“Who controls the previous controls the long run: who controls the current controls the previous.” This quote from George Orwell’s world-famous novel “1984” describes in a single sentence the significance of historical past in politics.
The quote finds a spot within the preface of the lately printed guide “Dancing on Bones,” authored by journalist Katie Stallard. Within the guide, she described how the leaders of Russia, China and North Korea use historical past for their very own functions.
“Authoritarian regimes acknowledge the facility and the resonance of historical past. They see historical past as an important instrument to producing widespread help,” Stallard advised DW.
Historical past generates legitimacy, is intently linked to the identification of residents, and affords a bonus to authoritarian rulers in that it may be manipulated as required, she stated. “Financial fortunes come and go. Historical past is the factor you possibly can depend on.”
Historical past as justification for the Ukraine conflict
Russia’s conflict towards Ukraine reveals the lethal penalties historic revisionism can have.
In July 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin printed an essay, titled, “On the historic unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
In it, Putin accused the West of pursuing a “harmful revisionism” and pressured that he — as an “all-knowing statesman” who is aware of the “one historic fact” — needed to counter this, historian Andreas Kappeler described in an evaluation for the journal Osteuropa.
The reality, in keeping with Putin, is: Russians and Ukrainians have at all times been a single non secular folks. It’s the West that’s making an attempt to show Ukraine into an “anti-Russia” entity.
Russia would by no means enable this and would forestall it by power of arms if obligatory, he pressured. On Might 9, when Russia yearly celebrates victory over Nazi Germany in World Battle II, Putin repeated his view of issues and went even additional, claiming that the West had deliberate an assault on Russia.
Putin’s Chilly Battle worldview
The narrative of supposed Russian-Ukrainian unity, which the West is pushing towards, is a part of a bipolar worldview and pondering in nice energy classes, Kappeler famous.
For Putin, solely large powers — like Russia, the US and China, for instance — matter, and “small” states like Ukraine don’t have any agenda of their very own. The good powers, in flip, are engaged in an ideological competitors that’s waged by any means obligatory.
This view of Putin, which Kappeler describes as a conspiracy principle, is mixed with ethnic nationalism and the thesis that allegedly Nazis have taken energy in Ukraine.
All this helps join it to “an important ingredient of Russian integration ideology: the Soviet victory over Hitler’s Germany,” Kappeler stated, including that Putin’s worldview is that of a secret service agent of the now collapsed Soviet Union.
Xi Jinping: Helmsman of historical past
Many patterns of the ethno-nationalist view of historical past of Putin and his supporters within the Kremlin can be noticed amongst Chinese language leaders.
But China needs to do higher than the Soviet Union, which Chinese language President Xi Jinping repeatedly cites as a cautionary story.
Xi believes the Soviet Union disintegrated as a result of its leaders didn’t eradicate the “historic nihilism” that undermined religion within the communist trigger.
To keep away from the destiny of the Soviet Union, the Chinese language Communist Occasion (CCP) got here up with, amongst different issues, an up to date official historical past of the celebration in 2021 that’s closely tailor-made to serve Xi’s pursuits.
“Getting into the brand new period, Basic Secretary Xi Jinping has led us to investigate the mechanism of evolution and discover the legal guidelines of historical past from the lengthy river of historical past, the tide of the instances and the worldwide storm, and has made the fitting alternative at each main historic juncture,” the Folks’s Day by day, the celebration’s mouthpiece, wrote of Xi.
The CCP’s narrative is disseminated within the press, social media, cinema, and laptop video games. Various views are unlawful.
The celebration ensures unity
The official Occasion narrative determines what could also be thought and written in China.
Xi’s conception of historical past affords “an ideological framework which justifies higher and higher ranges of celebration intervention in politics, the economic system and overseas coverage,” says Kevin Rudd, former Australian prime minister and China professional.
The CCP makes use of historical past to justify its energy: Earlier than the Communist takeover, China was weak and divided. The disunity enabled the West to humiliate the nation. Solely the CCP, the subtext goes, was in a position to unify the nation and lead it to its former glory.
The CCP is continuous what Chinese language nationalists had began within the nineteenth century, as Invoice Hayton identified in his guide “The Invention of China.”
At the moment, China’s historical past was retroactively reinterpreted to determine a Han-Chinese language unitary tradition. The traditions of the Manchus, the Mongols and plenty of different ethnic teams have been written out of historical past to make manner for the imaginative and prescient of a China that had at all times been united.
At present the Uyghurs and the Tibetans are on the receiving finish of this historic revisionism, with them being pressured into re-education camps and having their language and tradition suppressed.
It’s becoming on this context that in 2013, Xi, addressing the CCP Central Committee on the significance of historical past, quoted Confucian scholar Gong Zhishen as saying: “To destroy a rustic, you need to first eradicate its historical past,”
He meant this as a warning to those that query the 5000-year unity of China.
Whereas it’s true that there was some continuity of language and Confucian doctrine, it’s inaccurate to say that the Han-Chinese language tradition has at all times been dominant in what’s now the territory of the Folks’s Republic of China.
In truth, the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was the final through which the Han Chinese language dominated. For hundreds of years earlier than that, dynasties from different peoples, such because the Mongols, dominated over most of what’s now China. The final dynasty was based by the Manchu and dominated from 1644 till the proclamation of the republic on January 1, 1912.
Within the will to create a unified historical past from which at the moment’s Russia and the Folks’s Republic of China emerged with out rupture, issues have come full circle to some extent the place Putin, who denies or distorts the historical past of Ukraine, is now in a position to declare that Russians and Ukrainians are one folks.
‘Recovered Territory’
As well as, there’s an obsession with territorial points in each techniques. Putin’s historic statements largely exclude the crimes of the Stalin period, however commit appreciable consideration to the territory of the Soviet Union, which additionally included Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states, the states of Central Asia, and others.
China, in the meantime, has laid declare to the complete South China Sea — a waterbody the scale of the Mediterranean — primarily based on what it says is its historic proper to the realm.
On the similar time, it refuses to acknowledge the choice of the Worldwide Courtroom of Arbitration, which declared all historic claims null and void.
Laying emphasis on territorial disputes has two features, in keeping with Stallard.
On the one hand, it emphasizes the humiliations of the previous: one thing was taken away from us that was rightfully ours. And on the similar time, it highlights the energy of the present leaders: we’re taking again what’s ours, she defined.
“That is a part of defending sovereignty, of the thought that you’re a sturdy nation which could be pleased with itself and defend your self.”
No competing views allowed
Even when there are variations within the content material of the historic narratives in Russia and China — China’s extra pronounced persona cult round Xi, as an illustration — the patterns are clear.
Each techniques declare a unity and continuity that by no means existed. Anybody who questions them in Russia or China should count on extreme punishment.
They assemble an exterior enemy, the West, from which solely they — Putin and Xi respectively — can save the nation and hyperlink historical past to territorial claims.
“The impulse to control historical past for political functions will not be a uniquely authoritarian trait,” Stallard stated. However solely authoritarian techniques clamp down on dissent.
This text was initially written in German.
Edited by: Sou-Jie van Brunnersum