The idiosyncrasies of historical remembrance of battle do not hinge alone on the presence of a Socrates or Teddy Roosevelt in the ranks. Sometimes there are wild cards of culture and politics as well. In this case and at this time, the fact that the Israelis fit the stereotype of affluent and proud Westerners abroad while the Palestinians were constructed as impoverished and oppressed colonial subjects brought to the equation the sympathies of influential Americans and Europeans in the media, universities, and government—the prominent and sometimes worrisome elites who determined to send their reporters, scholars, and diplomats to Jenin rather than to Islamabad or Grozny.
Like it or not, Westerners from Herodotus’s time to the present age carry historical weight far out of proportion to their numbers, and so create waves where there should only be tiny ripples. In the decade of the 1990s alone there were literally millions of innocent Africans butchered in Rwanda, the Congo, Somalia, and Mozambique, more killed in a single month than all those lost on the West Bank or in Israel proper in the last half century—but for a variety of perverse reasons those dead carried little moral capital with the arbiters of the world’s attention and memory.
Of course, history is only a capricious recorder of battles, the craft that elevates remembrance of a few thousands who battled at Thermopylae over the hundreds of thousands who perished in oblivion when Cambyses conquered Egypt. But there are also the parallel ripples—those that I tried to chronicle in this book—of private experiences and individuals who are lost to the historical record, but not lost to the great train of events that equally affects the human condition, whether that be the decision to drop the A-bomb, the lessons of battling suicides, the Lost Opportunity, Ben-Hur, Euripides’ Suppliants, the complete annihilation of Thespiae—or the death of an obscure Swedish farm boy in 1945 on far distant Okinawa.
Quite apart from what most people remember or read, some forgotten battles will silently and without acknowledgment still continue to change the way they live and think. So we do not know what saint or monster, what devilish cult or humane religion, or what great poem or worthless doggerel will arise out of the holocaust of mass killing and fighting in Rwanda, but right now, unbeknown to the world, the swells from that horrendous hand-to-hand slaughter are billowing out, and on what shores they will finally lap we can hardly imagine. And we Americans in our professed greatest age of security and affluence are not immune from battle and its ripples.
The United States was roused from its siesta on September 11 to learn in dismay that millions abroad were pleased over its losses. Many of its supposed friends among “moderate” Arab regimes were silent. Some, in fact, either inadvertently or deliberately, may have been involved in aiding and abetting the terrorists themselves. Post-9/11 polls revealed that as many as 70 percent of those surveyed in most Arab countries shared a dislike of the United States. The bombing exposed a previously ignored but vast fault line between the Western and Islamic—and particularly Middle Eastern—worlds, all the more dramatic given near-instant satellite transmission of celebrating throngs in the streets of the West Bank, Pakistan, and Egypt. Terrorism on a grand scale in minutes strips away the pretensions of peace. It shows things the way they really have been among the masses rather than how events and ideologies were supposed to be presented by those elites in government, universities, and the media.
Millions of Americans had forgotten that the easy use of the Internet, participation in the World Cup, or showy foreign jets at major Western airports had little to do with the nature of civil society abroad. For all the veneer of Westernism in the Islamic world—cell phones, television sets, luxury hotels, and fast-food franchises—citizens of the United States were rudely reminded in the aftermath of 9/11 that there are few, if any, legitimate democracies in the Arab Middle East. Whether theocrats in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan, dictators in Libya, Syria, or Iraq, or milder autocrats in Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, not one government is subject to audit, recall, or removal by its populace. Such an absence of consensual politics permeates all such unfree societies that are more likely to be without religious tolerance, free expression, truly secular institutions, sexual equity, and an unbridled media.
This sudden sobriety ushered in on September 11 also reminded us of the vast differences between freedom and tyranny in a supposedly uniform global culture at “the end of history.” After the honking in the streets celebrating the American dead in some Muslim countries, few Americans perhaps saw Mr. Arafat as a responsible force for peace, the tribal yet ultramodern sheiks of Saudi Arabia as temperate friends—or even many of the NATO allies that voiced anger at America in the months after as real comrades in arms.
Neither diplomats nor strategists immediately could grasp that the world—as happened after Salamis on September 28, 480 B.C. or the Fall of Constantinople on May 29, 1453—had suddenly cracked apart and would not be put back together with quite the same pieces. Thus the 9/11 tragedy and its aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq led to fundamental rethinking about NATO, the role of the United Nations, and American relationships with continental European countries. Europeans loudly pronounced a new anti-Americanism and talked of a separate “German way”; Americans silently seethed and were resigned to give them their wish. After September 11, Europeans vented against the American protectorate even as average citizens in Des Moines and Tulare quietly shrugged and likewise asked why the United States at great cost is defending a continent that has a larger population and economy than its own.
Culture, like politics, is not immune to these billowing waves of combat. And we can look to the past to see that cultural repercussions usually follow from battles. The catalysts for modernism were Verdun, the Somme, and the general carnage of the First World War trenches. Out of those infernos spread the belief that the old foundations of staid manners, traditional genres of art and literature, unquestioning patriotism—dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—and national politics had somehow led to Europe’s millions being gassed and blown apart for years in the mud of the French countryside without either victory or defeat.
Perhaps the present brand of postmodernism was born primarily in France as well. After the humiliating drive of the Panzers through the Ardennes in May 1940, the collapse of Europe’s largest army in six weeks, and the rescue by the Americans and British in August 1944, theories were easier to accept than facts. For a few elite but stunned postwar Frenchmen, fiction was more palatable than reality, text and discourse a refuge from a truth as unacceptable as it was bothersome.
The crater in New York at the very epicenter of American arts and letters perhaps will have a similarly profound though more likely opposite effect—as we reply to a temporary loss with a more confident pursuit of victory rather than embarrassing denial. Without the World Trade Center on the New York skyline, it will be discomforting to suggest that events are mere historical fictions or constructions of power. Who now will insist that papier-mâché and urine jars best capture the human condition? Not that such art and literature born often out of sarcasm and nihilism will evaporate. Such sensationalism will not—at least for a time and among a few. But most people, desperate for transcendence and something real—and perhaps even exquisite—amid the recovery from catastrophe, will gradually be less interested in the clever but empty games of relativists who spawn such faux-art a few blocks away from the detritus of the greatest foreign attack on American shores in our nation’s history.
Carefully arranging together some concrete and steel, putting it on display in a gallery, and then calling such impressionism “art” will not be as popular as before. Millions, after all, have seen and then judged the jumbled mess on a far grander scale—mixed with flesh and bone no less—to be not sculpture, but a catastrophe and an abomination. Where terrorism and killing take place is often as important as how many fight and die and who wins.
The creed of contemporary multiculturalism sought to establish that all societies were roughly equal and that the “other” was but a crude Wes
tern fiction. But we were reminded that people like the Taliban who did not vote, treated women as chattel, and whipped and stoned to death dissenters of their primordial world were different folk from citizens of a democracy. A chief corollary to such cultural relativism was that Americans have wrongly embraced a belief in the innate humanity of the West largely out of ethnocentric ignorance. But surely the opposite has been proven true: the more Americans after September 11 learned about the world of the madrassas, the six or seven varieties of Islamic female coverings, the Dickensian Pakistani street, and murderous gangs in Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan, then the more, not less, they are appalled by societies that are so anti-Western.
Blasts in Manhattan followed by televised pictures of women in burqas having their brains blown out in an Afghan soccer stadium have a tendency to make people rethink what they had been told—and just maybe to realize what a rare and beautiful gift is the Western heritage of democracy and freedom. So it was also after Thermopylae and the invasion of Poland in 1939, and so it is after 9/11—a date that has blown apart history as we have known it over the last few decades.
Others among the influential for a moment after the retaliatory strikes of October 7, 2001, talked of moral equivalency—the conventional wisdom that American precision targeting of an enemy in time of war carried the same ethical burden as the terrorists’ deliberate mass-murdering of civilians at peace. But billions worldwide knew that the selective wreckage of al-Qaeda safe houses in Kabul was not comparable to the smoldering crater that was once the World Trade Center. Why else were terrorists and the Taliban hiding in mosques and infirmaries to avoid American bombs while their own manuals instructed killers to commit mass murder in Jewish hospitals and temples? So the reality that average folk viewed on their televisions made them question the bottled piety of the last decades that they heard from a powerful and influential few. And in that moral calculus, September 11 shocked an affluent and at times self-satisfied American citizenry into confessing that it was no longer either too wealthy, too refined, or too sensitive to kill killers.
Knowledge of the past would have reminded us that battle does such things to a people. Socrates cannot be understood without appreciating that his thought came of age only during the murderous three decades of the Peloponnesian War. Battles, as Delium and Shiloh suggest, can create prominent men and can destroy them as well. The same is true of ideas. The pacifism of the post-Vietnam generation shamed Americans into thinking that all conflicts were bad. Relativism sometimes convinced them that they were not that much different from their enemies. Conflict resolution advised that there was rarely such a thing as a moral armed struggle of good against evil—to be scoffed at as “Manichaean”—and that strife is a result of misunderstandings and so can be resolved through give-and-take and rational discourse. But once more September 11 has returned America to the classical view of war as a tragic, but sometimes necessary, option for humans when unchallenged evil threatens civilization.
In 1986 a panel of the United Nations declared that war was an aberration and not in any way natural or innate to humans. Yet the Greek philosopher Heraclitus twenty-five centuries earlier had dubbed it “the father, the king of us all.” After the fall of the twin towers, Americans were more likely to believe a dead Greek than the most sophisticated lawyers and social scientists of the modern Western world.
In a single morning Americans also rediscovered the Hellenic idea that it is not wars per se that are always terrible, but the people—Hitler, Tojo, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, and bin Laden—and their repugnant ideas who start them. In this present conflict, the -isms and -ologies of radical Islamic fundamentalism that have infected millions can be shown to be bankrupt only by their complete repudiation, which tragically must come out of military defeat, subsequent humiliation, and real personal costs for all who embrace them. Only that way can both adherents and the innocent alike learn the wages of allowing their country to be hijacked by agents of intolerance. Ask the Japanese about the terrible sequelae to Okinawa.
The enemy in battle is never a person per se, but the fanaticism that has taken hold of him. Battle likewise is sometimes the only exorcist strong enough to rid the zombie host of such deadly demons. The brilliant memoir of E. B. Sledge about his ghastly experiences in the inferno of Okinawa is often cited as an antiwar tract. It is. But we remember that his recollection is also more than that—as the last lines of the book reveal: “As the troops used to say, ‘If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.’ With privilege goes responsibility.”
Even we in the supposedly enlightened West may also relearn from fighting rich and educated terrorists that conflicts can often arise not out of real, but rather perceived grievances—or, as the Greeks taught us, from old-fashioned but now passé ideas like hatred, envy, fear, and self-interest. The agitators for secession were not the millions of poor and nonslaveowning Southern whites who lived hand-to-mouth, but the few plantationists whose antebellum cotton sales had made them among the wealthiest men in the history of civilization. Japan had as many people and as little land in 1941 as it does now, but a very different perception then of its own grievance, national right, and imperial destiny. People and their leaders can go to war not because their bellies ache with hunger, but out of the belief that they may otherwise lose—or even not augment—the sizable fortune, influence, or real power they hold.
The terrorists of al-Qaeda, like the Japanese militarists, attacked America not simply because they were poor, exploited, abused, or maladjusted, but perhaps as much out of loathing, trepidation, and resentment of the West. That fact in and of itself seemed somewhat a refutation of perhaps the entire twentieth-century confidence in the assertions of social science that man’s nature is not absolute, unchanging, and timeless, but simply a construct of his contemporary environment and (often pathological) upbringing. After September 11 we were reminded that our own prosperous and peaceful era, not history’s long centuries, was the true aberration in its denial of an unchanging human character driven by timeless passions and appetites.
Battles that seem to allow horrible things to transpire as ordinary events—as we saw from Shiloh and Delium—can also transform more subtly the lives of thousands of both the renowned and ordinary, well apart from the grand cosmology of politics, war, and culture. Rudolph Giuliani before September 11 was a lame-duck mayor of New York City, a sort of has-been limping out of office, pilloried by the press, and caught in personal scandal and gossip—his unique potential for leadership still unchanged, but the requisite arena for its manifestation long ago gone by. After the attacks he immediately emerged from Ground Zero to steady the city in the twilight of his tenure—reenergizing himself as the embodiment of New York grit and calm under fire, and so acclaimed as Time magazine’s Man of the Year and America’s civis princeps. Given his character, a Plutarch would suggest, his time was not over as we thought, but waiting all along for the eye of the storm.
George W. Bush, who lacked his predecessor’s encyclopedic knowledge of names, places, and dates, was—after the election fiasco in Florida—considered a near-illegitimate president, tongue-tied and in over his head, his impoverished vocabulary purported proof of his intellectual levity. But the terrorists’ war proved that he, like the Greek iambic poet Archilochus’s hedgehog, “knew one thing, but a big one”: how to galvanize his people and lead them to battle against an evil enemy in the hour of his country’s great peril. That “big one” should never have had the opportunity to appear, but then conflicts also are illogical things and should also perhaps not occur. Few before 9/11 would have remembered that the original prime directive of the founders’ presidency was to protect the citizenry from foreign attack rather than to ensure healthy GNP, the Dow above 11,000, and an approval rating of over 60 percent.
We learned in the early part of the Afghanistan war that a slain Johnny Spann was an unheralded middle-class American with a fine record at the CIA, a captured John Walker a “mixed-u
p” child of affluence cavorting among the Taliban. The one died doing his duty for his country, the other fought for its enemies confused and searching for personal fulfillment. Both were caught in battle on videotape, their respective fates instantly suggesting that there were two very different Americans at cross-purposes even six thousand miles away. Not all reputations, then, were won and lost among the elite. Amid the grieving and less well known after September 11, there are right now thousands of undiscovered brave and anonymous souls who will vow to remember their fallen in all that they do and say for the duration of their lives. If the past is any guide to the future, Americans will see their spirit soon enough at shops, on television, and in bookstores for decades hence—and with it the knowledge that the voices of the battlefield dead can still speak among us in the here and now.
Ripples of Battle Page 31