Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Read online

  In the 1920s, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs coined the term “collective memory” for the things we think we know for certain about the past of our own societies. “Typically,” he wrote, “a collective memory, at least a significant collective memory, is understood to express some eternal or essential truth about the group—usually tragic.” So the Poles remember the partitions of their country—”the Christ among nations”—in the eighteenth century as part of their martyrdom as a nation. The Serbs remember the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as their defeat on earth but their moral victory in their unending struggle against Muslims. Often present-day concerns affect what we remember as a group. Kosovo acquired its particularly deep significance in the memory of the Serbs as they were struggling to become an independent nation in the nineteenth century. In earlier centuries, the battle was remembered as one incident in a much larger story. Collective memory is more about the present than the past because it is integral to how a group sees itself. And what that memory is can be and often is the subject of debate and argument where, in Halbwachs’s words, “competing narratives about central symbols in the collective past, and the collectivity’s relationship to that past, are disputed and negotiated in the interest of redefining the collective present.”

  Peter Novick has argued forcefully in his book The Holocaust in American Life that for American Jews, the Holocaust became a central identifying feature of who they were only in the 1960s. In the years after World War II, few American Jews wanted to remember that their co-religionists had been victims. Jewish organizations urged their community to look to the future and not the past. It was only in the 1960s that attitudes began to change, partly, Novick argues, because victimhood began to acquire a more positive status and partly because the 1967 and 1973 wars showed both Israel’s strength and its continuing vulnerability.

  As the nineteenth-century Zionists began their bold project of re-creating a Jewish state, they looked to Jewish history for symbols and lessons. They found, among much else, the story of Masada. In A.D. 73, as the Romans stamped out the last remnants of Jewish resistance to their rule, a band of some thousand men, women, and children held out on the hilltop fortress of Masada. When it became clear that the garrison was doomed, its leader, Elazar Ben-Yair, convinced the men that it was better to die than submit to Rome. The men killed their women and children and then themselves. The story was recorded but did not assume importance for Jews until the modern age. Masada has been taken up as a symbol not of submission to an inevitable fate but of the determination of the Jewish people to die if necessary in their struggle for freedom. In independent Israel, it became an inspiration and a site of pilgrimage for the Israeli military as well as for civilians. As a popular poem has it, “Never again shall Masada fall!” In recent years, as pessimism has grown in Israel over the prospects for peace with its neighbors, another collective memory about Masada has been taking shape: that it is a warning that Jews always face persecution at the hands of their enemies.

  While collective memory is usually grounded in fact, it need not be. If you go to China, you will more than likely be told the story of the park in the foreign concession area of Shanghai which had on its gate a sign that read, “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted.” While it is true that the park was reserved for foreigners, insulting enough in itself, the real insult for most Chinese was their pairing with dogs. The only trouble is that there is no evidence the sign ever existed. When young Chinese historians expressed some doubts about the story in 1994, the official press reacted with anger. “Some people,” a well-known journalist wrote, “do not understand the humiliations of old China’s history or else they harbor skeptical attitudes and even go so far as to write off serious historical humiliation lightly; this is very dangerous.”

  It can be dangerous to question the stories people tell about themselves because so much of our identity is both shaped by and bound up with our history. That is why dealing with the past, in deciding on which version we want, or on what we want to remember and to forget, can become so politically charged.

  We argue over history in part because it can have real significance in the present. We use it in a variety of ways: to mobilize ourselves to achieve goals in the future, to make claims—for land, for example—and, sadly, to attack and belittle others. Examining the past can be a sort of therapy as we uncover knowledge about our own societies that has been overlooked or repressed. For those who do not have power or who feel that they do not have enough, history can be a way of protesting against their marginalization, or against trends or ideas they do not like, such as globalization. Histories that show past injustices or crimes can be used to argue for redress in the present. For all of us, the powerful and weak alike, history helps to define and validate us.

  Who am I? is one question we ask ourselves, but equally important is, who are we? We obtain much of our identity from the communities into which we are born or to which we choose to belong. Gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, class, nationality, religion, family, clan, geography, occupation, and, of course, history can go into the ways that we define our identity. As new ways of defining ourselves appear, so do new communities. The idea of the teenager, for example, scarcely existed before 1900. People were either adults or children. In the twentieth century, in developed countries, children were staying in school much longer and hence were more dependent on their parents. The adolescent years became a long bridge between childhood and full adulthood. The market spotted an opportunity, and so we got special teenage clothes, music, magazines, books, and television and radio shows.

  We see ourselves as individuals but equally as parts of groups. Sometimes our group is small, an extended family perhaps, sometimes vast. Benedict Anderson has coined the memorable phrase “imagined communities” for the groups, like nations or religions, that are so big that we can never know all the other members yet which still draw our loyalties. Groups mark out their identities by symbols, whether flags, colored shirts, or special songs. In that process of definition, history usually plays a key role. Army regiments have long understood the importance of history in creating a sense of cohesiveness. That is why they have regimental histories and battle honors from past campaigns. Not surprisingly, the stories from the past that are celebrated are often one-sided or simplistic.

  Most Americans know the story of Paul Revere’s ride: the brave patriot galloping alone through that night in 1775 to warn his fellow revolutionaries that the British redcoats were about to attack. Eight decades later Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped to fix the ride in American memories with his epic poem. To the regret of historians, he got some of the key details wrong. Revere did not, for example, put the lanterns to signal the movements of the British (“one if by land, and two if by sea”) in the steeple of the Old North Church. Rather, they were a signal to him. Most important, perhaps, he acted not on his own but as part of a well-planned, well-coordinated strategy. Several riders went out that night, in different directions. David Hackett Fischer, who has written what is the definitive study on the ride, finds this truer version preferable to the Longfellow one. “The more we learn about these messengers, the more interesting Paul Revere’s part becomes—not merely as a solitary courier, but as an organizer and promoter of a common effort in the cause of freedom.”

  Historians have also been examining the myth of the American West. Hundreds of Western movies and thousands of novels by writers such as Zane Grey (who only went west on his honeymoon) and Karl May (who never went there at all) have helped to create a picture of a wild world where bold cowboys and determined settlers braved savage Indian hordes. The myth casts a powerful spell. From President Teddy Roosevelt to President George W. Bush, American political elites have liked to portray themselves as bold cowboys. Even Henry Kissinger, improbable as the image may seem, once fell under the spell. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse,” he told the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. “He acts, that’s all, by
being in the right place at the right time.” Yet the “real” old West, the time of the wagon trains moving through the ever-open and lawless frontier, lasted for a surprisingly short time, roughly from the 1840s, when settlers in increasing numbers moved west of the Missouri River, to the opening of the first transcontinental railway in 1869. Moreover, many of the familiar stereotypes dissolve into something more complex and even disturbing. The cowboys were often teenage gunslingers who today might well be in urban gangs or in jail. Billy the Kid was a charming and cold-blooded killer. Miss Kitty Russell, the warm and attractive saloon owner in the television series Gunsmoke, would have looked quite different in the real old West. Women of her sort on the frontier were miserable low-paid prostitutes, frequently drunk and riddled with diseases. Many of them killed themselves.

  Within the United States, the national organizing myths have been challenged by strong regional ones, particularly in the case of the South. Whites in the American South developed their own distinctive history after the Civil War. Not surprisingly, the old prewar South took on a golden glow, where men were gentlemen and women ladies, where gentility and courtesy marked relations among people, even between slave owners and their slaves. The Yankee victory brought an end to a civilization, and Reconstruction caused only loss and degradation. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, set up in 1894, were vigilant in monitoring school curricula to ensure that their approved version of the past was taught in Southern schools. Textbook publishers complied, publishing different versions of the American history texts: one for the South, which downplayed slavery and ignored its brutality, and the other for Northern schools. And so, even black children in their segregated schools were presented with a picture of the South in which slavery and racism were largely absent. They were told, though, that Africans were fortunate because they had been brought to America and so into contact with European civilization. It was a pity, the texts concluded sadly, that the Africans had not had the innate capacity to take advantage of the opportunity. Black teachers did their best to counteract such views by introducing African and African American history into their schools, but it was not always easy because the curricula had to be approved by white school boards.

  Public commemorations, museums, and archives reinforced the white version of Southern history. Throughout the South, such public spaces as parks and squares were named after Confederate heroes and filled with their monuments. In 1957, the state of Virginia held a ceremony to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the first settlement at Jamestown. The past being celebrated was entirely white; there was no mention of the local Indians or the African slaves who were going to be brought there a few years afterward. No blacks were among the invited guests in 1957; six had been invited by mistake, but their invitations had been hastily rescinded.

  In the 1960s, with the growth of the civil rights movement, the balance of power in the South began to shift and Southern history shifted along with it. As state after state integrated its schools, the old-style textbooks became an embarrassment. Museums started to acknowledge the black presence in the South in their displays and exhibitions. It was surely a sign of changing times when the Museum of the Confederacy put leg irons on display. Southern blacks pushed to get their own museums of black history and the history of civil rights. Their task was not always easy, and not just because of diehard white opposition. Because black history had not been valued by white-dominated institutions, much documentation and many artifacts which could have illuminated the history of blacks in the South had simply not survived. Blacks increasingly demanded that their heroes be commemorated in public spaces. In Richmond, Virginia, which first elected a black-majority city council in 1977, a monument to the great black tennis player Arthur Ashe has been added to those to Civil War heroes along Monument Avenue, and in 2000 two bridges over the Potomac named after the great Civil War soldiers Stonewall Jackson and Jeb Stuart were renamed after local civil rights fighters.

  Recently whites and blacks in the South have tried to share a common history. In 1999 blacks and whites stood together at the unveiling of a roadside plaque in Georgia to mark the lynching of two black couples half a century before. It was the first time the infamous history of lynching had been publicly recognized in the state. “It is time,” said a local paper, “to heal the wounds.” In Williamsburg, Virginia, where the carefully preserved colonial town once had no reference to its large slave population and where the historical reenactments showed only whites, the newer history depicts the relationship between slaves and slave owners. At times angry tourists have intervened when beatings of runaway slaves, for example, have been too realistic. And not everyone appreciates the more rounded view of the past. History, many maintain, should be uplifting, not depressing. Opponents of a monument in Virginia to a failed slave revolt argued that it was glorifying violence.

  Feeling part of something, in our fluid and uncertain times, can be comforting. If we are Christians, Muslims, Canadians, Scots, or gays, it implies that we belong to something larger, more stable, and more enduring than ourselves. Our group predated us and will presumably survive our deaths. When many of us no longer believe in an afterlife, that promises us a sort of immortality. Identity, though, can also be a trap which imprisons us and divides us from others. Victorian boys used to be told, “Don’t cry, you are a little Englishman.” Women repeatedly have been told that as members of a particular community, they must be meek and submissive. Neighbors are told not to trust one another because they are Serbs or Croats, Muslims or Jews. In Toronto, where I grew up, Protestants and Catholics went to separate schools. It used to be a matter of scandal and shame if a member of one community chose to marry a member of the other.

  History is a way of enforcing the imagined community. Nationalists, to take one example, like to claim that their nation has always existed back into that conveniently vague area, “the mists of time.” The Anglican Church claims that in spite of the break with Rome during the Reformation, it is part of an unbroken progression from the early Church. In reality, an examination of any group shows that its identity is a process, not a fixed thing. Groups define and redefine themselves over time and in response to internal developments, a religious awakening, perhaps, or outside pressures. If you are oppressed and victimized, as gays have been and still are in many societies, that becomes part of how you see yourself. Sometimes that leads to an unseemly competition for victimhood. American blacks have watched resentfully as the commemoration of the Holocaust has taken an ever greater place in American consciousness. Was not slavery just as great a crime? some have asked.

  When previously marginal or ignored groups develop a sense of themselves, the past inevitably comes into play When women and gays started to push for greater rights, for example, their histories also developed. Examining the ways in which women and gays were disadvantaged in the past or how they coped, or by discovering and telling the stories of earlier feminists or gay activists, historians helped to create a sense of solidarity and even a sense of entitlement to some form of compensation.

  In the 1920s, the black American educator and historian Carter G. Woodson started the Negro History Week to challenge white stereotypes about blacks, in part by highlighting black achievements. By the 1970s, American blacks had successfully asserted their rights through the civil rights movement and were increasingly taking pride in being black. In 1976, as the United States celebrated its bicentennial, Woodson’s week became Black History Month. President Gerald Ford sent a message of goodwill: “The last quarter-century has finally witnessed significant strides in the full integration of black people into every area of national life. In celebrating Black History Month, we can take satisfaction from this recent progress in the realization of the ideals envisioned by our Founding Fathers. But, even more than this, we can seize the opportunity to honor the too-often-neglected accomplishments of black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.” The aims of the equivalent month in the United Kingdom similarly are to
celebrate black contributions to British society and encourage blacks to feel pride in their own culture. In Canada, in the 1990s, black parents argued that local schools did not say enough about the contribution of blacks in Canada. “Africans in America were held on the outside,” said the director of the Black Cultural Centre in Nova Scotia. Now, with blacks entering the mainstream, they needed to know their history. For other black leaders, their history was a way of coping with a hostile world and overcoming stereotypes. In 1995, in response to pressure from Canadian blacks, the government decreed that Canada have its own Black History Month, “to celebrate the many achievements and contributions of Black Canadians, who, throughout history, have done so much to make Canada the culturally diverse, compassionate and prosperous nation we know today.”

  Today deaf activists, who argue that being deaf is not a disability but a distinguishing mark of separateness, are in the process of creating a Deaf Nation. They resist medical interventions, such as cochlear implants, or attempts to train deaf children to speak (“Oralism,” they say with contempt) and insist that sign language is a fully fledged language in its own right. Capitalizing the D in “Deaf” symbolizes the view that deafness is a culture and not simply the loss of hearing. Scholars give papers and teach courses on Deaf history and publish books with titles such as Deaf Heritage in Canada: A Distinctive, Diverse, and Enduring Culture or Britain’s Deaf Heritage. In 1984, an American professor named Harlan Lane started researching and publishing about the oppression of the deaf in the past. Although he himself can hear, he is learning sign language.