Rewriting the past to discredit enemies and stoke hatred
Clio traduced: on the manipulation of history
History is key to explaining the origins of conflicts, but instead it’s widely used to justify them. Pushing back against distorted narratives, especially official ones, is a constant battle, but a vital one.
Benoît Bréville
Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2024
In May 1945, soon after Germany surrendered, the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) asked people which country they felt had contributed the most to its defeat. At the time, respondents were highly conscious of the millions of Soviet troops who had died on the eastern front and their decisive role in weakening the Nazi forces, as well as the United States’ late entry into the war: 57% chose the Soviet Union and only 20% the US. When IFOP asked the same question this year, the ratio was inverted: the US scored 60% against 25% for the Soviet Union.
Collective memory changes over time, depending on the balance of power and political interests. Hollywood has of course portrayed the US as having saved the world in dozens of films celebrating the heroism of the GI, from The Longest Day (1962) to Patton (1970), The Big Red One (1980) and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Today, the USSR is gone, and in France, the Communist Party, which helped preserve the memory of the Soviet sacrifice, has withered away; for the last 40 years French governments have commemorated the Normandy landings as the turning point of the second world war.
For many years, D-Day was seen as a relatively minor event: the ceremony to mark its fifth anniversary in 1949 was a modest affair with just a local bugle corps, two young women laying flowers on the beach and a flypast by a few bombers which dropped bouquets and fired rockets. Though later on the festivities grew, no US president ever considered making the trip to Normandy, and in 1964 De Gaulle himself refused to attend: ‘Why should I go and commemorate their landings when they were a prelude to a second occupation of France? I won’t do it!’
That all changed in 1984 amid growing US-Soviet tension. The D-Day commemoration, timed for live broadcast on breakfast TV in the US, became a major event with a lasting geopolitical dimension. French president François Mitterrand’s guest list included Ronald Reagan, Queen Elizabeth II, Pierre Trudeau and King Baudoin of Belgium. The countries of the ‘free world’ made a show of unity, presenting themselves as defenders of democracy. In a belligerent speech, Reagan said, ‘Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They’re still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost 40 years after the war.’
Since then, every anniversary has been used to send a message – through guest lists, order and content of speeches and military parades. This year, no fewer than 25 monarchs and heads of state attended the 80th anniversary celebrations. The NATO alliance was out in full force, and for the first time since the end of the cold war no Russian representative was invited, not even an embassy counsellor. The Élysée explained: ‘The conditions are not right, considering the war of aggression that Russia is waging against Ukraine.’
‘Things worth fighting and dying for’
US president Joe Biden spoke of the sacrifices made by US troops: ‘There are things that are worth fighting and dying for. Freedom is worth it. Democracy is worth it. America is worth it. The world is worth it.’ Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky was, of course, in attendance and received a long standing ovation from a carefully vetted audience of 4,000. The Élysée said his presence highlighted ‘how the landings resonate with the just struggle that the Ukrainian nation is waging today’ (1). The next day, at the French National Assembly, Zelensky drew one of his favourite historical parallels, implicitly comparing the Soviet Union, which broke Hitler’s war machine at Stalingrad, with the Nazis.
It’s hardly surprising that such commemorations give a distorted view of the past: they are after all a vehicle for a narrative that suits the organisers’ interests. But the rewriting of the history of the war goes far beyond D-Day celebrations: it extends to the media, school textbooks, museums and, in some countries, government policy.
For many years the Soviet Union’s role in defeating the Nazis has been played down compared with that of the US. It is now regarded as sharing responsibility for the war equally with Germany. This narrative first emerged in central and eastern Europe and the Baltic states with the revival of nationalist movements in the late 2000s. In these countries, which were freed from Nazi occupation by the Red Army but remained under Soviet control after the war, there emerged the notion of a ‘double occupation’ by two totalitarian regimes. Establishing this narrative involved erasing all trace of the past, especially any signs of the victory of the Red Army and collaboration with the German occupation.
Soviet troops that came to the center of this continent did not leave when peace came. They’re still there, uninvited, unwanted, unyielding, almost 40 years after the war Ronald Reagan
In 2007 the Estonian government decided to demolish a statue in central Tallinn erected in 1947 in honour of Soviet troops killed in combat, which was by then seen as a symbol of Soviet occupation. When protests by the country’s Russian minority turned into riots, the authorities decided instead to move the statue. This has become common practice in the last 15 years: in Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Ukraine, hundreds have been relocated.
In 2017 the Polish government gave local authorities 12 months to take down all public monuments deemed to ‘pay tribute to persons, organisations, events or dates symbolising communism or other totalitarian systems’. A law passed the following year made it an offence to attribute responsibility for or complicity in crimes against humanity (specifically the Holocaust) to the Polish nation or state and banned any suggestion that Poles had collaborated with the Nazis: the Polish Institute of National Remembrance would monitor infringements. In 2018 Ukraine banned a Russian translation of Antony Beevor’s book Stalingrad, which claims that Ukrainian nationalists enlisted in the German army executed 90 Jewish children in Lviv in 1941.
‘Importance of European remembrance’
The idea that Moscow and Berlin shared responsibility for the war – previously found only among neoconservatives – has gradually gained traction throughout western Europe. In September 2019 this even became the official EU line, when the European Parliament adopted a resolution tabled by eastern European MEPs on ‘the importance of European remembrance for the future of Europe’; it stated that the second world war was ‘an immediate result’ of the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact and called for 25 May (the anniversary of the execution of the Auschwitz hero Witold Pilecki by Poland’s communist authorities) to be designated ‘International Day of Heroes of the Fight Against Totalitarianism’, implicitly linking the Soviet Union to the Holocaust.
The idea of politicians writing and fixing history is in itself questionable. In 1990 leading French historians including Madeleine Rebérioux and Pierre Vidal-Naquet opposed the Gayssot Act banning Holocaust denial, which was passed by the French parliament shortly after the desecration of the Jewish cemetery at Carpentras. Rebérioux wrote, ‘The way to encourage independent thought is not to repress [debate] but to explain the crime, place it in its historical context, and compare the Nazi genocide to other crimes against humanity’ (2). Scholars, at least, were agreed. It was the same with the memorial laws on the 1915 Armenian genocide and on slavery that followed: no serious historian denied that the first was genocide, or that the second constituted a crime against humanity.
Today, legislators intervene for purely political reasons on subjects they know nothing about and which historians are still debating. At Ukraine’s request, in March 2023, an overwhelming majority of French deputies followed the example of their European counterparts in recognising the great Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 as genocide – though experts are still deeply divided on this. One deputy who supported the bill said, ‘I know the genocidal character of the Holodomor is a matter of debate, but there comes a point where you have to take a position’ (3).
The European Parliament’s 2019 resolution on European remembrance was not just the expression of a point of view: the MEPs rewrote history, eliminating anything that might contradict their new narrative. Blaming the Soviet Union for the second world war while ignoring the roles played by France and Britain is clearly hypocritical. Before Moscow signed the non-aggression pact in August 1939, the UK and Poland had torpedoed all attempts to negotiate a collective security agreement that would include it. The British elite were in favour of appeasing, or even making concessions to, the Nazis, whom they saw as far more respectable than the communists. The indulgence shown to Hitler by Britain’s politicians, City financiers, aristocracy and press played an important part in the march to war, yet it is ignored in political speeches, school textbooks and historical documentaries.
Putin’s complaint of revisionism
This ideological onslaught made it easy for Vladimir Putin to complain of anti-Russian revisionism. In a long article published in the conservative US magazine The National Interest (18 June 2020), titled ‘The real lessons of the 75th anniversary of World War II’, he wrote, ‘Historical revisionism, the manifestations of which we now observe in the West, and primarily with regard to the subject of the Second World War and its outcome, is dangerous because it grossly and cynically distorts the understanding of the principles of peaceful development, laid down at the Yalta and San Francisco conferences in 1945.’
To counter Western manipulation, Putin has become a history teacher. He has made interminable speeches blaming the West for starting the war, criticising the ‘Munich betrayal’ and Poland’s collusion with Nazi Germany, and praising the Red Army’s heroism. And like his Western opponents, he has distorted the past to serve his own interests, banning any mention of links between the Soviet Union and Germany, and rewriting school textbooks, notably to justify ‘de-nazifying’ Ukraine, and to deny its historical legitimacy as a sovereign nation.
Putin has spent years obsessively contesting Ukraine’s claim to an independent history. In May 2023 he appeared on television, examining a 17th-century map of eastern Europe, and telling viewers, ‘The Soviet government created Soviet Ukraine. This is well known to everyone. Until then, there was never any Ukraine in the history of humanity.’
Two years earlier, in July 2021, he had published an essay titled ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. It goes all the way back to the kingdom of Kyivan Rus, founded in the 9th century. Putin writes: ‘Voivode Bobrok of Volyn and the sons of Grand Duke of Lithuania Algirdas – Andrey of Polotsk and Dmitry of Bryansk – fought next to Grand Duke Dmitry Ivanovich of Moscow on the Kulikovo field. At the same time, Grand Duke of Lithuania Jogaila – son of the Princess of Tver – led his troops to join with Mamai. These are all pages of our shared history, reflecting its complex and multi-dimensional nature.’
Zelensky responded in a long speech that August, ‘Our hryvnia [Ukraine’s currency] is more than a thousand years old – it existed under Prince Volodymyr [the Great]. Our trident [in Ukraine’s coat of arms] was approved in the Constitution of Ukraine 25 years ago, [but it was] embossed on the plinth bricks of the Tithe Church 1,025 years ago.’
These contradictory statements would be amusing if the battle for collective memory had not degenerated into a bloody war, and if other countries did not use the past in similarly far-fetched and murderous ways. Israel’s leaders often refer to the iron-age Israelite kingdom of Judah, founded in the 9th century BCE, and show off archaeological finds that supposedly demonstrate a continuous Jewish presence in the region. Coins, tombs and stelae several thousand years old are used to justify colonialism and oppression.
History should help to explain the origins and motives of conflicts, but is instead used to fuel them. Commentators find that immediacy suits their narrative better. For them, the war in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and the war in Gaza on 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel. The victims have a right to defend themselves, and the West has a right to help them. QED.
Taking the wider view
They are not wrong – but if we take a wider perspective the picture changes considerably. We cannot fully understand the Ukraine war without going back to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia was then in a weakened state, but the US decided to maintain the NATO alliance and invite several former Warsaw Pact countries and former Soviet republics to join, with the ultimate goal of admitting Georgia and Ukraine. This resulted in an anti-Russian alliance, and a considerable military and strategic deployment, at the very gates of Russia.
Noam Chomsky invites us to imagine what would happen if Mexico were to sign a military alliance with China, and allow it to station troops and weapons on the US border, despite US warnings against doing so (4). And if the US responded by invading Mexico, who could imagine the European Union, keen to see international law upheld, giving Mexico billions of dollars in aid?
The Hamas attacks of October 2023 had a historical context, too: six punitive operations carried out by Israel against Gaza in 18 years; one of the world’s tightest land and sea blockades; and the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, which the UN has condemned countless times since 1967. Rather than putting Hamas’s actions into perspective, the media have focused on the immediate past, disregarding the longstanding day-to-day harassment of Palestinians, the continual ID checks, the military occupation, the Separation Wall around Gaza, the demolition of Palestinians’ homes and the appropriation of their land. Thus, the 7 October attacks seem to lack a motive, unless it is ethnic or religious. By labelling them as a slaughter of Jews, a ‘pogrom’, even ‘the biggest pogrom since the Holocaust’, journalists and politicians have linked them to the long history of persecution of the Jews – which means they can accuse anyone who tries to explain the reasons behind them of being antisemitic (5).
Thus, history is widely manipulated and used to justify wars, discredit opponents and cement collective identities. Anyone can deny, rewrite, distort or draw analogies or references from history to support their case. Those who control mass communications have a huge advantage when it comes to shaping the public debate to fit a narrative that suits their interests. By framing and limiting the scope of the debate, the media strive to exclude anything that could tarnish the image of Western democracies. Who in the West recalls the US’s reluctance to join the fight against Nazism? Or Churchill’s part in the 1943 Bengal famine, which claimed three million lives? Or the massacre of hundreds of thousands of communists in Indonesia, while France and the US stood by? Or Western liberals’ support of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile?
Neither Clio, muse of history, nor Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, can stand up to today’s media and publishing industry. Fighting the prevailing view is always hard work. Before we can expose the truth about the past, we have to eliminate the received ideas that obstruct our view. According to US historian Michael Parenti, ‘Dissidents … are not drifting with the mainstream but swimming against it, struggling against the prevailing range of respectable opinion. They are deprived of … “the background assumptions”, the implicit, unexamined, but commonly embraced notions that invite self-confirming acceptance because of their conformity to what is already accepted as properly true. This established familiarity and unanimity of bias is frequently treated as “objectivity”. For this reason, dissidents are constantly having to defend themselves and argue closely from the evidence’ (6).
Notes
(1) Victor Goury-Laffont, ‘France U-turns on inviting Russia to D-Day memorial ceremony’, Politico, 31 May 2024.
(2) Madeleine Rebérioux, ‘Le génocide, le juge et l’historien’ (Genocide, judges and historians), L’Histoire, Paris, November 1990.
(3) Aurélien Taché, then a French MP for Europe Ecology-The Greens, had previously represented Emmanuel Macron’s La République En Marche. He currently represents Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (Médiapart, 31 March 2023).
(4) From Jeremy Scahill’s interview of Noam Chomsky, The Intercept, 14 April 2022.
(5) See Enzo Traverso, Gaza Faces History, Footnote, London, 2024, and Serge Halimi and Pierre Rimbert, ‘The French left and the antisemitism trap’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, October 2024.
(6) See Michael Parenti, History as Mystery, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1999.
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