Reacting to History

As I suspected it would, the reaction of the popular press this summer to the anniversary of the Battle of Britain has been jingo-istic to the point, occasionally, of parody. This, as I wrote earlier on this blog (and also in the September edition of BBC History magazine), has not necessarily been helpful to an understanding of the real significance of the Battle of Britain in the history of WW2.

But it is a natural reaction. Everyone is proud of the ‘good’ bits of their own history – even sometimes to the point of omitting anything inconvenient that doesn’t fit the myth.

This is part of a broader problem that we often ignore. Indeed, I have had a great deal of personal experience over the last twenty years of how people can operate different standards of judgment depending on what they were predisposed to think about a particular historical subject. Let me give you an example. In 1991 I wrote and produced a film which looked at what I believe was a ‘British’ war crime committed in Austria during WW2. It was called ‘a British Betrayal’, and examined the handover by the British army of Cossack and Yugoslav prisoners to Stalin and Tito in 1945. Many of these prisoners then suffered appallingly – a number were tortured and killed. And the British Army give up these prisoners illegally – acting against Allied policy. I still think this was scandalous.

The film got me into a lot of trouble. There was a campaign mounted to get me sacked from the BBC and various complaint actions were launched against the film. Despite the fact that no factual error was ever uncovered in the work, I was still hugely attacked for making it. Yet some of the same people who loathed me for making ‘A British Betrayal’ were subsequently quick to praise me in 1997 for making ‘Nazis: A Warning from History’.

Why? Was the Nazi series ‘better’ than the film criticizing some soldiers in the British Army? Well, it was only ‘better’ in the sense that it conformed to many people’s predisposed view about the Nazis – that they were, of course, responsible for some of the worst crimes in history. And, crucially, the British had helped defeat them. We were thus the ‘good guys’ and I should be praised for conveying this convenient message.

Ironically, the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels could have predicted this response. He once said – in effect – that no creative work exists on its own. It only exists in the space between the work itself and the prejudices and preconceptions the audience bring to the work. (And by the way – of course – just because I think Goebbels was capable of insightful media criticism does not mean I do not also think that he was a loathsome individual. He was both brilliant at his job and also capable of profoundly evil actions. A position I hold which my co-producer once tried to sum up by saying to me: ‘You mean, you think Goebbels was good at being bad?’)

It may be difficult not to bring preconcieved ideas to the table when we examine history. It may be difficult, but we should still try not to do it.