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I wonder about this. Unlike the 70s or any time before the 21st century, the dialogue and commentary around this is largely done on the internet, which is very easily accessible. Memory holing something that can be looked up with a single click of a hyperlink on your phone is harder than doing so for something you'd have to look up old newspapers or journals in a library.
Yet it certainly seems doable. Stuff like the Internet Archive can be attacked and taken down or perhaps captured, thus removing credible sources of past online publications. People could also fake past publications in a way to hid the real ones through obscurity. Those would require actual intentional effort, but the level of effort required will likely keep going down due to technological advancements. More than anything, human nature to be lazy and ambivalent about things that don't directly affect them in the moment seems likely to make it easy to make people forget.
I wonder how much people in the 20th century and before were saying "We're on the right side of history" as much as people have been in the past 15 years. Again, people saying that has never been as well recorded as it has now. It'd be interesting to see in the 22nd century and later some sort of study on all instances of people saying "this ideology is on the right side of history" and seeing how those ideologies ended up a century later.
Suppression of undesired facts is entirely possible without Minitrue-style erasure and rewriting. It can be done pretty much as effectively with but a single word:
"Ew."
If it's common knowledge that anyone who'd even begin to question the default narrative is Gross, Icky, and Super-Low-Status, then people won't listen to challengers no matter how much evidence they bring. (In fact, bringing more evidence just makes it worse, because that "proves what obsessed sickos they are.")
Not to put too fine a point on it, but isn't this is how "HBD" is handled? The awful IQ statistics are still out there, neither erased nor rewritten, but to even wonder if they might exist and show anything contrary to the default narrative is to be declared racist, deserving exile.
While this doesn't perfectly erase anything, it does ensure that any dissent on the matter is scoured out of polite society and limited to - well - thrice-banished communities like this one. Probably it's less risky to use sheer social force like this than to attempt an outright cover-up and risk being caught in the act.
I know this method works, at least for a time, because it worked on me. I did not look into HBD deliberately and I still have an aversion to looking in detail lest I be an "obsessed sicko." I can only wonder how many other things I avoid without realizing it.
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The persistency of the Internet is somewhat overrated to begin with. My goto example is usually this compilation of epidemiologists saying Covid is no big deal.
But aside from that, it's not a question of accessibility, it's a question of who cares. In the linked thread I gave an example of a similar episode in medicine, where scientists were selling the idea of solving personal and social issues with brain surgery. The academic papers are there, the newspaper articles are there, the bestselling books and Hollywood adaptations are there... it's all just collecting dust, all these people are long dead, nobody cares.
Without a constant drumbeat of how we must Never Forget, this will be the fate of any atrocity.
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Wouldn't the obvious stance be "we aren't the progressives of the past?" Residential schools have plenty of evidence towards their existence in Canada, and were certainly pushed by what would've been a progressive mindset back in the day.
I think by their very nature, conservatives are more tied to the past of their movement than progressives are. I don't think it'd be memory holed - it would simply be treated as "how awful that society did this - good thing we are making progress to change the horrors of the past"
Yup. There is some irony there considering how in vogue collective responsibility is right now for those with a progressive proclivity. Progressives in 20 years will feel no responsibility for a tired, irrelevant movement of yesteryear that, thankfully, didn't succeed. If it plays out that way. People's hearts were in the right place, after all. Until we grow enough time that we can well and truly consider the past as ignorant and backwards as any other.
It's not necessary to scrub the Internet Archive. Unless we get the really bad ending.
Let society make history. Irrelevant, old, and forgotten. The progressive drive and impulse maintains direct connection, but the cause of day in the future won't be directly related. Except maybe transhumanist stuff. It is not as if we can't go read Days of Rage today. Perhaps if conservatives take the cultural reins they can bring up the historical excesses of progressivism more frequently. There will be no introspection at scale and nobody should expect any-- and that is the good ending.
Learning from history is not a commoner's interest, but learned men are meant to know how we got where we are. We are all too great and unique and, for progressives, too sophisticated to repeat mistakes or learn from the inferior past.
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My rejoinder would be "you are making the same mistakes they did."
One problem is that when Progressives win they write the history to make it seem that the victory was inevitable. When they lose it just gets quietly ignored, and conservatives likewise get no credit for holding the line against them for the greater good.
Oh, sorry, I may have been unclear - I am not a progressive. My comment was simply a model of how I think they would respond in this circumstance.
I think your model is on point, I'm mostly just considering the point and seeing what seems like a solid 'rebuttal.'
My main point is that progressives are consistently convinced they're in the right at all times, and dismiss any arguments that might disprove that belief. So even after they've been 'proven' wrong, they don't have to admit it. So yeah "we aren't like those old progressives, we're smarter and we won't make the same mistakes" is an argument I can believe they'd make.
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The issue is that "we aren't the progressives of the past" is the stance of the progressives of today. So saying that doesn't escape one from repeating the mistakes of the past; it's how you repeat the mistakes of the past.
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