<
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/28/slavery-and-the-guardian-the-ties-that-bind-us>
"If you know how a trick is done, if you have peered through the smoke and
looked past the mirrors, if you have figured out how the illusion is
accomplished, surely you can no longer be fooled by it? Surely?
The smoke-and-mirrors trick I thought I had seen through sits at the centre of
British history, how it is generally taught and understood. Like all the best
illusions it draws your eye in one direction, away from the details the
illusionist does not want you to see. It is carefully designed to frame and
delineate our understanding of the past by focusing our attention away from
certain linkages and connections.
The illusion in question works like this: it marginalises the histories of
slavery and empire, corralling them into separate annexes. It creates firewalls
that neatly compartmentalise history, rendering almost invisible the great
flows of money, raw materials, people and ideas that moved, back and forth,
between distant plantations on colonial frontiers and the imperial mother
country. What happened in those colonies is either ignored or dismissed as
insignificant, of interest perhaps only to a few minority communities or
handfuls of historical specialists, with no broader importance.
It conceals the history of slavery and the slave trade behind a distorted and
exaggerated memorialisation of abolition and a select number of the leading
male abolitionists. It presents the Industrial Revolution as a phenomenon that
sprang whole and complete from native British soil, but is suspiciously silent
about the source of much of the capital that funded it and equally mute as to
where certain key industrial raw materials came from and who produced them.
The trick was constructed over centuries by politicians, lobbyists and
journalists who sought to create a highly romanticised version of our national
story. They were assisted in this task by generations of historians who were
equally determined to construct British history around the biographies of
“great men” whose achievements, they believed, proved the nation’s supposed
exceptionalism. The illusion is effective because we are all subconsciously
schooled in it. It has long shaped the history delivered to us at school and,
as we are not taught of the existence of the redacted and missing chapters, we
have no reason to go in search of them. This approach to the past is so
powerful that it is capable – as I recently discovered – of triggering a form
of cognitive dissonance."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
