Thread by @medievalguy

Enormously excited about my TV debut tonight on #Contact for @Discovery (check your listings!).

And yeah I want to talk about it a LOT. But…

I need to take this moment to get something off my chest about mass murder and the weaponizing of history.

THREAD 1/x

In the past days, white supremacists have murdered dozens of people. Among the texts that inspired this violence is the racist manifesto “Might Is Right or The Survival of the Fittest,” published in 1896 under the pseudonym “Ragnar Redbeard.” 2/x

The shooter at the Gilroy Garlic Festival mentioned the book on Instagram days before opening fire on the crowd, murdering three people and wounding many more. It is frequently cited in the alt-right circles through which other shooters have moved. 3/x

Over the past 120 years, this book and others like it have advanced misguided ideas of history as a narrative of the white “West” triumphantly toppling all other civilizations that preceded it with sheer power. 4/x

There is no question that racist terrorists are thus using these books to weaponize history, and historians have a responsibility to respond in turn to the violent, deadly challenges these false histories create. 5/x

At its core, “Might Is Right” is a racist and anti-Semitic rant that argues that purging “impurities” will result in a more perfect social order. It advocates an extreme kind of Social Darwinism by imploring readers to uphold master-slave dynamics over Christian morals. 6/x

It venerates strength over weakness, men over women and authority over democracy. The text makes clear that so-called “Vigorous Northern peoples” (that is, white Europeans) should have power over everybody else. 7/x

Might makes its own right, Redbeard argues, because the only arbiter of action is power. 8/x

The book aimed to inspire social and political upheaval in accordance with Redbeard’s philosophical views. Like most manifestos, it found a welcome audience among like-minded segments of society — it has been republished and translated dozens of times. 9/x

And more than a century later it remains highly pervasive on the far right, persistent and enduring because Redbeard presented his ideas as an intellectual argument rooted in history. 10/x

This begins with his pseudonym, harkening back to the days of Vikings, and it continues in the text, which is consistently focused on the past. 11/x

“Human rights and wrongs are not determined by Justice, but by Might,” he writes. “Disguise it as you may, the naked sword is still king-maker and king-breaker, as of yore.” 12/x

Not surprisingly, a critical reading of “Might Is Right” reveals that the author didn’t study history or know much beyond the popular and simplistic view of “Western Civilization.” 13/x

His text assumes that “history” advances like this: The Greeks were replaced by the Romans, then the Romans by the Germanic Europeans in the triumphant march of the West. 14/x

While ideas about the superiority of the West were then mainstream, the narrative advanced in “Might is Right” is ultimately not supported by evidence. And so, intellectuals quickly challenged the history and the racist assumptions embedded within this work. 15/x

T.H. White, in his classic fantasy novel about King Arthur, “The Once and Future King,” saw fit to make Redbeard’s theory of history and humanity a constant foil to his hero. 16/x

Though published in 1958, “The Once and Future King” spliced together works largely written in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a time when authoritarian, might-makes-right governments were rushing headlong into World War II. 17/x

Grappling with questions about the cause of human conflict, White seemed to address Redbeard’s theory head on, when a villain tries to trick Arthur by espousing the idea of “might is right” and arguing that “love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution.” 18/x

White’s Arthur wisely rejects the notion completely.

Despite such intellectual efforts to cast it aside, Redbeard’s book remained extremely popular and was re-printed and translated dozens of times over the years. 19/x

Its pages anticipated the horrors that emerged when his pseudo-naturalist principles became nationalist principles with state power put to use behind them. 20/x

The 20th century saw the bloody results of “survival of the fittest” taken to its logical conclusion, through the mechanized and chemicalized horrors of World War I and then the unbridled terrors of World War II. 21/x

And the twisted history espoused by Redbeard — that the physical manifestation of power is the only arbiter of action, and that the white European man is that manifestation’s apotheosis — is very much alive and well today. 22/x

Young men Young white men in America have taken the “survival of the fittest” doctrine into a new, ugly place, firing weapons of war into families at festivals and malls. 23/x

Historians need to be more vocal than ever in condemning not just Redbeard’s work, but also the dangerous historical narrative at its root. This week’s horrors demand that we interrogate the ways that our discipline and work perpetuates violent ideas. 24/x

We neglect doing so at our own peril, because all around us are different publics battling about history, and whether might makes right. 25/x

The most horrifying evils of the twentieth century proliferated in ignorance, or worse, in crafted, weaponized histories. Nazis imagined themselves Nordic heroes. The British National Party sends its children to Camp Excalibur. 26/x

The Gilroy Garlic festival shooter celebrates Redbeard on his Instagram before turning his rifle on a crowd. 27/x

At the end of White’s “The Once and Future King,” King Arthur reflects on a life spent fighting philosophies like Redbeard’s. Despite the battle wounds, he believes that hope lies in persuading people to learn new lessons of reason. 28/x

Today, ours is an age of racists reciting lies while loading their guns. 29/x

If we are to have any hope of changing this culture, we must start with calling out the false and dangerous myths of history — not just in monstrosities like “Might Is Right,” but wherever we find them woven into the fabric of our society. 30/END