Biff and the Partisans

In the second instalment of the film trilogy Back to the Future, Biff Tannen steals a time machine and travels to the past in order to create a new present.

The story begins in the year 1984, when the main character, Marty McFly, is whisked away by the inventor of the time machine, Doc Brown, to the year 2015. Their mission is to prevent Marty’s future son from being manipulated by Biff’s future grandson into committing a bank robbery. A lot happens, but the crucial plot twist is that the now-elderly Biff secretly borrows the time machine and travels back to 1955. There, he hands his younger self a sports almanac containing the results of every major game through the year 2000. With it, Biff becomes rich through betting.

When Marty and Doc return to 1984, the present is no longer what it was. Biff has altered the past and created an alternate reality. In this new timeline, he is no longer a humiliated buffoon, but the kingpin of a casino empire and a criminal gang that terrorizes the town and its residents. Holding a personal grudge, Biff eliminates Marty’s father from history and marries his mother. Marty is packed off to a Swiss boarding school.

Though fictional, Biff is a good example of the archetypal angry, frustrated man who blames everyone but himself for his miserable life. Biff sees himself as a victim, and his life's main ambition is to exact revenge on those he holds responsible for his pathetic existence—those who are more successful, more knowledgeable, or simply different. Biff’s psychology is the same that created Trump in America—and Trump-lings elsewhere who see Slovenia’s son-in-law as a role model for their own political and authoritarian aspirations.

Life, at times, cruelly imitates fiction. The story of Biff should serve as a warning to those who believe people try to change the past for the sake of the past itself. That forgetting history will somehow make us better, happier, or more successful. The film also offers a critical reflection on false equivalence—this idea that both sides of Slovenia’s infamous political divide are equally obsessed with the past. That’s simply not true. It is Biff who wants to rewrite history—because that's the path to an alternate present and a different future, one in which he is no longer a self-proclaimed victim, but an omnipotent boss.

In our desperate attempt to forget the past, we’re not alone. For decades, the western half of the European political space has been obsessed with moving beyond history—or more precisely, with historical amnesia. A few days ago, a French politician and former minister who spent two decades in the European Parliament told me that, before the EU's eastern enlargement, MEPs followed an unwritten rule alongside all the official treaty articles: never mention the past. Think of Basil Fawlty, nervously muttering “Don’t mention the war” when German tourists checked into his hotel.

In his book The Road to Unfreedom, American historian Timothy Snyder calls this western determination to forget history the politics of inevitability. This doctrine builds on the narrative of the "end of history," insisting that the future will merely be a slightly improved version of the present—with no alternatives—since the laws of progress are fixed and beyond challenge. In Europe, the politics of inevitability says that history created nations that, having learned the value of peace through conflict, chose integration and prosperity. The fall of communism was seen as irrefutable proof of this thesis, and even a quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europeans kept repeating these mantras—producing a generation of millennials who have no clue about history and couldn’t care less.

The belief that historical memory is unnecessary—or even harmful—is one reason why authoritarian populism has been so successful. We ourselves disabled democracy’s immune system. If you don’t want to remember history or understand it, you won’t recognize when it returns.

This intentional historical amnesia created ideal conditions for the rise of an alternative to the politics of inevitability, which Snyder calls the politics of eternity. While inevitability promises a better future for all, eternity places the nation at the centre of a cyclical narrative of victimhood and injustice. Time is no longer a journey forward, but a loop constantly returning to the same threats and wrongs of the past. Politicians of eternity argue that the government cannot help society as a whole—it can only protect it from threats. Hope for a better tomorrow is replaced by fear of an inescapable fate.

The dilemma with the politics of eternity is that it has so far been much less successful at providing material well-being and social progress. That’s logical—it doesn’t even try, except for a tight circle of those close to power. But eternity populism is also aware that the adrenaline rush of fearing “the other” is not a sustainable defence against public anger. Sooner or later, citizens will notice they are less free and worse off than their neighbours. The trick populism devised to excuse economic failure is to offer the fiction of spiritual superiority in place of material goods or freedoms. This is the essence of the newly manufactured Eastern European conservatism—claiming to defend the cultural and spiritual purity of the nation against the decadence of the morally bankrupt West, supposedly ruled by feminists, cultural Marxists, homosexuals, and Soros-paid agents of globalist multicultural conspiracies. We may never be the richest or the freest—but, hey, at least we’re the purest.

Though politics of eternity has many shared traits, each country has its own historical ground zero—a moment from which it derives its sense of victimhood or heroism and claims an exclusive moral right to power. Sometimes it’s based on real events—but more often manipulated or distorted. In Slovenia, that ground zero is World War II. In other words—partisans and nazi collaborators. The almanac that Slovenia’s Biff seeks is a new “truth” about who was where, why, and doing what during that war. If he succeeds in rewriting history, he can reshape the present and future. He’s not interested in reconciliation or respect for victims on both sides. He wants to turn memory and facts into a time loop of eternal struggle against a many-headed, undying communist monster—one that once justified collaboration and now justifies dismantling the rule of law.

The prerequisite for this sleight-of-hand is discrediting anti-fascism. Biff’s problem is that anti-fascism wasn’t the exclusive domain of leftist revolutionaries—it was the shared platform of all democratic progressive forces who stood against fascism and built, after WWII, the European project as the antithesis to authoritarian, nationalist, violent politics obsessed with absolute sovereignty, the same kind that pushed Europe into war 80 years ago. Because anti-fascism and the European project are inseparable, the attack on anti-fascism increasingly becomes an attack on Europe itself, on its institutions, and on its values.

History isn’t just a chronology of events, and it cannot and must not be reduced to a hunt for one single historical truth. Multiperspectivity is part of modern historical understanding. Your view of a historical event doesn’t have to match mine, and that’s completely normal and legitimate. But multiperspectivity cannot stretch into the distortion of historical facts, and above all, it cannot be used to undermine the civilizational values on which modern, progressive, democratic societies rest.

History is deeply important—but it can also be a cruel and merciless teacher. If we forget it, then Biff may just end up writing our future.