“Midwit historians”: The backlash against Dan Snow
In a recent Spectator article, the writer Samuel Rubinstein takes aim at the popular historian and broadcaster, Dan Snow. Snow had recently been interviewed for an article in the Times in which he had the temerity to acknowledge that he has a elite background. “I am a product of all that history”, he told the interviewer, “and that’s why I am where I am in the world.” Perhaps even more unforgivable, he argues that history is complex and cherished narratives about Britain’s past need to be contextualized. Dangerous stuff. “You can love your country”, he says, “but also be aware that the story is not as simple as the Battle of Britain pilots were defending freedom; they were defending a British imperial system from an ambitious German imperial system.” This brief comment has caused much outrage. In Rubinstein’s view, it makes him “the ultimate midwit [sic] historian”.
For Rubinstein this observation is “is the stuff of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact-era Soviet propaganda”. It is evidence that Snow is merely engaged in debunking myths and “slaying the most sacred cow you can find.” Drawing on a crude and cruel meme, Rubinstein described three types of historian. First, the “unthinking troglodyte” or “Oaf” who makes simplistic claims. Second, the “Savant” who sees some grains of truth in such claims. Finally, the “midwit” who sets out to debunk such claims. Snow is placed firmly in the latter camp.
There are several problems with this insulting caricature. For a start, Snow’s brief comment does not set out to debunk a myth. His statement about the Battle of Britain does not deny that pilots were “defending freedom”, rather he states that the reality was not that “simple”. In fact, they were also — implicit in the sentence — defending the British imperial system against a rival “ambitious German imperial system”. Of course, one can take issue with the striking understatement in describing the Nazi regime as merely an “ambitious” “imperial system”. But Snow is not wrong. The Nazis did wish to establish a vast, racially pure Empire — The Greater German Reich. Meanwhile, the British state, including the RAF, was bent on defending its own Empire. As the historian Alan Allport notes in his magisterial history of Britain in the first half of the Second World War, Britain at Bay, Chamberlain took Britain to war to defend the Empire and the way of life it ensured.
The question for Chamberlain — and really, this is the question that lies at the heart of the origins of the Second World War — was not whether Britain should ever go to war but, rather what specifically were the interests so ‘vital’ that the country would have no choice but to do so. Chamberlain sketched a few of these out: the defence of British territory and the imperial lines of communication; the preservation of British ‘liberties’ and the British way of life; the prevention of another nation dominating the world and so endangering these things. (p. 83)
Chamberlain was hardly alone in seeing the war in this fashion. Upon achieving power in May 1940, Churchill delivered his famous Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat speech to the House of Commons. In this speech, he asked ‘what is our aim?’ His answer:
It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal.
Indeed, the British state viewed the Empire as not only to be defended, but that it would be the ultimate source of victory and ensure British freedom. In 1940, stamps were produced to raise money for the Spitfire fund. They were emblazoned with the words ‘The British Empire stands for world peace and security’ and in large lettering, ‘Defend It’.
So, let us return to Dan Snow. His point was clearly not to ‘debunk’ the idea that the war was being fought merely for freedom, but that there were other complex motives which drove the nation, its Empire and people to war — the defense of the imperial system being one of them. Clearly, in Rubinstein’s crude and insulting conceptualization of historians, Snow in fact should belong in the ‘Savant’ category. In effect, he does “say that” claims, such as the RAF pilots fought for freedom, “are, in a basic and rudimentary sense, correct.”
There is also something of an unintended irony in Rubinstein’s argument. His entire premise is built upon the construction of strawmen caricatures, which he then sets about dismantling. Proper historians, Savants like Kenneth Clark, “delight in the sharing of knowledge, not to ‘debunk’”. In alarming fashion, he laments that “the genre of popular history has been taken over by the Midwits”. Worse, “by and large, popular historians, not to mention academic ones, conceive of their vocation as nothing more than pedantry masked as ‘subversion’.” In short, the idea that historians are learned individuals who delight in the sharing of knowledge is itself a myth, such individuals have, in fact, been swept away by a “wave of midwittery”. Rubinstein, in his article, seeks to debunk this myth revealing instead the reality that the profession has been colonised by politically motivated midwits.
So, let’s think about this as Savants for a moment. Certainly, there are grains of truth that make up this myth image painted by Rubinstein. Some historians of the Second World War, not least Clive Ponting and Stuart Hylton, did write popular books which set out to debunk national myths of the Second World War rather than understand and historicise them. These individuals, the historian Mark Connelly describes as “sensationalist revisionists” (p. 9). Yet most historians, including Snow as we have seen, do not do this. Indeed, over many decades, historians like Connelly, Allport, Daniel Todman, Malcolm Smith, Sonya Rose, Penny Summerfield, Geoffrey Field, and most famously, Angus Calder, to name but a few, have tried to make sense of British myths regarding the Second World War. For such historians, in the words of Arthur Marwick, “Part of the necessary function of history is that, in advancing understanding of the past, it challenges and deflates myths, while at the same time explaining their origins and significance.” (p. 33)
The historiographical reality is far more complex than the myth Rubinstein constructs and then debunks. It is tempting to conclude that, by his own logic, Rubinstein is a midwit. But why engage in such mean-spirited rhetoric at all? What is the point?
