History has changed its spots. The Vikings, who as late as the mid-1980s featured in school textbooks as “fierce raiders”, had mutated by 1994 into “Danish farmers and traders” who settled down with the Saxons in “one rich and peaceful kingdom”. The Saracens, during this period of school history revisionism, apparently gave up their rough habits and took to living in “peace and harmony” with the Crusaders. Napoleon became less of a soldier and more of a reformer of measurement and legal systems. In one German textbook, even the French Resistance is portrayed as part of a natural and benevolent evolution towards a future united Europe.
We are indebted for these gems to Yasemin Soysal, the eminent president of the European Sociological Association, who as part of a wider investigation into nationhood has spent three years researching attitudes to national identity and conflict in schoolbooks for 11 to 14-year-old children. Her impresssion, confirmed by educational conferences, is that “there is a general consensus that we need to teach children that Europe evolved naturally through the organic coming together of a group of sympathetic nations, rather than through a series of tense and bloody clashes between a collection of wildly diverse countries. But,” continues this brave woman, “Europe’s history is about more than commonality: it is about conflict, and that should be admitted and even celebrated.”
Those are startling, refreshing words from a modern communitaire sociologist working on a pan-European project. She is absolutely right. There is no wisdom in brushing conflict under the carpet and pretending that we inhabit a world of herbivores. God knows, I am an irritating Pollyanna myself, always brightly hoping the best from human nature, but even I can see the bowdlerising that Dr Soysal describes. Hatred, revenge and tribal rivalries are always with us and always were. Until you admit that you cannot even begin to resolve them.
Oddly, her survey brought to mind the silly, petulant outburst from Downing Street against Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter in Baghdad. He had observed — perfectly credibly — that during the chaos of last week some Iraqis were “experiencing their first days of freedom in a greater fear than they have ever known”. Anybody who has ever talked for five minutes with a survivor of invasion or revolution will recognize what Gilligan was describing when he explained: “The old fear of the regime was habitual, low-level. The fear is sharp and immediate. It is the fear that your house will be invaded, your property will be taken, and your daughters will be raped.”
This sad, perennial truth of wartime was met by the Prime Minister’s official spokesman with hysterical rage. “Try telling that to people whose relatives had been dropped head first into shredders, or people who had been tied to a post and had their tongues cut out. . .” he ranted. Adam Ingram, the Defence Minister, was wheeled out with the transparently ridiculous claim that the looting was mostly “directed against regime figures and establishments”. Rubbish: once criminal looting gets under way it does not make that sort of choice. In a city full of wounded civilians, attacks on any hospital are wicked and terrifying. The American anxiety to guard oil interests before hospitals (or priceless heritage) is not, to put it mildly, creditable. The US Marines could take a few lessons in post-war policing; maybe the British Army might help.
Yet after the Downing Street attack, pro-war commentators rushed forward in turn to call poor Mr Gilligan a traitor and to excoriate the BBC for filming grief as well as euphoria. They endlessly cited the other pictures, the ones they would have preferred the media to focus on: stagey shots of those Iraqis who did publicly welcome the liberators.
Yet both, most likely, reflect truth. Depending on their private and individual circumstances, Iraqis must be severally angry and grateful, relieved and terrified, happy and devastated, hopeful and despairing, ashamed of being conquered and glad of liberation. War is messy, not only physically but emotionally. Trying to stage-manage it into an orderly upward progress, full of smiles, is as daft as denying that the Vikings and Napoleon did a lot of killing to earn their place in history. Downing Street should know better.
As it happened, over the past week I found myself rereading a wartime novel by Nevil Shute, Pied Piper, published in 1942. It is set during the fall of France two years earlier and is a simple story about a retired English solicitor, mourning his son killed in action, who takes a holiday in the Jura during the spring months when France still feels safe. As the invasion looms, he is asked to escort two small English children home by train via Dijon and Paris. As chaos mounts, the route becomes impossible and the old man finds himself in charge of several other children: a French orphan with English relatives; a small boy wandering by the roadside after his parents’ car is shot to pieces by a German fighter; a lost Dutch infant found in a gutter being stoned as a “spy” by frightened old women in a village. They walk the dusty roads towards the coast, find lifts, sleep in barns, and in the occupied towns pose as French refugees to use the German army’s soup kitchens.
The striking thing about the novel, written at a time when Western Europe was threatened with the lawless confusion that we nowadays associate with the Balkans or Iraq, is that it tackles the moral confusion and corrosive hatreds of war without sentiment or false patriotism. The old man, putting aside his own feelings, has to reassure the children that “only bad aeroplanes” hurt people, even when one of their party is injured in an RAF bombing raid. The book is rich in ironies, as when the eldest boy is enthusiastically and kindly shown over a tank by jovial German soldiers.
But when they pick up their final child — a Polish Jew whose parents have been killed — we confront stark hatred. The ten-year-old boy, asked what he wants to do when he grows up, replies, “Kill Germans” and talks of guns, knives, and “driving a pitchfork into one’s belly as he sleeps”. The old man says, mildly, that when he finds asylum in Britain or America, Marjan will have to learn his lessons with the other boys. To which the child replies: “I know there is a great deal to learn, monsieur. One thing, you should always go for the young women. If you get the young women then they cannot spawn, and before long there will be no more Germans.” The tone is deliberately shocking; but it has been echoed down the decades since by many a young Palestinian, Israeli, Serb or Bosnian, Tutsi or Hutu, ANC militant or Irish republican. Hatred is real, and often understandable, and takes generations to fade. The old man in the book says heavily: “God knows what sort of world we shall have when this is all over.”
But readers of 1942, even in an essentially optimistic novel about a good man, at least felt able to face the squalid, confused reality of conflict and its long aftermath. Legacies of hatred and yearnings for revenge do not affect only current war zones. France was liberated, but suspicion of “collabo” families took decades to erase, and even now is murmured about. Germany has joined the mainstream of peaceful Western nations, yet it is not hard to whip up old hatreds among its disaffected young. The British Empire is long dismantled, yet shame and confusion about its worst aspects still haunt us, sometimes leading to cowardly and ill-judged decisions. Even between social classes, old grudges linger on: British labour relations are still overshadowed by the memory of the worst mill and mine- owners, and British education is a snakepit of unproductive class resentment.
It is always tempting, especially for governments, to whitewash over the mess and pretend that life is nice, people are rational and war is clean and tidy once our side wins and everybody dances in the streets. Tempting, but stupid. It is better that we should see the mess and the misery and acknowledge the hatred. Only then can we begin to deal with it.
There will be children in Iraq now who think, like Marjan in Shute’s book, that they would like to drive pitchforks into the British and Americans for turning their parents into corpses. Accept that and we can begin to build trust again. Deny it, and there is not a chance.
Join the Debate on this article at
comment@thetimes.co.uk
