Poetry
Temme, Leonard A.
served as a political agent. Even before reaching the New World, John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, instructed his Puritan congregation to be "as a shining city upon a...
...In 1630, Winthrop warned gravely that "the eyes of the world are upon us," a responsibility echoed by George Bush in his 1991 State of the Union address...
...Cloaked in morality, our actions often seem unimpeachable--at least to us...
...Small wonder that the president can cash in handsomely with a few easy references to this ignoble past...
...Dispassionate analysis shows that the United States had expressed national interest in Europe before World War II...
...The ideal remained powerfully fixed in the American mind, nursed along by heroes like Abraham Lincoln ("last, best hope of earth") and Woodrow Wilson in his policy of neutrality pursued from "Olympian heights...
...Our popular history tells us repeatedly that appeasement was cowardly, that it failed, even that it was morally reprehensible...
...Students who begin to study World War II with the precon224: Commonweal...
...and that defeating Hitler offered tangible economic and diplomatic rewards...
...All too often, however, our moral language allows us to hide our real motives and ignore the actual facts at issue...
...In the Middle East, on the contrary, our national interests have never been fully defined...
...By sounding highly subjective moral themes, presidents and moviemakers convey a great deal of subliminal information~ History students, however, would do better divorcing, at least momentarily, issues of morality from their study of the past...
...But there are obvious dangers...
...In comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler, for example, Bush assumed that Americans remember Hitler in moral terms far more accurately than they remember him in historical ones, and that most don't care to disentangle the two...
...In doing so, Taylor began to rescue another historical event--the so-called appeasement--from the closet of disrepute...
...Few nations even bother to measure their conduct against such daunting moral standards...
...that Americans owed a great deal of their history and culture to Germany and England, the two principal combatants in 1941...
...Even before reaching the New World, John Winthrop, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, instructed his Puritan congregation to be "as a shining city upon a hill," a religious bastion initially, but also an enclave with a beacon...
...Even Ronald Reagan employed the "shining city" metaphor (though not its spirit) in his 1984 acceptance speech at the Republican convention...
...J.E Taylor, perhaps the most distinguished historian of modem Europe, was criticized severely for arguing that Hitler's rise to power did not oblige historians to couch their analysis in moral terms...
...Students must learn to differentiate among historical contexts...
...America's attitude in this respect is something to be proud of...
...Arab and American culture seem starkly different...
...Moreover, in diplomatic terms the president's policy may have suffered diminishing returns from the Hitler analogy: since one can't very well negotiate with the morally reprehensible, the president may not have been able to respond freely to diplomatic initiatives...
...and we say we are not seeking rewards for our efforts...
...For example, if we accept the Hitler analogy, the inescapable moral judgment surrounding Hitler doesn't hold up when applied to Hussein and the Gulf war...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 7
