First EU history book is 'just a whitewash'

18.08.01: EUROHISTORY is bunk ­ and that's official. The one thing everyone involved in the project agrees on is that the first textbook to come out of the Eurohistory directive is 99.99% whitewash.

The intention was innocuous enough ­ to provide all schoolchildren in the European Union with the same historical grounding. But, as Professor Stefan Grosvenor-Kinski, head of the Eurohistory project, has admitted, "The lack of consensus on even the most basic points was astounding."

The working party discovered that schoolchildren tend to be taught all about their country's military victories, and next to nothing about their military defeats. Thus, English and French children supposedly studying the same wars were memorising completely different lists of battles.

Initial arguments about the way to fill these blanks in the record were, apparently, heated ­ there were times, said one source, when "we were worried we were going to have to fight the Hundred Years war all over again".

The end result has more holes than Swiss cheese. Oskar Schindler is given more space than the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland is dismissed as an "unfortunate hiccup" in British history. And Waterloo and Gibraltar are not even mentioned. MF