Читать книгу Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 13

To know something we have to know its opposite. To define something we have to define what is not that something. Thus we define our groups in terms of those who are excluded from them. The group ‘golfers’ is defined by those who do not play golf. If everybody played golf we would not need a group called ‘golfers’. We do not talk about ‘breathers’ because everybody who is alive breathes but we do talk about ‘drivers’ because not everyone drives a car. When asked to define Britain the film-maker Terry Jones said, ‘We are set apart as Britons by our lack of French-ness, German-ness or Italian-ness.’³

No doubt, if asked to list the groups to which we belong, each of us could produce quite a few. However, some of these groups would be no more than collections of people with whom we occasionally spend some time while other groups would be an integral part of our identity. These groups are usually those of gender, family, race, religion and nationality, but all these categories are not necessarily applicable to everyone. If someone calls me an atheist I can only reply that I am an atheist only in the same way as I am an ‘a-fairy-ist’ or an ‘a-Father-Christmas-ist’. When the broadcaster Jon Snow was asked if he was British he said, ‘I think that Britishness has died off in my lifetime and nothing has replaced it. When I was a child it was Winston Churchill, beefeaters and lots of pink on the globe. Now it’s an irrelevant concept. Personally, I’m a Londoner living in Europe.’⁴

The groups which we join only transiently we can usually define very simply – ‘the crowd I drink with on Friday nights’, ‘the people who live in my street’, ‘the guys with me at college’, but the groups which are part of our identity, while they might have simple labels like ‘Church of England’ or ‘Australian’, have complex definitions which are difficult to make entirely explicit. ‘Australian’ might mean anyone who carried an Australian passport but it also means a wide range of different attributes. Recently my son sent me two videos made by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. One was the film The Castle, a funny, sentimental story about a family whose home was to be requisitioned for an airport extension, and the other a set of four episodes of the satirical series Frontline about a television current affairs team in Melbourne. The family whose home was their castle were all loving, kind, tolerant and simple-minded to the point of stupidity. The television team were murderously competitive, hurtful and cynical, with an intelligence used only for self-interest. Yet both the film and the series were an accurate representation of what I would recognize as Australian.

A complex definition of our group allows us to align ourselves with certain aspects of our group and to distance ourselves from other aspects. We can claim to have all the virtues of our group and none of the vices. Primitive pride can make good use of this ploy whenever certain events threaten our meaning structure. Primitive pride is not wedded to truth or logic, and so, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa revealed more and more of the abuses of the apartheid era, those who had benefited from that era did not reject their group but continued to claim its virtues while denying that they ever knew that such atrocities had occurred. When F. W. de Klerk was in the UK to promote his autobiography he told BBC Radio Four listeners that, on the one hand, his government had done much to promote the welfare of blacks and, on the other hand, he had known nothing of what happened at Vlakplaas, a farm near Pretoria which was used as a base for police hit squads. He had to admit that he had known of the existence of Vlakplaas but he thought it was simply a place where ANC activists were ‘turned round’. The assassins of Vlakplaas were unruly elements who wanted to keep their activities secret from him.⁵

The chutzpah of primitive pride in action can often leave onlookers flabbergasted. They are unable to point out to the exponent of such pride that every idea we hold, every meaning that we create, has bad implications as well as good. De Klerk might claim ignorance of what was going on in the country of which he was President, but this has the bad implication that he was not doing his job properly. People were acting in his name, and so he was responsible for the matters of which he claimed ignorance.

However, many people feel that it is better to be charged with incompetence than to be charged with wickedness. By saying, ‘I’m just a poor, fallible human being trying to do my best,’ we can show humility and contrition while taking pride in our humility and contrition. We are all extremely skilled at reinterpreting events in order to hold our meaning structure together.

One area where we frequently redefine is that of responsibility. Like de Klerk, we can deny responsibility for events for which we were clearly responsible, or we can claim responsibility for events over which in fact we had no control. Such a redefinition, the writer and biologist Barbara Ehrenreich surmises, could be at the beginning of our concepts of sacrifice and religion.

When, some 100,000 years ago, our species first emerged it was into a world dominated by large animals. We were small creatures, much smaller than we are today, and we were prey to the beasts. It took us many thousands of years to develop tools to defend ourselves. Artificial fire-making and action-at-a-distance weapons like the bow and arrow were not invented until some 15,000 years ago.

Only then did we turn ourselves from prey to predator. However, the fear of being prey is still very much with us. Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out that grief, depression and helplessness are the experiences of those who are prey. It seems from the research on phobias that people much more readily develop fears of spiders or snakes than they do of cars or guns, even though in a modern world people are much more likely to be killed by cars and guns than they are by spiders or snakes. The psychiatrists Isaac Marks and Randolph Nesse regard panic disorders, phobias and chronic anxiety as evolutionary adaptations to an environment which required human beings to be very readily alarmed at the possibility of danger.⁶ Fear serves to keep us alive.

This fear not only drove us to flight or fight but also inspired our ancestors to devise ways of outwitting the powerful beasts. They would have noted that the beast was often satisfied with just one kill. They might have reasoned that if they gave the beast some food, even if the food was one of them, the rest of the group might be spared. Thus the idea of appeasing a great power with a sacrifice could have been born, and then flourished as an integral part of the ritual of religion. The idea of sacrifice allows us to reconstrue a disaster over which we had no control as a sacrifice which we had chosen to make. Barbara Ehrenreich considered the possibility that

Sacrifice, in its most archaic form, was not a ritual at all, but a face-saving euphemism for death by predation. Perhaps no victims were ever thrown to the wolves or lions, but it somehow pleased our hominid ancestors to think of those who died in the jaws of predators as victims voluntarily offered up by the group.⁷

The concepts of prey and predator, sacrifice and appeasement are still today central to the way in which we define the groups with which we identify. We might no longer think of ourselves as prey to the beasts of the African savannah, but in the economic jungle we’re either the exploited or the exploiter.⁸ Modern religions might not demand blood sacrifices, but the belief in the importance of sacrifice still operates powerfully. In Hinduism, as recounted in the Rig-Veda, the entire world is a result of a sacrifice by the gods. All Christian churches remind the faithful that Christ sacrificed himself for them, and, in all religions, the faithful are reminded of the necessity of personal humility and abasement.

The concepts of prey, predator and sacrifice are central to our definition of the group because they are central to our experience of being an individual in a group. In the hierarchy of the group we might have enough power to prey on others and force them to make sacrifices, but each of us started life as small and weak and at the mercy of people around us, so even the most powerful know what it is to be prey. This is one of the reasons why the powerful usually hate to relinquish power.

The concepts of predator, prey and sacrifice have both good and bad implications. To be prey is bad, but if there is a power strong enough to prey on us it might also be strong enough to look after us. The beasts which preyed on our ancient ancestors also provided our ancestors with much of their food. They could scavenge the kills made by the beasts. Thus a sacrifice was both an appeasement and a reward. A savage god might be appeased by a sacrifice and coaxed into generosity. Throw in a few hymns of praise and the prey might be safe.

Being the predator has its disadvantages too. If the prey becomes an enemy the predator can become prey. When our ancestors turned from being prey to being predators, the most successful predators the world has ever seen, they remained mindful of the dangers of being a predator. It was not just a matter of being mindful of the dangers of having an enemy. To become too strong, too powerful as an individual, was to invite retaliation either by the gods or by the group. The Greek gods punished anyone who displayed hubris, while every group developed its own way of punishing those who were not mindful of the necessity of humility. In Australia, as they say, tall poppies get cut down, in Japan the nail that sticks up gets hammered down, while the English quietly damn those who are too clever by half. A popular group pleasure is that of schadenfreude, the joy felt at the spectacle of someone who has flown too high being brought down to earth.

Thus the group constantly presents us with a conflict between pride and humility. We need pride, both moral pride and primitive pride, to maintain our individuality. Too much humility threatens our meaning structure because humility requires us to value other people’s ideas more than our own. Most of us deal with this conflict by developing ways of appearing to be humble while privately maintaining our pride. However, this is merely a tactic. The overall strategy is always problematic because this strategy is always about justice.

Every meaning structure, left to itself, would seek to make the entire universe conform to its expectations and demands. In real life other meaning structures get in its way and spoil its plans. Every meaning structure has to compromise, and the compromise always has to do with justice. The idea of justice is essential to the maintenance of the meaning structure. Long before a child can utter the words, ‘It’s not fair!’ the child will demonstrate the anger we all feel when life is not fair to us.

Life is rarely fair. We do not mind that when we are the ones benefiting from its unfairness, but when we feel hard done by we want justice. We want this justice to be applied to all the trades we do with other people. These might be trades in goods or services, or simply in feelings. We can believe that ‘If I am patient with you, you must be patient with me,’ or ‘If I love you, you must love me.’ Sacrifice is a trade. ‘I give you this offering. Now you must benefit me.’

Every group develops its own rules or laws about justice. Our ancestors lived in small bands which, as the centuries passed, swelled into or came together as a tribe. Tribal law could deal with goods and services trades between people and sort out some of the issues which arise in relationships, but it could not deal with disasters which were beyond the control of the tribe. A brave man who had led a blameless life might die in an avalanche, a good wife and mother might die in childbirth, or the tribe itself might be threatened with starvation by an unforeseen change in the climate. How can such disasters be explained? How can good people be recompensed and rewarded? How can the wicked who go beyond tribal law be punished?

Now the meaning structure’s great capacity for fantasy could come into play. What if there was a law of justice greater than the tribe, something that covered the land, sea and sky which the tribe knew and beyond to realms which could only be imagined? What if this justice decreed that ultimately all people get their just deserts. The good are rewarded and the bad are punished. Thus the idea of the Just World was born.

It seems that all tribes at some point in their existence arrived at the idea of a Just World. In their imaginations what that Just World looked like was different for different people, and so a vast number of religions came into being, each with its own story which gave a meaning to death and the purpose of life, and an explanation of why suffering exists.⁹ The supreme power which administered universal justice took on the features of those who had conjured it into being, and its abode took on the features of the territory the conjurers inhabited. The practices of tribal law were enlarged and elaborated to become the practices of the universal power, and the rewards and punishments of tribal law were transformed into universal rewards and punishments whose enactment might take an instant or an eternity. However terrible and mysterious the power might be, weak, frail humans could know that they were secure provided they were good.

But what was ‘good’? The power might demand absolute belief and constant praise, and the tribe might have rules about good behaviour, but what was good enough? What was an adequate sacrifice – one virgin or twenty? Would a smidgen of doubt about the existence or competence of the Almighty cast you into hellfire for ever? If you coveted your neighbour’s wife but did not act on your thought did that make you a good person or a bad person?

You could spend your life trying to be a good person and still be struck by disaster. Did that mean that you had not tried hard enough and this was your punishment? Or had there been some failure in the system of justice and you had been treated most unfairly? Or had the suffering been sent to try you and, if you suffered expertly enough, would you get your reward? The highly talented but severely disabled actor, film-maker and broadcaster Nabil Shaban told how

Many disabled friends have admitted to me they think they are disabled as a punishment. My own mother told me I was born disabled because I had been very bad in my past life – and that, if I continued to be an atheist, I would be in an even worse position in my next life … When I was working in Calcutta on the movie City of Joy, an old Hindu hotel porter every time he saw me would bow. Eventually he told me I was a god. What he meant was that my being born disabled was not a curse but a divine blessing as I would end this life a spiritually stronger person than someone who didn’t have to suffer as I did, and would come closer to God and end my cycle of lives and achieve Nirvana.¹⁰

Fertile though our imagination might be in creating scenarios which we hope will give us security, such scenarios always produce as many problems as they were created to solve. The same has happened in the financial world, where ‘products’ were conjured into being to give us financial security – banks, insurance, pensions, futures and options – only to produce new and worse kinds of insecurity.¹¹ Where religion is concerned it would seem best to choose the set of beliefs which would give you personally the greatest chance of happiness – provided nothing happened to you to confound your choice. However, not many of us are given the opportunity to exercise such choice. Jean Said Makdisi, who recorded her life in Beirut during the religious and political war there, was brought up as a Christian but, as she said, ‘I think of Islam as part – a large part – of my inheritance and revere it as such.’ However, as Lebanon was being increasingly segregated according to religion, she wrote,

I have felt repeatedly that religion has worked like a stamp with which cattle are branded …

And so are we all, like it or not, branded with the hot iron of our religious ancestry. Believers and nonbelievers alike, struggle though we may, we are being corralled into the separate yards of our fellow coreligionists by the historic events of the moment. Belief and political vision have less to do with how one is seen, and then is forced to see oneself, than with external identification – the brand.¹²

Most of us are born into a religious group and much of our early education is concerned with learning the tenets of that religion. Muslim children have to memorize the Koran while Jewish children study the Torah, and, while they can ask questions in order to increase their understanding of the holy books, they are not allowed to question the veracity of the books themselves. Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox Christian children are taught that God sees everything they do and will reward or punish them accordingly. In those homes where the adults speak of their god or gods in the same way as they speak of a revered but absent grandparent, the idea of a deity can become for the child as firm and fixed as the meanings the child has created about his parents.

The neural connections which underlie these ideas must for some children at least become firm and fixed. I have met a large number of people who have told me that, although they had been given a religious education, in adulthood they had rejected or drifted away from religion only to find that when they became depressed all the shame, guilt and fear which their religious education brought them in their childhood had returned to haunt them. The brand was still on their hide. Some of these people were determined to resolve the conflict between their sense of who they were now and the demands of their childhood religious beliefs. They challenged these beliefs, changed them into beliefs which gave them courage and optimism, and ended their depression. Others dared not challenge their childhood beliefs and so remained depressed.¹³

Religion might have had its origins in the search for justice, but it was justice for the tribe, not for all human beings. Religious groups, like all groups, define themselves in terms of who is excluded. Matt Ridley in his study The Origins of Virtue wrote,

The universalism of the modern Christian message has tended to obscure an obvious fact about religious teaching – that it has almost always emphasized the difference between the in-group and the out-group: us versus them; Israelite and Philistine; Jew and Gentile; saved and damned; believer and heathen; Arian and Athanasian; Catholic and Orthodox; Protestant and Catholic; Hindu and Muslim; Sunni and Shia. Religion teaches its adherents that they are the chosen race and their nearest rivals are benighted fools or even subhumans.¹⁴

The wickedness of those excluded from the religious group has to be emphasized by the group’s leaders in order to deter any of their flock from straying. During my Presbyterian upbringing I heard much about the wickedness of the Catholics. Nowadays we often hear about ecumenicalism, and in public the clerics of different religions are polite to one another. In private ideas might not have changed that much.

At a refugee centre in London I met Father Rossi, a Catholic priest from Italy, who told me about the wickedness, not of the Protestants, but of the Italians from southern Italy. I asked him about the current situation in the debate on whether the northern states of Italy should secede from the south. He said quietly but very firmly, ‘It’s not likely but it should happen.’ He told me that he was from the north. He spoke of the south with bitterness and hatred. ‘They should be left to themselves, cut off from the north completely.’ He spoke of the corruption in the bureaucracy, politics and the police. ‘Every manager’s chair,’ he said, ‘is filled with someone from the south.’ (My parents used to talk about how a Catholic church and presbytery always occupied the best land in any Australian town.) He showed none of the tolerance and forbearance which many Christians like to think are peculiarly their own.

I remembered my conversation with my Italian friends Lorenzo and Magdalena when they, devout Catholics, told me that Italy is no longer a Catholic country.¹⁵ I asked Father Rossi, ‘Is Italy a Catholic country?’ He replied immediately, ‘No, it is not.’ In asking him why it had changed I spoke of how the school system was now predominantly a state system where religion was an optional subject. I saw this as part of the explanation why Italy was no longer a Catholic country, but he saw this as the effect of a deeper cause, which was the work of the Devil.

I asked him if he was speaking literally or metaphorically. His answer was quite unambiguous. The Devil is real, and the Italian people had been seduced by him. The Devil, he said, cannot make people do things but he can suggest things, and people can be too weak to resist these suggestions. He hated the Devil and he hated southern Italians. His defence against the Devil was exorcism. ‘I am an exorcist,’ he said. So the Devil must be exorcized and the southern Italians driven from the north and confined in the south. Italy should be two nations, north and south.

The schools, he explained to me, had ceased to teach history, philosophy and religion, and instead taught frivolous subjects like screen printing. Without a knowledge of history, philosophy and religion people were rendered vulnerable to the blandishments of the Devil. I thought, but politely did not say, that the history, philosophy and religion he wanted taught in the schools would be those versions which are approved of by the Catholic Church. In his view, not believing what the Catholic Church teaches is evidence of being seduced by the Devil.

Implicit in Father Rossi’s definition of Catholics and non-Catholics are ideas which clearly relate to national groups. Indeed, our religious and our national groups can overlap markedly in the characteristics we give them and in what we want to get out of them. Chiefly what we want from our groups is support for our meaning structures. According to Jean Said Makdisi, being forcibly labelled as belonging to a certain group is a terrible insult to a person’s individuality. Mamphela Ramphele found sustenance from both her political and religious beliefs through her darkest days as a political activist under apartheid, but she saw a similarity between religious and activist communities. She wrote,

As in the case of religious conviction, political activists are moved by something greater than themselves – a belief in a future which might be better than the present, a desire to be engaged in the establishment of a better order, and compassion for the underdog. Secondly, they share a sense of fellowship with others who are similarly committed. The need for renewing such fellowship in ritualized meetings – church services or political gatherings of the faithful – is also a common feature …

Then again there is a common desire of individual members of such communities to conform to the group. The more fundamentalist the tendency, and the more insecure the community feels, the more likely conformity will be enforced …

The willingness of individuals to sacrifice or subordinate their personal ambitions or goals for the sake of the group is also a notable similarity. This tendency is often closely tied to a willingness to engage in communal sacrificial acts, either symbolic or involving actual physical violence. Such sacrificial violence is sometimes justified as an important and necessary act to contain communal violence by focusing it on a sacrificial victim. Some of the most gruesome necklace murders [killing a victim by setting alight a motor-car tyre filled with petrol which is placed around the person’s neck] committed by political activists in the 1980s involved the sacrificial death of fellow activists suspected of disloyalty.¹⁶

Whenever we identify with a group we immediately put ourselves in jeopardy of being expelled from the group. As children we discovered how painful this could be when other children refused to play with us, or when our parents, in order to discipline us, threatened that we would be expelled from the family. In our teens our peers became very important to us, and our happiness depended on being accepted by them. A pair of shoes or a certain haircut could put our meaning structure under threat because we had failed to conform to our group.

Because the group demands conformity individuals must adapt their meaning structure to what the group sees as the correct set of ideas. For some people this is a serious threat to the integrity of their meaning structure, while for others just about any change is acceptable because they value the security and support which the group gives them above all else. However, the group itself might not be secure because it is under attack from other groups. Then, as Mamphela Ramphele pointed out, conformity is likely to be enforced.

In such a situation the fear of being prey comes to the fore. The group then can create a defensive solidarity, not just against the outside enemy but against a member of the group. Coming together to sacrifice a scapegoat can produce in the group what Barbara Ehrenreich called ‘a burst of fear-dissolving strength’.¹⁷

The choice of a scapegoat is never random though it might be mistaken. The scapegoat is someone who is considered to have betrayed the group; the punishment will serve as a warning to those group members whose loyalty to the group might be less than absolute.

To many whites in South Africa necklace murders were simply utter barbarism, acts of mindless violence which showed that the blacks were incapable of governing themselves. Such an interpretation maintained the whites’ sense of superiority and thus their own meaning structure, but it failed to take account of how all actions, whether peaceful or murderous, arise from the way in which the participants have interpreted the situation.

William Finnegan is an American journalist who, in the eighties, spent long periods in South Africa, where he worked with black journalists. He recounted the story of Ruth, a secretary in her forties who lived in the township of Alexandra. She told him about her background: her teenage son had been jailed without charges for three months.

For the first month she had not known where he was, or even whether he was alive: many mothers were simply informed by the authorities that their children were dead and already buried; others never heard. ‘When he was released there was something wrong with his heart,’ she told me. ‘The police struck him too many times. The doctor told me he must not get excited. But how can you tell a seventeen-year-old boy that he must not get excited? Especially with all that is happening to us now.’ Ruth’s son was on the run. She saw him occasionally when he came home for a change of clothes, and friends of his who were also running sometimes slept at her house. But the police came regularly, bursting in, hoping to find her son, and seizing any other comrades they found there. ‘I have not slept properly for a year or more,’ Ruth said, and I believed her.

The conversation then moved on to a recent incident when a woman who had been informing for the police was caught and necklaced. William Finnegan wrote,

Ruth turned to me and said, emphasizing every word, ‘I think the necklace is a good thing.’ Her eyes were full of strange, sad anger. She went on, ‘It makes people think twice before they will collaborate, even if they have no job and the system offers them money to inform. We are unarmed. They are armed. We must take and use what little weapons we have. Informers have been the system’s greatest weapon for a very long time. Finally, now, we are stopping them.’¹⁸

There is no way of knowing how the woman who was caught informing interpreted the events which followed, but, just as the act of necklacing can be interpreted in at least two different ways, so the act of being scapegoated can be interpreted in at least three different ways, each then having a different effect on the meaning structure of the victim.

Victims might accept the verdict of the group and believe themselves to be wicked and deserving the inevitable punishment. This punishment might be viewed with utter dread because it is ultimate and for ever, a hellfire from which no escape is possible. Or the punishment might be seen as an expiation of sins; out of such hellfires the person will be redeemed. Both primitive pride and moral pride may prefer the second interpretation.

Victims might see themselves as unjustly charged and the punishment totally undeserved. This may well be the case. Groups are not infallible. Or it might be that primitive pride has come to the fore, determined to maintain a sense of feeling good about yourself no matter what the evidence against you. After the people of the Philippines deposed President Marcos, who had enriched himself at the expense of his country, his wife Imelda demonstrated that she was a past mistress of this kind of interpretation. She always insisted that everything she did was for the good of her people and that she was, actually, very poor, despite the fact that she still lived in a most luxurious fashion.

Choosing the ‘I am innocent’ interpretation can arouse in the person great anger and resentment and even paranoia. Or it can lead to a third interpretation, one which Imelda Marcos has often demonstrated – that of being a martyr.

Groups often need martyrs and martyrs always need groups. Martyrs might feel themselves to be alone and isolated, but they need a group to play the support role in the drama of their lives. The group, or at least some influential members of the group, must first heap scorn and suffering upon the martyr before casting him out. (Men as martyrs usually choose a very public role for their martyrdom while women down the centuries have found a special niche as domestic martyrs. For domestic martyrs, being taken for granted by those for whom you sacrifice yourself is the equivalent of scorn and suffering and being cast out.) In the course of time members of the group must discover the error of their ways, whereupon they repent and forever revere the martyr. A martyr is, by definition, superior and good, therefore any group which has a martyr must itself be superior and good.

To turn yourself from a scapegoat into a martyr you must have the opportunity to say a few last words. The victims of necklacing never did. Some of the most fraught and painful testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings was from the relatives of those who had been necklaced. We need to learn how to live together in groups without resorting to scapegoating in order to maintain group solidarity, but we will not be able to do this until we can deal effectively with our fear of being prey.

The history of religious and national groups is full of scapegoats and martyrs. The nation state was a product of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nationality is now an idea that has common currency, but not everyone feels the need to claim membership of a national group.

Nationality becomes a vital part of a person’s identity when little else is available to sustain that person’s pride. If you feel that you have considerable control over your own life, if you have work which bolsters your identity and you have an income which meets your needs, nationality becomes an add-on extra, something you can assume when your national football team looks like winning the World Cup and abandon when you go abroad and wish to demonstrate your international skills. However, when you feel that you are utterly helpless, that your fate is in the hands of other people, even though you might have work which bolsters your identity and an income which meets your needs, and even more so if you do not have such work and income, nationality can become vital to the integrity of your meaning structure. Thus Jon Snow, an acclaimed and successful journalist and broadcaster, could abandon the idea of nationality while my friend Dusan, professor of psychology at Belgrade University, held on to his. When I visited Dusan in the summer of 1998 he told me that he felt helpless in the political and economic upheavals Yugoslavia had suffered. He had always loved his country and especially his city, Belgrade, but the break-up of Yugoslavia and the following war intensified his feeling of being a Serb. I found this intensity most striking in contrast to the nonchalant way psychologists in England and Australia treat their nationality.

Then I remembered how intensely we all felt about nationality during the Second World War. It was vitally important both to one’s meaning structure and to one’s physical survival to identify with the nation which was winning the war and to avoid being identified as belonging to an enemy nation. The history of nations is a history of war. Every nation has to invent a national story, and that story becomes its official history, where the great milestones are wars. In official histories Britain looked to Crécy, Agincourt and Trafalgar; France looked to Marengo, Austerlitz and Jena; Serbia to Kosova; America to Lexington and Bunker Hill; Australia to Gallipoli and the Somme. Such events defined the nation, but the event which defined the nation did not have to be a victory. The Serbs were defeated at Kosova, the Australians at Gallipoli. Defeats mean sacrifices.

The story goes that on the eve of the fateful Battle of Kosova in 1389 Prince Lazar told his men,

‘It is better to die in battle than to live in shame. Better it is for us to accept death from the sword in battle than to offer our shoulders to the enemy. We have lived a long time in the world: in the end we seek to accept the martyr’s struggle and to live forever in heaven. We call ourselves Christian soldiers, martyrs for godliness to be recorded in the book of life. We do not spare our bodies in fighting in order that we may accept holy wreaths from that One who judges all accomplishments. Sufferings beget glory and labour leads to peace.’¹⁹

The Serbs have long memories. Six hundred years later Slobodan Milošovic, President of the Yugoslav Republic, could persuade the Serbs that the sacrifices at Kosova justified many more sacrifices.

In 1922 the Sydney Morning Herald declared that ‘The Gallipoli campaign has been described as “the most glorious failure in military history”’, and went on to ask, ‘But was it failure to Australia? It has made us a nation. Was the price worth paying? Are not nations like individuals? If the nation is to be born, if the nation is to live, someone must die for it.’²⁰