Andrew L. Urban
“Keep people from their history and they are easily controlled,” Karl Marx believed. In his case, it was an imperative. In the case of others, such as George Orwell (“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” 1984), it was meant as a warning. This seemed perfectly relevant as I read the beginning of Chapter 5 of Dr Bella d’Abrera’s hair-raising new book, Mindless: How the Education System is Indoctrinating Children and Destroying Our Civilisation (IPA).
This section is worth quoting at length:
Much of this book has explored the extent to which children are being inducted into a world that is far too political, far too ideological, and far too adult for their tender years. This should not be their world, but it is.
Progressive educationalists, teachers’ unions, and policymakers are working night and day to ensure that the politics of identity, intersectionality, and decolonisation are the cornerstones of education in the West.
But there is another, equally insidious element in all of this: the distortion of school history in the name of diversity and inclusivity, all under the banner of making amends for past injustices in order to build a more ‘inclusive’ future. British schoolchildren are being taught that the British Empire and colonialism were, and continue to be, wholly destructive forces.
In the US, the 1619 Project recast the entire American experiment as a four-hundred-year system of racial oppression. In Australia, children are constantly reminded that they live on ‘stolen land’ and that the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 was not the founding of a penal colony which eventually became the modern nation of Australia, but the beginning of genocide and dispossession by British settlers who made the conscious decision to systematically wipe out Aboriginal Australians, destroy their culture and take their lands. Genocide, in this context, is not framed as a tragic side effect of colonisation, but as its central goal.
A curriculum that was once about understanding the past has become about dismantling it. The danger is a loss of intellectual rigour and a simple sense of history. Children are being taught to feel history rather than to understand it. The task of history should not be to erase complexity or to moralise the past through the lens of the present. It should be to help future citizens understand where they came from, what unites them, and why their nation, even with its flaws, might still be worth loving. But the more they learn about their countries these days, the less they love. By downplaying a nation’s heritage and denying any rooted connection between its history and its people, children are left with guilt, not pride; shame, not belonging.”
And as d’Abrera points out, all this is being done deliberately to sever loyalty to country. It is keeping children from their true history, which they are unlikely to discover after they exit the education system.
It got me thinking how the Anglosphere has managed to squander all the social progress (as in real progress) that had been made along with economic progress by the beginning of the 21st century. But by the time (2020) Douglas Murray wrote The Madness of Crowds – gender, race, identity (Bloomsbury), he could wonder at the mad irony of the ghosts of Marxism and racism haunting the public square, their old manifestations dragged about the streets by activists, just when these curses had been largely defeated. Zombie Marxism, Zombie racism, perhaps?
“The number of Americans who view racism as a ‘big problem’ doubled between 2011 and 2017,” writes Murray. “At the exact moment that racism had never been more discredited or more socially and politically unacceptable, it is portrayed as omnipresent and needing a great pushback. (Equally applicable in Australia.) Having begun to view everything through the new lenses we have been provided with, everything is then weaponized, with consequences which are deranged as well as dementing. It is why The New York Times decides to run a piece by a black author with the title: ‘Can my Children be Friends with White People?’
“And why even a piece about cycling deaths in London written by a woman can be framed through the headline: ‘Roads Designed by Men are Killing Women’. Such rhetoric exacerbates any existing divisions and each time creates a number of new ones. And for what purpose? Rather than showing how we can all get along better, the lessons of the last decade appear to be exacerbating a sense that in fact we aren’t very good at living with each other.
The immature, uninformed sheep-like behaviour of students on campuses in Australia displaying antisemitic tropes goes to show how easily they were controlled by malevolent forces. (I wonder how the Royal Commission into antisemitism will frame its report come December 14, 2026?)
That immaturity is no restricted to uni students. The shiny baubles of identity politics, oppression, victimhood and the climate alarmism vehicle, has manifested through pug ugly demonstrations and violence. The intolerance displayed is exactly the sort of intolerance shown by toddlers as they throw the toys out of the cot. They like to think it revolutionary; it is just revolting.
Marx remains the leading influencer, albeit his thinking has passed its use-by date. Baby Karl Marx (hard to imagine such a creature) came into this world over 200 years ago (May 5, 1818 – the year Mary Shelley published Frankenstein). Marx died at age 65 (March 14, 1883).
Clearly, Marx didn’t formulate the Communist Manifesto in a vacuum. He perceived a need to change the world around him. And he wasn’t the only one. It was published when he was 30, in 1848, a year full of upheavals: a series of republican revolts against European monarchies, beginning in Sicily and spreading to France, Germany, Italy, Poland and the Kingdom of Hungary (against the Austrian empire). They all ended in failure and repression, to be followed by widespread disillusionment among the left. It was indeed a world that needed to change, a world structured on class and privilege.
Indeed, life for most European people in the 19th century of Karl Marx was awful. For example, at least 80% of the population in England was working class. Hard work, low pay, lack of security and nothing like a fair go … this was the context in which the socialist/communist ideas were forged. No welfare safety net, no health insurance, no childcare subsidy, no air-con, no fridge, no TV, no pension plan, no holidays in Spain…. He lived in the age of Charles Dickens.
That political imperative was framed in the 19th century, when the socio-political environment of Karl Marx was vastly different. Indeed, the world did change. Workers are no longer the chained victims of capitalist oppression …. But victims there must be, or Marxism withers. So victimhood is re-introduced, re-defined, expanded, inclusive even … A Zombie philosophy. And all around, the new anti-history teachings of a cohort intent on changing society as if it were the 1800s.
In Britain, writes d’Abrera, “it remains entirely possible for a child to leave school without ever hearing of Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo, or Gallipoli, which were once staple reference points in the teaching of British history, but which have been quietly dropped from the curriculum. Admittedly, historical ignorance is nothing new. A 2010 poll found that one in twenty children believed Horatio Nelson was a French footballer.”