"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting", wrote the Czech dissident novelist Milan Kundera. One of the stories he told in "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" is of Vladimir Clementis, the Foreign Affairs Minister of Czechoslovakia in the early days of the Communist regime, who was hanged in 1952 on trumped up charges of treason.
The authorities immediately airbrushed Clementis's image out of a famous photo which showed him standing next to the Communist leader Klement Gottwald during a triumphal party rally in 1948. All that remained of Clementis was his fur cap, which he had placed on Gottwald's bare head to protect his leader from the snow just before the photo was taken.
Having lived under a regime which drastically rewrote history to suit its own sordid ends, Kundera understood that truth is always the potential enemy of powerful vested interests. This tension is present even in liberal democratic states such as our own, and when politicians start talking about "historical facts" people suspect that they may well be thinking of a past which has been airbrushed clean of embarrassing details.
Given the loathing Australia's intellectuals feel for Prime Minister John Howard, it is not surprising that this is how they chose to interpret remarks he made last month that school history teachers had placed "perhaps a little too much of an emphasis on issues rather than on exactly what happened". Professor Martin Stuart-Fox from the University of Queensland claimed in the Courier-Mail that this must mean history should "avoid all those aspects of Australian society that Howard would prefer not to discuss -- such as deviation, deprivation, multiculturalism or Aboriginal affairs".
John Tonkin, professor of history at the University of Western Australia, sneered that Mr Howard had a "simplistic understanding" because "history is not just facts". But the Prime Minister never suggested that it was. He was merely urging a more balanced integration between teaching facts to school children and exploring broad issues, and by giving their own jaundiced and misleading twist to his actual statement, the history profs were demonstrating that Mr Howard really did have a point. Clearly, the facts don't matter much to these guys.
Without a good knowledge of exactly what did happen, any consideration of historical "issues" is always likely to become captive to political fashion and feelgood moralising, which is what seems to be occurring in many Australian schools and universities today. Students can discuss "deviation, deprivation, multiculturalism or Aboriginal affairs" till their bodies light up with a warm inner glow, but unless their discussions are constrained by a rigorous adherence to facts, they might as well be playing video games.
Unfortunately, along with conservation and the environment, these four issues are the very ones where academics have been most diligent in applying a political airbrush, and where hard information is always under threat of contamination by propaganda -- usually of the "Australia is wicked" kind.
The problem is made worse by many academics in the humanities and social sciences believing that "truths" and "facts" are culturally constructed. According to them, people who insist on drawing a firm distinction between fact and fiction are "privileging" a white Western view at the expense of other equally valid ways of thinking about the world.
At a Melbourne University seminar a few years ago, I heard a prominent "progressive" historian cheerfully explain that all she and her colleagues could hope to do with their research and writing was to present coherent and interesting stories; but stories whose truth could never be decided. A Holocaust survivor in the audience told her that this was a foolish and highly irresponsible position, which made it easier for people like David Irving and other Holocaust deniers to spread their lies.
The historian indignantly rejected any suggestion that this might be the consequence of her remarks. But she could not explain why it was possible to speak of facts in relation to the Holocaust, and not about other historical events. The seminar broke up in turmoil and bitter recriminations, with the "story teller" and her supporters refusing to join their critics at the customary post-seminar meal at a nearby restaurant.
Certainly, in many circumstances determining "exactly what happened" can be a very difficult task. Students need to learn how historians and other scholars handle conflicting evidence, and the criteria for deciding why one account might be preferable to another. Some kinds of facts are harder to establish than others, and certain matters, such as a person's reasons for behaving in a particular way, will always be open to interpretation and debate. But none of this is any excuse for ridiculing those who call for a greater emphasis on factual information in the teaching of history.
One of the great strengths of a liberal democratic society is the widespread belief in the importance of ensuring the independence and neutrality of the courts, the media, and the universities. In their different ways, and with varying effectiveness, these institutions ensure that collective memory is not lost or seriously distorted, and so help to protect us from abuses common in societies where political or economic power reigns untrammelled, and where the airbrushing of history can proceed with little hindrance.
But these institutions can achieve their purpose only if they are committed to a notion of objective truth, and if they jealously guard the rules and procedures that are designed to discover and transmit the facts about the situations they investigate.
By stressing the importance of historical facts, John Howard may be expressing a notion that seems hopelessly simplistic and unfashionable to our sophisticated "progressive" intellectuals. But his comments -- and the intellectuals' response -- show that he has a better instinctive understanding of the things that protect our freedoms than they have.
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