Revising history

First of all, thanks to everyone for their best wishes and supportive comments. Mrs Stan remain very unwell, but is making progress albeit slowly. Sometimes it's two steps forward and one step back - sometimes it's one step forward and two back - but there are occasional glimpses of the woman I married starting to show through. It's been particularly hard on the kids though - it can't have helped that this happened while they were on summer holidays - but they are coping well under the circumstances.

However, rather than dwell on the problems of the Stan household, I'd rather talk about something which is currently happening in Britain. To be honest, I've been rather surprised by it as the sort of thing that is currently taking place is more often put off until a more .... appropriate time. I'm talking about the progressives habit of rewriting history.

Progressives hate Britain. They hate England even more, but essentially they hate anything to do with our country which is not of their making or choosing - and that means anything that happened before progressivism took its death grip on our nations throat - i.e. anything before 1960, roughly speaking.

In particular they despise anything that is positive about Britain or British history. They'd like you to think that everything pre-progressivism was bad - health care was bad, education was bad, inequality was bad, social mobility was bad and so on. Unfortunately for progressives, historical evidence often disputes their depiction of pre-progressive Britain - so what they do is rewrite history to change that view.

It's not that hard to do. All you have to do is wait until everyone who might possibly remember what life was like in the past is dead then get someone to write a book telling the "true" story of the bad old days before we had social liberalism. These books are often based on second or third hand anecdotal evidence - i.e. the thoughts and opinions not of people who were there at the time, but people who knew people who were there at the time - and then published as non-fiction.

As I said, this is easy to do when those who were really there are dead - and even easier if they are long since dead - but it is a little trickier if there are still some who are still alive. Which is why I was surprised last week to find that the task of rewriting the history of WW2 is already in progress - with particular emphasis on transforming the crucial and decisive Battle of Britain into a "folk myth".

Robin Hood is a folk myth. There is no evidence to suggest he ever existed let alone did the things he was supposed to have done - but the Battle of Britain was not only a real event it was a real event captured on film and photograph and which those who were there at the time still remember. Even my mother recalls the time a "Spitfire" downed a "Messerschmidt" near Slough (they may not have been a Spitfire and a Messerschmidt, but to a very young girl every British fighter plane was a Spitfire and every German aeroplane was a Messerschmidt).

Incidentally, even popular folk myths are not immune from progressive revisionism. In its last incarnation on television, Robin Hood was depicted using a Saracen bow rather than the traditional English longbow with the explanation that it was "more powerful". It wasn't. The English longbow was the last word in weaponry back in those days as the French knights of Agincourt would testify (Agincourt itself being subjected to revisionism in recent years). The only advantage of the Saracen bow was that it was easier to use while mounted on a horse due to its shorter length - but there wasn't a chance in hell that someone like Robin Hood would have used one in preference to the English longbow. It would be like a sniper today giving up his telescopic sight equipped long range rifle in preference for a handgun.

Anyway, over the last week I heard and saw various attempts to suggest that the Battle of Britain was neither crucial or decisive or even particularly important in the grand scheme of things that was World War 2 - and the cheerleader of this revisionism was the dear old BBC. Unfortunately for Auntie and the rest of the progressive scum who want to do this country down, there are still sufficient men and women around who were not only alive at the time, but actually took an active part in defending this nation from Nazi tyranny.

This won't stop the progressives, though. They planted the seeds of doubt and over the coming years they will feed and water them. It is the intention of progressives to destroy the Battle of Britain as an icon of our history - it will no doubt be replaced by something more acceptable to the progressive mind set. I don't know what that will be, but it will almost certainly involve women, ethnic minorities or homosexuals. By the time of the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Britain it will be a celebration of the part played in victory over Nazism by transgendered Moslem immigrants.