[The blog post I started composing about the riot of dumb articles posted about recent events - above all, the Refugee Crisis and the Paris Attacks - by actual historians and people calling themselves historians grew too long to be one post, so I have broken it up. Here is Part 1, in which I tackle some preliminary issues. Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.]
"History could hardly be more brutally exploited. No one should doubt
the dangerous nature of the memories that ISIS is playing with."
These words conclude
an article in
the Daily Mail by self-appointed ‘historian’ Tom Holland.[1] Holland’s article rounded off a pretty
shameful couple of weeks for the historical discipline (if indeed it be one
such, because I am beginning to doubt it).
First of all, superannuated Berlin professor Alexander Demandt gave an
interview to Die Welt in which he
expressed the views that the refugee crisis was pretty much like the Völkerwanderung which (said he) brought
down the Roman Empire, that a north-south ‘farbige Front’ (a coloured front:
yes, you read that right) was opening up, but that the current immigrants were
more dangerous than the Goths because they weren’t armed (and thus, I assume,
we can’t justifiably just gun them down on sight). The next week, after the Paris attacks,
Harvard (yes, Harvard) professor of History Niall ‘Fire His Ass’ Ferguson
penned a piece for the Murdoch Press arguing that Paris and the West were
falling before a new barbarian invasion, just like Rome.[2] Ferguson’s piece was of course taken up
eagerly by UKIP News, with his credentials as an academic used to support the
truth of the argument.[3] Mostly Ferguson drew upon a half-remembered,
half-digested version of Gibbon but he also cited, approvingly, the books by
Bryan Ward-Perkins and Peter Heather, which (as people have attempted to
silence me before for saying) lend themselves to precisely this sort of far
right-wing argument. Not only – to my
knowledge – has neither of these two worthies made any sort of statement
distancing themselves from this use of their writing (thus increasing my
gut-feeling that they are happy enough with these politics); none of the
usually posturing self-styled ‘socially committed historians’ has – to my
knowledge – made any effort to speak out.[4] That has been left to the usually
self-effacing, unassuming Professor Mark Humphries and Dr John Henry Clay. As ever, outside the UK, the picture was
rosier.[5] And finally ‘top historian’ Tom Holland wrote
a shocking piece that simplified and distorted 1400 years of history into a
binary struggle between Christianity (which seems to be lazily interchangeable
with ‘The West’) and Islam (which seems to be lazily interchangeable with
‘Arabs’). All this, in a whole range of
ways, sums up the deep, probably terminal, intellectual crisis in which the
discipline of History finds itself: one which, alas, the discipline itself is
far too complacent, self-satisfied and cocooned to notice.
Let’s go back to
the words I quoted at the start: "History could hardly be more brutally
exploited. No one should doubt the dangerous nature of the memories that ISIS
is playing with." Let’s leave to one side the idea that Holland himself is
no stranger to the ‘exploitation’ of ‘history’, as I am sure his bank- or
hedge-fund-manager would agree. It’s the
second phrase that interests me: ‘the dangerous nature of the memories that
ISIS is playing with.’ Let’s think about
this for a minute. How can a ‘memory’ be
dangerous? How can the events of the
past (all dead and gone) be dangerous in themselves? I, for example, had a row with a Jewish bloke
once. Is that a dangerous memory? Of course not. If I choose
(now) to make that fact the basis for
a generalised, antisemitic hatred of all Jewish people, that would be dangerous. But
I might just as easily (and do, or at least try to) make it into the basis of a
reflection on what a tit I was perhaps being back then, or as a reflection to
bring myself up short when the baser instincts (which I suspect all of us who
are honest have) might make me want to generalise from one unfortunate
exchange. In the latter case at least,
therefore, that memory could be called the very opposite of dangerous. France and Germany fought a string of
tit-for-tat wars between 1756 and 1945 as a result of which millions of people
died. Is that a ‘dangerous memory’? It
would be for Holland (were we to assume he was consistent in what passes for
his thought). But in fact it has been
precisely that history and that positive desire to ‘put an end to all this’
that has forged, since 1945, closer ties between the French and German
republics. What could be – in Holland’s
terms – a more ‘dangerous memory’ than the Holocaust? But that has widely been used[6]
as the basis for a desire to do all one can to prevent further genocides. It is not the events of history, the ‘memories’,
that are dangerous; it is what one does with them. And here, of course, is the irony: Holland is
playing with the events of the past every bit as much as Daesh/ISIS. To paraphrase a commenter on my ‘official’
Facebook page, Holland is essentially saying ‘the world has been irreparably
divided into us and them, and the problem with them is that they regard the
world as irreparably divided into us and them’.
This is perhaps the central point
that I am trying to work through in Why History Doesn’t Matter: that the past has no force in and of itself and cannot force anyone to do anything. It is people who use a view of the past to justify
what they are doing in the present
that causes the problems. No knowledge
of any actual ‘facts’ of the past will be ‘relevant’ in helping you understand,
confront or challenge that in any fundamental fashion. This seems to me to be an obvious point but
it apparently eludes a depressingly large number of the practitioners of history (by
which I mean not raconteurs like Holland but actual bona fide historians) and that surely constitutes serious grounds
for concern.
The second,
closely-related point about Holland’s phrase is the idea that these historical events (and –
intriguingly – the particular reading that Holland places on them) somehow
constitute ‘memories’, inherent within entire groups of people. Apparently, Muslims carry around, hard-wired
into them, a set of ‘dangerous memories’ that can simply be ‘played with’ by
Daesh. Ponder that as a piece of imagery
to be peddling to the readership of the Daily
Mail. Note also that Holland makes
no attempt, at any point, to argue that what he calls these ‘memories’ are in
any way false; on the contrary, his story presents them (albeit dubiously, as
we’ll see) as historical fact. The implication is that Muslims simply can’t
cope with their history. They have somehow to have
their supposed ‘memories’ suppressed, rather than being awoken by Daesh
ideologues. By contrast, the white
middle-class readership of the Mail evidently
either has no historical ‘memory’ at all, which is why Holland has to spell it out, or at least it can
safely deal with its historical knowledge.
There is no reflection by this ‘top historian’ on the relationship
between the (dead) past and the (living) practice of history but then nor is
there on the part of most genuine historians either. This is why history is fast disappearing as
any sort of intellectually respectable discipline.
One could go on but
let’s draw a veil of charity over it, leaving only the point that it is a
pretty damning indictment of putatively élite British education and its supposedly starry
products that they can swill out language and arguments as light-weight and
illogical as this. Leaving aside all of
the problems with ‘top historian’ Holland’s historical reconstruction, his
characteristically florid, bombastic, overwrought prose (diagnostic of the schlock-horror-novelist
that he essentially is) lacks the slightest sign of any intellectual
reflection. It is thoughtless, careless and at best logically loose – and loose
talk costs lives.
Part 2 of this essay can be found here.
Part 2 of this essay can be found here.
-----
[1]
Unsurprisingly, like most of
his ‘historical raconteur’ ilk, Holland comes from a ‘private school and
Oxbridge’ background. His qualifications, a first-class BA, are no greater than
those of many thousands of other people, who nevertheless do not claim the
title of ‘historian’, let alone ‘top historian’.
[2] This is hidden behind a pay-wall but
see: http://www.businessinsider.com.au/this-is-exactly-how-civilisations-fall-historian-niall-fergusons-dramatic-take-on-the-paris-attacks-2015-11
[3] For other reactionary political use of the
trope, see http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/659694fe-9440-11e5-b190-291e94b77c8f.html#axzz3slVEkDY5
[4]
If any of the rogues’ gallery
of poseurs in attendance at this conference, in remembrance of the
greatest faux-radical poseur of them all, has made any sort of public intervention
about any of this I am not aware of it.
[5] See,
e.g.: http://www.pressreader.com/austria/salzburger-nachrichten/20150822/281547994637298/TextView;
http://www.knack.be/nieuws/belgie/waarom-de-huidige-vluchtelingencrisis-niet-te-vergelijken-is-met-de-val-van-het-romeinse-rijk/article-opinion-594313.html
[6]
Outside Israel, where, with tragic irony, the commemorative
lesson appears to be not so much ‘lest this happen again’ as ‘lest this happen to us again’. I can understand that
easily enough, but I can hardly condone its use to justify Israel’s genocidal
policies in Gaza and the occupied territories. This, by the way, makes me no more opposed to the existence of the state of Israel than my disapproval of Putin's policies makes me opposed to the existence of the state of Russia.
