A few years ago, we made a brief visit to Albania as part of an Adriatic cruise. The tour included a visit to Tirana, the capital, and its Museum of Albanian history. It really has been quite a history. Albania was called Illyria in the ancient world. Shakespeare imagined iy as a magical world in the play Twelfth Night, and many strange things happened there both in fiction and in fact. The Romans controlled the territory for 400 years, after which it suffered a long, violent history of wars and occupations. Kings and Warlords. Albania became a one-party communist state after 1945 under the dictator Enver Hosza, until the communist regime collapsed in 1992.
Why am I telling you this? Today, Memorial Day is all about history and memory. The Museum of a nation like Albania is bound to be fascinating and it was. Our little group of tourists was led from the exhibits of ancient times all through that turbulent history and some of us could hardly wait to see how the museum had dealt with the period of dictatorship. Disappointingly, they didn’t. That Wing of the museum was blocked off. Our friendly guide explained to us: ”They are still writing the history for this part.” You can’t argue with that. History is always being written and rewritten.
Today, we are asked to honor the military personnel who died in past wars, and so we should. But it might also be sobering to reflect on the casualties of the murderous wars that are going on right now, to say nothing of the millions of non-combatant civilian casualties and refugees. The entire planet seems to be an armed camp full of fanatics, with more and nastier weapons being invented all the time, so it might be even more sobering to reflect on the inevitable wars of the future.
What do we remember on Memorial Day? The problem with historical memory is that it is not really memory at all but something we learned at second, third, or tenth hand. What we “know” is made up of layer after layer of storytelling, mythologizing, political manipulation, and commercial exploitation. This makes the historical record very vulnerable. The job (you might almost say the mission) of professional historians is to keep pushing back against the distortion of the past. They destroy a lot of myths in the process, which makes them unpopular because people want to feel that they come from a race of heroes.
Every culture has a mythical history, which diverges more or less extravagantly from reality and is an essential propaganda source for politicians. Even the ancient Romans had their own mythical history, which nowadays we teach as the classics. You can’t believe a word of it. The Chinese and the Russians have national histories, which are taught in their schools; the Albanians have theirs, under construction, but so also the English, the French, the Germans, and everyone else. I was taught the standard version of English history in school and, in retrospect, it was almost pure fantasy.
How vulnerable history is! Authoritarians, like conspiracy theorists, take the past to be a blank slate on which they can write their wish lists. The government is now eyeing up museums, schools, universities, and libraries where history is stored and reproduced. No doubt, the past will be improved, made more heroic and uplifting for the next generation.
As for the history of our own time, they’re still working on that.
