Correcting History

 

Correcting History

 

This week I watched Raoul Peck’s excellent and troubling documentary series, ‘Exterminate All the Brutes.’ It is a beautifully made yet brutal exposition of colonialism, racism and genocide. The documentary traces the development of the idea that European culture was somehow superior to other cultures and that it was their manifest destiny to replace, exploit or even exterminate the ‘lesser’ cultures of the world. This idea, supported by appalling pseudo-science, led to the horrors of slavery, imperialist conquest and in many cases the genocide of native peoples and cultures.

These ideas of cultural and racial superiority are skilfully traced from 1492 when Columbus ‘discovered’ America, and Spain expelled its Jews, through to the Holocaust of the Nazi era and the attitudes of many who follow populist fear mongers like Trump in the USA or Orban in Hungary. It is not without irony that some of Trump’s supporters marched through the streets chanting the white supremacist trope, ‘You will not replace us!’ This slogan grew from the supremacist notion that white races are in danger of extinction due to the rise in numbers of non-whites in their society and that all of this is somehow controlled by the Jews. Such ludicrous thinking links back seamlessly to the ideas in Raoul Peck’s documentary about the superiority of white people.

I also got to thinking about the ideas expounded by Peck as I read about the inquest into the murders of ten Irish men and women by the British Army in August 1971. Ireland was England’s first colony and no doubt the north-east corner of the island will be its last. There is a wealth of evidence about the racist attitudes towards the Irish which stretches back centuries. Victorian pseudo-science declared the Irish to be culturally and racially inferior to their Anglo-Saxon neighbours. Charles Kingsley, author of the popular children’s book ‘The Water Babies’ visited Ireland at the height of the great hunger. He saw the horrors unfolding there and reacted with a chilling lack of sympathy, devoid of any hint of empathy or humanity…

 

"I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along the hundred miles of that horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault, but to see the white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours."

What struck me about the Ballymurphy atrocity and the slaughter in Derry six months later by the same army unit was the manner in which the victims were demonised and a compliant press printed every lie the army asked them too. They were told at the time that the people shot were innocent but they refused to listen to witnesses who saw what happened. We were told to believe that a mother of eight out looking for her son before being shot in the face by a paratrooper was a terrorist. We were asked to believe that a parish priest, shot dead while giving the last rites to a victim, was a gunman. It was absurd at the time and absurd 50 years later when the lies were exposed.

At the time of the Ballymurphy massacre there was a TV show airing called ‘The Comedians.’ It regularly lampooned the Irish as stupid, ignorant and illogical. Those attitudes could have been lifted from Elizabethan or Victorian England such was their lineage. Common thought at the time suggested that there could be no blame attached to the British Military for Ballymurphy or Bloody Sunday as our ‘brave lads’ were decent fellows trying to keep the mad warring tribes of Ireland apart. The reality was that the Army in Ireland was using the same tactics of brutality and propaganda they had deployed in various colonial conflicts from Kenya to Aden. There have been scores of ‘Ballymurphys’ from Amritsar to  Ventersburg, from Kenya to Croke Park, as the Pax Britannica was enforced on the ‘lesser’ peoples.

John Teggart, whose father Daniel was murdered in Ballymurphy said after the coroner found his father and nine other victims were completely innocent of wrongdoing said…

‘We have corrected history today. The inquest confirmed that the soldiers who came to the area, supposedly to protect us, turned their guns on us.’

 

What remains shameful is that the majority of the British people, for the most part, have no idea of the crimes committed in their name. The history curriculum in schools talks of Empire as a great achievement and all too often the certainty of ignorance is manifest in the attitudes of many who swallow the myths and any lies that they are fed.

I was lucky enough to visit Berlin a couple of years back and in that fine city I found a people who, for the most part, had confronted their past. The Germans acknowledge the magnitude of what occurred in the Hitler years and the city is dotted with memorial great and small to the crimes of the Nazis. From the large Holocaust memorial, to small metal plaques embedded into the pavement bearing the names of lost Jews, they remember and more importantly they teach their children about it to ensure such things are not forgotten and are unlikely to occur again.

We humans are a tribal species by nature and are often most at home with our ‘ain folk.’ We seek the reassurance and identity which comes from belonging to the group. We see it mirrored on social media where likeminded people form bubbles containing the same opinions or supporting the same sports team. This can shut out other opinions and lead to a group think which shouts down or abuses any who stray from the party line.

Raoul Peck’s masterpiece eviscerates the idea that any human being is superior to any other. It challenges us all to learn from the mistakes of the past and to see where some of our current prejudices stem from.  As Voltaire is reputed to have said, ‘history is a bag of tricks we play on the dead.’ In learning the truth, we are better able to order our societies today and better able to relate to the ‘other’ in our midst who have their own stories to tell.

There is only one race; the human race, despite what the charlatans have told us.