History Ain't Bunk

Did you know that 31 January is the 350^th anniversary of the execution of Charles I? If you did, do you think it matters and do you know why it happened? Bet most of you don’t because no one gives a toss about the past these days. Those who do get told to ‘get a life’, ‘get real’ and look forward. Not back. What does that mean? I’ll tell you, it means forgetting dictators and wars and the nastiness of the past unless it can be packaged into some kind of theme park version with lots of computers and flashing lights. It means thinking that HMS Belfast is a pretty funky place to hire for the Christmas party and forgetting why it was built. Such things are seriously dangerous and are only useful to the maniacs of the right who want us to forget, not remember.

There’s another thing about history: even if it doesn’t always prove the left is right, it has an unfortunate habit of proving the right to be horribly wrong. Take Mad Margaret’s friend General Pinochet; history has proved the man to be a brute who presided over torture, murder and the destruction of democracy. Now he might have to face justice in a court of law, something he denied his opponents, and something which Mad Margaret and Nasty Norman Lamont don’t like. Why? Because the next stop might be looking a bit more closely at their antics and when you look closely at the past, your average hero turns out to be pretty flawed.

Yes, I know it’s unpopular, but history is not about the bits that come with photos and gung-ho stories of how the plucky British valiantly defeated the brutal African/Indian/American savages. History is also about the societies the plucky British destroyed the cultures it trampled on and the people it enslaved. It is about the way governments treat their own people; it is about injustice as much as it is about justice, but most of all it is about memory.

We forget the past at our peril, if only because remembering what really happened might stop another Holocaust, another injustice or another tin-pot dictator being welcomed when he comes over to buy bits for his torture chamber. Like I said, history ain’t bunk; it happened and we are pretty stupid if we ignore it.