Bad History Feeds Dehumanization in Gaza
The Lies about Global History that Americans Believe Feeds the Idea that Non-Europeans are Less Worthy of Life
Death of children should evoke horror by any decent person - and the Hamas murders clearly did, for good reason. But somehow, many Americans seem far less moved by the mass deaths of children and other civilians in Gaza.
A lot of complicated political reasons go into people dehumanizing others enough to justify their mass murder, but the systematic dehumanization of Arabs and those who practice Islam is a big part of it. “Racism” is an answer but I think a more specific part of that comes from comments like this from one propaganda outfit (with 798K followers):
The core idea is that if a people have contributed little to the betterment of humans as a whole - and technological achievement is an obvious baseline for many technocratic people - then the loss of the people themselves is a lesser loss than those (read Israelis) who actually do something for humanity.
For most Americans, the assumption is that “the West” is the source of the largest portion of what makes global society better and that’s based on a history of the world that reinforces that claim. The history most Americans learned goes something like this:
The world was once a warring band of primitives, savage in tooth-and-claw, with little positive interaction between them. Think the world after the Tower of Babel is destroyed and no one understands each other.
But then. A core idea of logic, science, and democratic values was born in Greece, which made real progress in the world possible. These ideas were absorbed into the Roman Empire which built an empire to broadly unite peoples and spread those technical skills and ethos - a positive kicker being the adoption of Christianity by its Emperors. When that empire fell, the world entered the Dark Ages, but that core ethos and knowledge was preserved against that darkness and would be revived in the Renaissance when a new age of Exploration would once again allow the world to be united and advance progress in the world. Yes, there were abuses in that colonial conquest but the results are still overall the betterment of mankind.
So any sadness people feel from bombs that fall on Gaza is tempered by the understanding that preserving outposts of knowledge like Israel against Dark Ages Islamic ideology has been necessary in history to get the world where we are today.
This is, I think, a fair summary of the common understanding most Americans have about global history- and the lens many are looking at the current conflict, as they have in many conflicts where the lives of Muslims have been discounted as less worthy than the Westerners dropping bombs on them.
One could argue we should value people regardless of their culture’s contributions to technological advance - and I think many Americans have that humanitarian impulse - but it’s also worth emphasizing something else.
The global history most Americans understand to be true is complete bunk.
The “West” meaning almost all of Western Europe outside Italy itself was for all but the last 500 years largely a backwater of primitive societies, while for the thousand years plus prior to that, the regions stretching from the Middle East to China had vibrant cities, advanced universities, and a global trading system that the “West” was barely part of because they produced nothing that anyone else had any interest in consuming. The “Renaissance” was largely the West importing knowledge from the Islamic world, including the much-lauded Greek philosophy that had been forgotten in the West but was a standard part of much of Islamic universities’ learning
Why Educating About History Matters
Fighting over history might seem esoteric as bombs fall, but the deep story people tell themselves shapes the biases in who we drop the bombs on - and to whom we recoil from delivering those blasts. In the domestic context, the Right recognizes this and is desperately censoring history to maintain the domestic fictions of white supremacy, so a bit more effort may be needed by progressives in fighting the fictions of “Western Values" Supremacy. Some reading this may know this history well, but for others, I’ll sketch the history largely erased among most adult Americans.
Take a step back to the Roman Empire, for example. Of the four largest cities besides Rome, all were to its East or in Africa. The next five largest cities were also all to the East. Culture, trade, and tax revenue were overwhelmingly located in the Eastern part of the Empire.
This goes with the biggest lie people in the West tell themselves, which is that the Roman Empire “fell,” plunging the world into the Dark Ages.
Rome was sacked and the western part of the empire - you know, the one with no big cities other than Rome and of little economic importance by that point - was overrun in 410AD. However, by that time, Emperor Constantine (the guy who converted the empire to Christianity) had relocated the main capital to Constantinople, today’s Istanbul. A subset of “western emperors” would operate in the Western portion with little power or control until they were finally extinguished in 476.
However, the Eastern Empire would survive for another millennium, although just barely near the end, until Constantinople fell to the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1453. In the 600s, after Rome “fell,” Constantinople would be the largest city in the world with an estimated 600,000 to 1 million people. But its leaders and society looked mostly to the economies and societies to its East, since the West was now economically and socially a backwater.
The Historic Contribution of Islamic Societies
And the now-renamed Byzantine Empire would soon face a new power based in the upsurge of Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries, a power that would sweep through some of its territories and extend power far beyond Rome’s original reach. Islamic Caliphates would build an empire twice the size of Rome’s, extending from the Iberian peninsula in the West almost to the Indus Valley and China in the East.
The Umayyad Caliphate and its successor Abbasid Caliphate would last for a combined six centuries until the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258. A few outlying areas would leave direct control of the Caliphate but the significance of their rule went beyond direct administration over a fixed territory, since their importance lay far more in being the heart of a global trading system uniting Europe, Africa, and Asia for a period far longer than the Pax Romana.
As Peter Frankopan describes in his much-lauded The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
“The economic heartlands of the Roman Empire and Persia had not just been conquered but united. Egypt and Mesopotamia had been linked to form the core of a new economic and political behemoth that stretched from the Himalayas through to the Atlantic Trade routes, oases, cities and natural resources were targeted and subsumed. Ports that connected trade between the Persian Gulf and China were annexed, as were the trans-Saharan trade routes…”
The wealth that flowed in this global society would help fund a wide range of philosophical and scientific advances. Again from Frankopan talking about 10th century Baghdad:
“Wealthy patrons also set about funding one of the most astonishing periods of scholarship in history. Brilliant figures – many of them not Muslim – were drawn to the court at Baghdad and to centres of academic excellence across Central Asia like Bukhara, Merv, Gundishapur and Ghazni, as well as further afield in Islamic Spain and in Egypt, to work on a range of subjects including mathematics, philosophy, physics and geography…Education and learning became a cultural ideal.”
European humanist philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas and scientists like Copernicus centuries later built on the work of Islamic Aristotlean scholars like Abū Sīnā, known in the West as Avicenna, and of astronomers like Abū Rayān al-Bīrūnī, who first proposed that the world revolves around the sun and rotates on an axis. Mathematical developments from India were a key source for “leaps and bounds in algebra, applied mathematics, trigonometry, and astronomy.”
Similarly, the arts that are one of the symbols of the Renaissance built on the dramatic advances in the visual and craft arts earlier in the Islamic world. Techniques of glass and ceramic production and ornamentation that would become a hallmark of European art were first developed in the 8th to 12th centuries in the Islamic world, while the dramatic colors that gave vibrancy to Renaissance paintings were all largely imports from that region via Venetian trade coming to the Continent.
Why Europeans were able to move from the backwater of history to conquer the world after the 15th century is a complicated story. What is true is that having used military power to subjugate the parts of the world that were once the center of global civilization, the Europeans then set about erasing those nations from history, partly as a way to justify their colonial domination.
Technological and artistic contributions are largely dependent on a society being wealthy enough to be able to afford the “idleness” of scholars and artists. Colonialism served to impoverish multiple parts of the world, particularly Islamic ones, that had previously been key contributors to global knowledge - one way colonialism created a self-fulfilling justification for its own dominance.
Erasure of the historical contributions to global society by Islamic nations is a macro version of the historical erasure of the Palestinians, of the idea that it was a “land without a people for a people without a land.”
Evidence of the Impact of Learning Global History on American Views of Muslims
If there is a generational divide on the war in Gaza, as this article and survey highlights, part of the answer may lie in the far more extensive global history many high school students now study.
Up until twenty years ago, little global history was available in US public schools and advanced students were far more likely to study just European History, which has been offered as an Advanced Placement course for more than half a century. The College Board only began offering Advanced Placement World History tests in 2001, but by 2022, over 300,000 students each year were taking it - with only about a third as many now taking the European History test. States like New York and California require a year of World History to graduate - although notably states like Texas do not.
While older adults were exposed mostly to the shorthand summary view of global history discussed at the beginning of this piece, far more younger people have received an education that details the contributions of non-Europeans to building our modern society.
While I don’t want to reduce the generational divide on Gaza and, more generally, the generational divide on views of Muslim societies more generally just to this broader exposure to global history, I do think it matters.
Culture wars do matter and progressives do need to take seriously how what is taught about the global past will impact how Americans think about foreign policy in the present.