We have been wrapped in world history for the past few weeks. Its embrace has been a reminder of the thin weave, of the gaping holes in history and stories of the past. Threadbare historical accounts continue to be relayed with significant, often wilfully directed narrative drift, and attendant intellectual occlusion.
The narrative drift occurs when writers of history change the past to suit prevailing prejudices, and intellectual occlusion simply erases or strategically curates things that happened in the past. The way stories are told, the way facts, myths, legends and preferences are selected and relayed, over and again in various permutations, are a sad reflection of what Elif Shafak remarked upon in her novel, The Island of Missing Trees, a war-torn love story set in 1970s’ Cyprus.
“Humans, especially the victors who hold the pen that writes the annals of history, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting.”
We celebrated Freedom Day on April 27. It was a day to remember for many people globally, never mind the denials and apologetics. Three days later, there was remembrance of the defeat of the US in Vietnam on April 30, 50 years ago. Globally, most countries across the world celebrated Worker’s Day on May 1. A few days later, on May 8, the North Atlantic community remembered Victory in Europe Day, that fateful day in 1945 when Germany formally surrendered to Allied forces, officially ending the conflict, which some of us believe started in 1914.
The responsibility of writers, Albert Camus said when he accepted his Nobel prize for literature in 1955, is “[to not] serve those who make history [but] those who have lived it”. Even that pithy statement conceals the disparities in power that writers and historians have that affect narrative drift and intellectual occlusion. There are writers, and political actors, for that matter, who might expect us to focus solely on the Allied victory, and occlude or sequester the fact that the Soviet Union and the Russian people played a significant role in the ultimate triumph over Adolf Hitler, the arch anticommunist.
The European war of 1914-45, with Germans as the main villains (who are trying, but failing, in these treacherous times, to place themselves on the right side of history) destroyed societies in Poland, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Greece, and invaded or occupied parts of North Africa. Among Hitler’s most disastrous campaigns was in the Soviet Union. The Soviets would, ultimately, inflict the most severe damage to the Germany army — notably at Stalingrad.
In 1942, the US joint chiefs of staff drew up a document that said: “In World War 2, Russia occupies a dominant position and is the decisive factor looking towards the defeat of the Axis in Europe ... Whenever the Allies open a second front on the Continent, it will be decidedly a secondary front to that of Russia; theirs will continue to be the main effort. Without Russia in the war, the Axis cannot be defeated in Europe, and the position of the United Nations becomes precarious.”
And so, when there is an outcry over why anyone wants to celebrate (with Russia) the end of World War 2, we have to remind ourselves about how intellectual occlusion works, or how single-story narratives are framed, and how these narratives are made to drift along lines that make us feel good about ourselves. Millions of “non-Europeans” (Russians, Indians, Pacific Islanders and Burmese, among others) fought against the Germans. It may have been a uniquely European war, but the war between 1914 and 1945 sucked in people from beyond the borders of the North Atlantic community.
Camus remarked after the fateful days at Hiroshima and Nagasaki that we live “in terror because dialogue is no longer possible”…. It is the most awful acts of dishonesty, duplicitousness, and intellectual surrender, to imagine that there is a single history of the past.
*Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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