[In this piece I am going, first, to question that historical memory/commemoration is always a 'public good', in that it often succours myth and national-identity-politics, and perpetrates and naturalises historical oppositions. On that basis I will discuss the apology for the Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar massacre (1919) and its shortcomings, and suggest some ways in which pleas for forgiveness might be better than apologies in bringing about closure.]
It’s generally held that historical memory is a
straightforward ‘good’. Most of the
standard justifications for historical study operate on that premise, combined
with the nation that one needs to know
about certain things – events – from the past (quite which ones being the
subject of debate). Historical knowledge
allegedly keeps us from repeating the mistakes of the past, though it’s
difficult to imagine a more empirically-obvious falsehood than that. Most societies
did not record or commemorate their history in anything like that sort of ‘factual’
way and yet functioned perfectly well, or at least no worse than those that did
do so. If ‘history’ existed in such societies
it did so in other forms more akin to myth.
Myth plays an important role in society but it does so not on the basis
of the kind of factual, empirical knowledge about what did or didn’t happen
upon which the sorts of modern justification of historical study just mentioned
are based. Whether or not battle, war,
king or queen X ever existed is irrelevant to the point of a story that serves principally
to illustrate concepts of honour, shame, loyalty or courage. The claim that society needs historical memory (as understood in the modern West) is a very
long way from being established and seems to me to be difficult to sustain.
That may be an odd thing for a
professor of history to say. Odder still
might be my suspicion that we might not be worse off to let historical memories
slide out of popular consciousness. I am
probably not the only person who has got more than a little sick and tired of
all the Second World War nostalgia being spouted by Brexiters (none of whom,
let’s remember actually fought in it or, in most cases, was even alive during
it). The idea that ‘we’ won the war is
of course easily challenged. Leaving aside the considerably greater roles
played by the USSR and the USA, even ‘Britain’ was not simply ‘us’ in a Second
World War context: ‘British armies’ contained large contingents from ‘India’
(that is the pre-partition South Asian sub-continent), Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa and Canada, as well as the sizable contributions from Free French,
Greek, Norwegian, Czech, Polish and other forces in exile from their occupied
homelands. There’s obviously a role for
historians, broadly defined, in stepping in to confront these narratives, just
as in the States historians have tried valiantly to combat the rewriting of the
history of the southern Democrats, which has attempted to make the Democrats
the party of racism.
But there are limits. Contrary to
one recent newspaper opinion column, the historian is not, and has better
things to do than being, simply the guardian of the national narrative. As I have repeatedly argued in this blog the
importance and value of Historical study lie ultimately in the doing, not in the knowing. More importantly,
the combat of history and myth can be hopelessly unequal. Facts are a poor instrument with which to
combat myth, for the simple reason that, as I said earlier, facts are not
important to myth. The importance of
myth lies in the feature of contemporary/contemporaneous society that it seeks
to render natural and immemorial.
Transposing some elements of Žižek’s critique of responses to racism/antisemitism
(and it’s the same problem one has in dealing with conspiracy theories), facts
operate in the register of the Symbolic (things as they are; representation; the
signifier) but Myth operates in that of the Imaginary (the ideal, the how things
should be; the signified). If the mythic
element of this kind of quasi-history seeks to eternalise an opposition between
plucky Britain/England (plucky Scotland and plucky Wales have their own myths)
and oppressive continental Europe, which is somehow foundational to the
identity of a generation of mostly English, mostly white, mostly male Brits,
then simple facts are going to find displacing that a tough battle. Something transcendent about that ‘Britishness’
will always escape the ‘facts of the matter’.
The problem is the very identification
with a past; the ‘we’ in the ‘we won the war’ (there’s a good Mitchell and Webb
sketch that mocks those
sorts of first-person plural identifications of people not involved in
something with people who were). A few
posts back I
discussed the then-recent furore over Winston Churchill’s reputation or legacy. The reason why that discussion is always so
heated is because it lies in the same region: the interplay between ‘factual
History’ on the one hand and identity and ‘Myth’ on the other. A challenge to the idealised figure of ‘Winston’
is seen as a challenge to the very identity of a particular kind of British
citizen; it’s to cut them adrift from some sort of fixed point of ‘pluck’,
defiance, heroism, etc. Alas many of
these kinds of fixed point involve a ‘them’ as well as an ‘us’; and thus
eternalise and naturalise an opposition (see WWII). This is why think that one of the things that
History should do should be instilling the idea that the past, even the recent
past, is irredeemably ‘other’. We are
not them; they were never us.
This point is in my view absolutely crucial
to emancipatory, ethical historical practice, and it applies across the
political spectrum. Thus, I think it not
only applies to national or ethnic associations with the past but also to other
types of identity: racial, gendered, sexual.
The problem with applying modern classifications to the people of the
past is that it naturalises and eternalises those categories, and the differences
and oppositions inherent within them. As
Emmanuel Levinas (to whom I have returned lately) said, to see the other in
terms of the self is to view it in terms of mastery and totality. The ethical approach recognises the unmasterable
infinity of the past, and the lives and experiences of it. That means letting go of the desire to
recognise ourselves in the past. This is
not to disavow the politics inherent in the study of the past, but to relocate
them in a different part of the project.
Now, as I have said before,
that’s easy for me to say. As a cis, hetero,
able-bodied, western, middle class, white male I have pretty much a full house
in privilege bingo. For many other
people there are as yet battles to be won concerning the recognition of a past. Nonetheless I think that that is the horizon
that historical study should strive towards. I also think that one of the ways
in which the battles I just referred to can be won is by those like me actively
stressing that the population of the past was not ‘just like us’, not just in
terms of norms or majorities but at all. The thought here is that by first evacuating
the past of its dead white (straight, able-bodied) males who look like us, people
like me might create a space for a more diverse and different past that seems
not to belong to anyone. That the whole
of the past should be of interest to all, equally, regardless of whether or not
you see yourself in it (which is similar to what the early Fanon argued, before
he realised that that was easier said than done). This would be my contribution to decolonising
the past in western European/Mediterranean history. Perhaps this is naïve. I think it is worth an effort though.
All of which brings me to the topic of
historical apologies. This has been in
the news recently in relation to the British Government’s apology for the
massacre at the Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar (Punjab), which occurred 100 years
ago. I am not in general a big fan of
historical apologies, at least for periods where the principals are all dead): I
strongly believe that apologies tend to be cost-free, empty political theatre. Furthermore, they perpetuate the idea of past
representatives of a modern country are to be seen as ‘us’ or ‘them’. There’s an inconsistency in demanding
apologies for the actions of past governments, armies, employees, agents or
citizens of a country as though the responsibility still lies with the
citizens, agents, government of that country and it is this: if one is expected
to feel shame for the actions of one’s forebears, then one surely can feel pride
in their achievements too. But if that
is the case then it becomes difficult to critique the likes of Mark Francois
(or Marc François as I like to call him) and his War Studies bluster. If ‘we’ committed the Amritsar massacre, then
‘we’ won the battle of Waterloo too (and if ‘we’ at Waterloo were actually mostly
Germans and Dutch, then ‘we’ at Amritsar were – partly – Ghurkas). If the crimes of the British past, the Atlantic
Slave Trade, say, are ours to bear, then are the achievements of the British
past not somehow exclusively ‘ours’ too?
We are back where we need to start finding reasons why people other than
white Brits might ‘also’ see this history as theirs. If the exclusive Britishness of those
achievements can be mitigated then so too can the Britishness of the bad stuff. There’s no logically sustainable reason to
distinguish between the two. If you
insist that a past crime be ‘owned’ by a modern national category (or an ethnic
or racial, or gendered category, or a combination of these) then, in the
parlance of the lawyers in the Law and Order franchise, you ‘open the door’ to the ‘ownership’ of the ‘glories’
too. You end up back with the ‘balance
sheet’, at best. This is why it’s more
important to think about the event than the participants.
As other people have argued, one
problem with the historical apology is that it somehow allows the dominant myth
– in this case of the British Empire – to persist. There’s no real facing up to the imperial
past. None of this was avoided by the
language of the apology which, by repeating previous disavowals, allowed the
idea to persist that the Amritsar Massacre was some sort of aberration. It permits the ‘balance sheet’ to go unchallenged. Some Indians felt that the language of ‘deep
regret’ didn’t really go far enough. It’s the equivalent of ‘yes, well, admittedly
mistakes were made.’
Isn’t the logic of my argument therefore
that it would have been better if there had been no commemoration and no
apology. Mostly, yes it is and ideally
that would have been the way it ought to have been. However, in the case of the
Jallianwala Bagh, I think that some kind of public act by the British
government could have been important. One
of the problems of modern British society is that Britain hasn’t faced up to
its imperial past, something which explains many things, of which Brexit is
only the most obvious. Not confronting that past has allowed its persistence as
myth. When I wrote about the referendum on the eve of the vote I tried to say that there
was a visceral tug at the heart strings that even I might feel at footage of
the Grand Fleet, of the might of the Empire manifested in battleships in line
astern. People thought I was defending
the Empire and I probably didn’t make my point clearly enough. What I was trying to say was that, while I
appreciated that nostalgia (it was a cack-handed attempt to 'reach out' to the Brexiter), you had to think beyond the visceral, the mythic,
to appreciate two things: that that world had gone and was never coming back; and also that the Empire and the global
exploitation that enabled those battleships had hardly been a good thing in any
case.
Many nations have a difficulty facing
up to pasts that have become mythic bases for identity. Apparently it’s Confederate History Month at
the moment, for example. Italy has never
properly faced up to its fascist past.
As a German friend of mine who lived in (and loved) Rome said to me ‘you
have to remember that Italy won the war’.
The change of sides by the Italian Republic has allowed the Fascist
state to somehow be put to one side. You
can see the myth of the ‘liberation’ of Italy from German occupation. Fascist epigraphy is all over the place in
Rome. The result is the myth that
somehow Italian Fascism was ‘nice fascism’.
The trains ran on time (actually they didn’t). And so Mussolini’s descendants represent Far
Right parties in Italy (can you imagine any putative descendants of Hitler
still bearing the family name, let alone standing as candidates for AfD?). For many, many years France was in a similar
position, thanks to the convenient Republican myth that portrayed the Vichy
State as an illegitimate interruption in the lineal descent of the French Republicanism
(it wasn’t; the powers vested in Pétain were voted to him by the Assembly). Thus it was not until Chirac that the
responsibility of the French state for its involvement in the Shoah was finally
acknowledged. France has a way to go, as
far as its record in Algeria goes, but it seems to be getting there bit by bit. Countries like Poland have if anything rolled
back any admission of involvement in Nazi atrocity. The Imperial heritage remains untouchable in
the UK; as the failure to remove statues of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford a couple of
years ago revealed.
All of the examples above show
abundantly that attempts to confront the mytho-historical bases of national
identity produce sometimes violent kick-backs.
Enough with the guilt, say AfD.
The French right-wing writer Pascal Bruckner has been arguing that the
West has been subjected to the ‘Tyranny of Guilt’ since well before AfD came on
the scene. I am (unsurprisingly) not
sanguine that historical education in the usual sense (educating people about ‘the
facts’; teaching them about different heroes from the national narrative) helps,
at least in the short term. Over the
long term perhaps it will; I am not sure.
To confront the myth, does one require something that steps outside the
world of facts? Do we require something
more than apology?
Let me try out an idea. I am not 100% sure it really works or even
that I have fully thought it through but here goes. The historical apology, I said earlier, is usually
an empty gesture that costs little and achieves as much. The demand for an apology is frequently the
same: a simple act of political theatre aimed at a base, as is the theatre of
publicly staying away from the ceremony or rejecting the apology. An apology, once given, rarely settles an
issue. I often think the discourse goes
like this.
You owe us
an apology
OK. Soz.
No. A proper
apology
We are
very sorry.
No. You weren’t sincere.
We
deeply and sincerely regret these actions and the damage done.
Your
apology needs to go further than that.
And so it goes on, essentially keeping
alive a grievance, rather like a feud.
Periodically it is reactivated so that people can line up behind the
viewpoints that are in conflict (yes, I am thinking of Jacob Black-Michaud’s
analyses of – especially Cyrenaican - feud as social structure, from the ‘70s). The dispute rumbles on with no hope of a solution
but continues to serve a political purpose, on both sides. One wonders whether an apology can ever
really put an issue like this to rest.
Rather like a blood payment in true feuding societies (again referring
to Black-Michaud), it does little more than signal a time-out, at best. The problematic ‘memory’ is kept alive, like
picking at a scab till it bleeds. We
continue to concentrate on the relative guilt, goodness and evil of the perpetrators
and the victims rather than on the event and its general human significance. As I have argued before,
the latter is what I think the object of the historical study of events like
massacres should be.
We are talking about speech acts and,
as Derrida famously said, speech acts are problematic because they are
iterable. The sarcastic apology can be
identical to the sincere one and because of that the sincere apology can be
heard as a sarcastic one. No one can
ever prove that a sincere apology wasn’t sarcastic or vice versa (here we are
back to the history of the lie). Perhaps
the issue with the historical apology is that the initiative rarely if ever
comes from the representatives of the perpetrators. It usually comes from the (historically at
least) weak to the powerful, from the heirs of the victims to those of the
perpetrators. You don’t see demands for apologies from Britain for, say, the
Kanpur Massacre – not least, of course, because Indians paid for that at an
exorbitant rate of interest not just in the late 1850s but, as Kim Wagner has
demonstrated, for generations afterwards.
That’s a bad example but I hope you get my general point. That dynamic,
surely, keeps alive the original power relationship. In a world (such as may in some views not be all
that far off) where powers in the ‘global south’ have come to dominate the West
economically it’s difficult to imagine the discourse over the Jallianwala Bagh
taking its current form (in that hypothetical future, if that form of global
imperialism replicated its precursors – though there’s no necessary reason to
suppose it would – we would be more likely to see statues of Tatya Tope and the
Rani of Jansi outside British factories than demands for apologies).
The demand for apology and the
condescension to offer one replicate past power-relations and for this and
other reasons is unlikely to bring closure.
What might? One thing that might, might be a unilateral statement
of forgiveness by Indian authorities.
This isn’t, of course, for me, a white British male, to argue for
but it is possibly worth thinking about.
Forgiveness, like true love, asks for nothing.* Only the unforgivable can be forgiven, as
Derrida said (incidentally a character on the rather good BBC drama The Victim
said this, which was interesting). True
forgiveness, as an act, cannot be dependant on getting anything in return. The advantage is that it reverses the power-relationship. We forgive you your many sins. As I said though, it’s not for me to argue
for that. It could justly enough be seen
as the white man saying ‘you Indians: couldn’t you just get over it?’ [I hope
it’s clear that it’s not that, but it would be fair enough as a response.]
Let me then suggest something slightly
different. Rather than apologising,
perhaps what we need is a public act of asking for forgiveness from India. Just as the act of forgiveness cannot be conditional,
the act of asking for forgiveness cannot be dependant upon expecting to receive
it. Such an act however does reverse the
roles; it puts Britain in the role of supplicant. For that reason and others it
therefore costs more than the simple apology.
I suggest that it is therefore possibly a better way of confronting the
Imperial past and uprooting it from its mythic position (where the signified of
the British Empire is the British government as supplicant asking forgiveness).
As an act it has, I think, greater
potential to unite the two parties.
Unlike demands for apology, demands for forgiveness can’t go on and on
being repeated without their force being entirely undermined. In the face of asking
for forgiveness, demands for apology cannot be endlessly repeated either. The plea
for forgiveness and, if granted, the act of forgiveness, are one-offs. For that reason, it just might bring about something like closure. We can then think about the Jallianwala Bagh
massacre as an event, typologically, in its general human context rather than
being distracted by issues of blame and guilt that are rooted in political
myth. As I
argued before, historical events, unlike dead historical actors are
something that historians have to judge ethically, as well as explain (in this
regard I disagree with Kim Wagner). In
that way, I would like to argue, we can think with the past in the present,
while breaking free from the chains of myth and identity.
Note
* I would just like to pause at this
point to suggest that this might be the first time where allusions to Derrida
and Stevie Wonder met in the same sentence.
Bibliography
As well as tweets and links provided
by Priyamvada Gopal, Kim Wagner and others on Twitter, my thinking here has
been influenced in particular by:
Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (trans. Mark Dooley &
Michael Hughes). London. Routledge, 2010.
Richard Holloway, On Forgiveness: How Can We Forgive the Unforgiveable? Edinburgh.
Cannongate. 2002.
David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting. Historical Memory and its Ironies. New
Haven, Conn. Yale University Press. 2014.
