Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (17 page)

History has so often produced conflicts, but it can also help in bringing about reconciliation. The purpose of the truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa and Chile was to expose the past in all its seaminess and to move on. That does not mean dwelling on past sufferings or past misdeeds to the exclusion of all else, but accepting that they have occurred and trying to assess their meaning. When John Howard was trying to promote a national history curriculum in Australia, the principal of a girls’ high school in Sydney described how she dealt with the contested story of the arrival of the first whites. “We canvass all the terms for white settlement: colonialism, invasion and genocide.” Examining the past honestly, whether that is painful for some people or not, is the only way for societies to become mature and to build bridges to others.

In 2006, those old enemies France and Germany brought out a joint history textbook, which students in both countries will use. Although it only deals with the period after World War II, the longer-term plan is to produce texts dealing with the more difficult subject of the period before 1945. In the Middle East, Sami Adwan, a Palestinian professor at Bethlehem University, has been working with an Israeli psychologist, Dan Bar-On, to design a text that both Israeli and Palestinian high school students can use. Their goals are more modest than the French and German ones; they hope merely to include the two different national histories side by side, as well as instances of cooperation and peace between Israelis and Palestinians to offset the prevailing stories of perpetual conflict. This, they hope, will help build a mutual understanding that will have a wider significance in the longer run. “In order for Palestinian and Israeli children to understand themselves,” Professor Adwan told an interviewer, “they must understand the other. It is only after they understand the story of the other that they will discover to what extent they are truly prepared to understand the other side, and thus prepared to make changes to their own stories.” So far, sadly, only a handful of teachers on both sides of the divide have shown an interest in using the text.

Public acts where the past is admitted can also help to heal wounds between countries. Chancellor Willy Brandt, on the first visit of a West German leader to Poland, made a huge impact when he fell to his knees before the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1984, Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, met at Verdun, site of the most prolonged and deadly battle between their two countries in World War I, to celebrate the future of an integrated Europe. The two countries have also built a shared war museum at Péronne, which was once the German headquarters for the Battle of the Somme. The museum was
designed to show the war as a European phenomenon and to stress the need for integration in present-day Europe.

Sometimes, of course, like a strong medicine, admitting past crimes can kill. The Soviet Union did not survive Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, of opening up discussion of the Stalinist past. The revelations of the extent of the Gulag and the number of Stalin’s victims served to undermine public faith in the whole system that could have produced such crimes. And the Soviet Union’s admission in the 1980s, after years of denial, that it had indeed agreed secretly with Hitler to divide up the countries that lay between them and that its armies had murdered Polish soldiers after they had surrendered in 1939 only destroyed still further the hold that the Soviets had over Eastern Europe. (Today, the Russian media are backing away from that admission and returning to the old, false charge that the murders were done by the Nazis.) Then, one can ask, should such a regime and such an empire have survived?

History, as we have seen, is much used, but is it much use? On that, opinion has been divided ever since the fifth century
B.C.
when Thucydides declared the past was an aid in the interpretation of the future. Edward Gibbon regarded it rather as “the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” A. J. P. Taylor, contrarian in this as in so much else, believed that history was an enjoyable exercise which had no use whatsoever beyond helping us to understand the past. “Of course,” he said dismissively “you can learn certain commonplaces, such as that all men die or that one day, the deterrent, whatever it may be, will fail to deter.” Perhaps it is best to ask if we would be worse off in the present if we did not know any history at all. I think the answer would probably be yes.

To begin with, history helps us to understand: first, those with whom we have to deal, and, second, and this is equally important, ourselves. As the American historian John Lewis Gaddis put it, it is like looking in a rearview mirror: if you only look back, you will land in the ditch, but it helps to know where you have come from and who else is on the road. One of the factors that made
the Cold War so dangerous to both sides is that they simply did not understand each other. The Americans took the Soviets’ rhetoric at face value and took for granted that their leadership really was out for world domination. The Communists, whether Soviet or Chinese, assumed that capitalist countries such as the United States and Britain would inevitably come to blows in their increasingly ruthless struggle for profits.

Michael Howard, the British military historian, despaired of the attitude that prevailed in Washington for much of the Cold War. “The Soviet Union was seen in the USA as a force of cosmic evil whose policy and intentions could be divined simply by multiplying Marxist dogma by Soviet military capacity.” Many of the Soviet goals were, in fact, traditional Russian ones, dictated by geography and history. Russia has few natural borders and has suffered repeated invasions; its governments have always sought buffer zones to protect the Russian heartland. When Stalin took the opportunity to move into Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, he was motivated as much by a desire for security as by ideology and national pride, Russian national pride, for all that he came from Georgia. During the war he created new military honors named after not Marx or Lenin but great czarist generals and admirals. One evening at the end of the war, after a dinner with his intimates, Stalin spread a map out on a table and happily pointed to all the old czarist territory he had regained.

American strategists also assumed that the Kremlin was prepared to risk all-out war in pursuit of its goals. In fact, given the Soviet Union’s huge losses in both world wars and the enormous job of reconstruction that lay before it after 1945, it was equally likely that the Soviet leadership would do a great deal to avoid war. We now know that was, in fact, often the case. When Nikita Khrushchev put nuclear-tipped missiles into Cuba in 1962, part of his motive was to let the United States feel what it was like to
fear direct attack and the devastation of its land, something the Soviets knew so well. And when he pulled them out, it was because he did not want to live through another, even more deadly war than the two he had already survived.

In 1949, when the Communists won in China, the Americans knew far more about China than they did about the Soviet Union, but they still got it wrong The pessimists who believed that the Chinese Communists really were placing themselves under Stalin’s orders drowned out those few experts on China who suggested that with such different histories and cultures, it was probably only a matter of time before the two Communist powers fell out. Mao, they predicted, would be the Asian Tito. (The Yugoslav Communist leader had just fallen out very dramatically with Stalin.) And indeed, that is exactly what happened a decade later. When the Sino-Soviet split occurred, some hardliners in the West could not bring themselves to believe it, arguing that the public recriminations between Beijing and Moscow were evidence of the extraordinary duplicity and deviousness of Communists.

The Communists usually misread the West just as badly, even though they had a much easier time in getting information. The Soviets expected Western powers to try to destroy them because, after all, wasn’t that what they had done when they sent troops to intervene in the Russian civil war? In fact, Western intervention, even though it was supported noisily by people like Winston Churchill, was halfhearted; at the end of World War I, there was little stomach for further military adventures in countries such as Britain and France. The Marxist blinkers were powerful ones, and what they learned about the West and its history only reinforced their preconceptions. Even young Soviet diplomats in training were only allowed to read the Communist newspapers from Western countries. Capitalism would continue to grind the
workers down, as it always had, and there would eventually be revolutions in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States. Talk of democracy, public opinion, or the rule of law in such places was just that—talk. When American presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton among them, raised issues of human rights, Communist leaders saw it as merely a way of interfering in their internal affairs.

If you do not know the history of another people, you will not understand their values, their fears, and their hopes or how they are likely to react to something you do. There is another way of getting things wrong and that is to assume that other peoples are just like you. Robert McNamara has spent much of his life trying to come to terms with what went wrong with the American war in Vietnam. In his memoir,
In Retrospect
, he came up with lessons he hoped future leaders might heed. “We viewed,” he says in one, “the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for—and a determination to fight for—freedom and democracy.” The United States failed equally to understand the determination of the North Vietnamese. Time and again, it assumed that it could raise the pain it was inflicting on the North to the point where its leaders would do a cost-benefit analysis and decide that the time had come to throw in the towel. Yet these were the people who had fought for seven years to defeat the French. “Our misjudgments of friend and foe alike,” McNamara concluded sadly, “reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area and the personalities and habits of their leaders.”

It was not a lesson the Bush White House of recent years appears to have learned. You believe in studying reality, a senior adviser said contemptuously to the journalist Ron Suskind in 2002. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” If the White House had studied reality a bit more, the president might not have used the word “crusade” two days after September 11 to refer to how he intended to deal with terrorists. Muslims, even moderate ones, tend to react viscerally to being reminded of much earlier attacks from the West. If some attention had been paid to reality, the United States and the United Kingdom might not have been quite so surprised that Iraqis failed to welcome them or appreciate foreign control of their oil.

In November 2002, four months before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair had his only meeting with independent British experts. “We all pretty much said the same thing,” said George Joffe, a Middle East specialist from Cambridge University. “Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don’t imagine you’ll be welcomed.” Blair did not appear interested in this analysis and focused instead on Saddam Hussein: “But the man’s uniquely evil, isn’t he?” The experts tried to explain that thirty years of Hussein’s dictatorship had ground down Iraq’s civil society to the point that there were virtually no independent organized forces to serve as allies for the coalition. Blair remained uninterested. The Foreign Office showed no more interest in taking advantage of their considerable knowledge and expertise.

A little more than five years later, in January 2008, the U.K. Ministry of Defence issued a report that was severely critical of the way in which British soldiers were prepared to serve in Iraq. There had been, the report said, a lack of information about the context the soldiers would be operating in and uncertainty about how the Iraqis might react to an invasion. The military, the report
went on, failed to anticipate differences between Iraq and the Balkans and Northern Ireland, where British forces had gained a great deal of their recent experience. In other words, they had not looked at the history of Iraq.

Knowing history can help avoid lazy generalizations as well. It would be folly to take on the Serbs, said the pessimists as Yugoslavia was falling to pieces; look how they fought off the Nazis in World War II. In fact, if you look more closely at what happened, as an American army researcher did a few years ago, you find that the German divisions were not the cream of the German army and most were seriously understrength. And if you look even further back, at World War I, you see that the Serbian army was defeated and forced into exile, and Serbia itself was occupied until the end of the war by German and Austrian troops. Afghanistan comes in for much the same rhetoric of despair; it has never, the pundits say, been conquered by an outside power. That would come as a surprise to Alexander the Great as much as to Genghis Khan. Today, we hear that the Western powers cannot interfere in the increasing chaos and misery of Zimbabwe because it would only rouse memories of colonialism among the population. It is a pity that such considerations were not taken into account when the United States went into Vietnam or, more recently, into Iraq.