“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” — George Orwell
Most people tend to think of history as a series of events and dates, merely a collection of facts and descriptions of things which happened; but that’s not true, or at least that isn’t the whole truth.
As well as being a series of events and dates, history is a tool and weapon with numerous uses.
In the Anglosphere, as part of our inheritance from the Enlightenment and the Classical Liberal tradition — which has been the hegemonic strain of liberalism in the Anglo world — there has been a premium put on logic, reason and the pursuit of truth for truth’s sake, devoid of any moral, mythic, or spiritual implications. And with that principle as paramount, the history syllabus has been developed for schools. Children are delivered more or less neutral building blocks of knowledge intended to be the foundation for a clinical study of the past.
The problem with this approach is that most people don’t go on to become historians interested in the clinical study of the past. An academic pursuit of history is the least common form of engagement with history.
What the Anglo education system has failed to account for, especially in its modern multicultural guise, is that humans aren’t just logical and methodical creatures. We’re storytelling creatures, moral creatures, tribal creatures, instinctual creatures, emotional creatures, and spiritual creatures. We find meaning, identity, and causes in all sorts of places, from the mundane to the profound. History is one of those places.
To quote René Girard, “Reality is not rational, but religious.”
In the modern Anglo world, history is most commonly used as a tool for shared identity building, and a weapon against out-groups to garner some desired outcome(s). We can see this in the way activists, and activist historians, use cynically cherry-picked examples from history and frame them with present-day moral implications to suit present-day sensibilities and political goals. They strip away multiple layers of nuance, complexity and context, and use what’s left as a cudgel against the wider society.
This is obviously the case. One need only look at the abysmal 1619 Project, spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times, which was a reframing of history so removed from reality that academic historians tore it apart; yet it still got published to great fanfare. One need only look at the books published by, and films produced by, David Olusoga, some of which are at best questionable in their accuracy, but quite obviously are exercises in black-British shared identity building or an exercise in chastising Britain for the excesses of her imperial history. One need only look at the lunacy which is produced on the Twitter feeds of people like Shola Mos-Shogbamimu which sees history reduced to a crude rhetorical tool.
Scottish Nationalists too, are often noteworthy for their reframing of history for political and/or social/communal (and perhaps also financial) gain. If one spends just a little time perusing Scottish Nationalist Twitter one quickly finds profoundly bastardised versions of “history”. If one were to form their understanding of history using only Scot-Nat Twitter, one would leave believing that in 1707 an English Tory army (which may or may not have been led by Margaret Thatcher or Boris Johnson) descended on Edinburgh and subjected a mighty kilt-wearing people at point-of-sword whilst doing whatever the 18th-century equivalent of sieg heiling was.
The British State’s (and, as far as I can tell, all Anglo States’) largest failures in the teaching of history are believing it could be taught as if it’s morally neutral and without emphasis put on the parts of history which are most relevant to the world in which we live today. The neutral teaching of history cannot stand up to the rhetorical moral assault of weaponised history used by today’s activists in their game of political divide and rule, sometimes to the point at which young people are coming to view their identity and their country’s place in the world as morally illegitimate.
Young people need to know that their identity, their country’s identity, is anchored in a historical continuum with moral legitimacy. Given the fact that so much of the national historical moral framing is being crafted by people who have a very narrow set of goals — none of which are necessarily beneficial to the country or its people as a whole — we shouldn’t be surprised that so many young people are turning to reactionary and often revolutionary politics, on the far-right and the far-left, in pursuit of an identity and a cause they can take pride in: the disestablishment of the evil Anglo imperial project (decolonisation one might call it…)— the countries we live in and the systems and institutions that have made modern civilisation possible, at least as we know them.
One of the few things these activists are right about is the British Empire isn’t taught enough at schools, but it certainly shouldn’t be taught in the way these activists would like it taught, as the founding original sin for which Britain must make amends from now and into the future indefinitely.
The British Empire did do some dreadful things. The treatment of the Boers in the Second Boer War was abhorrent, the Amritsar massacre is a stain on British history, and the response to the Mau Mau rebellion was vicious in the extreme. But there is context and nuance to all of these events which make them understandable by today’s standards, if not justifiable.
The atrocities committed against the Boers were in the context of a savage war in which the Boers had adopted guerilla warfare tactics as their style of fighting. The British simply didn’t know how to respond to it. Lord Kitchener responded with brutality and by putting the Boer women and children in prison camps to prevent them from supporting their male family members who were fighting. The prison camps came to be known as concentration camps.
Unlike the Nazi concentration camps, they weren’t intentionally death camps, although that is what they became due to poor hygiene and a lack of food to feed the prisoners. The conditions were unforgivable.
In response to the concentration camps and the mistreatment of the Boers, a public campaign was led against the actions of the British military by one of my historical heroes, Emily Hobhouse; something which was unthinkable in almost any other empire in history. This led to the Fawcett Commission which made numerous suggestions to reduce the abysmal suffering the Boers were having inflicted upon them, however, the war came to end a year later.
Churchill — who had been taken prisoner by the Boers in 1899 and escaped — saw them as honourable opponents. He too was rather appalled by the callousness with which they’d been treated. Scorched earth tactics and concentration camps, it’s not cricket! He argued with his maiden speech in the Commons that they ought to be offered generous peace terms to end the war, provocatively telling Parliament:
“If I were a Boer fighting in the field — and if I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field — I would not allow myself to be taken in by any message of sympathy, not even if it were signed by a hundred hon. Members.”
The Amritsar massacre happened in the context of rioting and violence which had been taking place in Amritsar prior to it which included the murder of four Europeans and a female missionary being attacked and beaten. The first Indian Mutiny was also tattooed onto the consciousness of the British. An event partly mythologised in the violence suffered by the British, which led to the infliction of extreme violence onto the Indians by the British. The British soldiers, led by Reginald Dyer on April 13, 1919, were tense and jumpy. When confronted by a crowd of Indians, they opened fire and murdered innocent people. But the crowd had been peaceful.
It was condemned in Britain when it happened, including by Winston Churchill, then Secretary of War, who declared in Parliament:
“However we may dwell upon the difficulties of General Dyer…one tremendous fact stands out. I mean the slaughter of nearly 400 persons and the wounding of probably three or four times as many…. That is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.”
Reginald Dyer was made to resign his position and his military career was brought to an end. Perhaps he didn’t face enough justice. Powerful people often don’t.
But Dyer wasn’t universally condemned. He had supporters in Britain. He was praised by the House of Lords, and his sympathisers raised a large fund to support him financially. To make matters more complex, Dyer wasn’t universally condemned in India either. Arur Singh honoured him with a saropa and thanked him for the protection of the Darbar Sahib complex, also known as The Golden Temple (Singh’s descendants apologised for this in 2001).
I don’t say this to condemn anyone, nor to obfuscate the scale of the crime Dyer committed, but merely to point out the complexities of history.
The British brutality towards the Mau Mau is also made more understandable when all the context is taken into account.
Once again the British were up against an enemy that had adopted guerilla warfare tactics to fight them. To make matters worse the Empire was also dying and weak. The British lashed out, as all injured and cornered animals do, with viciousness spurred by weakness and fear.
There are some truly enlightening accounts written by the award-winning American journalist, David E. Reed, to the Institute of Current World Affairs, describing the situation on the ground and the constant state of fear and paranoia the British were living in. He writes:
Many European male civilians carry side-arms and not a few women have small-calibre weapons in their purses. Hotel guests leave their weapons in the office safe. Weapons are never left in rooms for fear that the African hotel help will steal them. The government is determined to keep arms from the Mau Mau and a European can be fined heavily and/or sent to Jail for losing one. The stiffness of the penalty depends upon the degree of negligence.
He goes on to describe the advice he was given upon arriving in Kenya:
On the advice of practically everyone I have met, I purchased a pistol. “The Mau Mau wouldn’t ask to see your U. S. passport first,” one acquaintance said. A rather bloodthirsty but otherwise charming European woman clerk in the gun shop said, when I commented that the Beretta equivalent of a .22 is rather small: “If you’re quick and hit the brain or heart, it’s all right.” She wore a small revolver on her belt. “It’s because we have a lot of money in this store,” she said. Like many Europeans in Kenya, she is separated from her husband. He lives on their up-country farm and has been threatened with death by the Mau Mau several times.
And other advice he was given highlights the extreme sense of heightened paranoia everyone was living with:
Then, I went trout fishing. The trout are plentiful now in the famous streams of Mt. Kenya as there are few fishermen. “Be Careful,” said the manager. “Stay close to the hotel. If you see an African, even if he is dressed up in a policeman’s uniform, get your gun out. The Mau Mau dress up as askaris [African militarised police officers working for colonial powers] to trick you.”
And he describes the sort of violence to which the British were responding:
It was at Nyeri where the latest Mau Mau murder of a European occurred. A nine-man gang entered the farm home of James MacDouglass, a 73-year-old arthritic cripple, and hacked him to death with pangas [African machetes]. Because of his condition, he could not get up from his chair for a weapon. MacDouglass was Nyeri’s oldest settler, having arrived in Kenya in 1903 after the Boer War. It is said that he walked the 100 miles from Nairobi to Nyeri and there made his home.
Again, none of this excuses the extreme brutality of the British in their reaction to the Mau Mau, but it does make it easier to understand.
There are other myths that are frequently used to try to emotionally blackmail the British too, such as the $45 trillion the UK allegedly owes India — a product of some rather creative accounting by a Marxist economist — which is explained here, and the alleged weaponisation of food to starve Indians which is explained here.
Whilst the activists would love for these events, and Britain’s participation in the slave trade, to be all that’s ever talked about in relation to the British Empire, they never seem keen to go beyond the colonial period. They never seem to want to discuss what the European powers found when they started building their empires. The revisionist activists seem to want to portray the world the colonial powers walked into and disturbed as Eden, occupied by Rousseauian noble savages; but this is palpable nonsense.
The Europeans didn’t set out and find Eden — they found the Land of Nod.
The world at the beginning of the European colonial period was barbaric and violent, and savagery was ubiquitous. By today’s standards, the Europeans were savage, the Africans were savage, the Indians were savage, the entire Oriental world was savage, the Americas were savage, as were the inhabitants of the Middle East.
Almost everywhere the Europeans landed there were established slave trades, in many places there was human sacrifice and cannibalism, there were tribal conflicts and regional wars, there was no written language, medicine wasn’t even approaching the stage of being treated as a science and architecture didn’t extend beyond single story huts with thatched roofs. Nowhere on earth consisted of flourishing democratic societies that respected the universality of human rights (a concept born of Christianity and spread by European colonialism). The closest anywhere had to anything approaching that was Europe, and Europe was a long way off!
In the modern Anglo world, everyone can sit at their laptops and throw digital stones at one another’s ancestors. We can dissect the history of the African slave trade and how Africans sold “their own people” to Arabs and Europeans. We can cast our eyes accusatorially over Arab history; discuss in detail their castration of African slaves and the eventual outlawing of the slave trade in Saudi Arabia in 1962. We can consider the raiding of European nations (including Britain) to take slaves for the extensive Barbary slave trade overseen by the Ottoman Empire. We can pontificate about the human sacrifice and cannibalism found in the Americas, and if one thinks North American Natives were peaceful pipe-smoking hippies then one really ought to delve into the Iroquois’ mourning wars which “were intended to acquire captives who would in turn either be ceremonially tortured to death or adopted into the group.” We can point at the Indians and condemn them for their practice of female infanticide and occasional widow-burning ceremonies. It’s also worth contextualising the crimes of Reginald Dyer by pointing out that “more people had been killed by police firing on riotous mobs in independent India than in the entire period of the Raj [India had been independent less than 20 years at this point] — this before the worst violence of the 1970s and 1980s.” And, if it’s empire building one most wants to condemn, then we can start with the Akkadian Empire and work our way forwards, including the various Chinese empires and the various African empires that dominated the continent, as well as the various empires that had been struggling for dominion over the Indian subcontinent for all of history. Empire building is how the world worked, how it always had worked, and to an extent always will work. Everyone can get their fair share of the blame for the almost ceaseless stream of misery and violence — with brief interludes — that history is a record of.
If these activists continue trying to push their extremely edited and lopsided version of history for political gain, if they try to construct minority identities treating the mass of the populace as an evil out-group who owes them something, we’ll just become evermore divided. Society will become an endless battle for the control of the historical narrative to use as a cudgel against one’s political opponents, and frankly, that isn’t good for anyone in the long run.
That this has become something about which we now must worry is the State’s failing. The Government long ago, when Britain started becoming multicultural, ought to have been thinking about the teaching of history and the crafting of a historical narrative that unifies us.
That doesn’t mean it needs to be untrue, nor that the worst aspects of the British Empire need to be avoided, it just means the framing of historical events needs to be considered, and events need to be put in their historical context. It shouldn’t be hard to teach history in a way that provides the Anglo world with moral legitimacy and provides a unifying story for our now racially diverse society. After all, if it were not for the British Empire, the modern world likely would not be globalised in the way it is now, and British society certainly wouldn’t be as diverse as it is now. There would have been little that brought us together.
And that doesn’t mean we ought to shy away from the failures of British colonialism. There were always two attitudes towards the colonies. One was paternalistic, built on a sense of noblesse oblige — the Churchillian view of the Empire — and the other was mercantilist and commercial — Robert Clive’s view of the Empire. Too often the latter view won out, such is human nature. Both perspectives have been written about, although the former isn’t fairly defended anywhere near as frequently as the latter has been (fairly and unfairly) condemned — although it has been.
There’s one particularly gut-wrenching letter written by David E. Reed in which he describes his interaction with Joshua Thomas in Kenya, a black African who was let down and exploited by British colonialism. People like Joshua, who was then a year younger than I am now, deserved more from us. They often didn’t get it, especially in Africa. Reed writes:
Joshua Thomas is a “detribalized African.” When I asked him his attitude toward the coming of the Europeans to his country, he said, “You have showed us civilization, Sir, but you don’t give us a chance to practice it. You have taught us to eat good food, but we have no money to buy such food.”
But, for all its ills, those Progressives who value diversity, liberal democracy, universal human rights, and constitutional law, owe nearly all of it to the British Empire. The very moral positions that they espouse and use against the British and European empires are products of the British and European empires and Western philosophy via Israel (indeed many Jews play starring roles in the Western historical canon). They owe the very moral paradigm they use to condemn Western colonialism to Western colonialism. It is from where they inherited it!
And that’s the unifying thread that should be the sinew of the Anglo history syllabus.
If the Governments of the Anglo world were smart, they’d call in the great historians of our time; people like Niall Ferguson, Tom Holland, Dominic Sandbrook, and Andrew Roberts, and they’d have them put together that syllabus. That way, when people grow up and they’re confronted by the cynics, the charlatans, and those that would divide us, they have a firm historical footing with moral impetus behind it. They’re not at a loss, surprised by the worst aspects of the British Empire, unable to reference any specific good that came of the Empire, and they’re aware and also know the context of the world at the time; what the British and Europeans found when they stepped off their ships in faraway lands.
In the US too, more so than in any other part of the Anglo world perhaps, there needs to be a unifying historical narrative. So racially adversarial is the framing of absolutely every part of American culture that I worry about the country’s coherence going into the future. The teaching of the passage of the Civil Rights Act for example shouldn’t be taught as a win for just black Americas against their white oppressors, but a win for all Americans hard fought for by black people and (some) white people alike. A step towards the ideals described by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…
History isn’t neutral, it isn’t dead, it’s alive and it's a battleground. But the thing not fighting is the entity that most has an interest in keeping the country together as a cohesive and productive polity, and that’s the State. Frankly, it’s educational and civic negligence and leaves vast swathes of the public — who are mostly good people who just want to do the right thing and don’t have time to delve into the annals of history — at the mercy of sophists and cynics, activists who will misuse history as emotional blackmail to push their particular cause whatever the cost.
