Read on Twitter
My initial reaction to @SimonClarkeMP's inane take on British history was despondency, but my students convinced me it's worth engaging - so here is a thread, since this really is a beautiful illustration of the right's historical illiteracy: 1/ https://twitter.com/SimonClarkeMP/status/1270326461422088194
Yes, our history is indeed complex - but that has nothing to do with how long a nation state (not sure which one exactly) has existed - the history of the US, for instance, is no less complex than that of Britain...2/
Re-writing history is quite literally what historians do - there is no *one* interpretation of past events that remains sacrosanct and unchangeable... 3/
It's entirely unclear who wants to 'erase' a 'painful' history - certainly not the historians of slavery or Empire, including myself, who are forever banging on about racialised violence and exploitation... 4/
But perhaps @SimonClarkeMP is referring to the calls to remove statues - which also does not amount to historical 'erasure' since our knowledge of the past does not reside in statues. No-one has forgotten about American Independence or the Iraq War, for instance...5/
Nobody is criticising people in the past for having a different set of values, or using a different language, than ours - it goes without saying that this is the case and it's something that can simply be taken for granted... 6/
People accordingly do not call for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, for instance, just because they don't agree with his world-view - but because we shouldn't celebrate those outdated views today, when they are blatantly anachronistic and explicitly racist. 7/
So, if I'm reading this correctly, 'rewriting history' is an 'ahistorical approach' and one that prevents us from learning the 'lessons' of the past - although it is entirely unclear what those 'lessons' are, or whether the past can indeed be instrumentalised so crudely? 8/
Not sure what this means. If 'measured' suggests that historians cannot say things that some people find painful, it contradicts the very point made previously. And since none of the statues were put up - or any of the loot stolen - 'democratically', that point is also unclear 9/
@SimonClarkeMP started out talking about history and enlightenment but is now pivoting to his feelings: 'I believe'. Unfortunately, 'belief' has nothing to do with historical insight and the past does not care about your feelings anyway...10/
And suddenly we've come full circle and unsurprisingly end up with the intellectually impoverished notion of the balance-sheet - yet neither 'good' nor 'bad' are analytically meaningful concepts that can be applied to a complex past spanning centuries...
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To argue that the UK has been 'overwhelmingly a force for good', requires some serious moral contortions according to which slavery, violence and massacres etc is cancelled out by...what? Certainly not democracy and the rule of law which never existed in the Empire...12/
Nobody is suggesting that people in Britain should hate themselves or their past (does 'ourselves' include the many descendants of former colonial subjects?). But perhaps an honest reckoning with the brute reality of what imperialism actually entailed would be in place.13/
This final point appears to be taken straight out of the 'clash of civilisations' narrative. If introspection - i.e. critical historical reflection - really undermines Britain's standing in the world, it does make you wonder what the myth of British exceptionalism is based on 14/
The end... 15/
