Re: Self-delusions of empire (Counterpunch)
How British schoolkids are taught history is not my business, but I would regard your article as the kettle calling the pot black. You engage in the very same “presentism” as that for which you criticise, inter alia, Niall Ferguson. The only difference is that you seek to hijack history in support of a different modern-day political proposition. Presentism is an overwhelmingly American phenomenon (it hardly exists at all in Ireland or continental Europe, for example, and Ferguson is almost unique in Britain) and thus, people like yourself or Ferguson are essentially out of step with both Britain and the rest of Europe. Both of you have turned yourselves into the servile satraps of the American Empire. You both suck up to the ultra-narrow and sectarian Americans and merely parrot their propaganda line, which you serve up as “history”. The only difference between you is which narrow-minded American sect you suck up to.
Nobody supports absolute monarchy , feudalism , anti-Catholicism , burning witches etc. The political arguments start really with the beginning of slavery and the start of Empire and the subsequent periods. particularly the 19th century . The insatiable pathological avarice motivating the system then is still very much here today in modulated forms and it is those connections which are still ‘dangerously political” to the modern Whig mind.
Demonisation of the unions would have been far harder in the 1970’s (whatever their genuine mistakes) if there had been a stronger cultural understanding of how workers had been treated pre-war , for instance. King and Queens history of the UK for me is not a problem as long as it is aupplemented by a UK equivalent of Howard Zinns A peoples History
Blog on Current Affairs 
Re: Self-delusions of empire (Counterpunch)
How British schoolkids are taught history is not my business, but I would regard your article as the kettle calling the pot black. You engage in the very same “presentism” as that for which you criticise, inter alia, Niall Ferguson. The only difference is that you seek to hijack history in support of a different modern-day political proposition. Presentism is an overwhelmingly American phenomenon (it hardly exists at all in Ireland or continental Europe, for example, and Ferguson is almost unique in Britain) and thus, people like yourself or Ferguson are essentially out of step with both Britain and the rest of Europe. Both of you have turned yourselves into the servile satraps of the American Empire. You both suck up to the ultra-narrow and sectarian Americans and merely parrot their propaganda line, which you serve up as “history”. The only difference between you is which narrow-minded American sect you suck up to.
Nobody supports absolute monarchy , feudalism , anti-Catholicism , burning witches etc. The political arguments start really with the beginning of slavery and the start of Empire and the subsequent periods. particularly the 19th century . The insatiable pathological avarice motivating the system then is still very much here today in modulated forms and it is those connections which are still ‘dangerously political” to the modern Whig mind.
Demonisation of the unions would have been far harder in the 1970’s (whatever their genuine mistakes) if there had been a stronger cultural understanding of how workers had been treated pre-war , for instance. King and Queens history of the UK for me is not a problem as long as it is aupplemented by a UK equivalent of Howard Zinns A peoples History