“Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past and historians are the people who produce it.” – Eric Hobsbawm

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason.

When contemplating the existential issues of the present, it is vital that we possess a sophisticated understanding of the past. Without that understanding humanity continues, over and over, to repeat the mistakes and failures of the past. That seems a constant in human history but never more so than in an age that believes it has perfected human knowledge and understanding through the application of reason, disconnected from morality, common sense, intuition and memory. Our age of reason has dispensed with these fundamental underpinnings of a civilised society simply by the application of blind reason to the present circumstance and without reference to context and history.

This can only sensibly be achieved by removing from the public mind any knowledge or understanding of history. That is why in the West, over the last 50 years, there has been a constant attack on the teaching of history, and attempts to eliminate it entirely as a non-useful subject for secondary and tertiary education. The concentration today is on the STEM subjects which, having been decontextualised from the society around them, lack interest for the bulk of students, hence the declining standards of student achievement throughout that period in these and other subjects.

A current illustration of that propensity is the attitudes and judgments of current Western elites and their tame mainstream media acolytes about causative recent historical events that make sense of events occurring now, which seem inexplicable to the current memory-deficient opinion leaders. They take their attachment to reason and apply it to those events devoid of any historical context. It is as though history did not exist before the arbitrary event they have chosen to base their reasoned approach upon.

October 7, 2023 is an apposite example. All of the media and political discussion and debate about Palestine and Israel in the West are based on history commencing on that date. No reference or even understanding of the events that preceded it, or the historical context in which it occurred, is permitted. Such an approach is understandable for a propaganda machine determined to apply reason to an event deliberately de-contextualised to prevent understanding, and therefore to facilitate ignorance and to switch accountability from the perpetrator to the victim. This has been commonplace in the West for some 500 years now as we set out to impose brutal colonial rule on the rest of the world and to blame that rest of the world for us doing it to them.

The Christian religion provided a convenient excuse for much of those 500 years, that we were simply bringing Christian civilisation to the savages to save them from the consequences of their sins. Frequently, that saving of them took the form of butchery of them and their families, presumably so they would be enabled to enter our “heaven” in the next life. Similarly, the predominant Western elite view is that we are, in participating in the genocide of a “savage” Palestinian people, again pursuing our pure and admirable desire to save their souls, whilst butchering their bodies.

However, history has a way of puncturing these self-serving delusions about ourselves and that is why our Western elites so despise it and its generational transmission, as it makes the management and control of the citizen so much more difficult. This is the much talked about “manufacture of consent” adopted first in the UK and US prior to, and at the beginning of, World War I to “take the risk out of democracy”. That risk was to the elites of the day who overwhelmingly felt that the people who owned the world should run it. That was a constant idea that ran through those elites from feudalism all the way to today. But they had to find a way to convince the plebs that they had the democratic power. Hence the parliamentary system, designed to give that impression whilst it still secretly responded to the owners of the society. Today there are thousands more lobbyists in Canberra than there are elected politicians and the job of those lobbyists is to convince the politicians to enact their clients’ self-interests and ignore the public interest. They have fulfilled that mandate in just about every Western, so-called democracy.

There is a factual history of slaughter, dispossession, torture and deprivation of the most basic human rights of the Palestinian people since 1947 at the very least. This is simply regarded by the West, that undertook and enabled these criminal actions to be taken, as irrelevant to what happened on 7 October. Millions of Palestinians have had their lands stolen, their homes and villages destroyed, their women and children deliberately murdered, their health and education systems deliberately destroyed and all within the largest open air prison in human history. All of this nearly 80 years of despicable and vast abuse of international law and of basic human rights has been simply eliminated by an act of convenient memory loss. They have managed to convince most Australians, and those in the rest of the West, that the Palestinian victims are the perpetrators by the simple expedient of selling their public on the idea that history started on 7 October 2023.

The damning consequence of this expulsion of history in the West is that we are constantly repeating the mistakes of the past while blissfully ignorant that we are.