Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (12 page)

When Serbian forces started to attack Bosnian Muslims, they tried to justify their unprovoked aggression by telling the world that they were yet again defending the Christian West against the fanatical East. The fact that Bosnian Muslims were not only largely secular but mostly descended from Serbs or Croats was not allowed to stand in the way. Serbian nationalists insisted on referring to them as Turks or traitors to the Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church. Croatians, of course, preferred to see the Bosnian Muslims as apostate Croatian Catholics. (Ironically, the effect of the war has been to make many Muslims in Bosnia much more devout.)

Using history to label or diminish your opponents has always been a useful tool. The Left shouts “Fascist!” at the Right while conservatives throw around the Stalinist and Communist labels. When Ariel Sharon, then prime minister of Israel, visited New York in 2005, he faced protesters who shouted “Auschwitz” and “Nazi” because he had dismantled illegal Jewish settlements in the Gaza. In January 2006, as Hillary Clinton was opening her campaign for the presidency, she attacked the House of Representatives, then dominated by the Republicans. “When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run,” she told a predominantly black audience in Harlem, “it has been run like a plantation and you know what I am talking about.” They did, and so did the Republicans who accused her of trying to play the race card.

Countries also use episodes from the past to shame and put
pressure on others. China, for example, repeatedly refers to the Century of Humiliation, which started with the first Opium War in 1839 and ended with the triumph of the Communists in 1949. The Chinese have a long list of grievances: defeat at the hands of foreign powers, from Britain to Japan; the 1860 burning of the Summer Palace in Beijing by British and French troops; foreign concession areas where foreign nationals made fortunes and lived under their own laws; unequal treaties that undermined China’s autonomy; and, of course, the famous “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted” sign. When the United States sells weapons to Taiwan, China reminds it of American support for the Communists’ enemies in the past. When Henry Kissinger made his first secret trip to China in the summer of 1972, he had to sit through repeated reminders by the then prime minister, Zhou Enlai, of past American sins, including the famous occasion at the Geneva conference in 1954 when John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, refused to shake Zhou’s hand. In 1981, China’s then leader, Deng Xiaoping, complained to the United States about its reluctance to sell China advanced technology: “Perhaps the problem is one of how the U.S. treats China. I wonder whether the U.S. is still not treating China as a hostile country.”

In the Chinese Communist Party’s history, China is the eternal victim, and so it can do no wrong. It has been a peaceful power throughout its long history, never trying to conquer other peoples or grab territory, unlike the Western powers or Japan. When China receives worldwide criticism for its support of dreadful regimes like the ones in Burma and Sudan, yet again it is being unfairly treated. Foreign powers, in the Chinese view, cynically use talk of human rights abuses to attack China and to interfere in its internal affairs. The Dalai Lama, supported by wicked and self-serving forces in the West, puts out false stories about Tibet when, according to the official Chinese line, what
had been a backward and priest-ridden society is rapidly modernizing with China’s unstinting help. In any case, say the Chinese, Westerners have no moral authority to criticize them when the West’s own history includes imperialism, slavery, and the Holocaust. When the Canadian government recently made inquiries about the fate of the Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil, who is being held in a Chinese prison, the Chinese countered with charges that, yet again, foreigners were trying to humiliate China but that China would stand firm. An interesting variant on the use of history to justify present-day behavior surfaced during the 2008 summer Olympics. When foreign critics pointed out that the Chinese authorities were not, as they had apparently promised the International Olympic Committee, respecting human rights, the response by China’s defenders was that foreigners had no authority to criticize China since they did not know its long history.

In its relations with Japan, China has made great use of the past, in particular the Japanese invasion and occupation between 1937 and 1945 and the well-documented atrocities, such as the rape of Nanjing by Japanese troops, which accompanied it. Japan’s behavior in China and its role in provoking World War II in Asia have been the subjects of painful debate within Japan, but the Chinese government has chosen to believe that Japan continues to deny its culpability. In the 1990s, as the Communist Party started the Patriotic Education campaign to bolster its own authority, attacks on Japan and its reputed amnesia grew. Painting modern Japan as the unrepentant successor to the militaristic country of World War II was a convenient way of justifying China’s own claims to leadership in Asia and undermining Japan’s claims for a seat on an expanded UN Security Council. In the spring of 2005, under the benevolent eye of the authorities, and perhaps with their direct encouragement, young Chinese attacked Japanese businesses in several of China’s big cities on the
grounds that Japanese textbooks were omitting all references to the sack of Nanjing. When the disturbances spread, however, and the targets widened to include the failings of the Chinese government in such areas as the environment, the Party decided enough was enough. The nationalist outbursts stopped. The emotions they were tapping into remain, though, and the Party continues to be tempted to play the dangerous game of using nationalism to bolster its declining ideological authority.

Sometimes the present is called in to effect changes in the past. To take one example which has been much in the news lately: Armenian groups around the world argue that Turkey should not be allowed into the European Union until it has admitted that it conducted genocide more than ninety years ago. It is absolutely true that a dreadful thing was done to the Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Turks during World War I. As Russian armies advanced on Turkey, the Turkish government feared that the Armenians would offer support to the invaders. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were forcibly uprooted from their homes in the northeast of Turkey and sent south. Many did not survive the trek. They were harried by local Muslims, often Kurds, and the Turkish authorities either watched with indifference or actively encouraged the killing. In countries such as the United States, Canada, and France, Armenians and their supporters have persuaded legislators to define the murders as genocide, arguing that it was official Turkish policy to exterminate the Armenians, and to demand that the Turkish government of today make a full apology. The Turks have dug in their heels, arguing that today’s Turkey should not bear the responsibility for what was done in the past by a very different regime. They deny, moreover, that what occurred was genocide. The issue has further complicated the vexed question of Turkey’s admission to the European Union.

In the aftermath of World War I, the Germans used history as
a weapon in another way, to undermine the legitimacy of the Treaty of Versailles, which they had signed with the victorious Allies. Military defeat—and there is no doubt that it was that— came as a terrible shock to the German civilian government and to ordinary Germans, both of whom had been kept in the dark by the supreme command. From 1918 on, the army did its best to avoid responsibility for defeat by sedulously fostering the myth of the stab in the back: Germany had been defeated not on the battlefield but by the activities of traitors at home, whether socialists, pacifists, Jews, or a combination of all three. The fact that the Allies decided, partly for reasons of their own war weariness, not to invade and occupy Germany (apart from a small slice on the west side of the Rhine) gave the myth more credibility among the German people. The sense that Germany ought not to be treated as a defeated nation was also enhanced by the circumstances of its surrender. Its government had exchanged notes with the American president, Woodrow Wilson, in which he had talked of a peace without recrimination or vengeance. As far as the Germans were concerned, the armistice with the Allies had been made on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, which painted a picture of a new and peaceable world based on justice and respect for the rights of peoples. Surely that meant that the Allies would not seek to slice off great pieces of German territory, inhabited by Germans, or demand heavy reparations? In any event, to strengthen Germany’s case for gentle treatment, the country argued that it was a different Germany. The kaiser had fled, and the monarchy had vanished. Germany was now a republic, and why should it pay for the sins of its predecessor? When Germans discovered the terms of the Treaty of Versailles in the spring of 1919, their reaction was one of shock and a conviction that they had been betrayed. And when they found out that there were to be no serious negotiations but merely a deadline for signing, they denounced the treaty as the
“Diktat.”

In the 1920s, hostility to the treaty went right across the political spectrum within Germany. The terms were seen as punitive and illegitimate, and there was widespread if unspoken agreement that they should be circumvented wherever possible. What was particularly galling was Article 231, which assigned Germany responsibility for starting the war. The “war guilt” clause, as it came misleadingly to be known, was intended both to convey the Allies’ moral disapprobation and, perhaps even more important, to provide a legal basis for demanding reparations. The leader of the German delegation which received the terms made a conscious decision to attack Article 231, and back in Germany the Foreign Ministry set up a special unit to continue his work. The events of July 1914 came in for particular scrutiny. Selected documents were released or shown to sympathetic historians to create a picture of a Europe stumbling toward war. The catastrophe was no one’s and everyone’s fault. Germany bore no more responsibility than any another country.

Within Germany, such views of the past were immensely influential in fueling both a deep sense of grievance against the Allies (and indeed against the German government, largely made up of Socialists, which had signed the treaty) and a strong desire to burst the “chains” of the Versailles Treaty. As he started to gather support among disgruntled veterans, extreme right-wingers, and the floating population of the Munich beer halls in the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler hammered on the themes of the stab in the back and the unjust peace. As he gained a hearing among the respectable middle classes, it was that appeal to a frustrated German nationalism that helped him to gain legitimacy. Unfortunately for the peace of the world, the rewriting of history made an impact outside Germany as well, particularly in the English-speaking countries. Increasingly, the leaders and publics in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States took the view that Germany had indeed been unfairly treated
and that it was quite right to demand a revision of the Treaty of Versailles. The distortion and misuse of history served Hitler well in two ways: by bringing him supporters and by feeding the appeasement policies of his potential opponents.

In the past two centuries, history has become important in another way—as a basis for claiming land, both within countries and between them. This is partly because, where there are no clear records transferring land from one group of people to another, as is the case with much Native land in Canada, evidence of possession in the past helps to support arguments that the transfer was illegal. Furthermore, we no longer regard treaties and agreements signed when one side does not have the slightest idea of what the words mean as valid. When Henry Stanley traveled up the Congo River getting local chiefs to put their marks on what were to them meaningless bits of paper, he acquired for King Leopold of Belgium a vast territory. And the great powers acquiesced. They were, after all, doing much the same thing themselves. Today we would treat such sharp dealing as fraud.

Nor, unless we are religious fanatics, do we believe that promises from the gods are a sound basis for claiming territory. Other traditional grounds for claiming territory are equally unacceptable today. Marriage, for example. When Charles II of Britain married Catherine of Braganza, she brought Bombay with her as part of her dowry. Today if Prince Charles wished to give the Duchy of Cornwall to his new wife, it would be simply unthinkable. Monarchs no longer can swap pieces of territory as they did for so many centuries. Napoleon could sell a huge chunk of the New World to the United States in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase; President Nicolas Sarkozy would not be able to sell even the smallest piece of France—the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, for example—today. At the Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic Wars, kingdoms, duchies, counties, and cities were
bartered among the powers in a great game of Monopoly, and no one saw anything wrong in it. A century later, at the conclusion of World War I, the Paris Peace Conference spent much time and effort trying to determine the wishes of the inhabitants—or at the very least their ethnicity—of the territories it found at its disposal.

Ways of thinking change, and what seemed perfectly normal two centuries ago now is literally unthinkable. War and conquest used to be quite standard ways of shifting boundaries about. If you lost a war, you could expect to give up money, art treasures, territory, weapons, and anything else the victor demanded. The spread of ideas about popular sovereignty, democracy, citizenship, and nationalism has meant that even the most ruthless of rulers had to pay at least lip service to the notion that peoples have a right to self-determination. When Hitler moved east into the Soviet Union, he claimed to be following the natural and historical path of the German race. When Stalin scooped Eastern Europe into his empire at the end of World War II, his cover story was that the Soviet Union was responding to the will of the local peoples or that it was simply restoring its historic boundaries. When Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait in 1990, he tried to justify his actions with unconvincing references to Kuwait recognizing Iraqi suzerainty in the eighteenth century, long, of course, before either country existed. History has become ever more necessary to provide legitimacy to claims to land as most other grounds, whether marriage or conquest, have fallen away.