As a young man in college – a boy, really – I invited as an officer of the Society of Saints and Scholars at University College Galway (or NUI Galway, as we were being invited to call it) the ‘revisionist historian’ David Irving to come and give a talk on his philosophy of history. To say that he was controversial would be an understatement, although I do remember thinking at the time that the pejorative ‘revisionist’ in the soubriquet to which he was referred seemed both unnecessary and political. Were not all historians in some way revisionist? Otherwise, what was their function? In any case, and I don’t quite remember the ins and outs of the thing, there was a lot of hoo-hah and the event never happened, notwithstanding the man’s acceptance of our invitation.

I remember that of particular interest to me had been his book on the Bombing of Dresden (1963), which had been a major part of a debate in the 1960s about the pervasive and suffocating narrative of World War II – Axis/Nazis bad, Allies/UK/USA good, that sort of thing. It was clinical, uncomplicated. The unnecessary and vengeful carpet bombing of Dresden was most certainly an act of terribly ferocity with tens of thousands of people killed in a few days, at a time when some argue – including Irving – that the Nazis had been substantially defeated. The German authorities themselves claimed at the time that 200,000 had been killed, and other reports even exceeded that number, though today the widely held view is that it was closer to 25,000. Irving may have been controversial at the time, and in subsequent years he was entirely discredited, supporting neo-Nazi groups and establishing himself as a prominent holocaust denier. While ‘technically’ not a war crime, the laws of war were substantially codified in response to World War II, and the authors were not about to retrospectively indict the victors.

There are many histories in these stories, laid down at different times, by different political actors. The German government claimed a high number, the Americans claimed only legitimate targets, and the attention-seeking historian could only ever have railed against the consensus. For what use is there for an attention seeker who agrees with everyone? In the aftermath of the War, of course, the defeat of Germany and Japan in particular was so profound, and the post-war settlement so suppressive, that it was inevitable that the Anglo-American narrative would win out. For the post-War generation, for that twenty years between 1945 and 1965, a comfortable consensus bedded in the Allies-Good / Axis-Bad dichotomy, until the 1960s came and the children of that generation started asking their parents questions about whether that story was legitimate. In America, they questions whether the basis for the war in Vietnam and other quagmires was viable, and whether there was another point of view that was being airbrushed. In Britain, persistent economic depression forced the younger generation to question the national story too. The establishment responded with non-sequitur positions, asking whether those young people were somehow on ‘the wrong side’, taking a challenge to the status quo as a rejection of orthodoxy. At that stage, the enemy had morphed from the Nazis to the Communists, and so those contrarians were swept up in the red scare.

I am currently reading both Jim Banner’s The Ever Changing Past: Why All History is Revisionist History, and Carlos Eire’s Reformations: The Early Modern World 1450-1650. Banner’s excellent and short book was triggered by an interaction with Justice Clarence Thomas of the US Supreme Court who let him know that he had spent some time reading everything he could on the history of slavery, though not the revisionists. His thought – like mine, in considering Irving way back in the early 1990s – was that all history is revisionist. The history of slavery that Thomas referred to – presumably that it was a bad thing and needed to be ended – was itself originally revisionist at a time when slavery was viewed in economic rather than ethical terms. Eire’s Reformations – a similarly excellent though much longer book – has many sections to recommend it in the context of revisionism, though in the first instance its title – pluralized – already suggests that the simple narrative of ‘Reformation’ is unacceptable. The two sections that I refer to are its introduction, and its consideration of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

The introduction is worth quoting from: ‘This book does not argue that the West became “modern” as a result of the Reformations; nor does it attempt to pinpoint the birth of modernity. Determining the birth of modernity with precision or defining its essence has become something of an obsession for scholars lately, and also a fierce competition. Not surprisingly, as conflicting claims for a definitive assessment of modernity continue to proliferate, the usefulness of the concept diminishes. What this book does concern itself with is transformations and transitions, and with their effects on the Western world.’ (p. xvii) In other words, Eire is resiling from the temptation to box-in the phenomena he is describing, referring to them as processes rather than events. Similarly, he is not assigning epochal agency – that one phase of history begat another, as “The Reformation” may have birthed “Modernity”.

The second section that I refer to, relating to the counter-reformation, is on the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dialectic, ‘self’ and ‘other’. In assessing its character, his starting point is Bishop Frances de Sales, whose criticism of Protestantism generally was that it was different, that it was, for example, local not universal, without an altar, without even the cross. This polarity, Eire writes, ‘…brings us to an essential dialectic found in all cultures, that of the self and the other, or us and them. This dialectic had always been an inherent characteristic of a church bent on converting the world. The “others” were always there, outside the circle of faith. They included not only the heathen, but also those who had lapsed into error, the heretics who perennially sprouted everywhere, like weeds in God’s garden. Throughout its long history, the Catholic Church had always been engaged in a constant dialectic with “error,” defining its ethics, beliefs, rituals, and symbols in reference to the errors of the heretics. This dialectic was a constant process of identity formation in which formulations of the “true” faith were defined positively—as in the “I believe” of
the church’s Creed—but always with an implicit negative dimension. What one affirms necessarily negates or excludes all other options. heretics, then, often play a decisive role in the definition of orthodoxy, through a dialectical process in which the “other” forces the self to define its identity more precisely. it is a process as natural and fixed as newton’s law of physics: to every action there is always an equal and opposite reaction.’ (p.391)

We have then in both arguments a Hegelian historicist construct – thesis, set against antithesis, from which emerges synthesis. Eire argues convincingly that the Catholic counter-reformation, and specifically baroque Catholicism, was colorful and vivid and dramatic, emphasizing power and control, because those were all the things that Protestantism was not: Protestantism was iconoclastic, inward looking, local and decentralized. It could of course be argued that the Renaissance that preceded the Reformation – or perhaps more precisely, and in deference to Eire’s framing, Luther’s Reformation – was itself a rejection of of Christian humanism and the discovery of the self, which in turn reacted to late medieval rationalist scholasticism and asceticism. This flow, and contra-flow, this intertwining of narrative strands – and never one single strand with another, but multiple, constantly weaving together and then forking into separate histories – is what constitutes our histories. Even then, your narrative strands may be different to mine.

Distance too, in time, simplifies these histories, as the value of history in identity formation becomes weaker. The attempted assassination of President Trump at the weekend will doubtless blend into some elongated flow that in fifty years time, or a century perhaps, be referred to as ‘The American Democratic Crisis’ or some such. Perhaps it will become the ‘Second American Civil War’, Jan 6th 2021 – some time in the future. Perhaps it will become known as the ‘American Constitutional War’, or the ‘Reconstitution of America’, or the ‘Great American Schism’. Perhaps a future historian will write a History of American Constitutions (with an emphasis on the plural). They will blend and merge with other histories, and they will move with time, politics, perspective and language. They will coalesce to form future presents, unbegotten identities, and new human formations.