The age of instant news has shortened our attention span, and blinded us to the pressing historical concerns of much of the world

As he was readying German troops to invade Poland, Hitler persuaded his colleagues that their brutality would soon be forgotten. "Who, after all, speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?" he asked. The answer is that the descendants of the victims speak of it, and will not allow the heirs of the perpetrators to forget. Turkey maintains that it never happened, but the genocide of more than a million Armenians under the Ottomans in 1915 is still a live political issue.

While British voters seem only too happy to - in the Prime Minister's words - "draw a line" under the invasion of Iraq just two years ago, elsewhere in the world, what happened even 2,000 years ago is still a matter of dispute. The age of instant news has shortened our attention span and blinded us to the pressing historical concerns of much of the world.

This, maybe more than anything else, sets Europe and North America apart. We are the generation which, in Francis Fukuyama's words, has lived through "the end of history", when communism was defeated and capitalism became the accepted global ideology. British politics reflects our post-ideological age, when all that Conservative and Labour can find to squabble over is the odd billion in the welfare budget. We are all social democrats now.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown don't think Britain's policy towards Africa has anything to do with colonialism. But the reason Robert Mugabe strikes a chord across Africa when he rails against Blair is that history matters in places where people are still trying to forge an identity. The Americans are surprised when Iraqis compare their behaviour with that of British colonialists in Mesopotamia in the 1920s; they see their mission as an essentially modern attempt at spreading democracy, while many Iraqis regard it as just another imperialist foray.

To study the discourse of al-Qaeda is to see an entirely different time-frame, in which the events of the seventh century - when Islam was in the ascendant - are more important than what happens today. When Islamists struck in Madrid, commentators struggled to explain the location. Was it because Spain had troops in Iraq? That was part of it, but the real injury dates back to 1492, when Isabella and Ferdinand drove out the Moors. "You know of the Spanish crusade against Muslims, and that not much time has passed since the expulsion from al-Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisition," said Serhane ben Abdelmajid Fakhet, the alleged leader of the Madrid train bombers.

The past is always ripe for manipulation. The recent anti-Japan demonstrations in China were supposedly sparked by a Japanese school textbook, which referred to the 1937 Nanjing massacre as an "incident" - as if up to 300,000 Chinese had died by accident, rather than being slaughtered by the Japanese Imperial Army. There's no doubt that the Japanese authorities have equivocated over war crimes committed in the 1930s and 1940s, yet these textbooks - used in less than 1 per cent of Japanese schools - have been around for years. China's real aim was to assert herself as the rising power in Asia, and to show the world why Japan should not have a seat on an expanded UN Security Council. Japan and China are in dispute over oil and gas in the South China Sea, but the state-controlled Chinese media reignited the schoolbooks issue as the most effective way to engage the masses.

Western politicians do understand the symbolic significance of history when they need to, even if they don't feel it. On 24 April, as tens of thousands of Armenians commemorated the start of the 1915 genocide, President Bush carefully referred to it as the "Great Calamity", a way of acknowledging the pain of Armenians without offending his

Turkish allies by using the word genocide.

The official Turkish version of history is that many Armenians sided with the Russians in the First World War, and therefore - inevitably - there were killings on both sides. The genocide has become an issue in Turkey's proposed entry into the EU. France, the European country with the most doubts about this and which also has a large Armenian population, is insisting Turkey confess to genocide before it can be admitted. The Turkish government has established a commission to re-examine history - a hard task, given that denying the genocide has been official policy since the massacres were perpetrated.

History never goes away, and it never stops. We are condemned to misunderstanding if we do not follow the twists and changes as history is reworked to justify current actions. "Forward not back" would be a meaningless slogan in most places because, although globalisation has spread western products across the world, beyond our shores they're really not thinking what we're thinking.

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News

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