From the Editor - February 2011

The essence of a totalitarian society is the lack of any distinction between private and public worlds. Hence the ecstasy experienced by Winston Smith and his lover Julia when they escape the scan of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 to enjoy their brief moment of privacy and self-discovery. Which should make us wary of the fundamentalist freedom of information campaigners at Wikileaks, led by Julian Assange, a man strongly protective of his own personal life, who also seeks to break down the barriers between the public and the personal that make life tolerable, in order that politicians and diplomats – or at least those that serve the United States – should feel embarrassed. Wikileaks’ exposure of more than 250,000 documents has received the cautious support of parts of the serious press and excited some contemporary historians. Timothy Garton Ash, who so brilliantly documented the baleful daily life of the Soviet empire and its crumbling, called them a ‘historian’s dream’, a ‘multi-course banquet from the history of the present’.

I presume that ‘history of the present’ is what we used to call current affairs; the contradictory presence of the word ‘history’ is there to add gravitas to and mask the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ nature of most news reporting, to give some import to a medium that has gone in for too much frippery and has realised its error too late. The Wikileaks ‘revelations’ may, as newspaper executives hope, bring new readers to their ailing format, especially those of a generation who believe that all should be free, whether books, music, information, or a three-year course at an elite university. They bring back too some of the spice of foreign reporting (albeit by surprisingly perceptive and well informed US diplomats) to newsrooms that have cut back on their foreign correspondents in recent years (including, shamefully, the cash-rich BBC) to follow an increasingly parochial agenda. But it also, I fear, signals a foreshortening of historical perspective.

After all, no one with a knowledge of the turbulent history of Saudi Arabia, dominated by its battles with Islamic fundamentalism, can be at all surprised that it was the leaders of the desert kingdom rather than those of Israel who shouted loudest for military action against Iran. Historians of China will hardly raise an eyebrow at news that the pragmatic and increasingly worldly People’s Republic is seeking to distance itself from the ‘spoiled child’ of North Korea. Similarly historians know that in Russia corruption is rife, as it is in Afghanistan, and can point to the longstanding reasons why that is so. This historical perspective is now all too rare among news reporters and it should not surprise us that many of today’s best foreign correspondents – David Loyn and Mark Urban at the BBC and Jason Burke of the Observer spring to mind – are themselves practising historians. There is no ‘history of the present’; there is current affairs informed by an understanding of history. And that is the best kind.