THE POWER OF GOOD HISTORY
Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. He has presented numerous BBC series. His latest book is In the Footsteps of Du Fu (Simon & Schuster, 2023). You’ll find him on X at MichaelWoodMV
IN A FAMOUS AND OFTEN-QUOTED SCENE IN George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith wakes up one day in the Ministry of Truth and realises the fundamental principle of history: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Perhaps less familiar are the words that follow: “Past events... have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records, and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it...”.
It’s a stark warning about the totalitarian control of history, published in 1949, soon after the Nazi terror and during the period of Soviet tyranny. History is always contested, of course. But now, in our current age of fake news, myths about the past are taking wider and wider hold in democracies, too – especially via social media. An estimated 5 billion people use social media, roughly 60 per cent of the planet. These figures would have been unbelievable even 30 years ago. Whatever else history is, it’s certainly dangerous.
That’s obvious in totalitarian societies. When the Nazis wanted to prove their theories of Aryan racial supremacy, they republished the archaeologist Gustav Kosina’s excavations ‘proving’ that Indo-Europeans originated in northern Germany. The book had a preface by Hitler himself. Such ideas underwrote
the Nazi genocide.
And it’s still very much true today. Take Vladimir Putin’s so-called ‘interview’ with controversial rightwing American commentator Tucker Carlson in February. Russian viewers were encouraged to believe Putin’s jaw-dropping claims about Russian history, which he uses to justify his aggression. The start of the Second World War? You’d never have guessed that it was Poland’s fault, and not a pact made between Stalin and Hitler to carve up Eastern Europe!
But in democracies too, television and social media are increasingly powerful in manipulating opinion through imagined pasts. With hindsight, for example, myths of British history and identity were a major factor in the 2016 Brexit vote. And, with the rise of conspiracy theories such as QAnon, nearly a third of the American people think the 2020 election was stolen.
In India this January, in the north Indian town of Ayodhya, a huge new temple was dedicated by prime minister Narendra Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A Mughal mosque that had stood on the site since the 16th century was destroyed in 1992 by Hindu fundamentalists, who believed it was built on the birthplace of the god Rama. The BJP had turned the issue into one of imagined Hindu identity. But archaeological excavation subsequently showed that, although the mosque may have been built over the ruins of a medieval temple, there were only insignificant traces of earlier epochs beneath. There never was an ancient cult of Rama on that spot.
The Ramayana is one of the world’s greatest stories, but the birthplace legend is a myth. For hundreds of millions of people in the world’s biggest democracy, however, the legend is being presented as history.
Faced by today’s torrent of fake news and imagined histories, it’s the job of historians of all persuasions to try to create honest accurate narratives. And that’s not just the professionals, because history of course is not their preserve alone. As Winston Smith saw, everything still must depend on the sources and on the written records. I am sure that most of us try to write truthful history, based on the sources – but we must always remind ourselves that no definitive story of the past is ever possible (or even desirable). The past after all is always changing.
Above all, it is vital that we stay open to other ways of seeing. In Britain the representation of the British empire is case in point. As different sources come to the fore, our view of the history inevitably changes. It seems to me that this makes the historian’s job all the more meaningful today. For if democracy rests on the informed consent of the governed, good history remains our great reality check.
In our current age of fake news, myths about the past are taking wider hold