"History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies, as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction.
The past is an essential element, perhaps the essential element, in these ideologies. If there is no suitable past, it can always be invented.
Indeed in the nature of things there is usually no entirely suitable past, because the phenomenon these ideologies claim to represent is not ancient or eternal but historically novel.
This applies both to religious fundamentalism in its current versions - the Ayatollah Khomeini's version of an Islamic state is no older than the early 1970s - and to contemporary nationalism.
The past legitimizes. The past gives a glorious background to a present that doesn't have much to celebrate...
In this situation historians find themselves in the unexpected role of political actors.
I used to think that the profession of history, unlike that of, say, nuclear physics, could at least do no harm. Now I know it can...
We [historians] have a responsibility to historical facts in general, and for criticizing the politico-ideological abuse of history in particular...
Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity by which groups of people today, defining themselves by ethnicity, religion or the past or present borders of states, trying to find some certainty in an uncertain and shaking world by saying, 'We are different from and better than the Others.'
They are our concern in the universities because the people who formulate those myths and inventions are educated people: schoolteachers, lay and clerical, professors (not many I hope), journalists, television and radio producers.
Today most of them will have gone to some kind of university. Make no mistake about it. History is not ancestral memory or collective tradition. It is what people learned from priests, schoolmasters, the writers of history books and the compilers of magazine articles and television programmes.
It is very important for historians to remember their responsibility which is, above all, to stand aside from the passions of identity politics - even if we feel them also. After all, we are human beings too...
We cannot wait for the generations to pass. We must resist the formation of national, ethnic and other myths, as they are being formed. It will not make us popular...
Ernest Renan observed more than a century ago, 'Forgetting, even getting history wrong, is an essential factor in the formation of a nation, which is why the progress of historical studies is often a danger to nationality.'
Nations are historically novel entities pretending to have existed for a very long time...
It is essential for historians to defend the foundation of their discipline: the supremacy of evidence...
The deconstruction of political or social myths dressed up as history has long been part of the historian's professional duties, independent of his or her sympathies...
Let it never be forgotten, history - mainly national history - occupies an important place in all known systems of public education...
Historians are the primary producers of the raw material that is turned into propaganda and mythology...
Historians, however microcosmic, must be for universalism, not out of loyalty to an ideal to which many of us remain attached but because it is the necessary condition for understanding the history of humanity, including that of any special section of humanity.
For all human collectivities necessarily are and have been part of a larger and more complex world. A history which is designed only for Jews (or African-Americans, or Greeks, or women, or proletarians, or homosexuals) cannot be good history, though it may be comforting to those who practise it.
Unfortunately, as the situation in large parts of the world at the end of our millenium demonstrates, bad history is not harmless history. It is dangerous. The sentences typed on apparently innocuous keyboards may be sentences of death."
