The Guardian's Selective History Highlights Need for Vigilance
It’s that time of year when the
National Archives yield up more of their secrets. The fact that this even
happens is underappreciated. Government secrets are necessary though
undesirable (sorry, they are, but that’s for another blogpost), but the fact
that we have a framework for the eventual release of (most of) them within a
generation is rather good really.
As we move through the next few
years, more and more documents will be released from the 1980s, a decade of
unparalleled importance in the recent history of Britain. Individual newspapers
will present their Pot Noodle Histories – quick and easy to make, maybe
initially satisfying, but ultimately ghastly and bad for your health.
A particular area of interest is
the revival of 2013’s favourite comparison: Mandela v Thatcher. The claim being
advanced by The Guardian this morning
is that Thatcher, contrary to the claims of her supporters, applied very little
pressure on South African President PW Botha to release Mandela. This is
presented under the broad historical statement “Margaret
Thatcher 'made no case' for Mandela's release”, and the article has been
doing the rounds on twitter.
Interestingly, Kevin Maguire of the Daily
Mirror decided to tweet this article, rather than using anything from his
own paper.
As readers, we must be very
careful here, because the statement in that headline simply isn’t true, and it
is an example of how newspapers, particularly in the age of the 140-character-history,
manipulate the facts.
The newly released documents from
1984 certainly demonstrate that Thatcher was not exerting tremendous pressure
for Mandela’s release, but she was attempting diplomatic ways of influencing significant
change in the Apartheid regime, having decided that isolation was not the best
way to get peaceful progress in South Africa. These methods were, naturally,
incremental.
By 31st October 1985,
Margaret Thatcher wrote this
letter to Botha, in which she explicitly urges him to release Nelson
Mandela. It also shows how many plates Thatcher was spinning, throughout the Commonwealth
and worldwide in the pursuit of her foreign policy. One can debate her
decisions and question how successful and influential her tactics were, but the
suggestion that she was a supporter of the Apartheid division is just plain
wrong, nor is it correct to say that she “made no case” for Mandela’s release.
Now, in fairness to The Guardian, the article does detail a
lot of facts that place Thatcher in a good light, noting that she told Botha
that it was “totally unacceptable” that rights were determined by skin colour,
and it is also made apparent that the Government at that time had supported
calls for Mandela’s release. However, that doesn’t prevent the headline being
poor history, and the structure of the article being such as to encourage a
view of history that is erroneous but beneficial to that paper’s particular
worldview. What that amounts to is total intellectual dishonesty.
We don’t tolerate this sort of
nonsense from The Daily Mail, and
rightly so. We must be consistent. Of course, all papers do this. As Charlie
Brooker noted in his excellent 2013 Wipe,
a large part of the job of newspapers is to spew the readers’ views back at
them, and no doubt someone will find that the Mail has been hagiographic to a fault today (I refuse to take the Mail unless absolutely necessary). Nevertheless,
we owe it to ourselves to be better. We should read wider, consider more calmly
and, hard though it might be, resist the urge to reduce everything to 140
characters, nor to think that any single tweet contains the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth.
Let This Be a Time of
Remembrance, Not Sickening Commemoration
The centenary is a deeply
difficult time to navigate, but the government is botching it in typically
schoolboy, Ripping Yarns-esque style.
Whilst I agree with Gove that the common view of the First World War has become
lacking in nuance and simplistic, it doesn’t take away from the fact that the conflict
was preceded by the needless power-games of the nations involved, and defined
by the obsolescence of their strategies and the incredible wasting of human
life in absolutely hopeless and pointless endeavours. The horror of what
happened (which, incidentally, Blackadder
Goes Forth portrayed magnificently) is what must be remembered.
The Government’s rhetoric seems
utterly opposed to this, seeking commemoration rather than remembrance and some
kind of reconsideration of WW1 as a noble conflict. Gove sees it as a glorious
fight against Social Darwinism. It wasn’t. It was the hideous extension of 19th
Century wars of conquest, imperialism and pride, driven by opportunism,
ambition and the lust for vengeance. Minting a coin to commemorate this, and
using a poster which ultimately sent huge numbers of men to a vain and pitiless
death, is just sick.
Sexism in Sport Remains
Insidiously Present
There was a muted outcry at the
end of the year, as Andy Murray went unrecognised in the New Year’s Honours
List. Murray, who collected an OBE from the 2012 list during the last year, had
been widely tipped to receive a knighthood after winning the Wimbledon Men’s
Singles Titles last July. Meanwhile, Ann Jones, Ladies’ Singles Champion in
1969 received a CBE.
The expectation that Murray was
to receive a knighthood whilst Jones has only just now received a CBE (largely
in recognition of her work in tennis administration), indicates the persistent
and irrational sexism that pervades our perception of sport in general. Tennis
is now one of the most egalitarian sports in terms of pay, but we still seem to
treat female players with less regard.
Whilst one may enjoy in a purely emotive way one
gender’s game more than the other’s (perhaps enjoying the higher speed that the
Men’s game is played at, for instance), it is ridiculous to treat the
achievements of female players any less. Murray will eventually get his
knighthood. He deserves it, but if that is so then Jones and Virginia Wade (the
last female winner of Wimbledon, who currently has an OBE) should be Dames.
