{"id":32518,"date":"2021-09-07T08:11:45","date_gmt":"2021-09-07T04:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/?p=32518"},"modified":"2021-09-07T08:11:45","modified_gmt":"2021-09-07T04:11:45","slug":"ancient-greece-and-rome-can-tell-us-a-lot-about-the-links-between-collective-trauma-and-going-to-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mauritiustimes.com\/mt\/ancient-greece-and-rome-can-tell-us-a-lot-about-the-links-between-collective-trauma-and-going-to-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Greece and Rome can tell us a lot about the links between collective trauma and going to war"},"content":{"rendered":"

20th anniversary –\u00a0 9\/11 <\/u><\/span><\/h4>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"America\u2019s political leaders rushed the nation into war just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, just like ancient Greeks and Romans did in response to similar traumatic events.\u00a0David Hume Kennerly\/Getty Images<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

On the outskirts of Grapevine, Texas, a town about 5 miles northwest of the Dallas\/Fort Worth International Airport, there\u2019s a memorial dedicated to the 33 airline flight crew members who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I stumbled upon the monument several years ago with my family, I experienced contrary emotions: sadness inspired by the memorial\u2019s stark figures, mixed with anger over how the attacks quickly became a pretext for U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, as U.S. soldiers\u00a0leave behind uncertainty and violence in Afghanistan, I look back on America\u2019s past 20 years with two sets of eyes.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the first-year graduate student who stood smoking a cigarette in\u00a0Washington Square Park at 8:45 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001\u00a0\u2013 less than a mile from the World Trade Center\u2019s Twin Towers and where the sound of the jet engines\u2019 final roar mixed in with a Tuesday morning\u2019s bustle \u2013 I feel visceral sorrow and remorse.<\/span><\/p>\n

Today, as a scholar of Greek literature who\u00a0studies narrative and memory, I see how this collective trauma shaped U.S. actions and has affected Americans\u2019 vision of their identities and shared history \u2013 a feedback loop that is reflected in the myths and histories of ancient Greece.<\/span><\/p>\n

Twenty years is still recent history for many, so memories of the 9\/11 attacks may still be too raw to easily reflect on and learn from. That\u2019s why looking for parallels in ancient stories of destruction and loss can help in understanding how shared trauma can shape the stories a nation tells itself, and the decisions that get made in response.<\/span><\/p>\n

What is \u201ccollective trauma\u201d?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Collective trauma\u00a0is a term that describes the shared experience of and reactions to a traumatic event by a group of people. That group may be as small as a few people or as large as a whole society.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 9\/11 attacks shattered collective American confidence\u00a0in its safety and sense of place in the world. America\u2019s collective efforts to learn to live with that trauma partly explain why there is a Sept. 11 memorial in a Texas town thousands of miles from where the attacks took place. It also demonstrates that collective tragedies can shape the world views of individuals who were not present at the event.<\/span><\/p>\n

The traumatized group may go through\u00a0shared stages of grief, from disbelief to anger. The further the group gets from the traumatizing event itself, the closer it moves to\u00a0social memory, a concept historians use to describe how groups of people come to share a consistent story about past events. This narrative can be manipulated to reflect or enforce values in the present.<\/span><\/p>\n

My studies of ancient Greek history suggest to me that this is what happened in the U.S. after the attacks. There are myths and histories of the ancient world that describe how, in the wake of the destruction of cities, societies created cultural memories that helped them find reasons for rushing into war. These episodes have parallels to the U.S. in the early 21st century.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reshaping history via stories<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the spring of 2002, I attended a New York University conference called \u201cSaving the City,\u201d where speakers were asked to consider such stories. One of the histories we focused on involved Athens after the Persian army invaded Greece \u2013 for a second time \u2013 in 480 B.C. and burned the temples, groves and homes of the Athenians. The attack was in part vengeance for a past military loss, and also a punishment for Athens\u2019 meddling in Persian affairs in Asia Minor. As with New York on Sept. 11, the attackers targeted an icon: the first version of the Athenian Parthenon.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the wake of this collective trauma, as the scholar\u00a0Bernd Steinbock argues,\u00a0narratives of city destruction became popular in Athenian storytelling and art. In some of these stories, cities that had committed offenses against the gods then suffered at the hands of international armies that formed to set them right.<\/span><\/p>\n

Athenians told one another these stories as they raised troops and a navy to harry the Persians in Asia Minor. Athenian political rhetoric was shaped by the specter of Persian invasion and the threat of re-invasion, the glory of victory and the casting of Athens as a force for freedom and justice in the world. This rhetoric justified imperial expansion, violence and eventually the murder and\u00a0enslavement of the city\u2019s own allies..<\/span><\/p>\n

That led to the\u00a0Peloponnesian War, a destructive 27-year conflict with Sparta that ended with Athens being conquered again in 404 B.C.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rhetoric and calls to arms<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2001, Americans were still in the early days of their collective trauma when talk pivoted to the rhetoric of war. Analogies were made to shared cultural or national stories from the past: The terrorists were \u201cevil-doers,\u201d President George W. Bush said soon after the attacks, and fighting them was \u201ca new crusade.\u201d September 11 was the \u201cPearl Harbor\u201d that made it OK to invade Afghanistan.<\/span><\/p>\n

By early 2002, Bush was telling the nation that Iran, Iraq and North Korea \u2013 the \u201caxis of evil\u201d \u2013 were threats to the United States, although they had not been implicated in the Sept. 11 attacks. His administration would soon use its claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction\u00a0as a \u201cGulf of Tonkin\u201d\u00a0moment to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq \u2013 a reference to the 1964 event that spurred greater American military involvement in the Vietnam War.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I listened to this sort of political rhetoric at the time, the language of Greek myth and poetry helped me understand how political speech capitalizes on memory to create shared realities and justify use of violence. I spent that first year of graduate school in New York City studying the\u00a0language and politics\u00a0in Homer\u2019s epic, the \u201cIliad.\u201d The story\u2019s \u201cthousand ships\u201d from different cities sailing east, with a bumbling fool at their head, to punish the Trojans seemed an awful lot like the fractious \u201ccoalition of the willing\u201d \u2013 Bush\u2019s term for the military alliance he assembled to invade and occupy Iraq.<\/span><\/p>\n

Collective trauma and imperialism<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Rome provides another example from ancient history of the relationship between collective trauma and justifications for imperial pursuits.<\/span><\/p>\n

The city of\u00a0Rome fought and won its first war\u00a0with the powerful city of Carthage \u2013 located in what is today Tunisia \u2013 between 264-241 B.C., and its second between 218-201 B.C. Rome then imposed a hefty war indemnity on Carthage, which helped it acquire territories that laid the foundation for a\u00a0pan-Mediterranean empire.<\/span><\/p>\n

These two victories ended any significant threat that Carthage may have posed, but Roman culture remained obsessed with war. According to the military leader and author\u00a0Pliny the Elder, the statesman Cato the Elder used to shout \u201cI think Carthage must be destroyed\u201d at every meeting of the Roman Senate. Rome went on to fight a third war with Carthage, besieging and destroying the city between 149-146 B.C.<\/span><\/p>\n

I can\u2019t think of this anecdote without remembering how\u00a0Bush agitated for invading Iraq\u00a0over 10 years after his father\u2019s invasion of the country. Or that just a handful of years after Bush\u2019s 2002 \u201caxis of evil\u201d speech, a presidential candidate sang \u201cbomb bomb Iran\u201d to the tune of\u00a0a Beach Boys pop hit.<\/span><\/p>\n

These and other accounts from ancient Greece and Rome suggest that over history, collective trauma has often created an opportunity for leaders to use social memory \u2013 a culture\u2019s shared stories \u2013 to create justifications for lashing out at the world, careless of any new damage it may cause.<\/span><\/p>\n

As individuals and nations, we don\u2019t act because of what we suffer, but often because of the stories we tell about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Joel Christensen<\/strong><\/span>
\nProfessor of Classical Studies, Brandeis University<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

* Published in print edition on 7 September 2021<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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