Against the backdrop of rising Ultra- Nationalism, Rewriting History is about taking action in the face of insurmountable odds, when two eccentric Jewish Professors stand in the way of the Lithuanian government's campaign to delegitimise the Holocaust as a unique case of genocide.
Rewriting History Promo.mov - YouTube
rewriting-history.org
It seems to be happening in Hungary:
Hungary rewrites history
And it's happening in the United States:
Rewriting history? Texas tackles textbook debate - CBS News
Oops: Consequently, we get rather confused about 'the facts':
Dribbleglass.com--Actual Answers to History Tests
The Russians are doing it:
Is Vladimir Putin rewriting Russia's history books? - NBC News.com
Russia's past: The rewriting of history | The Economist
Russia rewriting Josef Stalin's legacy - Chicago Tribune
The Serbians under Slobodon Milosevic did it:
Milosevic's Speech in Kosovo - 1989
Gazimestan speech - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Greeks and Macedonians are fighting over who was Alexander the Great:
ancient history - Was Alexander the Great Greek or Macedonian? - History Stack Exchange
Skopje's Strange Quest to Rewrite Its History ... Through Public Sculpture - CityLab
The Japanese and Chinese are unhappy at how the other writes history books:
Japanese history textbook controversies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Like Japan's, Chinese Textbooks Are Adept at Rewriting History - Los Angeles Times
And in the most contentious part of the world, history is bitterly fought over:
Palestinian history fabricated | PMW
EI exclusive: a pro-Israel group's plan to rewrite history on Wikipedia | The Electronic Intifada
Rewriting Israel's History :: Middle East Quarterly
The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 | Reviews in History
New Historians - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
And it's pretty political too in India:
RSS rewrites history: Dalits 'created' by invaders - Hindustan Times
This is called 'revisionism':
Historical revisionism (negationism) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
historical revisionism - YouTube
Here's a lesson plan on the subject:
Education World: Lesson Plan: Rewriting History
Finally, though, it's happening in the UK:
The British Government is Rewriting History, Literally
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
― George Orwell
― George Orwell
UK Education Secretary Michael Gove has unveiled his new History curriculum, and with it his plans to reduce the subject to a romp through the stories of Great White Men of the British Isles, and tales of the Empire. This confining of taught history to a tiny island in the Atlantic, albeit our own, is training a generation of school children for world that no longer exists, while denying them access to a thrilling world beyond their own doorstep.
The Importance of History
If I could write personally for a moment…I love History; it was my favourite subject at school. I was fortunate enough to have an extraordinary teacher called Ms Attwood (I do hope she reads this) who brought the past to life such that I was inspired, awake and engaged in every lesson. She actually taught my first and my final lessons at secondary school and I went on to study the subject at University.
It was the first place I started to see that there was a world of history, that civilisation did not belong to the British, and that often history repeated itself. There were amazing lessons to learn by reviewing and examining what had come before.
Yet, I was happily astonished at how much broader the history curriculum became after my days at secondary school in the nineties. School children were learning about China , the Israel-Palestine conflict, the invasion of Iraq, Tom Paine and Robert Owen . They were learning British History, but they were learning it in the context of the world. It thrilled me to see these young people, through their history lessons, becoming citizens of the world rather than just Britain.
Therefore, to see Gove manhandle the subject out of some sort of whimsical nostalgia for the days of Empire fills me with the kind of contempt one can only truly feel for those who seek to injure that thing which we hold most dear.
What’s All the Fuss About?
One doesn’t need to conduct an extensive search to discover the widespread and vigorous opposition to Gove’s new curriculum. A group of Britain’s leading Historians and academics wrote an open letter to the Observer stating their opposition to the new curriculum and outlining their concerns. I have developed these below.
Early in his tenure as Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove followed the historian Niall Ferguson in calling for history lessons in schools to “celebrate” the legacy of the British empire.
Tristram Hunt on empire, Britishness and Michael Gove | Prospect Magazine
Michael Gove's history wars | Books | The Guardian
Gove's 'gentle tweek' to history curriculum - news - TES
BBC News - Blackadder star Sir Tony Robinson in Michael Gove WW1 row
Simon Schama to advise ministers on overhaul of history curriculum | Politics | The Guardian
Why the rush to rewrite World War I history as a glorious victory matters so much today
Damaged by Iraq, ground down in Afghanistan, defeated over Syria, the jingoistic right are determined to rewrite the history of the First World War in an effort to rehabilitate imperialist war in the early 21st century.
"The men who enlisted in 1914 may have thought they were fighting for civilisation, for a better world, a war to end all wars, a war to defend freedom: they were wrong." - Richard Evans, historian
IF I HAD TO create a sitcom caricature of an odious suburban bigot, I would take Michael Gove as my model. That a bar-room bore like Gove has influence over the education of my children is surely symbolic of a rotting social order. But before discussing the Education Minister’s Daily Mail rant on the First World War, here is some good news.
A new poll shows that 62% of respondents said that the centenary of the First World War should be an occasion for ‘remembrance of loss of life and national reflection’, whereas only 23% preferred a commemoration of victory over Germany. So, at this moment, it is almost three to one against Max Hastings, Michael Gove, The Daily Mail, and other flag-waving jingoes on the lessons of the First World War.
This is what they hate. Here is an argument that the Left won in 1918, when a wave of revolution brought the First World War to an end, partly in revulsion at the carnage in the trenches, partly in response to privation at home, partly in disgust at a ruling elite of imperialists and profiteers.
Why does this matter so much? Perhaps because what happened in 1918 represented a sea-change in popular attitudes to war. The first modern industrialised war had consumed millions of citizen-conscript soldiers in four years of apocalyptic destruction. War was no longer something painted on the tops of biscuit tins. It was a visceral reality in millions of homes torn apart by grief and hunger.
Popular hatred of war – and, to an extent, of the nationalism and imperialism that breed it – became commonsense politics for working-class people in the interwar period. It is with us still, having fed into several great upsurges of anti-war protest in the post-war period – against nuclear weapons in the early 1960s, against the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, against cruise missiles in the 1980s, and against the War on Terror from 2001.
History matters because it is about the present. Our rulers know this. That is why they are determined to refight the ideological battles of 1914-1918. Damaged by Iraq, ground down in Afghanistan, defeated over Syria, the jingoistic right are determined to rewrite the history of the First World War in an effort to rehabilitate imperialist war in the early 21st century. Their arguments are crass, and, the polls suggest, most people know it.
The ‘dupes’ argument
Gove, echoing several other revisionist commentators, says that historians have ‘demonstrated that those who fought were not dupes but conscious believers in King and Country, committed to defending the Western liberal order’.
Now this is a curious species of argument. The best way to expose the false logic at work here is by counter-example. It might equally well be argued that if I ‘consciously believed’ that Protestants were agents of Satan – as many did in 16th century Spain – I would be entitled to set up an Inquisition to burn them alive. Or, if I ‘consciously believed’ that black people were inherently inferior to me and capable only of routine labour – as many did in the antebellum South before the American Civil War – I would be entitled to hold them in slavery. And so on.
Many British men volunteered to fight in 1914 for ‘King and Country’. Whatever that meant to them, it clearly had nothing to do with their real interests. Just as it was not in the interests of German men to fight for the Kaiser, or Russian men to fight for the Tsar, or Turkish men to fight for the Sultan. These are children’s stories, and if millions of men were duped – yes: duped – by these stories in 1914, that is an indictment of their society.
Cambridge historian Richard Evans is therefore absolutely right to argue: ‘the men who enlisted in 1914 may have thought they were fighting for civilisation, for a better world, a war to end all wars, a war to defend freedom: they were wrong’.
The job of historians is to cut through the lies. Millions were indeed duped by the ideologies of their rulers in 1914: nationalism, imperialism, military glory, allegiance to monarch and flag, and all the rest. By 1918 millions of them knew better. Soldiers were streaming out of the trenches and threatening to gun down officers who tried to stop them; and workers were on the streets at home toppling warmongers from their thrones and settling accounts with the war-profiteers who employed them.
We also know better – because of the experience and the example of our forebears. What Gove hates is that my children cannot be duped as easily as their great-grandparents were duped. Now that is progress of a sort.
The ‘honour’ argument
Gove deplores ‘an unhappy compulsion on the part of some to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour, and courage’. He is thinking of ‘left-wing academics’. He is also thinking of such artefacts of popular culture as Oh! What a Lovely War, The Monocled Mutineer, and Blackadder. (For some reason he did not mention the war poets, but since Max Hastings, amongst others, already has them in the dock, we can assume it was oversight.)
The Observer gave space to Tristram Hunt, Labour’s shadow education spokesperson, to reply to Gove. At least I assume that was the intention: a reply. It was certainly how the piece was framed. In fact, because Hunt is currently metamorphosing from reasonably good historian into ghastly New Labour clone – rather like that beetle in the Kafka story – it was nothing of the sort.
‘The British responded to such fascism [Kaiser Wilhelm’s] by largely supporting the war effort. Appeals by trade union leaders to oppose German aggression … led more than 250,000 of their members to enlist by Christmas 1914 … Contrary to the assertions of Michael Gove and The Daily Mail, the Left needs no lessons on “the virtues of patriotism, honour, and courage”.’
Where to begin with this dog’s dinner? No time to discuss the technical definition of fascism here; suffice it to say that, whatever else he was, Kaiser Wilhelm was not a fascist. Even Max Hastings does not accuse him of this, merely suggesting that he might as well have been, since the First World War was really a grand dress-rehearsal for the Second.
Then there are those ‘patriotic’ trade union leaders. Call me a dinosaur if you like, but some might say that their job was to represent the interests of their members – not to encourage enlistment in a bosses’ war for empire and profit in which workers in uniform on one side killed workers in uniform on the other.
As for ‘patriotism, honour, and courage’, the Left may not need lessons, but Tristram Hunt most certainly does. This is the garbage that killed 15 million between 1914 and 1918. Let me translate in so far as I can. When they talk about ‘patriotism’, they mean nationalism, imperialism, and militarism. When they talk about ‘honour’, they do not mean the ‘honour’ of the Suffragette, the striking miner, or the Irish nationalist. And when they talk about ‘courage’, they do not mean the courage of the pacifist, the mutineer, or the revolutionary.
Steve Bell portrays Gove as a duck. (I am not sure why. Does he look like a duck?) The stupidity of talking about ‘patriotism, honour, and courage’ in relation to the First World War certainly makes Gove a sitting duck. But Hunt has missed the target. (Perhaps because he has turned into a beetle.)
The ‘nobility’ argument
Breathless from declaring his admiration for ‘the heroism and sacrifice of our great-grandparents’, Gove then proclaims that ‘Britain’s role in the world has been marked by nobility and courage’, and that Britain has a ‘special tradition of liberty’. Unlike Germany.
‘The ruthless Social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims, and their scorn for international order, all made resistance more justified.’
There you have it: the First World War was a struggle between the good empire and the bad empire. It is of course the pantomime season and Gove is Education Minister, so maybe all this is just pretend. The goodies are ‘noble’, ‘courageous’, and fight for ‘liberty’ (applause). The baddies are ‘pitiless’, ‘aggressively expansionist’, and have ‘scorn for the international order’ (hiss). We know who has to win.
Then, having won, the British helped themselves to Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Namibia, and Tanzania, while gunning down protestors in Dublin, Cairo, and Amritsar. In South Africa, they were busy inventing a system that would later be called apartheid by driving black farmers from their land to force them to work in British-owned gold-mines. Back home, unemployment hit 2.5 million in 1922, remained above a million for the next decade, and then soared to 3 million in 1932. This was wartime Prime Minister Lloyd George’s ‘land fit for heroes’.
It is the outcome that gives the lie to revisionist arguments about the First World War. It was a war for empire and profit in which the many were sacrificed for the wealth and power of the few, and in which Britain’s rulers demonstrated once again that they represent not ‘nobility’ and ‘liberty’, but a world of exploitation, oppression, and violence.
Source: No Glory in War
To finish, a summary from the FT:
Last updated: March 17, 2014 6:32 pm
How wars can be started by history textbooks
By Gideon Rachman
The imposition of an authorised version of events turns education into brainwashing
W
hen political leaders start rewriting the past, you should fear for the future. In Russia, Hungary, Japan and China, recent politically sponsored efforts to change history textbooks were warning signs of rising nationalism.
In January Vladimir Putin presided over a meeting designed to produce a new standardised history book for use in schools. The Russian president complained that many current textbooks are “ideological garbage” and “denigrate the Soviet people’s role in the struggle with fascism”. He dislikes the suggestion that the countries of eastern Europe were occupied by the Soviet Union in 1945. His preferred vision of history is that the USSR saved these nations from fascism.
ON THIS STORY
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- How far will Michael Gove go?
- David Pilling America’s regrets about Abe
- Nationalists in office, not power
ON THIS TOPIC
- Putin tries to extend soft power to UK
- Gideon Rachman Europe’s bloody borders
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- Drinks with Russian soldiers in Lugansk
GIDEON RACHMAN
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The political significance of this historical dispute became clear in the crisis over Ukraine. Moscow has consistently attempted to tar the new government of Ukraine as “fascist”, arguing that its leaders are the ideological heirs of the Ukrainians who fought with the Nazis against Stalin’s Soviet Union. That version of events is now being energetically promoted by the Russian media.
Ironically, Mr Putin’s Russia enjoys warm relations with Hungary – the one government in the former Soviet bloc that could justly be accused of adopting a dangerously equivocal attitude to the history of the far right. Hungary’s conservative government, led by Viktor Orbán, seems to be encouraging the rehabilitation of Miklos Horthy, Hungary’s authoritarian and anti-semitic leader of the interwar years. Several statues to Horthy have been erected around the country, as a well as a plaque in Budapest. Efforts are also under way to rewrite school history textbooks to give them a more “patriotic” tone.
As with Russia, Hungary’s neighbours have reason to be concerned by this outbreak of historical revisionism. One of the reasons that some of the country’s rightists look kindly on Horthy is that he was a believer in a “Greater Hungary” that would one day reclaim the territories that the country had lost after the first world war, a cause that remains dear to modern Hungarian nationalists.
Nationalist efforts to rewrite history textbooks are also cause for concern in Asia. Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, has suggested some school textbooks adopt too “masochistic” a view of the country’s history. This suggestion has outraged the governments of China and South Korea, which even before Mr Abe’s advent had long complained that Japanese textbooks play down crimes such as the Nanjing massacre of 1937 or the use of sexual slaves by the Japanese imperial army.
Yet Beijing is itself hardly innocent of the abuse of history for nationalist purposes. President Xi Jinping unveiled his plans for the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” in a speech given at the recently redesigned National History Museum in Beijing. The building devotes acres of space to the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, as well as the crimes of the British, French and other foreign imperialists who “descended on China like a swarm of bees”. But the national museum – like the textbooks that teach Chinese children – is virtually silent on the many millions who died under the rule of the Communist party, whether in the famines caused by Mao Zedong’s “great leap forward” or during the cultural revolution. A portrait of Mao still hangs over Tiananmen Square. For all the revisionism indulged in by Mr Putin’s Russia, it would be unthinkable (one hopes) for a portrait of Stalin to be on permanent display in Red Square. The point of the official version of history is obvious: to direct popular anger outwards, at China’s neighbours, rather than inwards towards its government.
Even Britain has experienced a controversy about the history taught in schools. Michael Gove, education secretary, has provoked fierce criticism from some eminent historians by suggesting children are being given an overly negative view of the first world war. Mr Gove argues they should be taught that it was a justified defence of freedom, and not just a futile bloodletting.
This illustrates that there is nothing unusual in the efforts of political leaders – including Mr Putin or Mr Abe – to try to influence the way their nation’s histories are taught and remembered. But there are still important distinctions to be made between legitimate debate and the politicised misuse of the past.
First, politicians should never be allowed to deny historical facts. Mr Gove may argue that the first world war was a just conflict. But he is not attempting to deny that the battle of the Somme took place, in the way that some Japanese nationalists, close to Mr Abe, have denied that the Nanjing massacre ever occurred.
The second important distinction is between encouraging debate – and shutting it down. It is sad and sinister that some Russian nationalists continue to promote a positive view of Stalin. But that view of Stalinism is much more dangerous if it becomes the unchallenged, official version of history, promoted in schools and on the media.
Politicians, like academics or ordinary citizens, will naturally have competing views about how to view their national history. But the abuse of political power to impose a single, authorised version of history on a nation’s schools and mass media is when education crosses the line into brainwashing. As we are seeing in Russia today, a public in the grip of a nationalist version of history can be a dangerous thing.
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