History, gone with the wind?

One of the marks of a malignant regime is one that seeks to wipe out its past.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.
– GK Chesterton

By knowing and understanding history as continuum of human activity – for good and for ill – we get a perspective on our lives today. We better understand why the world is the way it is and, on that basis we can make decisions on how we make better, more informed choices about our lives, and in doing so, hopefully leaving the world in a better place.

To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child.
– Cicero

And as we know, children are impressionable – not because they are stupid (far from it), but rather their thoughts and perspectives are malleable because they have no temporal anchor – nothing existed before the were born and nothing will exist afterwards.

They absorb and assimilate received wisdom and declare ‘everyone knows that…’ without any active independent search for uncover truth for themselves.

One of the most overt of these totalitarian regimes was France’s Republican Convention which named 1793 as Year One. Everything which happened before the September 22 1792 ceased to exist with the stroke of a bureaucrat’s pen.

Even today there are parts of French Revolution history that the French would rather not talk about.

One hundred and eighty odd years later the evil Pol Pot went one better and declared Year Zero in Cambodia resulting in a holocaust that the south-east Asian nation is still recovering from today.

Thanks to Russia’s Communists, we have the commonly understood phrase ‘to airbrush history’  because that’s exactly what Stalin did – murder his opponents and literally airbrush them out of photographs – a trick employed by the Nazis and North Korea’s current despotic dynasty as well.

Today we have Islamic State blowing up historic cities and ancient monuments in an attempt to erase every aspect of a past which existed before them.

We can all be agreed that not only are such actions barbarous and extreme, they are highly dangerous.

I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases.
— Edmund Burke

And yet not even the most liberal, democratic republics are immune from such things and George Orwell’s 1984 offers a salulatory lesson in its pages:

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. “Reality control,” they called it: in Newspeak, “doublethink.”

Just this very week, we have a country more or less banning a flag because it is an unpleasant reminder of their past, one they would rather forget, and if they can’t forget it, they will expunge it.

This is quite despite the fact that one can purchase a Nazi flag, a USSR flag and a Communist Chinese flag today – all arguably symbolic of more evil and deadly practices than a mere internecine squabble between fellow countrymen. In fact no trendy, hipster is complete without his Che Guevera T-shirt or poster – cue the irony there.

It might be tempting to read too much into this except the Year Zero for a little flag is already having people talk quite openly about airbrushing Thomas Jefferson from history because he owned slaves (shhhhh, don’t tell the presciently named Ashleigh Banfield that George Washington owned slaves, otherwise a nation’s capital and a whole state may be looking for a new name).

I’ve been following the story and the tragic events which have led up to this and, not being American, I wouldn’t have dreamed of even turning it into a blog post but for this article today that piqued my interest as a film student, professional film reviewer and now, as an author, a member of the arts community.

‘Gone With The Wind’ should go the way of the Confederate flag:

But what does it say about us as a nation if we continue to embrace a movie that, in the final analysis, stands for many of the same things as the Confederate flag that flutters so dramatically over the dead and wounded soldiers at the Atlanta train station just before the “GWTW’’ intermission?

Clickbait? Satire? A Polemicist? Quite possibly. Except that the same disquiet about this film was raised by a BBC columnist late last year:

Far from being simple, wholesome family entertainment, the film is an admiring portrait of a conniving, lying, mercenary seductress. It’s a valentine to the slave-owning South, and a poison-pen letter to the anti-slavery North. It’s a tonal rollercoaster that plunges from frothy comedy to gruelling tragedy and back again. It’s a romance that puts the hero and heroine at each other’s throats. And it’s an episodic coming-of-age story that keeps going for nearly four hours before reaching its abrupt, unresolved ending. In short, Gone with the Wind is a preposterous, almost unclassifiable mix of highly questionable elements. The wonder is not just that it’s America’s most beloved film, but that it isn’t America’s most hated.

As a historical romance novelist, I take my responsibility to history seriously. The story of history is the story of humanity – the good, the bad, and yes, very much the ugly.

“History ought never to be confused with nostalgia. It’s written not to revere the dead, but to inspire the living. It is part of our cultural bloodstream, the secret of who we are. And it tells us to let go of the past, even as we honour it; to lament what ought to be lamented; and to celebrate what should be celebrated.”
– Simon Schama, “A History of Britain”

I’ve been critical about Scarlett O’Hara as a heroic figure, but the thought of banning Gone With The Wind is as unthinkable as banning Leni Rifenstal’s Triumph of the Will. If watching these films makes us feel uncomfortable, then good. We should feel uncomfortable. That is our conscience telling us something.

At the beginning of the 20th century no one would have thought that Germany – the centre of prosperity, power, science, arts and philosophy would have instigated not one, but two world wars before half the century was over. How things can change within a span of a generation…

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
– Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (1973).

The arts allows us to examine our hearts from the safety of Chesterton’s hill. Arts that use history to this end offers an even better view.