Criticising Right-Wing Historians

As anyone who watches BBC Television’s Newsnight Review will know, the journalist Johann Hari has a tendency towards the excitable. This appears to be especially true when it comes to right-wing historians. Today, in his column in the Independent, Hari launches an attack on Andrew Roberts, whose new study of the Second World War, Storm of War, has garnered considerable acclaim (and a trite profile of the author in last week’s Observer). Roberts is capable of defending himself against the allegations made by Hari of consorting with apologists for apartheid and neo-fascists. But his assertion that Roberts, the author of some of the outstanding historical studies of recent years – Eminent Churchillians and Masters and Commanders will suffice - ‘would be shunned in a culture that takes human rights seriously’ is absurdly juvenile.

It reminds one of the spat that Hari had with another distinguished right-wing scholar, Niall Ferguson. Empire, Ferguson’s critical (often highly critical) defence of British imperialism broadcast by Channel 4 in 2003 was described by Hari as ‘a startlingly obscene TV series’ which means, presumably, that he would have liked it to be banned. Ludicrously, in his critique of Ferguson, Hari described the British Empire as a ‘psychopathic form of totalitarianism’ equal to that of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Quite where one goes when historical debate has descended to that level is hard to fathom. Ferguson proposed that Hari read some Solzhenitsyn.

I often disagree with both Roberts and Ferguson, as with almost all historians, regardless of their political views. But both are extraordinarily good scholars who make compelling arguments that demand to be taken seriously. To call Ferguson ‘an apologist for mass death’, as Hari did, is to reduce serious historical debate to that of the playground.

Andrew Roberts will be writing about the first use of Blitzkrieg in the September edition of History Today.

Meet Roberts and more of our most distinguished contributors on our Authors page.

Russian Historical Memory

James Rodgers, the BBC’s former Moscow correspondent has an interesting article about the Russian state’s desire for a single historical truth. The idea is given short shrift, and quite rightly, by the distinguished historian of the Soviet Union, Robert Service. It anticipates a fascinating article by Catherine Merridale, to be published in the September edition of History Today, which examines Russia’s inability to come to terms with its troubled past.

Blunt in the News Again

The release by the British Library of Anthony Blunt’s memoirs is a good time to return to Miranda Carter’s brilliant study of the art historian turned Soviet spy, Anthony Blunt: His Lives (Pan, 2002). Those who visited Manchester’s legendary nightclub, The Hacienda, will remember that it had a bar called The Gay Traitor over which hung a portrait of Blunt.

Bitter Spring

The ever excellent Arts and Letters Daily is currently linking to a review of Stanislao Pugliese’s fascinating new biography of Ignazio Silone, Bitter Spring (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux). Silone was among that small group of principled progressive writers and activists, such as Orwell, Camus and Raymond Aron, who were appalled by the excesses of Soviet communism yet remained fervent opponents of injustice, racism and imperialism. He was, also like Orwell, a brilliant novelist. Among his finest works are Fontamara, a thrilling anti-Fascist tract distributed throughout Italy by US troops during the Second World War, and the arguably superior Bread and Wine, one of the great political novels of the 20th century.

On a similar theme, the death has been announced of another prominent writer, the Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kolakowski, born in 1927. After a youthful embrace of communism, he became an unrelenting critic of totalitarianism. He once compared the idea of a reformed, democratic communism to ‘fired snowballs’. Such comments led him into a dispute with the British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson. In An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski, published in the 1973 edition of Socialist Register (edited, interestingly, by Ralph Miliband, father of the current Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change), Thompson laid into Kolakowski for his abandonment of Marxism. Kolakowski’s reply is brilliant and, uncharacteristically, very funny. No ivory tower academic, Kolakowski played a crucial role in the Polish dissident movements of the 1970s that eventually became Solidarity.

Antichrist

In The Guardian yesterday, Joanna Bourke, Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, offered this assessment of Lars Von Trier’s very controversial new film, Antichrist.

Lars von Trier's new film opens with heart-breaking lyrics of loss and longing from Handel's Rinaldo opera. The graceful yet ecstatic beauty of death – literal and symbolic (la petite mort) – sets the tone. Black and white scenes, in which the camera moves with a dreamlike slowness, are followed by dazzlingly dyed scenes of claustrophobic carnage. The effect is breathtaking and compulsive, like a drug; I would have watched the film a second time if it had been possible. The theme of the film is an ancient one: what is to become of humanity once it discovers it has been expelled from Eden and that Satan is in us? Despite the erotic beginning, Von Trier has little interest in desire; his focus is on Sadeian extreme pain and enjoyment, the abject emptying of self and other (including the audience, who are made complicit in the sexual violence
infusing the film). Antichrist circles relentlessly around acts of transgression. The violence is defiantly excessive and beautiful. It is gendered, but more misanthropic than misogynistic. The man's violence is the heartlessness of rationality. Patronisingly, he sneers at the woman's research project on gynocide. He is a rationalist cognitive therapist, who bullies herinto exposing her inner demons.

In contrast, the woman embraces the mysterious, uncanny energies of the unconscious and unknowable elemental forces. Her violence against the man and her own body is unbounded. The scenes of her crushing his penis and then snipping off her clitoris and labia are graphic. But it is not designer violence, intended to appall and titillate in the same breath. Neither does it inspire compassion. Von Trier simply presents cruelty as "there", serving no liberating function for the audience. Pain – its infliction and its suffering – is integral to life.

Von Trier has admitted that, of all his films, Antichrist "comes closest to a scream". It exposes us to an untamed erotic and aggressive aesthetic without redemption. It jolts us out of a passive voyeurism and, in despair, leaves us (in the words of Handel) crying over cruel fate.

My thoughts exactly.

Charles Arnold Baker Obituary

My obituary of Charles Arnold Baker, author of The Companion to British History is published in The Guardian today. It can be found here. Charles’s final interview, for History Today, is in our current edition. It can be viewed here.

An Age of Peace?

A few weeks ago, I was invited along to a conference at the newly inaugurated Department of Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Among the guest speakers was the classicist and broadcaster Bettany Hughes. She talked of the ‘guilty pleasure’ she took in watching the film 300, the highly stylised adaptation of Frank Miller’s graphic novel inspired by the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 bc, when the Greek city states, led by Sparta, defeated the vast Persian forces of Xerxes I. I too took some pleasure in the film but, not being a speaker of Ancient Greek, I did not realise that the script was highly regarded by classicists. Apparently, it follows the idioms and rhythms of the original Greek very closely. What had struck me about 300 was its ferocious violence. After listening to Bettany’s enthusiasms for all things Greek, I was moved to read the Iliad, in the Penguin Classics translation by Robert Fagles. Again, I was struck by the intensity and frequency of the violence and the graphic descriptions of brutal hand-to-hand combat: javelins crack shoulders, arrows pierce foreheads, limbs are hacked, repeatedly. Death and danger are constant.

Which leads me to an interesting article by the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker called Why is There Peace?. In it, he claims that we are ‘probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species’ time on earth.’ With Darfur and Iraq fresh in our minds, and the increasing death toll in Afghanistan, that may be hard to believe. But Pinker points to the evidence of ancient texts which ‘reveal a stunning lack of regard for human life’. The Classics we have already noted, but what about the Bible? ‘Go and completely destroy those wicked people, the Amalekites’ reads one typical passage from Samuel. The Hebrew God continues: ‘Make war on them until you have wiped them out.’

Aside from literary texts, statistics also reinforce the view that the past was far more violent than the present. The criminologist Manuel Eisner claims that murder rates in Europe have declined from 100 killings per 100,000 people in the High Middle Ages to less than one killing per 100,000 today. Since 1945, the number of deaths in battle has fallen from 65,000 per conflict per year to less than 2,000 deaths in the last decade. Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, there have been fewer civil wars and a 90 percent reduction in the number of deaths by genocide.

So why do so many people think we live in an age of frequent if not unprecedented violence? Well, Pinker thinks, blame the news crews. As he puts it, ‘the Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars across the globe than were 16th-century monks’. And, as cognitive psychologists point out, the easier it is to recall an event, the more likely we are to believe it will happen again. ‘Gory war zone images from TV are burned into memory,’ writes Pinker, ‘but we never see reports of many more people dying in their beds of old age.’ Further, no charity or NGO ever attracted more donors and supporters by saying things are getting better!

Why then has violence declined so much? There is no lack of desire to watch violence re-enacted: whether in films like 300 or in gratuitous horrors like the Saw franchise; in the plays of Shakespeare or in video games such as Grand Theft Auto. But fewer people, it seems, wish to make these fantasies a reality. The sociologist Norbert Elias gives credit to European modernity which ‘accelerated a civilising process marked by increases in self-control, long-term planning and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others.’ This process was hastened by the emergence of nation states with a monopoly of violence. Certainly, it has been demonstrated that the witch-hunts, the great irrational and violent craze that afflicted Europe during the early-modern period, were much less frequent in centralised states such as England or Spain than they were in the small, personalised prince-bishoprics of Germany. The political scientist James Payne suggests another reason for the decline in violence. Life was once very cheap and ‘when pain and death are everyday features of one’s own life, one feels less compunction about inflicting them on others’. Life seems very cheap indeed in the pages of the Iliad. It’s nice to know that modern mankind is doing something right.

Terror!

Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution, broadcast on BBC2 on Saturday and available on iPlayer, was the best television history documentary in a very long while. Written and directed by Mark Hayhurst it told the story of the events of 1793 when Maximilian Robespierre and a small coterie of similarly fanatical revolutionaries established the Committee of Public Safety, deciding for themselves what was good for the people of France. Terror was unleashed, the very calendar around which people organised their lives was changed, the Gallic church was replaced by the worship of the ‘Supreme Being’.

Unusually, the dramatic reconstructions of the meeting of the Committee were brilliantly reimagined, set in a single, claustrophobic room, the paranoia and self-delusion tangible. But the most brilliant conceit of this extraordinary programme was to pitch Simon Schama, author of Citizens and defender of the humanist values of the Enlightenment, against the, shall we say, ‘provocative’ Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zjizek.

When the latter compared a revolution without terror to ‘beer without alcohol or coffee without caffeine’ Schama almost choked with anger and one was relieved that they were filmed separately. Hilary Mantel, author of an interesting novel about Robespierre, was among the other guests, but it was Schama, on terrific form, who stole the show. Having damned St Just as an adolescent who never grew up, he visibly delighted in the demise of Robespierre. The ‘seagreen incorruptible’ was shown with his jaw fractured by a musket wound being led half-dead to the guillotine. ‘I wish I had been there,’ said Schama, with a grin. It was superb television, excellent history, and utterly unmissable.

The Fourth Plinth

I think One and Other - Anthony Gormley’s ‘living sculpture’ in London's Trafalgar Square - is meant to be a radical work of art. For 100 days, a different person will stand upon the plinth and do what they do for one hour at a time. Of course, on many different occasions in the past, people have gathered upon the square’s fourth plinth, most memorably on VE Day in 1945. The people that did so, ordinary people transformed by their extraordinary experiences, gathered there unencumbered by the ludicrous health and safety apparatus that envelops the plinth at the moment. This safety netting only reinforces the general mediocrity of One and Other and its participants. Walking past it recently, I noticed a women in a floral-print dress attempting a half-dance atop her column.

Anthony Gormley, the Ampleforth-educated artist at the heart of the cultural establishment, no doubt believes himself to be a radical, a transgressive. In fact, he simply enhances the standing of the great figures celebrated in the square and its environs by drawing attention to the lack of ambition and talent of his attention- seeking living sculptures.

Such nonsense reminds me of another attempt to democratise and radicalise Trafalgar Square. The artist Marc Quinn made a sculpture of a woman, Alison Lapper, who was born without arms. It was a groundbreaking piece of sculpture, said the critics, which confronted an embarrassed and ignorant public with the uncomfortable truth about disability. Then, it was pointed out by historians that, for the best part of two centuries, Trafalgar Square had been occupied by a man with one arm and one eye, who just happened to be our greatest naval hero.

Personally, I would put a Spitfire on the fourth plinth and have done with it.

Spanning the Centuries

As Leo Hollis reports in the latest issue of History Today, Mayor Boris Johnson has revived the idea of an ‘inhabited London Bridge’. The £80m scheme, inspired by the original structure, whose 800th anniversary is celebrated this weekend, is for a new bridge between Waterloo and Blackfriars.

Johnson and his developers, however, should heed a warning from history. Research by the University of Leicester’s highly-regarded Centre for Urban History suggests the organisation that managed the bridge during the mid-18th century - the period when its medieval houses and shops were removed - was plagued with incompetence and corruption. ‘Furthermore,’ says the center's Mark Latham, ‘managers often paid for improvements to their own houses out of the coffers of the trust running the bridge.’ Plenty of contemporary parallels there.

Problems were compounded by a risky, costly and ill-timed project undertaken during the height of a credit crisis, similar to the one we are currently enduring, that sought to construct gentrified houses on the bridge in the belief that such houses would prove attractive to affluent Londoners. However, the authorities grossly miscalculated the demand for such properties and the houses attracted only a handful of tenants.

A London-wide property crash ensued and the trust running the bridge began to haemorrhage money. London Bridge was literally falling down. At this point, the realisation dawned on the members of the trust that it was no longer viable to maintain structures on the bridge. By early 1755, the trust had begun to petition Parliament for the funds to carry out their demolition. It marked a most visible break with London’s medieval past. As Latham points out:

‘The renovation of London Bridge in the mid-18th century was such an important event in the history of London as in many ways the demolition of these characterful medieval houses and the subsequent transformation of the bridge in to a bland utilitarian functional feature represents a rupture with London’s medieval past and can be taken as symbolic of London’s emergent modernity.’

An inhabited London Bridge is likely to remain a pipe dream.

Read Leo Hollis' colourful account of 800 years of London Bridge from History Today July 2009.