Hobson was also a blazing anti-Semite and racist, as Jeremy Corbyn belatedly discovered. This works both ways: The crusading anti-imperialist economist J.A. But eventually he saw slavery as a taint on national history and spoke of an invasion of Afghanistan as “uniting criminality and folly in a higher degree than any undertaking in my recollection” his Cabinet “saw real danger in investing self-interested white settler minorities with power over black majorities anywhere in the Empire.” Gladstone, whose name is being removed from the University of Liverpool’s halls of residence, was indeed the son of a slave trader. As with any country, there is a broader, more inclusive and more nuanced narrative to be told. This doesn’t mean Britain must replace a cartoonish Land of Hope and Glory narrative with something unremittingly dark and equally cartoonish. When protesters attacked Churchill’s statue, they were not attacking just him, but this state-sanctified notion of Britishness that centers and renders indispensable a racist, imperialist warmonger. The rest “taught the controversy,” as creationists would put it. Of 15 heads of school history surveyed by one academic in 2016, only one taught the Empire as a study of exploitation. While the British Empire is taught in schools, it makes up a tiny part of the high school syllabus. … They therefore know practically nothing about empire and its legacies - including in Britain.” A University of Liverpool lecturer pointed out her students “know very little about Britain’s past, let alone Britain’s connections with the wider world or the history of the world outside Europe. But if we are to leach this poison from the British mind, then it is school curricula that will have to change. So, take down such statues - Churchill, of course, but also Clive “of India” on Whitehall and the generals of the British Indian Army in Trafalgar Square. Johnson said that statues “teach us about our past, with all its faults.” Statues do not teach schools do. This is a Britain whose mind has been poisoned by such myths and, yes, held back by the weight of statues of slavers and imperialists. Without an honest reckoning with its past, the Britain of 2020 will continue to be adrift in a world with few allies, uncertain of what its own economic advantages are and with an increasingly unclear sense of itself as a modern nation. In a world where Winston Churchill never existed, the war would still have been won.īeyond Brexit, the notion of Britishness that Churchill embodies is one that has no place for racial minorities and which, as my colleague Therese Raphael has pointed out, dismisses their justified complaints. And, as the historian Richard Toye has so painstakingly demonstrated, the myth of Churchill’s speeches stiffening the spine of a half-defeated world is just that - a myth. I am as much of a historian as is Johnson - that is, not at all, in spite of his awful book on Winston - but unlike him, I read actual historians. The war was won thanks to half the world’s determination and to the superior innovation of free societies - not a few speeches. The statue, says the British prime minister, “is a permanent reminder of his achievement in saving this country - and the whole of Europe - from a fascist and racist tyranny.” His achievement? I suppose America, Russia, the rest of Europe, not to mention the rest of the Empire, had nothing to do with it? Shashi Tharoor has explained that Churchill was “a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of non-white peoples, a man who fought not to defend but to deny our freedom.” When angry Londoners attacked this same statue last week, many cheered here in the colonies Churchill struggled all his life to keep.īoris Johnson disagrees. Those who abhor Churchill do so for good reason. That had no place in this warm celebration of Cool Britannia. There was, however, one strong dissonant note: the moment when, as a camera follows the Queen’s supposed helicopter from Buckingham Palace to the East End, Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square smiles and waves its stick in greeting. The Britain celebrated there seemed amused, multicultural, cool - the Britain of the Beatles, the National Health Service, Shakespeare and Mr. (Bloomberg Opinion) - Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics briefly united the world in Anglophilia.
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