Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (8 page)

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.

Today, those who count themselves Deaf often wear a blue ribbon because that is what the Nazis made the deaf wear. At a
formal blue ribbon ceremony in Australia in 1999, seven Deaf narrators carrying candles spoke of their culture, their history, and their survival as a community. “We remember those Deaf people who were victims of Oralism in their education, denied their sign languages and Deaf teachers.” And, he went on, “we remember the constant attempts either to eliminate us or to prevent us from being born, by not allowing Deaf people to marry each other, through enforced sterilisation.” At a recent Deaf convention in the United Kingdom, Lane told his British audience that speech therapists and hearing-aid manufacturers in the United States have coalesced into a powerful lobby to grind the deaf minority down. Paddy Ladd, an equally impassioned British professor who is himself deaf, praises the nineteenth-century deaf French scholar Ferdinand Berthier, whose attempts to build an international deaf community, Ladd says, were thwarted by oral imperialists. There was an earlier, happier time, even a golden age, so Deaf history has it, when a venerable French priest set up a school for deaf children in the second half of the eighteenth century and understood that they must have their own sign language. Unfortunately, for the Deaf activists, the record shows that he intended signing to be not an end in itself but a stage on the way to teaching his pupils to lip-read and perhaps even speak.

Lost golden ages can be very effective tools for motivating people in the present. “Unity was and is the destiny of Italy,” Giuseppe Mazzini, the great nineteenth-century Italian nationalist, urged the divided peninsula. “The civil primacy, twice exercised by Italy—through the arms of the Caesars and the voice of the Popes—is destined to be held a third time by the people of Italy—the nation.” Mazzini was also a liberal who believed that a world filled by self-governing peoples would be a happy, democratic, and peaceful one, yet there was an ominous tone to his exhortations:
“They who were unable forty years ago to perceive the signs of progress towards unity made in the successive periods of Italian life, were simply blind to the light of History. But should any in the face of the actual glorious manifestation of our people, endeavour to lead them back to ideas of confederations, and independent provincial liberty, they would deserve to be branded as traitors to their country.” A great past can be a promise, but it can also be a terrible burden. Mussolini promised the Italians a second Roman Empire and led them to disaster in World War II.

Greek nationalists in the early nineteenth century, and their supporters in Europe, took it for granted that they were freeing the heirs of classical Greek civilization from the Ottoman Empire. Surely history would grant them a second chance. Greek scholars wrote books showing that there was a direct line from the classical world to the modern. (The four centuries of Ottoman rule were largely overlooked.) Foreign scholars who suggested that such a view was too simplistic were pilloried or ignored. Written Greek was modeled on the classical, and so generations of schoolchildren struggled with a language which was very different from the one they spoke. It was only in 1976 that the government finally conceded and made modern Greek the official language. More dangerously, the past held the promise of a reborn Greek empire. Eleuthérios Venizélos, the leading Greek statesman at the time of World War I, once gathered his friends around a map and drew the outlines of ancient Greece, at the height of its influence, across the modern borders. His outline included most of modern Turkey, a good part of Albania, and most of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. (He could also have included parts of Italy, but did not.) Under the influence of that great
(megali)
idea, he sent Greek soldiers to Asia Minor in 1919 to stake out Greece’s claims. The result was a catastrophe for the
Greek armies and for all those innocent Greeks who had lived for generations in what became modern Turkey. As the resurgent Turkish armies under Kemal Atatürk pressed the Greek forces back, hundreds of thousands of bewildered refugees, many of whom barely knew Greek, followed them. In turn, huge numbers of Turks, many distinguished from their Greek neighbors only by their religion, abandoned their homes and villages for Turkey. The events of those years have in turn become part of history and have poisoned relations between Greece and Turkey up to the present.

Ideologies call on history as well, but in their hands the past becomes a prophecy. The faithful may have suffered, and may be suffering still, but history is moving toward a preordained end. Whether secular like Marxism or Fascism, or religious like the fundamentalisms of various faiths, the story they tell is at once breathtakingly simple and all-encompassing Every event is fitted into the grand account and all is explained. The writer Arthur Koestler remembered the great relief and delight he felt when he discovered Marxism in the troubled years when the Weimar Republic was failing and the Nazis were reaching out for power. Past, present, and future all became comprehensible: “The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled at one stroke.”

Karl Marx believed that he had discovered that history had laws just as science does and that these showed a Communist future was bound to come. History had started with primitive communism, an idyllic world of hunters and gatherers where there was no private property but everyone shared everything according to need. The end of history, Marx promised, was a similar society but this time, thanks to new and improved types of production, a much more prosperous one. Fascism, like Communism,
saw itself as facing the future, but it, too, called on old emotions and memories. The Nazis made much of ancient myths and legends and of historical figures such as Frederick the Great; Frederick Barbarossa, who was crowned German king in the twelfth century; and the contemporaneous Teutonic Knights, whose crusades included not only the Holy Land but also much of the Baltic. These were all supposed to show the genius and continuity of the German race—and the need for it to resume its onward march. “We take up where we left off six hundred years ago,” wrote Hitler in
Mein Kampf.
“We stop the endless German movements to the south and the west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east.” Religious fundamentalists, of course, do much the same as they summon believers back to the “true” religion as it first was after the divine revelations. They, too, paint a golden age when all the faithful lived in harmony, obeying the laws they had been given. Muslim fundamentalists, for example, want to revive the caliphate and bring in sharia law (although deciding which of the several schools of sharia may be difficult).

Setbacks and defeats become parts of such stories, rather than challenges to their truth. If the faithful have suffered, that is because of the plots and conspiracies of their enemies. For Hitler, of course, that meant the Jews. They had started World War I and created the Bolshevik Revolution, and they had ensured that Germany suffered under the Treaty of Versailles. He had warned them, Hitler said repeatedly, that if they dared to start another war, he would destroy them, “the vermin of Europe.” World War II was the fault of the Jews, and the time had come to deal with them once and for all. If any one person was responsible for that war, it was Hitler himself, but logic and reason do not enter into closed systems of viewing the world. In 1991, the American televangelist Pat Robertson warned that Bush Sr.’s victory over Iraq was not what it appeared. It was paving the way not for peace
but for the triumph of evil. It was all so clear to Robertson. Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a secret conspiracy had been pushing the world toward socialism and the triumph of the Antichrist. The European Union was clearly part of the plot and so was the United Nations. The Gulf War and the missiles that Saddam Hussein had fired on Israel were yet more steps toward the final reckoning.

Remembering the evils of the past helps to sustain the faithful. Yes, the present may look dark, but that, too, is part of the story before the triumph of the faithful and paradise comes on earth or in heaven. A few weeks after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden released a tape in which he exulted about the destruction of the World Trade Center towers: “Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.” Few people in the West knew that for him, Muslim degradation had started in the modern age with the abolition of the caliphate. In 1924, in a move which caused little comment in the West, Atatürk, the founder of a new and secular Turkey, had abolished that last office held by the deposed Ottoman sultans. As caliphs, they had claimed spiritual leadership of the world’s Muslims. The last one, a gentle poet, had gone quietly into exile. For many Muslims, from India to the Middle East, the abolition was a blow to their dream of a united Muslim world governed according to God’s laws. For bin Laden and those who thought like him, disunity among Muslims had allowed Western powers to push the Middle East around; to take its oil and, with the establishment of Israel, its land; to corrupt its leaders; and to lead ordinary Muslims astray. The Saudi rulers had committed the ultimate sin of allowing the United States to bring its troops onto the holy land where Muslims had their most sacred sites. Bin Laden’s history includes much more than the past eighty years.
The Crusades, the defeat of the Moors in Spain, Western imperialism in the nineteenth century, and the evils of the twentieth all add up to a dark tale of Muslim humiliation and suffering. Such history keeps followers angry and motivated and attracts new recruits.