You Have Your History, I Have Mine

Recently, it seems, one headline after another has been rooted in the long ago. Poland’s prime minister demands an apology after the FBI director suggests that the Poles were complicit in the Holocaust. Turkey’s president rails against the pope for saying that, a century ago, the Turks committed genocide against the Armenians. Japan’s prime minister asks to amend an American history book that accuses Japanese troops in World War II of forcing Korean women into prostitution — the so-called comfort women.

Lies, all lies, they say.

Day after day, the news is filled with such conflict, not over what is but what was. The past proves to be as inflammatory as the present. "The past is never dead, it’s not even past," observed William Faulkner. In grade school, we learned history was composed of accepted facts and dates that neatly yielded to true-and-false quizzes. As adults, we discover history to be utterly fluid, a changeling that spurns hard facts and cold truths. Far from the calm reflecting pool presented to us in youth, we now see it as a caldron of resentment and recrimination. History does not resolve. It festers.

But these days I am left to wonder what remains of history, and what can be trusted of a past that is forever at the beck and call of a self-serving present. Is anything indisputable? The corpses, the annexations, the genocides are all now punctuated by question marks and asterisks, entangled in the dialectics of nationalism and identity politics. Does historical fact even exist, or is it simply a relativistic construct?

History has always been suspect. More than 2,000 years ago, Herodotus became known as both "The Father of History" and "The Father of Lies." More recently, Henry Ford declared that "history is more or less bunk." But today, more than ever, it seems history has hijacked the headlines, become the fault line between friends and foes, and a frontline in the culture wars. It’s not as if we don’t already have enough discord to occupy us without having to dip into the past. But there it is. Today’s lesson: There is no "was," only "is." ...