Historian Stephen Kotkin has penned an important new essay expanding on the phenomenon of junk history. This is Kotkin’s term for reductionist or plainly wrong interpretations of historical events—“the history that everyone ‘knows’ and cites or recites but has little or no basis in empirical reality”—, which would be inconsequential if they were “not marshaled in policy debates as justification for action, up to launching wars”. Alas, they frequently are.
The emblematic example, as Kotkin has remarked previously, is Neville Chamberlain at Munich in 1938:
Everything is Munich… It turns out not everything is Munich. It turns out Munich wasn’t even Munich when you get down into the nitty-gritty details.
Another example of junk history is what many otherwise well-informed observers think they know about Sweden’s conduct during World War II and the Cold War, crystallized by Aaron MacLean’s comments during a recent discussion I had with him on the School of War podcast:
