Barack Obama, among others, likes to accuse people of being on the wrong side of history. As if history is some sort of self-correcting gizmo where truth always rises to the top. This is of course complete nonsense, and Joan Wallach Scott’s book On The Judgment of History proves it by examining three major attempts to actively get on the right side of history.

She picked the Nuremburg Trials, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the current attempts to wring reparations for blacks out of the US government. In every case, history has been twisted, abused, ignored and sometimes just plain sidelined. The results are always disappointing. Both of history and of this book.

In Nuremburg, allied lawyers spent countless days slicing and dicing words and concepts, as lawyers always do. They questioned whether Germany was actually a nation-state and whether the National Socialists were actually a political party. They of course pontificated on the morals or lack thereof in a genocide of Jews, without the slightest sense of irony or hypocrisy, because all of their countries had done something similar, if not to Jews then to natives or other ethnics or homsexuals. But history is written by the victors, and history’s “judgment” is therefore quite worthless.

In South Africa, the TRC became a self-purge of guilt under the commission’s leadership of Bishop Desmond Tutu. It was designed to be a national, collective self-reckoning, but degenerated into lurid confessions by individuals to ask forgiveness from other individuals. No one was prosecuted and no new laws were born from its loins. Did the nation heal from all this bleating? Many think not.

And in the USA, calls for reparations for hundreds of years of slavery followed by hundreds of years of discrimination have led precisely nowhere, as blacks are still far behind in social and economic terms. New generations of blacks are discovering their more recent ancestors also called for reparations, as they suffered similar indignations and insults, not to mention discrimination and death. White supremacy is still on the right side of history, it seems.

So history is not the truth filter many like to claim, and it is just a cop-out, a way to avoid dealing with a crime, a rogue, a bigot or a criminal. Barack Obama in particular, should be ashamed.

Scott’s book is a written version of a lecture series she gave. She is a historian of renown, but the book is sadly flat and uninspiring, often just snippets of quotes from her research. I could find no great insights of hers to repeat, and nothing quotable to impress readers here. What she says has to be self-evident to students of history. For the rest of us, it is pretty obvious anyway.

David Wineberg ( )

American historian Joan Wallach Scott (° 1941) earned her spurs in gender historiography, but in these Ruth Benedict lectures, at Columbia University, she focuses on a very theoretical question, namely whether history has its own moral weight . With that she refers to phrases such as: "history will judge," or "we are on the right side of history." For her, that question became particularly topical after Donald Trump took office in the US and his encouragement of the racist and extremist right; had history not clearly referred those movements to an outdated, dark and uncivilized past? For sure, an interesting question!
In these lectures, she ventures into an analysis of 3 moments in the 20th century in which the 'judgment of history' was formally invoked: the Nuremberg Tribunal in 1946, the Truth Commission in South Africa in 1996 and the movement for compensation of slavery in the United States. She offers a very critical analysis of those moments, which she says could not substantiate that moral weight of history because they followed too much the logic of the nation-state. In an epilogue Scott sketches the contours of a new philosophy of history, distancing herself of linear, progressive historiography. More about this in my History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3334032860.
(Thanks to Netgalley for an advance copy) ( )