As if history was made to be forgotten, not learned from

Several years ago, I read a great book by historian Gerda Lerner called Why History Matters. One of the intriguing chapters dealt with the historical revisionism that the Nazis engaged in after their rise to power. The story they were trying to sell the German people, of their hidden greatness and their culture's sabotage by outside forces, didn't mesh with available historical information. So the Nazis had to revise all the school textbooks to take out all the foreigners and German Jewish citizens who had contributed to the greatness of their culture. Through such purges, they were able to sell people on their story more completely.

The story gave me flashbacks to architecture history, in which Egyptian kings of the later eras had the names of their predecessors carved out of the monuments documenting their accomplishments, and replaced them with their own. Or of the Spaniards reaching the new world and burning the written Codices of the locals, and then insisting that the locals had no culture or civilizations because they had no books, a "problem" which the Spaniards could fix... by supplying books about how great the Spaniards are, while depriving the locals of means to recall their independence with historical detail.

History gives you legitimacy. We are here! We have been here! Textbooks in the U.S. are a political battleground for legitimacy: the groups that are overrepresented don't want to give up the space they monopolize, because it might give too much legitimacy to other groups who share this country. I bet you can tell me lots of details about the individual wealthy early leaders of the country, but have no idea how many native persons were already on this land at about that time.

Shaping history for self-serving ends works. We're told what's important in all media. We believe it. Less well documented truths are fuzzy, not widely enough shared to be jointly discussed and recalled, and don't take hold in debates.

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This seems like a long tangent, and it is. But it's also about the denial of history required to believe in war.

This morning I read Howard Zinn's essay, Artists in Times of War, about how people who often think independently and creatively often manage to resist the groupthink of wartime hysteria. This wartime hysteria requires a denial of history: toss out the bad and ambiguous parts and insist that one's home nation is the good victim of an evil villain, regardless of circumstances. As a good victim, our nation can engage in retributory actions which would only be evil if others so acted.

I've marveled several times at quotes from my fellow Americans which verged on completely senseless: comments about how other nations couldn't understand what we went through on September 11th, because no one else had ever suffered a serious terrorist attack. !?!?

Each time I've heard such opinions through the mainstream media, such comments are accepted completely, adding to the lack of connection to history. Plenty of other nations have suffered terrorism. Plenty of other nations have suffered, even at the hands of the U.S.! But the mass media plays into the new game, failing to provide context. They don't mention other attacks. They don't mention other nations, except as potential attackers. There is no history.

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Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy, and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us. Never mind the murder and repression done in our name by bloody surrogates from the Shah of Iran to the Congolese dictator Joseph Désiré Mobotu... We define ourselves. All other definitions do not count.

-- Chris Hedges, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning

Hedges, a war correspondent, reflects on how individuals and nations twist history to make themselves look better and justify evil acts. He does a depressing, persuasive job in arguing that the nationalism just beneath the surface of most citizens could bring us to commit atrocities against innocents at the drop of a hat. In a fit of emotion, we could believe anything good about ourselves and anything bad about others, high on a shallow unity of panic which will leave us feeling alone and desperate to forget how dirty our hands are the moment the conflict of the day ends. His comments on the textbooks of recently warring nations, and the twisted, self-serving versions of events that makes them conflict with each other, shouldn't be surprising, but it is.

It's a good, yet discouraging read.

Context

The U.S. is still facing credibility problems abroad that it doesn't suffer at home, in its statements about wishing to liberate the Iraqi people to bring them freedom and democracy. A lot of this credibility gap isn't based on wacky information that the rest of the world is getting: rather, the gap would be narrower on the domestic side if Americans had any idea of the United States' support of non-democratic, non-liberating regimes throughout recent history.

The BBC's brilliant feature "Iraq: Conflict in Context" provides fabulous links and articles on the region's history and U.S. involvement there. This history is not well known to most Americans.

BBC - History - Crusades and Jihads in Postcolonial Times, by Dr. S. Sayyid tells us this:

The United States has tried to exert control by using regional powers such as Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt as its proxies. By relying on these proxies the US has often become involved in the internal politics of these countries. US support has often increased the coercive resources available to the ruling elites of these countries while at the same time it has also tended to undermine the legitimacy of these regimes.

Thus, these regimes have to place a greater reliance on coercion - which further undermines the legitimacy of the ruling elites... It is this cycle of declining legitimacy and increasing repression that plagues the political order in the Middle East. Within this context political groups seek to close the gap between rulers and ruled by making rulers more accountable, and find themselves facing a repressive machinery that is often supported by western powers.

Those who have survived the U.S.' support for undemocratic regimes are unlikely to believe mere language invoking liberation. There just hasn't been enough evidence of it, and so the words are reduced to vague rhetoric. If freedom, liberty, and democracy are TRULY American values, our history in the region would have demonstrated this.

American actions have NOT demonstrated this.

The history of western powers demonstrates that it is perfectly possible to have democracy at home and exercise tyranny aboard. Both France and Britain maintained relatively free 'democratic' societies while exercising authoritarian control over their imperial possessions.

Americans, who experience significant freedom, assume inappropriately that their experience of American power is shared by others abroad. A conceptual gap exists in their experience.

Part of the reason the U.S. says one thing about freedom and democracy and does another, according to Dr. Sayyid, is that Americans cannot overcome our historical mythology that insists that we are the bearers of civilization, and that anyone else is barbaric. Many cultures suffer from this sort of egoism. But the United States is enforcing this belief with its military and intelligence services, deciding that the freedom of [barbaric] others is unimportant relative to U.S. interests. Our papers read this way daily, influencing the thoughts of ordinary citizens who might not come to such conclusions on their own.

This is a great article: I encourage you to read it in its entirety.

Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It's a tactic. It's about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we're going to win that war. We're not going to win the war on terrorism....

Acts of terror have never brought down liberal democracies. Acts of parliament have closed a few.

----Lt. General William Odom (Ret.), U.S. Army

This sensible quote is from Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech, and Opinion Control Since 9-11 by Nancy Snow. Snow's latest book, part of the Seven Stories Press Open Media Series of compact, concise books on vitally important topics, is a treasure. She cites voluminous source material to examine how propaganda has historically been used, and is currently being used by the corporate media in support of its owners' interests. The use of language to hide dissent and distort reality to create a docile populace during war is amazingly important right now, and we all need to be media-literate enough to know when we are being manipuated. Her dissection of commentary is graceful and sharp.

Her website is also an excellent and highly recommended resource for information on information manipulation.

You ARE reading the Thismodernworld.com blog every few days, aren't you? If you aren't, you must. It is ALWAYS full of intriguing news.

For example, this entry quotes from a Financial Times article which reports that Pakistani officials see no justification for the Orange Alert in the U.S. based on persons they have in custody, though the Pakistanis are being used as justification for the alerts.

Another recent entry cites The Secret File of Abu Ghraib: New classified documents implicate U.S. forces in rape and sodomy of Iraqi prisoners, by Osha Gray Davidson in Rolling Stone. While the title discusses more of the graphic abuses, day-to-day conditions were inhumane:

The prison was filled far beyond capacity. Some 7,000 prisoners were jammed into Abu Ghraib, a complex erected to hold no more than 4,000 detainees. Prisoners were held in canvas tents that became ovens in the summer heat and filled with rain in the cold winter. One report found that the compound "is covered with mud and many prisoner tents are close to being under water." ....

In a series of increasingly desperate e-mails sent to his higher-ups, Maj. David DiNenna of the 320th MP Battalion reported that food delivered by private contractors was often inedible. "At least three to four times a week, the food cannot be served because it has bugs," DiNenna reported. "Today an entire compound of 500 prisoners could not be fed due to bugs and dirt in the food." Four days later, DiNenna sent another e-mail marked "URGENT URGENT URGENT!!!!!!!!" He reported that "for the past two days prisoners have been vomiting after they eat."

The fact that this officer kept requesting assistance and had it ignored suggests that correcting the deplorable conditions were not a priority for anyone above him. Or, that these deplorable conditions were desirable and/or intentional. Which is worse.

And it's not just that the citations to other materials are great: TMW has great commentary of its own. See Bush manipulates the war for his own gain. Again.

Read it often! I had a link prior to my page formatting change: I'll (eventually) get this omission from the new format corrected.

[Week+ vacation interruption in posting. Posting will resume shortly.]