If you click here you will get to a sharp article in Sunday’s Observer by David Olusoga. I have included an extract below. Have a read and see what you think…
“In both the US and the UK, these new history wars have the warped logic of a witch trial. Their aim is to convince people that they are being oppressed by the irrefutable facts of their own national histories. Shared histories, such as US slavery or the British empire, are presented as alien narratives, introduced by outsiders in order to pollute the pure waters of “Our History”.
Like men with a guilty conscience, those promoting these history wars accuse others of the crime they are committing, because it is not historians but politicians who are fomenting divisions. This is why Jenrick’s statue wars article was loaded with trigger words – “mobs”, “woke” and “militants”.
The defenders of “Our History” and the promoters of “patriotic education” understand that their vision of the past is simplistic, reductive and ahistorical. Their aim, in both the UK and the US, is to pander to notions of exceptionalism that have for so long prevented us from confronting difficult facts and painful truths about what our nations have done and been and how those histories continue to shape our modern societies.”
I would be very interested to know what you think about this view.
Mr Kydd.
