Interest in history is on the rise in books, films and television. Is that necessarily a good thing?
The Balkans, Winston Churchill wrote, had more history than they could consume. Too much history can even become “the gravedigger of the present,” sapping our vital energies with memories of past wounds and losses, as Friedrich Nietzsche said in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life.
Margaret MacMillan borrows Nietzsche’s title, but not his message in her new book, The Uses and Abuses of History. For her, understanding the past is vital, even if history is an explosive substance that needs to be handled with care.
A prize-winning historian and the warden of St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, MacMillan is good on the perpetuation of historical myth. A case in point is the oft-repeated contention, boosted by economist John Maynard Keynes, that the victors’ vindictive treatment of Germany after World War I inevitably led to World War II.
Yet the Germans did, after all, lose the war, and their punishment in practice was never as harsh as critics persist in suggesting, MacMillan reminds us: Germany paid only a fraction of the reparations bill; Adolf Hitler canceled what was left; and in any case it was the Great Depression that really put the screws on the country, sharpening its aggressive mood.
Facing up to uncomfortable historical truths can be painful, as MacMillan notes. Britain’s mismanagement of the Irish question and Rhodesia are good examples, as is Germany’s embrace of the Nazis.
Yet it’s immature to see our past as little more than an accumulation of guilt, she argues. Everything comes down to a balanced view of history, something Russia’s leaders are now upsetting as they seek, little by little, to refurbish Josef Stalin’s reputation, she says.
A similar perversion of history can be seen in Japan, where many a textbook continues to shy away from presenting a true account of the atrocities Japanese troops committed in China in the 1930s and during World War II.
Nationalism is one of history’s greatest enemies, MacMillan argues. The Chinese, she says, would be surprised to learn that Hindu extremists claim to have rediscovered an advanced Indian civilization that preceded China’s. By this account, the Chinese are little more than descendants of Hindu warriors. Equally surprised by this theory would be the followers of Marcus Garvey, who claimed in the 1920s that a black civilization once ruled the world.
The danger of knowing too much history is of course outweighed by the risk of knowing too little. Americans, according to MacMillan, failed to understand the historically formed mentality of their Cold War opponents, Russia and China (not that it stopped them winning, except in Vietnam). Ignorance of Iraq’s culture was a major factor in some of the catastrophic consequences of the US-led invasion of that country, and MacMillan devotes many pages to a familiar critique of former US president George W. Bush and all his works.
Given this emphasis on the past’s lessons for the present, it’s surprising that MacMillan doesn’t discuss the history behind the rise of terrorism. She rightly accuses some countries of developing grievance cultures, and she chides the Chinese, the Latin Americans and the French Canadians (MacMillan is Canadian) for blaming colonialism for all their woes.
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