Revisionism

Variety of Revisionisms

Three authoritative interpretations of intellectual and political history, and the political arrangements that accompany them, have engendered the main versions of revisionism. They are related to Marxism, the Great War, and the Holocaust. As a strong and recurrent political label, revisionism was used aggressively in 1908 by Vladimir Lenin with the explicit intention of defining a canonical brand of Marxism against what he deemed to be the nonrevolutionary reformist trend gaining sway over German and Austrian social democracy. The evolution of Marxism as the official ideology of state socialism could be read from then on as a narrative of orthodoxy enforcing its speculative outlook and political command by permanently exposing and overcoming present or suspected revisionisms. In the history of international relations, revisionism is a descriptor of the foreign policies of the former Central Powers that stood in defiance of the status quo established in 1919 by the Treaty of Versailles. The classic example would be Hungary, a polity traumatized by severe territorial losses and insulated in a culture of denial of its new identity as a diminished European actor. The normative elusiveness of the international order presided over by the Society of Nations allowed Japan, albeit a victor of the Great War, to adopt a revisionist language, critical of Western supremacy, and to embark on revisionist operations in East Asia and the Pacific; in the process, the democratic-oriented Japanese governments of the 1920s were replaced by a military-driven direction of national politics in the 1930s. German revisionism was rooted in the 19th-century völkisch (ethnic) movement and related to previous forms of national revanchism (a term used since the 1870s to describe a political manifestation of the will to reverse territorial losses incurred by a country, often following a war) and irredentism (any position advocating annexation of territories administered by another state on the grounds of common ethnicity or prior historical possession, actual or alleged). The initially progressive, then turned “Old Right” American scholar Harry Elmer Barnes (1889–1968), perhaps the most prominent and prolific revisionist historian, echoed the German style in his work. In his book The Genesis of the World War (1929), Barnes argued against what he described as “court historians,” that the Great War (World War I) was by no proper historical account a just one, and that all the powers concerned share responsibility for its causes and course of events. He extended his argument after World War II, theorizing against the “blackout” of mainstream historiography, which he denounced as a myth factory working for political purposes and under political command. Expanding his prior analyses, Barnes maintained that Nazi German war crimes and the extermination of the European Jews were to be considered at best unproved facts, anyway matched by the treatment imposed by the Allies to the vanquished Germans.

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