ZGram - 9/30/2002 - "Churchill - the truth"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

September 30, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

You might call this a revisionist essay of sorts - with a few 
politically correct platitudes and a great many revisionist 
concessions:

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Churchill - the truth

Black history month starts tomorrow, but what we really need is white 
history month to dispel all the myths

Gary Younge
Monday September 30, 2002
The Guardian

Winston Churchill's finest hour may, yet again, be upon us. More than 
50 years after he won the war and lost the election, Churchill is the 
man of the moment. On the night of September 11 his biography was on 
the bedside table of the then New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani; now 
his bust sits on the Oval office desk of George Bush. In May his name 
topped a BBC poll of the 100 greatest Britons. And last week, the 
televised portrayal of his prewar years, Gathering Storm, won three 
Emmys.

There is a certain irony in the timing of this transatlantic 
adulation. As Tony Blair and Bush trot the globe warning of the evils 
of chemical weapons, Churchill hardly stands out as a role model. As 
president of the air council in 1919, he wrote: "I do not understand 
the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of 
using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes." A few years later 
mustard gas was used against the Kurds. Nor did his distaste for the 
"uncivilised" stop there. He branded Gandhi "a half-naked fakir" who 
"ought to be laid, bound hand and foot, at the gates of Delhi and 
then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new viceroy seated 
on its back".

True, despite these flaws Churchill led his nation to victory in war. 
But then so did Stalin and it is unlikely Russians would put him at 
the top of their 100 greatest. That Churchill remains so revered 
tells us more about Britain than it does about him.

We live in a multi-racial nation which champions a mono-racial 
history. It puts Sir Henry Havelock, who distinguished himself by 
leading the massacre of thousands of Indians, in Trafalgar Square, 
and it shamelessly displays its colonial booty.

So as black history month begins tomorrow we should turn the tables. 
October is when black people relate the truth about our past so we 
might better understand the present and, it is hoped, navigate a 
better future. It aims to redress the imbalance in whose stories are 
told and how. Thirty-one days may be insufficient, but the purpose is 
important: it gives us the chance to hear narratives that have been 
forgotten, hidden, distorted or mislaid. It is time to ask whether 
white people would not benefit from doing the same for the other 11 
months of the year. White people are in desperate need of becoming 
better-acquainted with their own history.

The very notion of black and white history is, of course, both a 
theoretical nonsense and a practical necessity. There is no 
scientific or biological basis for race. It is a construct to explain 
the gruesome reality that racism built. So long as there is 
discrimination against races, we will also need to discriminate 
between them. Yet while blackness is relentlessly examined, whiteness 
is eternally presumed.

Black history is not a sub-genre of history. It is not an isolated 
part of the past with sole relevance to black people. Logic suggests, 
you cannot have black history without white history. There would be 
no Nelson Mandela, as we know him, without the architect of 
apartheid, Hendrik Verwoerd; nor would we have known of Rosa Parks 
had it not been for Mr Blake, the white driver who refused to let her 
sit at the front of the bus.

Nonetheless, given the imbalance of whose stories are told, the 
demand for white history months might appear odd. The trouble is not 
that we do not hear enough about white history, but that what 
masquerades as history is more akin to mythology. White people, like 
black people, need access to a past that is accurate, honest and 
inclusive. We do not need more white history; we need it better told.

The object here is not individual guilt - there are therapists for 
that - but collective responsibility. Slavery, colonialism and empire 
- propelled by economic expansion and justified by white supremacy - 
inform much of what Britain is today. The wealth they created funded 
everything from industry to commerce and roads to railways in 
Britain. The poverty they engendered contributed to everything from 
famine to war and disease to debt elsewhere.

To deny this is just one more version of white flight - a dash from 
the inconveniences bequeathed by inequality. "I am born with a past 
and to try to cut myself off from that past is to deform my present 
relationships," writes Alasdair MacIntyre in his book, After Virtue. 
"The possession of an historical identity and the possession of a 
social identity coincide." This is not just true of race but of 
gender, nationality and religion as well. Arguably, one of the 
principal beneficiaries of historical honesty would be the Irish.

So it does not mean that white history is racist history. A white 
history month would include many a progressive voice. Anti-slavery 
campaigner William Wilberforce, anti-apartheid leader Trevor 
Huddleston, and Rhaune Laslett, who was instrumental in organising 
the Notting Hill Carnival, would be on the syllabus, as would the 
story of the Lancashire cotton workers in 1862, who supported the 
blockade of the southern states during the civil war to show their 
"detestation" at the attempt "to organise a nation having slavery as 
its basis".

But in place of this reckoning we have a national psyche that is both 
selective in its memory and particular in its perspective. "When it 
comes to empire there are several types of ignorance," says Katharine 
Prior, the historical adviser of the new British Empire and 
Commonwealth Museum opening in Bristol on October 25. "There are some 
who are not aware of the different dimensions of the history of 
colonialism and others who know only a version. It's a mix of 
received opinions and vast gaps."

The problem with these "gaps" is not only that they omit historical 
truths, but that they distort current realities. The ignorance goes 
all the way to the top. Only this could explain a home secretary who 
calls on immigrants to speak the local language at home and integrate 
here when the British tradition was to do exactly the opposite in the 
empire. Or the Labour minister Jeff Rooker, who refers to asylum 
seekers as "young, single men who have deserted their families for 
money", when he could just as easily be talking about the staff at 
the East India Company. The myopia reaches all over the world. 
Britain once ruled Palestine, Zimbabwe, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, 
Sudan and Iraq - to name but a few - where conflicts rage that are 
directly related to their colonial legacy. But to look at our foreign 
policy you wouldn't know it.

Black Britons know it because we experienced it first hand. It is 
those white Britons who have either forgotten or never knew, or who 
prefer a version edited beyond both comprehension and credibility, 
who need to be taught. The first white history lesson would start 
with a quote from a prominent politician. "This small island [is] 
dependent for our daily bread on our trade and imperial connections. 
Cut this away and at least a third of our population must vanish 
speedily from the face of the earth." His name? Winston Churchill.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/race/story/0,11374,801438,00.html

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