Telling the Truth, but Whose? Yours or Mine?

The truth' is a thorny subject. Whose truth, yours or mine? But perhaps we can be clearer on its opposite: lies and untruth. Perhaps truth and lies are less absolute states than permanent struggles. 'Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened,' said Sir Winston Churchill, never short of a pithy phrase.

Ten years ago now, Switzerland, the peaceful country where I live, went through something of a national trauma over the national history during the Second World War. Largely through external and media pressures, a government-financed group of historians was set up to produce a report over 'dormant bank accounts' of Jewish victims of Nazism, and the wartime compromises and policies of the Swiss government. Just recently, marking the tenth anniversary of the start of the commissions work, Jean-François Bergier, the historian-President, sadly noted that their report had not had the impact that he'd hoped, had not been taken into the thinking and politics of the country. But he helpfully reminded us that this massive and critical examination of the past was not a question of apportioning blame or judging our forebears. Rather it was an attempt to tell the truth.

The truth, of course, has many sides to it, many facets. Some of the older generation in Switzerland, enraged by this re-examination of the past, made themselves look foolish by saying that no-one who had not lived through a period had any right to say anything about it - which taken literally would mean that most of us could say nothing about the Second World War - but no-one could now talk about events further back in the past! But these reactions led to an audio-visual archive of the period being created, gathering the stories of hundreds of ordinary people - a positive outcome, and one of real help for future historians.

I am struck by how hard it is for nations to be willing to confront their past, and to want to tell the truth. We pride ourselves in our democracies on our freedom - including the freedom of information and media - but there are strange 'black holes of history'. The recent book by President, Mohamed Sahnoun, Wounded Memory (it is published so far only in French) touches on one such black hole that is starting to be addressed: the Algerian war and Algeria's relations with France. Spain is struggling with memories of its civil war, with the children of forgotten victims leading the search for hidden collective graves. Between Japan and China and other former enemies of the last war, in Turkey, in so many places, the past is still so alive - and mostly toxic.

It's always easier to discern other people's and nations' 'black holes' than our own. I've read several painful - for me - history books recently. One was about the struggle to end the Atlantic Slave trade - a great story of thousands of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people mobilizing to end a great wrong. But we shouldn't lose sight of the great wrong, which perhaps marks the African continent to this day. And then in Kenya: Caroline Elkins, Britain's Gulag - the brutal end of Empire in Kenya, and David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged - the dirty war in Kenya and the end of Empire. To my shame, I'd unconsciously held to the idea that the British might have done some pretty terrible things here and there, but that at least we weren't as bad as the French! Having read these books, now I'm not so sure. But in any case, it's not a question of balancing the books of blame, but truth-telling.

How can we help each other to cherish the truth? How can we build the trust that is the best natural fertilizer for the truth to grow? These are questions that lie at the heart of many Initiatives of Change programmes and at the heart of its history: in the USA and UK, Initiative-Dialogue in France. It is one important strand in the dialogue and alliance of civilizations that the United Nations seeks to promote. The Bible says, 'Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.' Telling the truth, with love, as best we may, is a step towards healing the wounded memories.