Analysis | History for Authoritarians
Dr. Kelly McFarland
This article is a piece from Kelly’s Substack newsletter Inflection Point, discussing the geopolitical and transnational challenges facing America and the world today.
History flubs can be funny. No one is going to correct Bluto when he’s on a roll, amirite? Hollywood comedy aside, what history we believe, and how we use it, has major, and at times, life and death implications for the present. With this in mind, I found myself interested in, but not surprised by, a summer article published in the Economist that speaks to the connection between history and today’s world.
The article highlights a Chinese archeological dig in the western Xinjiang region of China. Archeologists have discovered the remnants of a 1,700 year old Buddhist temple that is similar to temples in Han China. This historical find matters because the Chinese government is using it to negate calls that it has been undertaking a cultural genocide against the Uyghur population in Xinjiang. As the article notes, “at the peak of a security campaign in 2018–2019, perhaps a million Uyghurs and other Muslim residents of Xinjiang passed through camps where they were forcibly assimilated into Han Chinese culture.” Now, with the recent archeological findings, the Chinese are saying that it is “clear proof that Xinjiang has been part of China since ancient times,” hence no assimilation can be taking place because the people of this region “have always been Chinese.”
Beijing is using shoddy history to push its narrative. Ancient China had intermittent control of the region at best, and didn’t conquer it until the late 18th century. As for the Buddhist temple, it serves as a perfect case study on how everything from money, goods, diseases, religions, and archeological styles flowed along the ancient Silk Road. And now, as the Wall Street Journal reported in July, China is taking their archeological show on the road in an effort to push back against the West and rewrite the history of China’s global influence.
Choose your own history
China’s actions are not a unique phenomenon. Politicians, political parties, governments, and pundits oftentimes cherry pick historical facts to create a mythologized past and rewrite history for present purposes. Autocrats and demagogues are the most serial abusers. Internally, they use it to control their own populations, or to denigrate a domestic “other” to win political office. Externally, they use the same methods to justify foreign policy decisions and even acts of war. Oftentimes, the domestic and external meld together.
China does both. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has spent decades rewriting history, erasing it, using it to justify its rule, and recently, to stake out broader national security goals. Since the 1990s, for example, the Party has pushed the notion of the “century of humiliation.” Domestically, the CCP highlights this era in its education system, which lasted from roughly 1839 to 1949 and included defacto Western rule over large portions of the country, to demonstrate “how China had been bullied and victimized by foreign powers before the party took control.” Emphasizing this period also has the added benefit (for the CCP) of painting the West in a negative light, helping to justify some of Beijing’s current anti-Western policies and its desire to create its own regional sphere of influence.
History also plays a major role in some of the potential flashpoints that could lead to a U.S.-China war. In the South China Sea (SCS)–a major choke point for maritime traffic that China depends upon for its trade–Beijing uses history to claim an outsized role in the region. They have built military bases on atolls and rocky outcroppings, creating artificial aircraft carriers on the sea. The problem is that their territorial claims are not legitimate. Beijing has voiced its claim to the SCS since the Party came to power, but China’s growing strength has given it the ability to act on those claims. As Howard French notes, “Since trotting out this claim, via a map that contains what is now popularly known as the ‘nine-dash line,’ in 1947, Beijing has ritually repeated that the body of water contained within the dashes has been China’s since time immemorial, that China discovered the sea’s many islands long before anyone else, and that the waterway and its islands have been traditionally controlled by China, which therefore give it historic rights over everything there.”
The historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians
This was the title of Vladimir Putin’s summer 2021 farcical historical article that justified, in part, his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The invasion irreparably changed the post-Cold War international order, sped up geopolitical trends already in motion, and placed U.S.-Russian relations (already seriously degraded) at their lowest level since the Cold War, and Putin’s view of history played a major role.
In his article, as two Russian analysts highlight:
“Putin insisted that Velarusians, Russians, and Ukrainians are all descendants of the Rus, an ancient people who settled the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas. He asserted that they are bound together by a common territory and language and the Orthodox Christian faith. In this version of history, Ukraine has never been sovereign, except for a few historical interludes when it tried–and failed–to become an independent state. Putin wrote that ‘Russia was robbed’ of core territory when the Bolsheviks created the Soviet Union in 1922 and established a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In his telling, since the Soviet collapse, the West has used Ukraine as a platform to threaten Russia, and it has supported the rise of ‘neo-Nazis’ there.”
They go on to note that, to Putin, “history matters–that is, history as he sees it. Putin’s conception of the past may be very different from what is generally accepted, but his narratives are a potent political weapon, and they underpin his legitimacy.”
Putin spent years distorting history so he could use it to justify war, one that has now killed hundreds of thousands. As historian Timothy Snyder has argued, Putin has created a “politics of eternity,” which “places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood,” where “time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past.” In Russia’s case, these “threats” emanate from the West.
Speaking of threats from the West, Putin has reinvigorated Russian pride in their role in World War II, known as The Great Patriotic War in Russia. The focus on WWII has also led to the restoration of Joseph Stalin’s image. The brutal totalitarian is now held up as a great wartime leader, while his horrific murder of millions of his own citizens has been brushed aside. Reemphasizing World War II is in Putin’s interest, as it enables him to warn of renewed threats from the West and “neo-Nazis.” In this vein, a new high school textbook describes Russia’s post-1945 history as one of victimhood at the hands of the West. It also discusses “neo-Nazis” in today’s Ukraine.
Our Sisyphean task
This is just a small sampling of why history is so important to the present. While we may not be pushing boulders endlessly up a hill, getting people to understand the importance of history feels like it at times. But, we relent at our own peril.
As a start, we must be sure that we in America practice what we preach before lecturing to others on their use of history. History can be muddy and multi-causal, oftentimes defying easy explanation. Instead of cutting funding for the humanities, we should be doing more to instill an understanding of history, basic facts, and a “historical mind” in future generations.
Most importantly, the United States must not succumb to the authoritarian impulses that drive politicians and parties to demand only the history that fits their political narrative. History is full of the good, the bad, and the ugly. It is the story of life, death, peace, war, love, and hate. Only discussing the positive aspects of that story does a disservice to a nation’s citizens and the nation itself. We must push back with all our strength against potential initiatives along the lines of the Trump administration’s “1776 project” that seek to instill a “patriotic education,” which is almost always code for whitewashed history. Writing history that downplays slavery, wishes away systemic racism, and passes over the mistakes America has made might make some people feel better about themselves, but it takes us backward as a nation. We shouldn’t fear that knowing this will make people less patriotic. One can still be a proud American, and seek to create a more perfect union, while cognizant of our imperfections.
Histories such as those depicted in the 1776 Project and others like it are mythologized histories. We should all seek to “challenge and even explode national myths.” As the historian Michael Howard noted years ago: “such dissolution is a necessary part of growing up in and belonging to an adult society; and a good definition of the difference between a Western liberal society and a totalitarian one…is that in the former the government treats its citizens as responsible adults and in the latter it cannot.” Let’s keep pushing that boulder.
Kelly McFarland is the Director of Programs and Research at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy. He has a PhD in history and experience as an intel analyst at the U.S. Department of State and a Presidential Briefing Book briefer.
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