Abstract
Although governments and other institutions rely on past experience to guide them they know that all history is shaped by the participants and they try to shape it themselves. Totalitarian governments try for years afterwards to hide their horrific crimes by lies and repression. But democratic politicians also lie and obfuscate when faced with intensive questions from the media. However, if they acquire a reputation for mendacity the public will quickly turn against them. In wartime they censor the media often with enthusiastic public support and they sometimes do the same in a time of general peace when publication of particular facts may lead to violence between communities. If historians can eventually show what ‘really happened’ they have to follow a tortuous road.
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Notes
- 1.
An exception in the modern world was the ‘Islamic State’ which ruled over parts of Syria and Iraq in 2015 and 2016. It boasted of its atrocities and displayed them on the media to terrorise people. It delighted in its ability to shock the liberal West.
- 2.
Ulrich Herbert, Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labour in Germany under the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997.
- 3.
See, for example, Eugenia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind, Collins/Harvill, London, 1981 and Mukhamet Shayakhmetov, The Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad under Stalin, Rookery, New York, 2006. For general Soviet policy, see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971 and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–1956, Collins/Fontana, London, 1974.
- 4.
Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva and Wojciech Materski, Katyn: A Crime Without Punishment, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2007, pp. 137–138.
- 5.
Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, Public Opinion 1935–1946, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1951, pp. 1062, 1063, 1065.
- 6.
Stefan Korboniski, Warsaw in Exile, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1966, pp. 77–86.
- 7.
‘Katyn killings cast a long shadow on tour’, The Times, 4 July 1988; Bernard Levin, ‘Stalin’s authorised massacre’, The Times, 13 April 1993.
- 8.
Fortunately, a monument was set up in Washington in 2015 to the murdered Ukrainians.
- 9.
N. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, Andre Deutsch, London, 1971. ‘Khrushchev’s Secret Speech’, Appendix 4, p. 572.
- 10.
Paul Hollander, ‘The Ideological Pilgrim’, Encounter, November 1973, pp. 3–15; David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1988.
- 11.
In fact there is evidence that Hitler was encouraged in his genocidal ambitions by his interpretation of Marx and Engels and by Soviet example, see George Watson, ‘Race and the Socialists’, Encounter, November 1976, pp. 15–23 and ‘Was Hitler a Marxist?’, Encounter, December 1984, pp. 19–25.
- 12.
Kim Philby, My Silent War, Granada, London, 1969, p. 7. See also George Blake, No Other Choice: An Autobiography, Jonathan Cape, London, 1990.
- 13.
He also killed those Soviet citizens who wanted to help the West, see Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievski, KGB: The Inside Story, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1990, p. 321.
- 14.
Five out of the top six were authoritarian monarchs or dictators, and Stalin was only defeated by about 5500 votes; ‘At last, Stalin is defeated by voters’, The Times, 29 December 2008. The Soviet Union and India were linked diplomatically during the Cold War but India’s culture could hardly be a greater contrast, Indians regard Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa as their icons. See ‘NDTV poll: icons from Mahatma Gandhi to Sachin’, The Hindu, 12 August 2007.
- 15.
Simon Sebag Montefiori, ‘Is the greatest Russian Stalin or Nicholas? The answer in obvious’, The Times, 18 July 2008.
- 16.
Yitzhak M. Brudny, ‘Myths and national identity in post-communist Russia’ in Gerard Bouchard Editor, National Myths: Constructed Pasts, Contested Presents, Routledge, London, 2013, pp. 148–151. See also ‘NATO publics blame Russia for Ukrainian Crisis, but reluctant to provide military aid’, pp. 8–9, Pew Research Center, 10 June 2015.
- 17.
John Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics, Duckworth Overlook, London, 2011, pp. 71–72.
- 18.
Chris Woods, Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars, Hurst, London, 2015, chaps 11 and 12.
- 19.
Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten: The Official Biography, Fontana/Collins, London, 1986, p. 556.
- 20.
Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1984, pp. 574–575.
- 21.
Richard Nixon, The Memoirs of Richard Nixon, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1978.
- 22.
Frank Snepp, Decent Interval: The American Debacle in Vietnam and the Fall of Saigon, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, p. 474.
- 23.
Eric Schlosser, Command and Control, Penguin, London, 2014.
- 24.
Graham Rhys-Jones, Churchill and the Norway Campaign, Pen and Sword, Barnsley, 2008. Ivan Simson, Singapore: Too Little too Late, Leo Cooper, London, 1970; Major-General S. Woodburn Kirby, Singapore: The Chain of Disaster, Cassell, London, 1970; Clifford Kinvig, Scapegoat; General Percival of Singapore, Brasseys, London, 1996.
- 25.
George E. Melton, From Versailles to Mers el-Kebir, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2015. For Churchill’s version see Winston Churchill, The Second World War: Volume 11, Their Finest Hour, Reprint Society, London, 1951, pp. 194–202.
- 26.
Louisa Burns-Bisogno, Censoring Irish Nationalism: The British, Irish and American Suppression of Republican Images in Film and Television 1905–1995, McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1997.
- 27.
Burns-Bisogno, Censoring Irish Nationalism, p. 125.
- 28.
Wolfsfeld, Media, p. 227.
- 29.
Wolfsfeld, Media, p. 180.
- 30.
Cantril, Public Opinion, p. 1131.
- 31.
See the contemporary defence of the right to demonstrate by Hans Morgenthau in Hans J. Morgenthau, Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade 1960–70, Pall Mall Press, London, 1970, pp. 45–50, 409.
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Towle, P. (2018). Hiding Victimisation. In: History, Empathy and Conflict. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77959-1_10
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