❊ Historical Dissociation

— Can you erase one of the world’s most documented events from history? —

Culture Minister Gaby Layyoun on the inclusion of the phrase “Cedar revolution” in Lebanese history books:

We cannot keep such a phrase in the curriculum … [It] is sensitive to many in the country and it might create problems between people

Let’s call that the “dissociation” school of historical revisionism. Shying away from any historical detail that might cause awkward feelings in people living in the present. Who cares if half the Lebanese took to the street if the other half finds that fact inconvenient? By that standard world war II should be removed from German history books and the entire slavery chapter should be scraped from American ones.

Defenders of Mr. Layyoun say that the debate is simply about semantics, that the revolution itself is thoroughly discussed in the book, but not its American-made moniker. But to me the interesting question is this: If history is always written by the victors, how does a country with “no victors and no vanquished” write its history?

The problem with Mr. Layyoun’s statement is not that it is a egregious distortion of events (after all, distortions like this happen all the time when victors write history books). The problem is one of overreach and overconfidence: An assumption by one party that its opponents have no life left in them, and that they can simply be erased away.

If Mr. Layyoun had truly read the history of Lebanon, he would not have made such a rookie mistake.