The History We Make Today

After a discussion of Western bourgeois confidence in work, the present and the future, as well as Henry Ford’s disdain for history and tradition in favour of the present (‘the history we make today’), Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, p. 132) writes: 

Progress does not elevate or enoble [sic] history. ‘Progress’ is a declaration of belief that history is of no account and of the resolve to leave it out of account…

This is the point: ‘Progress’ stands not for any quality of history, but for the self-confidence of the present. The deepest, perhaps the sole meaning of progress is made up of two closely interrelated beliefs – that ‘time is on our side,’ and that we are the ones who ‘make things happen.’ The two beliefs live together and die together – and they go on living as long as the power to make things happen finds its daily corroboration in the deeds of people who hold them. As Alain Peyrefitte put it, ‘the only resource capable of transforming a desert in the land of Canaan is the confidence of the society members in each other, and the trust of all in the future they are going to share.’ All the rest which we may like to say or hear about the ‘essence’ of the idea of progress is an understandable, yet misleading and futile effort to ‘ontologize’ that feeling of trust and self-confidence.

When reading this, it strikes one immediately that it could only have been written before 2020; indeed, it is a forceful reminder that ‘2020’ constitutes a kind of historical watershed between an era when one could still debate whether a belief in ‘historical progress’ made any sense, and if not, what the reasons for this were (the direction in which Bauman takes this question in Liquid Modernity). From the present standpoint, ‘before 2020’ appears to have been, incredible as it may seem, a time of ‘innocence.’ 

Why ‘innocence?’ Surely no one, nor any event, could be deemed innocent after the Holocaust, when millions of people were deliberately, unforgivably, killed by the Nazi fascists? Yet, I would argue that, despite the indelible stain left by the horror of the Holocaust on the notion of ‘innocence,’ there is a different sense in which humanity retained some innocence until 2020.

In Hitler’s Germany the Nazis’ programme of wiping out millions of Jews, hidden from the view of outsiders as it was, happened mostly, if not exclusively, in gas chambers at concentration camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau. Admittedly, as we were informed when we visited Dachau, inmates who were herded into the gas chambers were not initially expecting to be executed, because the gas chambers were disguised as shower areas. The key word here is ‘disguised,’ insofar as it points forward towards a hidden genocide – in fact, democide – in the present, on a vastly bigger scale, which was initiated in 2020. 

The fact that the latter has been unfolding on a ‘vastly bigger scale’ does not minimise what the Nazis perpetrated against Jewish people, of course. Both of these events – the Holocaust as well as the present, still-unfolding democide – fall into the category of what is known in philosophy as the ‘terrible sublime,’ which means that the horror signified by these two events (and one could add Hiroshima and Nagasaki) was such that one cannot find an image which could adequately encompass the horror. It is, and remains, ineffable. 

So why talk about retaining a sense of innocence before 2020, then? Simply because the democide being perpetrated today is done with such stealth and deception, (and censorship) that most people are still unaware of its true nature. The key to the deception is that the organisations controlled by the neo-fascists do the exact opposite of what they stand for: the WHO is supposedly a global health organisation looking after the health interests of the world’s people (while covertly undermining it); the WEF is putatively a world economic organisation promoting the economic interests of the world’s people (but is actually a fanatical political organisation that works against the best interests of the majority of the world’s people), and the United Nations, one is led to believe, is the overarching organisation that is supposed to ensure that peace and prosperity will prevail in the world (while secretly being committed to depopulating the world). 

Furthermore, there is a prevailing innocence in the sense that most people simply don’t believe that others who ostensibly belong to the human race are capable of committing such an unrepresentable, inexpressible, atrocity. I have personally had several experiences of informing friends of the ‘depopulation programme’ (what a euphemism!) that is occurring at several levels, only for my well-meant information to be thrown back into my face with expressions such as ‘If this were true it would be in the media,’ ‘Who would do such a thing?’ ‘Are you out of your mind?’ and ‘Governments (or medical authorities) would never do that!’

Ergo, it is not really happening because the very idea is unbelievable, incomprehensible. More accurately, of course, they find it intolerable because of the cognitive dissonance it brings about. Again, I have cause to remind readers of the ancient Chinese thinker Sun Tzu’s emphasis on deception being the central principle of warfare. The neo-fascists we are up against today have evidently perfected the dubious art of deception.

Under such circumstances the very idea of progress seems absurd, of course, because, as Bauman points out, such a belief presupposes something (p. 132):

…we hurry into the future attracted and pulled by the hope of ‘our affairs to prosper,’ the sole ‘evidence’ to go by is the play of memory and imagination, and what links them or separates them is our self-confidence or its absence. To people confident of their power to change things, ‘progress’ is an axiom. To people who feel that things fall out of their hands, the idea of progress would not occur and would be laughable if heard.

Several things in this excerpt strike me as being important. To begin with – if, around the turn of the century, when Bauman published this book, one could still contrast the self-confidence of people who had reason to hope for a prosperous future, with those who felt that things were becoming less predictable (under conditions of ‘liquid modernity,’ where the very pace of change is such that things slip from one’s fingers), today one has to contend with a very different state of affairs. It is no longer merely a matter of economic changes that have brought about an unsustainable situation. 

Counterintuitive as it may seem, it is a matter of a coterie of people with unimaginable wealth and technological power that has implemented a programme that has been years, if not decades, in the making, aimed at destroying the vast majority of humans in a multi-pronged manner. Evidently these people do not lack confidence in their own (technological) capacity to bring about the changes they envisage. Do they think of this as progress? Probably not – ‘progress’ falls woefully short of what they think they are capable of achieving; I would imagine they rather regard it as a prodigious break with the past (think ‘fourth industrial revolution’), particularly as their self-image is one of beings with ‘god-like powers.’ 

Secondly, do we, the Resistance, find ourselves in the position of ‘people who feel that things fall out of their hands?’ If this were the case – and I don’t believe that it is – it would have nothing to do with the ‘liquid modernity’ that Bauman diagnosed twenty-five years ago, but with the difficulties we face when looking for avenues of effective resistance. After all, it is not easy to resist a cabal of totally unscrupulous psychopaths who have used their great financial wealth to bribe or threaten almost (but not quite) everyone (worldwide) in government, the judiciary, the media, education, the entertainment industry, and health services, to support their dastardly plot, or else…     

In the third place, however, Bauman alludes to ‘the sole “evidence” to go by’ as ‘the play of memory and imagination.’ While he was referring to ‘evidence’ supporting the likelihood of progress, or its contrary, today the creative tension between these two faculties can, and should, be enlisted to invigorate our efforts to put an end.  

It is impossible to overstate the importance of imagination in relation to critical thinking – without imagination, one cannot conjure up the possibility of an alternative world, nor the means for its actualisation. Albert Einstein famously remarked that imagination is more important than (existing) knowledge, which does not deprecate knowledge as such, but stresses the ability of imagination to expand and transform existing knowledge, whether in the sciences or regarding everyday approaches to recurrent problems.

Immanuel Kant, and before him, William Shakespeare, showed that, far from being antithetical to reason – as the common philosophical prejudice, which had existed for centuries, claimed – imagination is actually an essential part of it. Shakespeare did this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where the dramatic action reveals the need for the passion-filled lovers to ‘go through’ Oberon and Titania’s (and Puck’s) forest of fantasy and benign bewitchment, before being able to return to Athens (the symbol of reason) as enlightened people. Kant, in turn (in his Critique of Pure Reason), argued – against the philosophical tradition, in this way lighting a spark that kindled the Romantic Movement of the 19th century – that imagination was essential to the functioning of reason, insofar as, in its ‘productive’ as well as its ‘reproductive’ role(s), it constituted a world in which analytical and synthetic reason could operate.  

Tyrants and fascists know the promise and danger of imagination only too well; hence the book burnings that have occurred intermittently throughout history, and the way that literature and cinema have reminded us of this (think of Ray Bradbury and Francois Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451). Frances Farmer, at one time a promising actress, was lobotomised by destroying that part of her brain which is the seat of the imagination, when she was increasingly seen as a ‘difficult person’ who upset the applecart in Hollywood. 

In short: imagination is a threat to anyone – particularly the WEF today – who has reason (and there are plenty of reasons) for resisting their totalitarian plans in favour of a more humane (and human) dispensation. So, for example, the so-called BRICS countries have just announced that they are working towards the establishment of an independent BRICS financial system and currency – something that does not sit well with the New World Order. I am no economist or financial guru, but I would imagine that this would spike the guns of the WEF’s planned CBDC system, which is supposed to become a global system, with every one of us being a slave to their centrally controlled, programmable digital currencies. By imagining an alternative to this, the BRICS countries have scored a (provisional?) victory against the WEF.   

What does this digression on imagination have to do with the question, whether it still makes sense to believe in historical progress? In a word: everything. I doubt whether we shall ever be able to return to the optimistic days when Henry Ford declared his faith in ‘the history we make today’ (referred to earlier), when there was no malevolent, spectral force ensconced in Billionaires’ Row, assiduously planning the demise of the ‘useless eaters.’ We have, after all, lost our innocence. But we stand at a historical juncture where we can infuse this expression (‘the history we make today’) with new meaning.

‘The history we make today’ will determine whether we can defeat the forces of evil, and re-inaugurate a truly human society, the outlines of which have already been adumbrated in the work that members of the Resistance have done, and are still doing. From the heroic work of America’s Frontline Doctors, and the many individual medical doctors and nurses who have valiantly worked against the iatrocratic regime of the WHO, all the way down to local level, to the numerous individual thinkers and writers – too many to name here – who have, and are still, labouring tirelessly against the shadowy powers intent on destroying us, we are making history today.       

‘Progress’ in the traditional sense under these circumstances? Not likely. Today it seems more advisable to do our best to make history by imagining a position where humanity can start afresh, but with less innocence, after having brought the perpetrators of the most heinous crimes the world has ever seen to justice. But it will require single-minded dedication and courage on the part of members of the Resistance, including children (such as my 12-year-old granddaughter, who is right there, in the trenches, with her father and mother, and the rest of us).