Frank Furedi, The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History, (Polity Press, 2024), puts the case that the falsification of history done by the Left will ultimately increase racial tensions. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/falsifying-history-can-only-increase-racial-tension/ . The Left's campaign, dressed up in supposed anti-racism and anti-colonialism, is to dismantle the cultural history of the West, from destroying statues of heroes, to having woke academics rewrite history in the black arm ban paradigm, so that White students become dispossessed:
"Does it matter that large numbers of race-obsessed intellectuals wish to discredit its legacy in ways that have very little basis in historical truth? Furedi is surely right to point to historic memory as the key to the identity of any coherent community. Nations exist because there is a sense of solidarity among their populations, of which consciousness of their past is a major component. Social and political institutions only work if people identify themselves with the wider society to which they belong. The fragmentation of a society's historic identity undermines the solidarities that bind it together. In the process, it also impedes the integration of ethnic minorities and creates artificial grievances which generate racial tensions. The problem is aggravated by the intolerant and polemical tone that characterises much of what is written and spoken about the past.
Today, an older generation can laugh off the eccentricities of this movement. But to a younger age group they are not eccentricities. They are all that are being taught. A poll conducted in 2022 found that most 18- to 24-year-olds thought that Britain was 'founded on racism', a view shared by no other age group. These young people are the future. 'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,' ran the slogan of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian world. They called it 'reality control'."
An example of this is the University of Nottingham, which has removed "Anglo-Saxon" from courses on history and literature to push back against "nationalist narratives". According to The Telegraph, a masters-level course, Viking and Anglo-Saxon Studies, has been renamed as Viking and Early Medieval English Studies. Another module, a literature course originally named "A Tale of Seven Kingdoms: Anglo-Saxon and Viking-Age England from Bede to Alfred the Great" has been recast as "Early Mediaeval England from Bede to Alfred the Great". This is part of the "decolonise the curriculum" drive that began in earnest with Black Lives Matter:
Cambridge University is now pushing the lie that Anglo-Saxons never existed as a unique ethnic group to dispel alleged nationalist "myths" about Britain. So, to counter a political movement, history is falsified. The response must be to close down these corrupt institutions as James Reed at this blog often argues, and reform the entire higher education sector of the West. The age of the university is over.
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2023/06/04/erasing-the-english-anglo-saxons-never-existed-claims-cambridge-university/
"Cambridge University is reportedly teaching its students that the Anglo-Saxons never existed as a unique ethnic group in an "anti-racist" attempt to dispel supposed nationalist "myths" about Britain.
In an ironic turn of events, the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) at the once prestigious Cambridge University in England is now attempting to dismantle the very ideas inherent in the title of the department, claiming that the Anglo-Saxon ethnic group is apparently a racist concoction meant to stoke British nationalism, according to a report from London's Daily Telegraph.
The woke academics claimed that the purpose of its anti-English stance is to make its history lessons "more anti-racist", the department said according to the broadsheet, adding: "One concern has been to address recent concerns over use of the term 'Anglo-Saxon' and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial English identity."
"In general, ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism… by showing students just how constructed and contingent these identities are and always have been," they continued.
Apparently unsatisfied with dispelling the supposed "myth" of the Anglo-Saxon people, the university department went on to claim that there was never a "coherent" ethnic identity for the peoples in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Wales.
According to the paper, one Cambridge lecturer claimed that the term "Anglo-Saxon" has been wrapped up in "indigenous race politics".
It comes amid a wider movement in academia to link the historical group of Germanic Angles, Jutes, and Saxon peoples who arrived after the end of Roman controlled Britain and the conquest of the Normans with alleged racism, which many claim has been fostered in America.
The attempt to brand the term as toxic has succeeded to such an extent that the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists decided in 2019 to change its name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England due to "the problematic connotations that are widely associated with the terms 'Anglo-Saxon'."
The name change came shortly after the resignation of Canadian academic Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm from the organisation, who later claimed that the study of Anglo-Saxon history is fraught with "inherent whiteness" and that the "Anglo-Saxon myth perpetuates a false idea of what it means to be 'native' to Britain."
Cambridge's claims about the history of England have sparked a heated backlash in Britain, with political commentator Paul Embery writing: "Just imagine a university saying the same thing about, say, Aboriginal Australians, Maoris or Native Americans."