The Uses and Abuses of History
by Margaret Macmillan
Profile, £11.99
This is a magnificent book, wise and timely; a must read for world leaders who hold our futures in their hands, and for all of us who care about the future. It tells, in clear, non-academic prose, how politicians have manipulated history down the ages for their own ends. And when they get the history wrong, they tend to get the politics wrong, too.
If this recession is like the start of the Great Depression then stimulating economies is the right thing to do, as Britain and the United States say. If it is more like the pop of the 1990s dot com bubble then the short term market adjustments advocated by France and Germany are more appropriate.
Margaret Macmillan is a Canadian historian with a particular distaste for George W Bush, which alone would make me warm to her. His “axis of evil” speech, she points out, did not so much make America look tough as stupid. An “axis” must be a working set of alliances like Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II. To suggest Iran, Iraq and North Korea are in any kind of partnership is laughable. Iranians and Iraqis hate each other, and fought a bitter war in the 1980s to prove it, and the leaders of North Korea would probably have trouble finding their two so-called allies on a map.
In the same way, the “war on terror” is nonsensical both semantically and historically. You wage war on your enemies, not on ideas, and with the aim of forcing them to capitulate, while a war on terror clearly can have no defined end.
Macmillan’s central theme is that before we can learn the lessons of history we must first teach it properly. But spin doctors are always changing the context to suit contemporary concerns, whether it be over-egging the glories of Britain’s imperial past or the mistaken belief that the Roman family structure was the same as our modern nuclear one.
In 1890s America a publisher of school history texts printed two versions: one for the South which downplayed the brutality of slavery and another, unvarnished account, for schools in the North. Even southern black children growing up in segregated schools were indoctrinated with the belief that racism was largely absent from the old Confederate states.
Old enemies France and Germany have addressed this predisposition to imbalance by producing a joint textbook of the histories of their countries after World War II. They are now working on a version which will take in the period before 1945. This exercise has been tried with less success in the Middle East by an Israeli psychologist and a Palestinian professor.
So those who set the history syllabus must first decide what it is for. Is it about celebrating a nation’s achievements so hearts swell with patriotism? Or should the marginalised and oppressed be included? Australian prime minister John Howard was in no doubt, and got very angry when teachers wanted to tell children about the shabby treatment of the Aboriginals.
Today’s Russia has done little to remind its citizens of the horrors of Stalinism and the gulags. And it was not until November 2007 that Spain enacted the Law of Historical Memory to mark the location of mass graves containing the remains of those shot by General Franco. Yet the country has been a democracy since 1975.
And even America did not create a memorial to its Vietnam war dead until shamed by families and veterans into doing so. “History is about remembering the past,” says Macmillan. “But it is also about choosing to forget.”
History changes depending on where you are in it. Nationalism, she tells us, is such a new phenomenon that it has to invent its history and traditions. For centuries the British did not think of themselves as particularly English, Scottish or Welsh, but as members of families, clans, regions or religions.
When the League of Nations carved up Europe after World War I they came across locals who had no idea whether they were Czechs, Slovaks, Lithuanians or Poles. In the 1950s there were still people living in remote parts of Sicily who had never heard of Italy, even though they had been Italian for generations.
That is why the Israelis are so keen on archaeology. They hope that by digging up the past they will find evidence of their presence. But as they unearth their Biblical settlements what if they also discover Iron Age Arab settlements which pre-date them? That means they will have to rely on their victories in 1956, 1967 and 1973 as their claim to ownership instead.
But who first lived on land, or subsequently conquered it, are no longer good enough reasons for hanging onto it. And gone are the days when national leaders can simply sell it, as chunks of America were by Napoleon in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. Self-determination is now the guiding rule and takes precedence in modern tussles over territory. It’s how Britain justifies her hold on the Falklands and Gibraltar.
“History is like looking in a rearview mirror,” says the American historian John Lewis Gaddis. “If you only look back, you will land in the ditch. But it helps to know where you have come from, and who else is on the road.”
Nigel Nelson
