When I was a very small boy my grandmother often told me ‘Never take sweets from strangers – they may have been poisoned by the French’. Unfortunately there is no evidence to support this presumption, which however tempting it may be, must be discarded.
It was the eminent Victorian, Colonel Charles Cornwallis Chesney, Royal Engineers, Professor of Military History at the Staff College from 1858, who said that historical facts, like legal facts, are proven by the evidence of reliable witnesses. While Chesney was undoubtedly right, the historian’s difficulty arises when there are numerous witnesses to the same event, and as any policeman will tell you, the accounts of unquestionably truthful witnesses frequently vary. In this case the historian must use his own experience to decide which account is nearest to the truth. The historical community may well agree a particular version of a historical happening, but individual conclusions based on these agreed facts can be widely different. Thomas Becket murdered for his faith/Thomas Becket ungrateful subject who deserved all he got. Richard of York, child murderer/ Richard of York competent soldier and sound administrator. Charles Stuart, man of blood/Charles Stuart King and Martyr. People can perfectly legitimately hold totally different views as to the merits or otherwise of Benjamin Disraeli, Francisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, Bernard Montgomery or indeed Margaret Thatcher, provided that those views are based on the evidence.
It is when one begins to consider the morality of historical happenings that one begins to tread on shaky ground. Something that today might be considered as immoral in the extreme may have been perfectly acceptable in its time. Slavery is as old as civilisation. Athens, the ‘cradle of democracy’ was a slave state. During the Peloponnesian War (431 - 404 BC) the population of Athens was around 200,000 of which 20,000 were slaves. Rome too was a slave state, but no one has (yet) suggested demolishing the Parthenon or the Colosseum as glorifying slavery or, if one wants to go farther back, the Pyramids. During the 16th Century forty percent of the income of the Ottoman government came from the tax on slave markets, but we still happily go to Turkey on holiday and marvel at the Hagia Sophia (admittedly originally Byzantine, but that too was a slave state).
African slavery came rather later, and was fuelled by African chiefs selling their surplus populations and prisoners of war to Arab traders, who in turn sold them to Europeans wanting a workforce in, predominately, the Americas where the climate mitigated against the employment of their own people in hard physical labour. The institution of slavery was perfectly acceptable (unless you happened to be one) until well into the eighteenth century when views began to change. In 1807 Britain, appointing herself the moral guardian of the world, declared the slave trade illegal, and stationed a squadron of the Royal Navy off West Africa to prevent slaves being exported from that continent. It took another thirteen years to make the owning of slaves illegal throughout the British Empire (although it had always been illegal on the British mainland) largely because the government had to find the money to compensate slave owners – if something is legal and you make it illegal, you have to compensate those deprived of an asset. It was not until the Union victory in the American Civil War that slavery in the United States became illegal, although Lincoln is on record as saying that he thought negroes would always be inferior to whites, and the proclamation freeing the slaves was as much a ploy to destroy the Southern economy as it was an issue of morality. One might argue that the past cannot be judged by the standards of today, but only by the standards of the time.
It would now be almost a hanging offence to suggest that race might be connected to ability or intelligence, but in the 1930s Social Darwinism – the survival of the fittest – linked with the quasi science of Eugenics was regarded as a perfectly respectable, if somewhat eccentric, theory that held the European races to be superior to the savages of Africa or the Australian aborigines. In Britain the Eugenics Society was supported by the writers and intellectuals Thomas Huxley, JB Priestly, George Bernard Shaw, DH Lawrence, WB Yeats and HG Wells, the politicians Arthur Balfour and William Beveridge (the author of the report that led to the creation of the National Health Service), the birth control advocate Marie Stopes, Bishop Barnes of Birmingham and numerous medical authorities. They may have been scientifically incorrect, but they were not evil.
Whether or not there is an absolute standard of good and evil is a matter for philosophers rather than historians, but if something that people did was generally accepted at the time as reasonable, it would not seem right to punish them retrospectively because our views have changed, even if the evidence has not. George Washington owned slaves (at least 70) but I detect no move to change the name of the capital of the USA or to pull down his statue in Trafalgar Square – perhaps disapproval is selective rather than absolute. There is currently much talk about ‘decolonising’ history – whatever that may mean – and colonialism and imperialism are held in some parts of academe as pejorative terms. I would argue that the British Empire did not get everything right, but in the main was an enormous force for good. It brought order where previously there had been chaos, an incorruptible administration, the rule of law and a functioning civil service, to say nothing of roads, railways, education and medicine. I well recall on one of my first visits to India some sixty years ago being told by a professor of history at the university of New Delhi ‘there has always been corruption in India, but it stopped at the first Englishman. Now it goes all the way up to the cabinet’. A counter argument sometimes heard is that it was wrong to go into someone else’s country and take it over. But in the main the British went into areas which were nobody’s country, or in retaliation to aggression, or after having been invited in by the native rulers. We hear accusations of the illegitimate acquisition of other peoples’ artefacts, but if Lord Elgin had not purchased the Elgin marbles from the governor of Athens they would not have survived, for he found the locals smashing them up to obtain lime for mortar. Similarly the ‘Benin Bronzes’ were neglected and of no interest at the time to the natives in whose areas they were found.
Any argument is perfectly legitimate provided it is based on evidence, but we are getting to the stage – or perhaps have already got there – where an unfashionable opinion attracts threats and worse. A professor of Black Studies from Birmingham City university stated at a recent conference that the British Empire was ‘worse than the Nazis’ and that Winston Churchill was a racist. He keeps his job. On the other hand Professor Nigel Biggar, whose sole offence was to say that the British Empire was not all bad, received threats to his safety and to his employment not only from students, but from academics too. The academics of Worcester College Oxford have threatened a sister college – Oriel – with a boycott because Oriel has decided not to remove a statue of its benefactor, Cecil Rhodes, who while perhaps not a resounding success as a politician was most certainly not involved with slavery, long outlawed. He was assuredly a white supremacist, but so was everybody else at that time. It is perfectly legitimate for historians to have political views – we would be an odd body if we did not – but we should not allow these to legitimise a version of history to fit with those beliefs. The late Eric Hobsbawm was a lifelong Marxist, and while one might disagree with some of his conclusions, no one could doubt his place as one of the foremost British historians, particularly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Recently some perpetrators of appalling atrocities are held to be victims of the wicked British Empire, and we see ex Mau Mau members being awarded compensation because at some stage they may have been beaten by prison guards. For those old enough to remember, or to have served there, Mau Mau in Kenya was one of the most appalling terrorist organisations ever to disgrace this planet. It administered oaths to its Kikuyu members involving the drinking of menstrual fluid, animal semen and large quantities of blood. They killed far more Africans – usually by the most unpleasant methods – than Europeans and were eventually defeated by British troops backed by non-Kikuyu native askaris. One can have little sympathy for them. A statement by Tony Blair’s representative about the Irish potato famine in the 1840s was taken as an apology, but the failure of the potato crop was not confined to Ireland, it covered the whole of Europe and there were many more starving Germans than there were Irish. The British government did what it could to mitigate the admittedly severe effects by repealing the corn laws, but the famine is still added to the long list of Irish grievances.
The ‘Armenian Genocide’ is still a live issue, with Turkey accused of the murder of Armenians as a policy of the state. The present government of Turkey does not deny that this happened, but they point out that they are the Republic of Turkey, and what was done in 1914 and 1915 was by the Ottoman Empire. Semantics perhaps, but what is not admitted by Turkey’s critics is that the First World War was raging with Turkey and Russia on opposite sides and that there was severe unrest in Armenian regiments of the Turkish army. Armenians are, of course, Orthodox Christians, as were the Russians, and rather than risk wholesale mutiny and transfer of allegiance (a not entirely farfetched possibility) the Turks decided to remove the problem by killing the Armenians. That does not excuse what happened, but it does go some way to explain it.
It is always dangerous to supress views because they may be unfashionable. In Austria it is a criminal offence to deny the holocaust. No one with an ounce of intelligence can seriously think that the deliberate elimination of millions of Jews did not happen – there is ample documentary and film evidence, to say nothing of the accounts of survivors, to prove that it did happen. Deniers should have their spurious opinions demolished by argument, not by banning their expression. Once you ban something people begin to think that there might be some merit in it.
Revision of history is one thing – and many of us would be described as revisionist historians – but obliterating history altogether is a different matter entirely. The current Socialist government of Spain is formulating a law that will make it a criminal offence to glorify the forty-odd years of the Franco regime. In the public image the International Brigades (most the size of small battalions, some not even that) that fought Franco in the Spanish Civil War were manned by young idealists fighting for freedom, but one can make a strong argument for Franco and his adherents being (marginally) preferable to the Republicans, and it is a close run thing as to which faction perpetrated more atrocities. Franco saved Spain from going communist and kept her out of the Second World War. However much a majority of Spaniards (and it is only just a majority) may deplore the victory and subsequent rule of the Falange, what happened is history, it happened, and to forbid those who think it wasn’t such a bad thing after all expressing their views is most certainly a sin against history.
Any opinion, however ridiculous, however crazy, however offensive, however plain stupid one might think it is, must be allowed to be expressed provided it is not contrary to the law of the land. It should then be demolished by reasoned argument, not supressed by overzealous proponents of victimhood. You can think what you like, and write and say what you like, as long as your opinions are backed up by reliable evidence.
Another excellent, refreshing analysis. Thank you