Within a week, amid widespread criticism, the video disappeared and the Government’s official ‘Ireland 2016’ website was quietly taken down — though not before it emerged that it had used Google to translate The Proclamation of the Irish Republic and historian Diarmaid Ferriter had labelled the video “embarrassing, unhistoric shit”.

Four years later, the Irish Government was similarly humiliated when Leo Varadkar, Enda Kenny’s replacement as Taoiseach, revealed his plans to commemorate the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) with a state ceremony. Not only were the RIC formed as the armed wing of British imperialism in the 1800s, used to protect British landowners during the famine, but many viewed the announced commemoration as an attempt to memorialise the infamous Black and Tans — thugs often recruited from British prisons who joined the RIC to violently hunt down Republicans during the early 1900s. In response to Varadkar’s plan to give “right and proper” status to the “police officers who were killed”, the Irish public sent the Wolfe Tones to the top of the charts with Come out Ye Black and Tans.

More than anything else, the past decade of Irish centenaries has shown how memorials and commemorations can be tense affairs. To say the Government in the south hasn’t done well when it comes to remembering is an understatement. And as Ireland prepares to commemorate 50 years since Bloody Sunday this weekend, that doesn’t look like changing; if anything, nowhere is the squeamishness with which Irish politicians approach the past more present than in its current Taoiseach, Micheál Martin.

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Earlier this month, Martin spoke at a conference commemorating the handover of Dublin Castle to the newly elected chairman of the Provisional government, Michael Collins. Addressing an audience at Trinity College Dublin, Martin said that “every state has a right to remember and honour its founders and the traditions which both won the support of the people and secured progress”. He then warned that “we live at a moment when attempts to distort and manage public histories are becoming more and more serious”. Calling on the need for “independent historical scholarship”, he lamented that “ours is a world where disinformation and populism are a very real threat to the sustainability of free democracies”.

Such charged language distinguished the framing of this commemoration from those that came before. This was more than a matter of bluster and ineptitude; here we had a blatant display of revisionism, one designed to bolster the Taoiseach’s anti-democratic agenda.

Far from a declaration of a new, free Ireland, the treaty that Collins handed over at Dublin Castle in January 1922 was signed on the condition that the members of parliament in an Irish Free State swore an oath of allegiance to the British Crown: Collins and others were forced to “solemnly swear” to be “faithful to His Majesty King George V, his heirs and successors by law” and agree membership of the British Commonwealth.

As well as selling out the six counties in the North, the brutal civil war between Republicans following the handover was based on the popular notion that the treaty had been a means for British establishment figures to use Irish heads of state to quell what had been a populist rebellion. A century later, as Irish politicians use the event to rail against “populism” and “disinformation”, some might wonder how much has changed.

Indeed, last September, Irish president Michael D. Higgins caused a stir by being the only southern politician who refused to engage in the historical whitewashing of partition. When invited to attend a church service in Armagh in the North to commemorate the “formation of Northern Ireland”, Higgins declined as the service was not “politically neutral” and failed to acknowledge the “coercion” involved in that moment of history.

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He clearly struck a nerve: DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson responded by calling Higgins’s refusal a “retrograde step”, while Ruth Dudley-Edwards described Higgins’s “bigotry” as being inspired by the southern Irish populace’s “latent Anglophobia”. Many unionists are equally up in arms at the fact that Higgins is billed to be attending the Bloody Sunday memorial this weekend.

And should we be surprised? As the past decade of anniversaries has shown, how the Irish political elite approach their nation’s collective history has always mattered. But at a time when a majority of people are in favour of holding a border poll in the next five years, and growing support for Sinn Féin shows that the issue of Irish unification is here to stay, the use and abuse of the past carries even more weight.

Since 1998, Irish politicians have been able to seek refuge in the stipulations imposed by the Good Friday Agreement: a border poll cannot be officially called unless the Secretary of State in the North is convinced that it “appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom and form part of a united Ireland”. In essence, you have to win before you are allowed to have a go.

A common refrain among politicians to those calling for a border poll has been the assurance that no one wants to return to the violence and chaos of Northern Ireland during the Seventies and Eighties. Yet the Irish political elite is not engaging in a war on history simply because they fear the return of the Troubles — but because reconciling with the past also involves taking stock of the present.

Perhaps more than anything else, unionist and loyalist forces in the North wish to avoid a border poll because it would call into question their political legitimacy and reveal the democratic deficit in Northern Irish politics. The power-sharing arrangement imposed by the Good Friday Agreement has long proven to be a block on political engagement, with Stormont disbanded for years at a time because of petty spats over flags, language and green energy bills.

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For the south, meanwhile, a border poll would mean southern politicians coming to terms with years of ignoring the discriminatory nature of partition. As former Republican prisoner Danny Morrison wrote in the Irish Times last week, “Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael deliberately attempt to conflate the Republic of Ireland with Ireland, to create the perception that the Republic of Ireland is the nation and that the North is ‘other’”. (The Irish elite, ever keen to suck up to their Brussels counterparts, are also aware of the dislike with which the EU views anything with a whiff of nationalist sentiment.)

So calling a border poll would be a painful process, one in which the “disinformation” condemned by Martin would be exposed as having coloured much of the establishment’s revisionist representation of Irish history. But it might also be inevitable; how long they can avoid their history remains to be seen.

The Irish author Colm Tóibín recently told British readers in the Guardian that people arguing for a united Ireland in their lifetime were engaging in “mystical blather”. It was a typical defence of the status quo — an attempt to pose the prospect of change as unreasonable, idealistic or as dreams of ‘sunny uplands’.

But a hundred years on from a treaty forced by British rule and opposed by Irish men and women — which not only went on to spark civil war but decades of unrest and political uprisings in the North — is such complacency wise? For too long, Ireland’s political elite have busied themselves rewriting history at the expense of addressing the present. As they lumber from one display of incompetence to another, it’s only a matter of time before it catches up with them.

The synagogue was named for the philosopher and physician Maimonides, who led the Jewish community here in the 12^th century, when Cairo was the most important Jewish centre in the Middle East. The building was nothing but a roofless shell, but I discovered a work crew laying planks in one of the rooms, up to their knees in fetid water. It turned out that the Egyptian government — the same regime that took possession of much of the property of the 80,000 Jews who’d been forced out of the country two generations earlier — was engaged in a restoration project.

A polite young engineer on the site showed me the location of the stand where the Torah scroll was once read. Another man, in civilian clothes but with some vaguely military authority, told me not to take pictures.

There couldn’t be anything bad about the restoration of a synagogue, could there? It was hard to explain why none of this felt right; why I preferred to see the building left to rot, rather than see it made up like a corpse at a wake. I had the same feeling when I saw other journalists refer seriously to the “Jewish community of Cairo”, quoting a woman who was its “President”.

There was no community, just a regime-approved simulacrum designed to allow everyone to pretend that an ethnic cleansing hadn’t taken place, and that something dead was alive. It was Weekend at Bernie’s. At the time of my visit, the Egyptian Government was trying to get one of its officials elected to a top cultural post at the UN, an effort hindered by this same official’s past support for burning Hebrew books. A synagogue renovation couldn’t hurt his cause! The real Jews were long out of Egypt, but their imaginary avatars were still hard at work serving the narrative needs of others.

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In Cairo, and at similar sites I’ve visited elsewhere in the Middle East and Europe, I’ve felt — in the words of the author Dara Horn — an “unarticulated sense that despite all the supposed goodwill, something was clearly off”. Horn has now articulated that sense, and many other important and elusive senses, in a superb new essay collection, People Love Dead Jews. (I should mention that I spent a summer with the author on a youth programme three decades ago, and have remained in touch.) Horn comes at her subject with a deep grasp of history and a personal commitment to the living Jewish tradition, with an acerbic sense of humour that pops out now and then — and also, refreshingly and necessarily, with anger.

One memorable essay recounts a bizarre trip to several “Jewish heritage sites” in Harbin, China, near the Siberian border. The city is known for its vast Ice Festival every winter, and also for being founded by Jews who were sent there by Tsarist Russia as part of a railway project, but were then dispossessed and driven out by a mix of imperial Japanese occupiers, White Russian bigots, and rapacious communists of both the Soviet and Maoist variety. (Horn quips that “Jewish heritage sites” — a benign term used in many countries for the purpose of multicultural branding and drawing Jewish tourism — sounds better than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.”)

The author visits “the largest Jewish cemetery in the Far East”, which turns out not to be a real cemetery at all, but just gravestones on empty ground. The original cemetery was re-zoned years ago and the Harbin municipality moved only the markers, not the bodies, which now seem to be under an amusement park.

The names of those Jews have inevitably been forgotten. A very different posthumous fate befell Anne Frank, the subject of another essay in this book, who, in the decades since her murder at age 16, has been turned into a global brand. Horn is cutting about the way her famous diary has been used as a feel-good story that flatters readers in the same way that a renovated synagogue flatters the multiculturalism of the Egyptian state.

The book’s most famous sentence — “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” — is something we all like to hear. But it obscures the obvious truth of the text, which was written a few weeks before Anne was turned in by Dutch neighbours to die in a German camp. No one was good enough to save her. “It is far more gratifying,” Horn writes, “to believe that an innocent dead girl has offered us grace than to recognise the obvious: Frank wrote about people being ‘truly good at heart’ before meeting people who weren’t.”

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And it’s easier to love a Jewish girl who can no longer express her potentially uncomfortable conclusions about her own life than it is to tolerate her annoyingly living co-religionists. In 2018, the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, located at the site of the house where she hid with her family, wouldn’t let a Jewish employee wear a kippah, explaining that this violated the museum’s “neutrality”. The directors changed their mind only after four months of deliberations, Horn observes, “which seems like a rather long time for the Anne Frank House to ponder whether it was a good idea to force a Jew into hiding.” A similar observation might be made about a place like Belgium, which also has nice Jewish museums and memorials, yet just passed a law banning kosher slaughter, a necessity for those living Belgian Jews who would like to practice their religion.

Looming over Horn’s essay collection is the place that is now home to the largest number of living Jews, the state of Israel. Israel is the ultimate demonstration of Horn’s thesis, though she mostly, and wisely, steers clear of the topic. Many people eager to venerate their vanished Jews are simultaneously uncomfortable with the ones who are still alive in the tiny corner of the Middle East where they fled after most other places on earth became unlivable.

Horn skirts close in one moving essay about a group of Yiddish actors and writers in the Soviet Union of the 1940s who were exploited for propaganda, then killed when they were no longer useful. The communists could tolerate Jews, she writes, “provided they weren’t practising the Jewish religion, studying traditional Jewish texts, using Hebrew, or supporting Zionism” — meaning that nearly all of Jewish life was out of bounds. “The Soviet Union thus pioneered a versatile gaslighting slogan, which it later spread through its client states in the developing world and which remains popular today: it was not anti-Semitic, merely anti-Zionist.”

This differentiation, which outlived the Soviets and is increasingly popular on the Western Left today, is largely lost on the plurality of Jews who are Israelis, and on the vast majority who think a Jewish state is a good idea. Older people here in Israel still remember how in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, just 28 years after the concentration camps closed, the same liberal countries of Europe that were expressing pious regret for the recent extermination of their Jews wouldn’t allow desperately needed American resupply flights to land in their territory en route to Israel, which had just been attacked by two Arab clients of the Soviets and was struggling to recover.

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And in 2021, young Jews can still see how countries like France, Germany, and the UK lay solemn wreaths at Holocaust memorials while participating in the isolation of the Jewish state at the UN, where the Human Rights Council, to give just one example, has condemned Israel more times than all other countries on earth combined. They can also observe how activists in places awash with Jewish heritage sites and Holocaust museums are energetically promoting a boycott of “Zionists” with telling success.

Horn doesn’t go there, in part because she doesn’t need to; her inspired essays say enough. But it is that kind of hypocrisy that’s at the heart of her argument. People Love Dead Jews helps explain the acute anxiety of many Jewish citizens of Western countries in 2021, who feel the ground shifting as old forms of thought reappear in public on both the Left and the Right — and as it becomes clear how few lessons have really been learned.

Or so Khruschev hoped. But Stalin, it turned out, could not be so easily forgotten. This June, Russians named him the “most notable” figure in history for the 10th year running; and now, a mere two months later, a new poll by the the Levada Center has found that nearly half of Russians want a Stalin statue to celebrate the USSR’s victory over the Nazis — a figure that has nearly doubled in the past ten years. Surprisingly, this is largely driven by people under the age of 40, among whom support for a monument has quintupled over the past decade.

Around this point in articles on Stalin it is customary to observe that the Russians, unlike the Germans, have not reckoned with their dark past. But this comparison is not exactly apples with apples. If Stalin had killed himself in a bunker surrounded by Karl May novels after starting and losing a war that had led to the collapse of the Soviet regime then nobody would be talking about erecting a monument to him today. But Stalin won — beating Hitler, establishing a vast empire and making the USSR respected and feared in the process.

In fact, if Stalin is on the verge of making a comeback, then he is about the last significant figure from Russia’s past to do so. This is a country exceedingly keen on resurrection: it is, after all, the land that produced Nikolai Fedorov, a philosopher who believed that it was mankind’s duty to reconstitute the dead of all past generations, atom by atom, that they might live again and colonise space.

Indeed, I can’t think of another country that has destroyed or suppressed so much only to bring back so much. When Gorbachev implemented glasnost in the 1980s, the response of many was not to look ahead but backwards. Authors and artists who had been memory-holed were rediscovered and republished, while the crimes of Stalin, buried by Khruschev, were exposed. Suddenly it was possible to read Solzhenitsyn and Shalamov without fear of punishment; it is no coincidence that one of Russia’s main human rights organisations, founded during this act of unearthing, is called “Memorial”.

Then Russia’s imperial past was exhumed. Nikolai II, the last Tsar, was dug up months before the USSR collapsed. Leningrad became Saint Petersburg once again, Gorky became Nizhny Novgorod and countless streets reclaimed their pre-Revolutionary names. Monumental buildings destroyed by the Soviets reappeared as shiny replicas: I vividly recall my first day in Moscow in 1997, walking down the street to the school where I was going to be teaching English to New Russians, when suddenly I saw looming ahead of me the golden dome and concrete shell of the Church of Christ the Saviour, reborn on the exact spot where the original had stood before the Stalinist regime blew it up. This was not the only cloned old building in the area: half a mile away, the gates to Red Square which I thought were ancient turned out to be a replica, as was the nearby Kazan Cathedral.

New monuments commemorating figures from history also appeared. The most notorious was Zurab Tsereteli’s enormous statue of Peter the Great standing on a toy boat in the Moskva River; the story goes that he had originally pitched it as a sculpture of Columbus to the authorities in NYC, but when they rejected (presumably on the grounds that it was terrible) he simply placed a different head on the body and had his good friend the Mayor of Moscow commission it instead.

Later, Tsar Alexander II got a monument in the grounds of the church of Christ the Saviour, while Dostoevsky got a giant statue in front of the Lenin Library in central Moscow — thus the great critic of revolutionaries got to cast his shadow over a building named after the greatest revolutionary of all. Meanwhile, the last Tsar and (most of) his family were buried in the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg in 1998, seven years after their exhumation. They were canonised two years later.

Yet even as Russia was resurrecting symbols of its Tsarist and Orthodox past, so Soviet elements were already creeping back in. A monument to the Second World War-era General Zhukov was unveiled a stone’s throw from the Kremlin in 1995. When Putin became president five years later, he almost immediately brought back the Soviet national anthem, albeit commissioning new lyrics from the 87-year-old children’s author Sergei Mikhalkov (who had written the original words for Stalin in 1944, and a second set in 1977).

At the eternal flame by the Kremlin Walls, the “hero city” of Volgograd was commemorated by its old name, Stalingrad. By the time I needed to get a police report for my US green card application in 2005, a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, first head of the Cheka, was waiting to greet me at Petrovka 38, headquarters of the Moscow police. There were also more innocuous manifestations of this fascination with the past — a TV channel called “Nostalgia” played back-to-back broadcasts from the USSR, while restaurants modeled on Soviet-era canteens were serving up compote and bowls of borscht.

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No doubt this is all a response to the war on memory and culture that was waged by the Soviet elites against their own people for much of the duration of the USSR’s existence. But it is also the case that the Soviets themselves had a complicated relationship with what had preceded them and were also quite keen on resurrecting selected bits of it. To begin with, they would not let their founder die — rather they preserved his body in a glass box, and spent decades declaring “Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live!” And while the likes of Vladimir Mayakovsky composed avant-garde poems addressed to readers living in the future, the art that would dominate — Socialist Realism — owed much more to the 19^th century novels and poems and paintings the regime’s leaders had enjoyed in their youth.

Yes, the Soviets destroyed a lot of churches (and other religious buildings), but they also assiduously maintained the cathedrals inside the Kremlin, preserved the painted interiors inside Saint Basil’s and collected the finest examples of icon painting in a dedicated museum in the capital of world communism. During World War II, Stalin rehabilitated Tsarist era generals such as Kutuzov and Bagrationov to inspire the war effort against Hitler. Post-war, the Soviets reconstructed historic buildings that that had been destroyed by the Nazis, preserved entire villages as open-air museums, published scholarly and popular collections of folk tales, and even formed “folk orchestras” to keep alive traditional songs. Thus, the new civilisation was obsessed with and beholden to the civilisation that had proceeded it, (although these acts of recreation also entailed mutation, needless to say).

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Meanwhile Putin, now that he is ageing out of posing shirtless with tigers, has taken to penning long historical essays which are published on Kremlin.ru. In Russia, the past is always coming back. Viewed in that context, it’s as if the rising support for some sort of formal commemoration of Stalin is the terminal point of that urge towards resurrection, the last stage in a process that they can’t quite pull the trigger on.

You can understand why: Stalin was an evil, murderous bastard. But it’s important to realise that many Russians have reckoned with this: the Levada report notes that Stalin’s “repressions, executions and military blunders are well-known” and that “only a small number of Russians” would “completely deny these facts”. But Russia is also no stranger to monsters. Ivan the Terrible — who received his first monument in 2016 — murdered his son, murdered princes, slaughtered priests, massacred the population of Novgorod, implemented a reign of terror and invented the oprichniki, the prototypical secret police organisation. But “terrible” is a mistranslation of grozny, which in Ivan’s case might be more accurately rendered as “formidable” or “awesome.”

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Now that the generation directly oppressed by Stalin is dying out, and a new generation raised on tales of heroism in World War II has come of age, it would seem that increasing numbers of Russians are coming to the conclusion that Stalin, like Ivan before him, was just one of those rulers who had to do terrible things to achieve great things. In fact, if you really want to see a monument to Stalin you don’t need to wait; according to Der Spiegel there are already quite a few busts and statues knocking about — they just tend to be out of the way. A Stalin in mosaic form very nearly made it into the Cathedral of the Armed Forces, which was inaugurated last year to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Included in the original plans for the interior décor, he was ultimately dropped.

For now, however, Stalin lacks a grandiose monument. Perhaps he will never get one. But the truth is, Stalin began his long comeback during Glasnost, when the archives were opened; he returned with his victims. From that moment on it became impossible to keep him buried. And so, despite Krushchev’s best efforts, the old man’s back again — whether we like it or not.

This relative neglect of the 1918 pandemic is almost understandable in France, which lost approximately six times as many citizens to the war as it did to the flu. But that neglect is repeated in almost every country in the world, and globally it is much harder to explain. The pandemic is estimated to have killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, compared to around 18 million for the war. Why, then, do we commemorate the war but not the flu? Is a death from disease less important than a death by combat, and if so, shouldn’t that trouble us?

I think it should, and not for purely moral or philosophical reasons. The threat of pandemic is no historical artefact; in fact, another flu pandemic is almost inevitable. The World Bank estimates that if a strain of the influenza virus as dangerous as the one that triggered the 1918 pandemic were to emerge in future, it could kill 33 million people in the first six months of the ensuing pandemic, and trigger a major recession. Yet governments are not making the relatively small investments that would render healthcare systems resilient to such a disaster, and vaccine hesitancy is on the rise in many parts of the world.

In the event of a pandemic, a vaccine against the novel strain of the virus would be our best chance of slowing its spread and of preventing those healthcare systems from being overwhelmed, so that they can continue to effectively process the sick. But uptake rates for the seasonal flu vaccine – the best proxy for how willingly people would vaccinate themselves against a novel strain – are falling off in the long term as young adults lose confidence in the vaccine’s safety and importance. With an absence of memorials to past pandemics in general, and to the 1918 episode – possibly the worst in human history – in particular, it seems that we have forgotten their horror.

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One reason for this collective lapse in memory may be that, until very recently, we did not understand the true scale of the pandemic. The first estimate of the death toll of the 1918 pandemic was published in the 1920s, and put it at around 22 million – placing it in the same ballpark as the First World War for loss of life. In 1991, that figure was revised upward to 30 million, and seven years later to 50-100 million, indicating that it was between three and six times as deadly as the war.

These revisions attest to the difficulty of diagnosing flu at a time when viruses were a relatively new concept. Most doctors thought they were dealing with a bacterial disease, and so in the historical records, many cases of what modern observers might reasonably suspect to have been flu, go by labels as diverse as cholera, typhus and pneumonic plague. By contrast, war dead were relatively easy to count – they wore uniforms, displayed exit wounds, and fell down in a circumscribed arena.

Memory is an active process, and unless we keep recounting them, events fade from it. After a war, at least one side generally has an incentive to mull over what happened; not so after a pandemic, where nobody wins. The communities traumatised by the 1918 flu wanted to forget it as quickly as possible, as did the scientists and doctors who had failed them.

Things change, though. New generations are born, and, unshackled from the trauma, seek to reconstruct the past. A hundred years after the 1918 pandemic, historians and scientists have a better idea of its scale, structure and impact. Though many questions remain unanswered, they understand the nature of flu pandemics sufficiently to know that there will be another, and though it might not be as bad, it could also be worse.

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But expert knowledge is only half the battle. Ordinary people need to understand it too, so that they comply with the public health measures that will be proposed in the event. A pandemic is a potential tragedy of the commons, a game theory problem, because interventions such as vaccination work best when everyone complies.

On top of that, an important lesson from 1918 and subsequent pandemics was that forcing people to comply, through threat of punishment, is often counter-productive. In places where public meetings were banned, for example, often gatherings simply moved ‘underground’. Public health campaigns are most effective when people comply of their own free will, but that presupposes that they understand the danger, and trust the authorities to act in their best interests.

Such trust does not come cheap, and depends on memories of what went before. When it comes to understanding the danger, it helps if, while navigating through the world in their daily routine, people encounter reminders of similar disasters in the past. Durable physical monuments to the 1918 flu are lacking, as are more ephemeral ones. Notoriously, and with very few exceptions, artists who lived through it ignored it in their work. But I think the situation is changing.

Now that the pandemic’s contours are becoming more precisely delineated, now that the vocabulary exists to describe it, novels are being written about it, dance pieces are commemorating it, and TV dramas such as Downton Abbey are folding it into their storylines.

The ephemeral monuments, at least, are proliferating, and the 1918 flu is entering popular culture. Soon it will become unavoidable – just as the Black Death of the 14th century, another pandemic that overlapped with a war, the Hundred Years’ War, did. Then, perhaps, people will remember the horror. And then they will take it seriously, and prepare themselves for the next one.