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N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S PAGE 7 E AG LE , SEPTOBER 2004 over Jerusalem played exactly such a flashpoint role a thousand years ago. The Crusades proved to have other destructive dynam ics as well. The medieval war against Islam, having also target ed Europe's Jews, soon enough became a war against all forms of cultural and religious dissent, a war against heresy. As it had not been in hundreds of years, doctrine now became rigidly defined in the Latin West and those who did not affirm dominant interpretations — Cathars, Albigensians, Eastern Orthodox — were attacked. Doctrinal uniformity, too, could be enforced with sacred violence. When U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft defines criticism of the Administration in wartime as treason, or when Congress enacts legislation that justifies erosion of civil liberties with appeals to patriotism, they are enacting a Crusades script. All of this is implicit in the word that President Bush first used, which came to him as naturally as a baseball reference, to define the war on terrorism. That such a dark, seething religious history of sacred violence remains largely unspoken in our world does not defuse it as an explosive force in the human unconsci ous. In the world of Islam, of course, its meaning could not be more explicit, or closer to consciousness. The full historical and cultural significance of “crusade” is instantly obvious, which is why a howl of protest from the Middle East drove Bush into instant verbal retreat. Yet the very inadvertence of his use of the word is the revelation: Americans do not know what fire they are playing with. Osama bin Laden, however, knows all too well, and in his periodic pronouncements, he uses the word “crusade" to this day, as a flamethrower. Religious war is the danger here, and it is a graver one than Americans think. Despite our much-vaunted separation of church and state, America has always had a quasi-religious understanding of itself, reflected in the messianism of Puritan founder John Winthrop, the Deist optimism of Thomas Jeffer son, the embrace of redemptive suffering that marked Abraham Lincoln and, for that matter, the conviction of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, that Communism had to be opposed on a global scale if only because of its atheism. But never before has America been brought deeper into a dynamite-wired holy of holies than in our President's war on terrorism. Despite the post-Iraq toning down of Washington’s rhetoric of empire, and the rejection of further crusader refer ences — although Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word this past March — Bush’s war openly remains a cosmic battle between nothing less than the transcendent forces of good 12TH CENTURY DEPICTION OF BA TTLE BETWEEN CRUSADERS AND MUSLIMS and evil. Such a battle is necessarily unlimited and open-ended, and so justifies radical actions— the abandonment, for example, The odd and tragic thing is that the world before Bush a unilateral structure of control on the world. As it pursues a of established notions of civic justice at home and of traditional was actually nearing consensus on how to manage the problem world-threatening campaign against other people’s weapons alliances abroad. of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and had of mass destruction, the Bush Administration refuses to confront A cosmic moral-religious battle justifies, equally, risks of begun to put in place promising structures designed to prevent the moral meaning of America's own weapons of mass destruct world-historic proportioned disaster, since the ultimate outcome such spread. Centrally embodied in the Nuclear Nonproliferation ion, not to mention their viral character, as other nations seek of such a conflict is to be measured not by actual consequences Treaty of 1968, which had successfully and amazingly kept smaller versions of the American arsenal, if only to deter Bush’s on this earth but by the earth-transcending will of God. Our war the number of nuclear powers (actual as well as admitted) next “preventive” war. The United States' own arsenal, in other on terrorism, before it is anything else, is thus an imagined relatively low, that consensus gave primacy to treaty obligations, words, remains the primordial cause of the WMD plague. conflict, taking place primarily in a mythic realm beyond history. international cooperation and a serious commitment by existing “Memory,” the novelist Paul Auster has written, is “the In waging such a “war,” the enemy is to be engaged nuclear powers to move toward ultimate nuclear abolition. All space in which a thing happens for the second time." No one everywhere and nowhere, not just because the actual nihilists of that has been trashed by Bush. “International law,” he smirked wants the terrible events that came after the rising of the sun who threaten the social order are faceless and deracinated but in December 2003. “I better call my lawyer." on September 11,2001, to happen for a second time except because each fanatical suicide-bomber is only an instance of the Now indications are that nations all over the globe — in the realm of remembrance, leading to understanding and transcendent enemy—and so the other face of us. Each terrqrjst | commitment. But all the ways George Bush exploited those Japa/i^ ,$?udi ^rabia, Argentina, Brazil, Australia — have begun is, in effect, a sacrament of the larger reality which is “terrorism." reevaluating their rejections of nukes, and some are positively events, betraying the memory of those who died in them, must Instead of perceiving unconnected centers of inhuman violence rushing to acquire them. Iran and North Korea are likely to be be lifted up and examined again, so that the outrageousness — tribal warlords, Mafia chieftains, nationalist fighters, xenopho only the tip of this radioactive iceberg. Nuclear-armed Pakistan of his political purpose can be felt in its fullness. Exactly how bic Luddites — President Bush projects the grandest and most and India are a grim forecast of the future on every continent. the war on terrorism unfolded; how it bled into the wars against interlocking strategies of conspiracy, belief and organization. And the Bush Administration — by declaring its own nuclear Afghanistan, then Iraq; how American fears were exacerbated By the canonization of the war on terrorism, petty nihilists are by Administration alarms; how civil rights were undermined, arsenal permanent, by threatening nuclear first-strikes against elevated to the status of world-historic warriors, exactly the treaties broken, alliances abandoned, coarseness embraced other nations, by “warehousing" treaty-defused warheads rather fate they might have wished for. This is why the conflict readily — none of this should be forgotten. than destroying them, by developing a new line of “usable” bleeds from one locus to another — Afghanistan then, Iraq now, nukes, by moving to weaponize the “high frontier” of outer Nor, given Bush's reference, should the most relevant Iran or some other land of evil soon — and why, for that matter, space, by doing little to help Russia get rid of its rotting "stock fact about the Crusades be forgotten — that, on their own the targeted enemies are entirely interchangeable—here Osama pile, by embracing “preventive war” — enabling this trend terms and notwithstanding the romance of history, they were, bin Laden, there Saddam Hussein, here the leader of Iran, there instead of discouraging it. How can this be? in the end, an overwhelming failure. The 1096 campaign, the of North Korea. They are all essentially one enemy — one “axis” The problem has its roots in a long-term American “First Crusade,” finally "succeeded” in 1099, when a remnant — despite their differences from one another, or even hatred of forgetfulness, going back to the acid fog in which the United army fell on Jerusalem, slaughtering much of its population. one another. States ended World War 2. There was never a complete moral But armies under Saladin reasserted Islamic control in 1187, Hard-boiled men and women who may not share Bush’s reckoning with the harsh momentum of that conflict's denoue and subsequent Crusades never succeeded in reestablishing fervent spirituality can nonetheless support his purpose because ment — how American leaders embraced a strategy of terror Latin dominance in the Holy Land. The reconquista Crusades undergirding the new ideology, there is an authentic global crisis bombing, slaughtering whole urban populations, and how finally, reclaimed Spain and Portugal for Christian Europe, but the that requires an urgent response. New technologies are now they ushered in the atomic age with the attacks on Hiroshima process destroyed the glorious Iberian convivencia, a high making it possible for small groups of nihilists, or even single and Nagasaki. Scholars have debated those questions, but civilization never to be matched below the Pyrenees again. individuals, to wreak havoc on a scale unprecedented in history. politicians have avoided them and most citizens have pretended Meanwhile, intra-Christian Crusades, wars against This is the ultimate “asymmetric threat.” The attacks of 9/11, they aren’t really questions at all. America’s enduring assump heresy, only made permanent the East-West split between amplified by the murderous echo of the anthrax mailer, the tions about its own moral supremacy, its own altruism, its own Latin Catholicism and “schismatic" Eastern Orthodoxy, and as-yet-unapprehended psychopath who sent deadly letters to exceptionalism, have hardly been punctured by consideration of made inevitable the eventual break, in the Reformation, journalists and government officials in the weeks after 9/11, put the possibility that we too are capable of grave mistakes, terrible between a Protestant north and a Catholic south.The Crusades, that new condition on display for all the world to see. Innovations crimes.Such awareness, drawn from a fuller reckoning with days one could argue, established basic structures of Western civili in physics, biology, chemistry and information technology — gone by — with August 6 and 9, 1945, above all —would inhibit zation, while undermining the possibility that their grandest and soon, possibly, in nanotechnology and genetic engineering America’s present claim to moral grandeur, which is simultane ideals would ever be realized — have had the unforeseen effect of threatening to put in a few ously a claim, of course, to economic and political grandiosity. Will such consequences — new global structures of an hands the destructive power that, in former times, could be exer The indispensable nation must dispense with what went before. American imperium, hollowed-out hopes for a humane and just cized only by sizable armies. This is the real condition to which “The past is never dead," William Faulkner said. “It internationalism — follow in the train of George W. Bush's the Bush Administration is responding. The problem is actual, if isn’t even past.” How Americans remember their country’s crusade? This question will be answered in smaller part by not yet fully present. use of terror bombing affects how they think of terrorism; how anonymous, ad hoc armies of on-the-ground human beings So, to put the best face on the Bush agenda (leaving they remember the first use of nuclear weapons has profound in foreign lands, many of whom will resist Washington to the aside questions of oil, global market control and economic or relevance for how the United States behaves in relation to death. In larger part, the question will be answered by those military hegemony), a humane project of antiproliferation can nuclear weapons today. If the long American embrace of privileged to be citizens of the United States. To us falls the be seen at its core. Yet a nation that was trying to promote the nuclear “mutual assured destruction" is unexamined; if the ultimate power over the American moral and political agenda. proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear Pentagon’s treaty-violating rejection of the ideal of eventual As has never been true of any empire before, because this one weapons, would behave precisely as the Bush Administration abolition is unquestioned — then the Bush Administration’s is still a democracy, such power belongs to citizens absolutely. has behaved over the past three years. The Pentagon’s chest embrace of nukes as normal, usable weapons will not seem If the power is ours, so is the responsibility. thumping concept of “full spectrum dominance" itself motivates offensive. other nations to seek sources of countervailing power, and when Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the hand the United States actually goes to war to impose its widely maiden of tyranny. The Bush Administration is fully committed James Carroll is the author of Crusade Chronicles of disputed notion of order on some states, but not others, nations to maintaining what the historian Marc Trachtenberg calls our an Unjust War, published this year by Metropolitan Books.This — friendly as well as unfriendly—find themselves with an urgent “nuclear amnesia" even as the Administration seeks to impose article is a shortened version of his introduction to the book. reason to acquire some means of deterring such intervention. GODFATHER’S BOOKS AND ESPRESSO BAR Audio Book Sales & Rentals * Cards # Pastries Incense * Occult i Metaphysical * Lattes i Literature 1100 Commercial • Astoria, OR 97103 Phone: (503) 325-8143