Torture and the crimes of history:
not too much masochism pleaseOpenness and transparency exact a price
in terms of public confidence in institutions, a price that may
eventually lead to a reaction
Michael White
Wednesday 10 March 2010 11.06 GMT
guardian.co.uk
What caught my eye in today’s papers was not ex-M15 head Eliza
Manningham-Buller’s admission that she was ignorant of the Bush
administration’s 9/11 torture policy, welcome though that was. No, it
was Lizzy Davies’s report that light is finally being shown on a far
more shameful chapter in French history.
You probably know a little about it, as most French people do – and
will now know more because of the acclaimed new film, La Rafle du Vel
d’Hiv – The Winter Velodrome Raid. Jacques Chirac apologised for what
happened in 1995, but it has always been murky.
The film tells the story of the 1942 round-up by French police of
13,000 French Jews and their dispatch to their deaths, most of them,
in German concentration camps. They were held initially at the sports
site in the Paris suburbs; hence the film’s name.
There’s no point in being smug about this. The story of the German
occupation of France is complex, full of heroism as well as shades of
villainy and complicity – as director Rose Bosch shows in her film.
No, the question is one of transparency, of confronting our own
uncomfortable past, collective and personal. It’s never easy. France
buried the occupation after the liberation of 1944, as Spain did its
own civil war horrors – until very recently.
Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity attempted to address crucial
issues, including collaboration and antisemitism ("better Hitler than
[the French Jewish politician Léon] Blum" was a slogan of the 30s), in
1969. It was banned on French TV until 1981.
Would the British have done any better if occupied? Do we sufficiently
confront our own past? Tricky questions, as last night’s
Manningham-Buller speech to a meeting in the House of Lords
underlines.
"We did lodge a protest," she said without further elaboration.
The Americans are our allies and we were facing a terrorist threat
whose scope and power we could not easily judge. The Bush White House
opted for the doubtful expediency of waterboarding and other
practices, many of which must be regarded as torture.
What did we know and when did we know it, are questions the Guardian
and others have been asking.
Similar dilemmas were agonised over the western alliance with Stalin
in 1941-45. By then enough was known about the Great Terror and other
horrors to make the partnership an act of uneasy expediency.
Ah yes, but what about our own crimes? 20th century dictators
sometimes claimed only to be taking the racist and imperialist
fantasies of the "liberal democracies" to a more robust conclusion
because they were in a hurry to catch up. Alas, there is some truth in
it.
Did we not learn during the Haiti earthquake that vicious reparations
(for the loss of slave property and land) imposed by republican France
helped cripple the island state for most of its history? What about
British troops’ conduct during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya? And in
the bloody retreat from Aden, now Yemen, in 1968, about which the
Times has been reporting lately?
By coincidence this week has seen two stabs at important revisionism
come to my attention. On Radio 4’s Today programme an Indian
politician and historian called Jaswant Singh discussed his book on
Muhammed Ali Jinnah with expat British writer William Dalrymple. The
founder of Pakistan has been "horrifyingly caricatured" by history,
according to Dalrymple.
I don’t know the truth of the matter, but had always gone along with
the consensus that made Gandhi and Nehru the heroes of Indian
independence in 1947, and the intractable Jinnah the bad guy who
insisted on a separate Muslim state, now two, where federalism would
have been a better solution.
Singh, who must be a Sikh (millions were forced to flee Pakistani
Punjab), says otherwise, that the usual mixture of miscalculation,
impatience (not least bankrupt Britain’s to quit India), and
personalities all played their part. Needless to say his book has been
attacked in Hindu India and its author ostracised.
Our version comes from Freedom at Midnight, with which Lord
Mountbatten, the last viceroy, cooperated, Dalrymple explained. It is
also the basis for Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning biopic Gandhi,
where General Reginald Dyer (Edward Fox) gets a kicking for his role
in the 1919 Amritsar massacre.
There was a lot of trouble at home and in India about that. The
official inquiry said 379 demonstrators were shot by British troops,
200 injured. Indians put the figure at 1,000 dead, 500 injured. The
issue is unresolved except in the sense that it contributed to the
loss of authority which was fast destroying the Raj.
The second controversy worth checking out is far vaster in scale: the
Turkish massacres of Armenians within the tottering Ottoman empire in
1915 that Norman Stone, brilliant and provocative as ever, asserts was
not genocide. Readers take him to task on the need to confront the
past today.
Brilliant he may be, but I suspect that Stone, an ex-Oxford history
professor now teaching in Ankara, is overstating his case for the
defence for an ethnic cleansing policy in which an alleged 1.5 million
people died.
But the issue reverberates today because the US Congress and the EU
are threatening a major rift with the key Nato ally in the region by
pressing genocidal guilt on the Middle East’s only successful, secular
Muslim state – just as it totters between east and west, Islam and
modernity.
Just so Muhammed Ali Jinnah’s reputation. India heads for 10% annual
growth and superpower status while Pakistan is – to quote an
Anglo-Asian playwright – "sodomised by religion" and other problems.
Divided Kashmir, part of the legacy of 1947, remains a focus of
profound tensions expressed in 2008’s Mumbai bombs.
And little old us? My working assumption is that Britain has
confronted its imperial demons better than France, partly because
history was kinder, partly because the Anglo-Saxons have a stronger
instinct for what we now call openness and transparency.
So it is hard to imagine Pontecorvo’s great 1966 film The Battle of
Algiers doing as well at the Cannes film festival so close to the
Algerian war it brutally depicts (torture and all) as the
Oscar-winning Hurt Locker and films like it have done so close to the
Iraq war. Indeed, it was banned for five years.
But openness and transparency exact a price in terms of public
confidence in institutions, a price that may eventually lead to a
reaction. So my other hunch is that in Britain we have reached a stage
where we may just be overdoing the masochism strategy, the
self-flagellation, in our dissection of this and many aspects of
public policy. The destruction of trust is corrosive.
In matters of knowledge, complicity and cover-ups involving sexual
abuse of children, popes, past and present, have a great deal more to
account for than Manningham-Buller, the current pope’s brother too
judging by today’s reports from that Catholic boarding school in
Bavaria.
But the Catholic church knows how to take the long view, keep things
in perspective and play hardball when it has to. That must be why it’s
still standing.