Rewriting history?

One of my favourite hobby horses is the teaching of history in English schools; frankly it’s risible, quite apart from the fact that it is so blatantly twisted against anything English, or for that matter, "British". The state seems to believe that our history is so shameful we should not teach it to our children and some sort of multicultural mishmash should be put in its stead so our kids can be taught about everyone else's history and how noble and good they were as they struggled to overcome our evil doings.

The political classes obviously have a serious problem. They cannot see the facts for the ideology they wish to push. They refuse to recognise that, until well into the 19th Century British subjects were being regularly seized and enslaved by the pirates who operated freely under the flag of Islam from North Africa. Anybody ever wonder why the French attacked Algeria and annexed it? No, thought not, mainly it was to stop the raiding of the coast of the South of France and the disruption of trade in the Mediterranean originating from the various Bey's of this that and the next controlling the coasts of Algiers, Tunisia, Libya and the rest. In 1836 a British Fleet assisted in an assault on Algiers for just that reason, Algiers based raiders had seized one too many merchant ships under British Flag.

OK, so we turned the trans Atlantic slave trade into a factory style process - that is one of the features of the English, usually slow to get off the starting block on anything, we simply don't know when to stop. Ask the residents of Hamburg, Dresden or one or two other German cities. Take a look at the same morons now in charge of education and you will see the same thing at work. They have spent so long campaigning for their "cause" that they can't see it has gone far enough and that it should now come to a gentle halt and consolidate what they have - not strive for more.

However, one of the more stupid assertions made by the "beat Britain for its slave trade" is that the Army or the Navy was engaged in capturing slaves in West Africa. If these morons knew their history instead of their prejudice they would know that the slaves were rounded up by locals who sold them to the Arab traders to their North as well. It was the Royal Navy and the Army that put a stop to the tribal wars that fuelled this from 1820 onwards, not an exercise in getting more slaves but in bringing peace to a region that had never had it! On the East Coast of Africa the slave trade continued in Arab Dhows well into the 20th Century, although, again, it was the Royal Navy that was hard at work to suppress it. Trouble was, being the other side of Africa and not affecting British shipping or people (except occasionally!) it was of little interest to the same bunch of wankers who now want our history suppressed. There is still slavery practised in the Islamic states, but you won't find that in any "multi-cultural" history.

It does worry me a lot that even today most of our kids either know so little of what really happened, or get their history directly from movies (Braveheart anyone) As a nation we can't really understand who we are until we know how we got here. This also goes right back to the claiming of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights as British, because they aren't, they're English and have nothing to do with Britain as a whole despite the ludicrous claims of our current Prime Minister.