‘Good’ and ‘bad’ war – and the struggle of memory against forgetting – John Pilger
Fifty years ago, E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working
Class’ rescued the study of history from the powerful. Kings and queens,
landowners, industrialists, politicians and imperialists had owned much
of the public memory. In 1980, Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the
United States’ also demonstrated that the freedoms and rights we enjoy
precariously – free expression, free association, the jury system, the
rights of minorities – were the achievements of ordinary people, not the
gift of elites.
Historians, like journalists, play their most honourable role when
they myth-bust. Eduardo Galeano’s ‘The Open Veins of Latin America’
(1971) achieved this for the people of a continent whose historical
memory was colonised and mutated by the dominance of the United States.
The “good” world war of 1939-45 provides a bottomless ethical bath in
which the west’s “peacetime” conquests are cleansed. De-mystifying
historical investigation stands in the way. Richard Overy’s ‘1939: the
countdown to war’ (2009) is a devastating explanation of why that
cataclysm was not inevitable.
We need such smokescreen-clearing now more than ever. The powerful
would like us to believe that the likes of Thompson, Zinn and Galeano
are no longer necessary: that we live, as Time magazine put it, “in an
eternal present”, in which reflection is limited to Facebook and
historical narrative is the preserve of Hollywood. This is a confidence
trick. In ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’, George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the
past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
