It suits a lot of people’s private agendas to claim that the British Empire was an evil one. But was it? When I went to work in India I was confronted by a six foot, broad shouldered American in a sari who bellowed: ” You Briddish ought to be ashamed of what you did in India, cutting off the thumbs of all the weavers in Madras to protect your Lanka Shire cotton industry!” Naturally horrified I looked into the alleged crime.
I hope readers won’t be surprised to find it was nonsense, a canard put about by the Indian Congress party to win an election. But the point of this Post is to warn readers to be very careful before acting or voting on the basis of emotive historical narratives which could easily be lies, and to suggest a way to check them.
This is no small matter The Second World War was started by ‘Ludendorff’s Lie’ which Hitler and many other Germans chose to believe, while Scotland could vote to leave the United Kingdom because of a false historical narrative put about by The Scottish Nationalist Party.
As a Space scientist is wasn’t wise to take complex decisions on the basis of emotive tweets, but how were we to take them, winnowing the grain away from the chaff?
I have tried to apply the ‘Scientific Method of History to the hypothesis ‘Scotland would have fared better outside the United Kingdom’ and come up with odds of 250 to 1 against. see:
https://mjdisney.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SCIMETHHIST.pdf
and have recently published ” HISTORY OF THE BRITS (From a scientists point of view)” 2020,Amazon, paperback £10, in which these ideas and techniques are discussed in a much wider context.The above url is extracted from it .
I would go far as to say that false history is very often a murder weapon far more deadly than shells or mines because it can stir up whole populations to set upon one another. One third of the German population is believed to have died during the religious Thirty Years War. At the present day Putin, Chi, Modi…… are all trying to use it to make their ‘countries great again’ with consequences which might be quite dreadful, even fatal to all of us. If you don’t believe me find out about ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion‘ , a historical falsehood which lead to tens of millions of deaths because decent people didn’t bother to check its veracity.
Tags: common sense, hypothesis testing, my books
Leave a Reply