52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School

by James Felton

Imagine if you would that Eastenders gets desperate for ratings and introduces a character based on Hitler. Now imagine he gets his own major story arc where he conks his head (clumsy Hitler!) and gets a specific type of soap-amnesia where he can remember only the good stuff he’s done. He spends the whole week-run wondering why people in the Queen Vic are calling him a cunt and explaining to whoever is kicking the shit out of him at the time ‘BUT I’M A GOOD GUY – I DON’T EVEN EAT MEAT’ whilst Ian Beale cleans blood off his shoe. Anyway, amnesia Hitler is basically us Brits. Over the last few years, ranging anywhere from three to fifty, there’s been a trend of politicians and media and people on the street taking credit for the good bits we’ve done in history and conveniently forgetting about all the atrocities. Politicians who weren’t even close to being loaded into their fathers’ penises yet, let alone being fired into their mums, somehow manage to use the pronoun ‘we’ when talking about defeating Hitler. And yet suddenly we go all ‘we aren’t responsible for what our ancestors did’ when reminded about one of our many massacres. In short, you can either be responsible for what our ancestors did or you can’t. You can’t just pick out the good bits and say ‘we did that bit’. We’ve made some very weird decisions lately and you could say that our selective memory of history and our idealised vision of our own place in the world is at least in part to blame. We’re soap-amnesia H...