The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

by Robert Trivers

  Initially, the Japanese government was forced to accept these conclusions as part of a peace treaty signed with the Allied powers in 1951. It was thus more difficult later to deny them, but conservatives (nationalists) do deny the tribunals’ conclusions, calling them “victor’s justice.” They assert that the role of teaching history is not to dwell on the dark and “masochistic” side but to teach history, however false, in which Japanese can feel pride. This is exactly what a false historical narrative is supposed to do: replace a potentially negative personal self-image with a positive one—or, more accurately, a negative image of one’s ancestors with a positive one. Of course, with simple (largely erroneous) genetic assumptions, the two images are the same.

  In 1993, the Japanese government finally acknowledged that it had managed the “comfort stations” but still refused to pay compensation. Even this meager step forward was contradicted by a recent prime minister who denied that the military had forcefully recruited the women, saying instead that “employment” had been arranged by “brokers.” A prominent Japanese historian summarized the state of affairs in 2007 by saying that the system obviously was one of sexual slavery but “the movement to openly deny this has grown stronger in the government and elsewhere.” This is only one of several examples of false Japanese historical narratives, including crimes such as the Rape of Nanjing and mistreatment of prisoners of war—not to mention the slaughter of more than twenty million Chinese in the 1930s and 1940s, a fact that has disappeared from world memory except in China and Korea.

  Of course, there is an irony here, since the teaching of false history is merely a new source of shame, a new dark history, so there is no redemption but a deepening moral problem. By contrast, the Germans long ago confessed their crimes, with numerous benefits in improved relations with neighbors and others. They can be faulted only for being overly solicitous toward Israel, but this is at least an understandable reaction to their own past crimes. Note again the role of the honest and often courageous historian who tells the truth. In all the cases of false historical narratives, we know they are false because of the work of historians in the societies themselves, often a small minority and often risking their jobs and sometimes their lives.

  The Japanese controversies highlight a larger problem in the teaching of history: to what degree is its function, especially in the young, to foster feelings of patriotism (self- and within-group love), and to what extent is its function to provide an objective view of the past, warts and all? Periodically the issue will burst forth in the UK press, for example, with some arguing that patriotism requires that Oliver Cromwell be taught as an exemplar of English manhood at its most manly while others say it would be better to emphasize that he was a warmongering, genocidal murderer who perpetrated huge atrocities on the Irish in the name of God and empire.

  Or take an interesting case from within Japan. Okinawa, the southernmost island, was the last annexed into Japan itself (in the late nineteenth century), and there is a long history of derogating the Okinawans within Japan. Even the huge US Army base located (and unwelcome) there is a gift from the larger country. One little problem that recently arose concerns how to teach the end of World War II to Japanese children. The land invasion was aimed at Okinawa first and one-fourth of the civilian population was killed. Japanese imperial troops treated the locals brutally. They were indifferent to their safety, used civilians as shields, and finally, in March 1945, urged them to commit mass suicide before US forces started landing on the main islands. This was said to benefit the Okinawans because they would thereby escape the horrors and humiliations the Americans had in store for them: rape, torture, and murder. The benefit to the imperial Japanese (besides continuing to decimate a Japanese sub-breed regarded as inferior by their overlords) allegedly was to prevent Okinawans from actively helping the advancing Allied forces. This was both a hostile projection and a guilt-ridden one. If Okinawans had not for so long been mistreated, would their loyalties be so easily questioned? Some Okinawans fell in line and committed suicide, some even bashing sisters, brothers, and mothers to death. Others politely declined.

  In the most recent twist, the Japanese legislature got reinvolved in 2007 and passed a law that promotes the teaching of patriotism in schools. Shortly thereafter, new textbook guidelines were announced that required the deletion of all references to the role of the Japanese Imperial Army in inducing mass suicides of Okinawans. Demonstrations ensued in Okinawa against this revisionism, which denied the cause of a particularly painful injustice at the hands of their overlords. More than 100,000 people massed in September 2007, the largest rally in Okinawa since its reversion to Japan from the United States in 1972. Two key pieces of evidence were that (1) mass suicides took place only where Japanese army units were stationed, and (2) grenades, which were precious weapons against the invaders, were given instead to the Okinawans to encourage group suicide. Textbook companies then petitioned the government to reverse the regulation, a change soon granted. This is a general (and welcome) feature of the three major “textbook controversies” in Japan. Nationalistic and right-wing forces arguing for a reversion to false historical narratives are often overcome by other forces in the society. Not so in Turkey.

  TURKEY’S HOLOCAUST DENIAL

  What about Turkey? What is this country’s problem admitting to a historical crime now nearly one hundred years old? I refer, of course, to the mass extermination of nearly the entire Armenian subpopulation. Some of the ancestors of the present inhabitants indubitably launched a brutal campaign of genocide against their relatively successful and middle-class ethnic subgroup, the (Christian) Armenians. About 1.5 million were put to death in the space of a year and a half. In other words, 100,000 Armenians were being murdered every month. This decision was taken at the highest level of the Turkish government, and a key figure was later assassinated for his role. Yet to tell the truth about this monstrous crime now is to risk assassination on the streets or incarceration for “insulting Turkishness.” It is explicitly against the law (article 305 of the Turkish penal code) to ask for “recognition of the Armenian genocide.” As in Japan, official school curricula also ordered teachers (in early 2004) to denounce to their children “the unfounded allegations” of the Armenians, that is, to openly attack the truth. With this kind of historical amnesia and enforced falsehoods, it is perhaps not surprising that the great majority of Turkish people seem offended at the very notion of an Armenian genocide.

  As we have seen, the younger the child, the stronger the force to teach lies. It may be fine for university students to learn that one’s country was founded on genocide and that slavery was a horribly degrading arrangement, but surely we should spare our children such negative self-images. Elementary-school students across Turkey were recently forced to watch a film in which Armenians are portrayed as having stabbed their own country in the back during World War I, massacring thousands of (non-Armenian) Turks, cooking their babies alive, and using civilians as firewood. This, of course, is the crudest kind of propaganda, reminiscent of the ancient claim that Jews killed Christian babies to use their blood to bake matzo, yet this new Turkish film is an official product of their Ministry of Education, ordered to be shown to all children.

  Genocide is presumably never pretty, but just so we know what this one looked like, consider the following. The Turkish army might appear in a town and demand all Armenians to the center. Grown men would be removed at once and killed elsewhere. Babies’ and children’s skulls would be cracked on the pavement in front of their shrieking mothers. Attractive young women might be removed for later rape and reproductive use while the others were either killed or set on long marches without food, water, or protection from the elements. Sometimes the Turks would ask for all the children so they could care for them, but this care consisted of piling the children on top of one another and setting them afire. With the ruthless efficiency that genocide often brings, eighty people might be tied together at the neck, one shot dead, and all pus
hed over a gorge into a river below, the dead one sure to drag down all the others. Detailed accounts were dispatched at the time by diplomats and others. Survivors, even into the 1990s, had vivid memories of the atrocities they witnessed. Remember: three thousand a day were dying. The Turks even devised primitive gas chambers, in which large numbers of Armenians were herded into huge, low-hanging caves and then fires were lit at the entrances to suck the oxygen out of the caves and from their occupants.

  What is perhaps more extraordinary than Turkish genocide denial is how governments around the world under pressure from Turkey fail to call genocide, genocide. It becomes instead a wartime “tragedy,” so that on the world stage the country of Turkey can maintain this falsehood. Turkish spokespeople often talk of Armenians starving to death during warfare. They do not mention that the Armenians were driven from their homes and properties and forced into long death marches without food or water. Naturally, if one does not die of dehydration, one dies of starvation. Successive US presidents (including Barack Obama) have promised to use the word “genocide” on the official commemoration date in April only to turn coward when the date arrives. Eight former secretaries of state argued against using the dreaded word in a proposed US congressional statement (which was not passed).

  Not only does Turkey threaten consequences for any such honesty, but it also follows through, as when it canceled more than $7 billion worth of military contracts with the French when their Senate passed a law in 2000 acknowledging the Armenian genocide. In 2010, it threatened to expel 200,000 Armenians said to be living in the country illegally in return for low wages. Thus, Turkey offers a false historical narrative to its own people and then insists that everyone else fall in line. Here it has been more successful than with the Japanese, whose rewriting of history is met by immediate hostility from its near neighbors Korea and China.

  Even Israel and some Jewish Americans have joined in Armenian holocaust denial, the more surprising because the Jewish holocaust and the Armenian one share many features in common, including the eradication of a commercially successful group of different ethnic/religious persuasion (Armenians/Christians slaughtered by Turkish Muslims, and Jews by European Christians). Hitler consciously patterned his behavior after the Turkish example, including perhaps his gas chambers. “Who,” he is alleged to have said, “still remembers the Armenians?” before launching his all-out assault on Jewish people. Fortunately, people still remember his victims, but Israel joins in denying the Armenian genocide partly because of pressure from Turkey (a close ally) and in part because the Armenian genocide is imagined to detract from the uniqueness of the holocaust. But there is nothing unique about the German holocaust of Jews per se, as events in the same century in the Congo, Turkey, Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan have shown. The notion of the holocaust has spurred the growth of an industry designed to extract long-ago costs of this event, which flow not to the camp survivors but to their distant cousins, usually nowhere near the camps, while serving to justify Israel’s frequent attacks on its Arab neighbors.

  Yet the Turkish genocide must in principle have had large indirect benefits for the remaining population—and this I believe is the key. The immediate loss of these skilled people puts you at a disadvantage in competing with neighboring groups, but their destruction allows you to occupy niches formerly denied to you because Armenians already occupied these places. The first is temporary, while the second is for keeps. That is, for a while you may do worse against other groups, but you will soon develop to fulfill the functions of those you have destroyed. Failing counter-genocide, your new position is all but secure. A whole series of non-Armenian Turks are benefiting every day from the absence of their former compadres, and this must make admitting to the genocide especially threatening—to the legitimacy of their own positions in society. Almost everyone must have moved up after the removal of the local Armenians, while a large Armenian country now sits next door.

  A LAND WITHOUT PEOPLE FOR A PEOPLE WITHOUT LAND

  A key original Zionist falsehood was the slogan popularized in the 1880s that the Jewish people needed to settle in Palestine because it was “a land without people for a people without land.” Alas, there were plenty of people in Palestine. Even by 1920, after a wave of Jewish immigration, there were about 80,000 Jews in Palestine and more than 700,000 Arabs. Most of these Jewish people seemed content to live with their Arab neighbors the way they had for generations, but the Zionists had other ideas—a simple colonial project to occupy (“reclaim”) places important in their religion. The Zionist project seems to have been set from the beginning, to entice enough Jewish people to Palestine with support from the colonial power of England and from Jewish people worldwide until they had enough power to seize Israel, which, when they did, involved expelling large numbers of Arabs, destroying or confiscating their property, and refusing them any right to return or compensation of any sort so as to produce a (now) 80 percent homogeneous Jewish state in lands some of their forebears had occupied a few thousand years ago. The Zionists were nothing if not consistent. Maps they drew up in the 1920s of their future state reveal later Israeli behavior remarkably well—they show Israel as including the West Bank and Gaza, as well as southern Lebanon, which Israel did indeed occupy from 1982 until 2000, before Hezbollah finally drove it back out of Lebanon.

  The notion of a people without a land occupying a land without people has been reinforced repeatedly since then. Of particular note was a book published in 1984 and widely applauded in the United States, where it was reprinted seven times in its first year alone because, among other things, “it could also affect the history of the future,” which of course is precisely the purpose of such narratives. The brand-new and far-reaching claim of this book (From Time Immemorial) was that there had been a massive—but hitherto undetected—illegal immigration of about 300,000 Arabs into Palestine during the British mandate (1920–1947), attracted by the flowering economy produced by the industrious and intelligent Jewish immigrants. This explained away roughly half the Arab population.

  The book argued that the inherent superiority of the Jewish immigrants attracted Arabs in search of economic opportunities, who then illegally occupied space that with any justice should have gone to new Jewish immigrants. In addition—absent a history of Palestinians occupying their own land—there is no current refugee problem or problem of compensation. The Arabs should simply return to where they came from in the first place. Is it any wonder that Zionists in the United States fell over themselves in praise of this pathbreaking and remarkable book, and still do? But in Israel the praise has been somewhat muted, since many know that the author cooked her demographic facts thoroughly to generate her novel results. The book is, in fact, a hoax. All the available evidence shows that a natural increase of about 2.5 percent every year, augmented by minor immigration (about 7 percent in total, primarily legal), explained the Arab population increase. In other words, most Arabs living in Palestine when Israel was formed had been there for their entire lives, as had their ancestors—if not from “time immemorial,” then at least for several centuries.

  The denial of Palestinian history is also built into Israel’s school curriculum. As an Israeli historian has pointed out, the land that would become Israel has no history from the destruction of the Second Temple until the onset of Zionist settlement. It is only a religious image surviving from biblical times, the subject of Zionist yearning but (with the exception of the occasional arrival of Crusaders) it has no occupants. The Palestinians first appear during Zionist colonization in the early twentieth century, but then only as external obstacles to the Zionist project. Even the most recent textbooks (which delete some of the overtly racist content of earlier ones) do not have a single map of the land during Zionist colonization that includes all the human settlements, showing only the Jewish ones (and occasional mixed Arab/Jewish ones). There are no Palestinian towns or villages, no people with their own desires, aims, and conflicts. Instead, the Palestinians appear first bec
ause of opposition to their de-employment in the late 1920s, but the fate of the banned laborers receives no attention in retrospect (as it did not at the time). Palestinians then reappear only because of their later opposition to Zionist projects, opposition that is portrayed in racist terms.

  THE FOUNDING OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL

  Once the United Nations agreed to set aside a section of Palestine to form a Jewish state in 1947, the Zionists launched an ostensibly defensive war against surrounding Arab armies. The conflict ended up expanding the size of Israel from the UN-mandated 56 percent of Palestine to 78 percent. Israel’s subsequent history is one of expansion outward and relentless attacks on the hapless, displaced Palestinians and on the nearby Lebanese—all to seize additional land and water and to terrorize the Arabs into submission. The policy continues to this day, with such regular events as the five-week bombing of Lebanon during the summer of 2006 (killing at least 1,300, while Israel lost about 160, mostly soldiers) and the slaughter of another 1,300 Arabs in Gaza in late 2008–early 2009 (Israel losing only 11). By the way, a 100:1 kill ratio is considered a successful war but a 10:1 ratio is a failure, and a 3:1 ratio drives Israel out of seized territory (southern Lebanon in the late 1990s). The United States is also willing to tolerate similarly gross disparities in mortality, with US deaths limited to fighting personnel. When America loses three thousand civilians in one day, the entire world trembles— each dead 9/11 victim has been redeemed now by almost one hundred victims elsewhere.