Boyd Tonkin: The past that we believe in is to others a myth
Outbreaks of revisionist history are questioning deeply held views
Tuesday, 25 March 2008
People who argue that nothing should be sacred often stay attached to
their own chosen taboos. Secular humanists (and here I'll stand up to
be counted) like to tell religious believers that, in an open
democracy, the odd squall of outrage and offence is a tiny price to
pay for the benefits of freedom.
Fair enough, but many libertarians who look for no gods in the sky
remain prone to a modern form of ancestor worship. They tend to revere
the historical events and characters that helped secure the liberties
and dignities they praise: from Napoleon to the Suffragettes; from the
American Revolution to Mahatma Gandhi. How secularists respond when
their own ancient idols become the butt of mockery and loathing offers
a good test of probity and consistency. Just now, that gauntlet has
been flung down on two fronts.
Outbreaks of revisionist history are currently questioning the deepest
beliefs about the past of countless citizens in France, Britain and
the US.
In France, a compendium of essays entitled The Black Book of the
French Revolution has triggered a media avalanche of dismay and
disgust with its indictment, not only of the violence of the Terror
and the ruinous wars that wracked Europe from 1792 to 1815, but of the
revolutionary ideal itself.France, of course, does maintain a state
faith: in the Republican virtues of 1789, lauded automatically by left
and right alike. To challenge them can feel like a form of blasphemy.
Meanwhile, the maverick American author Nicholson Baker has just
published Human Smoke. This documentary-style collage of the events
that led up to the Second World War makes the pacifist's – some might
say the appeaser's case – against the conflict. It presents Franklin D
Roosevelt and, above all, Winston Churchill as racist warmongers,
aggressive conspirators, and blood-soaked war criminals. The book
suggests that a negotiated peace with Nazi Germany would have
prevented more misery than it caused, and comes close to implying that
reckless Allied force pushed Hitler towards genocide. Expect a
carnival of excoriation when Baker's bombshell reaches these Winston-
worshippping shores in May.
In both cases, the threat to orthodoxy comes from rather subtler
weapons than the gross lies peddled say by Holocaust deniers. Indeed,
plenty of Britons will be far more appalled by the idea that
Churchill's ferocious intransigence somehow contributed to the "human
smoke" of Auschwitz than by the fantasies of David Irving and his
sorry crew.
Baker describes himself as "a non-religious pacifist who is
sympathetic to Quaker notions of non-violent resistance". Whatever the
effect of Human Smoke, it aims more to rehabilitate the peace-seekers
of the 1930s than to justify the losing sides in the conflagration
that they proved so powerless to halt. To anyone who sticks – in this
instance, if in no other – to the doctrine of the unavoidable "just
war", Baker may be more unsettling than a hundred neo-fascist covens.
Across the Channel, the "Black Book" has stirred up some slumbering
demons of its own. Enemies of the Revolution of 1789 – monarchists,
Catholics, conservatives and regionalists – never really went away.
They made up a sometimes formidable bloc in French politics right up
until the country's defeat in 1940. Then, because Marshal Petain's
collaborationist regime had drawn so heavily on counter-revolutionary
principles and personnel, the anti-Jacobins fell decisively from grace
at the Liberation in 1944.
Arguments against the sacred uprising became utterly heretical. A
sceptical historian such as the great Francois Furet could banish many
illusions, but not defeat the myth. Even a revisionist history as fine
as Simon Schama's Citizens (which counts the cost of 1789 from a
progressive, not a reactionary point of view) failed to find a French
publisher. The compilers of the "Black Book" have deepened outrage by
borrowing a title and a format from The Black Book of Communism, a
French bestseller of the 1990s that sought to show that Marxists in
power had claimed almost 100 million victims. One historian, Stephane
Courtois, worked on both incendiary devices. Behind the implicit
comparison lies the proposition – commonplace in Britain, still
shocking in France – that the Revolution ushered in the totalitarian
age that Hitler and Stalin would bring to fruition.
A propos of the French Revolution, I can look at the spluttering
horror of Fifth Republic orthodoxy with fascination, and not a little
relish. When it comes to Nicholson Baker's apologia for appeasing
Hitler, then I begin to feel the same foam form upon the lips. No
matter: even the most vehement unbeliever treats as holy some kinds of
story, myth or hero. And it's precisely these untouchable taboos that
ought to be subject to probing and persistent doubt. Those of us who
cherish the right to give offence should from time to time enjoy the
taste of our own medicine.
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/boyd-tonkin-the-past-that-we-believe-in-is-to-others-a-myth-800230.html