The problem with history | The Saturday Paper

History does not stay in the past. That is the problem with history.

We are always told to remember. You know the old quote by George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Santayana wrote about the dangers of progress, not history. If we are always changing, he argued, we risk oblivion. We cannot deny our ancestors.

“Spiritual unity flows like sap,” he said, “from the common root to the outermost blossom.”

I am connected to my ancestors and carry not only their bloodline but also our eternal, collective memory. What happens then – to quote another great thinker, the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz – when these are memories of wounds?

I have felt the pain of my ancestors over the past few weeks as my Wiradjuri people celebrated 200 years of what we call the Homeland Wars – Subscribe in our language.

In 1824, colonial governor Thomas Brisbane declared martial law in the Bathurst region of New South Wales. The proclamation authorized “the use of arms against the natives beyond the normal rule of law in time of peace.”

The Wiradjuri were excluded from the protection of the law. Brisbane's decree was a last-ditch attempt to break Wiradjuri resistance to the invasion and land theft. A bounty was placed on the head of the Wiradjuri leader Windradyne.

There are horrific stories of poisonings and shootings. The number of Wiradjuri killed is estimated to be in the hundreds or thousands.

In recent weeks, Wiradjuri people have gathered in Bathurst to commemorate and celebrate their survival. I have chosen not to go. My heart is deeply there and family members were there. Their voices should be heard, not mine. I wish them strength.

I didn't want to be in a place where it hurt. I didn't want to open up the wounds. I wrote about this war, I spoke about this war and I was insulted and threatened by those who don't want to hear our truth.

It has taken a terrible psychological toll.

Instead of attending these commemorations, I have chosen to rest in my beautiful Wiradjuri land, lying by a stream, surrounded by hills and in peace.

I don't know what to do with the story anymore.

This is not about numbers or explanations. This is not about facts – which we can all learn – or memories.

This is about how history shapes us. It is buried in our bones, burned into our souls. The phantom wounds of our ancestors feel more real than our own. Perhaps they are because they run deeper.

Maybe it's better if we just forget about it. Santayana said that too: “Mortality has its compensations: one is that all evil is transitory, another is that better times may come.”

Is it better to take our history with us to the grave and let the unborn come into the world anew?

There is a Chinese myth about the old woman Meng, who sits at the exit of the underworld and serves the broth of forgetfulness. The reincarnated forget their past lives, even their language.

Ancient civilizations knew the dangers of too many memories. At the end of the Athenian civil war, citizens swore not to remember past tragedies. They were not allowed to harbor grudges.

The Greeks knew something about revenge; their myths told of the Erinyes, the goddesses of vengeance who visited children with the crimes of their parents.

Today, history is all too often associated with revenge. Reflecting on Ireland's bloody, sectarian history, Yeats wrote:

There is nothing but our own red blood

Can produce a real rose tree.

Nothing but blood: the price of justice.

Tyrants swear never to forget and feed their people a bitter grudge. Vladimir Putin laments the end of the Soviet empire as the greatest political catastrophe of the 20th century. It is a scar on his soul. Osama bin Laden never stopped leading the crusades.

History meets militant nostalgia. Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reminds his people of the greatness of the Ottoman Empire. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán tells his people that they were cheated after the end of World War I, when the country lost two-thirds of its territory. He swears that this will never happen again.

Donald Trump is still campaigning with the slogan “Make America Great Again.” He promises a Valhalla of personal insults and racist slander.

Samuel Beckett wrote, “His birth was his death,” and there is perhaps no more fitting phrase for someone like Xi Jinping. Xi was born with the bread of the apocalypse in his mouth. He never tires of telling his people about the hundred years of humiliation brought about by the Opium Wars and the collapse of the Qing Empire, which was only ended by the triumph of the communist revolution.

China's return to power comes with no small amount of revenge.

This attitude is not unfounded. The arrogance of the West has rubbed salt into the wounds of the humiliated peoples.

Nietzsche described this as resentmentThe man from resentmenthe wrote, “loves hidden corners, winding paths and back doors.” History is a wound that must be scratched again and again without ever being allowed to heal.

The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin was persecuted by the Angelus Novusa monoprint by Paul Klee. Benjamin bought it and hung it in every apartment he lived in, even when he fled to Paris to escape Nazi Germany.

Benjamin saw something of the torture of history in the picture. Klee depicted an angel retreating from the viewer with outstretched wings, open mouth and staring eyes.

“This is how one imagines the angel of history,” wrote Benjamin. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe that piles rubble upon rubble and hurls it at his feet.”

Am I the angel of history? The man of resentmentIs history just one big catastrophe?

These are difficult questions. When we look at history, we see a pool of ripples and only a distorted image of ourselves. There is too much of it to change what we cannot change.

That's one of the reasons I stayed away from the Bathurst commemorations. I don't dare deal with history. It can bring out the worst in me.

In his refreshing 2017 book Praise of ForgettingJournalist and philosopher David Rieff has warned that “thinking about history is more paralyzing than encouraging.” He says we are in danger of turning it into a “formula for endless complaining and revenge.”

However, too much forgetting also brings dangers. We owe it to ourselves to remember. As Paul Ricoeur said: Forgetting buries the victims twice.

There is so much nonsense being written about history, platitudes about finding the truth and healing. I have heard it all again in the last few weeks. When the truth is told, we can all walk together.

Our world tells us something completely different. Truth is subjective and controversial. Memory is flawed. Witnesses are unreliable. History is used as a weapon by victors and victims.

At the heart of every conflict I have covered in my 40 years as a journalist has been identity, strained through the sieve of history.

Santayana is taken out of context. Yes, we should be wary of advances that destroy our traditions; but when it comes to history, we can have too many memories, too many false memories.

Hegel saw history as a slaughterhouse, but also as an engine of progress. It led us to an ultimate ethical state: the end of history itself. Western liberal triumphalism declared the end of the Cold War and the defeat of the “evil empire” to be the end of history. How wrong that was.

There is another reaction to the story: forgiveness.

Theologian Miroslav Volf was scarred by the wars in the former Yugoslavia. As a Croat, he had to ask himself whether he could hug a Chetnik (Serbian guerrilla fighter). No, he said – but he had to.

Volf says we must remember correctly. We must not forget, but we must free ourselves from the “disease of memory.”

When Windradyne led his proud people over the Blue Mountains to Parramatta to meet Governor Brisbane, he reportedly wore a hat with the word “Peace” written on the brim.

That is his legacy. That is the task Windradyne gives us. I remember him in the right way. I remember the suffering of all my people. I honor God when I dedicate myself to peace.

It is the essence of the Wiradjuri way of life – Yinyamarrato live quietly with respect and love.

When I remember, I find a way to forget the unforgettable.