Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History

by Margaret MacMillan

  The public and often bitter debate over the history standards was always about more than curriculum. It came at a time when the United States was uncertain about its role in the post–Cold War world and about its own society. The neoconservatives feared the United States no longer possessed the will to use its enormous power. At home, conservative Americans saw a decline in family values, which for them was often symbolized by legalized abortion. And many Americans worried about whether there truly was a central American identity anymore. Many of the new immigrants no longer appeared to want to be assimilated. Hispanics, for example, were insisting on keeping their own language and even having Spanish schools. Universities were abandoning their traditional Western civilization courses, and American history courses increasingly focused on cultural and social history. If Americans did not share a common sense of the past, what would happen to the dream expressed in the widely used government motto “E pluribus unum”? Would it come to stand for “Out of the one, many,” rather than the other way around? Although the particular furor over the National History Standards died down (indeed they have been widely adopted), the fear remains. In 2004, the respected historian Samuel Huntington published a melancholy book, Who Are We?, in which he warns that the “deconstructionist project” has elevated group and regional histories at the expense of national history. “People,” he warns, “who are losing that memory are becoming something less than a nation.”

  In countries that are, for whatever reason, lacking in self-confidence, the teaching of history can be an even more sensitive matter. In Turkey the government takes a strong interest in the curriculum. Historians who argue for greater attention being paid to the history of Turkey’s minorities or who dare to suggest that there was an Armenian genocide in World War I can find themselves in serious trouble. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin took a personal interest in the writing of new “patriotic” history textbooks being used in the schools. He handed out grants to approved authors (one was a former professor of Marxist-Leninist social science who had transformed himself into a historian), and his government gave itself the powers to determine what textbooks were used. At a teachers’ conference at the Kremlin in June 2007, Putin praised the new textbooks. “Many school books are written by people who work to get foreign grants,” he said. “They dance to the polka that others have paid for. You understand?” Just in case the assembled teachers missed his point, he told them that the time had come to get rid of the “muddle” and have a more openly nationalistic view of the past. The new textbooks, he said, would present a proper view of Stalin and of his place in Russian history. There were, Putin admitted to the teachers, some “problematic pages” in Russia’s past but far fewer than in other countries. (And look how the United States had behaved in Vietnam.) Stalin was a dictator, but that was necessary at the time to save Russia from its enemies. In the great struggle of the Cold War, which, according to the manual, was started by the United States, “democratization was not an option.”

  In China, the Party’s propaganda and education departments keep a close eye on the schools to ensure that they teach students of the suffering of the Chinese at the hands of the imperialists and convey the lesson that history selected the Communist Party to lead China into its present happy state. (In imperial China, the mandate was conferred by heaven, but the idea is much the same.) Recently, the authorities closed down a journal called Freezing Point after it carried an essay by Yuan Weishi, a well-known Chinese historian, in which he pointed out that high school textbooks were filled with errors and distortions. What is more, they gave highly slanted views of the Chinese past, to show, he argued, that Chinese civilization is superior to all others and that foreign culture should be seen as a threat. What really got him and the journal into trouble was the assertion that history, as it was being taught, justified the use of political power and even violence to keep people on the right path. Professor Yuan’s views, the authorities said, were heretical and attacked “socialism and the leadership by the party.”

  In Shanghai, a group of academics boldly produced new school textbooks which gave less space to the old staples of Chinese Communist history such as the depredations of imperialism and the rise of the Chinese Communist Party and paid more attention to other cultures and to such topics as technology and economics. The texts also let it be known that there could be more than one viewpoint on the past. Their fatal mistake, however, was to downplay the role of Mao. When a New York Times article headed “Where’s Mao?” commented on the improvement over the old two-dimensional histories, the authorities swung into action. Historians in Beijing issued a statement: “The Shanghai textbooks depart from Marxist historical materialism, and simply narrate events, rather than explain their nature. There are serious mistakes in political direction, theoretical direction, and academic direction.” The texts were banned.

  Fortunately, the teaching of history can change for the better. In South Africa, since the end of apartheid, the schools, as part of the national project of truth and reconciliation, have tried to present a history that includes all South Africans. In the Republic of Ireland, history used to be similarly circumscribed by political pressure. The story told in the schools was a simple one: eight centuries of oppression and then the triumph of Irish nationalism in the 1920s. Episodes that did not fit this version—the civil war, for example, between the competing nationalists—were ignored. Today, as its president pointed out, the schools teach a much fuller and more rounded version—and let the students know that there may be more than one way of viewing the past.

  Schools are only one battleground. In Australia, John Howard and the more conservative media also went after the new National Museum on the grounds that it presented the past as white Australia’s genocide against the Aboriginals and failed to highlight the great explorers and entrepreneurs who built up the country. Museums, especially ones that involve history occupy a curious place in our minds. Is their purpose to commemorate or to teach? To answer questions or to raise them? The answer in most societies is not clear. The Chinese, for example, have what are described as museums of World War II but more resemble Madame Tussauds waxworks than the Royal Ontario Museum or the British Museum. Instead of labeled objects in glass cases, they feature tableaux where Japanese soldiers bayonet Chinese civilians and Japanese doctors bend over the victims of their hideous experiments. The distinction between museums and memorials is a blurred one and, as a result, gives rise to often angry debates over how the past should be portrayed and interpreted.

  In 1994, as the war over the National History Standards was heating up, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington started to plan an exhibit to commemorate the end of World War II. One of its holdings was the B-29 bomber which had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Enola Gay, named by its pilot after his mother, became the center of a huge controversy when the curators suggested that visitors might want to think about the morality of using the world’s newest and most destructive weapon. Part of the exhibit was to be broken objects retrieved from the rubble at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the museum had consulted with special interest groups, including veterans’ associations, and with historians, this did not spare it the storm that followed.

  The Smithsonian curators tried, naively perhaps, to use the Enola Gay to raise questions about the nature of modern war and the role of nuclear weapons. They also hoped to inform the public that the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki had been controversial at the time and had remained so. Such explorations of issues ran up against those who felt strongly that the National Air and Space Museum existed not to encourage public debate, but to commemorate the glories of flight and of airpower and to reinforce Americans’ patriotism. Neoconservatives charged that the Smithsonian and liberal historians were attacking the record of the United States in World War II and American society itself by suggesting that Hiroshima had been of questionable morality. The Washington Times found something sinister in the fact that the
lead curator was both a Canadian and a former professor. Veterans resented the implication that their war had not been entirely a good one. The first script for the exhibit contained two sentences, subsequently deleted, which were quoted repeatedly as examples of the Smithsonian’s reprehensible rewriting of history. For most Americans, the early version said, the war against Japan “was fundamentally different than the one waged against Germany and Italy—it was a war of vengeance.” (It was ironic that some of the Smithsonian’s critics said the exhibit should include as part of the context Japanese atrocities such as the rape of Nanjing and the Bataan death march.) Even worse, from the point of view of the veterans and their supporters, the text then went on to say that for most Japanese, “it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.” The American Air Force Association charged that the exhibit claimed there was moral equivalency between the United States and Japan. Almost worse, perhaps, from the association’s viewpoint, it was a “strident attack” on the value of air-power.

  Members of Congress, newspapers, and right-wing radio talk shows jumped in enthusiastically to charge that the Smithsonian was besmirching the honor of the United States and its war heroes. George Will said the Smithsonian and the National History Standards were equally infected with the “cranky anti-Americanism of the campuses.” Pat Buchanan, who was soon to announce his candidacy for the 1996 Republican presidential nomination, saw the exhibit as part of “a sleepless campaign to inculcate in American youth a revulsion toward America’s past.” Nancy Kassebaum, a Republican senator from Kansas, introduced a resolution in the Senate which declared that the exhibit’s script was offensive and directed the National Air and Space Museum not to impugn “the memory of those who gave their lives for freedom.” In an election year, no one was going to vote against such sentiments. The Smithsonian had retreated step by step, redoing the script and the exhibits repeatedly, but the attacks merely increased. In January 1995 it canceled the show. Four months later, the director of the National Air and Space Museum resigned.

  Canada has just gone through a similar dispute, and yet again it is over the way a museum chose to commemorate World War II. When the new War Museum opened in Ottawa in 2005, it was widely hailed as a stunning building with detailed and well-planned exhibits showing Canada at war from its earliest days to its twenty-first-century campaign in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the museum almost immediately ran into trouble over the part of its exhibit devoted to the bombing campaign against Germany between 1939 and 1945. As I mentioned earlier, the plaque titled “An Enduring Controversy” gave particular offense to veterans and their supporters. It called attention to the continuing debate over both the efficacy and the morality of the strategy of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command (and its head, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris), which sought to destroy Germany’s capacity to fight on by massive bombing of German industrial and civilian targets. The veterans were also upset by photographs that showed dead Germans lying amid shattered buildings after bombing attacks.

  The issue was almost bound to cause trouble with the veterans because so many Canadians—about twenty thousand—had flown with the RAF’s Bomber Command and nearly ten thousand had died. Furthermore, the veterans had already fought a similar battle a decade previously when they had taken on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation over a television series it ran in 1992 on Canadian participation in World War II. One segment of The Valour and the Horror suggested that Canadian airmen, brave as they were, had been led into carrying out a morally dubious bombing campaign by their unscrupulous leaders. The veterans organized petitions and letter-writing campaigns against the series and the CBC. Conservative members of Parliament asked hostile questions in the House of Commons, and the hitherto-obscure Senate Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs started a portentous series of hearings. By the summer of 1993, a group of air force veterans was suing the makers of the documentaries for a huge amount in damages. It was, said the lawyer for the veterans, quite simply “about right and wrong; good and evil; white and black; truth and falsehood.” The suit made its way to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled it out of order. The CBC made a commitment to the veterans not to rebroadcast the series.

  Since the veterans and their supporters had won that battle to their satisfaction, they were more than ready to take on the bombing exhibit. Legion Magazine, in an article titled “At War with the Museum,” said, “The war museum has proceeded in such an insensitive and hurtful way that many air veterans feel they and their fallen comrades are being fingered as immoral—even criminal—by an institution of the very government that sent them on those harrowing missions.” The letters started to come in, accusing the museum of labeling Canadian pilots as war criminals. Yet again, those who took part in history were said to have a better view of what had happened than those who studied it later. Official Ottawa, which has tended to have an exaggerated sense of the veterans’ power, was more than ready to try to find a compromise before things got out of hand again. Hoping to defuse the criticisms, the museum’s director called in four outside historians (of which I was one) to give their opinions on the exhibit. Unfortunately, they split. Two tried to uphold the standards of their profession by saying that, yes, there was indeed a controversy over the bombing but that the presentation was “unbalanced.” And was it really necessary, asked one, to refer visitors to a controversy that was quite a complicated one, best carried on among experts? “If we even need to ask the question,” he concluded, “then the answer is no.” The other two historians took the view that museums must be places of learning, and that when there are controversies, they ought to say so. “History,” I concluded, “should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated.”

  The Senate Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs roused itself from its customary torpor and held a series of hearings in the spring of 2007 in which the veterans featured prominently. Its report recommended to the War Museum that it take steps to sort out the dispute with the veterans. The museum, it said, ought to “consider alternative ways of presenting an equally historically accurate version of its material, in a manner which eliminates the sense of insult felt by aircrew veterans and removes potential for further misinterpretation by the public.” What that meant soon became apparent. The War Museum’s director left in circumstances that are still not clear, and soon after, the museum announced that it was going to work on revised wording for the exhibit in consultation with the veterans. Cliff Chadderton, chairman of the National Council of Veteran Associations in Canada, was ungracious in victory. “We don’t know what took them so long, because it’s patently wrong, the text of the panel.” He promised more trouble if he and his veterans did not like the revised wording.

  Like many other countries, Canada has also had its disputes over public holidays. Many objected when Dominion Day a celebration which dated back to the formation of Canada as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, was renamed Canada Day in 1982. Others argued that since Canada had just cut its last legal tie to the United Kingdom, the new name was a mark of full nationhood. In the United States, Columbus Day has caused even greater trouble in recent years. Originally intended to celebrate the discovery (itself now a contentious term) of the New World (another source of contention) by Christopher Columbus in October 1492, it now pits Native Americans—who argue that Columbus’s arrival was a very bad thing for them and Columbus himself a murderous thug—against Italian Americans who take the opposite view. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, who was never slow to jump on a bandwagon if he knew it was going to gain him publicity and simultaneously annoy the United States, has renamed the holiday in his country as Indigenous Resistance Day. The five hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the Caribbean was particularly tricky. In the lead-up to 1992, three hundred indigenous Americans met in Quito to talk about five hundred years of resistance. In the United States, the protestant National Council of Churches attempted to make amends by w
eighing in with talk of invasion, genocide, slavery, “ecocide,” and exploitation of the land as Columbus’s true legacy. The Reagan administration, not relishing this particular battle against the forces of political correctness, hastily renamed the official commemoration a jubilee and not a celebration. That did not stop conservatives from accusing liberals in the universities and elsewhere of hating the United States so much that they wanted to deny its European roots.

  The more complicated the past, the more difficult the commemoration. West Germany, as it then was, could not decide how to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Frederick the Great. Were they remembering the scholar or the soldier? Was he a figure of the Enlightenment or a forerunner of Hitler? Almost everyone in France agreed that 1989, the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, ought to be commemorated. But what did the Revolution mean? Was it to be celebrated for liberty, equality, fraternity, or deplored for the Terror? The members of the commission supposedly responsible for the commemorations quarreled among themselves and with the government. In the end, the national celebrations were taken in hand by an impresario who staged a marvelous and eccentric parade—the Festival of the Planet’s Tribes—through Paris. With the funky chicken, African drums, Russian soldiers marching in fake snow, Chinese students towing a huge drum, and a marching band from Florida, should the new slogan for France be, Newsweek wondered, “Liberty, Frivolity, Irony”?

  If the significance of the French Revolution is difficult for the French to agree on, so, too, is much else in France’s history. What about Napoleon? Is he a great national hero or, as a French historian recently charged, a racist dictator? Should the major anniversaries such as his great victory at Austerlitz be commemorated as the British commemorated the bicentennial of the Battle of Trafalgar, or should they be passed over in silence? How should French schools present the history of French colonialism in Algeria? For many years, the savage war between the Algerian nationalists on the one hand and the French settlers and the French army on the other was officially downplayed as “the events.” The pervasive and sanctioned use of torture against the Algerians became a matter of public discussion only when General Paul Aussaresses, who was a high-ranking intelligence officer during the Algerian war, publicly defended the use of torture in 2000. (After September 11, he recommended using his methods on Al Qaeda.) In 2005, the government passed a law stipulating that textbooks should recognize “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas colonies, especially in North Africa.” At first a few historians protested against this attempt at an official history, but when the nation was shaken that autumn by rioting adolescents of North African descent, the issue hit the headlines and the National Assembly.