Spilt History - revisionist history

Reason, Dec, 1999 by Charles Paul Freund

After the historical, comes the conditional: That's how Robert E. Lee lost a battle this year in Virginia, where things had otherwise gone so well for the general since the unpleasantness in Appomattox that he'd become a rare American example of honor traduced by fate, of the peculiar fulfillments of the tragic. Yet in June, just as officials in Richmond were placing a Lee mural as a tribute along a new James River walkway, Lee's fate was recast. A single statement by Richmond City Councilman Sa'ad El-Amin ended a widening debate over the mural's propriety, and resulted in what press accounts called the painting's "instant removal." "If Lee had won," asserted El-Amin, "I'd still be a slave."

After the conditional, comes the revisory. That's how Bill Clinton prevented weltkrieg last spring. Clinton conjured Adolf Hitler from the grave, as presidents contemplating military action have done before. And then Clinton, to justify his own coming military actions, drove a rhetorical stake through Hitler's black heart. Making his case for the NATO bombing of Serbian forces in Kosovo, Clinton decked his rhetoric in deadly derby and cigar: "What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to Adolf Hitler earlier?" he asked an audience of government employees. "How many people's lives might have been saved, and how many American lives might have been saved?"

After the revisory, comes the accusatory. That's how Pat Buchanan has saved the West from military destruction. He closed the western front of the Second World War, allowing Bolshevism and Nazism to lock in mortal battle in the bloody East instead. Hitler, asserted Buchanan in his controversial book, A Republic, Not an Empire, "was driven by a traditional German policy of Drang nach Osten, the drive to the East," and "had not wanted war with the West." It was only Britain's misbegotten military assurances in the East that sealed the alternate fate of the West. "Had Britain and France not given the war guarantee to Poland," Buchanan argued, "there might have been no Dunkirk, no blitz, no Vichy, no destruction of the Jewish population of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France or even Italy."

What is all this? Since when does politics succumb to an act of the imagination, as it has done this year in Richmond? Since when does history - speculative history at that - breach the wall that in this nation has always separated it from a pragmatic politics defined by the pothole that needed filling or the entitlement that could be created? Since when has foreign policy been advanced - from the presidential stump, yet - in terms of past paradigms as opposed to present national interest? Since when, for that matter, has the historical conditional, which has never succeeded even in establishing its own professional legitimacy, mutated into revisionist rationalization and topical political accusation?

Looking backward politically has always been the role of losers: those sighing over a romantically remembered Lost Cause, or seething over a supposed Stab in the Back. Why are history's seeming winners now engaging in repeated arguments over events that, the suffering and bloodshed they entailed notwithstanding, appear ultimately to have led them to prosperous triumph? After all, alternatives to what happened always include far worse possible scenarios. These are not arguments over expressing regret for outrageous historical injustices. What we have, at the center of our national discourse, is a recurring debate over the essence of our history. What's this about?

Counterfactuals, allohistory, parahistorical conjecture, what if?. The bastard child of causal contemplation has gone by many names, as if it were trying to escape its reputation as an unworthy, unprofessional waste of time and instead start life over again in more respectable guise. It has never worked. British historian E.H. Carr, in his 1961 "What is History?" lectures, dismissed all "what if?." speculation as a "parlour game." David Hackett Fischer cited "the fictional question" as a historian's fallacy: "All historical 'evidence' for what might have happened if [John Wilkes] Booth had missed his mark is necessarily taken from the world in which he hit it," Fischer wrote 30 years ago. "There is no way to escape this fundamental fact." The German historian Karl Hampe once declared in the Teutonic absolute that "History knows no 'if.'"

The objections to imagined historical alternatives seem impressive: What-ifs can never prove anything, can never be tested, can spin out into an infinite number of contradictory scenarios, etc. What then is the point of indulging in them? Worse for the counterfactual, if its critics were to decide tomorrow that History does indeed know an "if" or two, these same critics would certainly reject it anew on the grounds that it is impossibly reductionist. Is the course of Western history really to be balanced on the alternate possible shapes of Cleopatra's nose? Can any kingdom ever have been lost merely for the want of a nail? Is this, as historian Niall Ferguson - a defender of counterfactuals - allows, not merely worrying over spilt milk, but worrying over the milk we might have spilled, but which is actually still safe in the bottle?