Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Read online

  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 matters 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, the role of the doughnut in the Canadian psyche (Canadians apparently eat more per capita than anyone else in the world), or the hamburger in American life, we ought not to forget the aspect of history that 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 centered 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 which 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 had fallen 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 Benito Mussolini, the Italian dictator, could broker a peace. When that was rightly rejected as unlikely to lead to anything useful and, moreover, ran the risk of dealing a serious blow to British morale, the cabinet made 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 the 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, which was preferred, or precision bombing was the most effective way of damaging Germany. What that former 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 conservative 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.) Frank-land, 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 its 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 insultin
g, 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 leveled 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 titled “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.”

  As so often is the case, the ways the public reacts to the work of historians have much to do with the issues of the time. In the late 1950s, Britain was going through a painful period of reexamination as it adjusted to its diminished importance in the world and its manifest social and economic problems at home. The Suez adventure of 1956 had been a costly disaster, and although the new Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan, made much of his nation’s special relationship with the United States, it was quite clear which country was the dominant partner. The empire was melting away; indeed, Macmillan had just made his famous speech about the wind of change blowing through Africa when he had to decide whether or not to let Frankland’s volume be published. World War II assumed ever greater importance as the glorious and gallant moment when all British pulled together and Britain was one of the Big Three powers. The mix of nostalgia and pride was neatly and unkindly caught by the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe in its sketch “Aftermyth of War.” Frank-land’s careful and clear examination of the bombing campaign and his revelations about the debates and disputes that had gone on at the time came as a dash of cold water.

  Historians, the great philosopher of history R. G. Collingwood wrote in his autobiography, examine the past with a careful eye, even if it means exploding cherished myths: “So long as the past and the present are outside one another, knowledge of the past is not of much use in the present. But suppose the past lives on in the present; suppose, though encapsulated in it, and at first sight hidden beneath the present’s contradictory and more prominent features, it is still alive and active; the historian may very well be related to the non-historian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller.” That can often be intensely irritating when the historians raise qualifications and point to ambiguities. Do we really want to know that our great heroes, such as Winston Churchill, made silly mistakes? That there was and is a controversy over the effectiveness and morality of the World War II Allied bombing campaign against Germany? That John F. Kennedy suffered from a variety of illnesses and was dangerously dependent on painkillers? I think we do, not for prurient reasons, but because a complex picture is more satisfying for adults than a simplistic one. We can still have heroes, still have views on the rights and wrongs of the past, and still be glad that it turned out in one way rather than another; but we have to accept that in history, as in our own lives, very little is absolutely black or absolutely white.

  Historians, of course, do not own the past. We all do. But because historians spend their time studying history, they are in a better position than most amateurs to make reasoned judgments. Historians, after all, are trained to ask questions, make connections, and collect and examine the evidence. Ideally, they already possess a considerable body of knowledge and an understanding of the context of particular times or events. Yet when they produce work that challenges deeply held beliefs and myths about the past, they are often accused of being elitist, nihilistic, or simply out of touch with that imaginary place, “the real world.” In the case of recent history they are also told, as Noble Frankland was, that they cannot have an opinion if they were not there.

  The idea that those who actually took part in great events or lived through particular times have a superior understanding to those who come later is a deeply held yet wrongheaded one. The recent dispute at Canada’s War Museum over the Allied bombing campaign has predictably brought charges that the historians who mounted the exhibit and those who supported it must defer to the views of the veteran airmen. Of course, said the National Post, “there is the issue of free expression and not caving into the sensitivities of every special interest group. Veterans, though, are not just any special interest group.” I was one of the outside historians called in to evaluate the exhibit when the fuss started. (I supported the plaque and strongly advised the War Museum not to back down.) When my views became known, I started to get mail saying that I had no authority to comment on World War II because I was not part of it. And, as a woman, it was hinted, what could I know of things military anyway? True, I did not receive the e-mail that one of my colleagues did: “The veterans have done more for our country and way of life, and shown more courage and dedication to duty, than you ever will. Since they were there, and you were not, it stands to reason that they should have the final say as to whether or not the plaque is fair.”

  Being there does not necessarily give greater insight into events; indeed, sometimes the opposite is true. I lived through the Cuban missile crisis, for example, but at the time I knew only what was reported in the media. Like millions of others, I knew nothing of the intense debates in Washington and Moscow about how to handle the crisis. I had no idea that Kennedy had secret channels of communication with the Soviets or that the Soviets already had nuclear warheads in Cuba. I did not know that Fidel Castro was prepared to see his country destroyed if it brought Soviet victory in the Cold War closer. It was only much later, as the classified documents started to appear on both sides, that we got a much more detailed and comprehensive view of what was really happening. The same gap exists between the experiences of the veterans and the history of the bombing campaign. They knew what it was like to risk their lives flying over Germany, but they could not know about the debates in Whitehall or the impact of the bombs they dropped. That could only come with hindsight and much research and analysis.

  Memory, as psychologists tell us, is a tricky business. It is true that we all remember bits of the past, often in vivid detail. We can recall what we wore and said on particular occasions, or sights, smells, tastes, and sounds. But we do not always remember accurately. Dean Acheson, the distinguished American statesman, once told the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that he needed a strong martini after spending a morning on his memoirs. Acheson had been sketching out the run-up to Pearl Harbor and remembered vividly being in President Roosevelt’s office with the president and Cordell Hull, then secretary of state, on that fateful day in 1941 when the United States took a step closer to war with Japan by freezing Japanese assets. “The President was sitting at his desk; Cordell Hull was sitting opposite him; I was in a chair at the Secretary’s side,” he had written. The only trouble was that his secretary had checked the records and found that Hull had not even been in Washington that day.

  We mistakenly think that memories are like carvings in stone; once done, they do not change. Nothing could be further from the truth. Memory is not only selective; it is malleable. In the 1990s, there was much public concern and excitement about recovered memories. Authoritative figures published books and appeared in the media claiming that it was possible to completely repress memories of painful and traumatic events. Working with therapists, a number of patients discovered memories of such ghastly things as sexual abuse by their parents, cannibalism, satanic cults, and murder. Many families were destroyed and lives, both of the accusers and of the accused, ruined. Now that the panic has died down, we are ruefully admitting that there is no evidence at all that human beings repress painful memories. If anything, the memories remain particularly vivid.

  Researchers at the Biological Psychiatry Lab at McLean Hospital, affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, have recently conducted a research project into the repressed-memory syndrome. Their interest was piqued by its sudden appearance in the late twentieth century. If the syn
drome were hardwired into the human brain, then surely there would be evidence of its occurrence down through history. They found examples in nineteenth-century literature, but, although they offered rewards, they turned up no examples either in fiction or in nonfiction before 1800. They concluded that “the phenomenon is not a natural neurological function, but rather a ‘culture-bound’ syndrome rooted in the nineteenth century.” The preoccupation of the Romantics with the supernatural and the imagination, as well as later work, most notably that of Sigmund Freud, into the subconscious, predisposed us to believe that the mind can play extraordinary tricks on us.

  We edit our memories over the years partly out of a natural human instinct to make our own roles more attractive or important. But we also change them because times and attitudes change over the years. In the early years after World War I, the dead were commemorated in France and Britain as fallen heroes who had fought to defend their civilization. It was only later as disillusionment about the war grew that the British and French publics came to remember them as the victims of a futile struggle. We also edit out of our memories what no longer seems appropriate or right. When I interviewed British women who had lived in India as part of the Raj, I always asked them what the relations between the British rulers and their Indian subjects were like. They all invariably told me that there was never any tension between the races and that the British never expressed racist views. Yet we know from contemporary sources—letters, for example, or diaries—that many, perhaps most, of the British in India saw Indians as their inferiors.

  We also polish our memories in the recounting. Primo Levi, who did so much to keep the memory of the Nazi concentration camps alive, warned, “A memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in stereotype … crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense.” As we learn more about the past, that knowledge can become part of our memory, too. The director of the Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust in Israel once said sadly that most of the oral histories that had been collected were unreliable. Holocaust survivors thought, for example, that they remembered witnessing well-known atrocities when in fact they were nowhere near the place where the events happened.