Abstract
History is under attack. It is being manipulated, used and abused by national leaders around the world. Here we interview five leading historians about what happens when history becomes a weapon
A War on Facts
Authoritarian leaders, and others, have often taken history seriously, because if they control history, they control their own legitimacy, said Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan.
She points to how the first Chinese emperor, in 221BC, called in all the history books and burnt them, then wrote his own version.
History, the Oxford University professor said, can have a lot of power. “The thing about history is, if people only know one version then it seems to validate the people in power,” adding that “the great thing about history is it can open up your mind, and you can say we didn’t have to come down this path”.
MacMillan, who writes extensively on World War I, said there were many examples of governments trying to control the historical record. “The German foreign office had a whole unit in the 1920s that was devoted to selecting and publishing German documents leading up to the war,” she said.
“Because the war was so dreadful, the question of who was responsible was a very important one. Governments tried [to establish] that it wasn’t their fault, it was someone else’s.
“But the Germans also thought that they hadn’t really lost, and that was a myth that was propagated by certain people.”
MacMillan explains that view also took root in the English-speaking countries and fed into the way the Western powers responded in the 1930s by allowing Germany leeway.
“A lot of people came to think in Britain and the United States that, yes, Germany had been unfairly treated and it should be appeased,” she said. “[That] Austria should have been allowed to merge with Germany at the end of the war.
“So even with Anschluss – when Germany took over Austria in the beginning of 1938 – a lot of people in the English-speaking countries said ‘well, you know, Germany was treated unfairly’.”
MacMillan also spoke of the impact of national leaders using historical stories as a platform for their nationalism, and why the role of historians was so important.
“Stories have been created by creating a national history, helped to create a sense of a nation, so it is not nationalism coming first, then historians following on, it’s historians.”
She said: “George Orwell got it completely. History can be subversive, it can be a tool of dictators.”
MacMillan feels strongly that history needs to be taught well in schools. It’s important to know that when you learn about a particular event, you are not hearing everything. But it is essential that every version is based on facts.
“I guess the best you can do is encourage people to ask questions.”
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History’s Bad Guys aren’t so Bad
When it comes to the Vikings, history has been written by the victims, not the victors – and that’s equally problematic.
“The Vikings were the last people in Europe to adopt Christianity. They remained pagans for longer than anyone,” Neil Oliver, the British archaeologist and presenter of hit shows including the BBC’s Vikings, told Index. He explains that Christianity played an essential role in introducing writing in Europe, which made a big difference to the way history was recorded.
“They couldn’t write the history that they were inflicting on others,” he said. “Other people they came into contact with wrote it and, because they usually didn’t like them, they portrayed them as murderous, as pagans and as villains.”
As a result, the Vikings have suffered from bad PR, both at the time of their conquests and in the centuries since. How easy is it to overcome this bias? Oliver said that, fortunately, there are other sources out there, which allow historians to get a better sense of who the Vikings actually were.
“When the Vikings began penetrating Europe, they came into contact with Muslims sent in for the Caliphate… along the Danube, the Tigris, and other European areas.”
While Oliver said that not all impressions were positive (Muslims would often remark on how the Vikings smelled bad and that they were disgusted by some of their customs), they did, nevertheless, write about them “quite favourably”.
“And you do have the Viking sagas and they were based on oral traditions,” he said, adding the caveat that these were written hundreds of years after the time, “so distance of time compromises those events”.
“In context, the Vikings were almost certainly no worse than anyone,” he said.
Context is, of course, key and this is something Oliver is also keen to highlight in reference to how more contemporary events, namely the EU and the internet, are viewed.
“I’m watching the present geopolitical situation and am struck by parallels between Brexit and the internet and how both are being presented.”
As with the Vikings, he believes history is being cherry-picked and is shifting of 1838 when they prayed and asked for God’s guidance for victory over the indigenous people and Blood River [a battle], and that becomes a central organising principle for the ethnic destiny.”
Van Onselen, who writes books on Afrikaner history, said: “It was laying down the political and ideological template groundwork for grand apartheid that was emerging in the 1960s, by saying you have got a separate geographical area, you have got a separate culture, you’ve got a separate history and indeed you will live separately.”
But, ultimately, this attempt to rewrite the nation’s history was not successful, because huge swathes of the population did not believe it, he argues.
“The history textbook rewriting comes from a manifest minority with a very particular ethnic and racial agenda in a country that is manifestly multiracial, multilingual and multicultural.”
Van Onselen is, however, not a fan of how history is being taught today in South Africa. He argues that very little is taught about wider African history.
“Our archives, our libraries, our documentary collections are in an utterly disgraceful and decayed state. Nationalists in South Africa - white and black alike - give pride of place to the role of history in their ‘struggle’.”
“Little time and money is spent on preservation of our historical records.”
Minority Report
“Ever since the age of the telegraph and the steam ship in the mid-19th century, the world is becoming increasingly globalised, but textbooks are written as if the nation state is the only entity and sort of offers the only levers of control in society – and this is manifestly nonsense,” argues leading South African historian Charles van Onselen.
He has an example at hand of how a nationalist political power attempted to use a historical rewrite of its country’s past to manipulate public opinion. During South Africa’s apartheid years, the Afrikanerrun government rewrote primary and secondary-school history books, before moving on to university textbooks a decade later. Van Onselen, a professor in the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at Pretoria University, describes how it started after the election of 1948. The government used the power of a secret organisation, the Broederbond, to influence the teaching profession.
“So the first thing that happens is that the school textbooks get rewritten and this manifests itself in wide-scale rewriting of history, foregrounding Afrikaner nationals’ experience and their destiny as chosen people,” he said.
“Central to that is this event our reality of the two. Oliver discusses how both the EU and the internet were born of conflict (the idea of the EU partly coming from the Marshall Plan – a US initiative giving assistance to help rebuild western European economies after World War II – and the internet growing out of the USA’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which “was a response to the launch of Sputnik” and “a great paranoia of the Soviet control of space”).
“It’s [the internet] portrayed now as if it was always this benign system that brings people together, but that’s not what it was created as,” said Oliver.
“I don’t see the wartime context for the foundations of either being talked about. A fractured, splintered Europe could have bad consequences. It’s not censored, it’s just not there.”
Separate Past
The Nigerian Civil War, more commonly known as the Biafran War, is one of Nigeria’s most defining events. But suppression of information about this conflict, which lasted from 1967 to 1970, is having unintended consequences now.
“When you put a lid on something for so many years and it’s boiling – when you finally open the lid, the steam or smoke blows everywhere and that is what is happening,” said Nigerian historian Ed Keazor.
Today, Nigeria is experiencing a growth in separatist movements across the country. Some claim the deliberate silencing of the war is responsible.
“A lot of the documentation of the civil war was not contained in any academic text, particularly for younger people,” he said. “People had to rely on the narratives of interested actors with their own subjective views.”
An absence of documentation and spin from both the Nigerian government and the Biafran separatists led to significant censorship during the military era (1970 to 1999).
“There was certainly a ‘don’t talk about the war’ [culture] amongst publishers,” said Keazor. “And it was a psychology that continued even when there was a civilian regime in the second republic.”
History was also taken off the education curriculum, which many claimed was a deliberate move by the government.
“It was felt by some that the removal of history as a whole was to prevent some unpleasant aspects in the nation’s history from being highlighted.”
Only a Fool Believed he had Free Speech
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In the scenes of my historical novels set at the Tudor court, freedom of speech was not a privilege held by many people. In fact, come to think of it, maybe only by the king’s fool, or jester – a truth-telling character who I’ve used as a fictional device in a novel about a maid of honour arriving at the court of Henry VIII and negotiating some of the power politics she found there.
You can see exactly why Henry VIII took the trouble to control his kingship so carefully – not just through the written medium but also through things like the design of his palaces, his public appearances and even who was allowed to come into his presence. His father had seized the throne in a coup just a generation before, and everyone was used to the upheaval of the Wars of the Roses. In a notorious piece of Tudor history rewriting, Henry VII dated the start of his reign from before the Battle of Bosworth, as if he’d been king all along, and when he won at Bosworth he was really just seizing the crown back again from the usurper Richard III – rather than Henry VII himself being the usurper.
Of course, historians today can see how Tudor historians were working for whoever was in power at the time and rewriting history to suit: just look at historian John Rous, who first praised Richard III to the skies when he was in power, then did the same for Henry VII in due course, and then blackened Richard III’s name after his fall.
Tudor propaganda was remarkably effective, whether it focused on the achievements of individual monarchs, or more generally when we look at the visual branding, the palace building, the heraldry and royal devices and image-making through artists such as Holbein from the 16th century. These are people we’re still talking about 500 years later: they had excellent public relations to have ensured that their reputations have lasted half a millennium.
But there were limits to Tudor power. The other thing that gave moral certainty to the writers of the 16th century was religion, and that’s something that can lead to powerful storytelling. For a novelist, the fate of Protestants under Catholic monarchs such as Mary I, or Catholics under Protestant monarchs such as Elizabeth I, instantly places characters in jeopardy. Your belief in heaven and hell and how these things might affect you personally will be yours and yours alone to a Tudor person, and not even a king or queen, however great their power, can force you to change your mind.
It’s sometimes amusing to make jokes at Tudor head chopping as it all seems so safely distant. But it isn’t so funny if you think of what people still do in the name of religious fundamentalism today.