History: Ethics | Quomodo Scimus : IBTOK

areas of knowledge - history

Ethics in History

How is history used and abused?

THE PROVOCATION

"I'm a student of history" - Donald Trump

The Abuse of History

History is invoked everywhere: as justification, apology, warning and slogan. British Prime Minister Tony Blair asks history to forgive Iraq, then later offers sorrow and regret. In China, students no longer recognise Tank Man, showing how history can be erased. Brexit turns history into independence rhetoric. Trump turns it into boast and performance, even as fact-checkers count falsehoods. The repeated phrase, “I’m a student of history,” becomes ironic: history is not simply studied; it is used, forgotten and abused.

Tony Blair, announcing the invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003, was already confident about history's verdict before the war began: "If we are wrong we will have destroyed a threat that at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive." The other clips follow the same logic. Each politician is not merely describing events - each is using history as a source of authority, invoking it to legitimate what they are doing or to pre-empt criticism of it.

The Chinese students who cannot recognise Tank Man are the reverse case. They have not been denied historical knowledge. They have been given something that occupies its place: a managed version of the past from which the inconvenient has been removed.

The refrain running through my video (... and my music and my slap bass playing) "I am a student of history" frames the question this page addresses: what does historical knowledge actually demand of those who claim it - and what happens when it is used for other purposes?

Big idea 1 - Bad history is dangerous

Writing in Budapest in 1993, as Yugoslavia was being dismembered along ethnic lines, Hobsbawm made his most precise statement of why history carries an ethical weight that most academic disciplines do not. The past is the essential element in nationalist and ethnic ideologies, and if a suitable past does not exist, it can always be invented. "Bad history is not harmless history," he writes. "It is dangerous. The sentences typed on apparently innocuous keyboards may be sentences of death."

Poppies have legitimate uses; so does the past. The problem lies in refinement - the selective processing of historical material in ways that concentrate its most dangerous properties and strip out everything that complicates the intended effect.

Margaret MacMillan identifies what that processing looks like in practice. Bad history selects evidence to fit a conclusion already reached and ignores what complicates it. The lessons it teaches are too simple, or simply wrong. MacMillan is particularly sharp on the misuse of historical analogies in political argument. The 'failure' to stand up to Hitler at Munich 1938 has served as a justification for almost every Western military intervention since 1945. In the film in the provocation above, British PM Blair invoked it directly in the run-up to Iraq - Saddam as Hitler, non-intervention as appeasement, opponents of the war as a new generation of Chamberlains. MacMillan's point is not that historical analogies are useless but that their selective deployment bypasses the hard work of examining whether situations are actually comparable.

The costs of distorted history are not distributed equally. James Loewen's study of American high school textbooks documents what that distribution looks like in schools. When an Abenaki fifth grader in Vermont tuned out as his teacher discussed Thanksgiving and said "My father told me the real truth about that day and not to listen to any white man scum like you," he was responding to a curriculum that had given him, throughout the school year, reasons to disengage. We examined precisely this example back in 11e when we examined the foundation myths of the USA. The attentiveness gap between white and minority students in social studies is larger than in any other subject. As Loewen explains, feel-good history for one group is, by definition, feel-bad history for everyone else.

We have also examined this in our previous history lessons. Japanese history textbooks have long minimized the Nanking Massacre of 1937, in which Japanese forces killed tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war. The word "massacre" itself has been disputed: official Japanese textbooks have referred to an "incident," and the controversy recurs each time Japan's Ministry of Education approves a new textbook cycle, causing repeated diplomatic crises with China and South Korea. In Russia, the rehabilitation of Stalin is systematic: he is progressively reframed as an "effective manager" who modernized the country and delivered victory in the Second World War, while the Gulag and the purges are treated as wartime necessities. In 2023, Putin signed legislation requiring all Russian schools to use a single state-approved history textbook - a logical endpoint of a process that had been underway for two decades. In Texas, the State Board of Education revised curriculum standards to soften the treatment of slavery, limit coverage of the separation of church and state, and reduce the prominence of Thomas Jefferson. Because the scale of the Texas textbook market shaped what publishers produced nationally, decisions made in Austin influenced classrooms across the United States.

In China, the mechanism is digital rather than curricular: the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 has been systematically removed from search engines, social media, and public discussion. The students in the provocation video who cannot recognise Tank Man have not been taught a distorted version of events - they have simply never encountered them. For some reason, my history website never has a visitor from either Russia or China.

Big Idea 2 - The historian knows more than the participants and less than they think

Good history is not heritage.

History matters because it protects the past from abuse. Unlike heritage, which uses the past to entertain, reassure, sell, or create identity, history tries to understand what really happened. Heritage can be harmless, even useful, but it becomes dangerous when tied to nationalist politics and simplified myths of past glory. In a world of rapid change, nostalgia offers comfort, but historians challenge comforting stories, expose partiality, and defend the difference between knowledge and patriotic fantasy.

Heritage is defined by its orientation: it faces the present, not the past. Where historical inquiry asks what happened and why, heritage asks what the past can do for us now - how it can provide identity, legitimacy, and belonging for a group in its current circumstances. Heritage is, above all, easy. It selects what is usable, removes what is inconvenient, and delivers a version of the past that requires nothing difficult of those who receive it.

The provocation video demonstrates this directly. Each politician in it is doing heritage rather than history: using the past to serve a present argument. Blair needed history to vindicate a war already decided upon. Farage needed it to make a referendum result feel like a liberation movement. The past is summoned as a resource, not examined as a subject.

Lowenthal's formulation captures this precisely. As he puts it, "historical ignorance is heritage insight." The less accurately the past is known, the more freely heritage can deploy it.

The mechanism Hobsbawm documented in The Invention of Tradition (1983) shows how heritage constructs the past it needs. Scottish Highland culture - clan tartans and Highland games - was largely invented in the early nineteenth century. The Welsh Eisteddfod's bardic traditions were reconstructed by a single eighteenth-century forger. Switzerland's William Tell was formalized in Schiller's play of 1804; the August 1st national holiday was established in 1891 to serve a nation-building project. If you have studied nineteenth-century nationalism in IB History, you will recognise the pattern: nation-states built their pasts to order.

The heritage industry extends far beyond the state and its textbooks. It is commercial, recreational, and pervasive. Heritage tourism generates billions annually: castle visits, Viking centres, plantation tours, battlefield trails. Living history museums like Colonial Williamsburg or the Beamish Open Air Museum offer visitors the experience of "being there" - a past that can be walked through and consumed without the discomfort of encountering what life actually contained for most of the people in it. The past is packaged for spending a pleasant afternoon, and what is packaged has been carefully selected for that purpose. Donnelly and Norton describe the result as a "bland shopping mall in which we can experience the times of our ancestors and buy replicas of things they used to own."

The past is also used to sell. Heritage branding deploys historical imagery to add authenticity to contemporary products: traditional recipes, artisanal methods, family crests on whisky labels. The historical claim is usually vague enough to be unverifiable and specific enough to feel grounding. What is being sold is the feeling of connection to a past.

For most people, the most powerful source of their understanding of the past is film, television, fiction, family memory, and landscape - not the history classroom. More people's understanding of the First World War comes from film and fiction than from any academic history. More people's sense of medieval Scotland comes from Braveheart than from the historical record, and Braveheart is, by historians' standards, an extended exercise in fabrication. Gladiator's Rome, The Crown's British monarchy, Assassin's Creed's Renaissance Italy: these are heritage products that shape historical consciousness at a scale no classroom can match.

This creates a specific challenge for IB TOK students. The course asks you to interrogate historical knowledge - to ask how historians know what they know, what standards of evidence apply, and where the limits of historical certainty lie. But the version of the past most students arrive with has been shaped primarily by heritage: films, family stories, national days, and curricula that served political purposes as much as educational ones. The question of what counts as historical knowledge requires, as a first step, the ability to distinguish it from heritage - and heritage is precisely designed to make that distinction difficult to see.

Big idea 3 - Good history is not easy.

Drinking and ocean and pissing a cupful.

History is hard because it demands patient, disciplined work. Unlike heritage, which cherry-picks the past for present purposes, historians must read, check, compare, reference and qualify every claim. Their task is not to invent comforting stories but to establish what can be known from evidence. This makes history vital: it challenges political myths, conspiracy theories and nationalist abuses of the past. Facts limit interpretation; without historians, anyone could simply make history up.

The case that bad history is dangerous implies something about what good history requires. Within the discipline, this question has produced two positions that pull in different directions, and both have something to recommend them.

Marc Bloch, writing under German occupation in 1940, argued that the historian's primary obligation is to understand rather than to judge. Condemnation, he suggested, is easy and tends to crowd out the harder work of comprehension. A history that reaches for moral verdicts too quickly is liable to produce the same selective reading it claims to oppose. Herbert Butterfield framed the same position in terms of role. The historian who appoints himself as moral avenger of the past - pronouncing verdicts, rewarding the innocent and punishing the wicked - tends to produce a new set of heroes and villains arranged according to his own prior commitments. For Butterfield, the historian's proper aspiration is to be the reconciler rather than the avenger: to achieve understanding of past actors in their own circumstances rather than judge them by standards they could not have anticipated.

But good history is even more than this. Remember the powerful ideas of Hayden White on the Methods and Tools page. White argued that historians do not simply report the past but emplot it - arranging events within narrative forms that shape what the history means. Pushed to its conclusion, this implies that any narrative arrangement of the past is as valid as any other: history becomes a genre of literature rather than a discipline of knowledge. If the historian's account is ultimately a story shaped by narrative choices, the question of which story is true loses its grip.

Richard Evans's response is direct. "Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric." He presses the point using White's own framework: Auschwitz "cannot be seen either as a comedy or a farce." The narrative forms White identified as available to historians are not all equally available here. Some events constrain the stories that can honestly be told about them, and that constraint is the constraint of evidence. The postmodern argument reaches its limit, morally and epistemologically, when applied to the Holocaust.

Historical knowledge accumulates through precisely the kind of work that makes this constraint visible. Historians spend years in archives, cross-referencing sources, checking footnotes, finding what does not fit. The opening of Soviet archives after 1991 transformed understanding of Stalin's terror - the scale of the Gulag and the mechanics of the purges became documentable rather than estimated. The ongoing transcription of Holocaust survivor testimonies continues to add detail to accounts that might have seemed complete. Colonial atrocities that were officially denied have been documented through records that governments suppressed for decades. This is how the discipline works: slowly, cumulatively, responsive to evidence.

In 2000, the historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books went on trial in London. David Irving, a writer who claimed the Holocaust had been fabricated or massively exaggerated, had sued Lipstadt for libel after she described him as a Holocaust denier in her book Denying the Holocaust. Under English libel law, the burden of proof fell on the defendant: Lipstadt had to demonstrate that what she had written was true. Her legal team assembled a group of historians - Richard Evans among them - who spent years going through Irving's works, footnotes, and sources to show, document by document, where he had misrepresented or ignored the evidence. The judge found comprehensively in Lipstadt's favour. The documentary record of the Holocaust was sufficiently precise and extensive that specific claims could be tested against it and found false. The film Denial (2016) covers the case in detail and is in the library.

This points to how we distinguish good from bad history in practice - what TOK calls a community of knowers. Professional historians working in universities set the standards of the discipline: peer review, footnotes, the obligation to engage with existing scholarship and account for what it has established. The community extends beyond those institutions. Some significant works of history have been written by journalists and independent scholars working outside academia. What makes a work count as history is recognition by the scholarly community as meeting its standards of evidence and honest engagement with uncertainty. Gavin Menzies's 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002) illustrates the mechanism. Menzies, a retired Royal Navy submarine commander, argued that a Chinese fleet had circumnavigated the globe in 1421, reaching America and Australia decades before European explorers. The book sold millions of copies worldwide. Professional historians and sinologists rejected it comprehensively: conclusions had been reached before the evidence was examined, and counter-evidence was ignored. Public success did not confer scholarly recognition. The community of historians - slow-moving and only responsive to evidence - remains the most reliable instrument available for distinguishing history from its alternatives.

Howard Zinn adds a final qualification. Accuracy in historical scholarship is a prerequisite, and the question of what the history is for remains open after that standard is met. A metalsmith who uses reliable measuring instruments has satisfied one condition but not answered the question that matters: will he forge a sword or a plowshare?

Think further: questions and resources

Lipstadt argued that the case against Holocaust denial rested not on what the denier believed, but on whether the claims could withstand scrutiny against the documentary record. If the standard is evidentiary rather than intentional, does the same test apply to historical accounts of events where the documentation is sparser, more contested, or controlled by governments that suppress inconvenient evidence?
Zinn argued that every historical account reflects a choice about whose story to centre, and that neutrality is a position that always serves existing power. Evans argued that some historical claims are simply false, demonstrable as such by systematic examination of the evidence. If Zinn is right that no account is neutral, does Evans's standard for falsification still hold - or does the acknowledgment of partiality undermine the distinction between good and bad history altogether?
Butterfield warned that judging past actors by the moral standards of a later time produces a distorted history that serves present-day needs rather than past truth. Reconstructing past actors entirely on their own terms risks treating practices now recognised as wrongs as simply "the way things were." If the historian cannot avoid the standards of their own time, yet those standards distort, what kind of judgment remains possible?
Lowenthal argues that heritage and history serve fundamentally different purposes: heritage cultivates belonging, history cultivates understanding, and the two can coexist only if their different functions are made explicit. If a community genuinely needs the stability that heritage provides, and accurate history would damage that stability, does the historian have an obligation to provide the accurate history anyway?
MacMillan argues that the political misuse of history almost always involves selective reading - isolating the evidence that confirms the desired conclusion and ignoring what complicates it. But selection is also what historians do legitimately: no account can include everything. If the mechanism is the same in both cases, what principle distinguishes legitimate historical selection from politically motivated distortion?

Films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.

🎬 WATCH — Denial (2016)

Mick Jackson

Directed by Mick Jackson from a screenplay by David Hare, Denial dramatises the libel trial in which historian Deborah Lipstadt and her publisher Penguin Books were sued by Holocaust denier David Irving. The film follows her legal team as they construct the historical case against Irving's claims, with Richard Evans as chief expert witness. Its central dramatic tension is that Lipstadt is advised not to testify: her lawyers judge that giving Irving a platform outweighs the case for her speaking in her own defence. The film raises a question directly relevant to this page: can historical truth be established in a courtroom, and if so, by whose methods?

🎬 WATCH — Hannah Arendt (2012)

Margarethe von Trotta

Directed by Margarethe von Trotta, the film follows Hannah Arendt's coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker in 1961. Arendt concluded that Eichmann was an ordinary bureaucrat who had simply stopped thinking, and described what she witnessed as the "banality of evil." Her reports, later published as Eichmann in Jerusalem, provoked fury: she was accused of diminishing the Holocaust and of blaming its victims. Former friends cut contact; colleagues publicly disowned her. The film dramatises what intellectual honesty costs when it produces conclusions the community of knowers finds intolerable.