Analysis by Keith Rankin.
Is history binary? A judge of past behaviour with just two available options: thumbs-up, or thumbs-down? If you are not on the ‘right side’ of history, are you therefore on the ‘wrong side’?
Can there be a ‘right side of history’? Given the contexts that we now proclaim to be the right or wrong sides of history, can we presume to evaluate future judgements of our behaviours as ‘history’? And, if we can, is ‘history’ about morals, or momentum; or, prosaically, is she just about facts? Can you (or we) ride history, like a wave? Clio, in Greek mythology, is the muse of history. She is not a straightforward lady.
Are politicians who support, by word or deed, fascists (or racists or any other obviously nasty ‘ists’) in another country ‘on the wrong side of history’ or could they be ‘riding a historical wave’? I am reminded of the Hitler youth singing ‘Tomorrow Belongs to Me’ in the musical cabaret. In Natacha Butler’s report (Al Jazeera 10 June 2025, Europe’s far-right leaders, hosted by Marine Le Pen, rally in France) she notes “the conviction [by ‘far-right’ protesters] that history is on their side”.
History as Momentum
Whoever participates in a social or political movement believes that their movement will become sufficiently consequential for those in the future to believe that the movement affected the course of history. So, the Hitler youth were correct, in the sense that their movement made their tomorrow different to what it would otherwise have been. The Hitler youth, though, were expecting a favourable judgement by ‘us’ in 2025. Clearly, we judge their movement in highly unfavourable terms, while accepting that the world at the end of the twentieth century mighthave been a better world than the world would have been had Adolf Hitler been killed in combat in the Great World War in1918. Problematic, though, is the whole subjective idea of a ‘better world’; better for whom?
An important example of historicism, or alleged historical momentum, is the writings of Karl Marx. He thought he was writing scientific history, of ‘historical materialism’, and many people believed him; a few still do. Marx fused classical Ricardian economics – the intellectual ancestor of today’s neoliberal macroeconomics – with the philosophical historicism of Georg Hegel. Josef Stalin, and others in his intellectually unaccommodating mould, killed people who spun different (or nuanced) stories of past or future history.
History as a Judge
From a judgment perspective, we place much weight on academic historians in the medium-term future to make (for all time) the correct verdict events in the present, immediate past, and immediate future.
Whether or not Clio is qualified to judge as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ past events, people, or movements, we today can evaluate Clio today – or at least her mortal disciples – on her performance so far.
Two of many issues we could look into are, first, Winston Churchill and the World War Two bombing campaigns by the ‘Allies’, and our present understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Was Neville Chamberlain on the wrong side of history? And Churchill on the right side? (See my Invoking Munich, ‘Appeasement’, and the ‘Lessons of History’, 13 Mar 2025.)
Churchill, more than most political leaders, features in many separable stories in history. His role in pursuing the Gallipoli campaign in 1915 has generally been awarded a ‘thumbs-down’. Likewise, his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1925, when he decided to fix the British pound to gold at the overvalued pre-war (1914) exchange rate; this decision was one of the key events that led the world into the Great Depression.
However, most post-war judgement of Churchill has focussed on his role as an opponent of ‘appeasement’ in 1938, and on his role as Great Britain’s leader for the majority of World War Two (though he had been removed as Britain’s leader, in a landslide electoral defeat, by the time the atomic bombs fell on Japan). On the ‘appeasement’ matter, Neville Chamberlain continues to be the epitome of someone ‘on the wrong side of history’, with Churchill on the ‘right side’.
Churchill had his own personal political agenda in 1938; his lifelong pursuit of the glory of the British Empire. Churchill’s principal strategic interest was to maintain the Mediterranean Sea as ‘Britain’s Lake’; substantially but not only because it represented Britain’s sea passage to India. So many of his actions in World War Two can best be understood in terms of what he was fighting for, not what he was fighting against.
In 1938, the alternatives to the ‘appeasement’ of Hitler were to abstain in the face of Nazi Germany’s clear-and immediate-threat to East Europe (a part of the non-Mediterranean world that Churchill was not interested in), or to threaten to declare war against Germany knowing that Britain couldn’t act on its threat and thereby risked revealing its weakness. (In the summer of 1939, Britain did reveal its weakness to Josef Stalin, who then relayed that information onto Hitler at the end of August, allowing Hitler to invade Poland in the sure knowledge that Britain had no military capacity to come to Poland’s aid. Chamberlain’s allowing that ‘information leak’ to happen was surely a bigger mistake than his 1938 Munich Accord with Hitler.) And we note that Churchill said that, rather than ‘peace in our time’, there “would be war”.
Churchill did not claim that any of the alternative choices that Chamberlain faced could or would have prevented war. Unless, that is, Chamberlain had been able to terrify Hitler into not going ahead with his military plans. (Hitler would have been more likely to liken threats by Chamberlain to ‘being mauled by a mouse’; a famous if somewhat forgotten witticism of our own Robert Muldoon, speaking in reference to Opposition leader Bill Rowling.)
Realistically, Hitler was never going to commit to putting his military toys away. I think that, in light of the alternatives, Chamberlain made the right call in 1938; he hoped that he had restricted Hitler’s military ambitions to the acquisition of territory inhabited by German-speaking people.
On the matter of the Allied bombing campaign, being willing to commit unspeakable aerial executions upon tens of millions of ‘enemy’ civilians, history has largely been silent; those (over a million) who were actually barbecued by the Allies fell well short of those who Churchill’s ‘scientific adviser’ and onetime ‘best friend’ Friedrich Lindemann would have liked to have ‘dehoused’. (See my Barbecued Hamburgers and Churchill’s Bestie, 17 Apr 2025.) We cannot rely on academic historians to counter decades of myth; in part because we have too few competent historians, and in part because historians hunt in packs and are as liable to fall under the sway of the zeitgeists of their eras as are the rest of humanity’s intellectual communities.
Despite Churchill’s firebombing efforts, most of which took place in the early months of 1945, it was American bombing specialist Curtis LeMay who became barbecuer-el-supremo. (See my Who Executed 100,000 Civilians in a Single Night?) In 1945, and mainly through his own initiative, he burned more Japanese civilians to death than those who died from the atomic bombs. Was Curtis LeMay on the right side of history? The Japanese ruling class thought so in 1964; LeMay had helped to make the new Japan possible. The Emperor had been saved, as an emperor without an empire. And Japan had been saved from Stalin’s advances, advances that stopped at Korea, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands.
We note that the worst of the Allies’ terror campaign took place towards the end of the war, when the ‘evil’ Axis was in no position to reciprocate. Inherently, such crimes – on the scale that ‘we’ perpetrated them – are asymmetric warfare. Killing your enemies’ civilians seemingly grants your enemies a moral right to kill your civilians. I think that no party who commits those kinds of war crimes can ever be on ‘the right side of history’; though some other people may take more convincing. To compound the criminality of the Allied bombing campaign, it was ineffective, because World War Two was already asymmetric; the main turning points were Hitler’s foolish declaration of war against the United States, and the Battle of Stalingrad in the latter part of 1942. World War Two could have been ended much more quickly with carrot than with stick, by finding suitable ways for the retreating powers to ‘save face’. Truth and reconciliation always trump vengeance. Yet so many horrendous “killings of civilians to [allegedly] save ‘our’ soldiers” remain either on the ‘right side of history’ or concealed from view, obviating the popular requirement to cast judgement.
The Great Depression was still much in historical memory in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1930s, Josef Stalin and his comrades believed this was the beginning of the end of the capitalist world; and he executed any economists (eg Nikolai Kondratiev) who suggested otherwise. At the time, a number of progressive western economists (eg Alvin Hansen) to an extent agreed with Stalin.
However, in the 1970s, a group of extremist ‘Chicago’ economists and economic historians – Milton Friedmanwould lay claim to being both an economist and a historian – successfully committed on the world an intellectual coup-d’etat which would distract the historical community from reality. Friedman’s coupsters scapegoated the United States Federal Reserve Bank (on the basis of a few quite minor ‘mistakes’ in monetary policy in 1929 and 1930). The net result was that the real culprits, the fiscal conservatives, escaped the condemnation of history.
The Friedmanites, and their ‘intellectual’ descendants, have claimed the ‘right side of history’; claiming victories (without convincing counterfactuals) in the alleged titanic battle between the ‘inflation monster’ and the battlers of the ‘lower middle classes’. These faux historians claimed that small “mistakes” in monetary policy in 2003/04 and 2021/22 have been the predominant causes of the 2008/09 ‘global financial crisis’ and the 2022 to 2024 ‘cost of living’ crisis. When it comes to macroeconomics and macroeconomic policy, this writing of consumable history is about as pathetic (as intellectual history) as the claims of the Holocaust-deniers, or of the people (such as Herr Hitler) who claimed that Germany was ‘stabbed-in-the-back’ by international Jewry in 1918.
Saying Sayonara to Clio?
In the meantime, Aotearoa New Zealand’s political leaders – and their public service collaborators – are doing their best to deconstruct Clio, by shredding many many books held at the National Library. (See National Library to dispose of 500,000 books from overseas collection, OneNews, 12 Jun 2015; and Book dealer sickened by plan to destroy half a million books, RNZ 12 Jun 2015.) This purge is being justified as a nationalist purge of books written in another time, and therefore with another perspective, and not written in our little exceptionalist country. And also the possible loss of much of our historical memory, through the lack of support for Aotearoan memory banks such as Te Ara Encyclopaedia of NZ, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, NZHistory, and Te Akomanga. Jock Phillips, recently retired historian in chief, is disgusted. (see More cuts proposed at Ministry for Culture and Heritage, RNZ, 13 June 2025.)
Clio is a muse to be loved and cultivated. She gives much, but rarely in simplistic right-wrong terms; and she changes her mind, in response to both new information and new zeitgeists. Whereas Hitler’s Nazis burned the books they didn’t like – and many other books besides – Aotearoa’s fiscal conservatives are looking for a whimper – a tearless shredding – rather than a blaze. And our remaining unshredded public collections, our memories – our abilities to evaluate the rights and the wrongs and the waves of our national and international pasts – stand to depreciate, to wither.
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
