th century? I did, even though year zero ideology today hasn't got the same corrosive and destructive consequences as, let's say, the Khmer Rouge had. But nevertheless, in terms of annihilating the ideals of the past, the those achievements that that occurred, it's got a lot of similarities to it.
00:18:56
Speaker
And what's interesting is that, unlike years of radiology in previous times, like that of Maoist China, our years of radiology is entirely oriented towards destroying the past, but not necessarily building a new future. So at least Maoism, for better or all its sins, at least claimed to build a new society, a society that was very utopian, very positive, whereas What's interesting about the war against the past is that it's not a war for something positive. It's not a war that tries to build a new world. It's entirely about systematically undermining what existed beforehand. In fact, if you talk to a ah lot of ideologues who are linked, for example, with the environmental movement, they always tell you that their ideal is a planet where human beings have still not existed. It's a pre-human planet.
00:19:55
Speaker
is what their ideal is, rather than anything that is more future-oriented.
From Optimism to Pessimism in Ideologies
00:19:59
Speaker
So it is a ah very ah very destructive process, and that's why I felt the term year zero ideology was merited. Yeah, it's an incredibly depressing ideology when you put it that way. I was speaking to Yasha Monk on this podcast not so long ago, and we were talking about the term cultural Marxism. And he had a problem with the term cultural Marxism because Marxism, A, being an economic concept, but more importantly,
00:20:25
Speaker
There is that end goal of the worker's paradise and some form of utopia. It's a bit unclear how you get there, but that is the end goal. The sad and troubling thing about this war in the past is you're right. There is the no end utopia. So it isn't in that respect, a form of cultural Marxism because that end point is very, very different. In fact, the end point is very unclear, isn't it? It is. I mean, it's, I don't even like the term cultural Marxism because Marxism was was what economics was about.
00:20:53
Speaker
something more transformative. I don't think that that's a suitable way of looking at it, but Marxism, cultural Marxism, whatever you want to call it, was devoted towards a new world, creating a new world. And it's a utopian conception that was utterly unrealistic, but nevertheless, it kind of inspired people towards building something that did not exist, whereas Now what you've got is a situation whereby in a sense calling to question humanity's achievements in the past. What you're really saying is that human beings are not capable of building or constructing anything positive in the future. and That's the logic of it. That's why it's so depressing because it teaches our young people that human beings have failed systematically to do something that is good and worthwhile. So if kids grew up thinking that there isn't very much hope in humans,
00:21:46
Speaker
There's obviously not very much hope for the future, and that's a pessimistic, cynical attitude is very deeply embedded in this war against the past. It's interesting, isn't it? Because my understanding of the left of the over the course of least modern history is that they have primarily and ah have had a primarily optimistic view of the human condition. And it's generally the right that have a more realist, cynical view of the way that humans will behave and that then informs their respective ideologies. How has the left gone from having that optimistic view of the human condition to this new form of ideology, which is fundamentally pessimistic about human behavior? I think we need to pause and reflect on the term left.
00:22:35
Speaker
Is it a left that's connected or or similar to what the left was in the past?
Presentism and Disregarding the Past
00:22:42
Speaker
Or have all these labels, like left and right, have changed? So for example, I get called far right very often. They say, Frank Freddy is far right. And I always tell them, the only time I'm far right is when I used to play football on the right wing. it's It's a meaningless concept. And similarly, I think the left has imploded to the point at which All of its key ideals are no longer ones that this anybody's putting forward.
00:23:12
Speaker
And what we call the left are really people that are involved in identity politics. You can call them identitarians, or you can call them woke. At the moment, we are struggling to find a name that adequately describes them. But in a sense, what you've got is is ah is ah is a movement whose only possible connection with the left in the past is that they hate everything ah about the world as it is.
00:23:41
Speaker
But their hatred for the world does not mean that they've got an idea of how to change it. They want to destroy it, but they have not got no idea what they want to destroy and and how they want to use that destruction for positive purposes. So it is a very unusual and and very kind of unique development that has occurred in modern times, that we are so stuck in the present, almost kind of trapped in the present, that we're losing sight of any possible way of getting out of our predicament or building something or creating something that is a better version of the world than the one that exists at the moment.
00:24:20
Speaker
And that's, of course, I think the third or the fourth chapter on the concept of presentism. So you say in that chapter, year zero's demotion of the past is sustained by a zeitgeist that is obsessively focused on the present.
Education Systems as Indoctrination Tools
00:24:33
Speaker
What are the reasons for this modern day presentism that we we find ourselves in? My chapter, I think, on presentism is really important to me because it's based on this notion but what's One of the things that has occurred almost imperceptibly, but now it's very, very clear, is that the temporal distinction between the present and the past has been destroyed. so For example, many of the people that hate the West literally seek to colonize the past, almost imagine that they can fix the problems of the past.
00:25:07
Speaker
and thereby redeem themselves. you know Instead of dealing with the problems of today, they're much more comfortable in giving lectures to someone like Shakespeare and telling lecture how he should rewrite his plays. So you have attempts to rewrite Shakespeare's plays by bringing out Shakespeare's supposed racism in a way that suggests that Shakespeare was reluctant to express himself in explicit racist language, but they'll help Shakespeare by making him sound much more racist than he supposedly was. In other words, what they're really saying is they can teach Shakespeare a lesson and they know what was in Shakespeare's mind more than he did. And they're doing that with Aristotle. they doing Every historical figure becomes a target. And in targeting them, you're cheering them as if they're your peers, as if they're ah you know talking to them, as if they're alive now. So there's a sense in which the past is being colonized to the point at which
00:26:03
Speaker
people go back and forth and the distinction between the present and the past no longer exists. And I call this the ever present because the present somehow goes back into the beginning of time and you kind of almost forget that there's any distinction between our life in in the here and now and at this moment and something that happened 2000 years ago.
00:26:25
Speaker
It also just strikes me as having this incredible ignorance and or arrogance associated with it that people in 2000 years in the future won't think the way that we behaved or acted was contingent on our context as well. it's It's almost as if we are at the end of, we now have enough adequate information to be able to make moral judgements on throughout history, but that exact same thing will not happen in the future. I just find, logically, I find it very difficult to get my head around.
00:26:54
Speaker
well I don't think logic is the strong point of this movement. What what you have is an interesting situation, which is what they really are saying is that ah people who are living that day in particular are so aware or so enlightened that you don't just simply know more than people that live in the 19th century, 20th century, they're better people. So there is a kind of moral arrogance that suggests that people beforehand were morally inferior to them, not just simply that they didn't have the same knowledge that that we have in the present, which which is something that I find extremely troublesome, that you can have that kind of paternalistic arrogance and not understand that our sensitivity or our understanding of the world is built upon these struggles and the accomplishments of successive generations in the past, that we're the beneficiaries of those people that we look down upon, and instead of of
00:27:54
Speaker
having that humble opinion of of ah seeing ourselves as as as the ah as the product of an interesting intellectual and moral journey through the centuries, we just basically pretend that everything started with us. Everything that is good and positive begins with year zero, which is which is now.
00:28:15
Speaker
And somehow you forget that all kinds of important things occurred before our time. And much of this comes down to, at both a school level and a university level, us not being as good at teaching the great things that have happened throughout our history and what we have to be grateful for. Are we not as good at teaching history as we used to be? And does that play into this? It does, but that's, you know, that That process is the consequence of things that happened beforehand. So schooling has changed because schooling reflects the society that we live in. Schooling reflects the values that are being created in the here and now. And schooling has really turned into a form of indoctrination where young people are systematically dispossessed of their intellectual and moral inheritance.
00:29:10
Speaker
and where young people are, in a sense, not really able to benefit from the insights of their ancestors. On the contrary, it's about turning young people against their ancestors and basically telling young people that you know better than your parents did. i mean they you know For example, if you look at sex education, which I'm very interested in because of its sociologically in importance,
00:29:34
Speaker
Seven or eight-year-old kids are being told that you probably understand your sexuality better than your mom and dad. And instead of listening to them, you know you should do what you think is best, listen to that your teachers. And there's almost a conscious attempt to separate the generations, to detach the generations from one another. And in that sense, it's not just bad teaching. It's an insidious form of education that's been institutionalized recently.
Linguistic Engineering and Thought Control
00:30:01
Speaker
You're of course a university professor. Give me the bird's eye view from your perspective as to the way that the teaching of history has changed since ah you started your career. Well, it's totally different. i'm Just the other day, I looked at the historic curriculum curriculum at Harvard.
00:30:17
Speaker
which is one of the best universities. And there's not not even a pretense to teach history as we knew it. you know In history, you have obviously conflicts and debates, and we argue with each other, and some of us want to reinterpret the past and even revise the past. That's perfectly all right. We always do that. Now what you have is almost a sense in which the past is just merely seen.
00:30:43
Speaker
as a kind of terrain into which you project your view of the world. So today, history is almost seen as a as that kind of a medium for basically reinventing ourselves in the past or flattering ourselves by showing how much better we are than people who lived in the 19th century. So for example, if you're teaching the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution, it's not about all the science and all about the technology,
00:31:11
Speaker
that that kind of came into the fore all the inventions. It's about how in the 19th century the Industrial Revolution polluted the environment and how the Industrial Revolution is to blame for all these horrible things that happened later on. And therefore what you've got is this kind of negative kind of history where you blacken people's sensibility about everything that has occurred. So look at the Harvard curriculum, for example,
00:31:39
Speaker
There are several courses on the queering of history, which basically means you look at it, look at, I don't know, the medieval era or the Renaissance from a queer perspective. And what that means is you're not interested in what actually happened in the Renaissance.
00:31:55
Speaker
You're interested in saying, well such and such person was gay, such and such woman was a lesbian, those people that were trans or gender fluid, and it's almost like a ah surreal comedy oh ah spot of spotting yourself in the 16th century. Yeah, it is very odd. I saw something on Twitter the other day talking about Jesus potentially being non-binary, which was another classic addition to that very warped canon. You mentioned before the discussion around language and how language is so important in this movement. You use the term linguistic engineering, which is a really nice term. So you say that the war against the past directs so much of its energy towards gaining control of it the everyday vocabulary. The question is, why do words matter?
00:32:43
Speaker
Well, words matter because words, in a sense, the words that we use reflect the way we think. And if it becomes dispossessed over our vocabulary and and are told that these are the words we should use, then the way we think also alters. So it's a way of controlling our internal life. If you, for example, get rid of words like husband and wife, and you cannot change them to partner,
00:33:11
Speaker
Or if you get rid of a word like woman and man, and you no longer have, you have this kind of equality between man and woman in the in the words that you express. You know, a pregnant woman becomes no longer a pregnant woman, but ah you know a woman with a womb, but a person with a womb, but you know, sort of breastfeeding becomes chest feeding. And all these words are brought into play. Then after a while, the way you think about other human beings also changes.
00:33:41
Speaker
there's a difference between an intimate idea about a man and a woman, a wife and a husband, which kind of is very clear about what is the difference, but this but but what is it that binds them together, then when you have the word partner being used, because partner can be a business arrangement, it can be just about anything in a sense, a partner in in a sport exercise. So when you have that, then you basically change or or can begin to change how you regard the world. And that's why language becomes a medium of control, social control. And that's why they use it so much, because if they can change our vocabulary, then we then we basically become captured by them. they become We become prisoners of their artwork without even having thought very much about it.
Guilt, Shame, and Cultural Conformity
00:34:31
Speaker
Yeah, and this is also, you can see this phenomena so clearly now outside of the universities in mainstream institutions like the corporate world, like the media where you are shamed into not using particular terms. There's also this moral element that is associated with the use of language. You're a bad person if you use this word or that word. How much of this comes down to basically guilting or shaming otherwise well-meaning people into just falling into line?
00:35:01
Speaker
A lot of it, I think that guilt tripping is very important here. The whole war against the past is to make us feel guilty about who we are. That's what it's really all about, to be ashamed of who we are. Because once we become ashamed of who we are, we have no pride in in our family, in our community. Then we lose our place in the world. We don't know who we are or where we're going. And I think that that is very important. And I think it's unfortunate that people feel, you know, kind of give into this. And when they're told to use a pronoun instead of he or she, instead of saying, well, actually, you know, I'm going to use a proper word like he or she rather than they, them, or Z. You know, a lot of people are too scared to be able to fight back against this because they feel there's so much pressure or even their job might be at risk. But we've got to learn to do this because if we don't use the word that words that are natural to us,
00:36:00
Speaker
that express our imagination and we become other people, but we change who we are, and we are become robbed of our own personality and become robbed of our own insight. And that is something that even totalitarian regimes in the past have never been able to
Defending Western Civilization
00:36:16
Speaker
achieve. I don't think the Stalinist regime, the Soviet Union, was able to get people to regard themselves ah so fundamentally different than is being demanded of us in the 21st century.
00:36:30
Speaker
You end the book with a look to the future and how we can actually go about winning this war. How can the war against the past be won by defenders of Western civilization? I think first of all, we got to recognize the scale of the problem, not just simply dismiss it as as a temporary aberration. Secondly, we have got to step up and make sure that we we don't lose another generation of children.
00:36:57
Speaker
to ah to the other side, because we lost three generations of young people already to this kind of indoctrination. So we've got to make sure that we keep the young people on our side. And I think we need to have a lot of courage. The way that I look at it is that our our opponents have benefited from the cowardice of our side. They benefited from the fact that we didn't fight back. It's not that their views are so eloquent and coherent and systematic.
00:37:26
Speaker
They've never been tested. They've never been forced to account for their sentiments. And I think what we need to do is to step up and and demonstrate a bit of courage. And next time, when you're asked to tick a box as to what your gender is, you don't have to do that. You don't have to you know go through the box-ticking exercise.
00:37:47
Speaker
that is demanded of us, we can basically just write men or women or whoever we are. And I think we got to find ways and means of demonstrating that the emperor has got no clothes. And that's basically what it's really all about. And if enough begin to do it, then I think something great will occur. um One of the things I've been involved in in my work, because i i'm i' I'm a director of a think tank in Brussels,
00:38:13
Speaker
It's just challenging this class systematically and, okay, people get shocked in the beginning. How can Fourier say this? How can I do that? But then at the end of the day, the the really nice thing is, is that even today, the majority of ordinary people instinctively and intuitively understand that what we think is right. They they just know in the heart, their soul, that there's something fundamentally wrong in the way that others are trying to change their vocabulary, to change the way they think. And we've just got to mobilize that kind of opinion and give them a voice to make them feel confident, to reject the people that are attacking them. And I think that's but it's as simple as that. And it's really up to us to take ourselves a little bit more seriously.
00:38:58
Speaker
and getting involved in this struggle, which is consequential, because the future of our civilization is really at stake here.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:39:06
Speaker
Yes, well said. There's a line from former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, John Anderson, that I often like to repeat, which is that the only cure for cancel culture is courage culture. Frank, your book is, I think, a wonderful addition to this hopefully growing movement, trying to push back against the people who are trying to tear down Western civilization. It's also just a cracking read in its own right. I strongly recommend everyone goes out and grabs a copy. Thank you so much for writing it, and thank you for coming on Fire at Will. Pleasure to talk to you.
00:39:37
Speaker
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