The AEJ UK hosted eminent historian and commentator Michael Burleigh at a meeting on June 4.
Burleigh is the author of highly acclaimed books including Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World , 1945-65 (2013); The Third Reich: A New History (2000) and Populism (2021).
AEJ UK Chairman William Horsley writes:
At this meeting with AEJ members and guests, historian Michael Burleigh shared penetrating insights into the uses and abuses of history up to the present day, analysing some of the enduring myths which leaders propagate to shape the consciousness of nations. They include what he calls “anti-history”, where black is turned into white and conspiracies abound.
Scrutinising the three “strongmen” of today — Xi Jing Ping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump — Burleigh finds Trump the least historically aware but armed with a unique “magic formula” rooted in a 21st century celebrity TV personality cult which has proved transformative as well as arbitrary and unpredictable. Putin’s obsessions with the Great Patriotic War, and with incarnations of the secret police from Tsarist times to the present, has led not only to the “autocratic barbarity” evident in Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, but to the country sinking deeper and deeper into the past “like a swamp”.
Xi Jinping is without doubt the most historically informed of the big strongmen; Burleigh points to the deep irony that Xi’s own father was severely persecuted and brutally beaten during the Cultural Revolution, yet he enforces unwavering loyalty to the communist party in today’s very different China out of a belief that open criticism of the party could lead to its downfall, as glasnost led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Professor Burleigh also looks further afield to illuminate ways in which national narratives — including ideas of collective “victimhood” – can end up motivating and condoning states’ belligerent or authoritarian behaviour. Burleigh attributes the extraordinary resilience of Iran’s “totally corrupt” regime, in the face of economic ruination and devastating military attacks to the martyr-centred mindset of its Revolutionary Guard Corps leaders, forged in their experience of the 1980-88 war with Iraq. He examines the logic behind Israeli intolerance and lack of empathy towards the Palestinians, observing that the Holocaust is taken up in Israel as the ultimate justification to license “acts of genocidal barbarity” in Gaza, southern Lebanon and the West Bank.
As for the United Kingdom, Michael Burleigh suggests that familiar ways of framing the nation’s history, including the 1938 Munich agreement and the 1956 Suez crisis, have led to an “instinctual belligerence” which is seen in daily political discourse and the media. Some history, he declares, “needs to be unlearned too.”
A common theme emerges from Michael Burleigh’s unsparing and sometimes iconoclastic analysis, He urges that closer attention should be paid to “institutional buttressing of the rule of law” against state arbitrariness; and wraps up his presentation by saying: “As humans I can’t see any alternative to thinking historically about the present or future.”
Michael Burleigh at the AEJ UK 4 June 2026
