Thread by @jonkay

Interesting @nytimes piece by @Max_Fisher. Russia, Hungary, China etc are sanitizing their national histories, & persecuting those who mention the bad parts. But in Canada/US, it's the opposite: Elites insist our history is nothing but racism & genocide…
nytimes.com/2022/01/05/wor…

... both narratives are profoundly ahistorical (including spin-off myths that present Indigenous societies as eco-feminist collectives populated by pacifistic barb-a-loots & ewoks). Yet some centrifugal force is pushing everyone to embrace one fantasy or the other. Very bizarre

in both cases, history acts as an ersatz creation myth for a post-religious world—but in radically different ways. In Canada, Indigenous societies were/are Eden, and "settlers" have Original Sin. Indigenous peoples therefore become prophet figures who guide us back to Eden ...

In the nationalist variant, the whole *nation* was once Eden, and they can return to it by channelling some (imagined) set of inherent and sacred national virtues—much as some Muslims and orthodox Jews seek to recreate the manners & virtues ascribed to ancient times....

this helps explain why, in Canada, conversations about history now resemble those once surrounding religion in, say, pre-quiet-revolution-Quebec. and why progressives push Indigenous pedagogy that's often explicitly creationst. creating a new theology isn't a bug. it's a feature

the US is an interesting case because it has people on both sides creating their fantasy religious histories: conservatives who idolize the founding fathers versus NYTimes/1619/Kendi progressive apocalypticists…

But in Canada, we have no foundational national historical cult. so progressives have a monopoly on adapting our history to their original-sin narrative. This is why cbc and high-concept literary media are wall-to-wall turgid sermonizing: no checks/balances on the new theology

It also explains why this swept over activism, govt, media so quickly, with all the machinery of religious faith (excommunication, forbidden words etc): it's 18th-c great-awakening revivalism. those hungriest for it are elites who discarded their (real) religious faith long ago