We all know that “history is written by the victors” – although a more literal translation would be that it’s “written by victorious scribblers” since it’s the academics who do the writing. As long as we relied on our memories, this wasn’t a problem.
But now that Google increasingly
makes our memory redundant, it is academic texts we unearth when we google. The
new gatekeepers are the academics. And
with that come new responsibilities for truth, neutrality and fairness for
which they are simply not equipped.
This was brought home to
me recently when I was trying to check my memory of events in the late 1960s
and 1970s when I was involved in initiatives
which swept across Scotland and had influences further afield. But as far as Google is concerned, these events
never took place. If you have the patience to search long enough, you will
find a few academic references to the events but they are generally schematic
and show little understanding – let alone interest – in the conditions of the
time.
“So what?” I can hear you say. It means basically that we are writing out of history the struggles of ordinary people. It’s only recently that social history started to be respectable – thanks to people such as David Kynaston although Ralph Samuel was an important forerunner
Life is lived in our localities. But the life has been sucked
out of our municipal institutions by a process of power grabs over the past
half century. Time was when people felt they had some control over their lives
but a fixation on central systems of power has been insidiously encouraged by
journalists and politicians alike.
A lot of lip-service is
paid to the need for decentralisation and “localism”. But it’s only –lip-service
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