History is Important. But Who Writes it Matters.

Richard Mellor

A few quick thoughts on the video.

 

A nice account of British colonial history, or some of it anyway. As I listened to some of this and the claims of erasing history, “our” history, it stresses the importance of class analysis and understanding who the “our” refers to. It reminded me of some of the white Southerners here in the US. I recall the musician Charlie Daniels talking about his need to defend his Southern heritage and the Confederate flag when he wrote: “The Confederate battle flag was a sign of defiance, a sign of pride, a declaration of a geographical area that you were proud to be from. That’s all it is to me and all it has ever been to me.” (my added emphasis) Unfortunately it was much more than that and a symbol of terror for the Black population just like the Swastika is to Jews. Had the South won the US Civil War, or the second part of the US Revolutionary War, white workers would have been far worse off than they are now, and in the US South, are worse off materially to this day due to  the failure to eradicate the very heritage the Charlie Daniels defends. This term, defending our heritage is commonly used to obscure class differences.

 

In the US South there were very poor whites. They weren’t subject to the same state violence that the Black population experienced on a daily basis and they had white skin privilege (as members of a race called white) which protected them to the point that they could literally get away with the murder or rape of a person of color. Daniels’ statement reveals his racist view of the world. Not only is he wrong about what the flag represented, by supporting it he is defending one of the most brutal regimes in human history. He could connect to the Southern history and the history of poor whites recognizing that they suffered great poverty and abuse while many of them willingly bought the poison bait of white skin privilege, the term coined by Theodore Allen. Allen and Noel Ignatiev  wrote extensively on this subject. See Jeffrey B Perry for more on this subject.

 

So whether it’s Boris Johnson Charlie Daniels or Donald Trump talking of “our” history, the issue for workers is whose history are they referring to? History as I recall it in my early days in England did not focus on the struggles of the poor and working masses. I remember that scene in Becket when King Henry and Becket enter a peasant’s hut. The daughter is there. The King feels her hair, refers to her as “it” pointing out how doirty she was and gives her to Becket. And the same masters who demonized and terrorized the occupants of the lands they colonized (Ireland, England’s first colony included) had the young children of the English working class working in coal mines and factories. The Peterloo massacre and the great peasant wars or even the Putney Debates and the history of the Levellers and Diggers and other peasant and working class revolts were not prominent like the history of the feudal aristocracy was or national “heroes” of British capitalism like Churchill, Kipling “Clive of India” and so on.

 

I think it was in  “My Life” Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky’s biography that I read about him and Lenin walking in London and Lenin pointing out government buildings and monuments and describing them as “their” House of Commons, “their” Buckingham Palace” and so on, the “their” being the ruling class or imperialists. It really influenced my thinking.

 

Nationalism, religion, race are all used to strengthen this deathly marriage of the ruling class of a state and the worker. Foreigners or the colonized have to be demonized, seen as less than human if the workers of an imperial power are to be used as cannon fodder in military ventures which are against our best interests. The ruling classes are too few and too cowardly to fight their own wars.

 

The statues of the exploiters can be put in museums and we can see them if we choose as long as their true history is explained.  Workers and oppressed peoples have plenty of heroic figures in our past we just are not aware of many of them as the dominant ideas in society are the ideas of the ruling class; the heroes we are supposed to look up to are "their" heroes. We have access to many sources fort this. For example, I read not so long ago An Indigenous History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz. There are countless heroic figures in there that resisted a colonial power, that fought against a brutal colonial settler regime; one thong I got from that book was that the hardest war the US state has fought was against the resistance of the indigenous people. The same for any group of people anywhere, there are heroic figures who fought against oppression in all its forms, most are not in the so-called history books. This we have to change.  History has to with a class perspective, be written from below by those who labor creates the wealth in society, not by those who profit from it.