George Orwell once penned that "he who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past", and since discovering Winston Churchill's statement: "history will be kind to me for I intend to write it", the two seem to coincide. Control of history seems paramount to success, power and strength.
It made me wonder, as a now ex-history student, what was the moral obligation of the historian. We cannot be objective entirely as we all have lived through different experiences, have been taught different things and believe in different things to make this impossible, as it often makes it impossible for people to agree on everything, most notably politics and religion; the two things, incidently, my mother told me never to talk about when I was little- something to stop me causing a small riot no doubt with my impertinent questions!! I never did understand why. Anyway, I am deviating. So, as I was saying the moral obligation of the historian. Since it is nigh on impossible to be objective, how do we decide what to write? How do we decide what to include? How do we portray the historical situation and context? Is it the victor of any war that commands history? Is it in fact true what Orwell said?
It is a troubling issue for me, even if I did have any answers to these questions. Today we have ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Who will tell the story of the people who live in these countries? Do they have a voice that we can hear? And I suppose some may ask what is the importance of history anyway? (I'll leave this last question for another time.) It makes me wonder whether we really do know what goes on in wars in other countries. It is always a problem in history to anaylse sources for their worth and decide whether this one account (often in a form of a novel found on a bookshelf of Waterstones narrating the life of a bullied woman, a desperate family in Iraq, etc) is experienced by the whole nation (unlikely).
In the past, who wrote the history of World War One and World War Two? Even at Essex University, a rather liberal university as it goes, and with prominent members of the History department were in fact German, little was told really of their experience and knowledge of what thier people went on in the war. They focused instead in the aftermath and the Cold War.
There was one instance, however, that provoked this debate separate to the two quotes at the beginning. Reiner Schulze, the History Department topdog, hosted an out-of-hours lecture on his current work of the Berlin air raids and the devastation caused by Allied bombings, something we British pretend never happened only believing the Blitz to have occured here. The contentious issue that Germans should have suffered in the war is a very little touched upon subject as far as I am concerned. Tis troubling indeed...
But at least finally their history is being recorded alongside (again controversially) with the Holocaust.
The woes of the past will never leave us and the woes of the past to come will be no different I fear.
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2 comments:
This has always been the big question for the study of history, I guess. The military historian David Irving is in some aspects a first class historian, finding and analysing scrupulously new source material. He fails though when he allows his prejudices (Nazi sympathies) not only to blind him to some of the things he sees but even to seek to excuse the inexcusable. Communist historians did that too, which is part of what you are saying. The problem it seems to me is how much can you say from the evidence you have - say to little and we ask what's the point of history - say too much and overinterpret the evidence, read too much into it, and you're a sitting duck. Scrupulous fairness plus a capacity to draw larger conclusions, and let them be tested against history. I guess!
OF
haha, yes, the deep and ponderous question... it is a tough one, and I don't think it is one that is ever likely to be solved, and perhaps it is one that shouldn't be solved.
For all the varieties of opinion, we can only draw a fair conclusion in our own minds by the evaluation of all aspects and points of view. This collection of points of view itself (written or oral) gives a varied account of the past from which we can discover what happened and also what people thought happened, which can be enormously fascinating, albeit it sometimes false, as well as perhaps more important!
As you say, OF, only time and history will tell :D
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