History in a Post-Truth World

Theory and Praxis

Marius Gudonis, Benjamin T. Jones, Marius Gudonis, Benjamin T. Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000198225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

History in a Post-Truth World: Theory and Praxis explores one of the most significant paradigm shifts in public discourse. A post-truth environment that appeals primarily to emotion, elevates personal belief, and devalues expert opinion has important implications far beyond Brexit or the election of Donald Trump, and has a profound impact on how history is produced and consumed. Post-truth history is not merely a synonym for lies. This book argues that indifference to historicity by both the purveyor and the recipient, contempt for expert opinion that contradicts it, and ideological motivation are its key characteristics.

Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this work explores some of the following questions: What exactly is post-truth history? Does it represent a new phenomenon? Does the historian have a special role to play in preserving public memory from 'alternative facts'? Do academics more generally have an obligation to combat fake news and fake history both in universities and on social media? How has a 'post-truth culture' impacted professional and popular historical discourse? Looking at theoretical dimensions and case studies from around the world, this book explores the violent potential of post-truth history and calls on readers to resist.

1 Who Controls the Past?

Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones

On 15 March 2019, a right-wing extremist opened fire on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people. The author, a self-described racist, fascist, and ethno-nationalist, penned a lengthy manifesto to explain his attack.¹ The editors of this volume do not reproduce it lightly. It is appropriate that his name and words are not widely spread by the media or on the Internet. In a volume such as this, however, concerned with the impact of a post-truth world, it is important to acknowledge the potential consequences of abusing history. Taking its name, The Great Replacement, from a white nationalist conspiracy theory, the manifesto states that

If you lose, history will write you as monsters, regardless of your tactics. Win first, write the narrative later. Victors write the history and the writers of history control the cultural climate of the present time… . Win first, write the story later.²

These are the words of a killer. They present a dystopian vision of a world where truth is subservient to ideology and where history is a tool of propaganda. For those who do not welcome such an outcome, it is important to understand how history is constructed and consider what defences can be formed against the intrusion of post-truth. In a climate of acute scepticism, historians must consider how their work is presented and consumed. Is ‘real history’ possible in an era of ‘fake news’? Can it be interpreted as something better than footnoted fiction?

False History as a Prelude to Genocide

That dangerous words contribute to murderous acts should come as no surprise. Genocides throughout history have been preceded by campaigns of propaganda that dehumanise future victims.³ False history has always played a particularly important role in the propagandistic scapegoating of ethnic, religious, or political groups. Yet we appear to have exceedingly short memories even for the most horrendous of atrocities. Adolf Hitler certainly had this in mind when, having described his plans of extermination to military chiefs on 22 August 1939, he asked rhetorically, ‘Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?’⁴

The Nazi era may well be the best documented example of state-level top-down disinformation of history that, at the very least, contributed to the ‘moral exclusion’ of Jews and others, making the Holocaust thinkable and feasible in the minds of those who took part. As soon as the Nazis took power in 1933, the dissemination of a racialist-nationalist and fallacious history – one in which Nazi educationalists specifically sought emotional, irrational, and anti-intellectual content, not dissimilar to today’s definition of post-truth⁵ – was prioritised.⁶ History textbooks for all ages aimed to inculcate the tenets of social Darwinism and Germanic racial superiority, eschatologically, and teleologically,⁷ which included historical claims that ranged from the preposterous (Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln were supposedly of German descent)⁸ to the iniquitous (Jews were considered worthless, immoral, racial parasites, who spread bubonic plague, exploited the poor through usury, caused the ignominy of the Weimar Republic, and spread anti-German universalist philosophies like Marxism and freemasonry).⁹ Most German historians who survived the massive 15% purge of Germany’s entire teaching staff during the 1930s and 1940s either openly and enthusiastically supported Nazism or hid passively behind a veil of supposed political neutrality and positivist scientific objectivity; dissent and active resistance was, bar a few individuals, nonexistent.¹⁰ The mournful experience of German Nazi-era historians, some of whom worked directly for new Nazi pseudo-historical institutes such as the Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands and the Deutsche Archiv für Landes- und Volksforschung and others for institutions and projects that were directly associated with genocidal policies in Eastern Europe, most notoriously the Cracow-based Institut für Deutsche Ostarbeit (Institute for the German Colonisation of the East),¹¹ surely testifies in favour of academic activism today that opposes post-truth history. Indeed, the empirical evidence in Chapter 15 suggests that few academics today would countenance such academic neutrality.

Historical disinformation as a prelude to genocide is not a peculiar Nazi aberration: it has also been observed in Rwanda, Serbia, and most recently Myanmar. At three times the death rate of German gas chambers, the Rwandan genocide, where about 10% of the national population – 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus – were slaughtered in just one hundred days in 1994, became the fastest killing operation in human history.¹² The seeds of the fratricidal violence, however, were sown during the Belgian colonial occupation from 1922 to 1962, when influential Catholic missionaries such as Bishop Léon-Paul Classe and Archbishop André Perraudin created a public discourse that essentialised the supposed racial differences between the majority Hutu and the minority Tutsi, explicitly favouring the latter.¹³ Hutu–Tutsi relations, imperfect though they were, remained relatively peaceful until the advent of European colonialism.¹⁴ Later, the colonial and ecclesiastical authorities – partly for strategic reasons to counter protestant inroads and partly motivated by ideology – effectively racialised Rwandan society by introducing ethnic identity cards and censuses and introducing discriminatory policies that reserved the best education and employment for Tutsis.¹⁵ In the late 1950s, this was confounded by an unprecedented wave of polemic publications distorting the history of Hutu–Tutsi relations as an enduring precolonial phenomenon of racial stratification dominated by ‘the racist spirit of the Tutsi’ and ‘the reign of Tutsi terror’.¹⁶ Textbooks similarly portrayed the Tutsi has highly intelligent in contrast to submissive simpleminded Hutu, suitable only for manual labour.¹⁷

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia, genocide returned to the bloodstained continent of Europe in July 1995 when Bosnian Serb forces – supported by some Serbian leaders and Serb paramilitaries and facilitated by the neutrality of Dutch UNPROFOR troops – deported 30,000 Bosniak civilians and murdered over 8000 Bosniak men and boys in Srebrenica, originally designated as a United Nations (UN) ‘safe area’.¹⁸ The causes of this legally recognised genocide are complex and multifaceted, but there is general agreement that Serb nationalist propaganda played an important role, including the widespread grassroots emergence of Serb mythic martyrological history after the death of dictator Josip Broz Tito in 1980. Historical disinformation, however, did not appear out of the blue with the reawakening of Balkan nationalisms in the late 20th century; on the contrary, it was already at the heart of the communist Yugoslav nation-building project. Under the slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’, Tito’s propagandists disseminated false accounts of Yugoslavia during the Second World War: total war-related fatalities of 1 million were inflated to 1.7 million;¹⁹ the entire fratricidal war experience was characterised as a simple class struggle devoid of interethnic genocidal hatred; the perpetrators of all crimes were bourgeois elites; Tito’s partisans were glorified; and internecine combat between communist Partisans, Serbian nationalist Chetniks, and Croatian fascist Ustaša were conveniently forgotten.²⁰

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the federal Yugoslav republic disintegrated, communist hagiography was replaced by nationalist hagiographies. The most pernicious, widespread, and radical of these was the ‘Heavenly Serbia’ myth,²¹ originally incorporating nostalgia for the short-lived 14th-century Serbian Empire, in which the 1389 Serb defeat by the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo has been interpreted ever since as a noble sacrifice to gain access to heaven.²² A veritable avalanche of ‘Heavenly Serbia’ texts – expanded to martyrise the whole of Serb history and demonise its neighbours²³ – ranging from pronouncements by academics, Orthodox clergy, theologians, intellectuals, and nationalist politicians to bestseller historical novels and popular histories inundated Serb public discourse in the 1980s.

Consequently, Serb-inflated numbers of wartime victims further rocketed to fantastic figures such as General Velimir Terzić’s 1983 assertion that over 1 million Serbs alone perished at the Croat Jasenovac death camp complex (the true figure being about 50,000),²⁴ while Serb state-level collaboration with the Nazis under the puppet government of Milan Nedić – where much of the discriminatory anti-Jewish legislation, the mass use of torture, and complicity in the Holocaust took place with native initiative and zeal – was passed over in silence.²⁵ Interestingly from the perspective of today’s post-truth, some Serb orthodox thinkers actually claimed that myths are more truthful than history. A chilling example comes from an article published just ten days before the beginning of the Srebrenica genocide in the church journal Pravoslavlje:

Historical science can change its truth with every new fact. Tradition does not need to change anything because it does not depend on facts, because it is an image of the divine Truth.²⁶

While our historical examples may giv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Who Controls the Past?
• Part 1 What Is Post-Truth? Theoretical Considerations
• Part 2 Case Studies of Post-Truth
• Part 3 The Truth About “Post-Truth”: Evaluation and Response
• List of Contributors
• Index