All history, it has been said, is contemporary. What is remembered and how it is remembered depends on the axes that people wish to grind.

Whether or not this is always the case, it is clearly sometimes the case. For example, there has been a renewal of interest in Europe recently in the Armenian massacres, although nothing fundamentally new has been discovered about them. It is easy to divine the reason for this renewal of interest: not a sudden upsurge of sympathy for the Armenians of the past, but of anxiety about the possible accession of Turkey to the European Union. The demand that the Turks should recognize their genocidal history as a condition of admission is tantamount to an outright rejection of their application to join, and an atavistic fear of the migration of a huge mass of unassimilable cheap labor, strong but disavowed, is thus transmuted into an ethically more dignified and acceptable historical argument.

The celebrations of the sixtieth anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany also illustrated the complexities of historical memory. In France, whose war record was equivocal to say the least, and the subject of a continuing neurosis, the newspapers recalled that the German capitulation coincided—to the very day—with that of a massacre of Algerians in Setif who were demonstrating for independence. The official number of dead given by the French was 1,000; the Algerian nationalists claim 45,000. Between May 7 and 9, French newspapers quoted figures of between 15,000 and