Yesterday's Memories ...

by Cliopatria

Claims on our collective memory were compounded yesterday. As I reached to turn the television off last night, I noticed that ABC's"Nightline" was celebrating its 25th anniversary. Twenty-five years of a late night talk show are insignificant, until you remember the events that called it into being. In Iran, young militants had seized control of the American embassy and taken its staff hostage. Nightly, we received reports of the latest developments in the crisis. The Carter administration seemed incapable of resolving it and the stalemate foretold the incumbent's defeat by Republican Ronald Reagan. What was remarkable then and remains remarkable now was how weak our hold on deeper memory was. I have personal memory of the hostage crisis, but in the midst of it my recollection of the background stretched little beyond the revolution that had driven the modernizing tyrant, Mohammed Reza Shah Palehvi, from his throne and replaced him with the mullahs' theocratic regime. All through that crisis, few of us in the United States recalled a crisis 25 years earlier than that, when American and British espionage agencies had orchestrated the ouster of Iran's nationalist prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and secured the Shah's autocratic rule. What Iran's new nationalists understood quite clearly and we hardly recalled was that our hands were not clean and the naked struggle was over the control of Iran's oil reserves.

Another story vying for our collective memory yesterday was the attack on Pearl Harbor 63 years ago. I have no personal memory of it and yet it dramatically shaped world history in my childhood. We recall it as a classic case of American innocense abused. All the subsequent investigation into the background of that attack, including American resistance to Japan's desperate search for access to natural resources its islands did not yield, has not shaken our sense that here was the perfect example of perfidy,"a day that shall live in infamy." So much so, that in the daze after 9/11 Pearl Harbor was the analogue that sprang immediately to mind. There's perfidy enough in both Pearl Harbor and 9/11, but it is the twin myths of American innocense and the American colossus that we can interrogate more directly and effectively than the perfidy. Europe and Asia were already aflame and we had stood by, preserving a sense of our innocense. Terrorism had struck repeatedly in the Middle East, Africa, and even at our own Twin Towers, but we believed that somehow we were invulnerable – until Terror destroyed the symbolic centers of our commercial and military might. We re-assert those twin myths in Iraq today. Abu Grahib is no extension of conditions in our domestic prisons because we are an innocent people. We will reshape Iraq's future because we are a mighty force for truth, justice, and our national interests.

Yesterday's third claim on our collective memory is Chanukah, the Jewish festival of lights that recalls the resistance of the Maccabees to forces of the Seleucid Empire and the rededication of the Temple at Jerusalem. Happy Chanukah to all the Cliopatriarchs and Cliopatria's readers! Its memory lies far beyond any of our reach and yet it remains as powerfully present as any of the others. Jews and Gentiles, alike, can admire powerful resistance to oppressors and devotion to a transcendent center of loyalty. Let the church and the temple and the mosque pray for the peace of Jerusalem and let us all pray for the peace of Baghdad.

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David Lion Salmanson - 12/9/2004

Michael,
Besides confusing Passover with Chanukah you are making an unfair allegation that Zionism and Judaism are the same thing. Or that being Jewish means unwavering support of Israel no matter what. I think Ralph was trying to gently point out that the two need not go together just as being anti-Zionist need not necessarily (but tragically,so often does) mean being anti-Semitic (or more properly anti-Jewish).

Now for the Jerusalem piece. The quote "Next year in Jerusalem" is followed by the phrase "Next year may we all be free." It is quite clear that all includes Jews and non-Jews. Jerusalem, in this case, is a metaphor for a peaceful,prosperous world without poverty or sin. The call for next year in Jerusalem is a call to make the world a better place for all humanity and the yearly reminder a key reason why many Jews continue to be involved in social justice movements no matter what their party politics are.

Jonathan Dresner - 12/9/2004

Actually, you can draw much deeper ironies than that, if you try....

Pearl Harbor wasn't as much of a surprise to our leadership as it was to our citizenry, whereas 9/11 was at least as much of a surprise to our leadership as it was to the Tom Clancy-reading set (that includes me, sometimes, by the way); The US-Japan war ended with suicide attacks, whereas the "War on Terror" began with them.

Chanukkah is a holiday that challenges me, as a liberal Jew. It celebrates the victory of religious hardliners over repression, to be sure, but they immediately turned around and did the same thing to Hellenized Jews, what we would call liberal and assimilated Jews now, and they weren't really friendly to the nascent Pharisaic movement (which is why Maccabees didn't make it into the official "books of the Torah" lists) which provided the ethical sophistication and liturgical innovation necessary for Judaism to actually survive into the modern world. The Maccabee's legacy was the lines of King Herod and High Priest Zadok (from whom the Sadducees get their name), which met bad ends under the Romans.

And, of course, the Chanukah story celebrates the victory of an ethnic insurgency against Imperial might: If they were a bit more ecumenical, the 9/11 attackers (and the Palestinians) could cast themselves in the role of the Macabees....

You know, irony is overrated, sometimes. Happy Chanukah, everyone.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/9/2004

Thanks for the comment, Michael. I'm certainly not sure that you are wrong. I did, in fact, labor over the third paragraph and aborted some things that I had written. The situation in Israel is, I think, more complicated than your abbreviated reference suggests. There is a _huge_ load of responsibility for conditions there that rests with the European powers of the inter-war period. Neither saying that nor berating Zionism and the current leadership of Israel eases any of the tension. I have both Jewish and Muslim colleagues at Cliopatria. I also have colleagues at Cliopatria who are neither Jewish nor Muslim, but who are better informed about current affairs in re Israel/Palestine than I am and who have strong positions about those issues. They are always free to speak about them here. As for me, it is sufficiently important that we work together that I am cautious about inflaming sensitivities about conditions I know too little about. As for the first two paragraphs, I certainly addressed conditions which I, as a citizen of the United States, bear some responsibility.

Michael Meo - 12/9/2004

I'll just speak for myself here.
The first irony outlined in your piece was, that 25 years ago we were steaming over our status as innocent victims (here I admit I was one of them talking about the classic causus belli), all the while most of us quite unreflective on the long record of US action taken to subvert the popular wishes of the population of Iran.

The second of the ironies addressed was the Pearl Harbor topos, which again paints the citizens of the US as innocent victims, a state which we tend to try to recapture in considering our supposedly unmerited losses as a result of the attack on the World Trade Center, but a state which is impossible to sustain when one considers our national complicity in Abu Ghraib (where my spelling differs from yours, but I haven't a clue which one is correct).

The third wish was for a Happy Chanakah. Yeah, well, next year in Jerusalem to you too, buddy, where the State of Israel seems intent on defying the World Court and world conscience, and committing one long atrocity against the original inhabitants of Palestine when the Zionist Movement got started.

As I see it, then you have three ironies in a row. Perhaps you did not allude to the third because it was too sensitive. I don't know.