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The Death of Official History
The rise of the Internet and social media and “rage-bait” videos means that the old days of Mass Media and historians like Niall Ferguson are facing what we might call The Autumn of the Mass Media Ages.
And there is no more Established Truth than the evil of Adolf Hitler, the heroism of Winston Churchill, the horror of the Holocaust, and the evil of the Nazi Salute.
And there is nothing worse than the anti-semitic revisionism of Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, and Candace Owens. That is what Niall and co-writer John-Clark Levin tell us in “The Death of History.”
Don’t get me wrong. Hitler was a monster; Churchill was a hero; the Holocaust is right up there with Soviet famines and purges and Maoist famines and cultural revolutions. Nothing comes close to the Nazi Salute, except perhaps the Communist Fist.
But I think it has been a strategic mistake for our ruling class to moralize World War II as the fight to save the world, and don’t you dare disagree if you know what is good for you.
Particularly after our rulers have come up with the fake crisis of climate change as another fight to save the world.
I think it was overkill to make The Holocaust into the worst thing ever, and then to punish people like David Irving that come up with alternative histories. The official toll is 6 million Jews. Whatabout the 20 million Russians, the 7 million Germans that died in WWII. Did you know that 14 to 20 million Chinese died in WWII?
I’ve read the official histories. I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer as a teenager and had my review published in the school magazine. I’ve read Churchill’s The Second World War. I went to the Houses of Parliament on my way to work and passed by Churchill’s bier as he lay in state in Westminster Hall after his death in 1965.
By the way, total deaths for the UK in WWII was 0.4 million. Total deaths for the US in WWII was 0.4 million. Read all about it at Wikipedia. Did you know it is estimated that 2 million German women were raped by the Red Army in 1945. NPR says so.
I wonder how much of all that we have been told is true. Perhaps we’ll never know.
I understand the concern of Niall Ferguson. He experienced the Age of Mass Media as a time when credentialed historians sifted through the documents and told us the truth. Now we have entered an age when everyone is chiming in, conscious that the wilder the narrative the better it sells.
But in the current Age of the Internet and AI, things are going to be different than in the Age of Mass Media. Maybe it will be a totally chaotic free for all. Or maybe, as with the market system, we will see new narratives gradually get established from the jousting narratives of all the players, big and small, qualified and unqualified. Maybe it will develop like the price system, settling down on a more-or-less agreed narrative after everyone has had a chance to publish their version. What I call the age of many-to-many communication.
Or maybe the competing narratives will cause chaos and riots in the streets and revolution.
| Wed, 15 Jul 2026 22:06:14 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe — external or internal enemy — in the present emergency.
Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger. — Eisenhower
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Consequences of Jordan B. Peterson
