Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Read online

  Their attitude toward history did not, of course, stop the great dictators from trying to ensure their own immortality through statues, monuments, tombs, and, in later days, photographs and films. Stalin wrote his own history of Communism in the Soviet Union, in which the only two individuals who figure in its triumphant progress are himself and Lenin. They struggle against various enemies, none of whom are named. The Qin emperor built a massive tomb that was meant to last through eternity. (In Mecca, the Saudi religious and political authorities are trying to enshrine Muhammad in a different way by taking him out of history so that he is no longer human at all. Religious police warn pilgrims off from praying at sites, such as the cave where the Prophet is said to have received the first message from God, on the grounds that such prayer is idolatry. Over the past half century, the buildings that housed the Prophet and his family have one by one been destroyed, down to their foundations. In the past two decades alone, according to the Gulf Institute, 95 percent of the oldest buildings in Mecca, dating back more than a thousand years, have vanished.)

  Our faith in history frequently spills over into wanting to set the past to rights through apologies and compensation for past actions. Now, there is a good case to be made for individuals and organizations admitting that they have done wrong and offering some form of redress. The Swiss banks that made profits from wealth confiscated from Jews were benefiting from and condoning the crimes of the Nazis and ought to have paid compensation to the heirs of those who suffered. The German state rightly paid compensation over the years to the families of the Jews killed by Adolf Hitler’s regime. The Canadian and American governments certainly had an obligation to pay back the Japanese whose property was illegitimately seized when they were rounded up and interned during World War II. The internments themselves of those Japanese who were citizens was of dubious legality. Both governments have apologized and paid compensation to all survivors. In all those cases, the link between those who were sinned against and those who did the sinning was direct and clear.

  Often the link is less clear, but the apology makes political sense in the present. Queen Elizabeth’s apologies to the Maori of New Zealand for the illegal seizure of their land in the nineteenth century did not mean that she was accepting blame; rather, New Zealand society and the New Zealand government were moving toward settling outstanding issues with the Maori and trying to redress the disadvantages they had suffered. In 2004, three American senators introduced a bill for an official apology to all Native peoples for the “long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States.” Cynics noted that in an election year, the bill’s sponsors may have been moved by the fact that the Native vote was key in several states. The bill ultimately failed to pass.

  The acceptance of responsibility and the act of repentance can be healthy for societies struggling to deal with past horrors. In South Africa, with the ending of apartheid, public figures, both black and white, began to talk about how to move on without allowing the past to tear society apart. At the end of the 1980s, as President Frederik Willem de Klerk and his white Nationalist Party negotiated the end of apartheid with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, their common challenge was to ensure a peaceful transition to black majority rule. The difficulty was both to reassure the former oppressors—the police and security forces, for example—that they would not be punished for obeying orders and to appease the understandable longing for revenge and retribution of the blacks whom they had oppressed. The deal, and it was a difficult one to make, was that a commission to examine the past would have the power to grant amnesty to its witnesses and to make recommendations about reparations to the victims of apartheid. In 1995, less than two years after the first multiracial elections, the South African parliament passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission started hearings in the spring of 1996 and produced its final report two years later. It was an extraordinary and moving experience which brought the evils of apartheid into the open. The commission held 140 hearings, in all parts of South Africa, and collected some twenty-two thousand statements from the victims of apartheid. Seven thousand members of the old regime applied for amnesties. Former secret policemen came forward to admit torture and killing. Black witnesses wept and prayed as they relived what had happened to them and their families. Of course the commission did not heal all wounds. The granting of amnesties remains unpopular especially with blacks, and the payment of reparations has been fitful and slow. Nevertheless, by the time the commission finished its hearings in 1998, South Africans of all colors and classes had examined and dealt with the record of apartheid and begun to move forward into a shared future.

  Is it healthy, though, for societies to apologize for things that were done in different centuries and under different sets of beliefs? Politicians and others have been quick to make all sorts of apologies, even when it is difficult to see why they need feel any responsibility—or what good an apology would do. The pope apologized for the Crusades. The daughter of the British poet John Betjeman apologized to a town near London for a line in one of his poems which read, “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now.” In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton apologized for slavery and Tony Blair for the Irish potato famine. A descendant of the famous Elizabethan freebooter and slaver Sir John Hawkins wore a T-shirt reading “So Sorry” while he knelt in front of a crowd of locals in Gambia.

  In Canada, successive federal governments have been apologizing and in some cases paying compensation for policies carried out—however distasteful they may be to us now—by their properly constituted predecessors. The practice leads to some interesting questions. Canada used to charge a head tax on immigrants coming from China. Its intent was undoubtedly racist, to discourage “Orientals” from settling in the country. But does present-day Canada have to pay recompense to the descendants of those who chose to pay the head tax? Would it make more sense to use funds for the community as a whole rather than for individuals? How much is enough? Sadly there have been some unedifying squabbles among different groups claiming to speak for Chinese Canadians about how any government money ought to be distributed.

  How far ought we to go in second-guessing, even trying to reverse, the decisions of the past? The British government recently decided that the army should not have executed soldiers for cowardice in World War I. So it has posthumously pardoned them. Is it right, asked Matthew Parris, a respected British journalist, to retrospectively question the judgments made then? “I doubt we are able today to second-guess judgments made three generations ago in different circumstances and according to a harsher moral code,” Parris said. Can armies be run without stern discipline, he asks, including harsh reprisals against those who refuse to obey orders or who try to desert in the face of the enemy? It is not natural for human beings to risk death on the battlefield. The threat of execution may help to keep armies from disintegrating into a disorganized rabble. We can say that there should not be wars in the world and that there should not be armies, but until such a peace comes, we need armed forces to defend ourselves and carry out our policies.

  Canadian governments have recently indulged in such attempts to refashion the past, over the interning, for example, of particular ethnic groups in wartime. In both world wars, Canada interned those it regarded as enemy nationals. In World War I, it was at war with Austria-Hungary, and many of the Ukrainians living in Canada came from within its borders. Perhaps they had left because they did not like Hapsburg rule; perhaps some of them still felt loyal to the old emperor. In August 1914, indeed, a Ukrainian bishop in Winnipeg urged the men of his flock to head into the United States so that they could make their way home to fight for Franz Josef. Should the Canadian government at the time have taken a chance on their loyalty to their new home? It chose not to and so interned them. The British and Australian governments took a similar view when they interned their German subjects, even though many of t
hem had been resident for decades.

  In World War II, Allied governments interned many of those of Japanese, German, and Italian origin. We now know that the Axis powers lost, but at the time the decision was made, it was not at all clear that would happen. And it was not reassuring that all three Axis powers confidently expected help from their emigrant communities in Allied countries. Would it have been responsible of any Allied government to have overlooked the possibility that there might be sympathizers with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or militaristic Japan among them (as indeed there were)? What is less forgivable is that so little attempt was made to distinguish between the loyal and the potentially disloyal. In the United Kingdom a majority of the “enemy aliens” from Germany and Austria were Jewish refugees. Yet they, too, were rounded up and sent to internment camps such as those on the Isle of Man. Over seven thousand were shipped off to Canada and Australia; several hundred died on the Arandora Star when it was torpedoed. And what was not responsible and indeed illegal was to seize their property as well. In both the United States and Canada, the property of Japanese internees was stolen, destroyed, or sold off at bargain prices to eager speculators. Both governments have since paid compensation.

  Words are cheap—although they can lead to expensive demands—and politicians like to appear caring and sensitive. Moreover, apologies about the past can be used as an excuse for not doing very much in the present. Australia has been trying to deal with the grim conditions in which much of its Aboriginal population lives (and Aboriginal life expectancy is seventeen years shorter than that of the rest of the population). Part of that attempt rightly involves looking at the past. In 1997 the country’s Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission issued a report condemning the long-standing practice, which lasted from World War I into the 1970s, of taking Aboriginal children away from their parents to be brought up as “white.” Liberal Australians were horrified, and all the state and territory governments expressed apologies for the “Stolen Generations.” In 1998 a citizens’ committee held the first annual National Sorry Day, and thousands of Australians signed Sorry Books, which were presented to Aboriginal communities. The Commonwealth government, however, remained silent. John Howard, Australia’s prime minister until his defeat in 2007, resisted any suggestion that Australia had anything to apologize for. His successor, Kevin Rudd, brought a motion to the Commonwealth parliament that was unanimously approved. On February 13, 2008, as Aboriginal leaders and other special guests sat in the gallery and Australians all over the country watched on their televisions, Rudd uttered the historic words: “We apologize for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.” Yet he carefully avoided the question of compensation and provided few specifics about how the government intends to tackle such problems as illiteracy, drunkenness, child abuse, and unemployment among so many Aboriginal communities. One Aboriginal leader was cynical about the possible impact of Rudd’s apology: “Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas keep the money.”

  In the United States, a particularly contentious issue has been whether or not the government should apologize for slavery. Blacks and whites divide sharply: while most whites do not feel an apology for what was done generations ago is necessary, an overwhelming majority of blacks think there should be an apology, and a slightly smaller majority think the government should pay compensation to the descendants of slaves. Ninety-six percent of whites do not think there should be reparations. In his 2000 book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson, a black activist lawyer, argued that much of the prosperity of white America is built on the proceeds of slavery, and he singles out particular institutions such as Brown University whose founders made their fortune by building slave ships. The putative bill is enormous. Richard America, an economist from Georgetown University, has asserted that black Americans are owed somewhere between $5 trillion and $10 trillion. A number of lawsuits seeking compensation for blacks have been filed against American governments and companies, so far without success.

  If we look back too much and tinker with history through apologies, the danger is that we do not pay enough attention to the difficult problems of the present. There is also the danger, as a number of minority leaders have pointed out, that focusing on past grievances can be a trap, as governments and groups avoid dealing with issues facing them now. American blacks can demand apologies for slavery and American governments can offer them, but how does that help the black children who are going to poor schools or the black men who cannot find jobs and dignity? Aboriginal Canadians have been preoccupied for decades by their parallel to the “Stolen Generations,” the practice of putting native children into boarding schools where they were to learn English or French and become assimilated into “white” society. According to their many critics, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, the residential schools, as they are known in Canada, abused the children in their care, sometimes sexually, and stripped them of their culture. Aboriginal leaders have talked of “cultural genocide,” and a former United Church clergyman has claimed, so far with little solid proof, to have uncovered evidence of murders, illegal medical experiments, and pedophile rings. The Canadian government has offered compensation to each former student and has set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which will spend five years gathering information and writing its report. Already the chair of the commission is talking of possible criminal charges. Of course, Canadian society must deal with the charges, but it sadly shows little willingness to expend the same resources on dealing with the ghastly conditions on many reserves today. Leon Wieseltier, the distinguished Jewish-American man of letters, warns that the message minority groups too often get from such a focus on the past is: “Don’t be fooled … there is only repression.” Dwelling on past horrors such as the Holocaust or slavery can leave people without the resources to deal with problems in the here and now.

  It is particularly unfortunate that just as history is becoming more important in our public discussions, professional historians have largely been abandoning the field to amateurs. The historical profession has turned inward in the last couple of decades, with the result that much historical study today is self-referential. It asks questions about how we, the professional historians, create the past. Which theories do we use or misuse? I remember, while reading applications for graduate school a few years ago, coming across one from what sounded like a bright student who said she wanted to go into a particular field in history because it was “under-theorized.”

  Perhaps because historians long to sound like their peers in the sciences or the social sciences, they have increasingly gone in for specialized language and long and complex sentences. Much of the writing is difficult, often needlessly so. Andrew Colin Gow, a historian at the University of Alberta, offers a curious defense of obscurantism. We should not, he said severely, expect historians to be entertaining or to tell interesting stories: “Do we need professional history that entertains us—especially when public money pays for so much of what we historians do? Do we need physics that entertains us?”

  Historians, however, are not scientists, and if they do not make what they are doing intelligible to the public, then others will rush in to fill the void. Political and other leaders too often get away with misusing or abusing history for their own ends because the rest of us do not know enough to challenge them. Already much of the history that the public reads and enjoys is written by amateur historians. Some of it is very good, but much is not. Bad history tells only part of complex stories. It claims knowledge that it could not possibly have, as when, for example, it purports to give the unspoken thoughts of its characters. Sigmund Freud did his own reputation no good when he teamed up with the American diplomat William Bullitt to write a biography of Woodrow Wilson. Freud never met Wilson, never read his intimate diaries, because Wilson did not keep them, yet he talked confidently of Wilson’s obsession with his father and
his feelings of failure. Bad history can demand too much of its protagonists, as when it expects them to have had insights or made decisions that they could not possibly have done. Should Europe’s statesmen in 1914 have foreseen the stalemate of the western front when virtually all their generals assured them that the war would be over quickly?

  Bad history also makes sweeping generalizations for which there is not adequate evidence and ignores awkward facts that do not fit. It used to be thought, for example, that the Treaty of Versailles, made between the Allies and Germany at the end of World War I, was so foolish and vindictive that it led inevitably to World War II. It was a compelling story, bolstered by the polemics of men such as John Maynard Keynes, but it overlooked a few considerations. Germany had lost the war, and its treatment was never as severe as many Germans claimed and many British and Americans came to believe. Reparations were a burden but never as great as they seemed. Germany paid a fraction of the bill, and when Hitler came to power, he canceled it outright. If Germany in the 1920s had financial problems, it was largely due to the fiscal policies of the German government, which wanted to neither raise taxes nor default on the war bonds that so many of its own middle class held. What is more, things were getting better in the 1920s, not worse. Europe and the world were recovering economically, and Germany and even Soviet Russia were being brought into the international system. Without the Great Depression, which put fearful strains on even the strongest democracies, and without a whole series of bad decisions, including those by respectable German statesmen and generals who thought they could use Hitler once they got him into power, the slide into aggression and then war might not have occurred. Bad history ignores such nuances in favor of tales that belong to morality plays but do not help us to consider the past in all its complexity. The lessons such history teaches are too simple or simply wrong. That is why we need to learn how to evaluate it properly and to treat the claims made in its name with skepticism.