Subject: CT: History's Lens Reground
Date: Sat, 20 Mar 1999 09:20:39 -0500
From: "John M. Miller" <fbp@igc.apc.org>The Canberra Times March 15,
1999, Monday Edition
History's Lens Reground; Who Knows Who Is Right Or Wrong In The Slanging About;
Australia's Role In East Timor, Lincoln Wright Says.; It's All A Matter Of The
Protagonist's Historical Perspective.
BEFORE the French philosopher Michel Foucault and his Palestinian-American disciple
Edward Said began to influence historical writing, a Cambridge historian of the Soviet
experiment, Edward H. Carr, propounded a philosophy of history that dazzled the postwar
Anglo-Saxon world.
In his little classic What is History? Carr made an elegant and logical attempt to show
that historians and history reflect the values and prejudices of their time and that the
so-called objective facts of history are interpreted differently, depending on the
historian's individual agenda and milieu, or what some would call the bee in his bonnet.
Carr said memorably, When you read a work of history, always look out for the buzzing.
If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog. The
debate over Australia's role in Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975 and the current
distemper in the Labor Party about the role of the Whitlam Government and later Labor
governments (under the influence of Gareth Evans) is a beautiful example of what Carr was
on about.
The current reinterpretation of East Timor is not a change in the factual base of our
knowledge about what happened in 1975, but a zeitgeist shift, a big rupture in the social
conditions that had buttressed the traditional or Whig view of Timor and made everyone
overlook the alternative view, even if they believed it.
There was no single way of understanding a historical period, Carr seemed to be saying,
and the best one could do was to be as sensitive as possible to the effect of the present
on one's view of the past. Truth existed, but it was a long road, and it did not run
straight from fact to truth. Carr mocked Victorian historians like Macaulay who had made
the mistake of judging the past subconsciously through the lens of British governing-class
values. Macaulay's happy and beautifully written Whig view of history extolled the wonders
of democracy for the common folk, but ignored the class exploitation of their rulers and
their snobbery.
Later historians, notably the Marxist revisionists, would interpret the facts of
industrial civilisation and British democracy differently and come to different
conclusions. Just who was right was a difficult question. Apart from the given facts, the
outcome of the debate depended for Carr on such things as the class values of the
historian and the social and political preoccupations of the time.
Just as it was no accident that after World War I the British historian Arnold Toynbee
began writing history as a story of civilisations in decline, so it was no accident that
Australia's views on East Timor are changing after the end of Suharto's regime and the
Cold War.
If Whitlam's and Evans's views represent the Whig view of Timor, Laurie Brereton and
his advisers are the revisionists. They are out to reinterpret facts that once seemed
solidly in place for Australia's own governing elite and reached their Hegelian pinnacle
in the security treaty of December 1995. What is the Whig view of East Timor? It is that a
series of sensible political decisions made initially by Garfield Barwick in the early
1960s when Menzies was prime minister, put into effect by the Whitlam Government in the
1970s, and validated by Fraser, Hawke, Keating and for a while Howard, established the
best possible policy for Australia.
JUST as the suffering of the industrial working class was seen as necessary and
progressive if economic growth were to occur, so the murders and tortures in East Timor
were seen in Australia's elite circles as part of the equation of running a nation-state
properly and not getting into unwinnable conflicts. The Whig view was that East Timor
belonged naturally to the Indonesian archipelago, was trouble in the making if it became
independent and, besides, no-one really wanted a big brawl with the Indonesians over a
poor, uninspiring half-island that could attract the evil Soviets or China if it went its
own way. For about 25 years, the Whig view of Timor was that it was best for Australia if
we just let the take-over slip incrementally from historical memory. Best of all was that
the United States agreed: US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did not give a damn.
The revelatory documents on 1975 have been available for some time, not just the
letters to Suharto and memoranda of meetings between him and Whitlam, but books by
diplomats and politicians involved in the events of mid-1975 as well as (in one form or
another) the book banned in 1980 by the High Court, Documents on Australian Defence and
Foreign Policy 1968-1975, the one containing Richard Woolcott's famous cable asking Gough
not to write again to Suharto. An issue that was once seen by Australia's official class
including the media as somehow settled has been reopened again, not by a great discovery
of archives or a St Augustine-like conversion in the morals of the governing class, but by
a bizarre and unpredictable series of events.
What was once a clear case of acceptable realpolitik that served Australia's interests
is no longer that, the Cold War having ended, Suharto having lost power and that steely
conquistador Jose Ramos Horta having hammered the international community over the issue.
Individuals who prospered in the old zeitgeist, like Whitlam and Evans, are floundering
now, largely because it is not a completely rational debate; rather a process of
realignment, with its own dynamics. Like a wicked form of punishment, the distinguished
pair are helpless to use their greatest gifts of reason and rhetoric against a view that
is in tune with the times. How could anyone believe Gareth Evans really wanted
self-determination after seeing the photo of him clinking glasses with Ali Alatas? Or
Whitlam after reading the memorandum of his September 1974 meeting with Suharto, when he
expressed his individual belief that Portuguese Timor was a natural part of Indonesia? The
problem with Carr's view is that it cuts both ways. Richard Woolcott now supports East
Timorese independence, but he is still a realist, explaining his change of mind in terms
of the changed environment. Brereton has a variety of motives, not just that backing
independence is the right thing to do or that it is a very effective way to attack the
Government. It was clear to Brereton back in 1996 that things were changing. Why not
change with the times and be on the winning side of history? Carr's work was a taste of
the radical subjectivism to come (under French influence at first, but later North
American) in the form of history as discourse or historical truth as construction, almost
fiction if you like, written by individuals with unavoidable bias, and without final
objective standards because those were, well, basically non- existent.
If there were a special school at Dili which examined how the West distorted the truth
about East Timor, it would probably be teaching the ideas of Columbia University's Edward
Said, a Palestinian activist and world-renowned literary critic who has railed against
Israel and America's distorted views of Islam. SAID was the one who really absorbed the
logic in Foucault's works and argued that the group of scholars who created the West's
worldview of Asia and the Middle East over the centuries had invented a way of looking at
the Orient which appeared to Westerners as real or rational, but which was ultimately
neither, and which served Western interests.
This was what Said called Orientalism and, in the jargon, it was a discourse, a
well-rounded blend of fact and fiction that really looked like the truth, but which in
many ways was ideology dressed up with academic prestige. Orientalism at its worst was a
nasty construction that could often be reduced to propositions that said things like Arabs
were lazy, Asians effeminate and untrustworthy.
The Whig view of East Timor is a form of orientalism.
Carr's first rule for readers of history was: before you study the history, study the
historian.
Gough and Gareth should recall Carr's second rule in their current bewilderment: study
the historian's social and political environment. It has changed.
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