DISTORTION OF HISTORY AND ITS EFFECTS

KAZI ANWARUL MASUD

If history is defined as a conversation with the past, narration of accumulated experience of people gone by that helps mankind to avoid the mistakes of the past in its quest for further progress then it is essential that historical narrative should be reflective of truth. Any disfigurement of history is intellectually dishonest and sometimes legally challengeable.

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) gave preeminence to the study of history. He wrote ” Poetry, Divinity, Politics, Physics, have each their adherents and adversaries; each little guilt supporting a defensive and offensive war for its own special domain; while the domain of History is as a Free Emporium, where all these belligerents peaceably meet and furnish themselves; and Sentimentalist and Utilitarian, Skeptic and Theologian, with one voice advise us: Examine History, for it is “Philosophy teaching by Experience.”

Thomas Carlyle’s emphasis was on examining history lest its authenticity is called into question. But then history as most other disciplines is subject to controversy as history is written by the victors and the voice of the vanquished is rarely heard amidst the din and the dust of the celebration of the victors.

History unless closely examined can become disfigured as by treachery. Ralph Waldo Emerson saw history as an amalgam of individual and collective narration of facts.

He wrote ” There is one mind common to all individual men…Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Edward Gibbons, the author of The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, asked historian to be “fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth; one who, as the poets says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade.

He should yield to neither hatred nor affection, not should be unsparing and unpitying. He should be neither shy nor deprecating, but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves but no more. He should know in his writing no country and no city; he should bow to no authority and acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think, but should state the facts as they really occurred.”

A man is the whole encyclopedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world”.

Often ethics as in politics took a backseat in the narration of history. Since Hobbesian nature of man has endured over centuries there is no reason for history to be angelic except when blatant lies are made to disfigure and distort history of mankind.

Nicolo Machiavelli’s description of The Prince gives an example of the immorality in the conduct of state affairs. Machiavelli advised in his The Morals of a Prince. that “hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity” proving that he believes it vital for a prince to know wrong in order to thrive and flourish.

Metternich believed that if we tried to live in a utopian manner then we would never be successful and would “learn [our] ruin”. It has been said that the period of Metternich’s congresses defined an era in which the governments in power attempted to create a reactionary international system.

This system came to be called the Holy Alliance, appropriating the name of the coalition of Christian values some wanted to set up at the Congress of Vienna. Though the days of Metternich’s feudal social structure are long gone with the advent of Samuel Huntington’s First, Second , Third and possibly of the Fourth waves of democracy clearly Metternich’s rewriting of the history of Europe did repeat itself in different guise in different places.

The recent observations attributed to a leader of the opposition questioning the very essence of the liberation war and the position of the Father of the Nation is an example of politics gone bad. It would be inexcusable to many that the liberation war in which so many fought and died should be questioned as a trivia and distorted in such a manner.

One can have the right to one’s opinion but international as well as domestic laws do put some opinions out of bounds due to moral and legal reasons. Can such an expression of illogical opinion be considered as treachery to destabilize the country?

The point here is not to defend the right to freedom of expression but to demonstrate that willful distortion of history can have far reaching effects and should be rectified through legal recourse by punishing the guilty.
Such moves are necessary particularly in largely illiterate societies where people tend to believe in fatwas given by village priests to discourse by dishonest “intellectuals” and politicians.

People familiar with Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, albeit discussed in the forced transformation of economic behavior of nations, could construe deliberate distortion of historical fact as incitement of the people to go up against the authorities.

Naomi Klein’s reference to out sourcing of the “war on terror” ” to Halliburton and Blackwater, tsunami that wiped out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches being auctioned off to tourist resorts, New Orleans’s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discovering that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened are examples of shock therapy.

These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”– using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Should these do not produce desired results terrorism can be a useful tool. It has been claimed that The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock can be made possible.

Such practices, of historical distortion, can be found in the dark side of post-colonial literature. Gyatri Spivak( Can subaltern speak-1988) argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society.

The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos–a totalizing, essentialist “mythology” as Derrida might describe it–that doesn’t account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.

Using Antonio Gramsci’s arcane label for oppressed people, she points out that anyone who has achieved enough literacy and sophistication to produce a widely-read piece of fiction is almost certainly by that very fact disqualified from speaking for the people he or she is supposed to represent. Though Salman Rushdie and a few others would not like to be known as post-colonial writers the fact remains that literature like history is a commentary of the time.

Charles Dickens, for example, throughout his life remained an implacable enemy of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Throughout his works, Dickens retained an empathy for the common man and a skepticism for the fine folk. In a free society everyone is entitled to his/her opinion.

But as right of expression has limit( European Convention of Human Rights-1950) states:-

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

So people of consequence should be held accountable when they are in violation of a country’s constitution and hurt the feelings of millions of people through irresponsible utterances.

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The writer is a former Secretary and ambassador

APRIL 25, 2014