Airbrushing history

I see that Britain's involvement in the slave trade will become a compulsory subject to be taught in British schools. Need we wonder what the purpose of that is? Am I being overly suspicious or will this be another exercise in making white British children feel undeservedly guilty about their heritage whilst casting non-whites as victims of cruel racist imperialism?. I am sure my suspicions are well founded, and that schools will be highly selective in what details of the slave trade they they chose to teach, also, I wonder how much accuracy and balance there will be in what is taught?

Will school children be taught that the international slave trade had been carrying on for thousands of years before Britain became, comparitively briefly, involved?. Will they be taught that 90% of all slaves were transported eastward to Arabia and Asia where there was a thriving slave trade at a time before England was a single nation, let alone Great Britain?.

Will they learn that there are currently twice as many people living in forms of slavery today, as I write this post as were transported to America in the entire North Atlantic slave trade?.

Will they be taught of Britain's leading role in ending the slave trade and eradicating across a quarter of the Earth's surface, and using our navy to prevent others from continuing the trade. Will they be taught that whilst Britain banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery across the Empire in 1833, Saudi Arabia did not get around to banning it until 1964 (a century after the American civil war), and in Niger it was not banned until 2003?.

in 1935, 100 years after Britain abolished slavery across our Empire, in Ethiopia an African country which had never been colonised, there were 2 million slaves. What are the chances of our children being taught that?

I doubt those facts about the slave trade are the ones British school children will be allowed to hear about.

All these details together with relevant links and sources were in an article I posted a couple of months back, which, without false modesty, I have little doubt is considerably more accurate that anything likely to appear in the forthcoming curriculum.

I can all but guarantee that facts will be re-written to produce a version of history that will fit the politically correct anti white fairy tales of our day.

In terms of re-writing history to create a past which fits a present political ideology the Britain of today is becoming more like those Eastern block countries before the fall of the Iron Curtain. I recently read the following account on K C Johnson's excellent blog about the Duke lacross hoax Durham in Wonderland, and repeat it here as I think it is very fitting.

In March 1948, shortly after a coup that installed totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia, when the Czech Communist Party (KSČ) convened a celebratory gathering in Prague's Old Town Square. Tens of thousands braved chilling temperatures to hear KSČ leader Klement Gottwald speak. The new communist foreign minister, Vladimír Clementis stood beside Gottwald on the podium, and gave up his fur hat to shield the prime minister's bare head from the cold.

Four years later, a wave of anti-Semitic show trials occurred throughout the Eastern Bloc; Czechoslovakia experienced the most spectacular purge. In late 1952, the government denounced Clementis, KSČ first secretary Rudolf Slánský, and twelve other prominent Communists as "Trotskyite-Zionist-Titoist-bourgeois-nationalist traitors, spies, and saboteurs." Eleven of the fourteen arrested leaders were Jews. All were found guilty in show trials; eleven, including Slánský and Clementis, were executed.

The trials' outcome required creating a new, politically correct, version of the past. Propagandists eliminated the executed party members from communist history books. Clementis, for instance, was airbrushed from the photograph at the Prague demonstration hailing the coup. In the KSČ's version of history, all that remained of the former foreign minister was the cap that he had placed on Gottwald's head.The true story of Clementis and his fur cap comes from the opening of Czech dissident Milan Kundera's novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. To one of the novel's characters, the tale showed how "the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." For historians, Clementis' fate illustrates the willingness of totalitarian regimes to alter the past to align with their contemporary political interests; and, from the other side, the need for scholars to resist such efforts.

I think we can be reasonably confident that Gottwald's hat will have lot in common with the history of the slave which will shortly be taught to our children.