The Arc of History Bends Toward Thoughtcrime By Seth Barron
https://tomklingenstein.com/the-arc-of-history-bends-toward-thoughtcrime/
Before spilled blood had dried following the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel, advocates for the Palestinians had preemptively designated the anticipated Israeli response a genocide. Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro chimed in on October 10 with concern for “the genocide that has begun against the Palestinian people in Gaza.” On that same day, American consumer watchdog Ralph Nader posted that Israel’s “genocidal bombing attack on Gaza’s defenseless civilian population is underway. Once again.”
Innumerable voices have warned that future generations will look back at our silence with shame and disapproval. Bernie Sanders warns that “History will never forget that we enabled this atrocity.” Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis says that “future generations” will grapple with the blood debt we are accruing today. Irish rock band Kneecap explained that they support Palestine because they “just want to make sure we’re on the right side of history.”
Appeals to history as justification for heinous political action are nothing new. At his 1953 terrorism trial, Fidel Castro famously declared, “History will absolve me,” conveniently excusing every abuse he had committed and would continue to commit when he became leader of Cuba. The Left appeals to History as a kind of god, and anything done in its name is sanctified.
Here in America we are told constantly that we had better do such-and-such in order to remain on the “right side of history.” A few days after George Floyd died, the Des Moines chapter of Black Lives Matter erected a billboard asking, “Which side of history will you be on?” Minneapolis police chief Medaria Arradondo vowed not to repeat Derek Chauvin’s name, and averred that “history is being written now, and I’m determined to make sure we are on the right side of history.”
History will also frown at us for the weather. Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg is fond of this trope. In 2020 she asked the World Economic Forum at Davos, “I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing the climate chaos you knowingly brought upon them?”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went a step further, narrating an animated film called “A Message from the Future.” In the video, the AOC of the future speaks to us from a clean energy bullet train about how successfully the Green New Deal saved America. “By committing to universal rights like health care and meaningful work for all, we stopped being so scared of the future…and we found our shared purpose.”
With the Democrats out of power, the events of January 6, 2021, are no longer pushed front-and-center in the American consciousness. The 2024 election was, to a certain extent, a referendum on whether the riot at the Capitol was really an “insurrection” that put the Republic at risk — or whether the real threat to the Republic came from another source. But in the first three years after it happened, we were told repeatedly that the date would be seared upon the American consciousness forever. In 2025, then-president Biden fretted that “in time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”
It became a commonplace of op-eds to reference President Roosevelt’s description of the date of the Pearl Harbor attack as a “day of infamy” in regard to the Capitol protest. “January 6, 2021, will go down in history as another ‘day of infamy,’ along with December 7, 1941, September 11, 2001. … The fallout from this tragedy will reverberate for a long time,” wrote William Reinsch, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Citing the opinion of the future to compel action now is a clever ploy to spur the credulous into doing whatever you want them to do. Antizionist activists have spent the last 20 months screaming about a genocide that is getting worse and worse, and demanding action now lest we incur the scorn of future generations. Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh of Kneecap — who was charged with a terror offense for waving a proscribed Hezbollah flag at a concert — says he must act now because “I don’t want to be 80, 90 years of age and my grandkids asking me why did nobody do anything about the Palestinian genocide?”
History doesn’t always go the way we imagine. Five years on from the George Floyd riots, BLM is an embarrassment (to the extent it has not already been forgotten); despite Greta Thunberg’s ravings, the planet shows no signs of imminent collapse; and nobody who isn’t paid to cares much about the riot at the Capitol. There is every probability that in a few years people will look at the Gaza war and acknowledge that it wasn’t, in fact, a genocide.
It is a commonplace of the Left that history is written by the winners, while the losers — the poor, the conquered, women, and minorities — are entombed in silence. From this perspective, the job of the historian is to excavate these untold stories to vindicate the struggles of the vanquished. Equally important to the leftist creed is the belief that history — with its long arc toward justice — has a right side and a wrong side, and it is incumbent upon moral people to situate themselves now on the correct side.
Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring, and that counts for the opinions of unborn generations. We have at our disposal ancient traditions of moral and ethical guidance that can inform our behavior. It’s much wiser to consult the past than the future about the present.
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