Woke Wargaming?

Every once in a while in the wargaming blogosphere, or at least the bit of it that I read, an interesting conundrum appears, which seems to me to be worth mulling over a bit more than just firing off a comment. The recent post on Don’t Throw a One about the Haitian Revolution is one such. I recommend reading the post and the comments if you have not already done so.

Without wishing to get into the pros and cons of wargaming such a conflict, it is worth noting a few things. Firstly, the argument is not really about wargaming the conflict. There are a lot of these sorts of questions around – in the comments, the issue of the Russian Front in World War Two was raised. I sort of tackled this a bit in a previous post, so will not bang the drum over it again. Sometimes, however, it does seem that the non-wargaming public has the sort of assumption that we would not wargame a specific subject, such as the Russian campaigns if we really knew what happened. Well, the answer to this is, of course, that we are wargamers and we know what happened. Wargaming the subject does not imply agreement or acquiescence with the activities of the participants.

To return to Haiti, a long time ago I undertook an Open University course in history, one module of which made extensive reference to the Haitian revolution, and the OU was not afraid of using the words Creole (for mixed-race individuals) and slave. It might also be worth noting that the international situation was the French Revolution – with its emphasis on freedom, after all – and a massive spike in imports of slaves into French Caribbean colonies after 1791.

The OU was also not afraid of describing people of African ancestry as ‘blacks’. Thus, the use of the names, however uncomfortable they might make some post-colonial scholars and ‘woke’ (whatever that is) individuals, is perfectly acceptable, albeit that the course was first published in 2007.

So what has happened? Has our sense of historical perspective completely disappeared? More to the point, perhaps, how are we actually going to refer to the combatants without using such pejorative terms? It is certainly a problem that is wider than the Haitian Revolution, and, for the matter of that, wider than wargaming. A good deal of the public discourse over history is dominated by these sorts of post-colonial debates. For those of you with strong stomachs, a dip into the debates triggered over Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism (which I reviewed briefly here) would show a fury in the scholarly community which would surprise most wargamers, even those who argue fiercely about points of contention in rule sets.

The key question was whether Ray should continue to wargame the Haitian Revolution over the objections of his family that it was racist, distasteful and used words which were, in some sense, to be depreciated. Well, maybe, but history is history and that it how words were used then. Failure to recognise that would make us misunderstand history in the round, which would be a bad thing. Not preserving the use of the words in their original context would make us fail to comprehend the mindsets of the people of the past. They were not like us.

Herein, I think, lies the rub. As wargames, we, sort of, recreate the past. Historians, in some sense, recreate the past in their thoughts and, hopefully, in their words and the minds of their readers. History which does not do that is not worth reading, after all. And yet the past cannot be re-created, which is probably just as well. Generating armies which represent a slave revolt over two centuries ago does not recreate the attitudes and world views of the participants.

I suspect that the answer, as it does in so many of these cases, lies in the question of context. If we react to the word ‘black’ for example, when used to describe a fellow human being, we are reacting to a whole bunch of stereotypes and tropes in our culture. A few headlines from recent years, relating to problems over treating skin conditions of black people, the death rate of non-whites in the Covid pandemic, to the scandal over the Windrush generation in the UK and I am sure many others all key into the use of this particular word. And hence people (at least those of a fairly liberal mindset) take offence.

But there is another issue lurking here, and that is about the difference between offence and harm. I can take offence at something, but not be harmed by it. Likewise, I can be harmed by something, but not offended by it. A rival shoe shop could open next to mine – my trade, and therefore my income, will probably be harmed, but I should not be offended by it. I can certainly take offence at someone gratuitously being described as a ‘black’ if the context suggests something negative is meant.

In this case, then, the description of a regiment in the Haitian revolution as black is not offensive and does no one (at least, no one who has any idea of the context) any harm. Out of context, the word generates many negative ideas and connections. In context, the OU’s description of Haiti that ‘black armies led by former slaves would be major powers in the land’ is hardly either harmful or offensive.

Taking offence, then, is a matter of context and, in this case, historical fact. It might not fit in with some wider political agendas, but that is neither here nor there. We can and do often reinterpret history, and it is frequently used to bolster ourselves and our own image – the celebrations of the 80^th anniversary of D-Day might be used for this, for example. An argument could be made that D-Day was more or less the last occasion on which the UK was a significant, positive force in the world and that we look back on those times with nostalgia. This is reinventing the past – no one knew what was going to happen next, after all.

So, should a war game on the Haitian revolution take place? It might not be to everyone’s taste, but that should not stop it. It is neither harmful nor offensive, in my view. The only way it can be so construed is by taking some of the language and events out of context and twisting them a bit to fit a modern, cultural, argument (or set of arguments). History is very prone to this, nowadays, which as a historical wargamer is a bit of a pity.