Rewriting the Vietnam War

22 Historically Speaking September/October 2006 of "West" and "East," which are meretricious imagined constructs that possess no solidity in time, space, or description. Just where are these places? Who represents them? Do these "sides"share any cultural, ideological, or social characteristics? The protagonists and conflicts of Greece versus Persia were very different from Hun versus Roman, Turk versus Frank, Berber versus Spaniard, or Japanese versus American. Crusading, not least for its peculiar ideology and chronologically and geographically local dimensions, cannot be harnessed to some theory of immutable global competition. It is simply wrong to argue that Islamic-Christian relations have always and everywhere been overdy hostile. This ignores the legal and fiscal framework of Koranic law and the experience of Christians in medieval Muslim Iberia or die early Ottoman Empire and of Muslims in 12th-century Sicily or parts of Frankish Syria. It is undeniable that the history of the Crusades throws up concerns central to all societies: forging identities through the communal force of shared faith; the use and abuse of legitimate violence; the nature of political authority and organized religion. Crusading exemplifies the exploitation of the fear of the "other." The first large-scale (although not the first) anti-Jewish pogrom in Western Europe came as a result of the First Crusade in 1096. There can be no indifference to such issues. But any modern appropriation of the Crusades should not ignore the wholly different moral, social, and intellectual circumstances of die past; easy assumptions of similarity or, still more fanciful, direct continuity, flout evidence. This will not prevent the ignorant or unscrupulous from using the past to take sides in the present, but such use should be seen for the meretricious confidence trick it really is. The idea that modern political conflicts in the Near East derive from the Crusades is only valid in die sense that protagonists believe it to be true. Yet all sides seem reluctant to accept that the modern images of crusade orjihad axe recent imports. The history of thejihad is as complex and nuanced as is that of the crusade and should be studied as carefully by diose who wish to make capital out of it, either for or against. Most African and Near Hastjihads since the 19th century have been against Muslims, not infidels. The last statejihad, proclaimed by the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, was encouraged by the Lutheran Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who had earlier single-handedly revived the reputation of Saladin as a Muslim hero. For all its antiquarianism, al Qaeda is as much a creation of modernity as globalization and die World Wide Web. The present is not in thrall to die past unless people choose it to be. To imagine otherwise goes beyond fraudulence. It plays on a cheap historicism that at once inflames, debases, and confuses current problems, draining them of rational meaning or solution . Lucrative apocalyptic prophecies from entrepreneurial academic peddlers of Armageddon allow those involved to avoid facing the real issues of political organization and accountability, nationalism, religious and ethnic diversity and disunity, secularism in law and government, the management of resources , and the creeping intolerance of self-appointed guardians of oppressive moral or religious codes. While such matters affect societies on all sides of world conflicts, the medieval Crusades have little relevance, comfort, insight, or instruction for any of them. They were of their time and place, not ours. Christopher Tyerman teaches medievalhistory at the University of Oxford, where he ¿s a Fellow of Hertford College. His most recent books are Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford University Press, 2005) and God's War: A New History of the Crusades, published in the U.S. by Harvard University Press thisfall. Rewriting the Vietnam War Mark Moyar My interest in the history of the Vietnam War began in die early 1990s when, as an undergraduate at Harvard, I took a core curriculum course on the war. I was struck by the extent to which Harvard faculty and students considered die Vietnam War closed to debate. In die course, historical works that did not conform to the mainstream interpretation of the Vietnam War received little attention and...