[BRIEF NOTE] On the uses of history

[rfmcdonald]

Via soc.history.what-if, I've come across Chris Floyd's recently-published article in The Moscow Times, "History Lessons". Set in the mid-22nd century, two centuries after the Nazi victory over the Soviet Union, "History Lessons" examines the struggle over Nazi Germany's history. In this world, everything that the Nazis wanted to do has been done--the genocide of the Jews, the settlement of the east, the transformation of Slavs into slave labourers--and the only thing left is to evaluate the morality of these events. Conventional wisdom in this post-Nazi Germany holds now that the foundational acts of the Nazi regime were evil and must be recognized as such. Of late, the Revisionist school has emerged, challenging this criticism of the past as ill-founded and fundamentally self-hating.

The Revisionists say such "scab-picking" is irrelevant in the modern world. "However regrettable, what's done is done," Metzger says. "What matters are the long-term benefits to civilization. One wonders if Herr Professor Vinogradov would enjoy the same kind of prosperity -- and freedom to criticize -- he possesses today if the communist evil had not been destroyed, at great sacrifice, by German power?"

Vinogradov dismisses these arguments. "The point of historical research is not to dispossess the present, but to disillusion it: to strip away self-serving myth and fatal ignorance in order to see more clearly how we got here, what it cost and how that shapes and distorts our responses to reality. Otherwise, we are blind -- easy prey for the abusers of power and their murderous deceptions."

What Vinogradov says.