SMOKERS’ CORNER: YEAR ZERO IDEOLOGY

There is a perception about young supporters of Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) that their knowledge of political history is extremely weak. That’s why, to them, everything done by or to their leader is a ‘first’, even though the country’s history is full of the same things done by, and to, many other Pakistani politicians.

I was in the US last November and, in my discussions there with dozens of young Indian-Americans — most of whom tried to convince me that Modi was the best thing that had ever happened to India — I noticed a similar tendency in them. The Hungarian sociologist Frank Furedi refers to this tendency as the product of “Year Zero Ideology” (YZI). 

Furedi describes YZI as an outlook that seeks a radical break from the past. It is derived from the ‘Year Zero’ evocations of revolutionary movements that (after coming to power) wanted to start anew by erasing all ‘evil’ memories and structures of the past. They wanted to divorce history and marry a new epoch. 

Some examples in this regard include the American Revolution (1776), the French Revolution (1789), the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia (1975). 

In an age where historical narratives are increasingly weaponised and distorted to serve contemporary agendas, are we erasing the past instead of learning from it?

To Furedi, the ZYI in these cases — although often brutal in its application — at least came with (albeit Utopian) plans for a “better future.” In his book War Against The Past, Furedi differentiates this strand of ZYI with its more contemporary strand. The latter strand, he laments, comes with no plans whatsoever, except to attack the past to enforce the “moral superiority of the present”, through which it can influence present-day affairs. 

According to Furedi, contemporary YZI is only interested in extracting bleak episodes from history to bolster narratives of victimhood of one community or the other. This alone is its plan. This leads to a highly politicised reading of history and the possibility of history’s complete erasure.

Bringing down physical historical structures which ‘offend’ contemporary values; suppressing memories of a past that don’t fit certain ideological frameworks; renaming streets or cities whose historical names remind one of a subjugated past etc — all this is not really about starting anew. It is about erasing parts of history one is uncomfortable with.

Nation-states deal with this by modifying/ altering/ distorting certain portions of their respective histories. Indeed, some have even tried to create their Year Zeroes, but they all did this with a plan in mind, no matter how fancy, utopian or ambitious. There are serious issues in this that have produced problematic outcomes. Yet, alarmingly, these are still not as troubling as the contemporary strands of YZI.

Contemporary YZI is not a state project, unless, for example, one is talking about India, where a Hindu nationalist government is trying to impose a Year Zero scenario from which, apparently, will begin a pure “Hindu state” inspired by a largely imagined Hindu past, but one which will have no memory of Muslim rule in the region. 

The Pakistani state tried to do the same when it lost its eastern wing in a civil war in 1971. It tried to create a Year Zero scenario from where it looked to enact an ‘Islamic republic’ whose history was uprooted from South Asia and brazenly transported to Arabia. Even the more modern memory of a pre-1971 Pakistan was systematically erased.

YZI today is largely a project of academics who are influencing the creation of (postmodern) liberal, left-wing and right-wing narratives. History is being used to extract episodes of violence, tyranny and repression from it, as if this is all history is ever about. What’s more, to do this, events and people who lived dozens, hundreds, even thousands of years ago, are being decontextualised from their eras and put in contemporary contexts, as if they were exposed to values similar to the ones held by societies today.  

The bleak episodes extracted from history are being used to bolster ideologically driven agendas. This is happening on the left as well as on the right. So, what’s the plan? To produce cliques/tribes of baby fascists, tiny communists and little liberals by feeding the youth selective bits of history, and treating the other bits as irrelevant? There is no plan. 

Contemporary YZI leads to “presentism” which, according to the American historian David Hackett Fischer, means the study and writing of history in a way that uses the past to validate present-day political beliefs. So Year Zero, in the context of contemporary YZI, gets frozen in the present. Battles are raging between all sides as they continue to weaponise certain historical events to one-up their equally frozen opponents — not really to build a case for a better future, but to win present battles. 

According to Furedi, the line between the present and the past has blurred, as the present continues to understand the past in the context of the present. This is a case of value-anachronism or the projection and placing of a present-day value in a past in which it was never present. 

Slavery was entirely acceptable in the distant past, so can one judge an ancient slave-owner of being a monster? Can one call those who died during the bubonic plague in mediaeval times fools for believing that it was caused by rats that materialised out of thin air in garbage dumps? 

It would be presentism’s arrogance to call them that. But this arrogance forgets that, in its own time, thousands of smarter, much more educated men and women refused to get a simple shot of the Covid-19 vaccine because they believed it contained nano-computer chips. Every epoch of history needs to be studied in the political, cultural, social and economic context that it existed in. 

History is perhaps the greatest of teachers. One may fear it or feel uncomfortable by it, but will always manage to learn something from it. Distorting it, demonising it or erasing it are all reactionary acts born from fear or arrogance. It is always there. 

In 1945, the Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s statues were smashed, posters of him set on fire, and his executed body hung upside down in Milan. A little over 80 years later, a party rooted in his legacy has come to power. 

History doesn’t begin from the bits one likes or dislikes. No lessons can be learned from it if its study is selective, done through a ‘presentist’ bias or, worse, erased. Because when it returns in any form, as it often does, those who thought it was irrelevant will have no knowledge of how to deal with it.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 16th, 2025