Dangerous Games by Margaret Macmillan

Author:Margaret Macmillan [MacMillan, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-768-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

Anyone who has ever had an argument and said, “You always do that” or “I trusted you” or “You owe me one,” is using history to gain an advantage in the present. And almost all of us, from heads of countries to private citizens, do it. We spin the events of the past to show that we always tend to behave well and our opponents badly or that we are normally right and others wrong Therefore, it goes almost without saying, we are in the right again this time.

When the troubles started in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, all sides called on history to justify what they were doing. The Serbs portrayed themselves as the historic defenders of Christianity against the Muslim onslaught and as the liberators of other southern Slavs such as the Croats and the Slovenes. The Croats saw a very different past. Croatia had always been part of the West, of the great Austrian Empire, and of Catholic civilization, while Serbia came out of the backward and superstitious world of Orthodoxy. The government in Serbia started to refer to Croats as Ustasha—the name of Fascist forces of World War II that had massacred Serbs and Jews. Serbian television repeatedly showed documentaries about the Ustasha, with the obvious implied warning that this could happen again. Croatia’s president, Franjo Tudjman, like Milošević another Communist turned nationalist, responded with scorn The Ustasha certainly had committed crimes, but it was nevertheless “an expression of the Croatian nation’s historic desire for an independent homeland.”

When Serbian forces started to attack Bosnian Muslims, they tried to justify their unprovoked aggression by telling the world that they were yet again defending the Christian West against the fanatical East. The fact that Bosnian Muslims were not only largely secular but mostly descended from Serbs or Croats was not allowed to stand in the way. Serbian nationalists insisted on referring to them as Turks or traitors to the Serbs and the Serbian Orthodox Church. Croatians, of course, preferred to see the Bosnian Muslims as apostate Croatian Catholics. (Ironically, the effect of the war has been to make many Muslims in Bosnia much more devout.)

Using history to label or diminish your opponents has always been a useful tool. The Left shouts “Fascist!” at the Right while conservatives throw around the Stalinist and Communist labels. When Ariel Sharon, then prime minister of Israel, visited New York in 2005, he faced protesters who shouted “Auschwitz” and “Nazi” because he had dismantled illegal Jewish settlements in the Gaza. In January 2006, as Hillary Clinton was opening her campaign for the presidency, she attacked the House of Representatives, then dominated by the Republicans. “When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run,” she told a predominantly black audience in Harlem, “it has been run like a plantation and you know what I am talking about.” They did, and so did the Republicans who accused her of trying to play the race card.

Countries also use episodes from the past to shame and put pressure on others.

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