UK Politics

I learned history in Scotland. There was no sugar-coating the evils of the 'English' colonial machine.

Agreed. Not sure anyone else's is much better. Africa mainly because Europe destroyed it. But all nations tend to tell themselves a rosy picture of their past.

Africa unfortunatly dose not have the media industry to tell what truth they can find.

But if you know any. Id Love to read any good fiction based on their history especially west Africa. That is after all how the west built our own biased stories.

Definitely depends on who teaches history, my history teacher was far from the best, but they didn’t gloss over the darker parts of our history, and certainly never justified the empire as anything more than a power grab by a nation that took because it could.

It’s certainly dangerous to have too rosy a view of our past, but I don’t think our history is exactly a secret.

That said, we do have a skewed view of the good and bad actions in our history, but I’m less convinced that’s a serious problem, it might even be beneficial, if framed correctly (ie we can’t hide when we’re sampling a rare good moment amongst a sea of horror).

To use an example from another nations history to avoid bias, statistically speaking it wouldn’t be justified for Germany to teach about Schindler, he was one unusual individual and not representative at all. But it seems critical that they do teach about him, because he represents the hope of a better nation buried within the darkness, they need stories like that to show that the making things better is always possible.

Maybe it’s important to teach both the overall horror of our past (to discourage fools thinking the empire was a good thing), and also focus on the rare moments when good came through nonetheless, because those are the moments we need to continue creating, and burying them under cynicism (even accurate cynicism) helps nobody?

Or maybe I’m overthinking it.