Ignorance of history is often deliberate

On July 9, 2019, “The Montreal Gazette” reprinted a commentary by Windsor Star columnist Gord Henderson entitled “Deeply troubling how little we know of our past”. It was all about how so many millions of Canadians, Americans and Britons, responding to polls about their knowledge of the Second World War, concerning such specific events as the 1944 “D-day” invasion of German-occupied France, and the Nazi extermination camps in Poland, were unable to even identify who their nation’s enemy was back then, or had not even heard about the Holocaust. Which then prompted several Gazette readers to write letters to the editor agreeing with Henderson about how really important it was for every concerned citizen to know at least something about the past, in order to comprehend anything about current events.

A sentiment with which I could not agree more. Especially since the Henderson piece was published only a few days after I wrote my own blogpost (“Lest we forget what?”) about the Second World War. Which tried to show in quite a few different ways how incredibly inaccurate were the official declarations pronounced at the 75th anniversary commemorations of the 1944 “D-day” landings in Normandy. According to which the successful invasion of German-occupied France back then supposedly inaugurated a period of “liberal democracy”, following the world-wide defeat of fascism.

In the real world, however, only a relatively small number of countries were ruled by anything resembling what is officially called “liberal democracy”, and even then only for a limited time (centring on the so-called “thirty glorious years” between 1945 and 1975). That has been replaced since the 1970s by a much less democratic period of history, under the control of the even more hypocritical ideology known as neoliberalism. Whose basic premise from the outset has always been that “private enterprise” (Big Business) should take over complete control of the world economy, and of social policy in every country, thereby forever dumping both economic nationalism (government “intervention”) and social-democracy (the “welfare state”) into the dustbin of history.

Neoliberalism first came to power back in 1973, when the US economists known as “the Chicago Boys” were invited to run the Chilean economy by military dictator Augusto Pinochet. But it really took off world-wide after the 1979 election of conservative politician Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and the 1980 election of her American “bosom buddy”, Ronald Reagan. Since that time, neoliberalism has come to be the dominant economic and social ideology throughout the world, not only in the still formally “liberal-democratic” group of countries, but also in all those very numerous countries that have recently succumbed to a gigantic, world-wide wave of ultra-right-wing populism, also known as neofascism.

In some of those countries still officially classified as liberal-democratic, the neofascist movement has so far been confined to increasingly popular, but not yet governing, parties such as the National Rally in France and the Alternative for Germany party. However, in several other, still theoretically liberal-democratic countries, the national government has recently been taken over by several different varieties of neofascism, such as the almost personal dictatorship run by the Trump billionaire in the USA, as well as the Hindu-nationalist Modi regime in India. In Israel, a country that has always adopted a neocolonialist attitude toward its Arab minority and its contiguous Palestinian colony, the Netanyahu regime has also recently become even more considerably racist than it used to be.

In the meantime, over the past four decades, neoliberal policies adopted all over the world have enormously enlarged the already considerable income gap between the social classes, causing huge resentment among millions of poor and middle-class people, very few of whom have profited at all from any of the new wealth created since 1979. To the extent that even the acting director of the International Monetary Fund, David Lipton, has called for a return to greater government “intervention”, and an end to world-wide tax evasion, without providing any hint as to how that complete about-face could possible be effected. In the meantime, the neoliberal income chasm is still growing larger every day, a situation which has gone a long way toward fuelling ultra-right-wing populism in every part of the world. Populist neofascism, however, which was supposed to “drain the liberal swamp”, has done exactly the opposite instead. Making it possible for ultra-corrupt, ultra-rich people to make even more money than they did before, at the expense of everyone else, as well as of the much-maligned natural environment.

Curiously enough, neoliberalism is still being practised not only in the formerly liberal-democratic countries already mentioned, but also in such authoritarian (neofascist) countries as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran. The very long list of such places also includes many Latin American nations (Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, etc.), many more countries not already mentioned in Europe (Italy, Poland, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belarus, Bulgaria, etc.), many African nations (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Rwanda, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia, Egypt, etc.), and many more countries not already mentioned in Asia (Myanmar, the Philippines, Vietnam, North Korea, etc.).

So what is the connection between all these trends in current events and the history lesson that Gord Henderson was giving his Canadian readers back on July 9? The fact is that all the neoliberal and neofascist regimes that make up this incredibly long list of beleaguered nations are also relying very heavily indeed on deliberate falsification of history in order to prop up their disgusting policies. None of these regimes, whether Donald Trump’s huge United States of America or Paul Kagame’s tiny Rwanda, could remain in power for more than a week if they had not managed to convince large numbers of citizens in the general population that what they are doing, or at least trying to do, is based on their firm and undying opposition to all the horrible crimes committed by their most important predecessors.

Every “ordinary person” has to be made to believe that everything going wrong in their lives these days is the exclusive fault of those regimes’ opponents, i.e., the world’s scheming, plotting, manipulative, international-liberal politicians and their compradore collaborators. Even the “invasion” of dozens of different countries (not only in the Western world, but in all the other regions of the world as well), by immigrants fleeing from the world’s most horribly violent countries, cannot ever be “fixed” by the neofascist populists, who are even more inhuman than were their liberal-imperialist predecessors.

It is extremely interesting to note, in this context, that none of the Gazette readers agreeing with Henderson about everyone’s unfortunate ignorance of history, paid any attention to the last part of his article. In which he condemned various “left-wing social activists” for having unduly criticized such “great men” from the past as Canada’s Sir John A. MacDonald, and Great Britain’s Sir Winston Churchill. Henderson got especially indignant when he denounced an un-named “Toronto Star columnist” for having condemned Henderson’s own “personal hero”, Winston Churchill, as a racist and a colonialist, as well as for having failed “to prevent a famine in India at the height of the (Second World) war”. The culprit from the “Toronto Star” seems to have been that newspaper’s race and gender columnist, Shree Paradkar, who on March 9, 2018, published a piece called “When will there be a film on Winston Churchill, the barbaric monster with the blood of millions on his hands?”. Enough to get poor old Gord Henderson’s knickers into quite an elaborate twist.

It seems that Paradkar first found out about the 1943 famine in the Bengal region of British India, during which three million people died, when she read a 2014 magazine article about “remembering India’s forgotten holocaust”. Which, according to the books that I read twenty years ago, when I was preparing my courses on Third World history, was indeed considerably exacerbated when the colonial authorities refused to do anything to help alleviate the famine. Not to forget that the eastern part of British India, where the Bengal region is located, was under a land-and-sea attack by the Japanese empire in 1942-1943, and that radical nationalist Chandra Bose, the former president of the Congress Party (who was ousted by Gandhi at the beginning of the war), collaborated with both the Nazis and the Japanese in an unsuccessful attempt to free India from the British. He eventually managed to convince several thousand Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese in Singapore, to join the fight against the British empire in Malaya. Several sources that I read back then made the not unreasonable suggestion that the British authorities may not have been terribly keen to help the suffering Bengalis in India while they were still fighting against Japan throughout the southeast Asian portion of their empire.

Paradkar also mentioned in her article that Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Britain from 1940 to 1945, and again from 1951 to 1955, not only refused to send food to alleviate the Bengal famine, but also authorized British Army killings of pro-communist anti-fascists in Greece in 1944, as well as sending several thousand Kenyan anti-colonialists into British gulags during his post-war period of power. As far as I can recall from my own readings on colonial history, none of Paradkar’s accusations seem terribly out of place. As for Churchill, he was definitely a racist and a colonialist, from his military participation in several British colonial wars towards the end of the nineteenth century, right up until the end of his political career over fifty years later. It seems that along the way he even managed to support Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, in several parliamentary speeches, only changing his mind for good after Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler in 1938.

In spite of all that, it is still true, as Henderson claimed, that Churchill indeed stood fast “against the rampaging Nazis after the surrender of France”, having in 1940 replaced his predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, who had lost all support in Britain after the failure of his disastrous Munich appeasement with Adolf Hitler in 1938-1939. Not to forget that other Western politicians from the same era, such as Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, also participated in that misbegotten appeasement of Hitler during his own friendly visit with the German chancellor in 1937. Meanwhile, in the USA, several hugely important patricians, such as Henry Ford and Prescott Bush (the father of George HW Bush and the grandfather of George W Bush), were also urging their government to support the Nazis against the communists, or at least to remain neutral during the war, rather than join the anti-fascist alliance.

The fact that Churchill, in spite of his racist and colonialist leanings, nevertheless led the British to participate in the world-wide victory against Nazi Germany and the other Axis powers in 1945, is simply part of history. Presumably, Winston’s own patriotic allegiance to the British Empire made it impossible for him to kowtow to Adolf Hitler’s rapidly expanding German empire. According to some sources, during the 1939-1940, eight-month-long “phoney war”, when there was not a lot of military activity between the British and the Germans, those two powers were trying to come to some kind of political arrangement involving an exchange of colonies, that fell through because Hitler wanted the British to give him half of their empire.

In any case, during the second phase of the war (1941-1945), the anti-fascist allies also included the USSR (much more totalitarian than it was communist), as well as all the very powerful, nominally-communist parties in several other countries. Which meant that a world-wide, liberal-communist alliance was created, that no one in his or her right mind could possibly have predicted in 1938, when Britain and France signed the short-lived Munich agreement with Germany and Italy.

During the war itself, the anti-fascist alliance also included such politicians as the free-French general Charles de Gaulle, who later became a genuinely authoritarian president of France, especially after his infamous 1958 “coup d’état”, as well as having held racist and colonialist beliefs himself for quite a long time. Even when he lost power in France in 1969, he waited only a few months before going off to Spain for a friendly visit with pro-fascist military dictator Francisco Franco, who he had never had the chance to meet up with before. In other words, for various different reasons, all sorts of people joined the anti-Axis alliance during the Second World War, including more than a few people who shared at least a small part of the Axis leaders’ ideological leanings.

The problem with naive people in every period of history, like Canadian columnist Gord Henderson nowadays, is that they are always looking for some simple explanation for what are in fact very complicated events. Which often leads them into completely irrational hero worship of famous politicians like Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, who hated each other almost as much as they hated their fascist adversaries. Unfortunately, hero worship also helps to explain why so many millions of other people throughout history also supported many considerably more extremist politicians as well, such as Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Admiral Tojo, Joseph Stalin and Mao Ze dong. Not to mention today’s equally varied crop of racist, sexist, neocolonialist and neofascist leaders, such as Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Recep Erdogan, Mohammad bin Salman, Ali Khamenei, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban, and so on and so forth. Not to mention such currently non-governing extremists as Marine LePen and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

When I was doing my research for my university and college courses, not only on the history of the Third World but also on the history of Western civilization, it soon became obvious to me that this kind of hero-worship, and the deliberate manipulation of historical evidence on which it is based, is true not only of the more recent decades of human existence on this planet, but also of all the prior periods of history as well. Every single political regime ever constructed has always fabricated its own elaborate historical machinations, dedicated towards “proving” that it and it alone truly deserves to be forever ruling its own part of the world, or the entire world in some cases. It turns out that the “thousand-year Reich” of Adolf Hitler (that only lasted for twelve years in the real world) was merely one of a hundred thousand other ideological constructions that have been invented over the past several millennia, to justify whatever disgusting elitist, racist, misogynist, imperialist and fascist regimes that hero-worshippers all over the world have been spewing forth over the centuries.

So, instead of giving in once again to the most recent examples of historical manipulation, by strengthening neoliberalism and neofascism even more than before, what we should be doing in its place is learning from our past mistakes and developing ways of avoiding the current dichotomy between national development and international cooperation. While at the same time overcoming the ever-increasing divisions between the social classes, and between the genders, as well as gradually integrating the rival cultures that currently exist all over the world into a single, universal whole. Which is to say building up all-inclusive solutions to each one of those formidable dichotomies, solutions that do not break down under pressure from the populist extremism currently emanating from each one of those opposing groups.

In other words, by doing exactly the opposite of what human beings have been doing to each other up to and including the recent, conjoined, “open conspiracy” of neoliberalism and neofascism, all over the world. Which also means doing exactly the opposite of what we have been doing to each other since the beginning of time, which is to say creating as many political, economic, social and cultural divisions as possible, to keep us all forever divided into separate, competing, communitarian fabrications. We have to at least try, before it is too late, to gradually reunite humanity over time without falling into the obvious trap of merely providing new ideological cover for the imperialist designs of any one particular grouping.

Needless to say, however, getting back together again in a real way, rather than in a fake way, is not at all what most people are doing nowadays. Trying to impose some particular hero, or some particular project, on everyone else, is what most politically-minded people are into these days. What we really need is what I call “equal opportunity” denunciations of every heteronymic quagmire currently being advertised all over the world, whether it is white supremacy, moral rearmament, bringing the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth, making “America” great again, the international community of the free market, the reconstruction of the “great silk road”, the revival of the medieval Islamic caliphate, the return of all the world’s lands to whoever got there first, or whatever other magical reinterpretation of the past about which various different ideological formations have recently fantasized.

Which also means that we have to stop promoting wilful ignorance of the lessons of real human history, as a necessary part of bringing everyone else under some particular system’s version of thought control. Just like what Gord Henderson was proposing, which is to say deliberate, and not just random, ignorance of what really took place in the past, whether last year or a hundred thousand years ago. Cultural wars (Kulturkampf), after all, are won much more on the ideological battlefield than they are on the military one.