By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, August 28, 2014
President Obama doesn't know much about history.
In his therapeutic 2009 Cairo speech, Obama outlined all
sorts of Islamic intellectual and technological pedigrees, several of which
were undeserved. He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine,
for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European
Renaissance and Enlightenment.
He also believes history follows some predetermined
course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those
he pronounces to be on the "right side of history." He also chastises
others for being on the "wrong side of history" -- as if evil is
vanished and the good thrives on autopilot.
When in 2009 millions of Iranians took to the streets to
protest the thuggish theocracy, they wanted immediate U.S. support. Instead,
Obama belatedly offered them banalities suggesting that in the end, they would
end up "on the right side of history." Iranian reformers may indeed
end up there, but it will not be because of some righteous inanimate force of
history, or the prognostications of Barack Obama.
Obama often parrots Martin Luther King Jr.'s phrase about
the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. But King used that
metaphor as an incentive to act, not as reassurance that matters will follow an
inevitably positive course.
Another of Obama's historical refrains is his frequent
sermon about behavior that doesn't belong in the 21st century. At various times
he has lectured that the barbarous aggression of Vladimir Putin or ISIS has no
place in our century and will "ultimately fail" -- as if we are all
now sophisticates of an age that has at last transcended retrograde brutality
and savagery.
In Obama's hazy sense of the end of history, things
always must get better in the manner that updated models of iPhones and iPads
are glitzier than the last. In fact, history is morally cyclical. Even
technological progress is ethically neutral. It is a way either to bring more
good things to more people or to facilitate evil all that much more quickly and
effectively.
In the viciously modern 20th century -- when more lives
may have been lost to war than in all prior centuries combined -- some 6
million Jews were put to death through high technology in a way well beyond the
savagery of Attila the Hun or Tamerlane. Beheading in the Islamic world is as
common in the 21st century as it was in the eighth century -- and as it will
probably be in the 22nd. The carnage of the Somme and Dresden trumped anything
that the Greeks, Romans, Franks, Turks or Venetians could have imagined.
What explains Obama's confusion?
A lack of knowledge of basic history explains a lot.
Obama or his speechwriters have often seemed confused about the liberation of
Auschwitz, "Polish death camps" the political history of Texas, or
the linguistic relationship between Austria and Germany. Obama reassured us
during the Bowe Bergdahl affair that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and
Franklin Roosevelt all similarly got American prisoners back when their wars
ended -- except that none of them were in office when the Revolutionary War,
Civil War or World War II officially ended.
Contrary to Obama's assertion, President Rutherford B.
Hayes never dismissed the potential of the telephone. Obama once praised the
city of Cordoba as part of a proud Islamic tradition of tolerance during the
brutal Spanish Inquisition -- forgetting that by the beginning of the
Inquisition an almost exclusively Christian Cordoba had few Muslims left.
A Pollyannaish belief in historical predetermination
seems to substitute for action. If Obama believes that evil should be absent in
the 21st century, or that the arc of the moral universe must always bend toward
justice, or that being on the wrong side of history has consequences, then he
may think inanimate forces can take care of things as we need merely watch.
In truth, history is messier. Unfortunately, only force
will stop seventh-century monsters like ISIS from killing thousands more
innocents. Obama may think that reminding Putin that he is now in the 21st
century will so embarrass the dictator that he will back off from Ukraine. But
the brutish Putin may think that not being labeled a 21st-century civilized
sophisticate is a compliment.
In 1935, French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval warned
Josef Stalin that the Pope would admonish him to go easy on Catholics -- as if
such moral lectures worked in the supposedly civilized 20th century. Stalin
quickly disabused Laval of that naiveté. "The Pope?" Stalin asked,
"How many divisions has he got?"
There is little evidence that human nature has changed
over the centuries, despite massive government efforts to make us think and act
nicer. What drives Putin, Boko Haram or ISIS are the same age-old passions,
fears and sense of honor that over the centuries also moved Genghis Khan, the
Sudanese Mahdists and the Barbary pirates.
Obama's naive belief in predetermined history --
especially when his facts are often wrong -- is a poor substitute for concrete
moral action.
