I remember snippets of a debate between my parents when I was a small child. My father had just informed me that Father Christmas did not exist & my mother was horrified that I had been told this at such an early age. I still remember dad looking up at her from his armchair and saying 'I will not tell lies to my son.'
My father was not a Christian & the closest he ever came to faith was a belief that 'something doesn't come from nothing.' The fact that something did in fact exist had to have a cause , and dad called that cause God. He had difficulty in accepting Jesus as God though, because he was a man. He could never accept that a man could be God despite the evidence of the gospels.
Reluctantly I have to admit that all this happened a long time ago & I am no longer a small boy, but a grown man fast approaching his sixties. In that time there has been a seismic shift in how our society thinks.
Recently whilst I was drinking coffee in my favourite watering hole I read an article in the Daily Mail that grabbed my attention. No, not that wedding, but an article that concerned TV presenter and historian Dan Snow. Apparently he has admitted to lying to his daughters during a visit to an aviation museum.
So what, you might say. Is not our world full of lies, deceit and fake news? Well apart from the fact that I naively didn't think that Dan Snow would lie, it was also to whom he was lying that shocked me. It was his own flesh & blood, his daughters. How could a father lie to his children. It went against everything that I had been brought up to believe. Then he explained why he lied & I understood. Not that I agreed with him, but at least I understood where he was coming from.
Snow is a historian so it came as a double whammy that he had lied about an historical fact. The lie he told his daughters was that women pilots flew in combat in Spitfires during world war two.
This is not true, they did not, but Snow told his daughters that they did. Why? So that his girls would feel free to 'follow their dreams' when they grew up. Implied in this is the idea that if the girls thought that the role of women in the past was not the same as the role of men then this might make them feel inferior to men today.
Now it is obvious that Dan Snow's motives were good. However I believe this to be an example of how evil can hide within good motives. The role of women in WW2 society was much different to how it is today, but just because it was different does not mean that their contribution to the war effort was not of the highest value.
We must remember the land girls who replaced men on the farms growing food for the nation. The women who made ammunition in the factories, who became mechanics, who flew new planes from the factory to the airdromes & like my mother were involved in the posting of armies across Europe.
Without the women of our nation back in the dark days of WW2 we would have lost that war no matter how brave the men were on the battle field. Snow should have used the facts of history to make his daughters proud to be female and proud of the women who lived before them. Yet he did not.
Unfortunately Snow had fallen (pun) for one of the lies that grip society today. That is the lie that to be equal you have to be the same. To Snow the fact that only men flew Spitfires in combat highlighted the inequality of the genders of WW2 Britain.
What about the fact that women risked their lives in the munitions factories which were a chief target for the Luftwaffe? If they survived air attack then the dangerous ordinance they handled would regularly detonate in the factories that made them. Did these women not risk their lives as did the men who went into battle?. Who can say that a woman blown up in a munitions factory had given less than a man who had been shot by the enemy on the front line? Their roles were different, but they both had the same end in sight.
Yet by playing down the roles actually played by women at the time Snow was showing the creeping political correctness & overt gender politics of today. As a good father Snow wants the best for his daughters & I applaud him for that. I also applaud him for not wanting his daughters to be treated as second class citizens. However for Snow that means women being treated as men, and ignoring the differences between us. That is where we differ.
However having said all this the purpose of this blog is not to discuss gender politics or the very real inequalities of WW2 Britain. The purpose of this blog is to look at what political correctness is doing to us, to truth, to history.
At the end of the day Dan Snows view of gender politics is such that he (a historian) was willing to rewrite history for the sake of his politically correct views on gender. Not for him 'I will not lie to my daughters'. His politics meant more to him than the truth, and this is what worries me. If a society were to throw out truth for the sake of its politics then you have to question its values.
I hope and pray that Dan Snows error was only his, and that those who share his liberal views would not go down that road. I fear that they would though.
