In a recent article carried in the Daily Telegraph
entitled “ Historians need to have loved and lost to understand the past” the
right-wing Thatcherite historian David Starkey intimated that the best
historians are older as you need to have loved and lost to understand the past.
Starkey says “What I have done is used my own experience of mourning and joy,”
he said. “You take the dry facts of history, and with memories in your own
life, you realise how you should understand them.”
Starkey’ was reminiscing about the loss of his
long-term partner three years ago. Grief can do strange things to the mind. I
have lost my father recently, and the loss can lead you to reevaluate many
things; however, it did not change my understanding of history, nor has it lead
to a better understanding of the past. If you did not have that understanding
in the first place, then no amount of loss can compensate.
Starkey believes that loss can better understand
figures like King Henry VIII. Since the Tudor period is Starkey’s expertise and
not mine, I am not about to cross swords with a world-renowned historian on
that subject. I will leave that to others far more qualified what I will say is
that Starkey is no stranger to controversy and almost seems to thrive on the
oxygen of publicity brings.
There are many dangers with Starkey’s crude shotgun
approach to historical and political questions that could lead to a lack of
understanding of the real issues involved. Starkey is no stranger to
controversy. Many times Starkey’s political views have undermined his
evaluation of complex historical events.
It should be said that I am not against political
views shaping historical understanding, but when those views are the expression
of pure ideology, then we start to have problems. Starkey is not subtle about
his politics. He has been accused of being an “aggressive racist” and “sexist” following
this quote on a Newsnight programme “The whites have become black; a particular
sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the
fashion.”
The same historian went on to say that the
proto-fascist Tory politician Enoch Powell was correct when he warned in the
1960s that immigration would lead to civil unrest.
Starkey went on that working-class youth “have become
black,” taken over by a “black” culture that has “intruded in England,” which
is “why so many of us have this sense literally of a foreign country.” As one writer said “though Starkey characteristically
uses racial terms to denote the targets of his hatred, he is using the term
“black” to denounce all working-class youth”.[1]
While Starkey’s political bias is easily recognisable,
one question comes to mind why is such an extremely right-wing historian given
such a high profile? Starkey has presented numerous television history
programmes. He lectures at one of the most prestigious universities in the
world. I do not know of any left-wing historian given the same opportunities to
present their views to such a large audience
It has become comfortable for universities to
tolerate very conservative historians and allowed to express their right-wing
views with virtual impunity while any views representing a left-wing challenge
to the current status quo are marginalised or ostracised.
Universities play such an essential role in imparting
knowledge about the world we live it is little surprising that given the
dominance of an economic system hell-bent on putting profit before people it is
little wonder that universities have become little more than corporate
appendages.
This, of course, goes hand in hand with an academic
assault on Marxism. Young people cannot expect to acquire the necessary
knowledge from the capitalist media because it knows full well that experience will
be used for its overthrow.
But what about universities asks the Marxist writer
David North, “with their many learned professors? Unfortunately, the
intellectual environment has been for many decades deeply hostile to genuine
socialist theory and politics. Marxist theory—rooted in philosophical
materialism—was long ago banished from the major universities.
“Academic discourse is dominated by the Freudian
pseudo-science and idealist subjectivism of the Frankfurt School and the
irrationalist gibberish of post-modernism. Professors inform their students
that the “Grand Narrative” of Marxism is without relevance in the modern world.
What they mean is that the materialist conception of history, which established
the central and decisive revolutionary role of the working class in a capitalist
society, cannot and should not be the basis of leftwing politics”.[2]
This situation cannot last forever. One small step is
to challenge at every level the right-wing rantings of professional right-wing
historians at every opportunity.
