History, according to the British

If you've ever wondered why the UK acts the way it does, consider that my formal history lessons at school went like this:

• Boudica had a perfectly justified but ultimately futile fight with the Romans
• Saxons exist
• "William the Conqueror" came, saw, and conquered liberated and/or unified the country
• "The" Manga Carta
• Civil war War of the Roses
• Henry VIII
• Civil war Catholics or Protestants argue about which one is sent from God and which is the unholy spawn of Satan's armpit hair
• Witch hunts
• "The civil war"
• The Spanish Armada is defeated by Britain being awesome in a totally unspecified way
• Britain decided to end the slave trade but only after profiting from it greatly and at around the same time as everyone else in Europe, probably because the industrial revolution had started and manual labour was becoming less important
• The Industrial Revolution, which according to this version of events consists entirely of "Steam Engine → power loom (that it exists, no description given) → one specific picture of Isambard Kingdom Brunel”
• Queen Victoria, who never smiled, perfectly embodied the essence of what it means to be British by calling herself “Empress of India”, marrying her first cousin (Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) and being the head of state when the Great Famine hit Ireland and a million people starved to death
• World War 1
• World War 2, where the UK stood alone against the Nazis with only the help of USA, the USSR, the British Empire, the French resistance, the Danish resistance…

In addition to my sarcastic strike-through comments, notice what is missing:

• The Roman empire disintegrated, resulting in several hundred years of highly localised kingdoms and combat between them
• Anything about the Saxons — the people after which the UK likes to call itself "Anglo-Saxon" — besides their mere existence, and anything including existence about what happened to them after the Normans conquered them
• What Manga Carta (no "the") actually said, who else had anything similar, and the fact it's been fully repealed since then
• Other than Henry VIII and Victoria, all other monarchs are mere footnotes, even Charles I and Elizabeth I — King George III might as well have be a fictional character so far as history lessons went, because I only even know he was mad because of the film
• The American War of Independence (!)
• The UK were the first to use concentration camps to systematically target an entire nation in a war which turned those countries into colonies under British rule
• The Irish War of Independence (!)
• The declining (but still not completely removed) influence of the aristocracy in the UK
• Apart from Gandhi starving himself, literally any and all other resistance to the British Empire, resistance which reduced it from the largest empire that ever existed about 100 years ago to a few tiny islands around the world today
• Why the UK joined the European Economic Community in the first place, and both the fact and the reason for France initially vetoing UK membership
• Literally everything about the IRA — current events weren't in history lessons, so I'm not counting attacks mentioned in the news
• Where the stuff in the British Museum came from, and why many of the people it was taken from want it back now

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Original post: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2019/07/12/history-according-to-the-british/

Original post timestamp: Fri, 12 Jul 2019 10:51:01 +0000

Tags: history, links, list

Categories: Politics