END EXCEPTIONALISM
AFTER posting a comment on social media in support of the EU, I was met with the old chestnut of “They’d all be speaking German if it wasn’t for us”.
The belief some have, that we won the war almost single-handedly, isn’t the issue I want to take up here. I want to concentrate on the “speaking German” argument .
I find it very ironic that the people who are so very proud of the fact that “we” prevented countries from being invaded and having to speak the language of the invader are equally proud that we invaded countries and forced them to speak English.
We have a great deal in our history to be immensely proud of, but our “glorious” empire isn’t one of them.
It’s high time we started teaching a “warts and all” history to tackle the English exceptionalism that our history lessons have nurtured and the Leave campaign exploited. We gained an empire for the simple reason that we had guns and they didn’t. Some argue that we brought them
“civilisation”. We did anything but.
What people fail to realise is that not all people are materialistic. The Australian Aborigines treated the land as sacred. They wouldn’t take anything from it that couldn’t be replaced naturally, hence gold and precious stones had no value to them. Captain Cook remarked that they were the most contented people he’d ever met. What we did was tantamount to grave robbing.
Had we all lived our lives as they did, we’d have no pollution or climate crisis – and we’d be happy. Yes, we wouldn’t have much in the way of possessions but possessions shouldn’t be important in the big scheme of things. The song line “You cannot own the land, the land owns you” is a powerful truth.
Similarly, the Cree Indians said : “When the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten and the last stream poisoned, you will realise that you cannot eat money.”
These people weren’t inferior, they just had different values. We could have learned a lot from them.
This “English Supremacy” was what fuelled the Brexit debate. Germany teaches a “warts and all” history so that they learn from their mistakes. It’s too late for us to learn that we’re not supreme enough to be able to “go it alone” but the sooner we accept that, the sooner we can sit at the EU table again and work on the problems that affect us all.
A less jingoistic approach to our history lessons would be a good start.
As an active pro-EU campaigner I’ve often been called a traitor. I’m a patriot, not a nationalist. The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does. We are in dire need of more patriots.