What the New World can learn from Old World history 

Heather Mallick
CBC.ca
October 20, 2008

How pleasant it is to live in Canada, where only 59.1 per cent of voters showed up to decide who might lead us through the worst economic era most of us will ever live through.

I'm not being sarcastic. It is indeed agreeable to be a member of the Canadian middle class (I am assuming, perhaps wrongly, that they were predominantly the ones who stayed home, not being desperate and all).

It is beyond agreeable, it is easeful and snug, it is purr-worthy. I drink clean water, my roof is nailed on tight and if we start to freeze in the dark this winter, I have a wood-burning fireplace. God, it's nice.

But I voted. It's my amulet for when things go badly wrong. Sorry as I am to see how few Americans bothered to vote in the last two elections that decided their decline as a nation, I'm glad to see them waking up this time and registering in force for their right to be counted. They're afraid.

New World, old story

It's a first, the New World being truly alarmed for its own health. Unlike millennia of war, pestilence and catastrophe in the old worlds of Europe and Asia, North Americans have long had the luxury of remaining simpletons with a fortunate geography. If you think this is strong language, then we're not reading the same headlines.

I just finished that fat travelogue of a history book called In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century by the Dutch journalist Geert Mak.

Weirdly, it was a relief to have someone else confirm what I always think when I travel in Europe. I am creeped out, haunted by the centuries of human blood and bones that lie beneath my feet.

The book took days. I had to slow down the trauma of reading it. Mak gives the impression that no Europeans have ever died peacefully in their sleep. If it wasn't Spanish flu or plague, it was burning, bludgeoning, beheading, gassing, ethnic cleansing, shooting, freezing or starvation.

I couldn't listen to Sarah Palin falsely accusing Barack Obama of "palling around with terrorists." I was too busy travelling with Mak through Verdun, Petrograd, Guernica, Dunkirk , Warsaw, Gdansk, Chernobyl, etc., and trying very hard to see the 20th century European map as a human tragedy that could have been prevented if only people had paid attention.

Grand tour

I was with Mak in Helsinki - Lenin passing through on his famous tootling train to kick-start the Russian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939 and now the fatal dullness of Helsinki.

The Finns have a pejorative word for "colourful." It translates as "eye-bashing." A Finnish advertising slogan reads, "Dress like the rest; after all, don't you have better things to do?"

"Where else could you sell clothes with a slogan like that?" an immigrant asks Mak, half-laughing, half in despair. But facelessness is safe, and safety has its own value after a century of horror.

In Nuremberg, Mak describes the war crimes hall as just an ordinary courtroom now, the original furniture long since stolen for souvenirs. The janitor slips you in and you can contemplate the death of 50 million-ish Europeans in the Second World War. Racism is rising in Europe once more. The Jews are pretty much gone. This time it's the Roma or the Muslim immigrants or the African refugees who drown off the Italian coast.

Mak sleeps in Munich's Hotel Lederer, in a cozy room off the corridor where the Rohm Putsch took place in 1934, Hitler's last warning if only it had been heeded. Chambermaids have been scrubbing away at the place for decades. There are no memories. Mak feels no emotion. He's wrung out, I guess.

After watching Obama's final debate with the grimacing McCain, barely banking down his rage, I read the last pages. Mak was in Sarajevo, where snow prosaically falls on everything, just as James Joyce had it fall poetically "on the living and the dead." It falls equally on the "shiny rebuilt streets" and the street corner along Apple Quay where Gavrilo Princip fired the shots in 1914 that began the First World War.

Even that reminder didn't stop the citizens of Yugoslavia from re-enacting centuries of war. Humans have no shame.

Solidarity forever?

Mak says the essence of the European Union isn't a common currency or those maddening regulations that are trying to "same" all of Europe, or even the erasure of border controls. Its core is preventing European nations from once again going back to war with each other. There is a common goal that underlies the superstructure, and it is peace.

Is it going to work? Compared with Europe, the United States, which is proudly militaristic, has no history to speak of. As the British novelist Mil Millington puts it, "We've got about 5,000 years of history and already it's more than we can cope with. And that, mind, is the slowest 5,000 years we'll ever have. In the seventh century, two, maybe three, things happened. Every century has more and more things happen, faster and faster. We are not short of history, OK?"

OK. But Americans are short of history and that's why they haven't learned to pay attention to it, why they seem to stray from the nation's Constitution, why they're casual about habeas corpus. In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just backed down on 42 days' internment for random terrorism suspects He has slowed down on a national ID card). He is re-reading the Magna Carta, and that's because he knows his history and is terrified of losing the next election to the Conservatives.

Because America has such as short history, especially none involving blitzkrieg, it isn't terrified yet. Canada has even less history than the Americans and what there is of it is boring, according to many of us. We barely even teach it in school. We haven't even woken up to what Americans now know: when it's time to vote, you should.

So we don't fill out our ballots. History will surely teach us a lesson.