A rchive Date
[ 25-05-2000 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Mansur_Salim/2007/09/08/4478789.php
Fickle memories
By SALIM MANSUR
Sat, September 8, 2007
On the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, I am reminded how fickle is memory and understanding of events that shape history in a liberal democracy such as ours.
In a remarkable little book from a generation ago - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting published in 1979 - Milan Kundera, a Czech writer fleeing his native home from Communist rule for Paris, France, reflected on the fragility of memory.
Kundera wrote: "The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the assassination of Allende drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the war in the Sinai Desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten."
Forgetting is a means by which people seek escape from the nightmares of the past and look to the future for redemption, transcendence and happiness. The liberal idea of progress and of an implicit faith in transforming human nature for the better is future oriented, and the past is deemed best as archived if not forgotten.
Six years is a mere blip in history, yet that morning in September 2001 has faded from memory and with it an understanding of what brought the Islamist terrorists to strike America's heartland. The attacks on that September morning were not the first shots fired as a declaration of war by Islamists against the United States and the West.
This war started much earlier, most notably with the 1979 revolution in Iran and the taking of American diplomats in Tehran as hostage for 444 days by the followers of Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini, an Islamist Lenin, raged with the memory of both recent and distant past. For Khomeini the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran's prime minister, in 1953 was the work of the CIA and America needed to be punished.
But beyond vengeance Khomeini sought re-constituting the past for Iran driven by the memory of the pre-modern power and glory of the Islamic civilization, and with a burning hatred of all things modern or originating in the West. For Khomeini and the Islamists - Osama bin Laden and his followers - the past is their future, and any deviation from that past needs to be expunged by making war in the present.
It does not matter to Islamists how anachronistic pre-modern glory of Islamic civilization would be today, how repulsive the practice of segregating women in society or discriminating against religious minorities. Liberal democracy, however, recoils from the past for it sees only its faults. It imagines instead a future as a clean sheet on which to imprint its ideals.
But if that future is to remain protected then those who are its sworn enemies - as are the present day Islamists as were the German fascists of the last century - need to be decisively defeated.
Liberal democracy is no less an armed ideology than Islamist ideology, and liberals forgetting this elementary fact disarm themselves for an eventual surrender to those who reject a liberal future and make war against it in the present.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Americans awoke to a war in progress. Six years later the question hanging in balance is whether Americans and their allies will end this war on their terms or concede defeat to Islamists.
You can e-mail Salim Mansur at smansurca@yahoo.ca Have a letter for the editor? E-mail it to torsun.editor@sunmedia.ca Copyright © 2007, Canoe Inc. All rights reserved.
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