According to a recent survey, pride in British history is at an all-time low, especially among 18 to 24 year-olds.
This worrying trend doesn’t surprise me. Indeed, a revealing and sadly not uncommon conversation I had with a Year 10 class last term goes some way to explaining it. They asked me what I thought about the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles. “Should they be sent back to Greece?” one asked. Initially surprised by an unexpected foray into current affairs, I demurred from committing to a position, concerned that the wrong answer could land me in hot water with my woke colleagues, and aware of my professional obligation to remain neutral.
My pupils’ awareness of such an important issue was encouraging, but a closer examination exposed a troubling ignorance. Every student willing to express an opinion, many with a worrying degree of certitude, said that the marbles should be returned because the “British stole them”. You must also return the Benin Bronzes for the same reason, they collectively opined.
Their use of the words “British” and “you” to address the country responsible for these so-called injustices was striking. I was standing in front of a group of mainly Asian-Brits (I work in a diverse school with a large percentage of Muslim students) who do not feel British. The week before, pupils in the same class decried the fact that we don’t have enough Muslim history on the curriculum. “It’s all about blacks and whites,” they said.
But where are they picking up this one-sided take on the Elgin Marbles and Benin Bronzes, facilitating their estrangement from their home country? Well, notwithstanding the suspicion that ignorant and ideologically driven parents are influencing their kids, anti-British disinformation is everywhere. It is therefore no surprise that they are absorbing a simple, dualistic, good-versus-evil interpretation of history disseminated by many of our self-loathing cultural institutions.
Just look at the BBC’s recent coverage of the spat between Rishi Sunak and the Greek Prime Minister. The corporation has taken to referring to the marbles as the Parthenon Marbles rather than the Elgin Marbles – a transparent, politically motivated nod to the Guardian line (remember, the most-read newspaper in BBC studios) that they belong in Greece.
When it comes to the Benin Bronzes, moreover, the Charity Commission has also drunk the Guardian Kool-Aid, concurring with the paper’s misleading claim that “they [the bronzes] were looted in 1897, when British forces sacked the Benin kingdom, in modern-day Nigeria, burning down the royal palace, exiling the Oba and seizing all royal treasures”. Indeed, in a statement, the commission said that the University of Cambridge is “under a moral obligation” to return the artefacts. It’s amazing that such a little-read newspaper has such prodigious cultural reach.
However, despite the self-loathing milieu that presents Britain as uniquely evil and refuses to consider the context in which the acquisition of these treasures took place – providing much-needed nuance and objectivity – their previous teacher is perhaps most to blame for feeding them misinformation. And she’s no exception, believe me.
She forced the pupils to write to the University of Cambridge, urging the rector to hand the Benin Bronzes back to the Nigerian Government.
In such circumstances, I decided to provide some much-needed balance. Handing back the Bronzes is not quite as straightforward as it first appears. First, their acquisition was not a simple case of colonial theft. According to the historian Andrew Roberts, the expedition involved was in response to the massacre of a peaceful British delegation. The Oba (King) of Benin was a violent, slave-holding monarch who often raided his neighbours to enslave their inhabitants. Furthermore, when the British arrived in Benin, they “found hundreds of dead and dying slaves, some beheaded, crucified or disembowelled”. The expedition saved lives and liberated many of the slaves. It also led to the Oba’s exile and the acquisition of the Bronzes, many soaked in the blood of the sacrificed slaves.
Sending the Bronzes back is understandably opposed by the descendants of those enslaved by the Oba – their ancestors, after all, paid in blood for the purchase of the bronze used to make the sculptures. They do not want the descendants of slave-holders – particularly the current Oba (who’s been promised restitution by the Nigerian Government) – to benefit from the suffering of their ancestors. They want them to be kept in Cambridge and elsewhere.
They had clearly not heard this part of the story before writing their letters.
The acquisition of the Elgin Marbles also deserves some context. They were not ‘stolen’ by the Earl of Elgin, as claimed. The British Ambassador to Constantinople legally purchased them from the Ottoman authorities in Greece. Furthermore, Elgin saved the marbles from probable destruction. The Parthenon was being used as an ammunition dump, had been badly damaged by explosions and was in the process of being “cannibalised by Turkish dragomen selling off bits as souvenirs to tourists”. Without Elgin they could and probably would have been lost for ever.
Why was my predecessor so reluctant to explore these fascinating complexities? Did she not have time to research them? Is she so ideologically wedded to postcolonialism that she deliberately ignored them? Or has she been so completely brainwashed by the predominance of anti-British propaganda that she had lost the ability to seek and recognise nuance?
Whatever the reason (and, for what it’s worth, I suspect the latter) it’s had a deleterious impact on my pupils. They are full of resentment and anti-British sentiment. More worrying, however, is the fact that my school is no exception. Brainwashed teachers are brainwashing our children. No wonder pride in British history has plummeted to a record low.
Joe Baron is the pseudonym of a history teacher at a London secondary school.
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Well done to Joe Baron for telling his students the whole story behind these historical artefacts that have been so meticulously restored and protected for posterity by British museums.
As someone said, it’s as if Western civilization is floating in a sea of evil, completely surrounded and attacked by the entire Third World, motivated by nothing more than envy.
As for the sheer hatred of everything British, and especially English, now openly displayed by Third World immigrants, we should emulate the American slogan printed on their baseball caps:
“America: Love It or Leave It!”
Let’s have T-shirts, caps and stickers printed with “Great Britain: Love It or Leave It!”
Or “England: Love It or Leave It!”
“England – Love it or Leave it” sounds good to me.
Me, too! It’s amazing how many MILLIONS OF PEOPLE hate England and the English, but CHOOSE to live in England, even pay huge sums of money to get here, whining and complaining the whole time.
The author knows first hand;
I was standing in front of a group of mainly Asian-Brits (I work in a diverse school with a large percentage of Muslim students) who do not feel British. The week before, pupils in the same class decried the fact that we don’t have enough Muslim history on the curriculum. “It’s all about blacks and whites,” they said.
When you demonise the greatness of our history, our culture, our legacy and our achievements, including our Christian-Romano-Saxon-Norman roots, the country is lost. Add in open borders and the hordes of Muslims and Africans it is clear that we are to be finished off and conquered. As simple as that.
“I was standing in front of a . . . who do not feel British.”
Because they’re not British.
Haha! Luckily I don’t have to teach History, but I do have to make sixth form students aware of ‘British Values’ (Democracy, Rule of Law, Mutual tolerance and respect and the other one…Liberty!). Obviously we could argue all night about whether any of these apply to Britain anyway, but educational establishments are under an obligation to promote these values. Nevertheless, when first introduced to our college, responses from teachers included ‘do we have to call them ‘British’ values – that is divisive’ ‘what about students who do not identify as British’ etc.
And the rest of us are no longer proud to be British.
And our kids are being taught there is nothing to be proud of.
It is all part of destabilisation of the country. The destruction of social cohesion from within each person’s mind – destroying any semblance of belonging to a nation and an identity and values.
To borrow the question from Jordan Peterson (although he was talking about Canada): if all of Britain’s past is shameful, if we have nothing to be proud of, if all of our history is just a series of despicable acts – what keeps us together then?
In that case, if this country was attacked – what would be there to fight for?
And this, indirectly, also leads to another question that the “conservative” party is unable to answer: what is there to conserve?
At some critical point these questions will surface in a very drastic way.
“Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement.”
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/02/02/how-a-generation-lost-its-common-culture/
Nicely written diatribe which makes for a nice read. But it’s really little more than the ages-old complaint about “the youth of today”. My father is a retired history teacher who’s almost completely ignorant of important events in German history of a mere hundred years ago like the Battle of Verdun and doesn’t even want to know anything about beyond “some people were fighting some other people and it was all completely senseless as nothing came of it.” That’s the officially proposed system story and he’s happy with it. And he’s certainly no longer in his twenties (mid eighties, actually). I could answer some of the questions in the 3rd and 4th paragraph but most of them only very cursorily and many not at all. And I have quite of a private interest in history.
Patrick Deneen seems to be expecting a bit much from his pupils.
Thank you Ian a good article. Loyalty seems to be educated out of pupils nowadays.
A powerful article, well worth reading!
Here’s 5mins of Rafe Heydel-Mankoo talking sense, as usual. He’s right, of course. ”Ideological subversion”, basically Marxism, is what we’re seeing and experiencing all around us;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBjV6PYg64o&t=293s
More truth bombs here as to why many from the Muslim culture are just not compatible with our Western values.
Some cold hard truths regarding the cultural problems in the UK.
”It is believed 70% of Muslim women are unemployed vs 27% Christian women
55% of British Pakistanis are married to some sort of relative
Between 2007-2011 , 37% British Pakistani marriages in Bradford were to 1st cousins
Islamist terrorism is the most significant terrorist threat to the UK according to MI5
It shouldn’t be considered Islamophobic or racist to discuss these matters especially when it comes to babies. A child’s likelihood of having a birthing defect increases massively when they come from cousins. It is so unfair on the children & something must be done.
We must not speak be afraid to speak about these issues. The lack of integration into British culture from some communities is destroying this country.”
https://x.com/SunilSharmaUK/status/1831593256133575116
I don’t know just how prevalent ‘cousin lovin’ is in the Pakistani community, or how many disabled kids this results in. Why do Pakistanis in particular do this? It’s totally gross and highly unethical. I guess it’ll never be made illegal though because ”cultural differences”. Didn’t they basically do the same with the Pakistani rape gangs? Give them carte blanche to carry on doing their depraved thing and to hell with the consequences?
Here’s Dr Renee Hoenderkamp’s comment;
”Sunil I did some work on this 10 years ago after seeing the resulting cousin marriage children in hospital for years at great cost to the NHS and awful life quality for the children. I was speaking to MP’s about law changes and eventually they decided that it was too politically sensitive. So those kids carry on being born. The NHS often the full time carer whilst the parents just keep on trying.”
The seriously crude brass artefacts created by the Benin stone-age slavers and human sacrificiers still ought to be molten down to turn them into something useful, say, door handles. If there are actually people on this planet who want to have them, let them collect them at some agreed upon date provided they’re willing to pay for the cost of keeping them for this long.
Telling pupils that Lord Elgin bought these statues at a bargain price from foreign invaders who had conquered and colonized present-day Greece about 350 years earlier is possibly not the best of all stories, although at least one which can be told in response to outright ridiculous claims from spokespeople of the government of present-day Turkey who complain about “UK colonialists” having removed them illegally (from Wikipedia). Such people should ‘politely’ be asked to return to central Asia where their ancestors originally came from and please return all the Greek territory they’re still occupying today to Greece immediately.
The sin consists in not pointing out the usefulness of the British model to the rest of the world. Literature, language, law, industrial technology. Obviously it wasnt entirely benevolent but it wasn’t a complete scam either. Now the Anglo-American model is completely Satanic and as with all forces of this kind is rapidly sailing towards self-defeat in a completely unconscious manner. And then of coure you have the uber-narrative of managed decline which the real power brokers watch and steer carefully. If you thought it was bad in 1850 then at least understand that the evil that was inflicted then in faraway places has been brought back home to the natives.
“I was standing in front of a group of mainly Asian-Brits (I work in a diverse school with a large percentage of Muslim students) who do not feel British”. The Great Replacement at work.
I don’t wish to sound racist because I’m surprisingly not, I don’t have any major problem with black brits.
But Muslims are a problem. That should be obvious yo anybody. It’s not a question of skin colour, or the smell of curry, but they hate us, and we would do well to return the compliment.
It has been this way for a while. I went to school in the 1980s and it was all about the horrors of the first world war, how Nazis are bad, how we are ruining the planet, liberation theology in Latin America, nascent environmentalism. It doesn’t really matter. You might get served a platter of left wing crap or right wing crap. The point is that somewhere in this attempted process you were roused from your intellectual slumbers or you weren’t. If you weren’t then you didn’t really care to begin with.
There’s definitely something a foot, but yo what end ?
Thank I hadn’t realised the nuances behind these stories. I was also ignorant of the fact that the Elgin Marbles had actually been legitimately purchased. So thank you again for enhancing my knowledge.
Why history teachers, not just the young but some old ones too, never mention the really evil empire, the Ottomans?
Until 1908, the Ottoman had been responsible for up to 90% of slavery in Europe and the Middle East for 600 years, raping and plundering mainly Middle European and East European countries. Capturing and selling the white slaves to those in the Middle East and Africa who wanted predominantly white slaves. Pupils of European countries were taught how the Turks would areal young men to turn them into fanatical islamist Janissaries and young women for the Sultan’s harem.
Well done for mentioning White Slavery, especially the horrific Ottoman demand for “Child Tribute”, called “Devshirme”, in which the Ottoman armies would arrive in Slavic villages and demand the prettiest little blonde girls and the strongest little blond boys to be dragged away as sex slaves to the Sultan. Blond children were preferred, as Mohammed had promised to give his followers “Yellow Women”, as they were called, and “Boys Like Pearls”.
It was children, little boys and girls, not adults, who were forced into the Sultan’s harem or forcibly circumcised, some also castrated to serve as harem guards, or turned into Janissaries. All were raped and sodomized as “war captives”, sanctioned by Islam. That’s where the word “Slave” comes from: “Slav”.
This went on for 300 years, and this is why the Christian Serbs fought so fiercely against the Muslims, even to this day.
BECAUSE THEY REMEMBER.
Much obliged, and delighted that there are still a few free thinkers in the UK.