October, 2002

September 11 and Historical Amnesia
Patricia Limerick, Department of History

A Speech in Aspen

I approach this topic with humility and discomfort. Western American history is not a particularly well-positioned area of specialization for saying anything useful on the subject of the September 11 attacks. A week and a half after the calamity, driving from Glenwood Springs to Aspen, my husband and I listened to President Bush’s "war on terror" speech. When we got out of the car in Aspen, we thought the United States was at war. The next morning, when I started giving my speech to the Colorado chapter of the American Planning Association, I made the audience deeply uncomfortable, as I struggled with the question of whether or not I was giving a speech in wartime.

The audience began to look intensely ill-at-ease. I gave up and returned to the talk I was supposed to give on Western land use. But it was quite the out-of-body experience, as I tried to think why my perception of a drastically changed world seems so odd and alien to the audience.

A year later, I am more inclined to think they were right, and I had it wrong. Normality flooded back in very fast. Most of us returned to airports. People, some warriors, some civilians, died in distant places. Politicians and federal officials squabbled over how to put turf aside and unify agencies in the cause of security. In day to day life, it is hard to see a clue or a hint that we are living in a nation at war.

Interpretations of the Dead

Reading the New York Times’s profiles of individuals whose lives were abruptly cut off presents my only way of not losing focus on what September 11 meant. Reading those portraits leaves me unsatisfied with the meanings attached to the deaths by people who think, variously, that the appropriate service to the dead is to kill many more, or that the dead worked as servants of global capitalism and thus paid with their lives for an ongoing crime against humanity, or that the deaths were worthwhile in giving the American people a reminder of what people in other countries suffer regularly

All of those interpretations of the 9/11 deaths give me the chills, and so I try to keep it individualized, one lost person at a time. If I were John Ashcroft for a day, I would put this restriction on free speech: No one expresses an opinion on appropriate responses to 9/11 until they have read all these portraits of the dead. Yes, free speech should endure, but I myself can only pay serious attention to analyses that have passed through the test of attending to these individual lives and their sudden ending.

Something Old and Terrible

There is one piece of territory where my professional perspective may have some bearing. For a Western historian, the proposition that there is something new and terrible about innocent civilians suffering violent death on American soil is peculiar indeed. For a Western historian, a more convincing proposition would be this: there is something old and terrible about innocent civilians suffering violent deaths in North America.

Of all episodes of historical amnesia, the disappearance of the Indian wars is one of the most striking. In a sense, the wars weren’t forgotten at all; the names Custer and Sheridan, Tecumseh and Sitting Bull, are famous indeed. But the dominant form of this popular memory has been directed toward quaintness and romance, rendering the Indian wars colorful, dramatic, and somehow or other not entirely real. Indians and whites fight constantly on film; there is a line of coffee table books about the Indian wars; the wars are at once very familiar, and very, very abstracted and very, very, very trivialized.

Innocent civilians (sometimes Indian, sometimes white) suffering violent death on American (or what would become American) soil?

And so on and so on.

These raids and wars took place nearly everywhere in North America. And yet a common assumption nonetheless took shape: after the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the United States was different from other nations because its wars were fought overseas, on the land of other nations. The assumed fact that the American civilian population lived at a safe distance from the battles was the basis of a resilient American innocence and naiveté about the human capacity for violence and brutality.

Historically, this denial of the wars fought on American soil makes no sense at all, but it is nonetheless a statement made by pundits aplenty, including some historians who have themselves managed to forget the Indian wars, while concentrating their attention on more conventionally "international" relations. The forgetting of the Indian wars is an extraordinary cultural achievement that shapes many of the commentaries and responses we have heard over the last year.

Passage from a CNN Transcript

What is the relationship between our ability to reckon with our Western past and our ability to deal wisely with our international future? I end with a passage sent to me this morning by my senior auditor, Marc Sobel. This is a passage from a CNN Crossfire transcript from September 9, 2002; the last person quoted, Scott Ritter, is an experienced UN weapons inspector who has been making the case against an attack on Iraq:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:
We know he has this capability.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER:
And making it urgent.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES:
We have no choice.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ANNOUNCER:
But there's still opposition.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SCOTT RITTER, FORMER U.N. WEAPONS INSPECTOR:
Basically, it will turn the world into the Wild West.

I hold on to the hope that Scott Ritter’s remark will prove to be only a figure of speech.

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