There are those who like to say that too much of Scotland's independence argument rests on events in the dim, distant past.

Who knows or cares about ancient wars and long-gone combatants? What does it matter - how could it matter - to us in the here and now?

You can see the point. It's akin to the claim that the present generation should stop apologising for a country's historic crimes. But if that's the case, by what logic do we identify ourselves with the virtues, as we see them, of those who are many years dead? When does that stop? When does history pass from consciousness? A lot of answers to those questions will be tested this year.

Jeremy Paxman's Britain's Great War, the first of innumerable planned TV series on the slaughter inaugurated on July 28, 1914, arrived early to the fray this week. It came on the heels of a calculated attempt by Michael Gove, England's Education Secretary, to claim the deaths of three quarters of a million British personnel on behalf of "the Western liberal order" from those who recognise only "a misbegotten shambles". A long century on, this history is still contested.

So the right-wing historian Niall Ferguson, advertising a TV documentary of his own, tells us that Britain's very participation in the First World War was "the biggest error in modern history". So the Tory peer Lord Lang of Monkton, a former Scottish Secretary, refuses to retract the ahistorical and insulting claim that a vote for independence would "dishonour the sacrifices made in common cause of those who died for the UK".

Meanwhile, David Cameron has £50 million of public money set aside to mark the 1914-18 war. This will be "a truly national commemoration", he said when announcing his plans in October 2012, one that "captures our national spirit in every corner of the country", one that "says something about who we are as a people". But amid educational events and solemn moments of remembrance it would in no way be mistaken, so the Prime Minister insisted, for a celebration.

Thus far, two things are striking. One is that those most passionate in laying claim to the Great War and what it might signify come from the political right. The second is that they seem determined to venerate - and celebrate - a Britain that long ago ceased to exist. Yet theirs isn't mere nostalgia. The arguments over old history are intended to have effects in the present.

You could wonder, as Lord Lang failed singularly to wonder, what gives anyone the right to conscript the dead. When was the privilege earned to summon 100,000 destroyed Scottish lives to a 21st century contest over the Union? Thousands who volunteered in 1914 knew all about the previous year's home rule bill. The older ones would have plenty of memories of the agitation for a legislature for "purely Scottish affairs" a decade before. So who is dishonoured now by Ian Lang?

You could say the same about Mr Gove and his "western liberal order". The suggestion is, chiefly, that German imperialism had to be fought to keep Europe safe for democracy, that far from being lions led by donkeys men from these islands were eager to preserve liberty against a rapacious enemy. The war was awful, but there was no alternative. There are several difficulties with that rhetoric.

Occupation by Wilhelmine Germany was not to be wished on anyone: that was a nasty empire. But Britain's empire was not exactly spotless, as independence movements around the globe have seemed to attest. By one, still accurate reading, what began with an archduke's murder in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 was a long-anticipated contest between imperial thieves that got out of hand. Among the colonialist powers the liberty of others had never ranked high.

Mr Gove's volunteers for the western liberal order might have struggled to recognise his terminology when they flocked to war. If 40,000 of the Scots who were about to die even had the vote they were lucky. In 1914, the franchise was still restricted to male householders over the age of 21. All women were excluded. All of the teenage boys who were about to be turned into tokens in the game of attrition knew nothing of democracy. Large numbers of grown men were denied a fundamental right.

Mr Gove failed to mention that part. In his book, Britain and its empire were a force for good, therefore their cause was just. This is like treating history as one of those fabled Christmas football matches in the trenches. Equally, like Lord Lang, it makes the staggering presumption that those who served and died would have viewed politics and patriotism with the eyes of 21st century Tories busy making propaganda.

Harvard's Professor Ferguson is a slightly different case. Controversy has done his career no harm. Imperial power, whether in finance or war, has become his specialist subject. Like Mr Gove, he is no admirer of left-wing views. Like his ministerial friend, the professor misses few chances to rehabilitate Britain's empire. His latest headline heard around the world is therefore of a piece with his previous pronouncements. Better that Europe had fallen to Germany, he judges, and spared our imperialism the loss of treasure and power before we were ready to fight.

Britain has never been well-prepared for those continental entanglements. Given the Ferguson thesis we could have saved ourselves a lot of grief and preserved an empire at the cost of a treaty obligation. No matter.

"For Britain it would ultimately have been far better to have thought in terms of the national interest rather than in terms of a dated treaty," the professor tells BBC History Magazine.

Coming from one who was unstinting in his support for war in Iraq and Afghanistan this is striking. In neither case was there an existential threat to Britain or its interests. Professor Ferguson has also been vociferous, like some of his American friends, in demanding "action" against Iran. Allies could and should have been ignored in 1914, he tells us, but in the 21st century allegiance to the United States should not be questioned. This, supposedly, is the only national interest worth the name, and worth more than Europe ever was.

The Great War is best understood as bloody farce. That was the experience of those who fought, regardless of armchair patriots who demand to speak in their name. If we wish to honour the fallen we should honour their understanding of what they suffered. Even the franchise denied to those dead Scots was granted in 1918 less because of benign imperial government than because of a revolution in Russia, and what that signified. Democracy had to be forced into existence.

The Tory view, the view of Lang, Gove, Ferguson and others besides, contains an irony. It treats history as seriously as any Marxist ever did. For that matter, it seeks to rewrite the record as avidly as any Stalinist ever did. But it doesn't work. Donkeys can't make dead lions roar, or restore long lost empires, or put that Britain back together again. Like the Great War itself, that was done with long ago.