The Folly of Fools (35 page)

Much more recently, George W. Bush said the United States was going to war with Iraq. Congress said they wanted evidence that Iraq was a threat. The CIA provided the evidence. Congress voted to go to war. My guess is that most Americans now remember the sequence as: The CIA provided evidence that Iraq was a threat. Based on this evidence, Bush and Congress decided to go to war. If so, a false historical narrative was born, another aggressive war turned into a defensive one.

One cost of US attachment to international intervention and war is the growth of the military-industrial complex famously warned against by President Dwight Eisenhower fifty years ago—or military-industrial-congressional complex, as he first called it. Its appetite seems insatiable; the United States alone now spends almost as much on warfare (“defense”) as the rest of the world put together. Many of the chief US export industries are military as well: fighter jets, helicopters, rifles, bullets. We arm the world at every level, from criminal gangs in our own hemisphere to entire states throughout the world. The collapse of the Soviet system gave only a temporary respite from these forces, and the United States is now spending relatively more than ever. At the same time, an enormous and very expensive intelligence system is being created.

Note that the Soviets provided a counterweight to rapacious capitalism. With their collapse, the past twenty years have seen intense American wars, an accelerated shift of wealth to the already wealthy (a trend that began a few years earlier), and gross financial thievery by the wealthy and their agents leading to near economic collapse.

US HISTORY TEXTBOOKS

A useful part of understanding false historical narratives is seeing what efforts are made to instill them in schools, and we shall try to do this for each of our examples. In the United States, high schools were first required to teach US history around 1900 as part of a nationwide, flag-waving frenzy. Although by logic, one might easily imagine that the function of teaching one’s own history would be to learn and prepare oneself for the future, the nationalistic origin reveals the deeper force that operates in country after country—toward building a positive, patriotic story, one that encourages group cohesion, self-congratulation, and superiority vis-à-vis others, a self-serving false historical narrative available to rationalize every action.

What we have now in the United States is instructive. Several huge books compete for a very large market. The average weight of each book exceeds six pounds and contains more than one thousand pages. This is partly due to pressure to mention every state and president, every event big and small, thus precluding any study of history’s larger patterns and events. To help the teacher get students to read these bloated books, multiple free teaching aids are offered, crisscrossed with organization. One book has 840 “main ideas within the main text,” 310 “skill builders,” and 466 “critical thinking” questions. No system of human thought is known to produce coherent patterns with so many variables. Students have been described as memorizing material for each chapter, only to forget it to free up neurological space for the next chapter.

In short, US history is sliced and diced right out of existence. Main themes and topics are easily lost. One book offered little more than a paragraph on all of slavery. Conflict of any kind, or even suspense, tends to be removed. The story is one in which every problem has been solved or is about to be. The present is almost never used to illuminate the past, and we learn nothing from the past that would help us with the future and very few lessons of any kind. Thus, the study of US history has become an exercise in rote memory and self-glorification, with almost no relevant learning. Not surprisingly, students routinely describe history as the most boring subject in school, easily beating English and chemistry, yet interest in history in other contexts, including general books, museums, and films, remains high.

When I was an undergraduate major in US history at Harvard in the early 1960s, the names of the texts gave away the game:
The Genius of American Democracy
. You did not need to read the book; the content was right there in the title. The chief problem in American historiography was: Why are we the greatest nation that was ever conceived and the greatest people who ever strode the face of the earth? Competing answers had to do with the value of a receding frontier (a benign metaphor for territorial expansion), of having upper-class Englishmen design the society, of building a country on perpetual immigration, and so on. The key is what was assumed in advance, and of course high school history texts reflect this as well:
Triumph of the American Nation
,
Land of Promise
,
The Great Republic
. Meta-message—you have a proud heritage, certainly nothing to be ashamed of, look at what the United States has accomplished and just imagine what it will soon do. Be a good citizen; be all you can be.

LARGER VIEW OF US HISTORY

The pervious sections are not meant to be a representative history of the United States. US history has many virtues, among which is the fact that the US population is reconstituted every generation through a roughly 10 percent admixture by external immigration from throughout the world. Although in its history rules of immigration have favored some groups over others, all have had some opportunity. And with illegal immigration, such opportunities are sometimes greatly enhanced. From a biological standpoint, the resulting outbreeding (insofar as it takes place, as it inevitably must) will tend to be genetically beneficial. The US population is perpetually heterogeneous, about to be infused with 10 percent more genes from around the world. This continual level of in-migration, outbreeding, and cultural diversity is unusual for most countries.

One other feature of US history is highly unusual and largely positive. Its most costly war to itself—700,000 dead out of a population of about 18 million—was the Civil War, a most ironic war in that one side wished to free slaves to whom they were less related than were the slaves’ owners. The owners cared primarily about maintaining these people as their property (rather than, in some cases, their children), so they fought to maintain this right even though this sometimes harmed their own flesh and blood. In short, the Civil War was fought in great part as a moral crusade to end something that was seen as a moral evil. Loss of life was mostly suffered by European Americans and roughly equally on both sides, those fighting for justice and those against it. The later history of African Americans was in some ways more dreadful than under slavery, since not counting as property they could be hanged or “lynched” by the thousands as a form of social control. Nevertheless, the subpopulation had become strong enough by the middle of the twentieth century to begin a political and social movement that led to eventual legal liberation, and with this yoke lifted, the intrinsic benefits of strong outbreeding associated with strong selection has produced a vibrant and powerful subgroup. African Americans are the melting-pot population par excellence in the United States, genetically roughly 25 percent European in origin, 70 percent African, and the remainder Amerindian and Chinese. At the same time, social policies such as the war on drugs amount to a war on lower-class African Americans, greatly increasing incarceration rates, with destructive effects on their communities. So the racist attack continues, but in the long run it can only strengthen the biological power of its target.

THE REWRITING OF JAPANESE HISTORY

In the past ten years, Japan has shown a very interesting retrogressive approach to its own past, in which critical events, sometimes formerly acknowledged, are now denied despite massive evidence to the contrary. With each opposing revelation, the denials are then tailored downward but always with the intent of minimizing official complicity in the historical crimes being assessed.

It is well documented that the Japanese government, mostly via the army, ran a vast, forced system of sexual slavery throughout conquered sections of Asia during World War II in which local women—Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Indonesians, and others—were forced, often at the point of a bayonet, to serve the sexual needs of the invading Japanese soldiers (often more than fifty men per day). They were given the euphemism “comfort women.” The matter was well researched immediately after WWII based partly on interrogation of Japanese prisoners in connection with possible war crimes. Dutch investigators described the forcible seizure of Indonesian women, who were beaten, stripped naked, and then forced to sexually service large numbers of Japanese soldiers every day. Their sufferings were vividly described by some of the women themselves who had long hidden the true facts in shame but spoke out in the early 1990s, when the Japanese government initially refused to acknowledge the crime, much less make any amends. And of course this is one of the benefits of denial: the lack of any need for restitution.

Initially, the Japanese government was forced to accept these conclusions as part of a peace treaty signed with the Allied powers in 1951. It was thus more difficult later to deny them, but conservatives (nationalists) do deny the tribunals’ conclusions, calling them “victor’s justice.” They assert that the role of teaching history is not to dwell on the dark and “masochistic” side but to teach history, however false, in which Japanese can feel pride. This is exactly what a false historical narrative is supposed to do: replace a potentially negative personal self-image with a positive one—or, more accurately, a negative image of one’s ancestors with a positive one. Of course, with simple (largely erroneous) genetic assumptions, the two images are the same.

In 1993, the Japanese government finally acknowledged that it had managed the “comfort stations” but still refused to pay compensation. Even this meager step forward was contradicted by a recent prime minister who denied that the military had forcefully recruited the women, saying instead that “employment” had been arranged by “brokers.” A prominent Japanese historian summarized the state of affairs in 2007 by saying that the system obviously was one of sexual slavery but “the movement to openly deny this has grown stronger in the government and elsewhere.” This is only one of several examples of false Japanese historical narratives, including crimes such as the Rape of Nanjing and mistreatment of prisoners of war—not to mention the slaughter of more than twenty million Chinese in the 1930s and 1940s, a fact that has disappeared from world memory except in China and Korea.

Of course, there is an irony here, since the teaching of false history is merely a new source of shame, a new dark history, so there is no redemption but a deepening moral problem. By contrast, the Germans long ago confessed their crimes, with numerous benefits in improved relations with neighbors and others. They can be faulted only for being overly solicitous toward Israel, but this is at least an understandable reaction to their own past crimes. Note again the role of the honest and often courageous historian who tells the truth. In all the cases of false historical narratives, we know they are false because of the work of historians in the societies themselves, often a small minority and often risking their jobs and sometimes their lives.

The Japanese controversies highlight a larger problem in the teaching of history: to what degree is its function, especially in the young, to foster feelings of patriotism (self- and within-group love), and to what extent is its function to provide an objective view of the past, warts and all? Periodically the issue will burst forth in the UK press, for example, with some arguing that patriotism requires that Oliver Cromwell be taught as an exemplar of English manhood at its most manly while others say it would be better to emphasize that he was a warmongering, genocidal murderer who perpetrated huge atrocities on the Irish in the name of God and empire.

Or take an interesting case from within Japan. Okinawa, the southernmost island, was the last annexed into Japan itself (in the late nineteenth century), and there is a long history of derogating the Okinawans within Japan. Even the huge US Army base located (and unwelcome) there is a gift from the larger country. One little problem that recently arose concerns how to teach the end of World War II to Japanese children. The land invasion was aimed at Okinawa first and one-fourth of the civilian population was killed. Japanese imperial troops treated the locals brutally. They were indifferent to their safety, used civilians as shields, and finally, in March 1945, urged them to commit mass suicide before US forces started landing on the main islands. This was said to benefit the Okinawans because they would thereby escape the horrors and humiliations the Americans had in store for them: rape, torture, and murder. The benefit to the imperial Japanese (besides continuing to decimate a Japanese sub-breed regarded as inferior by their overlords) allegedly was to prevent Okinawans from actively helping the advancing Allied forces. This was both a hostile projection and a guilt-ridden one. If Okinawans had not for so long been mistreated, would their loyalties be so easily questioned? Some Okinawans fell in line and committed suicide, some even bashing sisters, brothers, and mothers to death. Others politely declined.

In the most recent twist, the Japanese legislature got reinvolved in 2007 and passed a law that promotes the teaching of patriotism in schools. Shortly thereafter, new textbook guidelines were announced that required the deletion of all references to the role of the Japanese Imperial Army in inducing mass suicides of Okinawans. Demonstrations ensued in Okinawa against this revisionism, which denied the cause of a particularly painful injustice at the hands of their overlords. More than 100,000 people massed in September 2007, the largest rally in Okinawa since its reversion to Japan from the United States in 1972. Two key pieces of evidence were that (1) mass suicides took place only where Japanese army units were stationed, and (2) grenades, which were precious weapons against the invaders, were given instead to the Okinawans to encourage group suicide. Textbook companies then petitioned the government to reverse the regulation, a change soon granted. This is a general (and welcome) feature of the three major “textbook controversies” in Japan. Nationalistic and right-wing forces arguing for a reversion to false historical narratives are often overcome by other forces in the society. Not so in Turkey.