Just come across this from this week’s Guardian: Simon Jenkins on the recent flap about whether Churchill was a hero or a rotter.
Much of it is very predictable, but in making the (stating the bleeding) obvious point that heroes v. villains history is generally juvenile, the writer throws in some offensive nonsense of his own. First, we have the use of rape as a metaphorical idea – here, a particular presentation of the past amounts to the ‘rape’ of history. Is this: (a) tasteless; (b) stupid; (c) inappropriate; (d) a pathetic attempt to intensify his comments; (e) all of the above? In doing this, he puts himself right down there with that great bard, Sting, in his epic work De Doo Doo Doo (the one about being raped by words … enough said).
And then there’s the throwaway insult to an entire people, in discussing what he sees as the exaggeration of Churchill’s sins in relation to Tonypandy, ‘In Wales, any myth is history if the English are involved.’ Jenkins has, I believe, some Welsh heritage. There is, however, no trace of sympathy with his semi-compatriots in these cheap words of DARVO sneering. Very poor and very disappointing that the Guardian let this pass. But – note – I am not even vaguely tempted to try and suggest that being wrong, and insulting, is in any way like rape, just to try and make myself look – what – edgy? macho? a proper writer?
Apparently, he has been writing a history of Europe, but does not think we should ‘rewri[te] old feuds’ in Britain (Scots, Welsh and Irish are all implicated here – but I am sure we could bring in some moaning and aggrieved former colonies). This, of course means that we stick with existing versions of events, which are, needless to say, utterly value-neutral. So take that pretty much all historians of the last several decades, and kneel before the deep thinking of S. Jenkins.