How Historians Lie

HISTORIOGRAPHICAL MALFEASANCE UNDER SCRUTINY

DURING the course of my research into the origins of World War II, a task in which I have been engaged for many years now, I have uncovered extensive, deliberate lying and deception on the part of professional (i.e., academic) historians. Most people trust academic historians, but the profession rarely repays the public's trust with honest, responsible scholarship. Indeed, you could pick up almost any journal article or book on the origins of World War II at random and what you will encounter will resemble propaganda much more closely than honest, objective historical research.

This blog aims to draw attention to the manifold departures from sound historiographical method, including deliberate deception, indulged in by members of the historical profession. Strictly speaking, the academic system is supposed to subject its practitioners to constant monitoring and quality assessment. To this end, for example, the articles published in historical journals are peer-reviewed, that is assessed by a number of readers who are themselves experts in the field, and usually in circumstances that preclude them from knowing the identities of the authors. However, such conventions do not accomplish their stated ends when it comes to twentieth-century historiography, above all, the history of National Socialist Germany and the origins of World War II.

As a trained historian myself - I have a Ph.D. in European history - I have challenged fellow historians from time to time about the fundamentally misleading nature of their work. What I uncovered in the process was a bias in favour of politically-expedient historiography. When, for example, I showed one Canadian historian that one of the central assumptions of her work was false, her evasive reply implied that she feared the consequences of the truth becoming known to the general public. Implicitly, her view was that the history of World War II was a Pandora's box that had to be kept firmly locked for fear that undesirable information might escape and have major repercussions. The great fear, of course, is that the normalisation of World War II history will lead to the rehabilitation of fascism. In such circumstances, academic historians assume, their fundamental responsibility is to produce ersatz history - a version of the recent past that the public simply has to put up with - as a means of fending off the much-dreaded day when it becomes socially-accepted to, say, wear a swastika armband to a fancy-dress party, as we all recall Prince Harry doing.

I completely disavow this conception, which I actually believe to be the common ideology of most professional historians, including those who think of themselves as 'radical,' that the function of professional historical scholarship is to impart politically-expedient history, that is, protect the public from information that might lead to the demise of the grand 'antifascist' narrative that has completely dominated postwar historiography. My view is that the antifascist paradigm has to be overturned simply because it is false. This blog aims to spotlight the lies, deceptions and curiously incurable errors historians make when they write about National Socialist Germany and the origins of World War II.

Although most entries will be focused upon a particular historian or particular journal article or book chapter, the aim is not to censure individual historians, although many of them would certainly deserve to be divested of their jobs by some kind of Board for Truth in History. Individuals are discussed because their work illustrates my contentions, not because I have something against them personally. Indeed, I will be discussing the work of many historians I have never met nor ever heard speak.

I should add that I will occasionally discuss the work of historians I know personally. I can think of no case where my comments are motivated by personal antipathy: most historians I met during my 15 years in a certain university's Department of History are nice enough people, some very nice. I will be discussing the work of some historians I think of as friends. The only professional historian of my acquaintance whom I detest, I detest so much that I simply do not read his work and therefore will not be discussing it at all.

But while most historians I know are fairly regular people, the few really competent historians I know are either historians of the ancient world or medievalists. While most historians are intelligent, as indeed they ought to be, they are also often naive to the point of gullibility. Coming mostly from comfortable middle-class backgrounds, very few of them have any idea of the dark, covert forces that seek to control our understanding of history. In their worldview, there was only ever one battle between the forces of goodness and those of evil and that was won, by the good side, in 1945. It is a sad fact both that people with such childlike views have a near-monopoly on the teaching of history and that so many young minds eager for truth end up being stuffed with political propaganda before their minds have even matured.

The point of this blog, therefore, is not to target individual historians, but to distinguish certain typical features of the postwar historiographical 'regime of truth.' This obviously cannot be done without looking at the work of individual historians.