A University of Virginia religion professor said this about the presence of the Charlottesville Robert E. Lee statue: it was “like if there’s a rabid dog in the neighborhood that has been hurting people, and it needs to be euthanized.” Such a statement is ignorant, fanatical, and substitutes childish subjectivism for objective reality. The statue has since been destroyed. That is where we are today.

And this erasure of culture is pervasive and has been going on for a long time. The college chant: “Hey Ho:  Western Civ has got to go!” dates to the Sixties.

A British professor has a new book about cultural destruction that cites its progress and nature chapter and verse: Frank Furedi, The War Against the Past, Why the West Must Fight for Its History (Polity Press: 2024). This should be of interest to thoughtful Southerners concerned about the ongoing attempts to erase our tradition, the only real American tradition.

The author reports of demands that we discard Aristotle because he was “racist” and put new words in Shakespeare’s mouth. The publisher of a new edition of Hemingway apologises for not having censored his offensive stereotypes but claims virtue in having warned the reader about them.  Examples of war against the past are countless. A biography of Churchill portrays his career as nothing but racism and colonialism.

(A certain crew of Alt-Rightists, some of whom claim to be Southern, though equally shallow with the Leftists, has turned this upside down by picturing Churchill as the evil genius who defeated the wise and benevolent plans of Hitler to save the West. But that is a sad discussion for another time.)

Our author started to think about our times when he happened to be in Portland, Oregon, and watched a mob destroy a Lincoln statue. In  England he went to visit his hospitalised mother,  announcing himself as her son. The hospital insisted on demanding to know whether he was the official “carer.”  Family meant nothing, only an artificial bureaucratic category.

According to the culture destroyers, Western civilization is nothing but a record of cruel oppression, morally toxic, which is to be dismissed as not relevant to our wiser and better times. This is a vicious kind of “presentism.”  Anything that is declared “outdated” is also “offensive.”  Only the present fashionable opinion counts. To dismiss all before now as “outdated” is the most superficial of thinking.

Worse, it leaves us without the continuity that is necessary for community and self-identification. It destroys the connection between generations, that is, it undermines family. It deprives us of everything of cultural value and authority. It debases our language with forced renaming of genders and endless cries of “racism” and “Oppression.”  Those who do these crimes claim that they are on a noble mission to “decolonize” our language. Falsifying language is one of their best weapons.

Anybody who has taught college students recognizes the degree to which the young are more and more being trapped in a phony present.  Many not only know nothing of the past, they are literally unable to conceive of anything that is not the present–they are barbarians.

This is all wrong. They  are abolishing Western Civilisation, mankind’s greatest achievement. Killing off the past is the destruction and distortion of knowledge and ability to think. The present is fleeting. The future is unknowable. The past is the source of everything valuable to be placed in young minds and to continue our life with.


Clyde Wilson

Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com, a source  for unreconstructed Southern books.

8 Comments

  • Earl Starbuck says:

    I think C.S. Lewis once referred to presentism as “chronological snobbery.” It is a great tragedy that we live in a society of snobs.

  • Gordon says:

    Dr. Wilson, I couldn’t be sure but if “a certain crew of Alt-Rightists” who repeatedly blame Winston Churchill for denying Adolph Hitler’s good works has an online presence I may know their identity. I may have seen your work and references to you there in the past. Even if I’m mistaken about the source, the one in mind is truly populated by self-impressed pedants.

    A while back there was a week of discussion extolling “The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down” as great history. Recent observations have included Jews driving the Confederate war effort and Frank Sinatra wasn’t a very good singer.

  • William Quinton Platt III says:

    BT Washington said in UP FROM SLAVERY, Chapter 1…”there is no group of blacks on the planet more fortunate than those who went through the US slave system”. There is nothing else to say.

  • Matt C. says:

    “Killing off the past is the destruction and distortion of knowledge and ability to think…The past is the source of everything valuable to be placed in young minds and to continue our life with.” Wholeheartedly Agree.

    “The future is unknowable.” In the context of the article, it’s understood this regards life on earth, before God intervenes. However, for the Bible believer, the future, the importance one, is known. The apostle Paul knew, whenever he left this life, he’d be with Christ. He knew it. And Paul said, that would be a “far better” thing. And believer’s know they will one day be reunited with saved loved one’s and friends. For example, I think I will meet R.E. Lee and Jeb Stuart.

    King David knew the future. When his first born with Bathsheba died, David said, “he will not come to me, but I will go to him.” Job said he’d one day see His Redeemer in the flesh on the earth.

    I very much appreciate this article. I’m not trying to be “preachy.” I too am appalled with the destruction of the past and the smug self righteousness. I think quite a few around here also realize the destruction of the past includes the Bible too. We just have to not forget eternity. That is the future and we can know that; we better know it, and be on the right side.

    • Matt C. says:

      I emailed a writer, for LRC, last week about an article he wrote. He sent a brief reply. One of the things he said was this: “I would say that right now there are fewer people who believe in him (God) than ever…”

      I don’t know the writer. That was the first article of his I ever read, but I think he’s been around. I realize another person could have a different view on the matter, of the number of people believing in God (of the Bible), but if this writer possibly sees this matter accurately, that’s not good. Certainly, has to be due in part, to that “War on the Past.”

  • Joyce Bennett says:

    “They are barbarians.” Heaven help us!

  • Steve Naidamast says:

    I tend to agree with Professor Wilson’s observations about modern western culture.

    However, he makes two points, which are rather in error.

    On the one hand, Winston Churchill was an incompetent drunk, who went to war for the sake of empire and in the pursuit destroyed his nation’s empire by selling of its major assets to FDR in payment for all the assistance he was getting from the US. To a degree Churchill was quite a racist considering that initiated the Bangladesh famine (or the area of that country at the time) during the war that starved over 1,000,000 people to death just so that his British troops could be fed.

    Churchill never entertained the idea of great works by Adolf Hitler and Germany but during the 1930s many did and for good reason.

    As to Western Civilization being the greatest that Humanity has ever created, this is somewhat absurd. All of Western Civilization was originally based upon Roman and earlier Greek civilizations, both of which were primarily Mediterranean civilizations, though they gave the west the basis for its own civilization to rise.

    Of course the West produced great achievements but mathematics, engineering, science were all the purview of earlier civilizations that the West merely built upon.

    And lets not forget the Chinese civilizations, which gave rise to naval power s a result of its capabilities in naval engineering, while at the same time giving the world philosophy as great as that of ancient Greece, while devising similar standards of educational prowess, which is still a hallmark of Asian civilizations to day.

    No doubt the dystopian forces in the West today want to destroy all the good that the West has reason to be proud of. Yet, historically, much of western growth was based upon military conquest and subsequent colonization for which there is little dispute of…

  • Joseph Johnson says:

    Western Civilization is the greatest achievement of mankind. If you deny that then you don’t know anything.

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