77. Fareed Zakaria spoke in these terms on Start the Week, BBC Radio Four, presented by Andrew Marr, May 16, 2003.
78. And of course Egypt, and some of the states of North Africa.
79. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Standardized official “national” dress for gulf Arab men has in fact evolved in its current form only in relatively recent times. See Andrew Wheatcroft, Bahrain in Original Photographs: 1880–1961, London: Kegan Paul International, 1988, pp. 72–81. For the issue of dress see Easa Saleh Al-Gurg, The Wells of Memory: An Autobiography, London: John Murray, 1998, p. 54.
80. For the nineteenth-century response to the Ottomans see Reinhold Schiffer, Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century Turkey, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
81. For example his analysis of General William G Boykin’s “dissembling” in Newsweek, October 27, 2003. He concludes, “Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Boykin’s remark is its utter ignorance.”
82. Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, April 21, 2003, based on The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
83. See Marion Farouk Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, rev. ed., London: I. B. Tauris, 2001, pp. 179–80.
84. For a full treatment of the game see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone,_Paper,_Scissors (November 9, 2003).
85. The reasons for this pattern of misconception are not clear. It is not for lack of high-quality research and study. For example, an informed and carefully analytical approach to the issues in Iraq from a U.S. perspective has been produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A report by project director Frederick Barton and Bathsheba Crocker, “A Wiser Peace: An Action Strategy for Post-Conflict Iraq,” outlines ten key actions that the United States and the United Nations must take to prepare to rebuild Iraq’s security, governance, justice, and economic sectors. The study “Postwar Iraq: Are We Ready?” may also be found at www.csis.org (November 9, 2003).
86. I first heard this in the Texas Panhandle, but this version comes from a Methodist sermon: A Texas farmer had a new mule he needed to have trained; it would not do anything he wanted it to—not even go into its stall in the barn. In exasperation, he hired a muleskinner to come out and break the mule in. The old mule tamer arrived out at the farm and had the owner explain what he wanted done. The old man looked at the mule, then at the farmer, reached down, and picked up a fence post that was lying on the ground, and swinging the post as hard as he could, hit the mule right between the eyes. The mule shook its head, braced its two front legs just as stubbornly as before, and refused to move. The mule tamer swung the post and again hit the mule between the eyes, this time twice as hard as before. The blow knocked the mule to his knees. As it struggled back to its feet, the old man went around to the back of the mule and hit it on the rear with a third blow. He then dropped the post onto the ground, caught the mule by its halter, and calmly led it into the barn. By this time, the farmer was furious; he threw his hat down on the ground, cursed, and yelled at the old man, “What are you doing!? I hired you to come out here and tame my mule, not to kill him!” While he ranted and raved, the old man just stood there. He looked up at the sky, then down at the ground. Finally, he just spat some tobacco juice to the side (he was chewing Red Man), and looked the farmer squarely in the eyes. “It appears to me that you’re a mighty good farmer,” said the skinner. “You got a good stand of cotton in the field out yonder, and your rice paddies look mighty good—but you don’t know nothin’ about taming mules!” “What do you mean?” asked the farmer. The old mule tamer continued, “You see, when I want to teach a mule something, the first thing I do is get his attention.” See http://www.cmpage.org/texasmule.html (November 9, 2003).
87. But of course some viruses, like smallpox, can be prevented by inoculation or vaccination. For a coherent view for the recent evolution of terrorist methods see Laden and Roya Boroumand, “Terror, Islam and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, April 2002.
88. See United States Institute of Peace, “Special Report: Islamic Perspectives on Peace and Violence,” January 24, 2002. “What is often viewed as a clash of civilizations is really a clash of symbols … The symbols on one side are headscarves, turbans [my italics] and other symbols of Islamic expression that Westerners often find repellent, just as fundamentalist Muslims view much of Western culture as anti-Islamic.” For an elaborate analysis of the clash of civilizations from a highly nuanced radical “Islamic” perspective, see The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilization, London: Al-Khilafah Publications, 2002.
89. See the convenient collection at http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/AmericanIdeal/yardstick/pr8_quotes.html (November 9, 2003) for the debate on the idea of happiness. For example, the “Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness … We claim them from a higher source—from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence … It would be an insult on the divine Majesty to say, that he has given or allowed any man or body of men a right to make me miserable. If no man or body of men has such a right, I have a right to be happy. If there can be no happiness without freedom, I have a right to be free. If I cannot enjoy freedom without security of property, I have a right to be thus secured.” John Dickinson (Reply to a Committee in Barbadoes, 1766).
90. See http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres16.html (November 9, 2003).
Conclusion
CHAPTER 15: THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
1. It was much more successful than the comparable effort in China.
2. See this page–this page.
3. See R. D. Kloian, The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the Armenian Press (1915–1922), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985, p. 266.
4. It is neither a new Rome nor (even more implausibly) some kind of restoration of Britain’s global sway.
5. Letter to W. S. Smith, November 13, 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 1, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955, p. 3.
6. See Michael Kammen, Meadows of Memory: Images of Time and Tradition in American Art and Culture, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992, p. 4. There were several other images of apotheosis for the first president.
7. See “The Apotheosis of George Washington: Brumidi’s Fresco and Beyond,” by Adriana Rissetto et al., http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/gw/gwmain.html (November 9, 2003).
8. On the address and its rhetorical context, see Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, New York: Touchstone, 1992.
9. See William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
10. Talking to the public in a Fireside Chat on December 9, 1941, FDR called the Japanese “powerful and resourceful gangsters.” See Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, FDR’s Fireside Chats, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
11. See John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, London: Faber, 1986. As Bakhtin observed, we always have a choice as to which register we use.
12. Morgenthau presidential diary, August 19, 1944, cited in Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941–5, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 159.
13. See Morris’s summary prologue to TR at the beginning of his biography, which captures this complexity and his subject’s seeming contradictions. See Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, New York: Modern Library, 2001, pp. 9–29.
14. Rather arbitrarily, I have classed as substantial works books of more than 176 pages that were not simply reprints of material that had first been printed elsewhere. There are several discordant views on Roosevelt’s literary talents. Unquestionably, his best work
is his four-volume study The Winning of the West.
15. See Stephen Ponder, Managing the Press: Origins of the Media Presidency, 1897–1933, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, p. 18. Ponder begins with the relationship between McKinley and the press; but the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House provided a complete shift of gear. As one of Roosevelt’s aides said: “He was his own press agent and he had a splendid comprehension of news and its value.”
16. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech to Congress available at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/national/speeches/spch2.html (November 9, 2003).
17. See Buhite and Levy, Fireside Chats.
18. See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/bush.statement (November 9, 2003).
19. I am not thinking here so much of the verbal idiosyncrasies that have occasioned so much innocent humor, but the words that are “wrong,” off-key, for the circumstances in which they are spoken. President George W. Bush is much more prone to this kind of misspeaking than his father.
20. Official transcript. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030702-3.html (November 9, 2003).
21. Ibid. I have changed “them” to “ ’em,” because this clearly is what the audio recording presents rather than the tidied-up version of the transcript. These minor variations in tone are significant.
22. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Towards a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986. The whole final section is significant. “There is neither a first or a last word and there are no limits to a dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even ‘past’ meaning, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed, in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue). At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of a dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in a new form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming.”
23. See Allen Brill, The Right Christians: “It is time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christians. Prime Minister Mahathir’s main point was a valuable one: Muslims must embrace modernity. That was bitter medicine for fundamentalists who would like to go retreat into some idealized past when Islam was dominant throughout the Mediterranean world, so Mahathir took the seemingly easy course of adding plenty of the ‘sugar’ of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. While the broader world audience would have been ready to applaud him for his condemnation of terrorism, his giving in to the temptation to tell his audience what it wanted to hear—Jews are evil and powerful—made that impossible.” See October 18, 2003, http://www.therightchristians.org.
24. For Mahathir’s full address, see the version reported at Millat Online, October 16, 2003, http://www.millat.com/events/oic/index.htm (November 9, 2003). The whole address totaled some fifty-eight sections, and the three sentences about the Holocaust which principally appalled Western opinion was in section 39 (“We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”) In section 34 he said, “It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack.” But in section 42 he declared: “We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us. Some are well disposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.”
25. See Jerry Chamkis at http://lists.gp-us.org/pipermail/texgreen/2003-August/002924. html (November 9, 2003).
26. See Brill (note 23): “At the time, what he said produced not criticism but accolades. Now that a broader community has heard what he said while in uniform, it’s a different story.”
27. There is an Encyclopaedia of Dr Mahathir Bin Mohammad, Prime Minister of Malaysia. At the book’s launch “Dr Mahathir in his recorded appreciation speech that was aired to the audience, thanked everyone concerned for their willingness to put together all the important thoughts, ideas and vision in one book. He said the encyclopaedia was a multi-volume work that contained his speeches and ideas during his tenure as the Prime Minister of Malaysia which reflected his views, concerns and ideas on important issues. He also hoped that the encyclopaedia would be one of the important references on the modern Muslim world in the future.” See Barisan Nasional at http://www.bn.org.my/cgi-bin/newsdetail.asp?newsID=989 (November 9, 2003).
28. Allen Brill, October 18, 2003. See http://www.therightchristians.org/archives/week_2003_10_12.html.
29. John Torpey talks—rightly—of a rapidly developing “memory industry”: “Memory emerges with such force on the academic and public agenda today, according to one critic, ‘precisely because it figures as a therapeutic alternative to historical discourse.’ Such discourse is constrained by the unpleasant facts that bestrew the canvas of the past, whereas memory talk allows for a subjective reworking of those events combined with the bland prospect of ‘healing.’ The excavation of memory and its mysteries salves buried yearnings for a presently unreachable future.” See John Torpey, “The Pursuit of the Past: A Polemical Perspective,” in Peter Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. John Torpey was kind enough to allow me to quote from a final draft of his chapter. He is citing Kerwin Lee Klein.
30. Understanding how historical memory works—how these ideas of the past are formed—is now becoming imperative. At Harvard, the twentieth-century historian of Europe Charles S. Maier has drawn a useful metaphor from nuclear physics for the way that historical memory functions. He proposes that there are two kinds of memory, hot and cold; some memories are like a “hot” isotope—plutonium—that remains dangerously radioactive for a very long time. He suggests that memories of the Nazi atrocities will remain “hot” for far longer than those of equivalent Soviet crimes against humanity. Cultural or social memories are formed in different circumstances, and it is those circumstances which define whether they are inherently long-lasting. He contrasts the carefully organized and closely targeted terror of the Nazis with the more random—stochastic—murderousness of the purges and deportations in the USSR. The memories from the former, he speculates, will prove “hotter” then those created by the latter. “To borrow a metaphor from nuclear physics, between a traumatic collective memory with a long half-life—a plutonium of history that fouls the landscape with its destructive radiation for centuries—and a much less perduring fall-out from, say, the isotope tritium, which dissipates relatively quickly. This paper is not an argument about which experience was the more atrocious, but about which has remained engraved in memory—historical, personal—more indelibly.” He then distinguishes between the closely planned strategy of “targeted” terror used by the Nazis and the more aleatoric, or “stochastic” terror of Stalinism. Targeted terror, Maier suggests, produced “hot” or long-term memory, stochastic terror created “cold” or short-term memory. See Charles S. Maier, “Hot Memory … Cold Memory: On the Political Half-Life of Fascist and Communist Memory,” Transit Europäische Revue, 2002. This is available online at http://www.iwm.at/t-22txt5.htm (November 9, 2003). But with some of the memories that I have discussed, “a long time” means not decades but centuries. Over that length of time, they have not behaved quite as Maier’s nuclear half-life model would suggest. Over time “hot” memories do not slowly transmute and diminish; rather they become more like an epidemic disease: lying latent for long periods and then, suddenly, when conditions are right, producing a new outbreak. While nuclear half-life represen
ts an inexorable process, a slow and unalterable change, epidemics occur only when the right conditions are present. Nor do epidemic diseases remain static. Influenza, for example, mutates, and each epidemic may result from a different variant of the virus. There is a continuing uncertainty as to how epidemics spread. R. Edgar Hope-Simpson, in The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza (New York: Plenum Press, 1992), effectively transformed the older notions of simple person-to-person transmission into a much broader theory dependent on climate, time of year, and context. See Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, who, in “The Dilemma of Influenza,” Current Science 78, no. 9 (May 10, 2000), pages 1057–9, suggest it may be related to sunspot activity.
31. David Frum, after quitting as a presidential speechwriter, became a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prolific columnist. Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003, resigned from the board in February 2004. He too is a resident fellow at the AEI. As the authors say, An End to Evil was “written at high speed through high summer”—presumably 2003. See David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, New York: Random House, 2003, p. 284.
32. See George Orwell, “Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak,” in Orwell, 1984; http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/orwell_1984_newspeak.html.
33. Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 9.
34. There is a huge literature on the Holocaust, but on this specific aspect, the most dispassionate work is by Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. But see also Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, 2nd ed., London: Verso, 2003.
35. Frum and Perle, p. 279.
36. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, The Malleus Malleficarum, trans. Montague Summers, London: Pushkin Press, 1948, Part 1, Question 14.
37. Sir Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), presents a world in which magical cunning was one way to counteract a dangerous and uncertain world. However, a wise or “cunning” woman skilled with herbs and folk medicine could easily be constituted “a witch” by authority, often as a result of jealousy or a local denunciation. Thus it was possible to be a valued member of village society one week, and a witch the next. “Witch” was thus an unstable category, dependent less on what you did and much more on how authority and your neighbors decided to regard it.
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