By Stanislao G. Pugliese
As we enter into what promises to be both the longest and nastiest presidential campaign in American history, the Bush Administration’s claims about Iraq and that country’s ties to terrorism are being seen for what they were all along: a flimsy excuse to invade an oil-rich country in a dual attempt to detract attention frÃ¥om the fact that we can’t find Osama Bin Laden (who may still make a dramatic “October Surprise” appearance) and the grandiose – but grotesquely and historically misinformed – geopolitical strategy of remaking the Middle East into an oasis of democracy and free markets.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Back in what now seems the naively innocent aftermath of the Cold War, a Bush State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, made news when he penned an essay, “The End of History,” in which he claimed that with the end of the ideological divisions of the Cold War, all of humanity would come to recognize the obvious superiority of democratic liberalism and free markets. Ideological conflicts – and history – would come to an “end.” (Fukuyama based his thesis on a misreading of the German idealist philosopher Hegel.) Instead, since Sept. 11, 2001, we have been confronted with history on a grand scale; perhaps too much history for a country that has along tradition of historical amnesia. Consequently, we embrace a politics of forgetting because to remember might be too painful.
Surely we have forgotten that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were our allies in the 1980s (see the picture of a smiling Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein) based on the simplistic philosophy that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” (Iraq at the time was fighting Iran, the enemy du jour.) Surely we have forgotten how the CIA sponsored the Taliban and the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan during the same period. Surely we have already forgotten how adamant our political leaders were about the imminent threat posed by Iraq: “We know where the weapons of mass destruction are,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld solemnly intoned on Sunday, March 30, 2003. “They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” President Bush, while insisting that Saddam Hussein was a “grave and gathering threat,” recently denied that he ever implied that the Iraqi dictator was an “imminent” danger to the US.
Even what we “remember” is often wrong or simply manufactured.
Recently a purported picture of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and John Kerry side by side has been circulating via the Internet. On seeing it for the first time, I was suspicious: a gut reaction told me it was a forgery. Soon, concrete proof of manipulation arrived when the photographer appeared to confirm that the image had been doctored. This seemingly banal episode immediately brought to mind a recent book by David King, “The Commissar Vanishes”. The cover depicts the transmutations of a single photograph: in its first incarnation, several leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution flank Stalin. As they fell out of favor and were systematically “purged,” their images were airbrushed out of the original photo until, by the mid 1930s, the Man of Steel appears alone. This Stalinist tactic, so powerfully depicted by George Orwell in “1984”, is now the method of John Kerry’s opponents.
But Americans are not the only one with short memories and susceptible to the manipulation of history. In an interview that appeared on the front page of The New York Times (May 10, 2003), Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi solemnly intoned “Only I can save Italy from communism.” I stared incredulously at the line again: was it possible that an Italian prime minister could speak that line without knowing that fascist dictator Benito Mussolini thundered the same phrase eight decades ago? There can only be two possibilities regarding Berlusconi’s public remarks that only he “can save Italy from the perils of communism”: either he is deaf to the irony of his own rhetoric or his hearing is pitch-perfect and his comments are really a not-so-subtle reference to his own brand of “benign” fascism. What does this reveal about the historical memory and political consciousness of contemporary Italians?
And what does it say about the historical memory and political consciousness of Americans in the post-Sept. world when we too are bombarded with images and rhetoric designed to suppress critical analysis? The terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 generated visceral reactions, similar in many ways to what happened in 1979. Most students at Hofstra were not yet born when radical Iranian students overwhelmed the US Embassy in Tehran. Pictures and film footage of blindfolded American hostages and strange looking men burning American flags were broadcast to us at the dinner table. I remember Americans asking (with more than a few expletives thrown in), “What’s wrong with these people? Why do they hate us? Surely they are crazy!” I too thought this until much later, on reading about how the United States government overthrew the legitimate government in Iran (and the Dominican Republic and Chile and Panama and Grenada and, most recently Haiti, and perhaps in the not too distant future, Venezuela), and had trained the Shah’s secret police in the finer arts of torture and repression. It was only then that I began to understand why some people around the world might hate Americans.
Please note: I write “understand” – not condone. It seems that anytime a person wishes to examine in a dispassionate manner these hot spots around the globe, they are immediately condemned as “hating America.” On the contrary, because we respect, admire and yes, even love, the historical and political traditions upon which this country was founded and evolved, we do not wish to see those ideals corrupted or profaned. Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, “History repeats itself: first as tragedy, second as farce.” Unfortunately, Marx was wrong: history may repeat itself, but not as farce.
Stanislao G. Pugliese, Ph.D., is associate professor of history and the author, most recently, of Desperate Inscriptions: Graffiti From the Nazi Prison in Rome, 1943-1944.