HISTORY AND MEMORY / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

History and Memory

Thoughts in and around geopolitics.

By: George Friedman

Earlier this week, I published a piece on Afghanistan, and in the course of writing that piece, I mentioned the origins of the U.S.-Afghan war: 9/11. 

I was awoken at about 8 a.m. on that day and told that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. 

A short while later, I was told that another plane had struck. 

One plane hitting a skyscraper could be an accident. 

Two planes hitting the World Trade Center towers evaporated that possibility. 

I had no idea how this had happened, but I knew then that the world had been transformed.

My own life became a combination of fear and futile activity. 

The fear was for two of my children, then in the military. 

I feared that we had been attacked by terrorists and I feared we would go to war. 

And I feared for my country. 

As it became clear that the attackers were Islamic jihadists, it became possible that this was merely the opening salvo. 

And I was futilely busy, trying to understand the nature of the enemy, what they might do next and how to defeat them. 

Fear was the only reasonable response to what had happened. 

An attempt to shape a strategy was preposterous. 

My knowledge of their capabilities and resources was zero. 

At moments like this, busyness hides impotence.

It seemed to me that everything had to change. 

All airlines had been grounded and thousands of people were stranded. 

I was asked to go to a meeting, which was pointless since none of us knew what we were talking about, but I felt significant for being invited in a week when my insignificance was manifest. 

I boarded a plane two days after flights resumed, and my thoughts revolved around a single question: If the plane were hijacked, how would I kill the hijackers? 

I decided that my laptop would be my weapon. 

It was hard metal, and I would smash the hijackers’ heads with its point. 

I’m sure all of my fellow passengers were having the same insane thoughts, fingering some futile illusion of a weapon and looking for a suspicious Middle Eastern-looking gentleman. 

Yes, it was profiling, but as the origins of the hijackers jelled, it was clear that they were young men from the Middle East. 

Old women from China were likely not a threat. 

The TSA had not yet been ordered to be insane.

What is most striking now is the degree to which I had become insanely obsessed. 

I was holding a laptop, watching and perhaps hoping for young, swarthy men to show their presence. 

I was sure I’d be prepared to kill, filled with the deadly power of a laptop. 

Staying home was not an option. 

There were meetings to be held, and held they would be. 

The war will be held in a conference room. 

This had become the impotent pivot of my life.

Twenty years later, I wrote the article earlier this week and discovered something stunning. 

I had not thought intensely about 9/11 or al-Qaida for some years. 

The event that had riveted me with fear and battle lust had crossed my mind, but it had become a minor dimension of my life. 

I knew people who served in the subsequent wars, and I know that those wars cost them much, but my moment in history had cost me little. 

The sense that 9/11 was a transformative moment in history had passed, and with it my memory of what I had brought to the table: emotions.

Memory consists of two things. 

One is the thing you remember. 

The other is the emotion you felt when you encountered the thing you remember. 

It is easy to remember a thing like 9/11. 

It is infinitely harder to resurrect the emotions. 

I can remember what I felt at the time, but I no longer feel it, nor can I conjure it up. 

Those who have been in combat may not be able to stop feeling the emotions they had. 

Indeed, they may have more trouble remembering what the emotion was about than what they felt, and their lives can be deeply affected by the memory. 

The recollection of an emotion can be redemptive or it can be devastating. 

For me, if the emotions of 9/11 still haunted me, it would cost me the ability to think and perhaps to sleep – or worse, make me long for sleep. 

Memories of joy are easier to bear and are a blessing. 

Feeling what you felt when you encountered horror can be devastating. 

For those who suffer from it, PTSD is the urgent need to stop feeling what you felt that day.

History consists of events and the emotions with which we approach them. 

For my parents, their memory of the concentration camp was always there, and it seeped into their everyday lives. 

For them, the Holocaust was the center of human history. 

How could it have been otherwise? 

But history requires that the emotion be allowed to seep out. 

One way is to remember the events you were not at. 

I was not at Normandy, but I will never forget it. 

Nor will I forget the Constitutional Convention. 

I was not there, and not yet alive, but I can remember it. 

I can have emotions about these events now, but they are different from the emotions of those who were actually there. 

My parents’ emotions were prisons they could not escape. 

My emotions toward Normandy do not grip me the same way.

History is about memory, and memory is related to emotion. 

An emotion determines the degree to which something is significant. 

On Sept. 11, 2001, the emotions I and others felt made it impossible for us to hold it in proportion. 

It was everything that ever was or would be. 

But as the emotions seep out of the viewers’ minds, a sense of proportion emerges, and that sense of proportion is essential for living a good life. 

When the emotion creeps into your mind and won’t leave, you cannot see events clearly. 

At that point, the moment in which you are living and the thing that is at its center become the eternal moment. 

And that is the origin of fanaticism.

History, and for good measure geopolitics, demands that we remember what has happened and intuit the emotions of the actors but never feel them. 

Without this, all sense of proportion is lost, and you are not telling the story of the past and present, but rather the story that has come to haunt your mind. 

And since those thoughts are both powerful and misleading, you fail as a historian but succeed in other ways – as an ideologue, for example. 

But an ideologue can’t be a good historian, because his emotions tell him what the answer is even before the question is posed.

The same can be said for all human beings. 

9/11 happened and we remember it. 

It was a terrible moment, and we factor that in. 

But we don’t surrender to the emotion because if we surrendered to it we would become emotional ideologues and dangerous. 

Americans have lost the emotions they once had for 9/11 and can therefore find perspective. 

In other matters, Americans cannot lose their emotions about the past, and no sense of perspective or moderation is possible.

Memory is the foundation of history, and emotion is its manager. 

Losing that emotion or managing it prudently is the foundation of civilization. 

However far the U.S. went after 9/11, the emotion slowly seeped out. 

A nation that cannot stop feeling an emotion drawn of what once was is in danger. 

My parents could not forget the emotions of the Holocaust. 

I must. 

It is not my memory. 

I must not forget it happened. 

But I cannot let myself feel it. 

Preventing it in the future demands a ruthless sense of proportion.