The Historical Society, Boston University

“The NLF was faced with the task of forging a modern combat instrument in the midst of a materially backward society with few disposable resources. Going beyond ‘Robin Hood’ or ‘social bandit’ forms of resistance, the PLAF was unmistakably an army. But it was not a big army, and the Front hoped to sustain its operations through volunteerism both in recruitment and in mobilizing civilians to feed and house the troops. Soldiers counted on the customary hospitality of the villagers, and villagers expected soldiers to comport themselves as would any guests, with the deference expected from youth toward their elders. Long-standing festive habits came into play, with theatrical presentations and food provided, as it would be for a village banquet.

In short, during the early stages of the war, quartering drew on established circuits of exchange and sociability. Units fought in line with strategic guidelines that broke from local custom, but they lived within the confines of village culture. Quartering helped homesick, frightened recruits maintain a sense of themselves as soldiers of liberation. The hospitality of villagers, who counted on the army to champion their interests, confirmed that sacrifices in battle served a larger purpose. Gifts of food were emblems of people’s war.”

“For the most part, on most campuses, faculty members had little or nothing useful to say [about the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon]. Everyone was upset, and many people worried that hapless Muslims or people of color would suffer attacks. Thankfully very little of such barbarism ensued. What academe lacked in most quarters was a sober discussion of the attacks, their meaning, and their consequences.

This silence ought to concern us as historians, for we are grievously at fault. Over the last half-century, we have eliminated military history from the curriculum. We regarded it as unseemly to study the conduct of war, the imposition of peace, the conduct of negotiations, or the consequences of victory and defeat. Few liberal arts colleges in the United States can boast the presence of an historian who focuses his or her scholarly attention on war….

As the older generation of military and diplomatic historians retires, we replace them with historians of gender and ethnicity. I do not disparage such studies. But they pale in importance when compared with international relations….War may be unpleasant, and the squeamish may regard its study as a sign of bad character. But a country must grasp what is necessary for its own defense, and that knowledge requires military and diplomatic history.”

“Although it requires a leap of the imagination to predict an Islamic Reformation as part of a global revolution, the scenario is not impossible. It also is not a Western affair. It is not the job nor the place of the West to reshape the Islamic world. Globalization—whether in Fukuyama’s political model, Thomas Friedman’s economically driven vision as expressed in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, or the everyday power of new cultures to disrupt old patterns—requires emulation and acculturation. The processes are synergistic. ‘They’ wish to become like ‘us,’ and, in turn, ‘we’ tend to become more like each other. Critics of the ‘McDonaldizing’ of the world should walk through the downtown district of any city in the United States, where pushcarts that offer skewers of halal meat stand alongside kosher hot dog wagons and tamale vendors, all of them vying for the dollars of passers-by who remain indifferent to the sociology of their lunch.

Cultural clash does not lead inevitably to cultural conflict. Emulation depends on respect for opportunities that are worth exchanging or modifying old ways in favor of new ones. Until September 11, the West forgot that respect can have its deepest roots in fear. That situation is not ideal. It is, however, all too human….The West must remember that weakness and vulnerability are not positive qualities for states and societies, any more than they are for individuals. Fundamentalism may be at Islam’s core, or it may be peripheral. That is for Muslims to decide. Muslims and Muslim governments also must decide what they will do as the United States tracks down those who challenge its right to exist. People frequently ask, ‘When will the war on terrorism end?’ A reasonable answer is, ‘When the next zealot who advocates giving a Westerner a hangnail is lynched by his own followers.’ That result requires, not attitude adjustment, but behavior modification.”

From Edward Kolodziej’s “Coalition for the Times or for All Time?: Responding to the Terrorist Challenge”

“Global society represents something radically new in human evolution. Now, as never before, the diverse and divided peoples of the world depend on each other to create the kind of world they want—a world to be won either by coercion or by cooperation. This society, of which we are all members, rests upon an increasing and accelerating number of real-time exchanges—destructive and supportive, threatening and reassuring—within progressively enlarging and accumulating networks of people, ideas, goods, and services that span the globe. One can image this global society as separate and distinct from the local, national, and regional societies we inhabit, but in reality it represents the hybrid product of our increasing global connectedness and the constraints imposed on globalization by these pre-existing local structures and the values of those dedicated to their preservation.

The coalition of democratic market states that won the Cold War provides the provisional governance of this global society. This coalition arose from the Cold War struggle because its solutions to the imperatives of governance that confront all human societies—order, welfare, and legitimacy—were superior to those advanced by the Soviet Union and its allies. The global wars of the 20^th century—two hot ones and a cold one—thus represent profound conflicts among the peoples of the globe over the appropriate response to these imperatives. Global society would be radically different had Nazi Germany won World War II, or the Soviet Union, the Cold War. The terrorist attacks of September 11 mark a grave, if not fatal, challenge to the solutions for global governance provided by the winning Cold War coalition.”

From Antony Sullivan’s “Has Samuel Huntington’s Predicition Come to Pass?”

“Much of the Islamic world today feels a deep and intensifying anger against the West in general and the United States in particular. Many Muslims misunderstood President Bush’s disastrous comment that the United States intends to launch a ‘crusade’ against terrorism to be a declaration of war against the Islamic world. If the war in Afghanistan—and the intensifying conflict between Israelis and Palestinians—spreads into Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere, the world will almost certainly confront a conflict that will be difficult to describe as anything but civilizational. But a conflict of civilizations is not likely to mean the ‘end’ of any nation-states. States such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt will probably endure but may well be taken over by radical Islamic forces obdurately hostile to the West and everything it represents. If this transpires, it would end abruptly every possibility of a ‘coalition’ of Western and Islamic countries. And if Israel destroys the Palestinian National Authority and Yasir Arafat, it will be faced with Hamas, which refuses even the pretense of negotiation. If this dark scenario materializes, Samuel Huntington’s 1993 hypothesis will be validated….

Recent events have obscured the moderate, culturally conservative, and deeply religious movement that marks the best of the contemporary Islamic revival. This revival may have much to teach the radically secular West. Even at this late date, the number of Islamists who would designate themselves as moderates greatly exceeds the number who have capitulated to the atrocities of al Qaa’ida and Hamas….But whether the moderate Muslim center will continue to adhere, and a war of civilizations consequently be avoided, will depend largely on what the United States and its Western allies choose to do when the war in Afghanistan concludes.”

“Muslim societies differ greatly within and among themselves, but Islam is immutable. Islam is an idea that very few Muslim groups, let alone societies, can hope to achieve. Therefore, it is inappropriate to call Muslim countries Islamic. Governments and leaders may use Islamic symbols when it suits their political purposes, as Iraq did in 1991, but such transparent manipulation obviously abuses religion for political purposes. There are no Islamic countries and no Islamic societies, only countries and societies that are Muslim, and their failings cannot be attributed to the religion of Islam. Islam does not fail; Muslims, who may or may not strive to achieve the ideals of Islam, do….

Huntington, who confuses Islam and Muslims, uses phrases such as ‘throughout Islam’ and ‘Islam is divided among competing power centers’—as if Islam is a continent, a tangible entity, rather than a religion. This viewpoint, perhaps amusing in its error, also provides the source for dangerous generalizations. For example, it suggests that the Muslim world is limited to countries with a Muslim government or a Muslim majority among the population. The Muslim world does consist of countries where Muslims comprise a majority of the population, but it also contains many areas, large and small, where Muslim minority populations play an important role….The religion of Islam may touch almost every corner of the world, but ‘Muslim’ describes the diverse peoples, cultures, music, art, and architecture that express Islam in these different contexts.

…Huntington’s clash of religions does not exist; in its place rages a clash of cultures and economic interests. In this clash, America will win most of the battles, at least in the short run, but the war will not end unless a enlightened administration responds to the basic causes of perceived injustices in the Muslim world.”

“Religion offers an explanation for terrorism, but one that American culture cannot recognize. American culture—and especially American religious culture—cannot understand terrorism because it actively rejects the existence of evil. Liberal religion after September 11 found itself in a hopeless logical morass, confronted by a fanatical religious movement that embodied every quality enlightened liberalism condemns, yet unable to state bluntly that the movement was evil and commanded resistance. While the Taliban were proclaiming a holy war, many liberals were calling for a ‘dialogue’ with the movement. Many Americans conclude that terrorists simply lack an understanding of Western culture or have made mistakes due to excessive but legitimate emotion. They view the terrorists’ grievances as understandable, even if their methods are wrong. Many other Americans, preferring to avoid the question of motivation, see terrorism solely as a technical challenge to national security systems. Still others seek a solution in organized international efforts to get to the root of the problem, and they assume that terrorism is containable and comprehensible within the intellectual categories of liberal culture. None of these attempts approaches an explanation for terrorism.

…Those who deny the role of religion in terrorism are at best partly right. The Taliban may have perverted the highest teachings of Islam, but all religions, including Christianity, contain elements susceptible to such perversion. Those who kill in the name of religion are usually sincere believers who turn good into evil. Religion shows its true relevance when it recognizes this danger and proclaims the existence of evil. Simplistic exhortations to understand alien beliefs simply trivialize all the great religions. Many religious believers argue that the freedoms Americans enjoy have led the nation into cultural decadence. For extreme Muslims like the Taliban, the antidote to decadence lies in the suppression of freedom: The denial of freedom solves the problem of its abuse. Western believers, on the other hand, hold that human beings are burdened with the necessity to make decisions that are simultaneously free and obedient to the will of God.”

“…Even if some religions are dangerous some of the time, or if religious commitments sometimes aggravate political grievances or intensify efforts to redress them, what evidence proves that secularism is safe? The last century certainly records the dangers of secular ideologies to their own citizens and to anyone else who stands in the way of expansion, revolution, or the new world order. If we answer honestly, then we must acknowledge that the terrorist enemy is about a lot more than Islam. We face adherents to a particular strand of that faith with plausible roots in one account of ‘jihad,’ which is popularly but incorrectly translated as ‘holy war.’ Unfortunately, many Muslims cheered Bin Laden or feel ambivalent about September 11. Their solidarity carries a religious element, to be sure, but it has more to do with the political and ethnic conflict in the Middle East than it does with religion.

What, exactly, constitutes the ‘fanatical’ element of the September 11 attack? What renders the attack so wanton that only religious zealotry can explain it? What about it suggests that the world has changed forever? Perhaps we conclude that the world has changed because the attacks happened to us. Much of the world’s population has lived with worse, and for a lot longer….The devastation of September 11 challenges our imagination because we have not suffered its like before now. The ‘fusion of religion and politics’ does not account for it, and secularism is no solution for it.”

From Leo Ribuffo’s “One Cheer for This Military Intervention, Two Cheers for Cosmopolitan Isolationism”

“Unquestionably, Americans need to examine the connections between domestic and foreign policies. Although President Bush probably chose the phrase as casually as he chose the word ‘crusade,’ his contention that the September 11 attacks threatened ‘our way of life’ revealed more than he knew, especially in light of his administration’s complementary recommendations to ‘return to daily life’ by attending movies, watching sports events, and shopping. While no president who embarks on a limited war wants the country to sense how disruptive it may be, Bush sets the record for obscuring the prospect of blood, sweat, and tears. Inadvertently, he also revealed how much American identity has become almost synonymous with material consumption. No less revealing in this respect are the endless media accounts of Afghanis buying televisions, watching videocassettes, and having their hair styled. You do not have to be a Taliban ascetic to acknowledge that Americans, regardless of class, race, or gender, spend an enormous amount of time, energy, and money on frivolous crap. And you do not have to be a super patriot to believe that the United States at its best has represented something better—and might do so again. A more generous definition of Americanism would serve both the country’s best ideals and its international interests. Steps in the right direction would include substantial increases in nonmilitary foreign aid and an end to the formulaic promotion of international free trade and privatization for every economy on earth.

Americans also need to grasp that their ‘way of life,’ as currently conceive, depends on cheap imports of petroleum. As long as this situation persists, the United States will not only court unpopular Middle Eastern regimes, but, as the Gulf War showed, will be tempted to intervene militarily. Having rediscovered the problem of energy dependence since September 11, ranking pundits nonetheless add that the situation cannot be ameliorated overnight. This metaphorical night began to fall with the OPEC oil embargo and price rises of 1973. Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter in turn offered overlapping plans to make the United States less dependent on imported petroleum, and the parts of Carter’s plan that passed succeeded for a while. Carter’s deeper message—that Americans cannot and sometimes should not have whatever they want whenever they want it—was dismissed as an ill-tempered outbreak of ‘malaise,’ when it was only unpleasantly dour realism.”

From Russell Hittinger’s “Desperately Seeking Culprits: Who Unleashed Anti-Semitism?”

“[David] Kertzer [in his book The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism] mentions four encyclicals, not always by name and without citation of the original source. On three occasions, Kertzer alludes to the Syllabus errorum, which Pius IX appended to the encyclical Quanta cura (1864). The Syllabus errorum provides a rich source for Rome’s view of political modernity in the wake of the revolutions of 1848, but Kertzer does not mention or quote any of the propositions that concern the states’ suppression of civil and natural rights. Kertzer did not deliberately omit evidence; rather, the note indicates that he fished the information out of an encyclopedia, which means he did not read the original document. What is worse, Kertzer neglects serious treatment of the one encyclical that bears directly on his project, Mit brennender Sorge (1937). Kertzer acknowledges that, in Mit brennender, Pius XI criticized the Nazi regime, but he insists that the Pope made ‘no direct attack on anti-Semitism’ (p. 277). My copy of the encyclical contains a discussion of why the Scriptures and the Incarnation itself forbid any racial derogation of the ‘chosen people’ (pp. 15-16). Perhaps Pius XI should have said more, but Kertzer could hardly have known what he said at all; in his notes we see that the six words he quotes from the encyclical are lifted out of John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope.

Why would Kertzer fail to read the public documents of the modern popes? Perhaps someone told him he would find nothing in the documents to favor his thesis. Indeed, if one puts aside Scriptural quotations, Jews appear in the public documents no more than a half-dozen times before 1937. Between 1775-1937, in more than two hundred teaching documents, only one sentence casts the Jews in an unfavorable light: ‘But it knew well that none of the metropolitans or the senior bishops would agree to ordain new bishops who were elected in the municipal districts by laity, heretics, unbelievers, and Jews as the published decrees commanded.’ The sentence appeared in Pope Pius VI’s Charitas (1791); the Pope was complaining that the regime’s Civil Constitution of the Clergy made clergy subject to election by taxpayers regardless of their religion or complete lack of religion. Unless one supposes that Jews should be entitled to elect Catholic clergy, the passage hardly demeans either the natural or civil rights of Jews. In fact, the documents published during the transformation of the older polities into states as we now know them show clearly that Jews hardly registered on the papal radar screen. The popes were preoccupied with Jacobins, Liberals, Masons, Socialists, Laicists—but not Jews.”

From Allan Kulikoff’s “Revolutionary Violence and the Origins of American Democracy”

“Voluminous evidence of the impact of the war on early American life—its violence, its immediate impact, the memories of those who lived through it, its political significance—abounds. George Washington and General Nathanael Green peppered their papers with insights into the behavior of soldiers and their officers and details of military-civilian relations during the war. The evidence confronts us in the petitions of debtors and rebels of the 1780s and 1790s; it resonates in the insistence of rulers to call in paper money and impose deflation on the country; it figures in the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. Nor did the memory die. Thousands of men wrote long narratives of their service (as required by the Pension Act of 1832); dozens of veterans wrote reminiscences full of searing reports of privation. In the 1840s Elizabeth Ellet interviewed hundreds of female survivors of the war period. Taken together, these sources point to the enduring significance of the war—its battles, its marches, its violence, and its indignities.

None of this should surprise historians familiar with the impact of the Civil War and World War II on the American public and politics. Yet historians of the Revolutionary War have largely erased this violence from historical memory, and with it the connection between war and politics in the new nation….

Unless we understand the Revolution as a war—a violent and protracted conflict—we shall not understand it at all. All Americans, including the slaves, free women, Indians, workers, and immigrants favored by social and cultural historians, experienced the horrors of the Revolutionary War and drew political morals from it. Mainstream early American historians, however, need to pay attention to military history, beyond the social history of the war and beyond fashionable concern with runaway slaves and camp followers. The strategies and tactics generals pursued affected everyone who stood in the way of their armies, structuring the experience of civilian and soldier alike. Several decades ago, the new military historians drew social and political implications from military action. We should revive their promising initiative, which would enrich the narratives of battles and generals, put a human face on the war, and raise new questions about post-war society and politics.”

“The condition of man…is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.” Leviathan (1651)

Unpopular as the thought may be—not least among many historians—war and religion rank as two of the great constants in human affairs. So central a place have they claimed in human experience, that they may reasonably be viewed as abiding aspects of the human condition. Some might even be tempted to argue that the ubiquity of war and violence stands as incontrovertible evidence of original sin, or at least the human propensity to sin, while religion embodies different peoples’ attempts to contain it.

In the spirit of sed contra, others—and these days in the Western world perhaps a majority—would counter that war and violence constitute the aberration and should be recognized as painful distortions of an essentially beneficent and benign human nature. Social conditions or material deprivation or sexual abuse made them “do” it. Some of our readers may even be old enough to remember the song, “Officer Krupke,” from Leonard Bernstein’s musical, West Side Story. The song, sung by a group of young urban gang members to the police officer who is threatening to arrest them for their violent confrontation with another gang, mocks liberal pieties about the tendency of difficult social conditions to produce criminal behavior. The message the young thugs throw back in the face of blindly well-meaning liberals is that they cannot be held responsible for their actions. The attitude reflects the typically modern sensibility that each of us is naturally born good and that the evil—should we even use such a word—we do derives from our situation and experience rather than from our nature. Yet one of the many delicious ironies of the boys’ taunting of the officer lies in Berstein’s having embedded it in a retelling of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which itself represents a retelling of the timeless tale of “star-crossed lovers.”

West Side Story, in its own way, raises the question that has figured prominently in the pages of The Journal and ranks among the most compelling in historical studies and our culture: what changes and what persists in human experience. That question lies at the core of our work for it challenges us to assess, if only provisionally, the potential wisdom or guidance we may draw from the past. Or, not to put too fine a point upon it, just what is history good for?

For those who would heed the signs proffered, the events of 11 September 2001 returned the question to center stage. The United States has entered a war that will doubtless claim many more lives, that has no foreseeable end, and that an overwhelming majority of the American people view as just. In some essential ways, this war differs from our previous wars, but in others it does not. The most visible differences from wars up to and including the Vietnam War lie in the sophistication of our military technology and our ability to restrict—although not to forego—extensive combat on the ground. The most visible differences from the wars since Vietnam lie in the country’s willingness to support an effort, including ground combat, which puts American lives at risk. Notwithstanding an impressive level of support for the Gulf War, this war against terrorism stands alone in the post-Vietnam era as one that, in the view of surprising numbers of people, justifies sacrifice, including the sacrifice of American lives.

For the first time in memory, American flags abound on cars and trucks, on houses, on lapel pins. There are moments at which it is almost tempting to think that the war against terrorism is, at least partially, exorcising some of the bitter residue of the war in Vietnam, although succumbing to that temptation would amount to gross over-simplification. For if, thus far, the war enjoys a surprising measure of support, it has also provoked opposition—not least, an opposition that likens American intervention in Afghanistan to American intervention in Vietnam. More portentously, the most vociferous opposition to American military intervention comes from those who would lay the blame for the events of September 11 directly upon American callous exploitation of the non-Western world. The mentalité is that of the post-colonialist critics discussed in earlier issues by Keith Windschuttle and Mark Bauerlein—one that, in the spirit of the liberals mocked by the gang members of West Side Story, blames everyone but those who perpetrated the attack, refusing to countenance the possibility that anyone who is not white and Christian or Jewish might share enough of a common humanity to be capable of evil.[1]

On the other side, the danger lies in uncritical support for an effort that will, however unintentionally, inescapably affect or even take the lives of civilians, wreak physical damage upon countries that are vastly poorer than the United States, and drive countless numbers of people into exile. There are understandable reasons to refer to the efforts of the Americans and their allies as a “crusade,” but there are also dangers of hyperbole and even inaccuracy. In other words, this war challenges our understanding of our position and responsibilities in a new international—and geopolitical—configuration. More, as Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis have compellingly, if in different ways, argued, it raises the possibility that we are experiencing a true clash of civilizations—a clash not merely between religions and nationalities but between fundamental and encompassing understandings of the world. Few would be willing to divorce the clash of civilizations from the vast gaps in wealth and technological development that divide the contending parties, which helps to explain why some are so quick to charge the West with post-colonial exploitation, but only the ignorant or ideologically blind-folded would attribute the clash to material inequalities alone.

Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (preceded by an article in Foreign Affairs in 1993) casts a long shadow over the myriad debates about the nature and significance of the war, and several of the participants in the symposium in this issue of The Journal evoke his analysis whether in agreement or disagreement.[2] Huntington, who, as Antony Sullivan points out, initially formulated his theory of clash between civilizations as a question rather than an assertion, has dramatically modified his position during the intervening years primarily by demonstrating much greater sympathy for and understanding of the Muslim world. Yet as even those most sympathetic to Islamic militancy and resentment of the West, especially American support for Israel, acknowledge, the events of 11 September have endowed the question with a new urgency and disquieting plausibility.

As the symposium on the aftermath of 11 September in this issue demonstrates, the possible positions are immeasurably more complex than a simple dichotomy between “for” and “against” might suggest, but one important question underlies them all—the question of causation, which, as Karen Fields argued in a recent issue, remains central to any historical narrative.[3] Without beginning to exhaust the possible answers to what has “caused” the current confrontation between large segments of the Western and the Muslim worlds, a leading American scholar of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, suggests that during “the course of the twentieth century it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam that things had indeed gone badly wrong.” For “the world of Islam,” in comparison with Christendom, “its millennial rival,” had “become poor, weak, and ignorant.” Throughout “the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the primacy and therefore the dominance of the West was clear for all to see, invading the Muslim in every aspect of his public and—more painfully—even his private life.”[4]

Muslim responses to this painful inequality have varied significantly, but many Muslims, according to Lewis, have found it easy to blame Israel in particular and the West in general, and their attitudes have often embodied a rage through which “the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region,” which could be caught in “a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination.”[5] Not all of the participants in this first installment of our symposium concur with Lewis’ assessment, and they all speak for themselves, providing distinct perspectives on the conflict. Here, in something akin to the spirit of Paul Rahe’s contribution, I wish only to call attention to the larger historical context for the protracted conflict by reminding our readers that it can be seen as a specific case of warfare’s standing as a perennial—or permanent—feature of the human condition.

However much we may prefer to see war as a departure from and distortion of true human nature, the anthropological and historical evidence offer little comfort. Lawrence Keeley, drawing broadly upon the research of other anthropologists as well as his own, argues that “the overwhelming majority of known societies (90 to 95 percent)” have regularly engaged in warfare. Keeley is here referring to societies of “savages,” those whom anthropologists have long delighted in regarding as inherently and naturally pacific, and his book is tellingly entitled, War Before Civilization. Along the way, Keeley explodes a host of cherished myths, noting, for example that, in varying degrees, “many societies tend to fight the people they marry and to marry those they fight, to raid the people with whom they trade and to trade with their enemies. Contrary to the usual assumptions, exchange between societies is a context favorable to conflict and is closely associated with it.” Finally, as if adding insult to injury, he dismisses the ideal of honorable warfare as one that spares civilians or noncombatants, insisting, “War has always been a struggle between peoples, their societies, and their economies, not just warriors, war parties, armies, and navies.”[6]

Victor Davis Hanson, in a recent lecture at Hillsdale College, as well as throughout much of his written work, argues that the Classics teach us that war is “a tragedy innate to the human condition.” Civilized people should not kill other civilized people over disagreements, but they do. “Tragically, the Greeks tell us, conflict will always break out—and very frequently so—because we are human and thus not always rational.” The philosopher Heraclitus, Hanson reminds us, called war “the father, the king of us all,” and Plato, to the dismay of many moderns, “once called peace, not war, the real ‘parenthesis’ in human affairs.” Pushing further than most of the contributors to our symposium—and much further than many American academics may be able to abide—Hanson insists that renewed study of the Classics might teach us that “we are not even remotely akin to the Taliban or the Saudis, but are in fact profoundly different in the manner we craft our government, treat our women, earn our living, and set the parameters of our religion.” Modern cultural relativists, he suggests, “would lecture us that the Taliban’s desecration of the graves of the infidel, clitorectomies of infants, torture of the accused, murder of the untried, and destruction of the non-Islamic is merely ‘different’ or ‘problematic’—almost anything other than ‘evil’.”[7]

Hanson makes the same distinction between the Western and non-Western worlds as Lewis, but makes it much more judgmentally and with little attention to the role of religion in the traditions and motivations of either side. One need not quarrel with his emphasis upon the importance of the Classics as the foundation of the Western tradition in order to insist upon the equal—if not greater—importance of Judaism and Christianity. Like many passionate Classicists, Hanson demonstrates little interest in the religious faith that shaped so much of Western culture between the fall of Rome and the Enlightenment, yet that faith decisively modified and developed many of the Greek and Roman notions of individual freedom and responsibility, and it has indisputably played a major role in the long history of conflict between the Muslim world and the West.

This issue of The Journal inaugurates a symposium on the many questions bequeathed to us by 11 September, and because of their importance for our work as historians, we plan to continue the discussion in subsequent issues. Here, we begin with Paul Rahe’s challenging reminder that, even within the Western tradition, ideas of justice have varied considerably. Today, most of us favor the cosmopolitan ideal whereby justice consists in the simple virtues of paying one’s debts and telling the truth—of rendering fair and equal treatment to all. Yet we have also inherited from the Ancient Greeks an ideal of justice that emphasizes the loyalty we owe to our friends and implicitly enjoins us to harm our enemies. Our growing tendency to marginalize—if not entirely banish—military and diplomatic history, Rahe argues, has only exacerbated our failure of understanding with respect to the crisis unleashed by 11 September.

Dennis Showalter locates the events of 11 September within the broad context of the post-Cold War World and suggests that Francis Fukuyama’s article, “The End of History,” together with Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations,” established the contours of the debate. No societies, Showalter suggests, could seem more different than the post-industrialist, technotronic United States and the quasi-Stone Age Afghanistan, and yet the two are not “polar opposites.” The attacks on the twin towers and the Pentagon could never have been launched without access to Western technology, and even within Afghanistan, “local combatants and citizens, for example, often depend upon the discards and debris left behind by Western armies.” As Showalter argues, it takes a special combination of factors for “the end of history” and “the clash of civilizations” to characterize a single situation, yet arguably that combination prevails in the current confrontation between Islamic radicals and the West. “Al-Qaeda,” Showalter argues, “did not propose to destroy the West. Instead it expected the West to self-destruct and sink into chaos from the internal contradictions the attacks would expose.” In the event, the West failed to comply, although its post-colonial and Orientalist theorists would happily have had it do so. In his judgment, it nonetheless remains for the United States to muster the will and resources to track down “those who challenge its right to exist.”

Edward Kolodziej also focuses upon the question of Western response, notably the new demands of governance in a global society and the special role of the West in defending its principles of free exchange of commodities and ideas. Many will doubtless find Kolodziej’s vision unduly optimistic or unacceptable with respect to the magnitude and purposefulness of the forces that oppose and fundamentally mistrust Western ideals of freedom. And not everyone will accept the case for cosmopolitanism as the only viable future. Antony Sullivan places greater emphasis upon the magnitude and intractability of the opposition between the Western and Muslim worlds. Picking up Huntington’s hypothesis of a clash of civilizations, Sullivan acknowledges that, in a worst-case scenario, we could experience a hardening rift between Islamic extremists and Western “crusaders,” but he does not regard this grim prospect as inevitable. The drama of recent events, he believes, has “obscured the moderate, culturally conservative, and deeply religious movement that marks the best of the contemporary Islamic revival,” and that revival, he adds, “may have much to teach the radically secular West.” Sullivan believes that “religiously grounded and culturally conservative organizations committed to enhancing the best in the three Abrahamic faiths” have the best prospects for effecting a reconciliation—or livable peace—between the Muslim and Western worlds.

Sullivan’s attention to the religious dimension of the conflict provides a salutary reminder of the central role of religion in the cultural conflicts that fuel and articulate the war between the West and the Islamic radicals. Like Sullivan, Haroun er Rashid begins with Huntington’s hypothesis about a clash of civilizations, and he faults Huntington—along with no few others who write on these matters—for failing to acknowledge the difference between Islam and Muslim, which should be understood as distinct. “Islam is a religion, the core of which the Quran explains. Muslims have accepted Islam as their religion, but they have not necessarily fulfilled all the conditions of Islam.” Rashid argues that the failure to understand this distinction helps to explain the problems with American policies towards the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mainly, however, he insists that Huntington’s clash of religions distracts attention from the real conflict, which concerns cultures and economic interests. Rashid’s argument has much in common with that of Lewis, and like Lewis he emphasizes the crying need for Muslim countries to undertake their own political reforms and economic development.

James Hitchcock moves religion to the center of the confrontation between the United States and the Islamic fundamentalists, with special attention to the religious climate in the United States. Hitchcock maintains that we cannot call the United States a religious nation, but also cannot dismiss it as irreligious, since its citizens participate in religious services and activities—and claim to allot religion a larger place in their personal lives—than the citizens of any other Western nation. Americans, nonetheless, resist viewing the current conflict in religious terms “because the state of American religion makes it impossible for most Americans to accept the marriage of religion and national identity that such a view requires.” Islamic radicals suffer from no such reticence and readily portray their cause as service to a religious truth for which it is an honor and a privilege to die. In comparison, the United States—no matter how religious it may appear in the indicators of statisticians and pollsters—ranks as a resolutely secular society in which religion, like everything else, obeys the prevailing law of individual choice.

This relativism makes it difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to believe in the reality of evil—even when it stares them in the face. Hitchcock suggests that the unwillingness to name evil derives from the essentially secular core of American religion and, in illustration, he evokes the case of John Walker Lindh. Raised in the lap of American freedom and comfort, Walker turned to the Taliban to give meaning to his life. Walker’s life, Hitchcock argues, “illustrates the dangers inherent in complete openness and the rejection of all absolutes—in short, the dangers of unlimited pluralism.” For human nature, he continues, “longs for stable beliefs, and if people are denied access to them in traditional ways, they may look for them in unexpected places.”

From a somewhat different perspective, Gerard Bradley presents 11 September as the confirmation of the American commitment to secularism. In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, Americans may have turned to their religions for comfort, but their demonstrations of religious fervor “are not likely to alter America’s long-term commitment to secularism.” Bradley points to articles in The New Republic and The Washington Post that captured the prevailing mistrust of religious zealotry. The authors of the articles concurred in reproving the marriage of religion and politics manifest in the suicide bombings, and Pervez Hoodbhoy, in the Post, proclaimed that American survival lies in the recognition that neither religion nor nationalism offers a solution. Our only choice, he wrote, lies in “‘the path of secular humanism, based upon the principles of logic and reason’.”

Without exploring the potential intolerance of which secularism has shown itself capable, Bradley turns to another of secularism’s inconsistencies. 11 September primarily shocked us because the attacks had taken the lives of American civilians, thereby violating all norms of decency. Yet most Americans seem at ease with taking the lives of the civilian populations of other countries without sacrificing a single American life. For Bradley, the compelling problem lies in American’s readiness to distinguish between others and ourselves in ways rather reminiscent of Paul Rahe’s Greeks, who hold that justice consists in protecting your friends and punishing your enemies. The great monotheistic religions with Christianity in the lead, Bradley reminds us, “condemn any such preference for our own as contrary to the truth of human equality.” The absolute moral norms, beginning with ‘thou shalt not kill’ come to us from the great religions, not from secularism, which is utilitarian to its core and which may, in principle, find any act morally acceptable. It is all, as they say, in the context—or one’s point of view.

Rather than receding, the problems multiply: do we look to religion or secularism for standards of justice and mere decency that are adequate to our times? Leo Ribuffo returns us to the realm of international politics and the history that paved the way for 11 September. Tracing American interventions in world affairs during the second half of the twentieth century, Ribuffo makes a compelling case for a surfeit of American arrogance, which culminated in Madeleine Albright, “who called the United States the ‘indispensable nation’ and blithely allowed that containment of Saddam Hussein might require the death of thousands of Iraqi children.” At the same time, Ribuffo, following the influential diplomatic historian, William Appleman Williams, rejects a simple retreat into isolationism. Americans cannot remake the world in their image but do have responsibilities to various peoples and regimes. Israel remains a uniquely troubling problem in this regard for although there may be some wisdom in cutting its losses “conciliatory policies could lead to worse losses instead of Middle East Peace.” In Ribuffo’s disturbingly realistic view, “Al Qaeda and the Taliban will settle for nothing less than the destruction of Israel, and that position may have deeper support among Arabs than anyone wants to admit.”

Ribuffo began his young adult life with opposition to the war in Vietnam and now finds himself in guarded support of American intervention in Afghanistan and perhaps beyond. The attacks of 11 September constituted an attack on the United States, claiming American lives on American soil, and they warrant a forceful response. It remains to determine the appropriate—or just—extent of that response, and the jury on that questions remains out. What we do know is that this new war differs in significant ways from the war in Vietnam in which the United States so disastrously intervened and in which it remained too long embroiled. To raise the curtain on the contemporary issues of the symposium, this issue opens with David Hunt’s article on Vietnam. Hunt departs from much of the recent scholarship on the Vietnam War by focusing upon the tensions that pitted groups within South Vietnam against each other. Under his sure guidance, readers are invited to see a wonderfully complex, if inherently troubling, picture of a South Vietnam that was suffering the equivalent of an internal civil war even as it suffered under the full weight of American intervention. In this world, the killing of civilians ranked as an ordinary feature of life, and the only questions concerned who was killing whom and for what.

The existence of civil wars within larger wars between nations may be much more common than we normally recognize. Similarly, the killing of civilians may, as Keeley argues, prevail in virtually any war, provided historians look closely enough to recognize it. Wars, by their very nature, have typically been sprawling, messy affairs that consume territory, including the farms of non-combatants, and spread tentacles into the very interstices of everyday life. Too often, historians, in the interests of a tidy narrative or analysis, have focused upon identifying the main causes of the conflict and following the moves of the main armies and their commanders.

The American Revolution has especially benefited from this treatment, since so many people in this country and beyond have had such a deep—and worthy—commitment to seeing it as the landmark struggle for national freedom and the institution of republican government. Yet Allan Kulikoff’s illuminating essay, which together with Hunt’s frames this issue, demonstrates, the American Revolution was anything but a series of clearly defined battles—the orderly encounters of the contending parties. To the contrary, it spread throughout the backcountry in the northern, middle, and southern colonies, pitting neighbors against each other, destroying crops and farm animals, confiscating food and valuables, and, in general, wreaking havoc among the civilian population.

If war were nothing more than the moving of units of men, like pieces on a chessboard, we might find some justification for trying to compartmentalize or quarantine it. But war has proven inseparable from the ebb and flow of human experience that many view as the true stuff of history. In a celebrated formulation, the eighteenth-century German general and military theorist, Karl von Clausewitz, underscored the inseparable relations between war and politics: “War is not merely a political act, but a political instrument, a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means (Vom Kriege [On War], 1833). History suggests that he might have also have portrayed war as the extension of religious differences as well. We are far from understanding the role of religion in war or politics, although it has long figured prominently in the histories of both. Russell Hittinger’s exploration of recent writings on the possible role of Catholics in the development and perpetuation of anti-Semitism—up to and including the Holocaust—adds a new dimension to the themes introduced in our previous issue by Robert Hertzstein’s reflections on Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Ordinary Germans.’[8]

Anti-Semitism remains compelling not merely because of the inassimilable horror of the Holocaust, but because of the persisting importance of Israel as a source of—or, according to Showalter, pretense for—the conflict between the Islamic radicals and the West. We should, nonetheless, be hard pressed to say that religion alone accounts for the conflict, which may fundamentally concern material and geopolitical interests—not to mention unmitigated national pride. The frequent intertwining of war and religion offer a searing reminder of and the omnipresent threat of both in the accusations and defenses, the attacks and the counter-attacks, and the bombings and ensuing deaths that wrack Israel and the Palestinian settlements and countless other conflicts around the globe. What we understand less well is how and why multiple currents of antagonism hibernate, percolate, and ultimately explode.

Secularists delight in charging religion with responsibility for intolerance, hatred, rivalry, and violence, yet secularism produces the same results—and often on the same or a larger scale. Neither religious faith nor its absence may claim a monopoly on intolerance, pride, or the willingness to perpetrate violence in the name of its professed beliefs. Secularists too frequently disregard or do not know that, as Bradley reminds us, the great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have introduced the world to the idea of the equal worth of each human being. Secularists now tend to view the commitment to human equality as distinctly their own, but it has yet to deter them from vigorous attempts to impose their views on others. In the end, we are left with the seeming ubiquity of war—and with the challenge of understanding the role of both base and noble convictions in unleashing and justifying a seemingly endless succession of deadly conflicts.

[1] Keith Windschuttle, “Cultural History and Western Imperialism: The Case of Edward Said,” The Journal of The Historical Society 1, nos. 2-3 (Winter 2000/Spring 2001): 169-206; Mark Bauerlein, “Literary Evidence: A Response to Keith Windschuttle,” The Journal of The Historical Society 2, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 77-87.

[2] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). See also, Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[3] Karen Fields, “On War: The Watchtower Episode of 1917-19 in Colonial Northern Rhodesia,” The Journal of The Historical Society 1, nos. 2-3 (Winter 2000/Spring 2001): 1-16.

[7] Victor Davis Hanson, abridged version of a lecture, “Classics and War,” delivered at a seminar on “Liberal Education, Liberty, and Education Today,” at Hillsdale College, 11 November 2001, reprinted in Imprimis Volume 31, No. 2 (February 2002): 1, 4.

[8] Robert E. Herzstein, “Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Ordinary Germans’: A Heretic and His Critics,” The Journal of The Historical Society 2, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 89-122.

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