On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher stated that while some conservatives do want to whitewash the past, “plenty of liberals also want to abuse history to control the present,” through presentism and acting as through “the capacity for cruelty” is “a white thing.”
Maher began by saying, “How we teach our kids history has become a big controversy these days, with liberals accusing conservatives of wanting to whitewash the past, and sometimes that’s true, sometimes they do. But plenty of liberals also want to abuse history to control the present, and last month, a scholar named James Sweet caught hell for calling them out for doing just that. He criticized the phenomenon known as ‘presentism,’ which means judging everyone in the past by the standards of the present. It’s the belief that people who lived 100 or 500 or 1,000 years ago really should have known better, which is so stupid. It’s like getting mad at yourself for not knowing what you know now when you were ten.”
He added, “Did Columbus commit atrocities? Of course. But people back then were generally atrocious. Everybody who could afford one had a slave, including people of color. The way people talk about slavery these days, you’d think it was a uniquely American thing that we invented in 1619. But slavery throughout history has been the rule, not the exception: the Sumerians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the British, the early Americans, all the way up through R. Kelly. The Holy Bible is practically an owner’s manual for slaveholders. The word ‘slave’ comes from Slav, because so many Slavic people were enslaved, and they’re as white as the Hallmark Channel. Who do you think gathered the slaves from the interior of Africa to sell to slave traders? Africans, who also kept their own slaves. We’re a species prone to making others of our species our bitch. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Humans are not good people, and the capacity for cruelty is a human thing, not a white thing. That’s the truth, even though it doesn’t jive with the current narrative.”
Maher continued, “But in today’s world, when truth conflicts with narrative, it’s the truth that has to apologize. Being woke is like a magic moral time machine, where you judge everybody against what you imagine you would have done in 1066, and you always win. … Yeah, this professor is right, it’s just a way to congratulate yourself about being better than George Washington because you have a gay friend, and he didn’t. But if he was alive today, he would, too. And if you [were] alive then, you wouldn’t. Portland Public Schools has a plan now to teach kids that the idea of gender being mainly binary was brought here by white colonizers. The curriculum guide says, ‘When the United States was colonized by white settlers, their views around gender were forced upon the people already living here.’ Not even ‘Star Trek’ would try that story, where they discover a planet and give them separate bathrooms. It’s like they finally discovered a unified theory of wokeness incorporating all their ideas about race, gay, gender, and colonizers. … There’s a play called ‘I, Joan’ currently being presented in London…and it portrays Joan of Arc as…nonbinary with they/them pronouns. Which, if you think about it, makes even less sense, because Joan, being French, spoke a language where every noun is masculine or feminine.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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