AHC: Radical political or religious faction persecutes Historians, Archeologists, and Paleontologists, charges them with the sin of Necromancy

[baltur2]

Your challenge is to make it so that a political or religious faction arises in the 19th or 20th century, which considers people who deal with the past, like Historians, Paleontologists, and Archeologists Necromancers because they symbolically summon the dead spirits of the past to obtain knowledge, instead of letting the dead rest.

In a similar vein, writers of historical fiction are also charged with this sin, because for example if they write a fictional novel about Ancient Rome, they summon Julius Caesar back from the dead for entertainment according to this ideology.

How could something like this religious, political, and social idea come to be?

 

[Arkenfolm]

Sounds like the product of a deranged regime akin to Pol Pot, although OTL Pol Pot quite appreciated the Angkor era and consciously evoked it in his propaganda.

Italian Futurists like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti also expressed hostile views on the past, although never in religious terms like that. Perhaps in a world where futurism is a prominent ideology some offshoot (perhaps in Asia or Africa akin to the local communist ideologies there) reincorporates enough religious aspects to justify such persecution in the name of letting ancestors sleep so those currently alive can move society into a glorious future.

 

[overoceans]

An ideology obsessed with sniffing out literal Necromancy would have to be one deeply rooted in the religious views of the past, and so unlikely to be one with an a priori hatred of anyone who studies the past.

I concur with metalinvader that this would more likely be some sort of hypermodernist movement. More Brave New World than The Handmaids Tale.

 

[Alexander the Average]

Alternatively you could have a hyper millenarian religious cult involved. One who views the end times as utterly immanent and concerns about the past not only an irrelevance but an obstacle in the way of carrying out the necessary work required of the true believers.

 

[overoceans]

Alternatively you could have a hyper millenarian religious cult involved. One who views the end times as utterly immanent and concerns about the past not only an irrelevance but an obstacle in the way of carrying out the necessary work required of the true believers.

I'm still kind of hard pressed to imagine a RELIGIOUS millenarian cult that would totally eschew quoting old scripture and stuff. They almost always love drawing comparisons between their current era and the days of Noah, Sodom and Gomorrah etc.

Maybe a Scientology-type group, preaching some newfangled, sui generis worldview with no reference to the past, but containing a doomsday eschatology?

 

[Ramontxo]

Liked the premise but I am tempted to write something like be careful ant dont give ideas to the stupid...

 

[Anarcho-Occultist]

I could see some sort of New Age-type cult that adopts the belief that the world was born with their founder/prophet and all that is supposed to have come before is a hoax. Not quite the same as the initial premise but I could see this sect target the people mentioned for attacks on the faith.

 

[overoceans]

I could see some sort of New Age-type cult that adopts the belief that the world was born with their founder/prophet and all that is supposed to have come before is a hoax. Not quite the same as the initial premise but I could see this sect target the people mentioned for attacks on the faith.

Hm, intetesting. Not sure I've ever heard of a group like that before, either in fiction or real-life, but it would not be an implausible thing to exist.

And it would tie in with the whole idea of cults turning people against their families, because you'd have older relatives telling kids stuff like "No, no, honey, I am older than your guru, and I remember the world before he was born", and the cult would try to stop their members from believing that.

It would probably be difficult, though, for such a movement to form government, since politicians often justify their policies according to what took place in the past, especially in regards to foreign policy, eg. We have to reclaim the territory that was stolen from us a hundred years ago.

The ruling ideology would probably be something like "THEY want you to read 'history' so you'll think all the horror and injustice they've brought into this world has been going on forever, but that's just a lie. There is no reason we should follow the supposed precedent of this imaginary 'past'."

 

[overoceans]

Another idea...

You could have a movement which, while affirming that the past exists and that it's okay to study it, objects to things like historical anachronism clubs, civil-war reenactment, period costume parties etc, as being a form of ancestor worship designed to get the spirits of the dead to posess the bodies of the participants.

They could have schisms over stuff like whether it's okay for professional actors to play historical figures etc.

 

[Aisha Clan-Clan]

The US goes communist. the USSR had a ton of past-hatred and well, going by how americans take things to extreme this seems pretty plausible. It wouldn't be a permanent feature but for the equivelant of the regime's lenin/stalin era or mao era? Yeah, a probable feature of it.