Normally, I would not be caught dead writing about, let alone reviewing, a book by a murderous and racist parasite such as Prince Harry, but something caught my attention. It was not anything written in the book but in a tweet from Harry’s ghostwriter.
The tweet quoted our royal genius saying, “Whatever the
cause, my memory is my memory…. There is just as much truth in what I remember
and how I remember it as in so-called objective facts.” The quote would not
have looked out of place in George Orwell’s 1984 or Harry’s friend Donald
Trump.
But as John Adams, the second US President, once said in 1770,
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations,
or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and
evidence.”[1]
The ghostwriter and editor did not oppose this garbage is extraordinary.
As one writer said, “This crime is compounded if
ghostwriters are complicit and editors are lazy or amoral. Every memoir should
be put through a fact-check in the interest of credibility, not only so that
readers are not misled but also that the other people and events featured in it
are given a fair deal. Spare has not been fair, and there
could be several reasons why it remains riddled with inaccuracies, putting a
question mark on the gamut of his claims and complaints.”
When it comes to making things up as he goes along Prince
Harry is an amateur. Certainly, the most damaging attack on the concept of
historical truth has come from what I term the post-modernist school of
historiography. It would not be an understatement to say that post-modernist
historians have been extremely hostile in academia to the concept of historical
truth. The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of post-modernism as
the dominant force in university life. This philosophical and historical
outlook has replaced what passed for Marxism inside universities all over the world.
The chief characteristic of the post-modernists is the use
of debatable philosophy, to blur over the difference between truth and lies,
and in doing so, commit a falsification of history. The practice of lying about
history has been taken to a new level by the various schools of post-modernism.
It would not be an overstatement to say that the impact of this school of
history has been as David North put it "nothing short of
catastrophic".
There is, of course, a connection between the falsification
of history and the attack on the struggle for objective truth. One of the most
outlandish post-modernist thinkers and an opponent of objective truth is the
German Professor Jorg Baberowski b (1961)[7]. A student of Michel Foucault,
Baberowski describes his method of work in his book (The Meaning of History)
"In reality, the historian has nothing to do with the
past but only with its interpretation. He cannot separate what he calls reality
from the utterances of people who lived in the past, for there exists no
reality apart from the consciousness that produces it. We must liberate
ourselves from the conception that we can understand, through the
reconstruction of events transmitted to us through documents, what the Russian
Revolution was. There is no reality without its representation. To be a
historian means to use the words of Roger Chartier to examine the realm of
representations".
Accepting this premise that truth is not objective but
relative sets a very disturbing precedent. Aside from the moral and
intellectual damage this may do to the individual historian, this kind of false
philosophy will poison the well that future young historians and people
interested in history have to drink out of.
The logic of this philosophy of history is that truth is
whatever goes on in someone's head. Smoking is good for you, and hard drugs are
not dangerous. Hitler is misunderstood and was a good guy. No person who wants
to function and live effectively cannot do without some sense of truth's
objective correspondence to reality. I believe that Objective truth is possible
but not without a struggle. The first stage in that struggle is telling the
truth about history.
