“Ernest Renan, the great nineteenth-century French historian and philosopher, once wrote the following: ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.’ Note, if you please, what he did not say. He did not say, ‘Getting its history wrong is part of becoming a nation.’ This would also be a true remark, but one considerably less provocative. We are familiar with the foundation myths on which countries rely, and which they furiously propagate. Myths of heroic struggle against an occupying power, against the tyranny of aristocracy and Church, struggles which produced martyrs whose spilt
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