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Dining across the divide: ‘He has a very rosy view of empire and colonialism’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Oh, a fascists supporter
... and an idiot
Well nearly 100 years of movies etc failing to show the truth about pre colonial Africa.
Its hardly a surprise he dose not even recognise we raised multiple African city States to the ground.
Add the likes of pit rivers influence on our early british museums etc. There is still a strong belief that the west found undeveloped savages rather then complex multicultural settlements throughout pre colonial Africa.
As a society we still do not make any effort to portray the truth about Africa pre colonisation. Hardly a surprise young brits grow up dumb to reality.
That said. Some how thinking Europe was a bastion of peace and goodwill to all nations in the 17 and 1800s. While the Africans were constantly at war.
Yeah thats real idiotic with no excuse.
UK history is dishonest and delusional. It does us no favours.
Definitely depends on who teaches history, my history teacher was far from the best, but they didn’t gloss over the darker parts of our history, and certainly never justified the empire as anything more than a power grab by a nation that took because it could.
It’s certainly dangerous to have too rosy a view of our past, but I don’t think our history is exactly a secret.
That said, we do have a skewed view of the good and bad actions in our history, but I’m less convinced that’s a serious problem, it might even be beneficial, if framed correctly (ie we can’t hide when we’re sampling a rare good moment amongst a sea of horror).
To use an example from another nations history to avoid bias, statistically speaking it wouldn’t be justified for Germany to teach about Schindler, he was one unusual individual and not representative at all. But it seems critical that they do teach about him, because he represents the hope of a better nation buried within the darkness, they need stories like that to show that the making things better is always possible.
Maybe it’s important to teach both the overall horror of our past (to discourage fools thinking the empire was a good thing), and also focus on the rare moments when good came through nonetheless, because those are the moments we need to continue creating, and burying them under cynicism (even accurate cynicism) helps nobody?
Or maybe I’m overthinking it.