Sunday 27 August 2017

More on manipulation of our history

John Elledge is only partly right when he says that "the centrality of the Second World War to the national myth warps our view of history" (Left Field, 18th August, 2017). There is another very important factor contributing to the mythology which goes by the name of "national history", and that is the destruction of millions of files, and the continued secreting of millions more, by governments intent on manipulating the story of this country`s past. Only when thousands of Kenyans sued the British government in 2013 for damages after the Mau Mau rising of the 1950s did British historians become aware of Operation Legacy, and the deliberate destruction of evidence relating to the UK`s imperial past. The truth about the atrocities, looting and other varied acts of imperial barbarism have to be kept hidden!
    Elledge is totally right, however, in stating that Churchill`s role in the 1943 Bengal famine "rarely comes up in biopics", but the trouble is, it doesn`t appear either in the best selling biographies of the wartime leader, like the one by pseudo-historian, Boris Johnson. Nothing must, it seems, damage the version of our "glorious past", and judging by the Brexit vote, that mythology still reigns supreme. The sooner the 1.2 million files hidden at Hanslope Park are released for scrutiny, the better!

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