POLITICIANS UNLIKELY TO ADMIT THE BITTER TRUTH OF OUR HISTORY
THE Prime Minister’s (BOJO) reason for speaking out over attempts to haul down statues is a bit rich for a man who has spent his career being a stranger to the truth.
He said to remove statues of colonialists and slavers would be to “lie about our history” – and he said with a stright face, as good liars do. “We cannot try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history,” he said. The fact is he’s lying about history, censoring and editing what the political establishment does. And it’s not peculiar to the British – every government does it.
EMBARRASSMENT
History can be embarrassed which is why they try to destroy it. How many of us know about the slaughter of thousands of indigenous Kenyan people by the British in the 1950s? I didn’t until this week. Having snatched there lands (as they done in Ireland), they herded the Kikuyu tribe into concentration camps at a time when the horrors of Nazi Germany were fresh in the minds. Among practices were rolling people in barbed wire and kicking them about the yard until they bled to death. One internee was boiled to death and the British invented a castration device. You will find no official records of this as they were all rewritten or removed. The truth only emerged in 2012 when Kikuyu survivors launched a compensation claim. You’ll have to look very hard for an official account of the slaughter of thousands in Malaya, or the enforcement famine in Bengal in 1943.
Dominic Cummings When they forcibly removed the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands to make way for a US airbase, the official version was the archipelago was uninhibited. I could go on. By its very definition colonialism is the subjugation of the indigenous population – Spain, Portugal and Belgium all have similar skeletons in their cupboards. From the dawn of time people have been enslaved – and the trade remains alive and well.
Having said that, I’m not sure pulling down statues and banning episodes of Fawlty Towers the or trying to – ludicrously – remove an episode of Father Ted will prompt countries to come clean about their pasts but never England they will never admit the truth of their atrocities
History and its various versions are one long chain of lies. The sad truth is can’t move on because we can’t move on because we are constantly lied to. Something we in the North of Ireland know all about. There are too many tracks to be covered for us to be told or taught the truth – whether it be slavery, torture or murder. To be honourable is to be honest about about your past, so don’t expect anything to change because when Boris change because when when Boris change because when Boris talks about not having a different history he means he wants to protect the establishment version of that history and ensure Britain’s shameful secrets remain undiscovered.
With many thanks to the: Sunday World and Richard Sullivan for the original story
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