View the H-World Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-World's February 2013 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-World's February 2013 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-World home page.
Independent r.barends@telfort.nl In response to Wim Pelt >While I would agree that it is not the primary task of a historian to >judge, and certainly not before the utmost attempts at objective >description and analysis, in many interesting subjects I fear judgments cannot be avoided. >With all respect to honest attempts at value-free analysis, I doubt >whether it is possible for a historian to restrict him/herself to pure >description and analysis, free of all judgments. I have studied at >Leiden and at an impressionable age I was confronted with many that >taught in the sense of tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner - the >favorite denial of judgment to hide a conservative judgment. > I agree too: a plea for objectivity all too often hides a conservative judgment and agenda. There is, however, something else involved here which I find frankly far more worrying and that is that under the banner of objectivity and particularly under a pressure mechanism called peer review on historians in the West - and presumably even more so in, say, China - there is a very severe pressure on historians to have their judgments conform to what the powers that may be consider the truth at any given moment. And that amongst historians to conform to such a peer review and to have your work published by a 'reputable publisher' there is a very strong tendency to a kind of inbuilt self-censorship, so that you do not write passages which may be deemed offensive by either the more conservative amongst your peer reviewers or by the 'reputed publisher.' So, you will omit things in the first place which might offend your peers. Or you write things to pander to what your more conservative peer reviewers might support or believe to get your book published. This does not apply perhaps to a few bigwigs who will get their book publised anyway - a Noam Chomsky or a Zizek - because they have made a name for themselves already but it does apply to your average historian who has to consider what his publisher thinks or his reviewers. Furthermore, the major publishing houses - which will get you the publicity for your book and for your views you may need - tend to be conservative or altogether right wing (the only left of center major publisher I know in the USA and England is Verso and they have a limited fund of authors). So if you want your views published and discussed and circulated you had better pander to the views of such conservative publishers too. Furthermore, reputable academic publishers tend to be as conservative as commercial publishers or altogether right-wing too and BECAUSE they are reputable publishers and BECAUSE they have 'the best peer reviewers' 'the objective truth' in the West is heavily slated towards anti-communist, neo-conservative and neo-liberal and at any rate 'pro-free market' views. And it is, therefore, difficult if not impossible to get a wide audience beyond a very small progressive niche if you do not subscribe to those views. Now, this is obviously less of a problem if you deal with, say, sixth century Tibet but if you deal with your own society and particularly in the recent past there are, in addition to all that, very powerful pressure groups which if you are willing to antagonize them then your publisher most likely will not. And that is a very long list: the Israel -lobby, the Vietnam-veteran lobby, the anti-communist lobby, the Cuban refugees lobby, the World war II-veteran lobby, even foreign governments (Israel, Saudi Arabia, Germany etc.) which your government in turn does not want to antagonize. And this is not only so in the USA: thus, a nearly absurd case: in Belgium it was until the fall of Mobutu Seze Zeko deemed not advisable for either journalists or historians to criticize that regime - although virtually the whole World knew it was rotten to the core - because this might offend the embassy of Zaire. Instead you had to remain 'objective' and write that the regime had its flaws for sure but was nevertheless a reliable ally of the free West in the struggle against Communism. Again, in France it is still very risky to even refer to the Algerian war as 'a war' because this might offend the ancient combatants or might get you into trouble with the front national. If you are willing to risk that yourself your publisher may not be. In Italy it only became possible to discuss the many skeletons in the closet there - e.g. the use of poison gas in the war against Ethiopia or the wartime mass-killings in Yugoslavia - when the neo-fascist MSI had disappeared from Parliament - and even now you can only do so with small publishers. And so on and so forth: I don't think any reference to the killing of the 'mountain Turks' in 1916 is very likely to get you published in Turkey for example. Because of these pressures much of what passes as 'the objective truth' spread by the 'reputable publishers and media' and honoured with good reviews by those same peers is really defined by what the government, and what pressure groups and conservative academics define as 'the truth.' And beyond that by a more basic and broad anti-communist and 'western unity' consensus. Thus, for example, and there are a myriad other cases, it is still difficult to even hint at the complicity of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust because the Wehrmacht was reconstituted by the US after World War II as the Bundeswehr under the former Nazi generals who - if they were not directly reengaged by the Bundeswehr - were at the very least allowed sumptuous pensions by the government. Thus, for example, it came out only recently that the still much venerated Erich von Manstein was actually responsible for the infamous Kommisar Befehl - in which any Russian prisoner of war who could be a member of the Communist Party was immediately to be shot - and that Manstein had instructed the army to allot any possible form of help to the Einsatzgruppen (executing or gassing Jews.) But Manstein was not punished for anything and you can see any number of documentaries about World War II - on the History Channel, Discovery and so on - in which this 'military genius' is praised without this ever being mentioned. The Federal Republic of Germany is our ally after all.... Again, though the list of the anti-communist consensus could go on for ever and ever: to stay with the Holocaust, I was actually amazed to find out that the first holocaust was actually not practised by Nazi Germany but by the white armies during the Russian civil war and that the surge of anti-semitism after World War I may actually owe a lot to the 'white emigration' after the victory of the Bolsheviks. You'll be hard put to find that fact anywhere. Because, after all, the whites were our allies in the lofty crusade against communist and that is more important than any minor misdeeds they have committed ... As to the veterans lobby: after any war there is always a large group of former combatants who get very angry if you pass any moral judgements they might have practiced crimes against humanity: they were victims who have suffered enough they will habitually answer and don't be mistaken these people are fond of death-threads and verbal abuse. Thus, to stay with Germany, though the German crimes in World War II were so patent that they could scarsely be hidden the Germans after the war followed on the one hand a strategy to say that all crimes were committed by the SS only and not by the Wehermacht which had 'clean hands.' And within the SS not by the Waffen SS but only by the Totenkopf division. Except for a few criminal elements 'from the dregs of society' - it is commonly aided - the army was therefore not responsible. And this is not a view which is not confined to Germany because there is a vast literature in English glorifying the heroic deeds of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS - just take a search under SS at Amazon.com or on Google.books. They WERE after all our heroic allies in the fight against Communism. It is probably no exaggeration to say that this is actually the popular view in the US on the Wehrmacht. And on the other hand the German strategy was to argue that if they might have committed crimes the USSR had committed worse ones. So that, if the Germans had, say, concentration camps German prisoners of war were also sent to camps where they were treated no better. There were a few rotten apples amongst them, no doubt, but the average German soldiers was an innocent boy who merely obeyed orders. A view which was enshrined by Reagan's infamous visit to an SS-cemetery at Bitburg: the Waffen SS were now the 'good guys' since they were mere innocent boys just like 'our' GI's. And I think it is fair to say this is the mainstream view in the US on both the Wehrmacht and the SS nowadays: just browse an average World War II documentary. And, finally, there is also a very severe peer-pressure and pressure of publishers to stay 'objective' and therefore silence over any complicity of large enterprises, which still exist today and which today still have vast power, in any crimes: I am not sure how many readers on this list know that Auschwitz was a plant of IG-Farben (which is, to say, Bayer-Hoechst nowadays, concerns you'd better not trifle with) and that it was expanded after constant pleadings of IG-Farben with Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler - though to be sure the gas chambers were an idea of the SS and IG-Farben pleaded that gassing people was a waste of useful labour though it did not object to gassing in principle. - And that throughout the war IG-Farben gathered handsome dividends from Auschwitz. Just like the German main battle tanks were of course also built by a General Motors' subsidiary. These are very inconvenient truths which have to be slightened or ridiculed to be objective. And finally there is a pressure of governments: to stay with my World War II examples: it's still not done in Germany to say that the main resistance against Hitler came from the Communist Party, instead you're urged to be 'objective.' And then highlight the few priests who were incarcerated by the Nazi's. Because after all those few priests are that's the pedigree of the Christen Demokratische Union, which dominates the Bundesrepublik, whereas the Communists are those of the Sozialistische Einheitspartie Deutschlands: i.e. of the German Democratic Republic. For this reason it is also a very bad idea to leave value judgments to your audience because what your audience thinks is going to be decided by the ones in your audience who have the loudest voices and in some cases (as with the veteran organisations) are most able to intimidate both you and your audience. Thus, to stay with my German examples (but that is as true for the Vietnam or Korea veterans in the US as it is for those of the Royal Dutch East Indies army in The Netherlands) if you say that the Wehrmacht had committed heinous crimes to an audience somebody in the audience is sure to rise up and say that "I have suffered in a Russian camp for eight years: how do you even dare blame us: us, poor victims!" And this will equally invariably intimidate your audience: this man has experienced it personally after all - and who are you, a mere historian who has not suffered like he has - to blame somebody who 'has been through all that suffering'. - And for that matter it will intimidate yourself too. Now, obviously this is less of a problem if you deal with a period before, say, the French Revolution but I understand that the historians are still divided in a pro- and anti-Carthaginian party over whom was responsible for the outbreak of the second Punic War. Because to one party Rome was the 'West' (i.e. the 'Free West'), so that Carthage must have been 'the East' (hence 'Communist slavery') against a party who perceives Rome as embodying 'imperialism.' Where the proponents of Rome as 'the free West' are constantly complaining that they are being silenced by the pro-Carthage multiculturalists! Now, doesn't that sound familiar?
|