October 7, September 11, World War 2, and the West

The civilizational moment

We will meet for coffee this Friday, September 13, at 6:30 am at Loyal North.

I write on September 11, 2024, the 23rd anniversary of that horrific day that changed the world, and the United States’ relationship to it, in ways that history is still unfolding. The anniversary this year comes on the heels of Hamas’s despicable murder of six hostages, including an American, Hersh Goldberg-Polin (may their memories be a blessing). That tragic event deserved more elevation in the public conscience, but it was quickly overshadowed by Tucker Carlson’s interview of a historian (so-called) sounding in historical revisionism, Holocaust denialism, and Nazi apologetics. Then there was last night’s presidential debate, in which we gained little additional insight on either candidate except perhaps that Vice President Harris is capable of clearing the exceedingly low bar that has been set for her.

And onward we march through the increasingly chaotic political present, which leaves me groping for waymarkers, the sort of “You Are Here” analyses that offer historical perspective and situate us in the moment and the place we find ourselves. I try not to “do politics” in this newsletter, but I do seek to understand the cultural, civilizational undercurrents that undergird our politics. So, this week’s Two Things is really many things grouped under two headings.

(1) 10/7, 9/11, and WW2

Today, The Free Press reprints, under the title “What September 11 Revealed,” a November 2001 essay by Jonathan Rosen, prefaced with the bracing observation: “Today it is possible to see the outline of the October 7 massacre nested in the mass murders of September 11, and to recognize, in the justifications and celebration of October 7, the portents of future barbarism.”

Stretching further back, the same outlet last week published an essay by (actual) WW2 historian Niall Ferguson on “The Return of Anti-History,” refuting in detail the claims of Tucker’s interviewee:

I have spent most of my adult life writing history books, most of them addressing in one way or another what still seem to me among the central questions of modern history: Why did the Germans, who in the 1920s appeared to be the most scientifically and culturally advanced people in the world, fall under the spell of Adolf Hitler and perpetrate the most odious crime of all: industrialized genocide? Why did the economic and intellectual success of the Jews after their nineteenth-century emancipation arouse such hatred? And why did the British Empire, for all its flaws, not succumb to the seemingly irresistible force of Nazism in 1940?

“I have never argued that Churchill was a saint,” Ferguson continues, but he “was the savior of Western civilization. Had he not stiffened British resolve … the repulsive, blood-drenched empire that was the Third Reich might conceivably have won the war.” And yet Ferguson cannot help but fear for the future:

It is surely the epitome of professional failure to have spent more than three decades writing, teaching, and speaking about these matters, and to have achieved so little that a nasty little Nazi apologist like Darryl Cooper can win an audience of millions. But that is apparently what happens when podcasts drive out books and anti-history drives out history.

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The Acropolis as viewed from Mars Hill, whence Paul proclaimed to the men of Athens that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God. and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him.” [Wikimedia Commons, CC0]

(2) The West’s Civilizational Moment

At Providence, Robert Nicholson begins a fresh look at Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, a book whose last sentence in 1996 foretold that, “[i]n the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.” It was an idea widely panned at the time but which, Nicholson argues, history is bearing out:

To see civilizationally is to see the currents, not the waves. And with threats mounting on every side, we can’t afford to do otherwise. The Russia-Ukraine war; the Israel-Iran conflict; the rise of China; the self-immolation of the Islamic world; the nativist-migrant struggle in Europe; the identity crisis here in the US—in all these cases, a civilizational analysis does more than merely explain. Applied to real situations, it offers the basis for better policy.

Nicholson extends his analysis in a second installment at Providence, critiquing Netanyahu’s July 24 speech to Congress in which he called the Israel-Iran war “not a clash of civilizations” but “a clash between barbarism and civilization.” For Nicholson, this is a “small erro[r] in perception” that promises “huge strategic mistakes.” The aftermath of 9/11 is a case in point:

The simple awareness that bin Laden’s call for jihad against “crusaders and Zionists” was anything but fringe, being grounded in mainstream Islamic theology and popular among regular Muslims, would have helped President Bush grasp the limits of his freedom agenda without total victory and long-term occupation.

In the aftermath of 10/7, will we make the same mistake? “Our enemies are not barbarians. They are highly-intelligent defenders of a rival civilization,” Nicholson writes.

There are pragmatic reasons to pretend that hatred of Israel and the US isn’t ubiquitous in the Islamic world and to portray our enemies as deranged philistines raving at the gates of progress. The implications of the alternative are certainly depressing. But in a moment of global upheaval, it is much better to build our foreign policy strategy on a sober assessment of the truth….

Most societies are organized around some spiritual tradition which constitutes the moral core of a transnational civilization…. To pretend as if hundreds of millions of Muslims who see the Hamas massacre as morally justified—and who condemn the US preoccupation with Israel’s security—are depraved savages is to insult both them and ourselves.

Finally, deepening our engagement with the history of the West more broadly, two new projects are worthy of mention. The first is a new podcast from Tikvah, The Pillars, a weekly, two-year-long exploration of “Jerusalem, Athens, and the Western Mind” covering “the profound impact of Abraham and Moses, the enduring legacy of Hesiod and Homer, the philosophical inquiries of Plato and Aristotle, the virtues of Cicero and the vices of the Roman Empire, the intellects of Maimonides and Aquinas, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael, the literature of Shakespeare and Cervantes, the music of Bach and Mozart, and the poetry of Blake and Byron.” At every turn, Rabbi Rocklin examines “how the Jewish understanding of man as covenantal, sacrificial, and redeemable”—concepts central to Christianity, too—“was integral to the development of Western civilization.”

Second, the Daily Wire serves up Foundations of the West, a 5-part documentary series with Dr. Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Spencer Klavan, Jonathan Pageau, and Bishop Robert Barron exploring the ancient cities that shaped the West—Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome—and seeking to “uncover the profound legacies of these civilizations and their lasting impact on the modern world.”

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As our public spaces increasingly become a great battlefield of civilizational war, we are being forced to confront anew the question that Lincoln posed nearly 161 years ago: whether our nation “or any nation” conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality “can long endure.”

Hope to see you at coffee.