Opinion

Past Indiscretions

Around 1807 the American inventor Eli Whitney patented his ‘Cotton ‘Gin’ (short for engine), a machine for cleaning the seeds from cotton plants. His device transformed the speed of harvesting and soon made cotton a vastly more profitable crop in the Deep South of the USA, where tobacco had previously ruled. The success of the Cotton ‘Gin rapidly enriched plantation owners and consequently embedded the demand for slave labour in the rejuvenated economy of the southern states. Conflict with the abolitionist north thus became inevitable. Whitney later went bust from the litigation costs of fighting illegal copies of his machine and was forced to take on a contract to manufacture muskets for the US government. His efficient methods of production revolutionised the arms industry and, forty years after his death, helped the Union side to victory in a civil war he had unwittingly helped to start. History’s often bizarre circularity. A similar paradox surrounds Alfred Nobel. The offspring of a Swedish family who had made their fortune in weaponry, (what is it with these people?), young Alfred was endearingly fixated with explosives. In 1867 he patented ‘dynamite’, (I love that he originally intended to call it “Nobel’s Safety Powder”). Disappointed with its limited destructive power, our hero pushed on and eventually developed a sort of lethal Play-Doh, which he named ‘Gelignite’. What a guy. However, when a French newspaper mistakenly printed his obituary, describing him as “the merchant of death”, Alfred was so shocked at realising how he would be remembered (really?) that he instead devoted his fortune to establishing the Nobel Prize - including the one for peace - in order to secure for himself a more respectable legacy. I can’t top Alan Bennet’s description of history being “just one (expletive) thing after another'” but I greatly enjoy these quirky facts; it’s also sobering to note how everything we know as “The Past'” was so close to being something else entirely. The labyrinthine course of history is no more or less than an unremitting cause-andeffect chain of consequences, mostly unforeseen and almost always unintended. For instance, if Napoleon Bonaparte had been born just 15 months earlier, he would have been Italian – how would that have changed European history? Or the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo which ignited the cataclysmic First World War but which only occurred because his driver took a wrong turn. The most alarming ‘what-if’ of them all is unquestionably Russian submarine officer Vasili Arkhipov prevailing in an argument with his captain beneath the waters of Cuba in October 1962. Just reading about it can make you sweat. All very interesting, of course, but tragically, history, although always fascinating, has an evil twin. It comprises the myths and falsehoods wrongly believed by so many to be true, the implanted false beliefs about the past. Consider: just six months before the 2016 EU referendum in Britain, an Ipsos MORI poll found that only around 1% of the British public thought of Europe as an important issue, a figure little changed during the previous decade. That’s one per cent. Yet a matter of weeks later, millions had become convinced the EU lay at the root of the country’s problems and that leaving it was the panacea to all ills. Whatever your feelings about Brexit, that is an astonishing reversal. How did it happen? An onslaught of anti-EU propaganda in the British media certainly contributed, but judicious use was also made of the two touchstones of British history – its days of empire and the Second World War. Such is the emotional clout of these two topics that much of the Brexit debate took place against this backdrop: that Britain had once been a global superpower (its empire) yet somehow simultaneously the plucky underdog (WW2). With highly selective portrayals of both, little mention was made of the incalculable human misery which largely financed the former or the countless other nationalities who fought alongside Britain during the latter. Of course, it worked and we’re out. History, as they say, is written by the winners, (apart from in 1066, obviously, when it was knitted). But basing gargantuan decisions on what someone urges us to believe about the past is perilous without examining who is doing the urging and, crucially, why. It’s an increasingly vital lesson every country must learn. In his dystopian novel ‘1984’, written more than seventy years ago, George Orwell warned: "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." As Mr Eli Whitney might have said, it’s about time we cottoned on.

Brian White lives in south Indre with his wife, too many moles and not enough guitars

It comprises the myths and falsehoods wrongly believed by so many to be true