Long Shadows: Truth, Lies and History

If you're fed up with the usual 'names and dates' types of history, and the 'just so' stories they convey, dig into this book. You're sure to be surprised at every turn. Seriously, you can't go wrong, if you're looking for an insight into how history is rewritten to fool us.


Confronting the Wrenching , and Doing It Very Well Indeed   July 18, 2002
6 out of 7 found this review helpful

Ms. Paris writes with the immediacy of a novelist and the analytical qualities of a philosopher. She is clearly enormously intelligent, well-read, introspective, synthetic in the best sense, and probing. I would not call her analysis of the experiences of memory and history optimistic; on many levels, it is starkly cynical. I would call it fascinating and deep, not only from the many interviews she did but from the background research that informs them. Her treatments of Germany, Japan, South Africa, the United States, the Balkans, and the issues of UN tribunals and international criminal jurisprudence are balanced, percipient, and compelling. She is a voice for dogged determination in the process of incrementally improving our species and its approach to conflict, against the culture of silence and looking the other way, against atrocity with impunity. Read her. Find motivation in her stories. Then act as best you can to further a better and different world. Humanity is, and always will be, a work in progress. Ms. Paris contributes mightily to an appreciation of the costs, tradeoffs, and nuances that entails.


Beware of Standing in the Shadows One Describes   June 30, 2008
R. L. Huff (Louisiana)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

"It is now a truism (although it didn't used to be) that every revolution of history inevitably distorts because it is the product of an individual researcher's choices, emphases and points of view." With this caveat on page 322 (hardback edition), Erna Paris masterfully describes her own dilemma in writing this book.

As a Jewish historian, Ms. Paris begins with the Holocaust and Germany and, inevitably using this as both yardstick and bottom line, begins to analyze selected targets of liberal wrath, those violators of "Western values" of tolerance and human rights. All the politically correct villains of the 1990s are here: Holocaust deniers, Serbs, Japanese who bewail Hiroshima while denying the Rape of Nanking, white racists in South Africa and the Mississippi Delta.

Conspicuously absent are others that could also well serve as examples of mythology and its deadly effects on the living. For one, the founding myths of Zionism, in deadly link to the ongoing repression and war of the Occupied Terr - well, you know where I mean. This particular choice might pull a few more bricks out of Holocaust mythology, as officially interpreted by Israel, than even Ms. Paris might dare. The shadow of truth, lies and history over Northern Ireland might have been raised; but as a Canadian subject of the British Commonwealth Ms. Paris might have felt that example wouldn't clearly demonstrate the superiority of Western values. True also, I suppose, for Central America, where the shadow of past injustices lingered long in present-day violence - helped along by "the West." Well, then, the Hindu-Moslem communal violence of India might also have been a fitting choice, but too culturally remote for demonstrating the human universality of Western values. Yes, there's just too many of these darn examples out there, so better to stick with those that give the author the high ground.

But a high ground has value only when an author doesn't use it for a urinal. Typical of Ms. Paris' approach is her 1990s demonization of Serb myth-makers and Slobodan Milosevic. Repeating all the cliches of Serb villainy and touting the West's moral irreproachability (the Rambouillet negotiations merely "failed," with no explanation as to why), our virtuous selves were left no choice but to finally bomb to demonstrate our commitment to tolerance and human rights. The fact that Serb mythology, especially regarding Kosovo, is a virtual template for Israel's take on Jerusalem and the West Bank is noted but ritually ridiculed. One should expect such shallow convenience from popular scribes, as well as ignorance of the Balkans: atrocities in the 90s were not some throwback to the Nazi era, to be conveniently explained by Holocaust terminology, but to the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, where the same tribal passions and bloody deeds were enacted and recorded by Western observers deserving far more recognition than Ms. Paris' one-dimensional effervescence.

To her credit, however, Ms. Paris does take on the "Goldhagen Thesis" of German collective responsibility for the Holocaust, treating it as self-righteous posturing that only descredits Holocaust survivors and their sponsors. (However, if Ms. Paris' address to an audience of survivors carried the same smug tone evidenced throughout her book I can see why they virtually egged her off the podium.) Exploitation of the Holocaust for personal axe-grinding and political gain are certainly to be decried. So is an oblivious inability to apply the lessons learned to one's own and one's self.