Quarterly Essay 60 Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern by Laura Tingle

Author:Laura Tingle [Tingle, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, Political Science, World, Australian & Oceanian, History, Politics, General
ISBN: 9781925203721
Google: VMoLEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 27793337
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2015-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

TABLOID TIMES

The Crimean War is well-nigh forgotten today, save for the Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale and, in Australia, a legacy of streets named Balaclava and Sebastopol. As the historian Orlando Figes noted in his 2012 book, The Crimean War: A History, there would not be many people who could say what it was all about, even in the states that fought, which included Russia, Britain, France, Piedmont-Sardinia in Italy and the Ottoman Empire, and even though three-quarters of a million soldiers died in the conflict. “Historians have tended to dismiss the religious motives of the war,” he writes:

Few devote more than a paragraph or two to the dispute in the Holy Land – the rivalry between the Catholics or Latins (backed by France) and the Greeks (supported by Russia) over who should have control of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem … Until the religious wars of our own age, it seemed implausible that a petty quarrel over some churchwarden’s keys should entangle the great powers in a major war.

Instead, the war has been seen as an outcome of imperial rivalries and the actions of statesmen.

The context in which we understand the past fluctuates over time, influenced by contemporary events and changing fashions of thought. Think how Shakespeare’s Henry V is regularly reimagined and reinterpreted every few years through the prism of contemporary fascinations. As Figes says, we might now understand the Crimean War as a religious war rather than an imperial one because religion, in the last couple of decades, has suddenly re-emerged as a recognised cause of war and a present danger to the Western world. But you could equally argue that our focus on ideological struggles of a political nature, and our ignorance of the past, incline us to see religious wars as something totally new – when of course they are not.

What is fascinating about Figes’s book for my purposes, though, is that he doesn’t just tell the story of the bleak battles in the freezing or roasting conditions of the Crimean peninsula, or of the machinations of the political leaders of the day, but sets events in a broader context:

This was a war – the first war in history – to be brought about by the pressure of the press and by public opinion. With the development of the railways enabling the emergence of a national press in the 1840s and 1850s, public opinion became a potent force in British politics, arguably overshadowing the influence of Parliament and the cabinet itself.

The aggression of the press then – not just in Britain, but in all the nations involved – is truly shocking, even to our jaundiced eyes, especially in contrast to our impressions of polite Victorian England. Yet seen from the standpoint of Australia in 2015, there is also something depressingly familiar in the way an angry populace and media drove events 160 years ago, and how war was used for political purposes.

Figes

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