My friend Liam has an excellent new blog called the Roe Valley Socialist. A common topic for the moment is nationalism, which he tackles again here. His point on nationalist exploitation on history is well supported, with an example which I think is worthy of further consideration being this. This matter has been on my mind quite a bit lately.

As an admirer of the Anglo-Saxons it was with some disgust that I came to discover that Nick Griffin has Alfred the Great to be his “favourite historical person”, despite him being a character who spent most of his life battling his fellow Northern Europeans. I suppose you could argue that Alfred was a fine Christian king fending off foul pagans, but given that Griffin’s favourite book was Atlas Shrugged (a text that ends in a “Speech” by the enigmatic protagonist John Galt that lasts for multiple hours and lambasts religion fiercely for encouraging the dreaded Objectivist vice of altruism) that would be rather curious. (Indeed, there’s nothing much about Griffin being a Rand fan that isn’t curious, seeing as she was an anti-racist, anti-theist immigrant who would be deemed a Jew by the Nuremburg laws. I suppose that they share absolutism & virulent anti-socialism, but the former would surely convince each to despise the other despite the latter. There is black & there is white, there is dark & there is light & and there is nothing, nothing in between, after all…)

That aside, the perversion of the past gets worse: you can read the BNP version of early pre-British history here. I especially like the part where they claim that England was founded as a “Nation”, instead of a kingdom. Additionally, they mistake a gafol for a geld, but I suppose that they can be forgiven since near enough everyone does.

But what galls me most about this account is that this flawed version of history being wielded by racist nationalists is most likely the first that the average reader of the website will have encountered. Ignorance of the early history of England is endemic throughout the land: most in this country can not name its first king. I’m no chauvinist, I’m not even any kind of patriot, but I don’t find the argument that this doesn’t matter persuasive. The thought of this account of our history being the first and most likely only one that people encounter is deeply worrying, and that this a twisted education advances the nationalist cause troubles me deeply. This is the most popular political party’s website in the country, according to Alexa. There is a distinct possibility that it is the most common source for information on this era. Which means that this page will both misinform the public & further their agenda.

As Liam puts it:

History, or more precisely a selective reading of history, is thus used by nationalists in all parts of the world to give justification for their desire for states that are congruent with their own conception of the ‘nation’. The ‘nation’ is viewed, almost always genuinely although I would argue wrongly, as perennial and ever-existing. The struggle for a nation-state is seen as the ‘rebirth’ or ‘reawakening’ of the sleeping consciousness of historic nations that have been denied their natural place by the usurpation of foreign and malign influences.

But a proper grounding in history demonstrates the absurdity of this: Alfred was one king amongst many in England. The Vikings did not introduce a threat to unity, they were simply a novel example of it: the English kingdoms were perfectly content warring amongst themselves for centuries before their arrival. It was because they were weakened from persistent conflict in which they were the losers that the East Anglians were so easily conquered by the Vikings. The notion that it was a “tradition for these major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to take turns in designating a supreme king, or Bretwalda (Britain Wielder), to serve for a while as overlord of Anglo-Saxon Britain” rather than supremacy being a matter of overpowering the local kingdoms via force, upon the battlefield is a nonsense. The closest Nick Griffin has ever come to acting in the traditional manner of the Anglo Saxons was during his nasty spat with the Yorkshire column of his own party, during which that region of the country was apparently one it would have been unsafe for him to step foot in. If he wanted to really get in touch with the Old English he should have donned armour, taken up a sword and claimed Northumbria for the West Saxons.

Even someone as lightly educated (A level standard) in early (pre-)English history as myself can see through the unconvincing sham artifice of the BNP’s edifice of history. But most have far less. Indeed, the OCR exam board is doing its best to ensure that when it comes to pre-1066 history nobody gets anything at all. And as ever, ignorance is something which nationalists are both capable of and all too willing to exploit. Education is vital to salting the ground which such ideologies can flourish. And we should not imagine that there is any era which they are incapable of harnessing for their malign purposes.