Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

National myths
Every society has a political culture. This presupposes what the
French philosopher Paul Ricœur has called a narrative identity
which includes a view of its origins and of its past sufferings and accomplishments.
There is no political community without a heritage
or a tradition. One cannot expect these not to be distinct from, or
even contradictory to, those of other countries. Nobody can expect
the British to have the same view of Joan of Arc as the French, or
Europeans to have the same nostalgia for Genghis Khan as the
Mongols. The problem arises when the identity of a society is disputed
by its citizens, with conflicting memories or myths struggling
for their soul; or when the prevailing narrative implies notions like a
chosen people, a hereditary enemy, or claims to foreign territory;
or when it hurts or obfuscates the memories, the suffering or the aspirations
of others. Both a search for historical objectivity and moral
or political judgment must then challenge or reconcile the various
national myths. If Germans adopt the same respect or nostalgia towards
Hitler, and Russians towards Stalin as the British towards
Churchill or the French towards de Gaulle, they must expect to be
challenged from within and from outside with arguments of historical
truth, of political opportunity and of moral judgment.
The papers in this volume rightly distinguish between cultures of
pride, cultures of guilt and cultures of resentment and revenge for
past injustice. This was the theme of the German historians’ quarrel
(‘Historikerstreit’) in the 1980s. In Israel, a debate around Bar
Kobah, the leader of the Jewish revolt against the Romans which led
to the destruction of the Temple, was clearly based on a subtext
concerning the quarrel of intransigence and vainglory versus compromise
and pragmatism in the current Israeli situation. Conversely,
the work of the so-called new historians in Israel, establishing the
fact of the brutal expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Arabs upon
the creation of Israel, was essentially inspired by the search for
truth: some of these authors drew pacifist conclusions from their
work, or spoke of Israel’s guilt, but the best-known among them,
Benny Morris, justified the forced expulsion as an inevitable condition
for the establishment of Israel, itself made necessary by the
experience of the Shoah.
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