The Uses and Abuses of History Page 3

  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, through 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 Muhammed in a different way, by taking him out of history so that he is no longer human at all. Over the past decades, buildings that housed the Prophet and his family have one by one been destroyed, down to their foundations.)

  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 illegitimately seized when they were rounded upover the years to the families of the Jews killed by Hitler’s regime. The Canadian government had an obligation to pay back the Japanese whose property was and interned during World War II. In all those cases, the link between those who were sinned against and those who did the sinning was direct and clear.

  The acceptance of responsibility and the act of repentance can be healthy for societies struggling to deal with past horrors. In South Africa, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a positive way for South Africans of all colours and classes to examine and deal with the record of apartheid and to begin to move forward into a shared future. By offering amnesties, it encouraged people, even those who had worked for the secret police, to come forward and describe what had been done in apartheid’s name. The commission brought the crimes committed into the open and made recommendations for reparations.

  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 this 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, this country 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 Habsburg 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. In World War II, the government did the same thing with 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 Canadian 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 was not responsible and indeed illegal was to seize their property as well.

  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 had National Sorry Day to deal with its miserable treatment of its Aboriginal population. The condition of the Aborigines remains appalling and not much is being done about it. 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 a 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 the residential schools issue, arguing that Aboriginal children not only suffered harsh treatment, from verbal to sexual abuse, but were stripped of their culture. Their leaders have talked of “cultural genocide” and a former United Church clergyman has claimed 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 that 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 been largely abandoning the fi
eld 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 reading applications for graduate school a few years ago and 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 “undertheorized.”

  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 defence 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 which it could not possibly have, as when, for example, it purports to give the unspoken thoughts of its characters. It makes sweeping generalizations for which there is not adequate evidence and ignores awkward facts which do not fit. It demands too much of its protagonists, as when it expects them to have had insights or made decisions that they could not possibly have done. 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 scepticism.

  Professional historians ought not to surrender their territory so easily. We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity. We must contest the one-sided, even false, histories that are out there in the public domain. If we do not, we allow our leaders and opinion makers to use history to bolster false claims and justify bad and foolish policies. Furthermore, historians must not abandon political history entirely for sociology or cultural studies. Like it or not, politics matter to our societies and to our lives. We need only ask ourselves how different the world would have been if Hitler and the Nazis had not seized control of one of Europe’s most powerful states. Or what could have happened to American capitalism and the American people if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had not been able, as president, to implement the New Deal.

  While it is instructive, informative, and indeed fun to study such subjects as the carnivals in the French Revolution, the image of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages, or the role of the doughnut in the Canadian psyche, we ought not to forget the aspect of history which the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke summed up as “what really happened.”

  Every generation has its own preoccupations and concerns and therefore looks for new things in the past and asks different questions. When I was an undergraduate, our standard texts dealt with political and economic history. There was little social history and certainly no gender history. The first wave of feminism in the late 1960s produced an interest in women’s history. The growth of the gay rights movement brought a corresponding growth in gay and lesbian history. The preoccupations of the baby boom generation with, for example, remaining young and attractive have given rise to such specialized subjects as the history of the body. The disappearance of the European empires and the rise of Asia in economic and political power have produced global history less centred on Europe and North America. That process of researching and writing about the new questions we ask of the past is what makes history change and develop.

  Nevertheless, there is an irreducible core to the story of the past and that is: What happened and in what order? Causality and sequence are crucial to understanding the past. We cannot argue that Napoleon actually won the Battle of Waterloo or that the battle took place before his invasions of Russia or Spain, although we can certainly disagree about why he lost at Waterloo and how much those earlier decisions of his contributed to his defeat. If we do not, as historians, write the history of great events as well as the small stories that make up the past, others will, and they will not necessarily do it well.

  Historians, especially in the past, have done their share of creating bad and tendentious histories. In the Middle Ages, Christian historians saw the past in terms of the triumph of the universal Catholic Church. When a Renaissance scholar showed that the document which purported to hand on the power of the Roman emperors to the Pope was a fake, his work helped to stimulate a fresh look at that assumption. Victorian historians too often depicted the past as an inevitable progress leading to the glorious present when Britain ruled the world. And French and German and Russian and American historians did much the same thing for their nations’ stories. Like epic poems, their books were filled with heroes and villains and stirring events. Such histories, says Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, sustain us in difficult times, but they are “nursery history.”

  The proper role for historians, Howard rightly says, is to challenge and even explode national myths: “Such disillusion is a necessary part of growing up in and belonging to an adult society; and a good definition of the difference between a Western liberal society and a totalitarian one—whether it is Communist, Fascist, or Catholic authoritarian—is that in the former the government treats its citizens as responsible adults and in the latter it cannot.” After World War II, most Western democracies made the difficult but wise decision to commission proper military histories of the conflict. In other words, they hired professional historians and gave them unrestricted access to the archives. The results were histories which did not gloss over Allied mistakes and failures but which strove to give as full a picture as possible of a great and complicated struggle.

  The British case is an interesting one. The government initially gave Winston Churchill free run of the records (and a very advantageous tax deal) to allow him to write his great history of World War II. Part of its aim was to make sure that a British account of the war got into print before the inevitable rush of memoirs and histories from the United States and Russia. The result, as David Reynolds has so convincingly shown, was a sweeping and magisterial account that glossed over many awkward issues. Churchill said little, for example, of the debates within the British cabinet in those dark days of May 1940. France was falling to the Nazis and, according to Churchill’s account, there was no discussion of what Britain should do, only unanimity that it must fight on alone. “Future generations,” he wrote, “may deem it noteworthy that the supreme question of whether we should fight on alone never found a place upon the War Cabinet agenda. It was taken for granted and as a matter of course by these men of all parties in the State, and we were much too busy to waste time upon such unreal, academic issues.” In fact, as the record shows, the cabinet properly considered alternatives, most notably to see if Mussolini, the Italian dictator, could broker a peace. When that was equally rightly rejected as unlikely to lead to anything useful and, moreover, ran the risk of dealing a serious blow to British morale, the cabinet then took its momentous decision.

  From the start of the war, however, the British government had also intended that there would be an official history, and in 1946 it appointed Sir James Butler, a respected historian, to oversee what was expected to be a series of volumes on different aspects of the British war effort. Butler made it clear that, for the sake of the reputation of the series, he wanted to be able to select individual contributors who were reputable and independent academics, not military specialists. Furthermore, his historians were to have complete access to th
e written record and a free hand to use what they found, provided it did not jeopardize national security. As a consequence, the British official histories are informative, frank, and at times controversial. The one on the bomber offensive against Germany, for example, deals bluntly with the disagreements in the Air Force’s High Command over whether area bombing or precision bombing was the most effective way of damaging Germany. What that strategy meant in practice was to target cities and towns rather than smaller sites, such as munitions factories or oil depots. When the Air Ministry objected in 1959 to the volume on the grounds that revealing such debates might damage the Royal Air Force, the secretary to the cabinet, Sir Norman Brook, gave a firm answer. The histories, he argued, were not meant to whitewash the record. Rather, by dealing with the difficult issues, they would help future governments learn from past mistakes.

  Blunt histories do not always meet with warm approval. Noble Frankland, the historian who wrote the official history of the bombing campaign, found himself the subject of vicious personal attacks. Although he had himself flown in the campaign and won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Beaverbrook-owned press in the United Kingdom insinuated that he had been judged unfit. (He had in fact been grounded for about eight weeks with pneumonia, after which he went back into the air over Germany.) Frankland, his critics wrongly claimed, had not been there, and only those who had taken part in the fighting could possibly understand it. Many of his most vociferous critics admitted that they had not read his book or had read only parts of it, but that did not inhibit them in the slightest. Frankland’s suggestions that the resources used in the bombing might have been better applied elsewhere in the last months of the war, or that their effectiveness in destroying German morale was open to question, were rapidly inflated into charges that he had called the whole campaign “a costly failure,” words he certainly never used. He was insulting, it was claimed, the memory of all those who had died and hurting the feelings of the survivors and their families. He was, said one Member of Parliament, typical of those cynical and unscrupulous writers who hoped to make money by writing sensational exposés. The charges levelled against Frankland find a parallel in those being made today about the Canadian War Museum’s exhibit on the same bombing campaign. The museum, its critics say, has wrongly suggested in a plaque entitled “An Enduring Controversy” that the mass bombing of German industry and German cities and towns was both immoral and ineffective. What the plaque actually said was, “The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested.”