Gary Younge is right to remind us that remembering and forgetting are not simply personal issues, but also relate to structures and “systems of power” (Only the whole truth about the past can heal the present, 31 May).
I am reminded of this, from Édouard Glissant: “To forget is to offend, and memory, when it is shared, abolishes this offence. If we want to share the beauty of the world, if we want to be in solidarity with its suffering, we need to learn how to remember together.”
For us all fully to share memories of mass atrocity (such as slavery, Holocaust, ethnic cleansing) and the abjection of individuals, and to share a commitment to social justice, we need both to overhaul the curricula at every level of our education system and to implement a radical redistribution of wealth and power. But as individuals we can begin to abolish the offence of forgetting by expanding our educational horizons.
Dr Max Farrar
Emeritus professor, Leeds Beckett University
• In his otherwise excellent article on the partiality that informs our representation of the past, Gary Younge repeats the mantra that 1066 was “the last time Britain was invaded”.
Aside from the excusable omission of “successfully”, it is the traditional reluctance to describe the events of 1688 as an invasion of which he has fallen foul.
The Whig interpretation of William of Orange’s coup d’etat as the Glorious Revolution, which ushered in a century and a half of anti-Catholic prejudice and discrimination, is itself a prime example of the deliberate selectivity in the construction of the historical record that impedes our knowledge of the whole truth about the past.
Ian Thackray
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
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