♪ >> Valerie: Welcome to Canada Files.

I'm Valerie Pringle.

My guest today is Margaret MacMillan.

She's an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Toronto and at Oxford University.

Her books include bestsellers, Paris 1919 ,Nixon in China and most recently War: How Conflict Shaped Us, has been translated into 26 languages.

She tries to make history interesting, accessible, humane and relevant.

And she succeeds brilliantly.

>> Welcome Margaret.

>> Thank you.

>> As someone like most of us, who has grown up in this unprecedented time of peace and prosperity, what were the most important lessons you learned from this intensive study of war?

>> One of the things I have learned, which has stuck with me is we can never assume war has gone away.

That it's always lurking around somewhere.

We're realizing that with Ukraine.

Who would have thought there'd be another major war in Europe in the 21st century?

That is something.

There's something that Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary, said, which always sticks with me.

"You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you."

>> People sometimes think we're hard-wired for it.

It's in our nature.

We know we've had peaceful times.

But it's just something that's part of who we are.

>> I don't like to think that.

That means we're condemned always to fight each other.

The evidence is still really mixed on that.

Yes, we are creatures.

We have a biology.

We've inherited certain characteristics through the process of evolution.

But I don't think we're determined to fight.

Because we have other characteristics.

We can be altruistic, kind and unselfish with each other.

What I think makes people fight is more a question of culture.

War is highly organized, not just a brawl outside a bar.

War is not just two people trying to punch each other.

When you think of the organization, planning, training that it takes to create war, it's culture and discipline.

It's what society expects of people that make war possible.

>> When you wrote War -- examined this from so many different angles, you think, what a curious waste mostly, of human life, effort, energy.

>> It's also so reckless.

The only thing we know for sure about war is when you start it, you don't know how it's going to go.

nor how you're going to end it.

So often people start wars without really thinking about what will happen if they don't win the victories they want to win.

Or how they end it if they do win the victories.

It is a terrible waste... unfortunately there are strong motives that push individuals, countries, groups of people to fight each another.

One is greed.

You have something I want.

You don't want to give it up so I'll fight you for it.

If that's the way I'm programmed or come to think.

Sometimes you fight out of fear because you're afraid if you don't attack first someone is going to attack you.

Sometimes it's ideology.

We know how powerful ideas can be.

People will fight to build a better world, religion, nationalism.

All of those things, we're seeing in the world today.

>> You've said that ideology is the scariest motive.

>> It is because when you're fighting on ideological grounds, those standing in the way are wrong and wicked.

If you're fighting to establish Christian, Muslim or Hindu rule on earth, anyone who resists you, by nature is evil.

Because they're resisting the promised land.

It's the same with nationalism.

Anyone who resists you is somehow deeply wicked.

So they should be removed.

Ideological wars can be the cruelest of all.

>> When you look at the situation...in Ukraine it's still dire.

You look at someone like Putin.

What do you do about that?

You want to avoid war at all costs but how do you deal with someone who behaves that way.

As Hitler did.

>> It's the age-old dilemma, isn't it?

We can hate war as much as we like.

We can say we don't want to have war.

But what do you do when you have someone who is determined to use war as a weapon?

Hitler was prepared to use war as an instrument of state.

Putin was clearly prepared to do the same.

Even though the instrument is turning, in his hand, not to be as effective as he thought it would be.

You can't reason with him-- can't say please don't fight.

Because they're not going to listen to you.

I admire the pacifists like Gandhi and Tolstoy.

Who believed you should never fight under any circumstances.

But I don't see how we can do it.

I couldn't do it.

if I see someone attacking my family or friends.

My reaction would be to say we have to fight back.

>> And leadership-- you've written a lot about individuals in history and their impact.

In this particular case in Ukraine, these individuals: Putin, Zelensky are really interesting.

>>I think the individuals matter enormously.

We understand the great forces in history.

Economics, sociology, geography, resources--all these matter.

But someone has to give the order.

I don't think this war would have happened without Putin.

It is Putin's war.

Zelensky is the other key figure here.

Who would have thought that someone who made his name as a comedian.

He won the Ukrainian equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing .

Charming but you wouldn't think of him as a statesman.

Somehow he's been the man for the occasion.

He's managed to inspire the Ukrainians.

He's a master at talking to them and the world.

>> It does feel like turbulent times in this world.

You talk about fault lines.

When great powers are failing and rising being particularly fraught.

People look at this situation, particularly with US & China.

>> There's always movement in international relations.

Countries don't stay at the same level of power forever.

They rise, they fall.

But they don't always fall continuously.

Sometimes they'll rise again.

US has gone through periods where it hasn't been that important in the world.

Then it rebuilt itself.

Same thing with Germany.

Germany was completely flattened after WWII.

Now it's much more of a power.

There's always shifting in the international order.

What's worrying is when those powers are pushing up, feel they're not getting their due place in the sun.

An expression Germany used before WWI.

Those powers feeling threatened, both moods are dangerous.

Because the rising powers may be tempted to strike out and the declining powers may be tempted to strike out while they still can.

What worries me about the present situation is not just the tension between the US and China, it's too many things happening at once.

There's all these overlapping crises.

There's war in Ukraine.

The worry of more pandemics.

The tensions between other countries in the world.

Of course overall, we have climate change.

>> That was what I was going to bring up next.

That it will inevitably lead to a conflict over resources.

>> We're already seeing it in parts of Africa, for example.

There's very serious potential of conflict between Ethiopia, which controls the upper waters of the Nile, and Egypt and Sudan, which depend on those waters.

Ethiopia is building a massive dam.

There are already warnings coming from Egypt That it can't allow Ethiopia to control these waters.

We're going to see a lot of fighting over resources.

>> When you've talked about this book, now for a couple of years, to many people in many venues.

Do people heed the warnings-- take them seriously?

You present this.

It looks like oh no!

>> They may take them seriously, not because of me now, because of the war in Ukraine.

We are extremely fortunate in this country.

You and I grew up in a country that was at peace.

Yes, we were involved in wars overseas.

Most of us weren't touched by war in the way our parents and grandparents were.

We got used to the idea that peace was going to continue.

That war would never come close to us.

We're now realizing it is coming a bit closer.

The possibility of war is there.

That fact that it happened in Ukraine is really shaking people.

>> I love the story of you growing up in Toronto.

With a family and no television.

Your parents wouldn't let you have television until all of you could read.

>> I was the oldest.

My youngest brother was 10 years younger.

He just wouldn't read.

He was very slow to read.

It wasn't until I was 21 that we had a television in the house.

So I missed all those cultural references.

When people say, "Leave it to Beaver", I haven't got a clue what they're talking about.

>> Did it do something to your brain and how you thought?

>> We read a lot.

We had to read a lot.

My parents didn't believe in organizing all sorts of activities for us.

They basically told us to go outside and play.

Which we did.

But we also read.

They were very good.

They told us stories.

So I think I learned a lot from their stories.

My dad was in the Canadian navy in WWII.

He told us stories, usually funny ones.

Not the really terrifying bits.

My mother had been caught here by the war in 1939.

So we heard about that.

Both my grandfathers were in WWI.

So we heard stories.

I grew up in a household where we talked a lot to each other.

And we read a lot-- I was very lucky.

>> And a great grandfather who was a British Prime Minister.

Who didn't figure largely in the family lore.

>> He did when I went to the UK.

Because there, his name meant something.

In Canada, most people had forgotten he was PM of Britain during and after the end of WWI.

Lloyd George >> One of Ryerson's students said to one of my colleagues, "I had no idea Prof. MacMillan was related to Boy George."

(laughter) >> To Ryerson, which it was then called, you taught 25 years of history to then-called vocationally-oriented students.

I was probably one--journalists, nurses,engineers.

You found that was critical-- how you think about and communicate history.

>> I didn't realize it at the time but it was actually great preparation for being a writer of history.

Because students had to take some many liberal arts subjects.

So they'd come in.

Some liked history.

Some would only come in reluctantly because it was the only course that fit into their timetable.

So it was a challenge.

I learned to tell the stories.

To get them interested.

I would tell them...I taught a course, "War and Society".

In the case of WWI, I'd say to the men in the class, you would have all gone off to fight and half of you would have been dead by Christmas.

I'd say to the young women in the class, you would have had to do jobs that men had been doing.

A lot of you would never get married.

Because so many men were killed.

It would catch their attention.

Because they could relate it to their own lives.

It was invaluable.

I dedicated one of my books to my students.

Because they made me, as best I could, explain history clearly.

And try and make it comprehensible to people who maybe weren't interested in history.

>> You spent 20 years working on your book, Paris 1919 .

>> It must have been about that.

I got interested through my teaching.

I was always interested in the history of the 20th century.

I looked for books on it.

To my amazement, there were books on bits of it.

But not very good histories of the whole thing.

So I thought maybe I'll try.

So I did... for 20 years, work away on it.

I was perfectly happy.

No-one was much interested in publishing it, at first.

>> Wasn't there one great rejection which was no-one is interested in reading about a bunch of old white men sitting around a table.

>> I said they're talking about quite interesting things!

I worked away on it because I was so interested.

I was lucky-- I was really interested in it.

>> All the personalities: Ho Chi Minh was working in the hotel.

>> He was working at the Ritz as an assistant.

He tried to present a petition about his little country, which later became Vietnam, saying could we please have more independence?

I don't think the petition ever reached anyone.

He went off and became the great revolutionary leader who led Vietnam to independence.

>> You must have been stunned.

When this finally got published, it was a huge success!

>> I was stunned.

My publishers may been a bit.

It was partly timing.

It was the end of the 1990s.

That period of peace at the end of the Cold War was now fraying.

Yugoslavia had fallen to pieces.

There was all sorts of trouble in the Middle East.

Then September 11th...my book came out just around Sept 11.

In the UK but not in the US.

Suddenly in the US as well, people were saying how did we get here?

What are all these causes that people are talking about.

How far back does this go?

My book was quite helpful in explaining where some of these issues had come from.

Why was this hostility in parts of the Muslim world against the West?

Why did Arabs feel they'd been betrayed?

Why did Yugoslavia break up?

I've had letters from people saying, I was trying to make sense of the world we're in.

Your book was quite helpful in showing where the roots are.

>> How did you pick after Paris 1919 to write about Richard Nixon and in China?

>> It was partly tactical and because I'd taught everything.

I'd taught Chinese history for years as well.

I'd taught the history of the Cold War.

So I'd got the background.

I've always been interested in people and history.

That's why I did it.

>> To look at the particular impact those two individuals had at that time, Mao and Nixon.

>> They were extraordinary individuals in their own way.

Mao was a dreadful man in many ways.

He was a great revolutionary.

Killed more of his own people than anyone else did.

Nixon was a very complicated character who was driven from office in disgrace.

But they were determining the policies in their countries.

Nixon, for all his faults, was a great statesman.

Mao was no fool either.

Mao recognized the time had come to move China out of isolation.

So it was a very important moment.

>> In what relevance today?

>> As the relationship between China and the US gets rockier, we have to think how far the relationship has come.

We have to remember before 1962, when Nixon went to China, they hadn't spoken to each other for more than 20 years.

The relations had broken off in 1949.

We have to remember they could go into the deep freeze again.

>> I'm trying to imagine what your office must look like.

Books, quotes...so much.

>> It's not very tidy.

I'm sorry.

Every so often, I have a great moment where I try and tidy it up.

Then I find something I haven't read before.

Start reading that.

Then the piles go up again.

>> It's interesting the number of editorials that you write.

You're called upon to talk about COVID, for example.

What's the relevance of Spanish flu and what can we learn.

As mentionned, in Ukraine.

So many situations the world is in now that you put in context.

>> I'm glad historians have been called up because we can be useful.

Nothing ever repeats in history.

What we can say is, there was a similar situation in the past.

We should watch out or try to do the following things.

It helps us try and make sense of the present.

It's not going to give us a blueprint for what to do.

It helps us test our theories.

It's the only way we have of testing ideas we might have.

Did these ideas work in the past?

>> You said history doesn't repeat itself...ever?

>> As Mark Twain famously said, "It echoes".

So you won't get an exact repetition.

But you'll get uncomfortable parallels.

There are times when I look at what's happening with Ukraine, and it's like the late 1930s in Europe.

Where you have an aggressive nation which seems to know no bounds to its aggression.

And a leader who seems prepared to go all the way into all-out war.

So yes, it echoes in very worrying ways.

>> You wrote a book called The Uses and Abuses of History.

Again to Ukraine, Putin's use of history and his assertion, used before that this is our land.

>> That's why knowing history is important.

To challenge his views.

His history is wrong.

I read the famous essay he wrote two years ago... it's about Ukrainians and Russians are one people.

One spiritual people.

It's wrong!

It's not a good essay but he believes it.

He has this vision of the past.

That state that became Russia grew out of Kiev.

One of the ironies is he's now trying to destroy Kiev.

Which he claims is the birthplace of Russian people.

He has this view that Ukrainians have always been Russian.

So the attempt to become separate is a betrayal of the Russian race.

He also refers to Peter the Great.

He has a view of history.

He wants to rebuild the Russian greatness as he sees it.

That it enjoyed under Peter the Great.

His vision is wrong but it's a very powerful vision.

My sense is he actually believes in it.

>> One of the things you said, it's about remembering the past.

But it's also about what we choose to forget.

I guess there's some convenient forgetting.

>> Because you see the conflicts that go on and on.

The conflict in Northern Ireland where Protestants and Catholics are remembering things that happened in the 17th century.

I did think when all those marches took place, can you stop commemorating things that happened 300 years ago and think about living together?

In what is a very small part of the British Isles.

History can be used to drive communities apart.

And it often is.

>> Absolutely!

The closing line in that book, The Uses and Abuses of History, is handle it with care.

>> It's a very dangerous force.

When people say it's all in the past, it doesn't matter.

The misuse of history can be used to motivate people.

That's what Putin has been trying to do.

That's what Xi Jiping is now trying to do.

He's portraying a China that was great.

And he's restoring China's greatness.

It can be a very powerful force.

It helps to create identity.

It can often help to create enemies.

>> That "being great again" thing is endlessly appealing.

And used over and over by leaders.

>> Look at Trump.

Make America great again.

He sells lots of caps with the slogan on it.

>> What is this idea that we were once great, we aren't.

We should or ought to be.

>> It can be very powerful, nostalgia for the past.

Particularly if your present is troubled.

In Britain, during the whole BREXIT campaign, I was there for a lot of the referendum.

There was a lot of nostalgia.

We were once of the proud independent European power.

We stood alone in 1940.

When the Nazis had conquered France.

When Britain was fighting but not alone.

As a Canadian, it infuriated me.

I said you weren't alone.

You had the whole Empire.

There were 4 Canadian divisions in the British Isles.

The Canadian navy was patrolling half the Atlantic.

The Australians were there, Indians were in the Middle East.

Canadian pilots were flying in the Royal Air Force.

This was a very powerful sentiment during BREXIT talks.

A lot of those who voted to leave were motivated by it.

>> Debate seems to continue even more now about who tells history.

I was just at an exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum by the Indigenous artist, Kent Monkman.

Looking at their Indigenous collection with totally different eyes.

>> History is always changing.

Historians try, as much as we can, to bring in different voices, to ask different questions.

As a student at U of Toronto, there was no women's history.

Just wasn't a subject and it became a subject.

Partly because there was a growing women's movement in the late 1960s and '70s.

Women's history became something we did.

There was very little Indigenous history.

Two of the people I went to university with began to research and write Indigenous history.

We're always adding to the story.

I'm very glad we now pay much more attention to Indigenous and other minorities in Canada's history.

More attention to immigrant and gay history.

All these things are part of what makes the country it is.

We need to know about them.

>> What's the point of museums, do you think??

>> It's hotly debated subject.

I don't need to tell you.

Are they a symbol of Western imperialism, simply collecting things from around the world.

To show Westerners all these other cultures?

Or are they... a commemoration of a shared heritage?

I don't know.

There's a very interesting debate now about what museums are.

I was just at the British Museum and the chair of their board said we want to be a museum for the world.

We want to try and bring the different cultures together and help people to understand them.

But what do you send back or keep.

Who owns it?

These are very difficult questions.

>> One of the things people have been dealing with, a great deal lately, are official apologies-- government apologies.

Are apologies necessary or helpful?

>> It depends on the circumstances.

It was necessary that the Canadian government made an apology to the Indigenous for things that happened to them including the residential schools.

It was necessary that the prime minister of Australia made an apology to the Aboriginal people of Australia.

The Aboriginals had been, in many cases, badly treated by settlers society.

An apology is only a first step.

What I worry about is apologies are becoming performative.

I do an apology, then what else do I do?

Apologies are only useful if they're backed up by determination to right the wrong to the past to do something for the people living in the present.

Words are cheap.

Sometimes there's a passion for apologizing.

Then you don't do anything else.

>> It's very easy.

We all slip into judging previous societies.

Earlier times.

How could they think or do that?

>> 50 years from now, I won't be around but someone will be saying how could those people in 2022 or 2010 think that!

If history does nothing else, it should give us some humility.

The past is full of people who had all of sorts of insights, power and sources of knowledge, very clever.

They still did things that we think now are wrong or very stupid.

We should just remember that someone's going to do it to us.

>> For sure, they'll be doing it to us.

Looking back at this illustrious career, what is it you're most proud of?

>> What I like particularly, is when people say to me, I read your book, enjoyed it but I don't read much.

But I really enjoyed it because I liked the people.

And I learned something.

That's what I've always been-- a teacher.

That sounds very biased but I do like it when people get interested in something and I hope will want to know more.

>> What does being Canadian mean to you?

>> I'm very proud of being a Canadian.

I grew up here.

It's my country.

Doesn't mean sometimes I don't get fed up.

with its politics.

We all do, with our own countries.

I live in a very decent and humane society.

We beat ourselves up but we are one of the nicest and kindest societies in the world.

Doesn't mean we don't make mistakes.

Whenever you ask people around the world what they think of Canada, we rank very high.

They see us as a decent society and they're right.

That has made mistakes but wants to do good.

I also find as a historian, helpful being Canadian I don't have axes to grind .

I don't come from a great power.

So I don't feel I have to attack or defend my own country.

If you're American, British or Russian, if you're writing about the history of your own country, you almost can't avoid taking a position.

Being a Canadian gives me certain freedom writing about other powers in the world.

>> It's been a total pleasure to speak with you.

>> A great pleasure for me too.

Thank you very much.

>> Thank you.

Thank you all for watching.

We'll be back next week with another episode of Canada Files .

♪