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HOW TO WRITE HISTORY

Either you saddle your horse and become a fellow traveler of those who go forth with the simple faith that they are called upon to kill men, or you do not.

Walter Kaufmann, "Kierkegaard," From Shakespeare to Existentialism, p. 179

We have all read lifeless histories that gave us no understanding of the people or events involved. Good histories, by contrast, are alive. They not only take impartial note of all available documents, but create a convincing, vivid picture. Good histories give us a vivid understanding of real people, and a convincing picture of the way in which events people were entangled in actually came about.

But vividness implies a sense of values on the part of the historian. It implies, specifically, that the historian appreciates the reality and daily lives of his or her characters. It implies that the historian appreciates the individuality of the historical people in his or her narrative. It implies that he or she is willing to weigh the importance of those people - as well as the abstract, historical developments in which the historical figures were immersed.

To do this is not easy. To make it somewhat easier, and to increase the amount of vivid, valuable history, I would like to make a few modest proposals.

Since history is largely the account of military imperialism, of depredations, carnage, and war, and since many of us in the democratic world are modestly doing what we can to stop or reduce these evils, I suggest historians do their part as well. I suggest they contribute to the humanist cause by writing accurate, important, vivid histories. I suggest, therefore, they do the following:

Whenever some lawless despot or misguided populace has killed a number of people, mention as exactly as possible the number, location, ethnic group (if any) of the victims, and the reason (again, if any) for the slaughter.

That's it. Mainly . . . just try to mention, as exactly as possible, the number and nature of the killed.

In this way, we might actually get some sense in history of who has done what to whom. This is a matter that all too often historians leave in darkness. Yet who killed whom in history is one of history's basic facts. Without an understanding of this, what can one hope to understand? Some of the most pivotal parts of history, I argue, are killings and massacres. We need what happened in such bloody occurrences to be definitely established.

We also need other related but controversial points in history to be argued and plausibly settled.

For example, did Stalin kill more people than Hitler? How many more? How many, by comparison, did Mao kill? Were 20th century German Jews really harming good innocent Aryans? Did Mao kill as many people as Stalin, fewer, or more?

These are the facts, I believe, that every intelligent lad or lass needs to know.

By carefully attending to and writing up killings and massacres, historians would not only clarify important historical matters but (incidentally) honor the memory of the grotesquely large numbers of innocent dead.

Of course, one might -- by trying really hard -- be even more useful and vivid.

For example:

In writing of Hitler, Mao, or Stalin according to my preceding suggestion, one should prominently point out not only how many people they slew, giving some sense of how totally innocent (or how partly guilty) the slain were, and trying (if the victims were slain in an unusual or brutal manner -- as is often the case by our Western standards) to give a sense of how grotesquely they were murdered. Were they compelled to die in a forced famine? Were they shot in the head or gassed? Were their relatives billed for the bullets? Respect for the dead, for our deceased and often helpless predecessors, and disrespect for their destroyers compels us to be accurate.

By following my rules, historians might give us some imaginative feeling, some true gauge, by which to measure the texture and relative depths of different evils.

We might even try -- if we had time -- to estimate the damage done in their lifetimes by significant rotten little villains, as well as by the major culprits. For example, we might try to count the people whose lives were destroyed by figures like American Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy (1908-1957), or infamous lawyer Roy Cohn (died 1986), or the number of injured and killed in the steel mills of Scottish-American industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919).

This concludes my modest suggestions.

As a lagniappe, here are a few historical questions. I confess my own uncertainty as to their answers. It seems . . . difficult, for some reason, to find the answers to these questions in the popular press. Perhaps some knowledgeable person can help me out?

In a brief battle, the United States Navy crushed the Spanish Navy in Manila Bay in 1898. They then temporized with the Filipino insurgents; not revealing to the Filipinos that the real American purpose for being in the Philippines was to colonize the islands. Finally, the Filipinos figured this out, and went to war to free themselves. War went on to suppress the Filipinos for years. (They were led by Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964).) The question: Did the American policy of colonization in the Phillipines -- between 1898 and 1911, say -- cause the deaths of 600,000 Filipinos? Or was the number less? Were famines to starve out the populace deliberately induced? How many Filipinos (by contrast) did the Japanese kill during their occupation in 1941-1945? A greater or a lesser number?

UPDATE at 4:24 PM 30/10/2003: An American account of this war suggests perhaps only twenty-odd thousand dead Filipinos by 1903. I am examining other accounts as well and will report back.

How many million people were killed in the Americas by the accidental introduction of European diseases? How many within, say the first 20 years? 20 million? 200 million? How many were killed primarily by enslavement (especially in the Spanish conquests)? How many were killed by the deliberate introduction of European diseases? How many in the United States? How many in Canada?

How was Canada really colonized? How was most of the land of Canada removed from the aboriginal peoples? How was it that the Mississauga people removed themselves from southern Ontario to Manitoulin Island? Did they have any real choice about going? Did Joseph Brant (chief of the Mohawk) sell most of the strip five miles wide on either side of the Grand River that the British had deeded to the Six Nations? Who got the money? Did Brant have any real choice, or would the land have been taken anyway?

How many Canadian aboriginal children were killed primarily by the policy (since changed) of removing them from their families to distant assimilationist schools? How many were sexually abused? How many were killed by a similar policy in Australia? More than in Canada? Fewer?

Note on June 1, 2003. John Pilger's invaluable The New Rulers of the World is very helpful on the subject of Australia's history of genocidal policies toward its aborigines. Many depressing pages testify to the fact that Australia is in denial about its history; the current government of prime minister John Howard (ally in 2003's Gulf War II of U.S. president Geroge W. Bush) is notorious in this regard. Does anyone have any sources to recommend to me about Canadian policies?

Did Chinese Marxist leader Mao Zedong (1893-1976) kill only 400,000 landlords upon taking power in 1947 (British estimate), or a higher number? 2 or 3 million?

Did American soldiers in Vietnam kill 1,000 Vietnamese civilians a week in what we nowadays lightly call "collateral damage"? Doesn't this show an appalling lack of consideration for civilian life? How many more Mylai-style massacres were there (besides that of former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, revealed in the news media in April 2001)? UPDATE: In mid-October 2003 the Toledo Blade newspaper revealed that a massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by U.S. Army soldiers had taken place in 1967 several months prior to Mylai and was successfully covered up.

Did the British accidentally or deliberately starve hundreds of thousands of Bengalis near the end of World War II when the British had supplies adequate to feed them in warehouses? (See the autobiographical memoir of Howard Fast, the American communist writer.)

In the Korean War, did the U.S. bomb North Korea's capital Pyongyang? Did the U.S. have a bombing campaign? How many Korean civilians were killed by American bombing? 1,000,000? None? How many people died in the Korean war in the North? How many in the South? What was the ratio of the number of dead North Koreans and Chinese to the number of dead South Koreans and Allies?

Did the U.S. ever use poison gas during the Korean War? Biological weapons? (I suspect the answer is No.)

Turkey apparently tried to wipe out Armenian culture and influence in Turkey during World War I. An American historian (I think, a Californian) estimated that only a few hundred thousand Armenians had been killed by the Turks during the 1915-23 period. (He was, I believe, threatened and physically attacked -- presumably by Armenian-Americans.) Armenians say the true number killed (many by being forced from their towns and made to walk through the Syrian desert) was between 1,125,000 and 1,500,000. What is the true number in this partial genocide? Why does the Turkish government not come clean about this matter nearly 80 years after the event? Has it opened up its state files to historians?

In terms of the percentage of their ethnic group annihilated by the Turks, was the Armenian Holocaust more extensive than the Jewish one? Was the Ukrainian Holocaust of the early 1930s -- caused because the Soviet government commandeered their crops and animals -- more extensive? In absolute numbers? In terms of the percentage of the entire people that were killed? Should we be calling any one annihilation The Holocaust (as if the Jewish one were unprecedented or the only horrible genocide of the 20th century)? Please note that about 1,000,000 Sudanese were killed in the 1970s (I understand), and about 1,000,000 more in the 1980s in the war between the northern Muslim government determined to enforce Islamic law (sharia) and the southern people, mostly animists and Christians.

The British poet and historian Robert Conquest said in my presence at the University of Toronto (1980s?) that when one looked at the demographic statistics of the forced famines and dislocations of ethnic groups in the Soviet Union during the early 1930s, 16,000,000 people (largely but not solely Ukrainians) were missing. Is this number accurate? What is the breakdown of the figures, nationality by nationality? Is this perhaps the greatest holocaust (i. e., the Holocaust) of the 20th century?

What is the true number of Soviet citizens killed by Stalin, Lenin, and the Communist party of the Soviet Union? 45,000,000 (Solzhenitsyn's figure)? More? Less? Is it appropriate to call the Soviet communists "butchers"?
The Taiping rebellion in mid-nineteenth century China: how many tens of millions were killed? About 25,000,000? And how about that Chinese general from the Ming dynasty (writer Robert Payne calls him "mad") whose motto was "Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill"? According to Payne, this fellow killed 30,000,000 people in the province of Szechuan.¹ Who was he, anyway? (Suggested assignment: Find out who this guy was. Tell me what you find.) Did his actions constitute genocide by modern standards? Was this the greatest Holocaust in history? And in the Taiping rebellion, what was British general Gordon doing there, anyway? Which side did he help? Did he affect things very much? Did he do good? Did he do evil? How much of each? How did his actions fit with British imperial policy? Was he sponsored by the British government?

In 1920-1921 the British were the colonial overlords of Mesopotamia. They were the first to use poison gas against the Kurds. (They used biplanes.) How many Kurds did they kill? Did they make any effort to discriminate between fighters and civilians? What was the attitude of the League of Nations to this atrocity?

When the Israelis were fighting to create their nation in 1947-1948, we know that David Ben-Gurion had a deliberate policy of dispossessing Arabs from certain areas. (This was revealed in the memoirs of one of the Israeli soldier-politicians, Yitzhak Rabin, who was prime minister when assassinated by a settler fanatic in 1995. I have since read it in another source: The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities by the Israeli politician Simha Flapan, Pantheon Books, New York, 1987.) Did the Israelis do this in certain areas by shelling and mortaring Arab towns from the hills? Did they then create the propaganda lie that the Arabs had voluntarily left these towns because they were called upon to do so (supposedly only for a few days, by which time the Jews would be destroyed by the encircling Arab armies) by their mullahs and muezzins? Did the mullahs in fact urge the Arab populace to flee? (Flapan, incidentally, denies this last.)

Has the United States in recent years destroyed all of its cache of biological weapons? A friend assures me this is true. If so, it would be remarkable.

How many suitcase-sized nuclear weapons did the United States build? How many did the Soviet Union? Did the Soviet Union ever send any to its Washington embasssy? If the United States did build such weapons, does it still have any? (I have heard a rumor that John F. Kennedy believed the Soviets had a suitcase nuke in their Washington embassy. I have also heard that the Soviet Union at one time had over 310 suitcase nukes, of which only 84 have been accounted for. Anyone know?)

Dear reader, the above may contain errors. Please weigh in here with the truth. For I am very eager to learn from you.

grantsky@ca.inter.net

Notes

¹ Robert Payne, Mao Tse-tung, Abelard-Schuman Ltd., 1962 (pp. 13-14 in the 1966 Pyramid paperback edition).

HOW TO WRITE HISTORY

Notes

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