Laudator Temporis Acti

Simon Heffer, "George Orwell's chilling prediction has come true – it's time to make a stand," Telegraph (February 22, 2023):

What is it about the past that some young people find unbearable? After all, no one is expecting them to live through it. Indeed, some of us who did find the present infinitely worse.

[....]

We have arrived at our own endless present, or Year Zero, where the record, historical and otherwise, is readily falsified. Its rules are designed to prevent what that arrogant and self-regarding minority who feel obliged to police and alter the thoughts of the rest of us consider the ultimate crime: giving offence. Most of us have spent our lives encountering things that could, if we wallowed in self-regard, offend us deeply. We were trained to ignore them and get on with life. Now, suddenly, we cannot be trusted to do that.

Therefore books, art, films and television programmes must be censored or suppressed, statues taken down as though the lives they commemorate never happened, streets and buildings renamed to eradicate thought criminals. Like Pol Pot, that minority feels a moral duty to erase the past to attain Year Zero. Sadly for us, their main qualifications are an overbearing self-righteousness, a profound ignorance of history and a deep misunderstanding of the idea of liberty that few of us share.