The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,299

cultural exchange. The Crusades were a series of vicious pogroms against Jewish communities that were part of a long history of European anti-Semitism. The Crusades were a brutal invasion of Muslim lands and the start of a long history of humiliation of Islam by Christendom.

• The American Civil War was necessary to abolish the evil institution of slavery and preserve a nation conceived in liberty and equality. The American Civil War was a power grab by a centralized tyranny intended to destroy the way of life of the traditional South.

• The Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was the act of an evil empire drawing an iron curtain across the continent. The Warsaw Pact was a defensive alliance to protect the Soviet Union and its allies from a repeat of the horrendous losses it had suffered from two German invasions.

• The Six-Day War was a struggle for national survival. It began when Egypt expelled UN peacekeepers and blockaded the Straits of Tiran, the first step in its plan to push the Jews into the sea, and it ended when Israel reunified a divided city and secured defensible borders. The Six-Day War was a campaign of aggression and conquest. It began when Israel invaded its neighbors and ended when it expropriated their land and instituted an apartheid regime.

Adversaries are divided not just by their competitive spin-doctoring but by the calendars with which they measure history and the importance they put on remembrance. The victims of a conflict are assiduous historians and cultivators of memory. The perpetrators are pragmatists, firmly planted in the present. Ordinarily we tend to think of historical memory as a good thing, but when the events being remembered are lingering wounds that call for redress, it can be a call to violence. The slogans “Remember the Alamo!” “Remember the Maine!” “Remember the Lusitania!” “Remember Pearl Harbor!” and “Remember 9/11!” were not advisories to brush up your history but battle cries that led to Americans’ engaging in wars. It is often said that the Balkans are a region that is cursed with too much history per square mile. The Serbs, who in the 1990s perpetrated ethnic cleansings in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo, are also among the world’s most aggrieved people.32 They were inflamed by memories of depredations by the Nazi puppet state in Croatia in World War II, the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, and the Ottoman Turks going back to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. On the six hundredth anniversary of that battle, President Slobodan Milošević delivered a bellicose speech that presaged the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

In the late 1970s the newly elected separatist government of Québec rediscovered the thrills of 19th-century nationalism, and among other trappings of Québecois patriotism replaced the license-plate motto “La Belle Province” (the beautiful province) with “Je Me Souviens” (I remember). It was never made clear exactly what was being remembered, but most people interpreted it as nostalgia for New France, which had been vanquished by Britain during the Seven Years’ War in 1763. All this remembering made Anglophone Quebeckers a bit nervous and set off an exodus of my generation to Toronto. Fortunately, late-20th-century European pacifism prevailed over 19th-century Gallic nationalism, and Québec today is an unusually cosmopolitan and peaceable part of the world.

The counterpart of too much memory on the part of victims is too little memory on the part of perpetrators. On a visit to Japan in 1992, I bought a tourist guide that included a helpful time line of Japanese history. There was an entry for the period of the Taishō democracy from 1912 to 1926, and then there was an entry for the Osaka World’s Fair in 1970. I guess nothing interesting happened in Japan in the years in between.

It’s disconcerting to realize that all sides to a conflict, from roommates squabbling over a term paper to nations waging world wars, are convinced of their rectitude and can back up their convictions with the historical record. That record may include some whoppers, but it may just be biased by the omission of facts we consider significant and the sacralization of facts we consider ancient history. The realization is disconcerting because it suggests that in a given disagreement, the other guy might have a point, we may not be as pure as we think, the two sides will come to blows each convinced that it is in the right, and no one will think the better of it because everyone’s self-deception is invisible to them.

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