History is shaped by where we choose to begin to tell our stories. David Cameron has learned that this week. So have the victims of the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia. So has my ten-year-old son.<\/p>\n
We went to see some gladiators fighting Christians in a Roman arena the other day. The Christians won. My son, whose favourite computer pastime for some months has been a strategy game called Rome Total War<\/em>, was outraged. \u201cThis is completely unhistorical,\u201d he fulminated. It was not the only solecism.<\/p>\n We were at the historical theme park at Puy du Fou in France on holiday. The massive site contains a variety of historical scenarios: a Roman amphitheatre with gladiatorial combat and chariot races, a Gallic settlement under attack from Vikings, a medieval castle with knights jousting, a palace \u00e0 la Richlieu with fighting musketeers, and so on. Historical disbelief had to be suspended again when the Viking raiders were converted, mid-pillage, by a dead saint who rose from a reliquary which the manly Nordics had knocked into the river earlier in their rampage.<\/p>\n You have to understand the difference between history and story, I told my youngster. History, as the old cliche has it, is\u00a0just one damn thing after another.<\/p>\n But storytellers almost always have a vision of the universe which shapes the way those events are recounted. So was the author of the Puy de Fou spectacles some kind of religious maniac, my lad asked. No, I replied, just a run-of-the-moulin French nationalist who saw the long march of history culminating in the glory that was France. Christianity was that nation\u2019s dominating metaphor when it came to putting the Romans, Vikings and any other adversaries in their place.<\/p>\n You can\u2019t say this to a ten-year-old but revisionism is pretty much the norm when it comes to interpreting the past. Indeed tradition, which is often erroneously portrayed as a synonym for conservatism, is just the process of the present paying its dues to the past. Tradition is not a fixed thing; it is a process of managing change.<\/p>\n The American writer I P Stone pins this down very neatly in his book on the Trial of Socrates<\/em>. Reflecting on the Greek word logos<\/em> he says: \u201cA thousand years of philosophical thought are embodied in a term that meant \u2018talk\u2019 in Homer, \u2018reason\u2019 in the Stoics and ends up in the Gospel of St John as the creative Word of God\u201d. The best stories are filled with such nuance: the reason that Christianity has been so potent for two thousand years is that it does not just have one story but four; the gospels complement and even contradict in a way which generates the ambiguity and uncertainty on which poetry depends.<\/p>\n There is ambiguity to the relationship between Britain and India, as the Prime Minister found on his travels this week. As he arrived in the place which was once the jewel in the crown of the British Empire he wrote in the mass-circulation newspaper The Hindu <\/em>that he approached India in a \u201cspirit of humility\u201d. (Don\u2019t mention the Raj). That century of imperial domination has now been transformed in Cameron-speak into a \u201cshared heritage\u201d which meant that Britain should be India\u2019s \u201cpartner of choice\u201d in the years ahead.\u00a0 It was a laudable intent, though bragging about your humility (I won the prize for humility at Eton, doncha know) is a bit like fighting for peace. Humility is better demonstrated than advertised.<\/p>\n Still, the idea of bringing the two nations\u2019 different accounts of their shared past together in mutually acceptable vocabulary is a good idea if you can pull it off. That it is not always possible has was shown last week in Cambodia where the first major Khmer Rouge figure went on trial since the 1970s regime, with its notorious Killing Fields, was overthrown. The fact that it has taken three decades to bring anyone to justice offers a clue as to the intractability of reconciling diverging accounts of the past there.<\/p>\n The man at the centre of the trial, Comrade Duch, who personally oversaw the mass torture and murder of 14,000 men, women and children at S-21 prison, made courtroom professions of \u201cexcruciating remorse\u201d which were adjudged to be genuine. But his excuse that he was just a small cog in the regime was no mitigation, which is why the sentence passed upon him of 35 years, less 16 for time already served, provoked local anger for leniency.<\/p>\n The outrage is not merely because this represents only 11 hours in jail for every person killed under his supervision. It is that Duch was in charge of just one of 200 detention centres in which some 1.7 million people died under a reign of terror which was calculated, planned and organised. What about trying the other four senior Khmer Rouge figures in custody, including the deputy of Pol Pot, the leader of the genocidal movement.<\/p>\n The truth is that there are too many former Khmer Rouge officials are now in senior positions in the Cambodian government. That is why the pursuit of justice has never been full-throated. The prime minister, Hun Sen, who was himself a former Khmer Rouge foot soldier who defected to the Vietnamese army which overthrew Pol Pot, has indeed has said that no more than the four figures currently in custody will be prosecuted.<\/p>\n That, and the scale of the terror of Pol Pot\u2019s attempt to turn back the Cambodian calendar to a Year Zero in which anyone with spectacles was murdered as a potential subversive, leave no room for a peace and reconciliation strategy of the kind masterminded in South Africa by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who announced his retirement from public life this week.<\/p>\n The versions of history of the two camps in South Africa have not exactly been reconciled. But there has been a common acknowledgement of the need to repair hurt if the nation is to move forward. The war between black and white in South Africa was in the end only a struggle for power in which the whites finally acknowledged that apartheid \u2013 the notion of \u201cseparate development\u201d \u2013 was an unviable self-deception. The Khmer Rouge never made such an acknowledgement; they lost power because they were defeated on the battlefield.\u00a0 But there are parallels between South Africa and Northern Ireland; the Irish lost their past in a vision of the future in which increased prosperity, the aegis of the European Union, the phenomenon of globalisation \u2013 along with the\u00a0 weariness of the fighting generation as it reached middle age \u2013 made the old certainties feel outdated.<\/p>\n The symbols of the past still embody the old ways of seeing things. To the Indians the Koh-i-Nor diamond speaks of colonial oppression and theft; it was sent as a gift to Queen Victoria by the seven-year-old Maharaja of Punjab as part of the punitive settlement of the Treaty of Lahore in 1846. That is why the Indian government keeps asking for its return. To the British, the gem which is the centrepiece of the Queen\u2019s primary crown, it speaks of the power and glory of an imperial heyday. That is why David Cameron, for all his newfound humility, refused last week to hand it back.<\/p>\n History is not only shaped by where we begin to tell our stories. It is moulded by where we chose to end them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" History is shaped by where we choose to begin to tell our stories. David Cameron has learned that this week. So have the victims of the Khmer Rouge killing fields in Cambodia. So has my ten-year-old son. We went to see some gladiators fighting Christians in a Roman arena the other day. The Christians won. 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