Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (4 page)

History has been kinder, and Truman is now generally rated by historians and pundits as one of the better American presidents
of the twentieth century. He found himself facing an increasingly belligerent Soviet Union and a deteriorating situation on the ground in Europe and met the challenge head-on. He and his administration made the decisions that laid the groundwork for the United States’ confrontation of the Soviet Union during the long Cold War. They adopted policies including the Marshall Plan, unprecedented peacetime defense measures, and the establishment of NATO, all of which probably saved Western Europe from Soviet domination. Moreover, Truman showed by his actions that the United States was prepared to contain the spread of Soviet influence. In 1948–49, the United States led the West in circumventing the Soviet blockade of the western zone in Berlin through a massive airlift. The next year Truman sent American forces to Korea to beat back the attack from the Communist North on the South. The Truman administration, many would argue even today, made possible the long confrontation with the Soviet bloc and, ultimately, the triumph of the West in 1989.

In the 2004 election campaign, Bush referred repeatedly and with admiration to Truman. As Bush grew more unpopular, the references to Truman grew more frequent. In December 2006 he told congressional leaders that although Truman had not been popular at the time, history had shown that he was right. In another comparison to the Cold War, Bush has talked often about the struggle with terrorism and fundamentalist Islam as one that will last for generations. In a speech to the graduating class at West Point in May 2006, he compared himself, implicitly, to Truman, who, he said, did what was right even though he was often criticized at the time: “By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America’s victory in the Cold War.” Bush did not mention the rather awkward fact that
Truman was a Democrat. Nor did he refer to another significant point of difference: Truman worked through the United Nations rather than treating it with contempt. The differences were not missed by the press or the Democrats, but the White House tried to spin such inconvenient details away. Press secretary Tony Snow denied that Bush was comparing himself to Truman; rather, he was reminding Americans that as in the Cold War, they faced an enemy motivated by ideology and global ambitions whose defeat would take a long time.

If history is the judge to which we appeal, then it can also find against us. It can highlight our mistakes by reminding us of those who, at other times, faced similar problems but who made different, perhaps better decisions. President Bush refused to deal with Iran, even though it has huge influence in the Middle East and in particular in Iraq. His critics remembered when another American president faced a situation where the United States was bogged down in an unwinnable war and was losing much of its authority in the world. President Richard Nixon decided that he had to get the United States out of Vietnam and rebuild American prestige, and that the key to doing both lay in Beijing. Even though the United States and the People’s Republic were bitter enemies that had had virtually no contact with each other for decades, he boldly embarked on an initiative to bring about mutual recognition and, so he hoped, mutual help. When I was lecturing in the United States about
Nixon and Mao
, my book on the president’s 1972 trip to China, a question I was asked repeatedly was, if Nixon were president today, would he be going to Tehran for help in getting the United States out of Iraq?

As a judge, history also undermines the claims of leaders to omniscience. Dictators, perhaps because they know their own lies so well, have usually realized the power of history. Consequently, they have tried to rewrite, deny, or destroy the past.
Robespierre in revolutionary France and Pol Pot in 1970s Cambodia each set out to start society from the beginning again. Robespierre’s new calendar and Pol Pot’s Year Zero were designed to erase the past and its suggestions that there were alternative ways of organizing society. The founder of China, the Qin emperor, reportedly destroyed all the earlier histories, buried the scholars who might remember them, and wrote his own history. Successive dynasties were not as brutal, but they, too, wrote their own histories of China’s past. Mao went one better: he tried to destroy all memories and all artifacts that, by reminding the Chinese people of the past, might prevent him from remodeling them into the new Communist men and women. With his encouragement, young Red Guards stampeded through China, smashing priceless porcelain, burning books, tearing down temples and statues, and beating up and frequently killing teachers, writers, priests, anyone who could be accused of transmitting the old. The Forbidden City in Beijing was only saved because Zhou Enlai sent soldiers to protect it. In the Soviet Union, Stalin wrote his great rival Leon Trotsky out of the books and the photographs and the records until Trotsky became, in George Orwell’s chilling formulation, “an un-person.” The true record of Trotsky showed, after all, that Stalin was not the natural heir to Lenin, the revered founder of the Soviet Union, and that he had not played the crucial role in the victory of the Bolsheviks over their many enemies.

Their attitude toward history did not, of course, stop the great dictators from trying to ensure their own immortality through statues, monuments, tombs, and, in later days, photographs and films. Stalin wrote his own history of Communism in the Soviet Union, in which the only two individuals who figure in its triumphant progress are himself and Lenin. They struggle against various enemies, none of whom are named. The Qin emperor
built a massive tomb that was meant to last through eternity. (In Mecca, the Saudi religious and political authorities are trying to enshrine Muhammad in a different way by taking him out of history so that he is no longer human at all. Religious police warn pilgrims off from praying at sites, such as the cave where the Prophet is said to have received the first message from God, on the grounds that such prayer is idolatry. Over the past half century, the buildings that housed the Prophet and his family have one by one been destroyed, down to their foundations. In the past two decades alone, according to the Gulf Institute, 95 percent of the oldest buildings in Mecca, dating back more than a thousand years, have vanished.)

Our faith in history frequently spills over into wanting to set the past to rights through apologies and compensation for past actions. Now, there is a good case to be made for individuals and organizations admitting that they have done wrong and offering some form of redress. The Swiss banks that made profits from wealth confiscated from Jews were benefiting from and condoning the crimes of the Nazis and ought to have paid compensation to the heirs of those who suffered. The German state rightly paid compensation over the years to the families of the Jews killed by Adolf Hitler’s regime. The Canadian and American governments certainly had an obligation to pay back the Japanese whose property was illegitimately seized when they were rounded up and interned during World War II. The internments themselves of those Japanese who were citizens was of dubious legality. Both governments have apologized and paid compensation to all survivors. In all those cases, the link between those who were sinned against and those who did the sinning was direct and clear.

Often the link is less clear, but the apology makes political sense in the present. Queen Elizabeth’s apologies to the Maori of New Zealand for the illegal seizure of their land in the nineteenth
century did not mean that she was accepting blame; rather, New Zealand society and the New Zealand government were moving toward settling outstanding issues with the Maori and trying to redress the disadvantages they had suffered. In 2004, three American senators introduced a bill for an official apology to all Native peoples for the “long history of official depredations and ill-conceived policies by the United States.” Cynics noted that in an election year, the bill’s sponsors may have been moved by the fact that the Native vote was key in several states. The bill ultimately failed to pass.

The acceptance of responsibility and the act of repentance can be healthy for societies struggling to deal with past horrors. In South Africa, with the ending of apartheid, public figures, both black and white, began to talk about how to move on without allowing the past to tear society apart. At the end of the 1980s, as President Frederik Willem de Klerk and his white Nationalist Party negotiated the end of apartheid with Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress, their common challenge was to ensure a peaceful transition to black majority rule. The difficulty was both to reassure the former oppressors—the police and security forces, for example—that they would not be punished for obeying orders and to appease the understandable longing for revenge and retribution of the blacks whom they had oppressed. The deal, and it was a difficult one to make, was that a commission to examine the past would have the power to grant amnesty to its witnesses and to make recommendations about reparations to the victims of apartheid. In 1995, less than two years after the first multiracial elections, the South African parliament passed the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission started hearings in the spring of 1996 and produced its final report two years later. It was an extraordinary and moving experience which brought the evils
of apartheid into the open. The commission held 140 hearings, in all parts of South Africa, and collected some twenty-two thousand statements from the victims of apartheid. Seven thousand members of the old regime applied for amnesties. Former secret policemen came forward to admit torture and killing. Black witnesses wept and prayed as they relived what had happened to them and their families. Of course the commission did not heal all wounds. The granting of amnesties remains unpopular especially with blacks, and the payment of reparations has been fitful and slow. Nevertheless, by the time the commission finished its hearings in 1998, South Africans of all colors and classes had examined and dealt with the record of apartheid and begun to move forward into a shared future.

Is it healthy, though, for societies to apologize for things that were done in different centuries and under different sets of beliefs? Politicians and others have been quick to make all sorts of apologies, even when it is difficult to see why they need feel any responsibility—or what good an apology would do. The pope apologized for the Crusades. The daughter of the British poet John Betjeman apologized to a town near London for a line in one of his poems which read, “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough / It isn’t fit for humans now.” In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton apologized for slavery and Tony Blair for the Irish potato famine. A descendant of the famous Elizabethan freebooter and slaver Sir John Hawkins wore a T-shirt reading “So Sorry” while he knelt in front of a crowd of locals in Gambia.

In Canada, successive federal governments have been apologizing and in some cases paying compensation for policies carried out—however distasteful they may be to us now—by their properly constituted predecessors. The practice leads to some interesting questions. Canada used to charge a head tax on immigrants coming from China. Its intent was undoubtedly racist,
to discourage “Orientals” from settling in the country. But does present-day Canada have to pay recompense to the descendants of those who chose to pay the head tax? Would it make more sense to use funds for the community as a whole rather than for individuals? How much is enough? Sadly there have been some unedifying squabbles among different groups claiming to speak for Chinese Canadians about how any government money ought to be distributed.

How far ought we to go in second-guessing, even trying to reverse, the decisions of the past? The British government recently decided that the army should not have executed soldiers for cowardice in World War I. So it has posthumously pardoned them. Is it right, asked Matthew Parris, a respected British journalist, to retrospectively question the judgments made then? “I doubt we are able today to second-guess judgments made three generations ago in different circumstances and according to a harsher moral code,” Parris said. Can armies be run without stern discipline, he asks, including harsh reprisals against those who refuse to obey orders or who try to desert in the face of the enemy? It is not natural for human beings to risk death on the battlefield. The threat of execution may help to keep armies from disintegrating into a disorganized rabble. We can say that there should not be wars in the world and that there should not be armies, but until such a peace comes, we need armed forces to defend ourselves and carry out our policies.

Canadian governments have recently indulged in such attempts to refashion the past, over the interning, for example, of particular ethnic groups in wartime. In both world wars, Canada interned those it regarded as enemy nationals. In World War I, it was at war with Austria-Hungary, and many of the Ukrainians living in Canada came from within its borders. Perhaps they had left because they did not like Hapsburg rule; perhaps some of
them still felt loyal to the old emperor. In August 1914, indeed, a Ukrainian bishop in Winnipeg urged the men of his flock to head into the United States so that they could make their way home to fight for Franz Josef. Should the Canadian government at the time have taken a chance on their loyalty to their new home? It chose not to and so interned them. The British and Australian governments took a similar view when they interned their German subjects, even though many of them had been resident for decades.

In World War II, Allied governments interned many of those of Japanese, German, and Italian origin. We now know that the Axis powers lost, but at the time the decision was made, it was not at all clear that would happen. And it was not reassuring that all three Axis powers confidently expected help from their emigrant communities in Allied countries. Would it have been responsible of any Allied government to have overlooked the possibility that there might be sympathizers with Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or militaristic Japan among them (as indeed there were)? What is less forgivable is that so little attempt was made to distinguish between the loyal and the potentially disloyal. In the United Kingdom a majority of the “enemy aliens” from Germany and Austria were Jewish refugees. Yet they, too, were rounded up and sent to internment camps such as those on the Isle of Man. Over seven thousand were shipped off to Canada and Australia; several hundred died on the
Arandora Star
when it was torpedoed. And what was not responsible and indeed illegal was to seize their property as well. In both the United States and Canada, the property of Japanese internees was stolen, destroyed, or sold off at bargain prices to eager speculators. Both governments have since paid compensation.