It’s sad to have to post this on my blog about the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s – but I’ve noticed a sharp increase in nostalgia and history posts on social media clearly designed to fuel racism through a kind of toxic nostalgia. For example, show old film footage of London in 1985 and this is a trigger for an avalanche of racist nonsense in the comments. Normally along the lines: “before the migrants”, “when we were all English”, “things gone to pot now”, etc, etc.
Some of the comments clearly come from people who were either not alive at the time or, I suspect, are posting from troll and bot factories in Russia and the United States. I even saw one nostalgia post on London purporting to be the city in the 1980s when I could clearly see it was old footage of Budapest!!!
One thing I advise you to do on sites like TikTok is check the profile of those commenting. Because so often they literally have zero followers, or a very small number. And their previous posts will be very suspect – sometimes even just pornography. I get very suspicious about accounts with Union Jacks and names like ‘John Smith’ because that smells to me like Russian bot.
Toxic nostalgia just gets things wrong
The posts are also often just plain wrong – film claiming to be from the 1970s is either the 1950s or 1990s – doesn’t take long to work that out. And there is, of course, zero context. So, you get film of Trafalgar Square looking amazingly empty when it was actually filmed, back then, at the crack of dawn.
I think it’s great to be aware of our history and this blog is very much about opening up a discussion and memory sharing regarding the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was an incredibly vibrant and amazing time to be alive. The politics were tempestuous. The music was stunning. And – despite everything – we were broadly optimistic. I genuinely think there’s a lot that people today can learn from those decades – especially the 1970s….my main obsession.
Nostalgia and racism should not be mixed
But please – don’t let the bigots weaponise our history. I grew up in London in the late 70s and remember the bigots were out in force back then ‘bashing’ people on the grounds of their race or sexuality. That I do not miss. In 1978, I was on the Anti-Nazi League demo, headlined by The Clash. We hated prejudice then and I still hate it now. So, enough of this misuse of nostalgia by creeps on social media trying to stir up division and polarisation. They can take a running jump.
