WHEN WE NEGOTIATE THE PAST, WE ADULTERATE HISTORY

The Globe and Mail (Canada)
August 30, 2007 Thursday

RICHARD FRENCH, Adjunct research professor at the University of
Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs

There is not much but sand on the highway from Alexandria to Egypt’s
border with Libya. The highlight is the museum marking the 1942
Battle of El Alamein that stopped the German expansion in Africa. The
curious Canadian learns that, while there were few Canadians in the
battle, there was a certain amount of Canadian hardware, represented
by an Ontario-made truck among the shattered tanks and artillery
pieces. Inside, we learn something unknown to history: Egyptians
played a vital role at El Alamein.

An entire room of the museum is devoted to this contribution,
not because of any relation to historical fact but because of the
requirements of Egyptian national pride and politics. (Noting this
fiction in no way diminishes the suffering of a nation thrust forcibly
into the role of host to a war between colonial powers.) The museum is
organized on national lines: One sees the German, Italian and British
Empire troops, each in a setting in which the others are foils for
the gallant warriors to whom the chamber is dedicated.

I was reminded of the El Alamein museum when I read the latest episode
in the sad controversy over the Canadian War Museum’s account of
the Canadian role in the strategic bombing campaign over Germany in
the Second World War. It is seductive to imagine that a war museum
"should not fight with its veterans" – seductive but unwise. That
way lies the kind of history represented by the El Alamein museum’s
confabulation of Egyptian heroism.

It is sad that the veterans’ suffering and sacrifice cannot redeem
for them some control over this harsh reality of life. If they triumph
over the wording of a plaque in the museum, they will in no way alter
the reality that historians are skeptical about the effectiveness,
and philosophers are troubled about the morality, of the bombing
campaign on German cities from 1940 onward. They will not erase the
memory of the firestorms in Hamburg, Luebeck, Rostock, Cologne and
Dresden, and they will not alter the bitter legacy of their own and
their comrades’ pain and loss. They will merely have proved that
expediency and sentiment may triumph from time to time over the
intellectual integrity of institutions that should know better.

The Turks have mobilized all the powers of a sovereign nation to try
to expunge the memory of Armenian genocide, and they have earned for
themselves contempt and ridicule. The French lied to themselves for
decades about their collective behaviour during the German occupation,
until their own allegiance to justice and truth overcame nationalist
hypocrisy. The Poles still have not admitted to themselves the extent
of their role in the Holocaust, but they will.

In this struggle for truth, we are all fallible, but we are also
all empowered. History is not static. If someone wants to alter its
interpretation, to influence its shape or direction, the way to do so
is not to deploy political influence – it is to do research, to argue
evidence. No one is compelled to believe anyone else’s version of
events, not even the version of those who were there. Historians know
that individual participants are among the most interesting sources,
but often only marginally reliable.

Some may think this kind of controversy is of no concern to the
practical man. Think again. The Japanese are the most flagrant example
of politically motivated amnesia in the world; most simply do not know
what happened to the people whom their parents and grandparents overran
from 1931 onward. They are taught that Japan was the victim of foreign
aggression, and they understandably retain a strong sense of being
the victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Japan applies a history
oriented more to political convenience than to truth: It has failed
the test of moral courage that the Germans have so painfully passed.

And the kicker is this: The ordinary Japanese is so ill-informed that
he or she cannot understand the significance of the assassinations
carried out by ultra-right-wing cells intent on enforcing this
prohibition on questioning Japan’s wartime role. We are talking about
a sophisticated democracy in which editors and professors die for
speaking about historical events. This, in turn, means the Japanese
voter cannot make an informed judgment of his country’s foreign
policy. This matters. The Far East is in the throes of an arms race,
and is second only to the Middle East or Kashmir as a potential spark
of a conventional war. Too bad the population of one of the major
protagonists has only the most partial idea of what happened in the
last one.