I enjoyed reading Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games, subtitled The Uses and Abuses of History, but it was more than just pleasure, it was an invitation to study history, a well-written plea for why it is so important to know what went on in the past: “History has shaped humans’ values, their fears, their aspirations, their loves, and their hatreds.  When we start to realize that, we begin to understand something of the power of history.“  What MacMillan writes about is important — how history is used to understand (use) and justify (abuse) personal, political, and social choices — and she cites interesting examples from across a wide spectrum of time and place.  She goes well beyond Santayana’s well-known (and itself abused) quotation, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” to show that we do not study history for answers but in order to know the right questions to ask of our present actions and their future impacts.  I wish she had gone further and into more depth with her many examples from social and political history to demonstrate the dangers and abuses, both personal and political, of relying on the past to explain and exculpate the present, and the past.  Her comfortable writing style and past scholarship demonstrate she could have written a longer, more probing and eye-opening volume on why we must study history, but perhaps her intention was to whet appetites, not satisfy them.

What I found most interesting was MacMillan’s exploration of the difference between memorializing events (non-critical analysis) versus understanding them (critical analysis that can lead to very uncomfortable conclusions for those involved in the past or vested in the past).  She cites many examples of  exhibits and memorials that tried to show the many-sided nature of a specific event in history (the bombing of Hiroshima, for example) but that met up with opposition forces who wanted their history black and white, not in shadings of gray.  Underlying the opposition was often a fear that those who had been involved in the focussed-on event will lose status and respect and become debased in memory, even vilified.  The role of history is not to buttress reputations of men and women long ( or recently) dead but to provide the full story behind events.  As MacMillan writes again and again, “mature” societies can understand the complexity of history and do not have to be spoon-fed illusions of past glory, heroism, and righteousness.  In controlling regimes, for example in China and Russia, history is contained as a steady, even, and positive flow of support for the current regime, and past atrocities that would upset the claim of entitlement, such as Stalin’s genocide and the Cultural Revolution, are hidden away as much as possible.

MacMillan is a good writer, engaging and spicy, bold and straightforward.Dangerous Games is a good read, a starting-point for exploration into the importance of knowing what has happened not only in your past but in the pasts of others around the world.  To understand history is a big part of understanding the present and planning for the future; the past is not a blueprint to the future but a guidebook to how humans have acted before, how they have been provoked, excited, angered, overcome; how they have changed themselves and the world, and, just as importantly, how they have not.