The Narratives Inside Our Heads

From an op-ed piece about a week ago called Does China Have A Foreign Policy by Zheng Wang:

Words like “aggressive,” “assertive” and “arrogant” have been used to describe China’s foreign policy, particularly with respect to its protracted war of words with Japan over a set of disputed islands in the East China Sea.

In fact, China’s bark is often far worse than its bite: China has not been at war with another country since a brief armed conflict with Vietnam in 1979, and has been very cautious in its dealings with its neighbors who occupy islands claimed by China in the South China Sea. This explains why Chinese nationalists have at times criticized the government’s foreign policy for being as soft and accommodating (sic).

The part that I have bolded reminds me of a passage I recently read in a book by, of all people, Pat Buchanan, called Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War. While I disagree with all of the assumptions that underlay Buchanan's book, I admit to finding it a bit intriguing, and the fact that I read it from beginning to end shows that I keep an open mind, doncha think?

One of Buchanan's points is that, because history is written by the winners, Kaiser Wilhelm has been treated particularly unfairly.  We often read of the Kaiser's bellicosity and aggressive posturing, but Buchanan compares Wilhelm's foreign policy rants and memos to Nixon's rants and scribblings, which his aids knew how to interpret. Buchanan should know.

Here is Buchanan's tally of wars, by country, for the century from Waterloo (1815) to the outbreak of WWI (1914):

Britain - 10
Russia - 7
France - 5
Austria - 3
Germany - 3

From 1871 to 1914, the Germans under Bismarck and the Kaiser did not fight a single war. While Britain, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Japan, Spain, and the United States were all involved in wars, Germany and Austria had clean records. And if Germany had not gone to war in forty-three years, and the Kaiser had never gone to war in his twenty-five years on the throne, how can one call Germany--as British statesmen did and British historians still do--the "butcher-bird of Europe?"

We accept and perpetuate narratives in our lives all the time without question, and it is probably always worthwhile to bring them up now and again for reexamination.