The person who knows no history remains forever a child, unable to see when he is being fooled and robbed.
By Peter Hitchens
Poor old Mary Seacole, a good-hearted, kindly person, has been the sad victim of fanatics.
Long
after she was dead, zealots used Mrs Seacole in their bitter campaign
to abolish Britain and replace it with a multicultural nothingness.
Their target was Florence Nightingale, steely, Protestant, patriotic, self-disciplined and authoritarian.
They wanted to expel Miss Nightingale from the national pantheon.
They chose Mary Seacole, a jolly hotelkeeper and herbal healer, as their weapon.
Mrs
Seacole did not reform the hospitals first of Britain and later of most
of the world. She did not re-found nursing as a profession.
She was not remotely the equal of Florence Nightingale.
But
because she was non-white, nobody dared to resist. They were scared of
being called ‘racist’. So Mrs Seacole was put in the history books, as
long ago as 1992.
Then she was turned into a national heroine and went into the National Curriculum.
Personally,
I doubt that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has the power to
remove her from it. Opposition to his plan is already brewing.
If you think this sort of thing is just a paper battle, you are sadly wrong.
In 1999, delegates at the conference of the Health Service union Unison
voted overwhelmingly for a motion that deemed Florence Nightingale an
‘inappropriate role model’ for modern nursing, as her image ‘represented
negative and backward-thinking elements’.
Mary Seacole was said to have ‘matched, if not exceeded’ Miss Nightingale’s achievements.
This rewriting of history, to
influence the present and the future, is what happens when revolutions
take place. In George Orwell’s 1984, the ruling socialist party
proclaims: ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the
present controls the past.’
When
I was growing up, we were still taught our national history as a story
and as something to be proud of. A dedicated campaign, beginning in
1960, changed all that.
Old-fashioned
narrative history books were thrown away. Confusing pamphlets full of
conflicting ‘sources’ appeared, designed to suggest there was no true
version of events and above all that what your parents had been taught
was wrong.
I hear
again and again of fragmented jumping about – children who have been
taught about the Romans, the Tudors and Hitler, but with very little in
between.
In secondary schools, many pupils give history up at 14, though it is compulsory up to 16 in most continental nations.
This
matters. A country whose young know no history (and even the
Eton-educated Prime Minister seems vague about Magna Carta and seems
never to have heard of the 1689 Bill of Rights) is like a person with
amnesia roaming the streets, the easy target of every sort of fraud and
crook, ready to swallow the stupidest propaganda.
And so we are.
If
you have ever wondered how it is that modern politicians survive and
prosper when they are so obviously mediocre and incompetent, now you
know why. Hardly anyone realises how bad they are, because they know no
better.
The person who knows no history remains forever a child, unable to see when he is being fooled and robbed.
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