Why Should We Study History?

I have been fascinated by history since I was a small boy. My mother used to buy for me and my sisters a wonderful children’s magazine called Treasure, which ran a serialised history of Britain, from the Old Stone Age until early modern times, including vivid coloured illustrations that seized my imagination and have stayed with me ever since. Seeing my interest, she nourished it in those early years with marvellous Ladybird books, which also had the most beautiful illustrations, of such varied historical stories as that of Julius Caesar and Roman Britain, the adventures of Marco Polo, Queen Elizabeth I, the voyages of James Cook and the achievements of Florence Nightingale. When I was in third grade, she gave me a superb book called A Pageant of History and there I read for the first time of Hannibal and Dante, Galileo and Edison.

It has been said of Edison that “he was taught reading, writing, and arithmetic by his mother, but was always a very curious child and taught himself much by reading on his own”. Who can say why my interest in history was there to be ignited by my mother? But she provided the initial materials and after that I was away and have never lost my passion for the furthest and deepest reaches of historical understanding. In fourth grade I discovered my father’s old Leaving, or as we would now call it Year 11, history textbook, James Harvey Robinson’s Medieval and Modern Times, and began reading it from cover to cover, learning about the fall of the Roman empire, the rise of the new kingdoms in Europe, the rise of the Muslim caliphate and so on all the way down to the First World War. I delighted, above all, in the coloured maps showing the changing boundaries and names of the empires, kingdoms and republics of the European and Middle Eastern worlds over 1500 years.

But a seminal moment in my sense of the importance of history came in fifth grade, when our class teacher read to us all The Lord of the Rings. For all my eager reading, the world I lived in at that time was, of course, still small, sheltered and innocent. What Tolkien’s remarkable fable did for me was to show how someone living such a life could suddenly find themselves embroiled, willy nilly, in the sweeping currents of history and the great dramas of their time. Book though it was, it brought the idea of history out of books and made it seem vivid. Fantasy though it was, it brought dramatically alive for me a sense of what it could be like to experience history as an inescapable and gripping drama in which one was deeply implicated through no choice of one’s own.

Those of you who have read the tale will recall that passage, in Chapter Two, “The Shadow of the Past”, in which Frodo Baggins learns for the first time of the perilous nature of the One Ring which has come into his possession and realises, with horror, that he, though a simple, inoffensive hobbit in a quiet corner of a peaceful little country, has been placed at the vortex of history. (The book is very much better in this scene, as in almost all, than the film.) I listened to it as a ten-year-old and it converted me from a small boy who loved colourful children’s histories and exotic maps into a boy with a vocation for understanding the history of the world. Here, for those who also love it and for those who have never heard it, is the key passage. It is rather long, but observe the ways in which the language draws one into a sense of the importance of understanding history—the shadow of the past:

“Hold it up!” said Gandalf. “And look closely!”

As Frodo did so, he now saw fine lines, running along the ring, outside and inside: lines of fire that seemed to form the letters of a flowing script. They shone piercingly bright and yet remote, as if out of a great depth …

“I cannot read the fiery letters,” said Frodo in a quavering voice.

“No,” said Gandalf, “but I can. The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Mordor, which I will not utter here. But this, in the Common Tongue, is what is said, close enough:

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

“It is only two lines of a verse long known in Elven    lore:

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,

Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,

Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,

One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne

In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,

One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.”

He paused and then said slowly in a deep voice:

This is the Master Ring, the One Ring to rule them all. This is the One Ring that [the Dark Lord] lost many ages ago, to the great weakening of his power. He greatly desires it—but he must not get it.

Frodo sat silent and motionless. Fear seemed to stretch out a vast hand like a dark cloud rising in the East and looming up to engulf him. “This ring!” he stammered. “How, how on earth did it come to me?”

“Ah!” said Gandalf. “That is a very long story. The beginnings lie back in the Black Years, which only the lore-masters now remember. If I were to tell you all that tale, we should still be sitting here when Spring had passed into Winter.

But last night I told you of Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord. The rumours that you have heard are true: he has indeed arisen again and left his hold in Mirkwood and returned to his ancient fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor. That name even you hobbits have heard of, like a shadow on the borders of old stories. Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.

"I wish it had not happened in my time,” said Frodo.

“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All that we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us. And already, Frodo, our time is beginning to look black. The Enemy is fast becoming very strong. His plans are far from ripe, I think, but they are ripening. We shall be hard put to it. We should be very hard put to it, even if it were not for this dreadful chance.

The Enemy still lacks one thing to give him strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences and cover all the lands in a second darkness. He lacks the One Ring …

… Why, why wasn’t it destroyed?” cried Frodo. “And how did the Enemy ever come to lose it, if he was so strong and it was so precious to him?” He clutched the Ring in his hand, as if he saw already dark fingers stretching out to seize it.

It was taken from him,” said Gandalf. “The strength of the Elves to resist him was greater long ago; and not all Men were estranged from them. The Men of Westernesse came to their aid. That is a chapter of ancient history which it might be good to recall; for there was sorrow then, too, and gathering dark, but great valour and great deeds that were not wholly vain. One day, perhaps, I will tell you all the tale, or you shall hear it told in full by one who knows it best …

From the time I listened to that very passage, I became determined to master the history of the whole world and I began, as a youngster, by reading and re-reading The Lord of the Rings, including its appendixes on the history of Middle-earth, as I endeavoured to come to terms with the enormity of the idea that had seized my imagination.

There was no One Ring, of course, on which to centre my inquiries, and I was not especially interested in fantasy. I was interested in the larger reality that actually shaped the little world I lived in. And just as the larger realities of Middle-earth existed on the borders of the Shire and at the outer reaches of Frodo’s awareness or imagination, so it was with the world I inhabited as a young boy. I had been raised a Catholic, for example, but the whole history of Catholicism and its roots in an even more ancient world was only a shadowy background to the everyday world of ritual practices and moral precepts in which I grew up. My father worked for the National Civic Council and would speak of the dangers of communism, but I had only a vague sense of what all this meant. The Vietnam War was on the nightly news, but I had no idea what it was really all about or what was at stake, one way or another, as it was fought out. The year after my teacher had read The Lord of the Rings to us, and when I was re-reading it for myself, the Tet offensive erupted in South Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, there were race riots and massive anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the United States; and Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. I remember this last event, at least, being played over the radio into our Grade 6 classroom in August 1968.

There were few books in the family home that could inform me about what all these ominous events in the wider world really meant, but I discovered that the local newsagency, owned and run by a gentleman by the name of Mr Forbes, unlike any you’ll find these days, had whole shelves full of serious books on ancient Greece and Rome, modern politics and political biography. It became from that time, until I found more substantial bookstores, a Mecca for me on my way home from primary school. Through the books on Mr Forbes’s newsagency shelves, a wider world of understanding beckoned and I was drawn irresistibly towards it. There I bought my first copy of Livy’s The War with Hannibal and histories of ancient Greece by H.D.F. Kitto and Moses Finley. And there, in late 1968, with two dollars my mother had given me to buy cake to take to the Grade 6 end-of-year party, I bought, for a dollar apiece, Stuart Schram’s life of Mao Zedong and Alexander Werth’s biography of Charles de Gaulle.

I played truant that day, sitting in a park all day utterly engrossed in reading the biography of Mao Zedong. I finished reading it that weekend. When I returned to school on the Monday, my class teacher, a nun in the Josephite order founded by St Mary McKillop, asked me why I had not come to the party the previous Friday. I told the truth. She must, I’ve always thought, have been incredulous; but she told me that my punishment for playing truant was that I would have to give a talk to the class about the Chinese civil war. Now this was my idea of what school should be about. “Do you have a map of East Asia?” I asked. She did and it was rolled out over the blackboard. Equipped with a long wooden pointer, I then proceeded to tell the class about the Chinese republican revolution of 1912, the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the founding of the Communist Party in 1921, the Northern Expedition, the break between the Nationalists and the Communists in 1927, the Japanese invasion of China in 1931, the Long March of the Red Army, the war with Japan and, finally, the Communist victory in the late 1940s.

Immediately after this episode, I asked my mother if she and Dad would give me a copy of Isaac Deutscher’s biography of Stalin for my birthday. They did so and I read it, absolutely riveted, during the summer beach holidays between primary and secondary school. While my father and sisters went to play ball on the beach, I lay on a couch reading about the Moscow Trials of the 1930s. During a visit to town that summer to see a children’s movie, I persuaded my grandmother to go to bookshops with me looking for a copy of David Shub’s biography of Lenin. Not long afterwards, I bought and read William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich and got my father to take me to see Joseph Losey’s film The Assassination of Trotsky, starring Richard Burton.

In short, Gandalf had got me up and running. There might not have been a One Ring to centre world history on, but there was One World and it was clear to me that things were happening in it that were every bit as dramatic as anything in The Lord of the Rings and that they were rooted in histories that, in Gandalf’s words, “only the lore-masters now remember”. From the age of eleven, I wanted very much to become one of those “lore-masters”. But, though my parents and teachers at that age were happy to encourage my budding interest in history, none of them had the first idea how to guide or mentor it, much less help me set a course to become a lore-master.

How does one chart such a course on one’s own? Well, as I discovered a few years down the track, this was the challenge faced by Thucydides, the first methodologically serious historian in the Western world, or perhaps anywhere in the world. A citizen of Athens, born in about 460 BC, Thucydides was a wealthy man and a supporter of the great Athenian statesman Pericles, under whom Athens built its maritime empire in the Aegean world in the middle of the fifth century BC. Both an educated man and a general, he decided, when war broke out between Athens and Sparta in 431 BC, to record its history and to do so accurately. Here are three paragraphs from the preface to his monumental history of that tragic conflict, so long ago, in which he tells us why he thought it important to write this history, as well as how and why he worked at getting it right:

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it. This belief was not without its grounds. The preparations of both the combatants were in every department in the last state of perfection; and he could see the rest of the Hellenic race taking sides in the quarrel; those who delayed doing so at once having it in contemplation. Indeed, this was the greatest movement yet known in history, not only of the Hellenes, but of a large part of the barbarian world—I had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity, and even those that more immediately preceded the war, could not from lapse of time be clearly ascertained, yet the evidences which an inquiry carried as far back as was practicable lead me to trust, all point to the conclusion that there was nothing on a greater scale, either in war or in other matters …

Having now given the result of my inquiries into early times, I grant that there will be a difficulty in believing every particular detail. The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever … There are many … unfounded ideas current … even on matters of contemporary history which have not been obscured by time … So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand …

On the whole … the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied upon. Assuredly, they will not be disturbed by the verses of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth’s expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the realm of legend … And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human affairs must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is intended to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

The “absence of romance” of which Thucydides wrote set his monumental book apart from much else written before or during his time; but also from a very great deal written since. He set standards of historiographic seriousness that remain sobering even now. His clarity of judgment was such that even so severe and humourless a translator and political theorist as Thomas Hobbes could write, in the seventeenth century, that Thucydides was “the most politic historiographer that ever wrote”. Thucydides more or less invented history as a serious and important discipline, and his ambition to write a record that would be useful for all time has, remarkably, been fulfilled. In my estimation and that of many others, The Peloponnesian War remains the single greatest primer in history and world affairs.

But of course, Thucydides lived in a world incomparably smaller and simpler than that in which we have all grown up and, if writing an accurate and useful history of the great war of his time was a major challenge, how are we to grapple with the vast tides of history that have ebbed and flowed in the two and a half millennia since he died? Well, of course, the answer is that, if any one of us had, like Thucydides, to do it from scratch and with only exiguous records to work with, we could not possibly get it done. Fortunately, he started something, in the manner that Hippocrates, Praxagoras and Herophilus started something in the field of medicine, or Democritus, Anaxagoras, Euclid and Archimedes started something in the fields of natural science and mathematics. Though all these endeavours went into eclipse as the ancient world tottered and then fell, the cognitive foundations had been laid. They were recovered in the Renaissance, and the modern world has seen an unprecedented flourishing of construction on these foundations. Any of us now seeking to study history, for example, has access to libraries and records and methods that simply did not exist when Thucydides set out to study history. So much is this so that we can now learn, through these sources, far more about his own world and the antiquity which preceded it than he ever knew.

Indeed, so vast are our holdings now in terms of records of the past that we cannot come close to even reading them all, let alone writing them from scratch. Even if we were to agree that studying history is in some sense important, we would inevitably be faced with the questions, but what history and how much of it? And to those questions there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Apart from the fact that no one of us could conceivably reconstruct the whole of history for ourselves, there are very many important things to study other than history and very many things to do other than study. When, therefore, we ponder the question, “Why is it important to study history?”, we clearly need to frame the question in terms of why it might be important to have the sources available to us for the study of those aspects of history which may come to seem important to us from time to time. Yet, if such sources are to be available to us at all, we must acknowledge that the labours of those who specialised in such studies have some continuing value and importance to us; that we might do well to encourage some among us to continue to aspire to the standards of objectivity that the best of them set and to analyse the past accurately and analytically; and that we might be well served to train our own minds to be able at least to read history well, even if we do not write any and even if the history we read is only a tiny fraction of what has been written.

There is a scene in Roger Donaldson’s film Thirteen Days, about the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which President Kennedy, confronted with the reality that the Soviet Union has lied to him and placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, has to ponder the possibility of a tense situation getting out of hand and escalating to catastrophic war. He turns to his brother Bobby and his close aide Kenny O’Donnell and says:

‘You know, last summer I read a book, The Guns of August. I wish every man on that blockade line had read that book. It was World War One, thirteen million killed. It was all because the militaries of both alliances were so highly attuned to one another’s movements and dispositions, they could predict one another’s intentions. But all their theories were based on the last war and the world and technology had changed and those lessons were no longer valid, but it was all they knew, so the order went out. Couldn’t be rescinded. And the men in the field, their families back home, couldn’t even tell the reasons why their lives were being destroyed. But why couldn’t they stop it? What could they have done? Here we are fifty years later …’

Kennedy was given pause by Barbara Tuchman’s book, which had shown him that he was in a situation analogous to that which confronted political leaders in 1914, that those leaders had made fateful decisions which precipitated a dreadful war and that they had done so because they had not seen the differences between their own situation and the wars of even the recent past. He was very aware of the differences between his situation and even the Second World War, because in 1962 the possibility existed for the first time in human history of thermonuclear war and the annihilation not only of millions but of hundreds of millions of human beings. History showed him not only what could happen in general terms, but that he needed to keep thinking and learning.

History, in other words, is not only a matter of deduction, as in mathematics or formal logic, but of analogy, induction, interpretation and variation. It requires enormous patience to document faithfully and very considerable judgment to interpret fruitfully and wisely. Thus, when we say that it is important to study history, we cannot mean merely that one should, as it is sometimes phrased, “learn the lessons of the past”. We need to think through both how we would know what the lessons of the past are, whether or how any of those lessons apply to our present or prospective circumstances, and how others might construe the same histories as teaching different lessons altogether. To study history, properly speaking, is to think in these terms and not only to read a few books. Moreover, history can be used not only in the sense of seeking to comprehend the past as a guide to the present or future, but as a resource alike for imaginative theatre and dubious propaganda. We’ve all heard of the so-called “history wars” in this country, but history, in general, is contested terrain and this is another reason why it is important to study it—or have others whom we trust do so.

I am reminded of this constantly when I watch films that are based on history or even classic literature. Those of you who went to see such sword-and-sandal epics as Troy or Alexander, both released in 2004, may or may not have enjoyed them simply as entertainment, but I watched them with an historian’s eye and found fault with them at many levels. At that time I was preparing my book, Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China, for publication and had occasion to reflect on cinema and history with reference to two Chinese film epics, Chen Kaige’s The Emperor and the Assassin (1998) and Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002). Again, each might be viewed merely as a martial arts and Chinese culture spectacular. But as I watched the two films and compared them, I realised that the first was a film of Shakespearean quality and daring, interpreting a famous episode from the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian’s Grand Scribe’s Records, written around 100 BC; while the second was a parody of that story which looked dangerously like a piece of propaganda for the Communist Party. If one was wholly ignorant of the history, such judgments could not be made. The existence of the original historical text, however, makes it possible to put the films into both historical and comparative perspective in this manner.

For more than 2000 years, the denunciation of the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, for his cruelties and massacres, his burning of books and purging of scholars, has been a classic part of China’s political culture. He has long been characterised as a self-satisfied and oppressive individual, who was lacking in humanity (ren) and righteousness (yi), and was unwilling to admit any fault. All these criticisms can be directed, with at least equal justice, at the Chinese Communist Party. Yet Hero portrays the First Emperor as handsome, brilliant and humane. There is no evidence of his crimes, only of his overwhelming military power, steadfast courage and unnerving insight into the machinations of those who plot against him. The film’s obeisance to the founding tyrant of China’s imperial past is all the more unsettling considering that Mao Zedong, who was directly responsible for the deaths by execution, torture, starvation and penal abuse of tens of millions of people in China, likened himself to the First Emperor—much as Stalin was inclined to liken himself to Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great. The overall result is that Zhang Yimou gave us a film similar in its political message to Leni Riefenstahl’s famous film of Nazi propaganda of 1934, Triumph of the Will.

There could hardly be a greater contrast, in this respect, than that offered by Chen Kaige, except that his offering came first and Zhang’s film was a response to it. Both films tell of the First Emperor’s ruthless unification of the many kingdoms in what he made into “China”, named after his own kingdom of Ch’in; and of attempts to assassinate him in order to put a stop to his relentless quest for total domination. But Zhang’s propaganda is far less grounded in historical fact than is Chen’s powerful political parable. Whereas Zhang makes the First Emperor a figure of wisdom and grave responsibility who seems wholly self-sufficient, Chen makes him a haunted and unstable character whose bloody quest to unify “all under Heaven” is denounced by those closest to him, most especially his mistress, Lady Zhao, played by Gong Li. Zhang weaves a fictional and fanciful story around the Emperor, whereas Chen takes a historical story and reworks it in a manner worthy of Shakespeare or David Lean. He invents the character of Lady Zhao, who appears nowhere in the historical record, and has her, uniquely among those in the film, relate to the Emperor like a free, modern and outspoken individual. None of this makes Zhang’s film uninteresting; but Chen’s film is incomparably more free-spirited and challenging.

In China the Communist Party continues to exercise a jealous guardianship over the history of China and seeks to monopolise the interpretation of that history. It has, of course, no more right to any such monopoly over the past than it has to a monopoly of political power in the present. But it enforces the first in order to protect the second. One cannot freely study history in China, whether it be the history of the civil war, or of the revolutionary terror that followed it; of China’s role in the Korean War or the catastrophe of the so-called Great Leap Forward, in which, as a direct consequence of Mao’s irrational policies being enforced, at least 30 million Chinese peasants died of starvation. Nor can one study the history of China’s occupation of Tibet, of the forced labour camps system run by the Communist Party, of the crushing of the democracy movement under tanks in 1989 or the crushing of the Falun Gong movement since 1999. I venture to suggest that, if these histories could freely be studied, the Communist Party would fall from power as utterly discredited. I think, for that very reason, the study of history in China and the study of the history of China by the rest of us is very important.

The study of Chinese history has become rather more important to many of us in the past couple of decades simply because China is rapidly re-emerging as a major world power, so that its nature and disposition, its possibilities and the openness of its cultural and political traditions to liberalisation are fast becoming much more important to the rest of the world than they have ever been. We badly need to be able to see Chinese history in detail and with clarity of mind, whether or not the Communist Party wishes us to do so. Dali Yang’s Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Famine (1996), Alastair Iain Johnston’s Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (1998), Edmund Fung’s In Search of Chinese Democracy: Civil Opposition in Nationalist China 1929–1949 (2000) and Jay Taylor’s The Generalissimo: Chiang Kaishek and the Struggle for Modern China (2009) are excellent examples of the kind of history that we need—and that the Chinese people need in their struggle for modernity and civil rights. All four books were written in the West and published by Western university presses.

But even as we seek to understand China, there are so many aspects of our own histories, in the West, that we still need to study and reconsider. To take but one example among many, Ernest May, in his path-breaking book Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (2000) was able to show, based on a great deal of detailed historical study by himself and others, that the conventional wisdom as to why France collapsed in six weeks in May–June 1940, under Nazi attack, was fundamentally in error. As he wrote:

‘In June 1940, and for a long time thereafter, the fact of France’s rapid defeat seemed to speak for itself. Three conclusions were thought obvious. First, Germany must have had crushing superiority, not only in modern weaponry but in an understanding of how to use it. Second, France and its allies must have been very badly led. Third, the French people must have had no stomach for fighting. Marshal Philippe Petain, who headed the satellite French government of 1940–44, ascribed France’s defeat to “moral laxness”. Though not everyone would have used Petain’s particular term (relâchement), most people around the world agreed that France’s defeat owed something to lack of moral fibre.

‘Now, sixty years later, in the light of what is known about the circumstances of France’s defeat, none of these conclusions holds up well. Overall, France and its allies turn out to have been better equipped for war than was Germany, with more trained men, more guns, more and better tanks, more bombers and fighters. On the whole, they did not lag even in thinking about the use of tanks and airplanes … In computer simulations of the war of 1940, if the computer takes control, the Allies win … And the more we have learned about the Nazi regime, the more its appearance of strength and efficiency seems an illusion created by its own propagandists … Confidence that France had superiority and that Germany recognized this superiority made it difficult for French and British leaders to put themselves in the place of German planners, whom Hitler had commanded to prepare an offensive no matter what their opinions about its wisdom or feasibility might have been. Imagination was not paralysed; far from it … But the possibility that the Germans might use ingenuity to shape a surprise version of a frontal offensive seemed too fanciful for consideration.’

May’s book was published in New York in 2000. He concluded his introduction with the words, “Judgment by the reader of whether this story serves as a parable for our own and other times will come more easily after it has been told.” He might, perhaps, have written at the end of that sentence “after it has been read or, better still, studied”. But in any case, his parable reads in a quite hair-raising way in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. It might also serve as a cautionary tale now, as countries such as China and Iran prepare new ways of challenging the dominance that the United States has exercised in world affairs since 1945.

I have covered quite a bit of ground. I hope that the stories I have told and the examples I have used will have vividly conveyed a sense of why it is important to study history. Let me, however, recap on the reasons I have offered, before finishing with one last story. I began by telling a personal story about how the colour and drama of history gripped me even as a little boy. This fascination with colour and drama might be one reason to read history, but it is not yet a reason to study it. I then added, however, that listening to The Lord of the Rings gave me my reason to study it: that, metaphorically speaking, I saw myself as Frodo Baggins in the Shire, with dark and dramatic events shaping the world around me in ways I felt impelled to try to understand. So, the first reason why I suggest it is important to study history is because there is no other way to comprehend how the world in which you live has come to be the way it is and why the institutions and conflicts that constitute it have come about. Ideally, if we really were hobbits like Frodo, we would be able to turn to a Gandalf or an Elrond for a coherent account of all these things. But we aren’t hobbits and there are no such one-stop-shop authorities to turn to. The real earth is vastly more complicated—and more interesting, I might add—than Middle-earth.

This, then, is the second reason why it is important to study history: because the truth is not easy to come by. It is not simple; nor, as the old saying has it, is it “set in stone”. As Thucydides remarked long ago, all too many people, including popular historians, journalists, parents and politicians, settle for the first story that comes to hand even with regard to their own traditions. We need to cross-examine any such story, check our sources, reconcile the contradictions between such sources, acknowledge uncertainties or gaps in the evidence, even devise new means of unearthing evidence. The facts (erga) of what happened are hard enough to ascertain, as Thucydides explained, but the reasons why things happened (logoi) require great patience, insight and discipline of mind to discern. The best history, as Donald Kagan has shown in his recent book Thucydides, continues even now to correct the great historian with regard to both erga and logoi.

Even when we have rendered our account of both the facts as to what happened and the reasons why things happened, we face yet another challenge, a third reason why it is important to study history, even more subtle than the first two: to determine the significance of all this for ourselves with integrity and insight. That was the challenge faced by John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It is the task Ernest May presented us with at the end of Strange Victory. For we live in a world of change and can, therefore, neither evade the need to come to terms with the past, nor assume that the future will be a mere repetition of it.

It is sometimes claimed that history is only the propaganda of the victors or that various interpretations of any given history are equally valid in an arbitrary sense. Such remarks imply that objectivity in history is not possible and that claims to objectivity are either delusional or dishonest. Let me conclude with a story which, I hope, shows that these claims are wrong and that historical objectivity, though very demanding, is perfectly possible and is, indeed, very important.

Just before Christmas, I was asked to review Christopher Andrew’s official history of MI5, Britain’s ASIO. The request sprang from an article I had written in the Australian last winter, about the history of ASIO itself and the suppression of documents bearing upon it. I had, at the time the request was made, also just read Chapman Pincher’s newly published book Treachery, which argued at great length that Roger Hollis, the Director General of MI5 between 1956 and 1965, had been a Soviet military intelligence mole throughout his twenty-seven-year career with MI5. I responded to the request saying that I would write an essay centred on this question, since the allegations about Hollis go to the very heart of what security intelligence is all about and the authorised history would surely address this matter in detail. Christopher Andrew had gone on the record, as his book was launched, with the statement that the claims about Hollis were nonsense, so I expected his book to deal with the matter systematically and authoritatively.

What did I find? I discovered that the authorised historian of MI5 had failed utterly to make the case that the allegations about Hollis were nonsense. The historical basis for the charges against Hollis centre on the claim that the Soviet military intelligence defector Igor Gouzenko told Western intelligence debriefers, in September 1945, that his agency, the GRU, had a mole codenamed Elli at a high level inside MI5. Some of Hollis’s defenders have argued that Gouzenko did not make this claim in 1945, but made it up years later and should not be believed. Andrew, however, with unprecedented access to MI5’s archives, argues that there was a Soviet mole at a high level in MI5, at least in the early 1940s and that this mole did have the codename Elli. He then argues that the mole in question was one Leo Long. But we know from opened Soviet archives that Long was not codenamed Elli. He was codenamed Ralph. Moreover, we know that he did not work for MI5, much less in a senior position there, but for MI-14, in the British War Office. Finally, we know that he was not a GRU mole, but a KGB one. So, Andrew has a problem. By his own account, there was a mole named Elli in MI5, but his argument as to who that mole was is fatally flawed.

This would be less of a problem for Andrew had he shown, at the same time, that Elli cannot have been Hollis. But here his performance was even worse than in the matter of Long. He completely fails to so much as mention, much less refute, the multiple lines of evidence and inference that have led a number of specialists over the years and Pincher in particular to conclude that Hollis was Elli. There are simply no entries in his index under any of the key terms and no discussion in his book of any of the contentious claims made by Hollis’s accusers. He states that MI5 and the British government conducted a number of internal inquiries into the matter many years ago and concluded that Hollis was innocent. But he provides not a scintilla of evidence as to how they reached this conclusion, or even what questions they asked. And, whenever he cites MI5’s archives, his endnotes read simply “Security Service Archives”, with no indication whatsoever which box or file or document he is drawing upon, or what date it has, or who authored it, or how credible it is.

What all this means is that Christopher Andrew has written very bad history. It also means that his conclusion about Hollis is very possibly wrong. It may even mean that he knows it is wrong, though that charge would be more serious than simply the charge that his work as the authorised historian has been useless, erroneous and incompetent. But all these latter charges are warranted, not because he has an opinion at odds with Pincher’s, but because his use of evidence and his specific argument are plainly deficient by common canons of historical inquiry and objectivity.

The tests I applied to Andrew’s authorised history are very similar to those Thucydides devised for himself long ago. It is by the application of such tests and standards that we get history more right than wrong and correct our understanding as we study it more closely. Indeed, it is through the application of such standards to Thucydides’s own work that specialists like Donald Kagan sharpen our perspective on the Peloponnesian War. It is important that we make such corrections, because we otherwise proceed on the basis of ignorance, error and the wilful obfuscation of reality by government or other institutions with an interest in controlling the past. The Hollis case is of some significance to Australians because, when Australia found it had security leaks in the late 1940s, and decided to create what became ASIO, it was, of all people, Roger Hollis who was sent from London to oversee its design.

To sum up, then, there are at least four reasons to study history, apart from its intrinsic fascination:

1) Because there is no other way to comprehend how the world in which you live has come to be the way it is;

2) Because the truth about these matters is not easy to come by. It is not simple; nor is it “set in stone”;

3) Because it takes close study of history to determine the significance of past events for ourselves with integrity and insight; and

4) Because historical objectivity, though very demanding, is perfectly possible; is, indeed, very important and requires trained discipline to exercise. 

This is the text of an address Dr Paul Monk presented in March to the Asialink Young Leaders Program. His article on Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5 appeared in the April issue.