What is the use of fact-checking in the face of politics that ignore facts?

Originally published in Hong Kong at 2022-12-18 13:20

Edin Heydarpasic/Text

Wang Liqiu / Translated

In early November, a report to the United Nations written by Bosnian High Representative Christian Schmidt was leaked to the media. In the report, Schmidt warned that Bosnia and Herzegovina was in danger of secession and that the prospect of a new civil war by armed Serb separatists was "very real". In the days that followed, as news of the impending war in Bosnia spread, some media outlets asked me if I, as a historian of the Balkans, could write a short article explaining the nature of the current crisis. source.

Of course I could write something like this - but the role that the historian is called upon to play in this situation always makes me uneasy.

This kind of person who is called in to "explain" the history of a place that has been neglected for a long time—whether it is Bosnia, Sudan, or Naka—is suddenly in the news. Destroy the myths associated with it.

But the more I think about postwar Bosnia, the more intrigued I am by the limitations of such short essays.

How useful is it to try to provide "deep" historical explanations for superficial conflicts that are rooted only in politics? While historians are good at fact-checking , is fact-checking really the best, or only way, to respond to state-sponsored narratives based on deliberate lies ?

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We are forced to confront such questions when looking at the Bosnian Autonomous Republika Srpska at the heart of the current Bosnian crisis. The current leader of the Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, has escalated his threat to build a new army, secede from Bosnia, and thereby plunge the former Yugoslavia back into armed conflict.

The Republika Srpska itself is a recent political creation. It dates back to 1992, when hard-line Bosnian Serb nationalists, led by Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, seized on the breakup of Yugoslavia to create a pure mono-ethnic nation-state. Backed by Milosevic and the remnants of the Yugoslav National Army, the founding fathers of the Republika Srpska relentlessly pursued their radical goal of annihilating the territory they seized in the first three years of statehood, from 1992 to 1995 non-Serbs (mainly Bosnians and Croats) on the

Karadzic and Mradić failed, and later the founding fathers of the Republika Srpska were charged and convicted of crimes against humanity and genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

However, under the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995, the Republika Srpska survived and was given the status of a self-government within the independent state of BiH (another political entity in BiH is a country composed of federal states).

Today, more than two decades after that war broke out, the Republika Srpska is in the hands of Dodik, who has portrayed himself as a defender of the wartime legacy. While initially presented as Karadzic's alternative, Dodik now staunchly denies any genocide committed by the Republika Srpska founding fathers, declaring that it won't be long before the Republika Srpska will have its own army, fiscal and other institutions. Russia's Vulcan and Serbia's Vucic both regard Dodik as their regional ally and condone his threat of secession.

Dodik's nationalist project also sees him committing himself to rewriting and "deepening" the history of the Republika Srpska. When you look up the "Encyclopedia of the Republika Srpska" that the government spent a lot of money on - a set of books that claims to have more than ten volumes, but only three volumes have been published so far - you will encounter various distorted claims, such as Said that the Republika Srpska has a long history and a glorious past, it existed as early as the Middle Ages and late antiquity.

Asking historians to dig deep into such a (short) history (like Republika Srpska) feels like sending a dive team into the bathtub - but that's what politicians are asking, mobilizing historians to provide the narrative they need Well, some scholars have also accepted this task, either under pressure, or they really believe in this set, or they are for speculation .

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When confronted with nationalist fabrications of an imagined past, historians often resort to their favorite tools: fact-checking and myth-busting. Confronted with misleading claims about history, historians are adept at pointing out the fallacies, distortions, and historically distorted misunderstandings that underpin these claims. This kind of work remains one of the most valuable functions of the discipline of history. Historians have the power to expose mistakes, build more accurate narratives, and examine the past from multiple perspectives in an evidence-based manner.

But how much can fact-checking correct misunderstandings in the face of regimes determined to create their own narratives about the past, no matter how delusional?

As far as Republika Srpska is concerned, it is clear that politicians like Dodik know the uncomfortable truth about recent events. Until 2007, Dodik himself admitted that the Armed Forces of the Republika Srpska had "engaged in genocide in Srebrenica".

Before long, Dodik decided it was better for his political ambitions to stoke nationalist pride. So he began talking about an Islamic conspiracy against the fictional threat of "Serbs" and "Christian Europe," while denying that the founding fathers of the Republika Srpska had systematically targeted Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the 1990s. "There is no such thing as genocide" became the slogan that Dodik repeated year after year at various media conferences and rallies. In 2017, the Republika Srpska government banned teaching in schools about subjects like the bloody sieges of Sarajevo and Srebrenica in the 1990s.

Protests at home and abroad have not been able to contain the offensive launched by the Republika Srpska. Efforts to deal with those who support "soft denial" and try to persuade them to admit some crimes without labeling them as genocide will only lead to constantly changing the definition of the relevant concept until "hard denial" becomes a crime again. mainstream results.

Such debates have also done great harm to postwar Bosnia. Republika Srpska's operation of rehabilitating convicted war criminals and relativizing their crimes negates the experience of survivors and victims' families, causing them secondary damage. By justifying past violence, denialist discourse also makes new threats of violence more credible and pervasive, especially as Dodik talks about building his own army.

Eventually, the problem became so serious that Valentin Inzko, the senior official in charge of Dayton's civilian enforcement in Bosnia, enacted a law banning genocide denial. While all genocide denial is generally prohibited by law, it is widely believed that this is something that was long overdue, but never done, on Dodik.

Dodik, in turn, escalated his threat largely because he refused to abide by the law; instead, he asserted that the Republika Srpska would seek de facto independence so that it would be free to create a Fact-bound past and future .

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Similar denial-powered forces are now on the rise in many countries, including the United States, although they operate in very different contexts. Recently, after successfully stoking a moral panic over the specter of "critical race theory," Republican politicians in 20 US states persuaded their state legislatures to ban the teaching of "potentially divisive subjects" in American history courses.

Historians in the United States are also scrambling to deal with the impact of this legislation on them. This effectively amounts to a state mandate that they deny some of the most fundamental aspects of American history. In June 2021, an open letter signed by 135 academic associations protested that, apparently, the goal of this law was to "suppress the teaching of the role of racism in American history." In August 2021, Jacqueline Jones, president of the American Historical Association, published a compelling paper summarizing the main patterns of anti-Black racism in American history, while also explaining what critical race theory is and is not .

But while the corrective effects of such fact-checking are valuable, they won't deter politicians who legislate against teachers teaching real facts about the past.

Moreover, the haste to overthrow denialist claims—say, by pointing out their falsehoods and then correcting them—runs the risk of endorsing them, giving them legitimacy, as if they were the starting point for historical analysis rather than political calculation. And such a plot should not be considered by most historians who work on the basis of experience.

Recognizing that all this fuss is about power shakes the generally accepted view about history—that ideally, history is a neutral field of study that is best kept out of politics. together .

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Such ideals are shared by Hannah Arendt, who brilliantly explores the role of lies and deceit in modern politics, but her analytical assumptions, truth-seeking — including the work of historians and fact-checkers — ultimately Should be a non-partisan, largely lonely errand.

According to Arendt, "To look at politics from the standpoint of truth means to stand outside politics. This position is that of a truth-teller who seeks to intervene directly in human affairs, or by means of persuasion or violence. If language speaks, then he loses his position..."

But the art of history inevitably intervenes in human affairs, and it does originate in human affairs. This fact makes Arendt suspicious of "historians and politicians" who "can't help but regard their reality - which is, after all, artificial from the start, and therefore could be something else appearance—into one's own theory, and thereby mentally freed from the disturbing contingency of this reality."

Our age, permeated with projects of denialism, thus opens up opportunities for a vision that accepts the many political potentialities inherent in history without attempting to minimize History is reduced to the task of preserving facts .

Confronted with powerful forces that are rewriting the past, historians should rethink their assumptions and ask new questions about the relationship between power and their discipline.

What kinds of community and institutional channels can help fight disinformation and pave the way for a more honest reckoning with disturbing pasts?

What use are professional historians to society?

I don't have definite answers to these questions. But I think that expanding the discussion of the relationship between politics and history will allow historians to better counter the rise of denial, whether in Bosnia or in the United States.

Arendt rightly emphasizes that fact is disturbingly fragile and resilient, that it always quietly recovers after being distorted and destroyed. Arendt concludes that this dangerous tension—the tension that keeps the truth in constant danger of slipping into the realm of lies—is “curable.”

But that just makes the multiple struggles of telling the truth all the more necessary. If the current crisis in Bosnia is any guide, it is that it shows that fighting a resurgent denialist project remains a dangerous and precarious process, one that should be pursued not just in this country but around the world. A process that elicits broad critical reflection.

Edin Hajdarpasic, “What Use Is Fact-Checking Against Fact-Free Politics? The rise of false histories by real politicians”, Public Seminar , December 7, 2021. The translation is for academic exchange only, please do not use it for other purposes.

Edin Heydarpasic is an assistant professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and author of Whose Bosnia? Imagination and Nation Formation in the Modern Balkans" (2015).

Wang Liqiu, born in Mile, Yunnan, Ph.D., School of International Relations, Peking University, lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Engineering University.