Avi Penhollow
Author’s Note:
This essay was written in a time when the past itself was under siege — when struggles over memory, history, and identity unfolded not only in textbooks, but in legislatures, classrooms, and streets. The Ancient History of Yesterday reflects on the forces that seek to bury living wounds beneath the myths of inevitability, and on the enduring necessity of memory as an act of justice.
It was composed amid renewed efforts to erase critical histories and enforce master narratives across public life. The Ancient History of Yesterday explores how injustice survives not only through power, but through the control of memory — and how remembering remains an act of resistance.
The Past That Refuses to Die
There is a strange alchemy at work in the modern imagination: yesterday becomes ancient history almost before it can settle into memory. The traumas that have shaped nations — slavery, colonization, cultural erasure — are treated not as living forces with lasting consequences, but as distant artifacts, relics of a time so far removed from the present that they no longer demand serious reckoning.
This transmutation is not accidental. It is a political act, carefully cultivated. Across the United States and much of the world, deliberate efforts are underway to erase critical histories, to render the narratives of the oppressed as obsolete, inconvenient fossils, while elevating the triumphs of dominant groups as timeless and sacred. Some histories are preserved with reverence; others are buried under the weight of strategic forgetfulness.
When contemporary movements urge a society to “move on” from the realities of chattel slavery, Indigenous genocide, or the long struggle for civil rights, they are not simply asking for historical perspective — they are demanding a kind of collective amnesia. They frame conquest as the normal rhythm of civilization, suffering as the inevitable byproduct of progress, injustice as an ancient wrong now too distant to repair.
Yet this selective memory reveals itself in who is asked to forget and who is allowed to remember. The struggles and losses of marginalized peoples are hastily entombed, while the victories of empire and nationhood are endlessly memorialized. The past, it turns out, is not ancient when it flatters power. It is only ancient when it accuses.
To speak of yesterday as ancient history is not simply to misplace the past. It is to participate in a political project — one that seeks not only to obscure responsibility, but to foreclose the possibility of justice. The past is not dead. It is not even past. It breathes through laws, institutions, borders, and wounds still open.
And until those wounds are acknowledged and healed, yesterday will never be truly ancient history. It will be the living evidence of what power wants so desperately to forget.
The Weaponization of Time
The most effective way to strip injustice of its moral urgency is to reframe it as ancient.
By pushing the memory of harm into the far reaches of historical imagination, the present can be made to seem innocent, unburdened, and inevitable. Time itself becomes a tool of power, not a neutral passage but a crafted story about when — and whether — accountability is appropriate.
We are told that slavery ended long ago, as if centuries of systemic extraction and brutality could be cordoned off cleanly at emancipation. We are told that Indigenous dispossession belongs to a romanticized frontier past, even as its material consequences persist in land rights, poverty, and erasure. We are told that colonialism is a finished chapter, despite the living economic and political structures that still flow from it.
This is not merely a matter of faulty memory or historical ignorance. It is a political tactic: to distance suffering from its consequences, to recast systemic violence as a closed book rather than an open ledger. It demands that those still bearing the burdens of conquest accept their condition as natural, unchangeable, and beyond redress.
In this way, the passage of time is weaponized not to heal, but to hide. The longer the injustice persists, the easier it becomes for power to demand that memory surrender to myth — that injustice fades into abstraction — that history itself is too old, too complicated, too remote to matter.
But there is nothing ancient about an open wound. And no number of years can alchemize injustice into absolution.
The Myth of Inevitable Conquest
Another powerful tool in the erasure of injustice is the naturalization of conquest itself.
Those who benefit from past violence often insist that domination is simply the way of the world — a natural, inevitable pattern of human history. Nations rise and fall, peoples are conquered and displaced, cultures vanish. It is presented not as a tragedy demanding repair, but as the ordinary background noise of civilization.
This story of conquest as normality serves a critical function. It allows the beneficiaries of injustice to evade responsibility by reframing suffering as mere inevitability. If conquest is universal, then no particular conquest need be judged too harshly. If all societies have fallen victim or risen to power by force at some point, then the moral urgency of any one act of dispossession evaporates.
Such arguments do not emerge equally across all histories. The normalization of conquest is selectively deployed, most often against those whose wounds remain most visible. When Indigenous nations demand land back, when descendants of enslaved peoples demand reparations, when colonized populations seek acknowledgment and repair, they are told that history is a graveyard — that all peoples suffer, that loss is simply the price of time. They are asked to accept the theft of their ancestors as an unremarkable fact of life.
But conquest is not an abstract process. It is a material reality, a scar cut into land, law, body, and memory. It leaves systems of advantage and disadvantage still thriving today. To normalize conquest is to normalize these systems — to treat injustice not just as ancient, but as natural.
There is nothing natural about stolen lives and stolen futures. The repetition of conquest across history does not excuse it. It only multiplies its debts.
The Seduction of Selective Amnesia
The insistence that the past must be forgotten is never applied equally.
Not all histories are declared ancient, and not all memories are asked to disappear. The demand for forgetting falls disproportionately upon those whose histories accuse the present, not those whose histories glorify it.
The foundational myths of nationhood — conquest framed as discovery, revolution framed as destiny — are carefully preserved, taught, and celebrated. National holidays, monuments, and school curricula enshrine these narratives, ensuring they live vividly in the public imagination. Reverence for the “founders,” for military victories, for imperial expansions is protected as patriotism, loyalty, even identity itself.
Yet when marginalized peoples speak of stolen land, stolen labor, stolen lives — when they insist that history is not over, that its consequences persist — they are told to move on. Their histories are framed as grievances, their memory as divisiveness, their claims as dangerous nostalgia.
Selective amnesia is not the forgetting of all history; it is the forgetting of certain histories. It preserves the memory of glory while erasing the memory of suffering. It sanctifies conquest while silencing its victims. It allows a society to imagine itself innocent, even as it walks through the architecture of injustice every day.
And the erasure does not simply vanish the past. It distorts the future. Emerging identities — or reemerging ones — must struggle to form themselves against a landscape deliberately stripped of memory. In a world that demands forgetting, even the act of remembering becomes an act of defiance.
Memory itself becomes an arena of power. And the question is never simply what we remember, but whose memory we are permitted to honor — and whose we are ordered to abandon.
Whataboutism and Historical Deflection
When forgetting fails, deflection begins.
Faced with calls to confront living injustices rooted in historical violence, defenders of the dominant narrative often resort to a familiar tactic: historical relativism. Rather than deny the harm outright, they seek to dissolve it in an ocean of human suffering.
“Every civilization has practiced conquest.”
“Every people have known slavery.”
“Every nation has blood on its hands.”
These refrains are not designed to deepen historical understanding. They are meant to paralyze moral clarity. By turning attention to the ubiquity of suffering, they erase the specificity of responsibility. Harm becomes too common to matter, too universal to address, too ancient to amend.
Whataboutism treats injustice as a closed ledger simply because it is widespread. It suggests that because others have suffered elsewhere or before, no one can legitimately seek redress now. It collapses distinct histories into a blur of inevitability, blunting the force of any one people’s claim to justice.
But history does not absolve itself. The existence of many wounds does not diminish the reality of each wound. The repetition of violence across centuries is not an argument against justice — it is an argument for it.
To point toward the ruins of past empires is not a defense of the structures that persist today. It is a distraction, designed to shield power from the demands of memory, accountability, and repair.
Yesterday Is Not Ancient History
The past does not slip quietly into the ground.
It echoes through laws, landscapes, wealth, poverty, opportunity, and exclusion. It moves beneath the surface of everyday life, shaping what is possible, who is visible, and what is forgotten.
To declare yesterday as ancient history is not an act of reflection — it is an act of power. It demands forgetting where memory would demand justice. It normalizes conquest where resistance would demand repair. It weaponizes time itself, folding living wounds into the cold abstraction of distant epochs.
But yesterday is not ancient.
Its consequences live in the bones of cities, in the patterns of belonging and exclusion, in the fault lines running beneath modern nations.
The call to remember is not a sentimental attachment to grievance. It is a refusal to allow injustice to be buried under the pretense of inevitability.
Justice begins with memory.
It begins by refusing the comfort of selective amnesia, by rejecting the myth that conquest erases its own debts, by challenging the lie that suffering is too old to matter.
Until the structures built by injustice are dismantled — until the burdens of conquest are no longer borne by the conquered — yesterday will not be ancient history.
It will be the living evidence of what memory can redeem — or what forgetting will repeat.