Edward S Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent demonstrates how state and corporate power can manipulate public opinion through subtle control of the media, creating a make-believe consent.
What appears “natural” or “normal” is often the deliberate product of vested interests -- frequently those of the ruling class. Democracy is supposedly a political system in which rulers govern with the consent of the people, but for Herman and Chomsky, that consent is manufactured.
Similarly, history can become a playground for manipulation, where those who control political power shape narratives to their advantage, often degrading or erasing the role of their opponents and silencing the other voices.
Has manufactured history any future? I think not.
The word manufacture comes from the Latin manus (“hand”) and facere (“to make”). In the 16th-17th centuries, it referred to goods made by hand. Its original meaning was literally “made by hand.” By the Industrial Revolution, the term broadened to mean producing goods -- often by machine -- on a large scale.
The word history derives from the Greek historia, meaning “inquiry,” “investigation,” or “knowledge acquired by investigation.” It came to mean a factual record of past events. The narratives of the past should be based on investigation and evidence -- not on invention, distortion, or hallucination.
Yet, to manufacture history, one must be highly imaginative. A common tactic is erasure: Removing an event, a fact, or a key figure from the historical record.
Imagine, for instance, an Indian college exam asking students to write the history of Indian independence without mentioning Mahatma Gandhi -- or a Pakistani exam requiring students to recount the country’s independence without naming Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
Hardcore Marxists might find this exercise easier, since for them the true engine of social transformation is class struggle; nations emerge, and countries gain independence, through the dynamics of class conflict. This “stylized” history is often applied to many countries -- except Russia and China, where the personal leadership of figures like Vladimir Lenin or Mao Zedong is acknowledged as having been catalytic in mobilizing the oppressed classes.
Indeed, material conditions and class struggles are important -- but leadership matters. During my first visit to China in 1996, I went to Tiananmen Square, next to the Forbidden City, whose outer wall facing the square was adorned with a large portrait of Mao Zedong. I was with my interpreter, a young college student born in post-reform China.
We discussed Deng Xiaoping, the so-called “father of modern China,” and she spoke admiringly of him. I joked -- perhaps mischievously -- about replacing Mao’s portrait with Deng’s. Her cheerful face hardened instantly. She replied politely but firmly: “That place is for Mao.”
Post-reform China has never denied Mao’s role in building modern China. Even revolutionary China did not erase the contributions of Sun Yat-sen, the nationalist leader who helped transform China into a republic. The Communists did not rename Sun Yat-sen University.
In 2013, I took a day off in Hong Kong to visit the Sun Yat-sen Museum. Sun, a medical doctor, was succeeded in political leadership by his brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-shek. The museum -- modest but well-curated -- displayed artifacts from Sun’s daily life.
I visited it after Hong Kong had become a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China in 1997. Rather than erasing Sun Yat-sen’s legacy, the museum dedicated to him was opened in 2006. After the communist revolution, Mao’s forces defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang army and drove them to Taiwan.
Similarly, on a later trip to China in 2004, I watched a CCTV documentary on Mao’s birthplace in Hunan Province, a site that continues to draw tourists both for its natural beauty and for its historical significance.
Denying a nation its history is like depriving a person of memory. Think of an individual with amnesia -- a common affliction of the elderly. You cannot remember your friends and relatives. It is a tragedy. If that amnesia is imposed, it is a double tragedy. A nation without history suffers a similar tragedy.
Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History -- a challenging book I struggled with -- argues the complicated history of the expansion of capitalism and how the European colonial powers often denied the histories of the “natives”.
One may deduce that such imposed amnesia turned colonized peoples into “lesser” people, and eventually into what the colonizers saw as “non-people” as slaves. That helped legitimize the rule of the colonizers. Ruling elites who erase history operate with a similar mindset.
When Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man in the early 1990s, he drew on the ideas of Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, who argued that once capitalism and liberal democracy triumphed globally, history would, in a sense, end -- having reached its final stage. I wrote soon after in response, in The Business Times, a Singapore newspaper, that history may have “ended” in the West, but in the developing world, history was only beginning.
The genocides and wars of the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century have proved beyond any doubt that history has not ended. It is very much alive, and it is history that gives hope and aspirations to the struggling peoples of the world.
History can be denied only temporarily. The enduring lesson of history is that it cannot be erased forever.
Habibul Haque Khondker is a sociologist and columnist.
