Free Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan

history would grant them a second chance. Greek scholars wrote books showing that there was a direct line from the classical world to the modern. (The four centuries of Ottoman rule were largely overlooked.) Foreign scholars who suggested that such a view was too simplistic were pilloried or ignored. Written Greek was modeled on the classical, and so generations of schoolchildren struggled with a language which was very different from the one they spoke. It was only in 1976 that the government finally conceded and made modern Greek the official language. More dangerously, the past held the promise of a reborn Greek empire. Eleuthérios Venizélos, the leading Greek statesman at the time of World War I, once gathered his friends around a map and drew the outlines of ancient Greece, at the height of its influence, across the modern borders. His outline included most of modern Turkey, a good part of Albania, and most of the islands of the eastern Mediterranean. (He could also have included parts of Italy, but did not.) Under the influence of that great (megali) idea, he sent Greek soldiers to Asia Minor in 1919 to stake out Greece’s claims. The result was a catastrophe for theGreek armies and for all those innocent Greeks who had lived for generations in what became modern Turkey. As the resurgent Turkish armies under Kemal Atatürk pressed the Greek forces back, hundreds of thousands of bewildered refugees, many of whom barely knew Greek, followed them. In turn, huge numbers of Turks, many distinguished from their Greek neighbors only by their religion, abandoned their homes and villages for Turkey. The events of those years have in turn become part of history and have poisoned relations between Greece and Turkey up to the present.
    Ideologies call on history as well, but in their hands the past becomes a prophecy. The faithful may have suffered, and may be suffering still, but history is moving toward a preordained end. Whether secular like Marxism or Fascism, or religious like the fundamentalisms of various faiths, the story they tell is at once breathtakingly simple and all-encompassing Every event is fitted into the grand account and all is explained. The writer Arthur Koestler remembered the great relief and delight he felt when he discovered Marxism in the troubled years when the Weimar Republic was failing and the Nazis were reaching out for power. Past, present, and future all became comprehensible: “The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled at one stroke.”
    Karl Marx believed that he had discovered that history had laws just as science does and that these showed a Communist future was bound to come. History had started with primitive communism, an idyllic world of hunters and gatherers where there was no private property but everyone shared everything according to need. The end of history, Marx promised, was a similar society but this time, thanks to new and improved types of production, a much more prosperous one. Fascism, like Communism,saw itself as facing the future, but it, too, called on old emotions and memories. The Nazis made much of ancient myths and legends and of historical figures such as Frederick the Great; Frederick Barbarossa, who was crowned German king in the twelfth century; and the contemporaneous Teutonic Knights, whose crusades included not only the Holy Land but also much of the Baltic. These were all supposed to show the genius and continuity of the German race—and the need for it to resume its onward march. “We take up where we left off six hundred years ago,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “We stop the endless German movements to the south and the west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east.” Religious fundamentalists, of course, do much the same as they summon believers back to the “true” religion as it first was after the divine revelations. They, too,