News Statesman , UK
April 28 2005
World view – Lindsey Hilsum explains why history won’t go away
Lindsey Hilsum
Monday 2nd May 2005
The age of instant news has shortened our attention span, and blinded
us to the pressing historical concerns of much of the world. By
Lindsey Hilsum
As he was readying German troops to invade Poland, Hitler persuaded
his colleagues that their brutality would soon be forgotten. “Who,
after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?” he
asked. The answer is that the descendants of the victims speak of it,
and will not allow the heirs of the perpetrators to forget. Turkey
maintains that it never happened, but the genocide of more than a
million Armenians under the Ottomans in 1915 is still a live
political issue.
While British voters seem only too happy to – in the Prime Minister’s
words – “draw a line” under the invasion of Iraq just two years ago,
elsewhere in the world, what happened even 2,000 years ago is still a
matter of dispute. The age of instant news has shortened our
attention span and blinded us to the pressing historical concerns of
much of the world.
This, maybe more than anything else, sets Europe and North America
apart. We are the generation which, in Francis Fukuyama’s words, has
lived through “the end of history”, when communism was defeated and
capitalism became the accepted global ideology. British politics
reflects our post-ideological age, when all that Conservative and
Labour can find to squabble over is the odd billion in the welfare
budget. We are all social democrats now.
Tony Blair and Gordon Brown don’t think Britain’s policy towards
Africa has anything to do with colonialism. But the reason Robert
Mugabe strikes a chord across Africa when he rails against Blair is
that history matters in places where people are still trying to forge
an identity. The Americans are surprised when Iraqis compare their
behaviour with that of British colonialists in Mesopotamia in the
1920s; they see their mission as an essentially modern attempt at
spreading democracy, while many Iraqis regard it as just another
imperialist foray.
To study the discourse of al-Qaeda is to see an entirely different
time-frame, in which the events of the seventh century – when Islam
was in the ascendant – are more important than what happens today.
When Islamists struck in Madrid, commentators struggled to explain
the location. Was it because Spain had troops in Iraq? That was part
of it, but the real injury dates back to 1492, when Isabella and
Ferdinand drove out the Moors. “You know of the Spanish crusade
against Muslims, and that not much time has passed since the
expulsion from al-Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisition,” said
Serhane ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, the alleged leader of the Madrid train
bombers.
The past is always ripe for manipulation. The recent anti-Japan
demonstrations in China were supposedly sparked by a Japanese school
textbook, which referred to the 1937 Nanjing massacre as an
“incident” – as if up to 300,000 Chinese had died by accident, rather
than being slaughtered by the Japanese Imperial Army. There’s no
doubt that the Japanese authorities have equivocated over war crimes
committed in the 1930s and 1940s, yet these textbooks – used in less
than 1 per cent of Japanese schools – have been around for years.
China’s real aim was to assert herself as the rising power in Asia,
and to show the world why Japan should not have a seat on an expanded
UN Security Council. Japan and China are in dispute over oil and gas
in the South China Sea, but the state-controlled Chinese media
reignited the schoolbooks issue as the most effective way to engage
the masses.
Western politicians do understand the symbolic significance of
history when they need to, even if they don’t feel it. On 24 April,
as tens of thousands of Armenians commemorated the start of the 1915
genocide, President Bush carefully referred to it as the “Great
Calamity”, a way of acknowledging the pain of Armenians without
offending his Turkish allies by using the word genocide.
The official Turkish version of history is that many Armenians sided
with the Russians in the First World War, and therefore – inevitably
– there were killings on both sides. The genocide has become an issue
in Turkey’s proposed entry into the EU. France, the European country
with the most doubts about this and which also has a large Armenian
population, is insisting Turkey confess to genocide before it can be
admitted. The Turkish government has established a commission to
re-examine history – a hard task, given that denying the genocide has
been official policy since the massacres were perpetrated.
History never goes away, and it never stops. We are condemned to
misunderstanding if we do not follow the twists and changes as
history is reworked to justify current actions. “Forward not back”
would be a meaningless slogan in most places because, although
globalisation has spread western products across the world, beyond
our shores they’re really not thinking what we’re thinking.
Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News