with a rousing British cheer

Trtstram Hunt ruins a generally good piece on the idiocies of patriotic history with this:

...before we return to King Alfred, Lord Clive and Horatio Nelson we should remember that the teaching of drum-and-trumpet stories of Britain's past changed for a reason. We are no longer the mono-ethnic, male-dominated, hierarchical world of 50 years ago.

Well, yes, and so what? Patriotic history is wrong because it tells lies about the past in order to create politically exploitable sentiments in the present. The fact that it’s a harder sell in a multi-ethnic country is welcome but not basically relevant, unless you’re arguing that historical relevance changes with ethnic heritage. Why should the state have any role in deciding what the lessons of history are, or even that there are any? That’s not what people pay for when they charter the state to provide history teachers.

Earlier, he gives us the following:

Mr Collins revealed that he had asked the historian Andrew Roberts to draw up a list of key facts about British history that all children would have to learn by the time they left school.

It would follow that someone who knows what every child should learn about English history would have enough judgement to extrapolate reasonably from their general historical knowledge, rather than using it as a basis for outright propaganda. Here’s Andrew Roberts in early 2003, predicting the outcome of the Iraq war.

In the face of a danger that the left, the Church of England, much of the establishment, the press and the French denied really existed, a lone voice told the truth unashamedly again and again until events forced the rest of the nation to listen. This brave politician faced public obloquy and collapsing political popularity, until he was proved right, when he became the most popular prime minister in recent memory. For Churchill, this apotheosis came in 1940; for Tony Blair, it will come when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam's henchmen.

Rarely in history are we allowed quite so exact a template as we have been given militarily by what happened in the Gulf in 1990-91, and politically by what happened in Europe in the 1930s.

The first clause is an outright falsehood, btw. A large and growing part of the left was very much in favour of stopping Hitler after the mid 1930’s, many going to Spain in an attempt to do it in person.

Comments

[dsquared]

I've never read an article by Prof. Hunt from start to finish because I always get distracted. I start humming the "Postman Pat" theme tune and singing to myself:

"Tristram Hunt
Tristram Hunt
Tristram Hunt is an ignorant ..."

then Ms. Squared asks why I am giggling and we have an argument.

[jamie]

He can be horribly twee, can't he? I thouhgt that was an encouraging piece but then he had to go and make with the pieties.