In 1895, 174 years after his death, a statue of mass-murdering slave-trader, Edward Colston, was erected in the centre of Bristol to commemorate his blood-fuelled philanthropy. 125 years later, this monument was torn down by anti-racism protesters, rolled towards the Bristol harbour, and drowned in the river Avon. Ever since then, the Black Lives Matter movement has faced constant accusations of trying to “destroy” history, and there has been a tangible hysteria around protecting British history and its idols.
This moral panic saw right-wing football hooligans such as the “Football Lads Alliance” descend on London, where herds of people gathered to “defend” Winston Churchill’s statue after it had been graffitied at the BLM protest (and, as it happens, at every other major protest in London).
Naturally, after BLM cancelled its protest these patriots had no choice but to keep themselves entertained by brawling with Metropolitan police. But whilst most mainstream commentators seem to agree that these right-wing nutjobs are little more than violent reactionaries, there remains a substantial movement within both conservative and liberal circles that accuses the BLM movement of a totalitarian attempt to destroy British history.
In particular, such pundits have banded around the following quote from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Of course, there’s nothing new about right-wing appropriation of one of the left’s most brilliant writers. But this empty argument from authority illustrates a growing ignorance of both history, and what Orwell understood as totalitarianism.
To be specific, Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism is defined by the “endless present in which the Party is always right” and, crucially, its creation through the wilful destruction and/or alteration of historical evidence that might undermine the Party and its Leader.
But the BLM movement is obviously doing nothing of this sort. Nobody is demanding that Churchill, or even Colston, be “purged” from the historical record in an attempt to make Britain’s past appear less racist than it is. Rather, protesters are simply calling for Britain to accept the foundational role of racism in British history.
This is far from an “Orwellian” demand, and instead represents the desire and respect for truth that defined Winston Smith’s character. In fact, those pundits accusing the BLM movement of a creeping totalitarianism are precisely those helping to build a propagandistic history of the British Empire and its leaders.
The hypocrisy here is so mind-numbing that it is difficult to even discuss. But the purposeful construction of an idyllic vision of the British empire is an inherently totalitarian idea – and, as it happens, one that has been official government policy for decades.
Operation Legacy, for example, was a secret program orchestrated by the British Foreign office between the 1950s and 70s. And as conspiratorial as it sounds, this program saw MI5 and Special Branch agents deliberately conceal at least 8,000 documents detailing British “activities” from newly independent colonial governments. In fact, some of the most inflammatory documents – detailing, amongst other things, the torture methods used in British concentration camps – were dumped into the sea or incinerated, a move anyone who has actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four will recognise as eerily reminiscent of Airstrip One’s Ministry of Truth.
This is a particularly brazen example, but recent efforts to whitewash Churchill’s character and accuse revisionist historians of trying to “destroy history” are just the latest instalments in this long line of empty propaganda.
For instance, as if he were making any argument at all, Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote that ‘it is the height of lunacy to accuse him [Churchill] of racism, when he stood alone against a racist tyranny that without his resistance would have overwhelmed this country and the rest of Europe.’
To illustrate how pointless this statement is, imagine how propagandistic it would be to claim that Stalin cannot have been a dictator because he stood against the same fascist tyranny as Churchill, that without his resistance would likely have overwhelmed the whole of Europe.
Of course, Churchill was not up to Stalin’s level of demagoguery – but the logic behind these two statements is the same. Having a dispute with an evil person does not aquit you of your own crimes. And in the case of Churchill specifically, you simply don’t have to murder six million Jews to be a racist. In fact, I refuse to believe that Boris is ignorant enough to subscribe to such a moronic definition of racism. Instead, his statement appears as just another wilful attempt to distort history in favour of the ruling elite – a distinctly Orwellian goal.
History is of course complicated, and human beings are full of contradictions in the ways that they the think and act. But to deny Churchill’s blatant racism is to ignore his own complexity, and paint him as good and pure saint of British nationalism – and as Orwell himself said of Mahatma Gandhi, saints are always to be judged guilty until they are proven innocent.
Saying this, the case of Winston Churchill is certainly more complicated than that of Colston. After all, Britain’s role in defeating Nazism is one of the only imperial legacies we can truly be proud of, and Churchill deserves a great deal of credit for his role in resisting Nazi totalitarianism.
But it is also true that Churchill openly hated Indians, that he oversaw policies that starved 3 million Bengalis to death, and that he advocated the use of poison gas to exterminate Afghani civilians that resisted British imperial domination – a policy that meets any reasonable definition of terrorism.
To purposefully deny these facts is to destroy history. Churchill may not have been racist in a genocidal, Hitlerian way, but in Orwell’s own words Churchill’s administrations in India and Burma were filled with “racial theories which were less brutal than Hitler’s theories about the Jews, but certainly not less idiotic.”
But this debate extends beyond Churchill’s image. The BLM movement is not just about police brutality, but systemic racism in a more general sense. And one way in which Western racism has been so institutionalised is through the white-washing of history, and the teaching of a propagandistic past.
Operation Legacy is part of this distortion, but the project extends into general education and popular history. We learn masses about ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, but nothing of Mali’s empire, dynastic China, or the Moors of Spain; we learn about the Nazi holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, but are taught nothing of British concentration camps in South Africa, or the torture and rape of Kenyan civilians by British soldiers in the 1950s; and we learn about (white) British abolitionists, but hear nothing of the heroes of the Haitian revolution, or Britain’s attempts to reinstall slavery in Haiti after one of history’s only successful slave revolts.
In many ways, our understanding of history depends as much on what we leave out of the story as it does on what we include. And this selective teaching has two main outcomes.
Firstly, it supports white supremacist logic by building a racist, “mud-hut” vision of non-white history. It paints a picture of non-white history as universally primordial and uncivilized, while suggesting that, throughout history, everything of any value has been built and achieved by white people. Obviously bullshit as this is, this racialised logic can easily slip through customs when it is so universally accepted.
Secondly, it transforms racism into a “foreign” problem. It suggests that, whilst Germans and Americans might have a problem with racism, “we” would never be so cruel and ignorant. This modern rendition of British exceptionalism is beyond delusion, and any student of history and politics should know that.
But a grownup conversation around modern-day racism is impossible without an acceptance of its historical foundations. And until British society stops deluding itself about the real history of the British Empire and its leaders, we will continue to be haunted by the racist foundations laid down over centuries of imperial conquest and propaganda.