THE USE AND ABUSE OF MEMORY AND HISTORY

IN MILITARY PEDAGOGY

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past,

controls the future”. - George Orwell

“It is only through knowledge of its history that a society can have knowledge

of itself”. - Arthur Marwick

INTRODUCTION

(47) Most Western European and North American military academies make extensive use of history in their educational curricula; certainly within the British military pedagogy political and military history is a major medium of teaching and learning. For the most part the place and role of history is largely unquestioned within most western military pedagogies.

(48) The ultimate context for the role of history in military pedagogy is the role of history in human life. The conceptual landscape circumscribing our discussion is philosophical and historiographical in nature. It is made up by such concepts as memory, collective memory, the duty of memory, and forgetting. This landscape affords fruitful tensions and it allows us a broad perspective that perhaps will yield new and unexpected insights and viewpoints. It is our intention to problematize the centrality of history as an unquestioned “given” in military pedagogy and suggest a different, more complex understanding of it and thereby a different role for it from what usually seems to be the case.

(49) While both history and memory are vital ingredients in our lives, they may not be unconditional goods. We shall argue that the potential for abuse is great, and that those teaching history in military academies have to be acutely aware of that fact. The relationships between history and memory are manifold. Basically history is vaster than memory; it has the whole apparatus of science at its disposal, it is explicit and aims at true representations of the past. Memory, on the other hand, may be implicit, biased, and its aim of being faithful to the past makes it highly susceptible to various forms of abuse. But neither is history a neutral form of inquiry, and historians may have an agenda of their own. Richard Evans (2004) argues that the historical writings about the Third Reich are not becoming more academic and scientific, but less. Many historians, he says, speaking about this particular field of research, exhibit an increasing tendency to downplay analysis, argumentation and rigorous treatment of evidence in favour of passing moral judgments. Whether he is correct or not, we may draw the twin lessons that historians like other academicians must be conscious of their own role and how they represent history, and that consumers of history also need to be aware both that historical descriptions may be distorted and that historians may have an agenda. The French philosopher Voltaire is reported to have said about history that it teaches only those events that meet the conditions of memory. For Voltaire, this meant that history as an academic discipline was barred from principled thinking and comparative analyses. For us in this context, should Voltaire be right, it would mean that history would lose its capacity to expand or refute memory.

(50) We shall proceed by first laying out our conceptual landscape. Second, we shall examine more closely the uses and abuses of history in military pedagogy; and finally we shall look at history in post civil conflict countries, where we shall argue that forgetting emerges as an imperative. And here we find the paradox that provides the all-pervasive tension both of history and of our article: memories of historical events are vital ingredients in peoples’ and nations’ identity, and all nations have voices reminding us of that which “we must not forget”. Yet in some circumstances such memories stand in the way of reconciliation and peaceful coexistence.

Date: 2015-01-02; view: 845