Questioning the Future - As A Historical Paradox

The Fall of Globalism, the Rise of Populist Nationalism, & the Question of 'Global History'

It seems as though the world is changing fast these days. It’s hard to keep up at times. There’s a lot of talk about a new age of uncertainty. And it seems as though many people are trying to gain some perspective on what is actually happening around us, but often it’s hard to see the wood for the trees when you are in the midst of the forest.

The internationalised future which appeared to have dawned in the last decade of the twentieth century seemed to presage an auspicious start to the new millennium. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, borders were beginning to blur, barriers began to be replaced by bridges – Europe was becoming more united with the establishment of the Schengen zone and a common currency, the founding of the World Trade Organisation, the economic rise of big countries such as China and India – globalism seemed to have been given the green light. The dichotomy of the Cold War era was now redundant, a new era of international harmony seemed a realistic possibility. But then everything began to change, and the changes seemed inconceivably contrary to all those optimistic expectations. Instead, the new century began with the unprecedented horrific spectacle of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York in 2001, which in turn precipitated the ‘global’ war on terror. A cultural dynamic had shifted dramatically, and today the repercussions are still reverberating from this seismic shift.

Then there was the financial meltdown of 2008. The pillars of the present world system suddenly seemed to be standing on political and economic foundations which were (and still are) dissolving with spectacular rapidity. Capitalism was in crisis. That optimistic new dawn, we were now being told, had been replaced by a new ‘age of austerity.’ The global financial downturn augured and helped to incubate a growing sense of disenfranchisement and disillusion. The green grass of the future had yellowed and dried to tinder. Hence the unexpected rise of popular nationalism seems to have suddenly spread out of nowhere, like wildfire. One can’t help wondering if this – our present time – is but the calm before the conflagration? Are we about to watch our world burn as that former optimistic future seemingly goes up in flames?

2016 may well come to be seen as a momentous year for global history. With the precarious onset of Brexit (perhaps for the EU as much as for the UK) in an uneasy near centre split of 52% versus 48%; the similarly narrow margin in the election of Donald Trump on a xenophobic nationalist platform (the likes of which, some outlets have been quick to tell us, ‘the West’ has not seen since the fall of the Weimar Republic) has prompted a great deal of worried navel gazing in public discourse, with pundits looking to history for similar precedents, and there by logical extension to historians in an attempt to unfathom the all-too-often hasty conclusions which some folks seem to be drawing from such history lessons. It is no wonder historians are being asked to step up to the task. These days the zeitgeist is ghastly. How often now do we read of the “lessons from history” being bandied about as a favourite phrase of the moment in the press and media?

These are bewildering times to be sure. And as someone currently enrolled on a programme of education with the goal of becoming a professional historian, I’ve often found myself contemplating the wider implications of such a career choice and the kind of calling it represents for me personally. It poses questions to which I have no concrete answers. All academics know that a perceptive question simply begets further questioning, but as a discipline our collective historiography is based on the process of asking and reflecting upon such questions. A recent article by Jeremy Adelman in Aeon Essays ruminating on the question: “What is global history now?” has really sparked a diode in my mind and focussed my thoughts a little further on this theme. It’s prompted me to ask myself again the question which every historian should constantly be asking themselves: what kind of a historian am I?

Of one thing I am definitely certain – I’m a global historian. And in reading Adelman’s article I find myself concluding that a 'global history' perspective is still just as relevant now, if not moreso, than it ever was before. My own field, the study of empire, is not a simple analysis of historical determinism; its scope is far, far broader than that. If global history is anything, it is pluralistic. It is as much about the local as it is about the international. You can’t raise questions of imperialism without invoking further questions about nationalism, there is no international without the local – and neither can be mutually exclusive. Hence today’s socio-political shift towards populist nationalism isn’t necessarily a retreat from the global, instead it presents a different set of contradictions to the surface simplicity that this same populist nationalism appears to champion. I, for one, think it is politically short-sighted on the one hand, and on the other, it is disingenuously calculating as a short-term tactic for taking and consolidating control. And clearly it is working. This is happening. 

Recently there’s been much talk in the UK about the nostalgia for empire. There is this harking back to a halcyon view of an untarnished past in which life was better at home in a country which was outwardly confidant and strong, exporting its vision of a just and rational modernity to a benighted and backwards wider world which naturally could only benefit from such an advanced and enlightened benevolence. But many have been pointing out that this is at best a false premise. The past was nowhere near so clear cut, nor so black and white. The study of empire is in effect a study in shades and nuances; it is an analysis of a greyscale of good to bad, benefit to harm, boon friend to bogeyman (cf. Ferguson versus Mishra). Theresa May talks about making a post-Brexit Britain a ‘global’ nation again – but what does that mean?

Surely being an active member of an international union such as the EU was a highly effective way of pursuing such a globalised vision for greater international harmony? Then again, I’m well aware that the same basis for such an arguement can be turned on its head and argued for precisely the opposite. Hence the question: - is a globalised world of individual nation states a more equitable base for a world system than one predicated on a preference for international unions of similar socio-economic ‘friends’ operating in concert? – Some might say it depends on the size of both the economy and the population of the nation state we are looking at. Think of the Philippines and China currently at diplomatic loggerheads over mutually disputed territories in the South China Sea. How can a small country vie with, let alone have its voice heard and respected by a relative superpower? Not all countries can “punch above their weight” as the oft-used trope of nationalist nostalgia in Britain would have us believe we do here in the UK; it’s a phrase which has so frequently characterised the rhetoric of British politicians since the demise of this country’s empire; indeed, whatever their party colour, UK politicians all seem to relish either cooing or crowing about this seemingly paradoxical incongruity of a plucky little island nation retaining its seat at the top table of global powers – history has denied many similarly small or even a fair few bigger nation states such a chance to join this particular club.

But nationalism versus globalism is the real question which Jeremy Adelman’s article set me thinking about. If the recent trend towards globalism has resulted in an unexpectedly inward turn towards parochial or populist nationalism, what follows on from that? – If such a nationalist turn seeks to differentiate a new (or renewed) notion of “us and them”, we have to wonder how such a polarisation is meant to take effect? Not least because the previous trend towards globalism has prompted a greater transnational social integration in so many countries. Many of our most economically burgeoning and flourishing cities are booming precisely because they have become expressly international cities. If the nationalists wish to categorically differentiate their “us” from ‘the other’ they can’t hope to do so on a macro, global level without precipitating doing so on a local, micro level at home too; and so, such a policy would simply end up being endemically fissiparous, or to put it another way, they’d in effect be throwing the baby out with the bathwater – hence some people’s legitimate fear that the implementation of such a policy would in effect equate to pushing a self-destruct button.

But then again, this might well be the intention ... Indeed, it follows that in the logical progression of such nationalism – anyone perceived to be a foreigner, say because of their colour or their creed, regardless of the fact that they were born in that same country, were fully acculturated therein, and held official papers attesting to their legitimate citizenship, perhaps even being several generations removed from their original immigrant forebears, would count for nothing. They may well end up being stigmatised as the enemy within, as indeed was the case with the Japanese in the USA after the attacks on Pearl Harbour, or worse with the Jews within Nazi Germany and occupied Europe in the 1940s , or similarly with the 'ethnic cleansing' in Balkan nations following the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Undoubtedly, though we might well shudder to consider it, there is every possibility of similar things occurring in exactly this way as the norms of civil society become increasing corroded and eroded by a toxic and exclusionary insularity. I would argue that the key question is not so much how this wave of populist nationalism has arisen or whether history is in any sort of sense repeating itself, though these are certainly important points to consider and debate; but rather, I would venture to suggest that the key question of our time is whether the dichotomy of this dilemma – globalism versus nationalism – is recalibrating and accelerating a new kind of global schism?

In his article Adelman quotes a deeply worrying statement about an imminent cultural collision of East and West apparently made in 2014 by the current chief strategist in the White House, Steve Bannon: “There is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. Every day that we refuse to look at this as what it is, and the scale of it, and really the viciousness of it, will be a day where you will rue that we didn’t act.” … Little hope then, perhaps, to echo a famous phrase attributed to Winston Churchill, that “jaw, jaw” might be allowed a chance to take precedence over “war, war.” But more essentially such an overtly militarist stance in terms of the foreign policy of such an intrinsically pluralistic nation does not look sufficiently deeply into the reality beneath its nose on its very own doorstep. You cannot have a dualistic confrontation in the form of a "clash of civilisations" when your own society is already one built upon an integrated internationalist base, as this is in essence blindly self-destructive. The fact that we are clearly so split right down the middle (vide the voting splits for the two opposing Brexit camps, or the Presidential campaigns of Trump and Clinton), I think utterly precludes it. Trying to purge a society of ‘the other’ from within its own midst today would in the end be tantamount to instigating a civil war (think again of the 1990s Balkans War). Ours is no longer a world of near and far. The ‘global village’ is real, we are all living it now, and we are all more closely interconnected than ever before. Take Brexit and the issue of the current right of EU nationals to permanent residence in the UK which has simply highlighted how deeply married Britons are to the Continent, literally in the case of so many transnational married couples who are currently facing the threat of dislocation.

And yet – in looking through this present glass darkly and attempting to envisage the potentially deeply dystopian future that may well now lie ahead of us: what if this populist nationalism ultimately succeeds in its goal of disuniting the globe? – What will follow to police and maintain the new world order which will result from this epic "clash of civilisations"? Will such resurgent nationalism eventually beget a shift to a reinvented imperialism? Will it end in a new Cold War-like stand-off between Crusader and Jihadi? Or will it require a new kind of colonialism? And if so, who will end up being subjugated, colonized, exploited, and controlled as ‘the other’ in this nightmare vision of our collective future –  both at home and abroad? … The globe might well be up for grabs, but in my opinion, taking my lesson from history – the outcome of the impeding tussle will be anyone’s guess to call. But right now – it’s the moment when we stop asking questions which worries me the most.

References & Further Reading

Jeremy Adelman, What is Global History Now? Aeon Essays (March 2, 2017)

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983)

David Cannadine, The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences (Penguin, 2013)

Sebastian Conrad, What is Global History? (Princeton, 2016)

John Darwin, Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (Penguin, 2013)

Pankaj Mishra, From The Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against The West and The Remaking of Asia (Penguin, 2013)

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the 19^th Century (Princeton, 2014)

Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978)

Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Knopf, 1993)

Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Ooi Kee Beng, The Eurasian Core and its Edges: Dialogues with Wang Gungwu on the History of the World (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015)

A Questing Curiosity

IN SEARCH OF ZARATHUSTRA: ACROSS IRAN AND CENTRAL ASIA TO FIND THE WORLD’S FIRST PROPHET

by Paul Kriwaczek  

(Vintage, 2002)

I stumbled upon this book whilst browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Singapore’s Bras Basah. Usually any book which begins with the author proclaiming: “Hello, my name is X …”, or, “Thanks for coming on this journey with me …”, would have me returning it to the shelf immediately; but the opening lines of Paul Kriwaczek’s In Search of Zarathustra are an arresting start, as he continues – “I had been practising this little speech in Farsi …” Hence Kriwaczek’s intended introduction to his local interpreter, fixer, guide, and travelling companion, whom he was meant to meet at the Mehrabad airport in Tehran, instead ends up setting the tone of the book it introduces. Part travelogue, part historical enquiry, In Search of Zarathustra is a tour de force of writing style. It is a compelling read. Once started I could hardly put the book down.

I’m amazed I’d never come across Kriwaczek’s writings before, and now having read the book through, and having looked him up in more detail, I find I more than likely have come across him before without ever knowing it. Before he passed away in 2011 Paul Kriwaczek had an enormously varied career. A trained dentist who had spent many years working in Afghanistan, he later went on to become a radio and TV producer with the BBC, making documentary programmes on scientific and religious topics, before turning his hand to writing books on ancient history. In reading this book I was constantly put in mind of another favourite author of mine, John Romer. Like Romer, Kriwaczek’s lightness of touch when dealing with the weightiest of subject matter is the real key to what makes him a wonderful educator. In reading his writing he enthuses you with his own questing sense of curiosity, which was not simply nurtured over long time and meticulous reading, but is also augmented by his own travels and practical investigations – questioning locals and those more in-the-know than him, as well as those possibly less in-the-know too. His curiosity causes him to pose questions and suggest connections others might not necessarily have come up with; but modestly, he never asserts that his ideas are any more or less valid than anyone else’s. This is a journey of shared discovery. One imagines travelling with Kriwaczek and chatting with him would have been a fascinating adventure on so many different levels.

The book, as its title suggests, is a historical investigation into the thoughts and ideas which form the basis of one of humanity’s oldest religions – Zoroastrianism. Yet in doing so it takes in and looks at a variety of civilisations and subsequent religions which may well have been influenced by Zoroastrian connections that have long since become muddied and obscured with the passage of time and often intentional cultural obfuscation. Beginning with the writings of Nietzsche and retracing its narrative backwards in time through the ‘Great Heresy’ of the Cathars in Medieval Europe, to the Manichaens of Central Asia, the Roman Mystery Cult of Mithras, to Biblical times, touching on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism along the way, the book ends by bring us back up to the present when Kriwaczek visits one of the few remaining active Zoroastrian temples in Iran, where he finds expressed in the contrasts of lightness and dark – the ‘good words, good thoughts, good deeds’ – which are the essence of this ancient religious perspective on the world, both human and divine.

Kriwaczek skilfully gives historical continuity to his readings of earlier phases of antiquity in ways which deftly help elucidate for the modern reader what it might imaginably have felt like to live and think on the world in those times. For instance: “There is no moral equivalence between the medieval Catholic Church and the Nazis, even in their attitude to Jews. But like the Communist rulers of the USSR and the other tyrants of the twentieth century, they felt a pressing need to keep the people loyal to their version of the truth. No accident, then, that a ruler like Stalin took careful lessons from medieval Christendom. Like communism to the USSR, Christianity to medieval Europe was the doctrine that supported the state.”  

Or similarly, when reflecting upon the spiritual outlook of the ancient Prophet, Mani: “And then I realised it: Mani was a painter. Manichaeism’s battle between the light and the darkness is a painter’s vision. Caravaggio, who said ‘Painting is light,’ would have understood, so would de La Tour, Cézanne and every other artist who ever strove to create a world by the interplay of chiaroscuro, brightness and shadow. So would Germany’s greatest poet Goethe, who wanted to be a painter in his youth and who opposed Newton’s mechanistic theory of light with his own explanation, because of his passionate conviction that light is indivisible and cannot be reduced to a procession of particles. Manichaeism was fine art raised to the status of revealed religion – unique in spiritual history.”

“To walk on the high, wide, tawny mounds which are all that remain of many of the great cities of Middle Eastern antiquity is a strange experience. If you take an ancient eye-witness as your guide, you can’t help being struck by the stark contrast between the described glories of the distant past and the observed desolation of the immediate present.” Yet Kriwaczek’s prose helps train the reader to see more clearly in their mind’s eye: “Where archaeologists have dug among the fragments, you can make out the remains of walls, windows and doorways, sometimes rising to shoulder height, with stretches of paved street between, so well preserved that their empty abandonment seems quite eerie, like a landlocked Marie Celeste.” And often he does so with sly humour too: “What stonework this is. Every inch is covered in bas-relief decoration and the huge capitals that supported the roofs are sculpted in the shape of bulls, lions and eagles of exquisite design. The monumental ceremonial double staircase leading up to the main platform, cut from twenty-four-foot blocks and rising some fifty feet to the first terrace level, has steps shallow enough to ride horses up, or for notables in long robes to climb while protecting their dignity – or their angina.”

In this remarkable little book, packed with so much inspirational imagination, Kriwaczek makes no claim to be the definitive historian of his chosen subject. Indeed, he once said of himself that he was the “Master of the Tertiary Source.” Instead, he is the educated enthusiast, with open eyes, open mind, and, as I said before, an actively questing curiosity which cannot help but impress and endear, as well as inspire and reward, the attentive reader. It is his empathy with the past which makes him such a wonderful guide. I hope one day I might be able to write half as well as he did.

“It may be easy enough to dream ourselves back into the nineteenth century or even early modern Europe. It may not be much harder, particularly for fans of ‘sword and sorcery’ romance, to fantasise living during the European Middle and Dark Ages. Roman and Greek ways were much closer to ours than we often think and because of familiarity with the Old Testament, its characters and its anecdotes, even life in biblical times is not beyond our power to imagine. (Though the one thing which we can never leave behind, in our mental journeyings, is the knowledge of what was to come after.) But with Zarathustra, even the prophets of Israel are far in the future. We have arrived back at a period in human history whose mind-set is very hard for us to fathom, so different from ours are its accepted beliefs, ethics and values.

            To us, such times seem at the very beginnings of history, but of course, to the people who lived in those days, they had just as long a past to look back on as we do. Nabonidus of Babylon is said to have been as fascinated by archaeological digs as any television viewer today. They certainly must have told tales about their wanderings and the adventures they had on the way. Perhaps, like the Hebrews who long remembered their father Abraham’s origin in the ‘Ur of the Chaldees,’ they still had a dim recollection of the far distant time when their remote agricultural ancestors had cut their moorings and left village life behind in exchange for a nomadic existence on the steppe.”

The value of such a book is surely to teach us that our world and our history is a vast and unbounded place which we are meant to explore and understand for ourselves. To seek continuities, connections, and contrasts, and to think and reflect upon these ideas. In this respect, enlightened writers, such as Paul Kriwaczek, make the most inspiring of guides.

~

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to travel to India to work with colleagues from SOAS, the British Library, the V&A, the Ancient India & Iran Trust, The Hermitage, the National Museum of Iran, and the National Museum in New Delhi on an exhibition entitled: "The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination." First held at the SOAS Brunei Gallery in 2013 the exhibition opened at the National Museum in New Delhi last weekend and will close at the end of May 2016. (Click on the link above or the poster below for more information)

 

The Sacred & The Profane

Historians are often asked to comment on the here and now, almost as much as they are on the events of the past. Particularly in the media. The validity of such comment is, of course, a useful point of departure for discussion, but do we give much pause to wonder why such analysis and comment is actually being sought? Is it simply to make some sort of sense of the here and now? Or is it merely meant to bolster and affirm the notions on which we have founded our world view? Are we seeking to understand? To justify? To champion, or to condemn? Or is it purely a means to provide ‘copy’ to fill TV news bulletins and newspaper column inches?

Undoubtedly the last question is a given, but the other questions all have a bearing on what angle that ‘copy’ maintains and whether or not such reports simply create an unending vicious circle. Social comment is the means by which we shape our collective worldview, it’s what we share as much as what we differ over which makes our society what it is – the present global world system operates in and through what we each think of ourselves and what we think of others. And this could well be simplified to binary opposites. Black and white. Good versus bad. Them and us, with both sides viewing their opposite as ‘the Other.’ We define ourselves by contrast; we are not like them, and they are not like us – but how true is this in reality if we look a little deeper?

I doubt many readers of this blog will not have looked aghast at the news images this week of men in Iraq’s second largest national museum in Mosul felling ancient Assyrian sculptures with sledgehammers. And rightly so. What an unthinkable thing to do! ... And why? ... It seems so pathetic. Are they really so afraid of inanimate objects? Are such ‘graven idols’ really an abomination in the eyes of their ‘jealous’ God – or, more precisely, are these statues really such a threat to that God’s legitimacy?

But to ask such questions is really too simplistic. There must be many levels driving the motivation to perpetrate such actions. Seeing those images my first thoughts were that these were desperate actions. The news reports said that the Iraqi Armed Forces were now beginning to push back against the Islamic State militias which have taken control of these regions. Thus, presumably, in a prelude to retreat, they are hitting out like impotent soldiers about run away. Taking a swipe at a symbol, in a sense itself equally symbolic, as a gesture of last ditch defiance.

But again, this too might still be an overly simplistic view. There may be more to it. They might well have destroyed these artefacts even if they ultimately prevailed in holding that region. No doubt it would still have been a gesture made with calculated symbolism and an eye to attracting the attention of the world’s media.

Help Restore Mosul Museum - Project Mosul : Call To Action

Whilst we still know really very little about precisely how coherently the Islamic State (or ‘Daesh’) might or might not be organised within its ranks, we are told that they are setting themselves up in opposition to the majority world system. Seeking a ‘medieval’ religious ‘caliphate’ in stark contrast to a modern, secular mode of Government, or even a moderate religious one. And as such, I read with interest a recent article which suggested that they weren’t so much smashing their own heritage into pieces, they were in fact smashing down the inherited or imported cultural institution of ‘the museum’ itself – the temple of ‘secular sacred idols’ – seeing the Western museum tradition as a colonial means of secular control. The worship of ‘graven images’ not so much in terms of false Gods from antiquity, but rather the false Gods of the present era – the worship of secular systems of government, capitalist economics, and the world system which has been globally imposed as a result of past colonialism, an ‘anti-Orientalising’ uprising of sorts. This struck me as a valid possibility, a plausible motivation, and, as such, a suitably manifest expression thereof.

But, then again, on the other hand, perhaps this is going too far – simply over-reading the situation instead? After all, it has been shown that a current major source of funding for Islamic State is the illegal trade in looted antiquities. In tandem with symbolic acts of destruction, it is currently facilitating the illicit Western art trade, under the radar so to speak, as a means of supporting itself. There’s possibly an irony here equal to the fact that the notion of an Islamic ‘State’ itself arises from the distinctly Western concept of the Nation State as an 'imagined community' (cf. Benedict Anderson, or perhaps the news reports regarding wannabe jihadis reading ‘Islam for Dummies’ instead).

Perhaps these orchestrated instances of iconoclasm are more likely to be an equally reductive quid pro quo as are those initial accusations of plain and simple barbarism. The same article sought to remind its readers of a similarly ‘iconoclastic’ image: that of the felled statue of Saddam Hussein, the dictator deposed by the US led military invasion of 2003. In a sense then this is perhaps a case of ‘history repeating itself’ in a never ending and yet ever increasing fractal pattern of symbolic destruction, this time with the boot firmly on the other foot. 

The political ‘spin doctors’ no doubt hoped the toppling of a statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Firdos Square would have a similar resonance in the media as the toppling of statues of Lenin had in Eastern Europe at the remarkable and unexpected end of the Cold War; yet what they didn’t account for was the spontaneity and the immediate agency (i.e. – the fact that it was done by an uprising of ordinary people) which made the toppling of a bronze Lenin so remarkable and so memorable, similarly the binary undoing of the toppling of a bronze Saddam was rooted in how the action came about – for the bronze Saddam was felled not by the local Iraqis, but by the soldiers of an uninvited and invading foreign Army. The symbolism of that fact was unwittingly reinforced by the faux-pas which saw a US soldier first rubbing 'the stars and stripes' in Saddam’s face before someone with a bit more media-savvy quickly (but not quickly enough) managed to replace those colours with the flag of the Republic of Iraq instead. All symbolic acts are meant to have a resonance, and all of them are meant to remain in the memory – but some acts, it seems, always return to haunt more than others. 

One can’t help thinking of Donald Rumsfeld’s shrug that in war “stuff happens.” Take for instance, another recent news report this week which first ran with the headline: “The Man Who Helped Blow Up the Bamiyan Buddhas” – a classic media spin to pull the reader in. But it wasn’t an interview with an unrepentant Taliban fighter responsible for what is possibly the arch-iconoclastic act of violence against ancient antiquity perpetrated in our own times (until, perhaps, we find out the full extent of what destruction the Islamic State fighters have done to Iraq’s ancient sites, such as Nimrud and Nineveh), nor was it an interview with a reformed and repentant Taliban who has at last seen the error of his ways – rather it was a more pitiful and pitiable interview with an ordinary man who happened to live near Bamiyan, who was taken prisoner by the Taliban and forced to commit the destruction in order to evade execution and keep himself alive. At the end of the piece he is quoted as saying: “I regretted it at that time, I regret it now and I will always regret it.” 

These are desperate times indeed, but they are not unprecedented; nor are they as black and white as they might at first seem. And to point this out is not to take sides, nor to excuse either side of such acts of cultural vandalism. It is hard to be objective rather than purely emotional. Destroying antiquities and attempting to erase the most important parts of our common heritage is and always should be an inexcusable crime. But, if we wish to view our world so simplistically, we should be mindful of how our own reductiveness actually blinds us to ourselves. Is rubbing a foreign nation’s flag in the face of a toppled dictator today not akin in some senses to the sacking of the Summer Palace outside Peking in 1860 at the start of China’s ‘Century of National Humiliation’, or smacking the head off an ancient Assyrian statue for that matter? How is our ‘just-retribution’ more just than their ‘just-retribution’? 

Is an extremist religious cult’s attempt to redefine the world system really so unprecedented, when we think of the Taiping Rebellion of 1850-1864? Perhaps Islamic State is less an extremist religious ideological expression, and more of an extreme psychological collective manifestation; as one recent perceptive article has suggested, perhaps Islamic State has more in common with David Koresh’s millenarian death cult in Waco, Texas in 1993 than it does with the true notions of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb? … No, Mark Twain is probably right, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

 

I deplore all forms of aggression, however necessary aggression might sometimes be. Think of the dilemma that pacifists faced when confronted by the juggernaut of destruction which raged through Europe in the form of Nazism during the last century. If anything at all is true in the old adage that ‘history repeats itself’, now is perhaps a salient time to ask ourselves: what can we actually learn from such cycles of history? Is it right to reduce our thinking to such simplistic clichés? Especially when we have the opportunity of being more informed and more measured in our own consideration and personal influence (via social media, for instance) than might have been possible in the past.

Think of all the recent media jingoism which has accompanied the centenary commemorations of the outbreak of the First World War last year – “Lions led by Donkeys”, etc. Many people might have thought so at the time, just as many seem adamantly sure of it today; and, similarly, so too, many thought so when the second invasion of Iraq was first proposed in 2003. – Cause and effect? – We reap as we sow? … Opinions will always be divided, as will outcomes. We can never know what realities the opposite counterfactuals might have created – What if Saddam was still in charge of Iraq today? – What if the Berlin Wall had not fallen? … A colleague of mine (who is only just a fraction too young to remember the last few years of the Cold War) once remarked: “I don’t see what all the fuss over the Cold War was all about; I mean, after all, it all turned out alright in the end, didn’t it?” … He was being serious too.

I might be a historian, but – it doesn’t mean I have any clearer answers than the next person. The world, likely as not, will always be a divided place. One person’s ‘terrorist’ will always be someone else’s ‘freedom fighter.’ History, like the present, is filled with seemingly unanswerable questions – but this in itself is no reason for us to stop asking such questions, or to stop challenging ourselves to think a little deeper than how the headlines might seek to herd us … 

Islamic State is far from ‘medieval’ when one stops to consider all the many cultural and scientific achievements of Islamic scholars in the Middle Ages. Islamic State is a modern phenomenon. It has not arisen in isolation seemingly out of nowhere. It has arisen in opposition. If division is to be the default mode of human existence, then I can only hope that one day we might at least all come to draw a line together, and abide with one another in an understanding of the stark truth spoken by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, that “an eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind.”