No. 167 ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘The History Wars’.
Dear James,
History and politics are inseparable. Two weeks ago Boris told us all that it was, “time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions, about our culture and we stopped this general fight against self recrimination and wetness”. He seemed to be saying, we have to believe in ourselves, in the nationalistic nostalgic narrative of ‘Rule Britannia’. The latest furore about the non-singing of that song at the Proms is a case in point. It was a storm in teacup. History was being exaggerated to threaten “our culture” from the unnamed vandals set on destroying it. Boris is doing a Trump. Scare them in order to maintain his fairy tale version of our nation’s story. He has taken up arms to defend his version of our history.
Every nation has its historical narrative and all narratives are adjusted towards the political needs of current times. The vast majority of nations, like people, are almost universally programmed to forget the negative and to emphasise the positive. Unfortunately for many politicians there is a body of knowledge which might be called ‘academic history’. As you would expect it is subject to academic scrutiny as the historians struggle to discover, understand and interpret ‘historical facts’. That’s why sometimes history and politics clash. That’s why Trump, Boris, Putin, Erdogan and Xi Xinping are not to be trusted. The facts tell a different story to the selected political narratives and so history is often fake news writ large as the populists of our world try to varnish their own histories in their attempts to return to idealised nations of the past.
In our nation it all blew up recently with the ‘battle of the statues’ where Edward Colston, a slave trader, was dispatched unceremoniously into Bristol docks. In the USA it was the countless statues lauding Confederate generals, those defenders of slavery, who were dragged to the ground. On July 4th President Trump railed against the statue destroyers at Mt Rushmore saying, ‘Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children.’ He was inciting his base to deflect from coronavirus and yet his method spoke of an attempt to rewrite an agreed history of the USA. “Angry mobs,’ said Trump,”are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”. Get the message?
Nations that refuse to confront their histories are signalling their weakness. In contrast to Trump, most progressives are focussed on a future which is different from the past. President Obama recently made a valedictory speech at the funeral of John Lewis, the 1960’s human rights demonstrator who died recently. The former president, framed all of his speech in terms of the struggle for a "fuller, fairer, better America". He said that ‘America is a work in progress.’ He talked about the progress towards a ‘more perfect union’ with its implication that today it is not perfect. John Lewis, defied the ‘Jim Crow’ laws of the USA which prevented him until then of travelling on the same bus as whites and whose actions had lead to the famous march on Selmer Bridge when the State Troopers had attacked the peaceful demonstrators and broken his skull. The contrast between this true American and Trump was laid bare. A long suffering, high minded, courageous champion of the equality aspired to in the American Constitution was being contrasted with a scoundrel desperately set on being re-elected no matter what.
History is part of belonging to a nation. I am proud of some parts of our history and shamed by others. I want our nation to be better than it has been and that requires confronting our errors as well as our successes. Facing its real history becomes a mature state. It is a sign of the humility required to build a better nation. But in Russia Putin has re-established the cult of Stalin, who killed 10 million of his own people. In China Xi Xinping has resurrected the cult of Mao, who also presided over the deaths of countless million of his own people. In Turkey Erdogan still refuses to accept his nation’s responsibility for the Armenian genocide in 1915 and in Serbia they continue to deny the genocide of Srebreniza in 1993. And in our own country, we conveniently forget about the Opium Wars when we condemned countless millions of Chinese to death by drugs? And what about the 3.1 million slaves that Britain exported over three hundred years of that terrible trade? Perhaps they do not compare with Stalin and Mao but the principle is the same.
If we need a lesson in learning from history, then Germany is surely the great exemplar. This country lives with its guilt. It is written deep into almost every German soul because they have confronted their history. It was not easy. In the first twenty years after the war, no one spoke about anything much. Then towards the end of the 1960s things started to change. Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with history) is what you do if a country has integrity in defeat. Today, Germany is the only nation that has truly confronted its past. It is an island of stability in the chaos of values that surrounds it.
James, Boris returns to work his week inured in his false notion of British history. He wants to curb our judges, to remove the bias of BBC comedy towards the ‘left’. Oliver Dowdsen our Culture Secretary also spoke last week. He said that ‘confident, forward looking nations don’t erase their history – they add to it.” I agree Mr Dowden, But before they add to it they must understand it. Warts and All!
Kind regards,
BH – Your Concerned Constituent