History of Who, Exactly?

Professor James C. Scott has published a book recently that is making some waves. As I've said before, I'm all for revisionist views of history, so long as they are well-grounded in the evidence. Sometimes, it's good to have someone force us to see things a little differently.

Such is the case with Professor Scott's book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. The title makes his thesis sound pretty radical but the idea is actually interesting. Professor Scott rejects the usual approach of state- or country-based histories, and tells the story of the peoples living in the deep jungles and mountains of inland Southeast Asia, far away from the cities and administrations of the governments clinging effectively to the coasts. These peoples, long persecuted as annoying and slippery minorities by the various governments which have passed in the region, have tried their best to stay as remote from the countries, their taxes and their prying police forces for centuries, living a sort of outlaw existence in the interior regions -- which Scott calls Zomia -- while rejecting any of the benefits of civilization and refusing to identify themselves with any of the established countries in Southeast Asia.

Some historians and regional specialists have taken issue with Professor Scott's approach and it may be indeed that he is guilty of some ideological over-reach -- theorists sometimes see things a little too black-and-white, ignoring many of the gray areas inbetween -- but still, I like Professor Scott's approach because it highlights our own propensity today to (lazily) simply assume that our lifestyle is the end-all and be-all of human existence. For instance, historians and archaeologists were puzzled in the 1980s and 90s when evidence surfaced in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that several groups seemed to have lapsed back into more primitive "hunter-gatherer" lifestyles after having "achieved" agricultural societies. Why would anyone reject the obvious fruits of civilization? -- or so ask we. Our popular assumption that human societies followed some form of linear development, that we were all on some sort of path towards ultimate civilizational utopia, has been challenged a lot in recent decades, but we still cling to it. The simple fact is, civlization doesn't quite work for everyone, and there have always been those who have carved their living on the outskirts of civilizations.

Don't get me wrong; I'm all for civilization. If you want this keyboard, you'll have to pry it from my cold, dead fingers! Still, it is impossible to completely dismiss Professor Scott's approach, and indeed there is even an echo of Zomia in Eastern Europe. The Carpathian Mountains arch to form a massive stone cradle in the heart of Eastern Europe, and despite all the fits of nationalism that have convulsed the region, there is a historic tradition of mountain peoples all throughout the Carpathians who share many traditions of music, folklore, fashion styles, lifestyles, and a romantic sense of anti-authority, anti-state banditry which has perennially frustrated the governments on the plains below.

You say tomato.....

Napoleon once (in)famously said "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon." In some sense, this is true, because how we look at the past is often defined as much by how we view ourselves and our world as by the (historical) facts we see before us -- hence the name of this blog. For instance, we today in 2010 see World War II as a defining event of our times, and we see ourselves as living in its shadow still some 60+ years after it ended. Consider then what it might be like for a time traveler to suddenly show up in our midst from the distant future who dismisses World War II as mere trivia but instead wants to talk about some obscure event that happened in 1978 in the Ugandan jungles which, according to our time traveler, is seen in his/her times as the earliest beginning of the Great Zoog Empire. We, the peoples of the early 21st century, are defined in the time travelers' era as "pre-Zoogites", and the defining historical events of our times for them are obscure and largely unknown minor news factoids for us, if we're aware of them at all. This is a fun exercise but it gives you a sense of historical perspective. Keep in mind that we today often impose this same type of reasoning backwards onto those who came before us.

But obvious perspectives aside, this brings us to the fundamental question, "What is History"? If it is nothing more than a pile of perspectives, then is it worth anything more than, say, travelogues or the average opinion you'll hear on politics any given evening in your friendly local pub? History is a discipline, a study of human relationships (best displayed in civilizations) over time and how they met both challenges and change. A trained historian tries to be objective and incorporate both an emic (internal, from the point of view of the subject) and etic (external) view into their studies, and while as we've mentioned no person can ever completely escape their own perspective, a historian will still always need to anchor their findings on facts. In the best tradition of EH Carr, historical facts are essentially data, the raw ingredients of history. Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. So what? As a stand-alone historical fact, it means little. Millions of Italian citizens today cross the Rubicon as well, and nobody writes a book about them. Only when that fact is interpreted and put in context -- in other words, is processed -- does a mere fact become History. Knowing that the Roman Senate had forbade any general from entering a perimeter around the city of Rome with his army, delineated north of the city by the Rubicon, suddenly explains why Julius Caesar crossing it is historically significant; by doing so, he was raising the flag of revolt and signaling his intention to take over the Roman Empire.

Man, that was a lot of wind just to get me to this point. Sorry. Anyway, the point is that interpretations sometimes change, and occasionally revisionist histories emerge -- which is all well and good, as they force us to continuously re-evaluate "established" history -- so long as they are anchored in facts. Historians spend a lot of time evaluating their sources, and checking the "facts". Unfortunately, there are those who are more concerned with interpreting history to fit their own perspective, or more accurately, their own ideology, which all too often does not require a very thorough analysis of the known facts, or a very selective recollection of them.

One such case appears to be Oliver Stones' soon to be aired 10 hour TV mini-series pseudo-history "Secret History of the Twentieth Century". I have not seen any of this series yet in any form so this is not a review, but rather a reaction to Stone's descriptions of it at a recent press conference in San Francisco. Stone has seemingly chosen to relativise Hitler, describing Hitler as merely a man of his times. Well of course he was; we all are. However, as an example, Mussolini was a man of his times, a nationalist and an imperialist in an age which still embraced both, but Hitler was different, he was extraordinary. Mussolini merely wanted what many -- most? -- Europeans of the first half of the 20th century wanted: Empire. He romanticized militarism and military pageantry, and believed in a Social-Darwinistic order whereby the strong rule over the weak, a sort of eat-or-be-eaten world. Nationalistic authoritarian dictatorships sprang up all across 1920s and 30s Europe, from Spain and Portugal to Greece, Latvia, Poland and Romania, most emulating Mussolini. Even in the established democracies, fascism had its supporters like the British 'Black Shirts'. World War I and the Great Depression had convinced many across Europe (and the world) that democracy and free-market economics had failed. People like Mussolini merely embodied what many Europeans wanted to do, to ditch messy, slow parliamentary politics in favor of some strong leader who would lead the nation to its rightful place among the great countries.

Hitler, however, was different. He also believed in empires, militarism and the superiority of some peoples over others -- but he took these concepts much further. Mussolini operated in the open and essentially usurped existing social and political structures to do his bidding. Hitler did not embrace the old order -- however it could be changed -- but rather tried to completely destroy it and replace it with his own. The very theatrical Mussolini was a man of his times; Hitler rejected his times. The very story of Nazi Germany is indeed the story of an extremist group coming to power and somehow convincing the citizenry of an advanced, modern country to do things that their own moral structures forbade: mass murder, brutality, extermination, genocide. Hitler railed against Judeo-Christian values and went to elaborate lengths to convince his people, bureaucrats, police and soldiers to do things considered before the war -- even after the experience of the First World War -- as unthinkable. The extermination camps of the Holocaust were hidden in rural Nazi-occupied Poland, and Nazi news outlets spoke only of deporting Jews "to the East". Hitler was challenging the fundamental moral and ethical codes of his day, but Mussolini was marching in step with them. Stones' attempt to describe Hitler as merely a product of his times is very much to miss the historical point of Hitler, that he rejected his times and the limits they put on his evil designs. The kinds of atrocities Hitler managed to convince his compatriots to commit in 1933-45 are important to us not as mere signs of the times but exactly because they are so extraordinary, so out of sync with the accepted norms and behaviors of Hitler's times. If they were indeed just the products of peoples of the 1940s acting normally, then we of the 21st century need never fear those kinds of behavior because they are only relics of the past. In reality, as the Yugoslav implosion wars and the Rwandan massacres of the 1990s show, Hitler's lesson has not been lost on others of our own times, and still pose a threat. Genocide and mass murder are anathema to us today, just as they were to our forefathers in the 1940s, but then, as now, some are willing to commit these crimes.

Again, I haven't seen Stones' series yet and I am only reacting to his own descriptions in the press, but there is a great danger in trying to relativise extraordinary people and events of the past. Stone is right in saying that there is little historical value in calling Hitler 'evil', but he is wrong to dismiss Hitler's crimes as merely contemporary or typical of the day. They were not, they were as blood-curdling and horrific to those of the 1940s as they still seem to us today; and therein lies the historical value of studying and understanding people like Hitler.