1.4: History and Power

History is Too Often the Fruit of Power

The old cliché is that history is written by the victors, but a more accurate version of this idea, as expressed by the Haitian scholar Michel-Ralph Trouillot, is that “history is the fruit of power.” (Trouillot 2015, 3) Power, in other words, determines which of the many possible narratives about a historical event get told. To illustrate this let’s look at the most famous event of the 20th century: World War II. 

During that conflict the United States and the Soviet Union were allies and both contributed to the ultimate victory over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Yet, histories produced in the two countries after the war narrated the events in a dramatically different fashion. How could two participants, indeed partners, in the same conflict produce such distinct and, in many ways, contradictory accounts? Why didn’t Soviet narratives influence American understandings of the war and vice versa? The answer to both these questions is that providing a factual accounting of events was never the sole, or even the most significant purpose, of the narratives. Instead, the histories were told as a series of facts that could be put together to carry a message that was useful to the power structure. Soviet histories referred to WWII as the Great Patriotic War. A war in which a brutal and unforeseeable Nazi invasion was resisted only through the collective bravery, strength, character, and sacrifice of the Soviet people. In the end, it was because of these heroic efforts by the Soviets that humanity was rescued from the evils of Hitler and fascism. The United States was a more open society with less centralized control over the production of history, but even given the greater diversity of American narratives of the war, those narratives still tended to follow similar beats. American histories concluded with a similar lesson as that of the Soviets except with the U.S. stepping into the role as the savior of the world. 

The problem with these narratives is not their lack of facts, nor that they are untrue, but that in their very nature, they are about selecting certain facts over other facts and particular perspectives over multiple perspectives. The Soviet story seems much more heroic if we begin it in June 1941 when the Nazi invasion began and not August 1939 when the non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was signed. Similarly, the righteousness of the United States seems greatest if we focus, for instance, on American troops liberating Nazi concentration camps in 1945 and less so if we ask why 937 Jewish refugees were denied entry to the country in June 1939 (most of whom ended up dying in those same concentration camps), why the military that fought in Europe and Asia was segregated, why Japanese-Americans faced internment, or why Japanese and German civilians were seen as suitable targets for American bombs. In an even broader sense, the story of the Second World War looks very different when we extend the timeline beyond the 1930s and beyond the European perspective. Doing that uncovers a lot of truths that the traditional national narratives tend to hide. That is because such a timeline would reveal that the evil of Hitler and the Nazis was not an aberration, not a sudden departure from the path of progress, but a perfectly predictable outcome based on the structure of the modern world. More to the point, to the hundreds of millions of people who had been subject to both the daily indignities as well as the more sporadic bouts of extraordinary violence that defined life in the colonized world or in the segregated United States, the rise of fascism did not emerge in the 1920s, it had been there all along. 

When the African-American writer and intellectual Langston Hughes traveled to Spain in 1936 to report on the ongoing Civil War between Spanish republicans and rebellious nationalists supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, he came to very different conclusions than a white journalist might have. Rather than being shocked by the ideology of the rebels and their allies, it all seemed very familiar to Hughes. He concluded his 1937 poem “Love Letter from Spain,” written to a fictional lover in Alabama, by explaining one big difference between Spain and the United States:

Just now I’m goin';
To take a Fascist town.
Fascists is Jim Crow peoples, honey- 

And here we shoot ‘em down. (“Anti-Fascism: Langston Hughes”) 

When we allow for a perspective that comes from outside what Galleano called “the system of power” the past begins to look very different. That system is very good at hiding its role in the production of history. Historians have too often provided cover for the system and to make up for that we must now do our part to reveal the process by which history is constructed. To complete the Trouillot quote that began this section, “The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, [exposing] its roots.”