History may be written by the victors, but in any age power confers the ability to manipulate history to achieve its ends. It does so in three related but distinct ways.
- Mobilizing chosen traumas (collective myths)
- Appealing to recent (or “ongoing”) existential threats
- Promoting organized forgetting
Our world is one in which the “virtuous” powerful invoke a “rules-based order” designed to act as a check on aggression. But they transgress that order routinely in search of the talisman of the total defeat of their enemies. They accomplish this by manipulating history to remove the shackles of the “rules,” in order to engage in revenge, or to wage unlimited and endless war.
Chosen Trauma
In Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas, Volkan provides an excellent recent example of the mobilization of chosen traumas in the case of the conflicts in Central Europe in the late 1990s. In discussing the Serbian march to war, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes against Muslims, he describes how a historical event from the 1300s when the Ottoman Empire Turks (Muslims) in the Battle of Kosovo assassinated Prince Lazar. He notes how the mythologized tales of the battle were “translated from generation to generation” until “(w)ith the awakening of nationalism in Europe in the 19th century, Lazar’s image was transformed from that of martyr, victim and tragic figure to hero and then ultimately to avenger” (emphasis added). Lazar, as avenger, provided a foundation for the violence that was unleashed over 600 years after his death.
Volkan notes: “Leaders intuitively seem to know how to reactivate a chosen trauma, especially when their large group is in conflict or has gone through a drastic change and needs to reconfirm or enhance its identity.”
He goes on to say:
But when a chosen trauma is fully reactivated within a large group by stressful and anxiety-inducing circumstances, a time collapse typically occurs. This term refers to the fears, expectations, fantasies and defenses associated with a chosen trauma that reappear when both conscious and unconscious connections are made between the mental representation of the past trauma and a contemporary threat. This process magnifies the image of current enemies and current conflicts, and an event that occurred centuries ago will be felt as if it happened yesterday. An ancient enemy will be perceived in a new enemy, and the sense of entitlement to regain what was lost, or to seek revenge against the contemporary enemy, become exaggerated.
According to Volkan, history is manipulated, and those in power do it deliberately—intuitively.
Existential Threat
In addition to chosen traumas, the powerful use more recent traumas (not yet entirely historical) to maintain a sense of existential threat. My son turned 33 this year, and I am reminded that throughout his entire life, leaders in the US have used perceived threats to maintain not only a global military footprint but also a global war.
Perhaps that sounds like hyperbole, but long before the global war on terror (GWOT), the US was involved in various global policing exercises in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The year my son was born found us in Iraq—well before the better-known Iraq war. I point to those years because those were the years when global communism crumbled, and the US was left as the sole superpower. It did not use that role for peace but to create and maintain global crises.
The GWOT, however, was the epitome of appealing to an existential threat to compel acquiescence to continued military action. In the post 9.11 world, a visit to Washington was a visit to a city under siege—but the symbolism of the concrete barriers surrounding government buildings was not limited to that town. In my small Northern CA city, we had the same visual reminder of the threat outside a local USDA field office.
It was the audacity of the GW Bush administration to maintain the existential threat and extend it to Iraq that was the hallmark of that historical manipulation. Even as the color-coded warnings began to wane, we were reminded that
America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. (George Bush in a speech calling for military action against Saddam Hussein in October 2002).
It was all bullshit, of course, as we now know. But revenge was needed against a former ally turned enemy, so…
Organized Forgetting
Of course, the entire GWOT (which continues in Southwest Asia and various parts of Africa to this day) also drew on the third form of historical manipulation: “organized forgetting.”
I first came across the concept of organized forgetting in listening to Philosopher Nathan Cartagena discuss it concerning critical race theory. Cartagena attributed the idea to legal scholar Kendall Thomas, but Thomas traces it back to Roger Bromley in “Lost Narratives.” Thomas writes:
Bromley describes the contested terrain of history as a dialectical unity of anamnesis and amnesia in which “[f]orgetting is as important as remembering. Part of the struggle against cultural power is the challenge to forgetting posed by memory. What is “forgotten” may represent more threatening aspects of popular ‘memory’ and have been carefully and consciously, not casually and unconsciously, omitted from the narrative economy of remembering.”
Most US citizens viewed the attacks of 9.11 as both unprecedented and unprovoked, and the leaders in DC did nothing to disabuse them of the idea that they were both. By ignoring the role that the US played in creating the Taliban and Osama bin Ladin during the Cold War, they promoted organized forgetting. They were successful in creating the narrative that far from the attacks being “payback” for US aggression around the world, they were carried out by extremists who did it because (to quote the then-president) “they hated our freedom.”
Later, there was a successful effort to promote organized forgetting about the support the US had provided to Saddam Hussein to wage war on the archenemy of the US—Iran during the 80s. In the aftermath of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and a decade later in the lead-up to the Iraq war, the US’s role in supporting this brutal dictator when it suited their purposes was rarely discussed.
The carefully curated, organized forgetting of the history of the US CIA in creating the Taliban to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, or the substantial support to Saddam Hussein to assist him in prosecuting his war against Iran, led the popular press—print and visual—to largely ignore these histories as merely posthoc arguments against a just war proposed by the (usual) anti-war (anti-American) suspects.
Organized forgetting meant that, in a real sense, history started on 9.11 when a nation committed to justice at home and peace abroad was attacked without reason by nihilists whose religion was described as a death cult. There could be no historical reason why the hijackers might take these horrific actions, and any suggestion that there was bordered on a justification for their actions and was, therefore, treasonous.
But there was a history, and it was not a pretty one. It rolled out in far-off places ignored by most Americans. But it did occur, and the intrepid employed words like blowback to describe how the death-dealing of the US “over there” brought the chickens home to roost here.
Still, there was no place for this history in the rapid reaction to 9.11 in Afghanistan or the much longer march to war in Iraq. Historical analysis would have required a clear-eyed look at what we had wrought. But for those in power, such a clear-eyed look would have stalled the actions necessary to exact swift and destructive revenge on those responsible.
Revenge (the Goal of Historical Manipulation)
It is hard to argue that despite all our “progress” as a species, we have left revenge behind and that we only wage war to achieve just outcomes.
And so, a word about revenge.
World War II—a few observations (see references for sources about the following):
- The United States imprisoned approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II following the signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942.
- The United States did not imprison German Americans during this war.
- The United States opposed the “area bombing” of Germany in the early days of the war. It limited its bombing campaigns to strategic bombing of sites of military significance.
- Great Britain, on the other hand, practiced area bombing and experimented with firebombing in Hamburg in 1943 (calling the effort “Operation Gomorrah”). The US participated in the Hamburg bombings but focused on strategic targets. British bombing killed 40,000 citizens of Hamburg.
- Germany bombed British cities—first by accident and later with purpose.
- Churchill used the German bombings of British cities to justify the area bombing of Germany.
- Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, which, while not a state, was a territory held by the US.
- The US firebombed Tokyo in 1945—killing over 100,000 civilians.
- The US used atomic weapons in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, killing over 210,000 innocent people.
These are simply facts, and they do not prove that revenge on a population is the goal. Indeed, if you read the official justifications for the area, and specifically, the firebombing of these cities, it was to damage citizen morale (thereby weakening support for the wars being waged by their governments) and to remove vital workers from the war effort. But it is hard not to see collective punishment as the actual goal—revenge for actions taken against the US and Great Britain by Japan and Germany respectively.
Further, the intentionality of these realities demonstrates the will to avenge the attacks against the US and Britain. In an exchange with Keith Lowe, author of Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943, he stated that the bombing of Hamburg over ten days was a “trial and error” approach to learning how to use incendiary bombs to maximum effect to destroy a city. This trial and error approach gave way to a much more deliberate approach to ensuring that hundreds of thousands would die in city firebombing.
In his book Dead Cities, and Other Tales, Mike Davis describes a visit to a restricted military site in Utah where the US built a replica German city and firebombed it, rebuilding it over and over to perfect the bombings’ effects. The British built a similar “city” in the UK. The rigor with which the engineers and architects built housing structures and added typical German furnishings to maximize fire destruction is stunning. No expense was spared to ensure the creation of massive firestorms (see Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, by John Vaillant for a full description of what a firestorm truly is—it is devastating.)
Here is Lowe, citing civil and medical workers who entered Hamburg after the firebombing:
On a little open square near Boonsweg – I shall never forget the sight – there lay hundreds of men and women, soldiers in uniform, children, old people. Many had torn the clothes from their bodies shortly before their death. They were naked, their bodies seemed unmarked, the faces showed peaceful expressions, like in deep sleep. Other bodies could hardly be recognized; they were charred, torn to pieces, and had shattered skulls . .. There an old woman lay. Her face was peaceful, soft, and tired
… And there, a mother with a child on each hand. They were all three lying on their faces in an almost gracefully relaxed position . . . And there a soldier, with charred stumps for legs. There a woman with a torn body, on whose bulging-out intestines the flies were feeding. And there a child, clutching a birdcage in his hand. And there, detached from the body, a boy’s foot with a black boot; a small, brown girl’s hand with a blue ring . .. The heart almost stops beating at such sights.
In Lowe’s telling, Britain maintained a pretense of bombing strategically but sought justification for area bombing—which it found. Few in Great Britain rallied against this destruction of human life—most cheered it on, and the cheerleaders used the ongoing existential threat posed by Germany long after Germany had effectively lost the war to continue the practice.
In the US, the voices opposed to the area bombing of Japanese cities existed within the US military, but they were systematically sidelined (see Searle, 2002).
I have taken this excursion into World War II for two reasons.
First, to make a case that the ends to which the powerful use chosen trauma, existential threat, and organized forgetting are bent on punishing their enemies—not merely to obtain a military victory. A close reading of Inferno reveals a chilling resolve to destroy and punish.
Second, the devastation of Japanese and German cities during the Second World War was so great and so visible that it led to the development of international accords about the treatment of civilian populations in times of war.
This so-called “rules-based order” stands as a self-congratulatory but largely empty standard that the powerful use to condemn others but conveniently ignore when it comes to their own wars.
When Hamas launched its attacks on Israel in October 2023, all three forms of historical manipulation were on display, and even as the global south pointed to the vacuousness of talk of a rules-based international order, the US and most European leaders provided cover drawing on these historical manipulations.
To be clear, what Hamas has done to Palestinians over the years and what it did on October 7, 2023, deserves unreserved condemnation. It was a crime against humanity.
But Israel’s response has proven every bit as destructive in terms of infrastructure and housing decimated as any of the area bombing campaigns during World War II. The global south is well within reason to point out the hypocrisy of the “West.”
And the manipulation of history? Let’s examine them.
Chosen trauma – Probably the most fascinating historical manipulation in this war is the trauma that Israel (and the US media) chose. Immediately after the attacks, the media was filled with statements such as “This is Israel’s 9.11.”
This choice would seem to be deliberate in that 9.11 was carried out by a “death cult” bent on the destruction of the US due to their hatred of our culture and freedoms. A chosen trauma that draws on the tropes of radical Islam is purposeful and powerful.
Existential threat – Israel’s Prime Minister has been a master at holding the Israeli population in thrall to a multitude of existential threats—with Iran as the source of most regional actors bent on the destruction of the state of Israel. Hamas’ attack, though relatively limited and “low tech” compared to the destruction Israel itself has been shown to unleash on Gaza, has been portrayed—even now after the overwhelming destruction—as an ongoing existential threat, calling for unlimited war to destroy the enemy.
Organized forgetting – In reality, the organized forgetting surrounding this event has a long history that stretches throughout the entire history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I can think of no other conflict in my lifetime in which the forgetting has been so organized, ongoing, and supported by media as this conflict.
Each time there is a Palestinian attack, the clear message is that it was unprovoked, unforeseeable, and unprecedented. Even as settlers use violence to displace West Bank Palestinians and the effective land “controlled” by Palestinians shrinks year by year, there is still no reckoning with a history of violence against these people. It is organized forgetting on a massive scale.
Conclusion
If there is one, it is this: as our weapons of war have become ever more “efficient,” precise, and destructive, those in power have attempted to convince us that we can have war with limited loss of innocent life. They seek to curate an image of war that is cleaner and only used in the most dire of exigencies.
But they know that we know it is a lie because the images that live stream onto our devices show us it is merely the same old civilian massacres carried out in the newest ways.
And because they know we know, they must manipulate history to assure us it is proper, necessary, and unavoidable.
It is time we reject this manipulation by refusing to be bound by the myths of the past, by telling the truth about history, and by refusing to be made afraid by the latest existential threat scare tactics.
References:
Bromley, Roger. Lost Narratives: Popular Fictions, Politics and Recent History. Popular Fiction Series. London New York: Routledge, 1988.
Cartagena, Nathan. “Whiteness,” June 30, 2021. https://www.nathancartagena.com/blog/whiteness.
Davis, Mike. Dead Cities, and Other Tales. New York: New Press : Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2002.
Giroux, Henry A. The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking beyond America’s Disimagination Machine. City Lights Open Media. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014.
Lowe, Keith. Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943. London: Viking, 2007.
Searle, Thomas R. “‘It Made a Lot of Sense to Kill Skilled Workers’: The Firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945.” The Journal of Military History 66, no. 1 (January 2002): 103. https://doi.org/10.2307/2677346.
Thomas, Kendall. “Rouge Et Noir Reread: A Popular Constitutional History Of The Angelo Herndon Case.” Southern California Law Review 65, no. 2599 (September 1992). https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2177.
Vaillant, John. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. First edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023
Yilmaz, Ruveday Celenk. “Srebrenica: The Result of a Chosen Trauma,” July 11, 2018. https://ruveydacelenk.medium.com/srebrenica-the-result-of-a-chosen-trauma-a2c3ea24326a.
Volkan, Vamik D. “Transgenerational Transmissions and Chosen Traumas: An Aspect of Large-Group Identity.” Group Analysis 34, no. 1 (March 2001): 79–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/05333160122077730.
Traveling at the Speed of Bike 