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

Historical truth takes second place, however, to a mixture of tradition,
living memory and self-justification or self-interest when people
engage in a competition of victimhood and suffering (as between
Jews or Jews and Arabs, or the victims of Nazism and of communism)
or in anteriority and continuity (as in the perpetual polemics
between the Hungarian and Romanian Academies of Sciences as
to the continuity of the Romanian people and its direct descent
from the Romans, or between Albanians and Serbs as to who came
first in Kosovo and in the Balkans in general).
Political manipulation
This leads us to the second case: the manipulation of these historical
controversies by one political faction against others within
the same country. In Ivory Coast a wave of nativism or autochthonism
served to exclude a leading contender for the presidency.
Professor Friszke has shown how in Poland, genuine dissidents
who had often spent years in prison for their opposition to the communist
regime, were accused by right-wing rivals, previously passive
in their own opposition, of complacency or complicity with the
communists for negotiating a peaceful transition or avoiding a
witch-hunt.
Falsifications designed to discredit rivals are universal features of
the struggle for power and are ordinarily fought in court or in public
before being submitted to the verdict of historians. The really serious
problem arises when a regime endowed with a monopoly of
political power tries to extend this monopoly to the interpretation of
history and to impose a prefabricated total interpretation as a substitute
both for the living experience and memory of citizens and for
the empirical research of historians. Totalitarian regimes cannot
endure without producing a total lie, and, conversely, a total lie can
be imposed only by a totalitarian regime.
Totalitarian orthodoxies
Whatever their differences, communist and fascist or Nazi
regimes converge in this respect, though with different emphases.
Communist regimes insist upon criminalising their predecessors
and their opponents, often by fabricating charges and extorting false
73 Pierre Hassner