Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (9 page)

While most of us do not take such a simple view of the world, we nevertheless find history can be useful to justify what we are doing in the present. In 2007, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, paid a visit to France for the rededication of the Vimy Ridge war memorial to the many Canadian soldiers who had died there in 1917. Canadians were uneasy with his government’s support for the Bush war on terror and with the mounting losses being suffered by Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Harper had already made it clear where he stood: Canada’s interest lay in backing Washington on virtually every major international issue, and he intended to keep Canadian forces in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. In his speech he underlined how the capture of Vimy Ridge was a triumph for Canadian forces and stressed that it was a great moment in the creation of the Canadian nation. “Every nation has a creation story to tell,” he said. “The First World War and the battle of Vimy Ridge are central to the story of our country.” Canadians had paid a heavy price for that victory. In an unfortunate choice of words, which left his meaning hovering uneasily between praise and condemnation, he told the living that they had an obligation to remember the “enormity” of that sacrifice and the “enormity” of their own duty, which was “to follow their example and to love our country and defend its freedom for ever.” And he urged his audience, both there and the much larger one in Canada, to listen to the voices of the dead. “We may hear them say softly: I love my family, I love my comrades, I love my country, and I will defend their freedom to the end.”

In Canada not everyone will agree with Harper’s interpretation of what Vimy means for today. We have a multiplicity of views about the past and its significance for the present. In China, by contrast, the Communist Party does its best to ensure that the public gets only one version of history. When my book on Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 came out, Chinese publishers showed an interest in translating it. There would, however, have to be a few small changes. Mention of the Cultural Revolution and of Mao’s often scandalous private life would have to go. (The book has not been published in China.) Although the Communist Party has repudiated most of Mao’s policies, it still holds him up as the father of the Communist Revolution. To question him would be to undermine the Party’s own authority to rule China.

Authoritarian regimes also find a judicious use of the past a useful means of social control. In the 1990s, when the Chinese Communist Party grew concerned about the waning of Communist ideology and the demands for greater democracy, which had led to the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, they called in Chinese history. In 1994, a member of the politburo, the central body of the Party, attended a memorial for the Yellow Emperor, a probably mythical figure from five thousand years ago who was said to be the father of all ethnic Chinese. It looked suspiciously like ancestor worship, one of the many traditional practices the Communists had condemned. The following year the authorities allowed a major conference on Confucius. Twenty years earlier, under the approving eyes of Mao, Red Guards had burned the great Confucian classics and done their best to destroy the sage’s tomb. The Party also sponsored a major campaign for Patriotic Education, which emphasized, as the official directive put it, “the Chinese people’s patriotism and brave patriotic deeds.” The Great Wall, which had in previous decades been condemned for its cost in ordinary Chinese lives,
now became the symbol of the Chinese will to survive and triumph. Very little was said about the joys of socialism, but China’s past achievements were neatly linked to Communist Party rule: “Patriotism is a historical concept, which has different specific connotations in different stages and periods of social development. In contemporary China, patriotism is in essence identical to socialism.” In other words, being loyal to China means being loyal to the Party. Chinese history was presented as the story of the centuries-old struggle of the Chinese people to unite and to progress in the face of determined interference and oppression from outside. China’s failure to get the 2000 Olympic Games, the Opium Wars of the early nineteenth century, foreigners condemning the brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square, and the Japanese invasion in the twentieth century were all wrapped up into one uninterrupted imperialist design to destroy the Chinese nation.

It is all too easy to rummage through the past and find nothing but a list of grievances, and many countries and peoples have done it. In the 1970s, Latin American nationalists blamed all their present problems on colonialism. The Chinese dwell on their Century of Humiliation and the ills they suffered at the hands of the imperialists. When the new state of Yugoslavia was formed after World War I, Serbs and Croats remembered quite different histories. Where the Serbs saw themselves as liberating their fellow southern Slavs, the Croats’ history was rather one where they had been dragged unwillingly into a Serb-dominated country and denied a fair share in their own government.

French-Canadian nationalists have depicted a past in which the conquest by the British in 1763 led to two and a half centuries of humiliation. They play down or ignore the many and repeated examples of cooperation and friendship between French and English Canadians. French Canadians—innocent, benevolent, communitarian,
and tolerant of others—are the heroes of the story; the English—coldhearted, passionless, and moneygrubbing— the villains. Esther Delisle, a Quebec historian, has run into trouble by attempting to show some ambiguities in that picture. She argues that Abbé Lionel Groulx, the renowned scholar and teacher, has become an icon to French-Canadian nationalists who manage, however, to overlook his anti-Semitism. While the nationalists stress the wrongs done to Quebec in the conscription crises of the two world wars, she points out that they fail to deal with the fact that in Quebec during World War II, there was considerable sympathy for the pro-Nazi Vichy government of France. As recent works on Pierre Trudeau confirm, he, like other members of the young French elite, carried on his life and career between 1939 and 1945 without paying much attention to what was going on in the world. “Reading the memoirs,” writes Delisle, “of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Gérard Pelletier and Gérard Filion, among other French Canadians promised to prestigious careers, one could conclude that they saw nothing, heard nothing, and said nothing at the time, and that they were only interested in (and marginally, at that) the struggle against conscription … There is more to the silence and lies than a simple narcissistic scratch. There is the need to hide positions which the Allied victory made unspeakable. These men would have to forget, and make others forget, their attraction to the siren songs of fascism and dictatorship in the worst cases, and in the best, their lack of opposition to them.”

Stories of past glories or of past wrongs are useful tools in the present, but they, too, often come at the cost of abusing history. History is also abused when people try to ignore or even suppress evidence that might challenge their preferred view of the past. In Japan at present, the nationalist right is furious with archaeologists who are going to examine some of the scattered
tombs where generations of the Japanese royal family are buried. Scholars have been asking for years for the right to investigate the sites, some of which go back to the third or fourth century. The nationalist fury grows out of their belief that the emperor is sacred and is, moreover, descended in an unbroken line from the sun. Japan, in the nationalist view, is a “divine land.” The more prosaic explanation is that the royal family came originally from China or Korea; even if that is not true, it is probable that there was a good deal of intermarriage between Japan and the mainland so that the imperial family’s bloodline may contain non-Japanese genes. If the investigations find evidence to confirm that hypothesis, a key part of the nationalists’ mythology is destroyed.

The treatment of the sites has fluctuated with prevailing political currents. While the emperors were mere figureheads, most of the sites were neglected. With the Meiji Restoration in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Japan began its great national project of rapid modernization, the emperor served as a convenient symbol of the national will, and a nationalist cult grew up around him. When suspected imperial tombs were discovered, the government bought the land and moved its owners away. No excavations were allowed until Japan’s defeat in 1945. The American occupiers embarked on an ambitious program to remake Japanese society, and that included rewriting Japan’s history. In theory, the ban on excavations of the imperial tombs was lifted, and indeed a number of discoveries were made which pointed to the extensive influence from both China and Korea on early Japanese culture. Access remains difficult, however, because the Imperial Household Agency, which runs the imperial properties, continues to insist that the sites are religious and that the spirits of the emperors’ ancestors ought not to be disturbed. Archaeologists continue to demand that the agency allow fuller
access. Several have received death threats from extreme nationalist groups.

Concern about what investigation of the past might reveal is by no means confined to Japan. In 1992 when a couple of spectators at hydroplane races on the Columbia River near Kennewick in the state of Washington stumbled on a human skull, their discovery set off a decade-long tug-of-war over the skull itself and the accompanying bones which were subsequently discovered. The remains turned out to be prehistoric, approximately nine thousand years old. Interestingly, the features of the skull appeared to be Caucasoid rather than aboriginal. These findings challenged what had until then been the widely accepted view that aboriginals were the first and only indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. The federal government, which would have preferred to avoid dealing with the issues raised, was prepared to hand over the bones to Native American tribes, but scientists sued for the right to do research. The Umatilla tribe argued that, according to its own myths, it had been near Kennewick since the beginning of time. “I have oral histories within my tribe that go back ten thousand years,” said one member. “I know where my people lived, where they died, where they hunted, where they fished and where they were buried, because my oral histories tell me that.” Kennewick man was an ancestor and must be properly buried. Furthermore, by letting the bones be investigated by scientists, the U.S. government was showing contempt for the tribe’s sacred beliefs. After an eight-year legal battle, the courts ruled that the bones stay in the possession of the Army Corps of Engineers, on whose land they were found, and that scientists be given access.

History that challenges comfortable assumptions about a group is painful, but it is, as Michael Howard said, a mark of maturity. In recent years, Ireland has witnessed a major revision of its
history in part because it is prosperous, successful, and self-confident and the old stories of victimhood no longer have the resonance they once did. As a result, the old, simple picture of Irish Catholic nationalists versus the Ulster Protestants and their English supporters and the two separate histories that each had is now being amended to show a more complex history, and some cherished myths are being destroyed. In World War I, it used to be believed, only the Protestants fought. The nationalists were engaged, depending on which way you looked at it, either in treason or in a struggle for liberty. In fact, 210,000 volunteers from Ireland, a majority of them Catholics and Irish nationalists, fought for the British against the Germans. The Easter Rising was not the unified movement of all Irish patriots of nationalist myth but the result, at least in part, of internal power struggles. As the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese, said in a recent lecture in London, “Where previously our history has been characterized by a plundering of the past for things to separate and differentiate us from one [another], our future now holds the optimistic possibility that Ireland will become a better place, where we will not only develop new relationships but will more comfortably revisit the past and find there … elements of kinship long neglected, of connections deliberately overlooked.”

Distorted history, suppressed evidence—there is worse still, and that is the history that is simply false. Sometimes it is done for the best of motives, to build pride among those who have suffered much and who live with a deep sense of powerlessness and humiliation. In 1923, Marcus Garvey the black American leader, wrote a stirring polemic titled “Who and What Is a Negro?” He tried to give his people back what slavery had stolen from them—a past as other peoples had, with a sense of who they were and what their achievements had been. He went further, though, and made claims which could not be substantiated. “Every student
of history,” he said, “of impartial mind, knows that the Negro once ruled the world, when white men were savages and barbarians living in caves; that thousands of Negro professors at that time taught in the universities in Alexandria, then the seat of learning; that ancient Egypt gave the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves.” His argument, which still keeps surfacing, was that civilization was like a torch which had passed from sub-Saharan Africa to Egypt, then, in an act of theft, on to Greece and Rome. It is a curious and static view of civilization as something that can be moved from one people to another—or that there is only one “civilization.” In reality, there are and have been many civilizations, and they are fluid and changing. The forces that shape them come from within and without. Of course, Greek civilization had outside influences, but they were as likely to come from the East as from Egypt. And there is little evidence that Egyptian civilization was derived largely from south of the Sahara.

More recent scholars have tried to bolster the claim by using linguistic and archaeological evidence. “Athens,” it is claimed, is originally an African word, and Socrates was black because one sculpture shows him with a flat nose. Scholars in the field have dismissed such evidence, but for some of the more committed supporters of the Garvey thesis that is simply proof that Europeans ever since the Greeks have been engaged in a massive conspiracy to conceal their theft and the fact that they could not create civilization on their own. According to Cheikh Anta Diop from Senegal, the Europeans even laid a trail of false evidence down through the centuries. Such stories bear the same relationship to the past as
The Da Vinci Code
does to Christian theology. They may help for a time to instill pride, but at a cost.