The Battle for History: September 11, 2001
written by Kevin Summers, November 2001
While the September 11 terrorist attack generated anger and shock within the United States, it has also led to a concerted move against those members of academia who have dared to ponder the extent to which America's past foreign policy actions have contributed to this horrific outcome.
In targeting academic staff, conservative elements have accused them of failing to rally around President Bush, of being out of step with the tide of American opinion and, more seriously, of continuing a slide in educational standards by fostering a false view of US history.
The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), a well funded Washington lobby group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney, has released a paper titled Defending Civilization which lists these offenders, quoting excerpts of their statements as evidence of their sins.
Mrs. Cheney has long been in the vanguard of those bemoaning the failure of humanities departments to teach the sort of curriculum which promotes the positives of American civilisation. In a recent book - Telling the Truth (1995) - she vented her spleen at syllabi which overlook the faults of other cultures while exaggerating home grown deficiencies.
For instance, Aztec civilization is praised for its organization without due examination of human sacrifice while America is censured as the only nation to employ the atom bomb. Moreover, the Cold War is depicted as a struggle between two superpowers intent on world domination rather than a conflict between totalitarianism and freedom.
She maintains that humanities faculties, particularly those engaged in the study of history, have lost a sense of balance in favor of a farrago of sullen lies to promote social and political transformation. "The grimmer the picture, the more heavily underscored is the need for the reforms they have in mind," she writes.
Clearly, Mrs. Cheney has no time for an energetic debate that may lead to reform. And so she should be a supporter of the status quo; her husband has done very nicely out of it lately. When he retired as Chief Executive of the Texas energy services company, Halliburton, he was granted a package worth more than $20m. He retired to campaign for the Vice-Presidency.
A reading of Mrs. Cheney and her ilk elicits the usual buzz-phrases. We are experiencing "a flight from truth." Students who challenge what is "politically correct" are intimidated and punished by their professors. Debate has been hijacked by "intellectual elites."
This latest sortie is part of the continuing battle for the hearts and minds of America's young. Dissent from US engagement in Vietnam emanated from the campuses and the conservatives have not forgotten. They don't want a generation who doubt the wisdom of Executive action - in Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Libya, and now Afghanistan - rather they want an assembly line of patriotic men and women, people like themselves.
ACTA expressed its anger at professors who "sponsored teach-ins that typically ranged from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America." It raised the question: if 92% of Americans favoured war as a response to the terrorist attack, what canker infects the minds of these educators?
These groups boast high sounding names, such as the Foundation for Liberal Standards and Tradition and the National Association of Scholars, and they proclaim their devotion to academic freedom and rigorous learning in the pursuit of excellence. They want a return to traditional - the word constantly appears in their media releases - subject areas and less study of class, race and gender issues.
The academic freedom espoused by these groups is a shibboleth. It is a freedom enclosed and debilitated by a fervent belief in the American way, unhindered by doubt. Their current witch hunt of academics exposes them as intolerant and self-serving.
Of course, Australia is not immune from this. During the Gulf War, Prime Minister Hawke launched a series of vitriolic attacks on the few academics who dared to suggest that Western motives may have more to do with oil supplies than Kuwaiti freedom. He was not much interested in the free exchange of ideas.
Conservative writers have long warned of critical interpretations of our past. Geoffrey Blainey's "black arm-band view of history" epigram was coined to convince Australians that too much time had been spent searching for negatives in our history. This was music to the ears of John Howard who in 1996 warned us to "guard against the re-writing of Australian history." We have nothing to apologise about, he intoned, basking in his remembrance of a relaxed and comfortable past.
Such is the battle for history. It is essentially a matter of social and political discourse. One hopes that it is not clouded by the use of tiresome and meaningless labels, and an attack on dissentient views, either here or in the United States. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Home