Free Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History by Margaret MacMillan Page A

paint a golden age when all the faithful lived in harmony, obeying the laws they had been given. Muslim fundamentalists, for example, want to revive the caliphate and bring in sharia law (although deciding which of the several schools of sharia may be difficult).
    Setbacks and defeats become parts of such stories, rather than challenges to their truth. If the faithful have suffered, that is because of the plots and conspiracies of their enemies. For Hitler, of course, that meant the Jews. They had started World War I and created the Bolshevik Revolution, and they had ensured that Germany suffered under the Treaty of Versailles. He had warned them, Hitler said repeatedly, that if they dared to start another war, he would destroy them, “the vermin of Europe.” World War II was the fault of the Jews, and the time had come to deal with them once and for all. If any one person was responsible for that war, it was Hitler himself, but logic and reason do not enter into closed systems of viewing the world. In 1991, the American televangelist Pat Robertson warned that Bush Sr.’s victory over Iraq was not what it appeared. It was paving the way not for peacebut for the triumph of evil. It was all so clear to Robertson. Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, a secret conspiracy had been pushing the world toward socialism and the triumph of the Antichrist. The European Union was clearly part of the plot and so was the United Nations. The Gulf War and the missiles that Saddam Hussein had fired on Israel were yet more steps toward the final reckoning.
    Remembering the evils of the past helps to sustain the faithful. Yes, the present may look dark, but that, too, is part of the story before the triumph of the faithful and paradise comes on earth or in heaven. A few weeks after September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden released a tape in which he exulted about the destruction of the World Trade Center towers: “Our Islamic nation has been tasting the same for more than eighty years, of humiliation and disgrace, its sons killed and their blood spilled, its sanctities desecrated.” Few people in the West knew that for him, Muslim degradation had started in the modern age with the abolition of the caliphate. In 1924, in a move which caused little comment in the West, Atatürk, the founder of a new and secular Turkey, had abolished that last office held by the deposed Ottoman sultans. As caliphs, they had claimed spiritual leadership of the world’s Muslims. The last one, a gentle poet, had gone quietly into exile. For many Muslims, from India to the Middle East, the abolition was a blow to their dream of a united Muslim world governed according to God’s laws. For bin Laden and those who thought like him, disunity among Muslims had allowed Western powers to push the Middle East around; to take its oil and, with the establishment of Israel, its land; to corrupt its leaders; and to lead ordinary Muslims astray. The Saudi rulers had committed the ultimate sin of allowing the United States to bring its troops onto the holy land where Muslims had their most sacred sites. Bin Laden’s history includes much more than the past eighty years.The Crusades, the defeat of the Moors in Spain, Western imperialism in the nineteenth century, and the evils of the twentieth all add up to a dark tale of Muslim humiliation and suffering. Such history keeps followers angry and motivated and attracts new recruits.
    While most of us do not take such a simple view of the world, we nevertheless find history can be useful to justify what we are doing in the present. In 2007, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, paid a visit to France for the rededication of the Vimy Ridge war memorial to the many Canadian soldiers who had died there in 1917. Canadians were uneasy with his government’s support for the Bush war on terror and with the mounting losses being suffered by Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Harper had already made it clear where he stood: