History and Histrionics

I am something of an indifferent Historian. Piecing together the various threads of history and weaving it into some kind of coherent tapestry is a mammoth undertaking and so my understanding of the various forces and dynamics that have shaped our present is, necessarily, imperfect. As it must be for everyone - even professional Historians. Nobody can know everything.

But even with my woefully incomplete picture of historical events I know that many of the “woke” versions of history are monumentally moronic - and childish.

Much of their “thinking” kind of looks like this :

Colonialism BAD. Decolonize.

Pick almost any topic upon which the “woke” pontificate and you’ll find a garbled, incoherent and facile version of history underpinning it.

In a recent Stack, Mathew Aldred looked at identifying as fat. He quotes from a 2021 paper entitled “Fat Acceptance and Social Justice”

As such, the surveillance and regulation of fat bodies must be understood in the context of colonialism and state regulation of Indigenous, Black and racialized communities. It is essential to think carefully and urgently [my emphasis] about how “obese” bodies are treated as “risky” in this political moment, and to ensure that conversations about fatness are read with an appreciation for the realities of structural racism and the history of insufficient care for members of BIPOC communities.

The history of fatness isn’t to be understood in terms of the number of pies and donuts one shovels in, but it “MUST” be understood in the “context of colonialism” and with “an appreciation of the realities of structural racism” and the history of, allegedly, “insufficient care for members of BIPOC communities”.

What kind of demented and childish nonsense is this? More histrionics than history.

People say bad things about being fat - therefore it must be colonialism and systemic stuffery. Although the only systemic stuffery going on with this issue is related to food.

The only “urgency” here is the gluttonous urgency with which people stuff their faces.

Distort your body with donuts, love - that’s on you - but fuck off with the egregious distortion of history.

I say this as someone with something of a love/hate relationship with donuts and other poor food choices¹ - which has been unfortunately more on the love than hate side of things.

I am more spherical than human-shaped - and it’s not something I’m proud of. Nor is it something to celebrate. It’s not healthy, it’s not beautiful. It’s a source of personal shame - because mostly I feel like shit . . .

And it’s my own fault

I know what I have to do about it - my problem is always that first step of overcoming my sloth and indulgence and turning the mental “switch” on in a fully committed way. I can do it - I’ve done it before, but I just need to get myself into the right headspace to properly change things for the better.

Once again, in this, we see the woke tendency to eschew personal responsibility and to blame everyone else, and history, for their current problems.

In Canada, for example, which seems to have gone full-on woke-psychotic, a criminal with a suitable skin shade (i.e not white) can have their lawyer argue that “systemic racism” played a role in their crime and get their sentence reduced. Poor thing just couldn’t stop themselves knifing that old lady because of decades of systemic racism, you see. “History” acts upon you in unavoidable ways.

Having a bit of a meltdown because someone misgendered you? Feeling “unsafe” at work because someone said that men and women can’t change their sex? It’s not your fault for being a weak, spineless, pathetic excuse for a human being who dissolves into trauma at a moment’s notice. No, it’s that nasty bigoted person who said such hateful things. It’s them wot dun it. The “history” of living in an oppressive cis-heteronormative society must be so unbearable and traumatic - you poor, oppressed, thing.

The “woke” perspective is tiresome, ridiculous, and irredeemably childish. The whole “oppressed/oppressor” framing, no matter how many fancy Pomo words and concepts you throw around it, no matter how big your vocabulary, no matter how long an incomprehensible sentence you can string together, is, at its heart, a childish framing.

It’s them wot dun it is pretty much all it amounts to.

This is not to say that genuine oppression does not exist or has never existed throughout history. It has. But to phrase our concerns over obesity as being some kind of “colonial oppression” is just absurd. To suggest that the sex binary was “invented” as a means to oppress non-white people is an idea so crazy it’s hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously - but they do.

To suggest that someone sitting in a Starbucks with their Tibetan Yak Milk Latte and tweeting on their iPhone is “oppressed” in any meaningful way is ridiculous.

Poverty is, in my view, the biggest source of “oppression” (outside of genuinely oppressive regimes like North Korea or China) - and this is, perhaps, the one thing that Marx (sort of) got right - but as we’ve got wealthier we’ve had to invent more and more sources of oppression. It’s almost like we’d much rather blame someone else for the things that go wrong in our lives isn’t it?

There are very real problems that people face - but few in the “west” suffer from anything like real oppression².

One place where people are said to be genuinely oppressed is in Israel - and any surface view of the situation will tend to lend support to the notion that the Palestinians are an oppressed people. The people in Gaza, for example, have been living in pretty crappy conditions for nearly two decades, at least - a situation rigorously enforced by Israel.

But . . .

The history of the situation and the truth of the matter is much, much, more complicated than “Israel bad, Palestinians oppressed”. The whole Israel as oppressive colonizers narrative is decidedly suspect - and the more I learn about the history of the country, the less I view this as the bad colonizer vs the oppressed innocent - which is the standard “woke” facile interpretation of historical events.

This documentary (31m 40s) from 1982, for example, fills in a bit more of the history (although, admittedly, more from the Israeli than Arab perspective)

One thing you’ll quickly appreciate from this is how much of the difficulties and problems over the last century in the region are a result of the British drawing lines on a map after WWI. It’s almost like the British deliberately didn’t want peace there - presumably to avoid the resurgence of another Ottoman-like empire.

Well, they certainly got their wish.

If anyone is to blame, I’d blame us Brits (and maybe the French, because we ought to blame the French as a matter of principle) for messing it all up in the first place, although it’s fair to say that, in general, the Arab and Jewish responses to our meddling, and the subsequent mess, were often very different. One side tended to start wars at the drop of a hat, and the other side didn’t.

One thing is very interesting about all of this - the only people who have, to some extent, welcomed the Palestinians are, in fact, the Israelis. The neighbouring Arab states just don’t want them at all.

It’s a fascinating documentary and one that will give you a bit more insight into some of the region’s troubles than the standard woke wankery.

The whole framing of the Palestinians as an “indigenous” people displaced by colonial oppressors is such a facile, and largely incorrect, perspective.

We’ve got more of these kind of “historical” shenanigans when it comes to the Klimate Krisis™. There’s a concerted effort to portray the industrial “history” of humans as being entirely responsible for the current Glowball Boiling™ that is said (by the Secretary General of the UN, no less) to be upon us.

This kind of simplistic, facile, reduction of a very complex problem³ to some simple (alleged) cause is very much a feature that is common to the way “woke” operates; you can just replace “systemic colonial racism” with CO2 and “white supremacy” with mean global temperature anomaly, and bingo, you’ve got the man-made Klimate Krisis™.

In “woke” parlance we absolutely need to “do the work” and to “do better” - but not in the way they suppose. We need to have a more mature and rational approach to history and tone down the histrionics - a lot.

1. Choices about the kind of food and the quantity

2. But we are getting there. Much of the covid response could be legitimately viewed within an oppressive framework - or at a least a totalitarian framing - and the ramping up of restrictions on our freedom of expression is starting to have an oppressive slant. We’re on the cusp. The new rules and regulations imposed in many places now on our ability to discuss things openly could be used to bring about some real oppression.

3. Which is only assumed to be a “problem” - I remain to be convinced that either “systemic racism” or “global warming” is actually any kind of problem at all.