Precisely determining whether a historical figure’s words are accurate in content and honest in intention is not always possible when studying and writing history. Ancient historians in particular must often make carefully considered value judgments on whether to trust, say, Procopius in his description of Emperor Justinian. Procopius is a clearly biased source (towards the Emperor during his time as his official historian, and against in his Secret History, written later), but he must be dealt with and used somehow due to the relative lack of other contemporaneous sources for the time period and places he describes. Moving closer to the present day, some of the same problems around authorial intent disappear, but most remain, and a few new problems unique to modern history arise.
Modern historians, unlike ancient historians, usually do not have to deal with the question of whether a person existed or whether an event actually occurred. The invention of the printing press and the spread of literacy from the beginning of the modern era meant that most important events and persons have independent verification from different contemporaneous sources. However, this explosion of documentation in some respects makes the problem of authorial honesty and intent more difficult to address. In the late modern period especially, actors, and particularly transnational actors, are increasingly aware that their words will be read and listened to not just by the intended audience, but also by unintended and sometimes hostile audiences as well. More than ever, politicians, ideologues, and intellectuals have a motive to disguise, embellish, and sometimes outright lie about their beliefs and goals.
This is something that I have to come to terms with when researching and writing my project. Because I am trying to determine, fundamentally, the ideological legitimacy of the post-WW1 Internationals, the question of bias has to be taken head on. The issue is that both sides (pro- and anti- on the position of whether the post-war colonial policy of the social-democratic Internationals is derived from that of the pre-war International) accuse the other of acting in bad faith. On the extreme ends, authors like Frantz Fanon accused the Labour and Socialist International of being a purely cynical vehicle for the maintenance of neocolonialism, while French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, among others, accused Algerian nationalists of using the “red drapery of socialism” as cover for their war crimes and human rights abuses. A more mundane example would be Labour Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald speaking of Labour’s “commitment to our common cause” in private letters to Indian socialists while disavowing any dual loyalty to anything but King and Country when questioned in Parliament.
This sort of rhetorical ping-pong and double-speak is endemic in my primary sources dating from the mid-20th century. Parsing through the sometimes contradictory statements of politicians is difficult, but I am not, thankfully, finding the task impossible. Actions speak louder than words, and in the case of active politicians and public figures, it is relatively easy to trace links between particular statements and policies that do or do not follow those statements. Somewhat more difficult to deal with are intellectuals who were not put under the same pressure to “put up or shut up”, if you will. Confirming the depth of commitment to a particular pro- or anti- colonialist platform in those cases requires more work.
I’d be interested to hear if this issue of self-conscious bias or misrepresentation has come up for other people conducting projects in the late modern period? If so, what strategies and methods have you come up with or come across to help deal with it?