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“I have seen that it is not man that is impotent in the struggles against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality.… Human history is not man’s battle to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.” — Vasily Grossman
“History teaches, but has no pupils," Antonio Gramsci wrote in one of his letters from prison. If we want to understand how we can affect our surroundings in the present, and have a clear view of what the possibilities of actions are, he insisted, we must understand the historical situation in which we find ourselves.
Despite what some governments may tell themselves, Gramsci’s words still ring true: we do not learn from history. And with our distracted brains, our bite-sized information consumption, our obsession with living in the moment, there is little space for history.
Yet history has always been a battleground. There is propaganda, denialism, revisionism, erasure. Arab Jewish historian Sophie Bessis says that history is the most ideologised discipline in the humanities.
The role of the historian, she explains, is to write a history which is not a story of nationalism. Our role is to give elements of explanations, to go back in time, not to reconcile different histories, she insists, everyone’s memory is different, history cannot be reconciled, but it is our role to see what in the past can constitute a path for the future. To see whether by embracing the past, one can build bridges to put an end to present tragedies.
In our present day, our rulers and mainstream media refuse to consider any history which deviates from the national project, from the national story. History either began yesterday or it’s fake, subversive and therefore, intolerable.
Why are we so afraid of history? And whose history is allowed to be told?
Those with a conscience know very well that those who are afraid of history are those who cannot justify their present actions morally or legally.
Holding a tight grip on history has always been in the authoritarian’s playbook. If you can rewrite the past, it’s much easier to control the present and the future (even though authoritarians have no vision for any kind of future).
When people have lost any sense of the past and have no vision of a better future, then we go into the realm of magical thinking. Referring to the writings of Hannah Arendt and others, author and journalist Chris Hedges explains that all totalitarian movements are grounded in magical thinking, when people’s conditions are so oppressive and they are in a state despair, where they can’t face reality, they endow omnipotent powers to their cultish leaders. “And once people are in the world of magical thinking, you can’t reach them through rational argument.”
This is a dangerous place.
“Once you start de-historicising people, the step to dehumanisation follows,” historian Ussama Makdisi says, in relation to what is happening to Palestinians, “once you strip people of history, you strip them of any kind of sense of purpose or being in history and therefore also in the present, and in the future.”
Makdisi says there is a history that needs to be told more humanely, more ethically, more honestly and with more complexity. He says he is a scholar because he believes there is something called telling the truth, there is something called history, justice, and even though it gets trampled on, it doesn’t go away.
“Yes, the powerful have always oppressed,” he says, “but there is no such thing as a state that remains the same forever. And no state of injustice endures forever. We’ve seen the history of slavery, we’ve seen the history of apartheid in South Africa, we’ve seen the history of colonialism… these systems eventually break down.”
Human evolution should not be characterised by technological inventions, these increasingly aim to erase the human altogether, but rather with humans reaching a higher consciousness, one in which we are able to learn from history, in its diversity and multiplicity.
One in which we each see a role in shaping this history, where our actions today shape our collective history.
Because history is also the history of each and every one of us who kept going against all the odds. It includes our despair, our rage, our broken hearts, and it includes our steadfastness and resolve to continue regardless of the outcomes.
When asked what may happen in the near future, Makdisi says: “I don’t know what’s going to happen. All I know is that each of us has an ethical obligation to oppose injustice and depravity to the best of our abilities. That’s the only thing that we can control. We can’t control what’s going to happen in the future. We can control what we say and what we do in the face of one of the worst things that has happened within our lifetimes.”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
Letters from Prison, Antonio Gramsci.
‘Europe, Israël, Palestine : une perspective historique’, avec France Culture avec Sophie Bessis, 7 August 2025. Listen here.
‘Democracy doesn’t exist in the United States: Chris Hedges’| UpFront, Al Jazeera English, 31 January 2025. Watch here.
‘Palestinian American historian Ussama Makdisi on Gaza, Palestine & Israel,’ Jung & Naiv: Folge 762, 13 May 2025. Watch here.
Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman.
The Makdisi Street Podcast, view here (or on any podcast service).
Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe.
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon.
‘African Revolutions and Decolonization (AR&D)’ - Ep. 1: Introduction w/ Momodou Taal, Guerrilla History Podcast. Listen here.
"The more the US interfere, the more they are hated," with Wadah Khanfar, Unapologetic, Middle East Eye, 23 October 2024. Listen here.
“This is not a time for the weak. This is a time for people who have a deep moral and spiritual vision of the future of humankind.” — Payam Akhavan
“Let each person ready themselves for the worst–and best–that is yet to come: when the Leviathan falls, it will take down as much as it can with it. Its grip will tighten more than ever, so much that any sense of individual sovereignty will almost vanish.” — Farah El-Sharif
"Only the story can continue beyond the war and the warrior … It is the story, not the others, that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence. The story is our escort; without it, we are blind."– Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah
