From the desk of Fjordman
Admiral Horatio Nelson may have guided the British naval fleet to a famous victory at the Battle of Trafalgar, but he faced a far tougher foe during celebrations to mark its 200th anniversary. Organizers of a re-enactment of the sea battle in 2005 decided to bill it as between a “Red Fleet” and a “Blue Fleet”, rather than Britain and its French and Spanish adversaries, describing it as a re-enactment of “an early 19th century sea battle.”
Trafalgar, in which the British Royal Navy saw off a combined Franco-Spanish fleet off the southern coast of Spain, marked a crucial defeat for NapoleonÂ’s sea power. Nelson himself fell during the battle. Apparently, we now live in the age of the Borderless Utopia and the Brotherhood of Man, and shouldnÂ’t be too hung up on Spain, England, France or other irrelevant historical details. ItÂ’s just rude. Maybe soon, we will hear that WW1 or even WW2 was fought between the Yellow Team and the Blue Team. We wouldnÂ’t want to insult anybody, would we?
The incident is part of a broader trend of re-writing history. Partly because of immigration, the British government appointed a commission on the future of multiethnic Britain. It concluded that “Britishness” had “systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations.” The report said Britain should be formally “recognized as a multicultural society” whose history must be “revised, rethought, or jettisoned.”
In the European Parliament, the German Christian Democrat Hans-Gert Pöttering stated that school textbooks should be reviewed for intolerant depictions of Islam by experts overseen by the European Union and Islamic leaders. He said textbooks should be checked to ensure they promoted European values without propagating religious stereotypes or prejudice. He also suggested that the EU could co-operate with the 56-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference to create a textbook review committee. |