History matters - or does it?

I’m reading about a drive to get people to realise that history matters.

Something that I would support. But only if I could be assured whose version of history is accepted. Even before the revisionists and apologists, there is more than one version of the same set of facts. Go to Waterloo (the battlefield – not the railway station) and it becomes clear that the idea that the forces under Wellington were not the winners. Seems the guy Napoleon was. Maybe it has to do with the majority of visitors being French who are more likely to buy the ghastly figurines of the man checking his wallet than of Old Hook Nose.

Still on the theme of revision of military matters, we have it nicely illustrated in the blog of An Englishman’s Castle.  As someone who had a service involvement that exposed me to the more brutal and licentious side of soldiering, I was always struck by how close Kipling got to matters military. He had it right. I cared not about his place in the events of the time and did not see him as some apologist or public relations man. Seems that I should have. He wrote about what went on. He did not use his access to give him a right to judge or condemn that, as a civilian, he did not have.

So, on the strength of just a few mouse clicks, I am less enamoured of this ‘history matters’. Lurking in the background are my reservations on the drive to grant blanket pardons on all those soldiers shot at dawn during the first World War. Now that Prescott has claimed to be interested in William Wilberforce, where will the story of slavery end?

Yes. I’m all for paying attention to history. But, it is going to be history as I learned at my mother’s knee and none of this new-fangled stuff.