Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (3 page)

In fact, many of the old conflicts and tensions remained, frozen into place just under the surface of the Cold War. The end of that great struggle brought a thaw, and long-suppressed dreams and hatreds bubbled to the surface again. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait, basing its claims on dubious history. We discovered that it mattered that Serbs and Croats had many historical reasons to fear and hate each other, and that there were peoples within the Soviet Union who had their own proud histories and who wanted their independence. Many of us had to learn who the Serbs and Croats were and where Armenia or Georgia lay on the map. In the words of the title of Misha Glenny’s book on central Europe, we witnessed the rebirth of history. Of course, as so often happens, some people went too far the other way and blamed everything that was going wrong in the Balkans in the 1990s, to take one of the most egregious cases, on “age-old hatreds,” which conveniently overlooked the wickedness of Slobodan Milošević, then the president, and his ilk, who were doing their best to destroy Yugoslavia and dismember Bosnia. Such an attitude allowed outside powers to stand by wringing their hands helplessly for far too long.

The last two decades have been troubled and bewildering ones, and, not surprisingly, many people have turned to history to try to understand what is going on. Books on the history of the Balkans sold well as Yugoslavia fell to pieces. Today, publishers are rushing to commission histories of Iraq or to reissue older works. T E. Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, which describes the Arab struggle against Turkey for independence, is a bestseller again, and particularly popular with American soldiers serving in Iraq. My own book on the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, where so much of the foundation of the modern world was laid, could not find a publisher in the 1980s. As one publisher said, no one wanted to read about a bunch of dead white men sitting around talking about long-forgotten peace settlements. By the 1990s, the subject had come to seem a lot more relevant.

Today’s world is far removed from the stasis of the Cold War. It looks more like that of the decade before 1914 and the outbreak of World War I or the world of the 1920s. In those days, as the British Empire started to weaken and other powers, from Germany to Japan to the United States, challenged it for hegemony, the international system became unstable. Today, the United States still towers over the other powers but not as much as it once did. It has been badly damaged by its involvement in Iraq, and it faces challenges from the rising Asian powers of China and India and its old rival Russia. Economic troubles bring, as they brought in the past, domestic pressures for protection and trade barriers. Ideologies—then Fascism and Communism, now religious fundamentalisms—challenge the assumptions of liberal internationalism and wage war on powers they see standing in their way. And the world still has, as it had in the first half of the twentieth century, the unreasoning forces of ethnic nationalism.

Dealing with uncertainty is not easy, and it is not surprising that we seize on whatever might help us—including history. The uses and abuses of history in decision making are something I will come to later, but for the present I want to look at why history can be at once so reassuring and so appealing.

To begin with, it can offer simplicity when the present seems bewildering and chaotic.

Over the years, historians have tried to discern grand patterns, perhaps one grand pattern, that explain everything. For some religions, history provides evidence of the working out of a divine purpose. For the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, it demonstrated the working out of the infinite spirit
(Geist)
on earth. Karl Marx built on Hegel to produce his “scientific” history, which purported to show that history was moving inexorably toward its destined end of full Communism. To Johann Gottfried Herder, the influential German thinker of the late eighteenth century, history showed that an organic German nation had existed for centuries, although in political terms it had not yet reached its full potential. For imperialists like Sir
Charles Dilke, the study of the past confirmed the superiority of the British race. Arnold Toynbee, whose work is largely neglected now, saw a pattern of challenge and response as civilizations grew great in overcoming obstacles and then failed as they turned soft and lazy. The Chinese, unlike most Western thinkers, did not see history as a linear process at all. Their scholars talked in terms of a dynastic cycle where dynasties came and went in an unending repetition, following the unchanging pattern of birth, maturity, and death all under the aegis of heaven.

History, and perhaps that is the case today, can also be an escape from the present. When the world is complicated and changing rapidly, not necessarily for the better, it is no surprise that we look back to what we mistakenly think was a simpler and clearer world. Conservatives dream of small towns painted by Norman Rockwell, where children played innocently in their gardens with no grown-up predators to disturb them, where men and women were comfortable in their roles, and where the sun shone on day after day of happiness. In Canada, an artist with the improbable name of Trisha Romance sells thousands upon thousands of prints of children in pinafores and sailor suits. The period is vaguely Victorian: horses draw carriages and sleighs, candles twinkle on Christmas trees, and families nestle around roaring fires. No one is ever sad or hungry or ragged in her past. Leftists for their part hark back to the glory days when the union movement was strong and the bosses were on the run. Behind much of the current fascination with World War II lies the feeling, certainly on the Allied side, that it was the last morally unambiguous good war. German Nazis, Italian Fascists, and Japanese militarists were so clearly bad people who had to be defeated. (The fact that we were allied with one of the greatest tyrants of the twentieth century in Joseph Stalin is something to be overlooked.) The wars since have not been as clear-cut. The
Korean War, true, was necessary to defeat Soviet expansionism, but General Douglas MacArthur’s attempt to turn it into a crusade against Chinese Communism divided Americans among themselves and against their allies. Vietnam was a catastrophe for the United States, and now the occupation of Iraq is looking like another.

We are also short of heroes today—or too aware of our leaders’ shortcomings—which may help to explain the cult of Winston Churchill, a cult that is perhaps even more pronounced in North America than it is in the United Kingdom. The British, after all, have had direct experience of Churchill in other roles than that of the great World War II leader. They are more likely to remember his long political career with its share of mistakes and failures. In North America, the Churchill who is remembered is largely the towering figure who fought on alone against the Axis and who helped craft the Allied victory, not the author of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in World War I or the ailing prime minister who stayed too long in office in the 1950s. President George W. Bush is, not surprisingly, fond of comparing himself to the first Churchill, not the second.

Political leaders have always known the value of comparing themselves to great figures from the past. It helps to give them stature and legitimacy as the heirs to the nation’s traditions. In comparing himself to Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, Stalin was taking on their mantle as builders of a greater Russia. Saddam Hussein in turn compared himself to Stalin or, drawing on the Islamic and Iraqi past, to Saladin. The last shah of Iran tried to draw a line down through the centuries from Cyrus and Darius to his own dynasty. Mao Zedong liked to point to the parallels between himself and the Qin emperor who created China in 221
B.C.

Our present longing for heroes is more than political expediency.
We are anxious to get the testimony of our war veterans before they die, for example, because we feel they have lessons to teach us. And we worry about how to commemorate them properly. As the last, very old veterans of World War I are dying off, a number of countries have considered holding a state funeral, usually given only for heads of state or extraordinary figures like Churchill himself, for the last soldier to die. The discussions have been macabre, about, for example, how to determine who is really the last. Do veterans who have lived all their lives in other countries count? What if a government gives a funeral and then another veteran is discovered? In 2006, in France, two more ancient veterans appeared out of obscurity.

The veterans themselves and their families have shown little enthusiasm for the pomp and circumstance. When the then president of France, Jacques Chirac, announced in 2005 that the last veteran would be buried in a special spot, perhaps the Pantheon itself, he had a cool response. Lazare Ponticelli, one of France’s last World War I veterans, said firmly, “If I turn out to be the last survivor, I say no. It would be an insult to all those who died before me and were not given any honors at all.” He wanted, and got, a simple memorial service because, he said, he did not think the nation’s attention should be directed at one person when so many hundreds of thousands suffered and died. Chirac hastily backtracked, and his government talked in vague terms about making any obsequies an occasion to symbolize European reconciliation.

In Canada, the Dominion Institute, which has shown great entrepreneurial talent for making Canadians feel guilty about how little they know about their own past, launched a petition to give the last Canadian veteran a state funeral. The government, which was initially noncommittal, bowed in the face of what looked like a groundswell of public opinion and allowed a vote in the House
of Commons. Not surprisingly, no member dared vote no on such an emotive issue. Again, the families of the veterans themselves were unenthusiastic. What also made it awkward was that one of the two surviving Canadian veterans at the time of the vote, John Babcock, a lively old man who told interviewers about his attempts to lose his virginity during the war, had lived in the United States since the early 1920s.

Often the desire to hold a state funeral reflects the concerns of the living. The British Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, argued, with one eye on the voters, that it would be a way of commemorating the whole generation that was there at the start of “the century of the common man.” When the Italian government buried the last Italian veteran with full state honors, the president, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, described the commemoration as “living and precious testimony to the sacrifice of the boys who fought … to make our country great, free, and united.” In Canada, Rudyard Griffiths, head of the Dominion Institute, said, “If there ever was a time for Canada and Canadians to be bold and generous in commemoration of our history, in commemoration of our shared values, surely the passing of the last Great War veteran is that moment.”

We call on the past to help us with our values at least in part because we no longer trust the authorities of today. We suspect our politicians of being self-seeking placeholders. Too many heads of companies have turned out to be cooking the books or giving themselves lavish emoluments. The craze for gossip fills the pages of
Hello!
magazine or
Vanity Fair
, but it also leaves us with the uneasy sense that there are no good and honest people left. We know too much, whether it is about President Bill Clinton’s sex life or Britney Spears’s drug problems. We read of doctors making mistakes or schoolteachers telling lies. All this happened in the past, of course, but not under the intense spotlights
that the media and the Internet provide today. History comforts us, even though, paradoxically, we know less and less about it.

In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values. Congregations at the old mainstream churches have declined sharply. It is true that there are huge evangelical churches out there, but they are as much about entertainment and socializing as religion. The millions who describe themselves as born-again Christians often have, according to surveys, the sketchiest of ideas about what it is they are adhering to. And even those who continue to have faith in a divine being may wonder how he or she can allow such evils as the twentieth century witnessed. History with a capital
His
being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.

President Bush has, according to news stories, been reading a lot of history lately, and in it he apparently found some comfort as his presidency stumbled toward its end and he sank ever lower in the opinion polls. He has taken to comparing himself to President Harry Truman, the untried vice president who found himself in office when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945. Truman, who came to office singularly ill prepared, thanks to FDR’s propensity to keep important matters to himself, was frequently written off at the time as the haberdasher from Missouri. During his tenure, his ratings were often as low as Bush’s are today. “To err is Truman,” said one wit.