the civil war a narrative

Then he added: "And, of course, there is the continuing problem of global terrorism, which is real enough even if it is sometimes grossly exaggerated."
Harries is unusual among conservatives because he almost entirely separates the issue of nuclear proliferation from that of terrorism. This leads him to a conclusion that distinguishes his approach to terrorism from that of other conservatives.

Last year Harries wrote in this newspaper: "Although today we speak of the war on terror, there is nothing comparable to the Cold War in existence today. Osama bin Laden in his cave is not the Soviet Union of the '60s. The use of the term war with respect to terror is metaphorical ... Despite lurid and absurd comparisons with Hitler's Germany, Iraq did not, and terrorism does not, constitute an existential threat." He acknowledges that nuclear proliferation is a great and imminent threat, but says there is no existential threat to the Western world today because no single actor possesses both immense destructive powers and a clear intent to use them against the West.

Unlike Harries, I propose that proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terror should be viewed in the same context. The factor that links the two issues is the spread among Muslim populations of the "single narrative" of world history involving Western and Zionist global oppression of Muslims.

The extreme Islamist single narrative of Western oppression is, as Greg Sheridan has pointed out ("Wearing down the West", Inquirer, May 12), enormously powerful because "any grievance at all, real or imagined, whether based in fact or fantasy or conspiracy, can be fitted into it". It provides an explanation for the Muslim nations' relative powerlessness and for the disappointments of Muslims living under dictatorial Middle Eastern governments or as vulnerable minorities in other societies. The battle for hearts and minds that is needed to undo it will be very difficult and protracted because almost everything Western powers do (except caving in to extremists) will be taken as confirmation of their oppressive proclivities.

Terrorist operatives, some political leaders and government officials, influential and affluent Muslims, ordinary Muslims who sympathise with terrorists and many ordinary Muslims who oppose extremist violence all adhere to one form or another of this single narrative. The narrative contains grains of truth and several points that are at least arguable, but essentially it is an unempirical and illogical, and therefore irrefutable, ideology.

The Western world has difficulty understanding the danger posed by the extreme Islamist single narrative because of the influence of the (originally Marxist) notion that ideologies serve the interests of an oppressor or the oppressed. Various aspects of the narrative are perceived by Western progressives as expressions of Third World resistance, and Western shame over its own worst contribution to ideology - the narrative of white racial supremacy - stops us from critically analysing anti-Western claims. Many Westerners, of course, do not share this leftist perspective, but because of Western secularisation and liberal individualism they nonetheless underestimate the power of religious and collectivist ideas.

The single narrative will continue to influence world affairs for decades. It will recruit individual Muslims to terrorism, it will influence some powerful people in Muslim nations, and it will provide opportunities for leaders who are in conflict with the West - including non-Muslims such as the North Korean leadership - to threaten the West by proxy. This is the connection between WMD proliferation and terror.

The virus of the single narrative started to develop before bin Laden sprang to prominence. What happened on September 11, 2001, was an explosion of imagination that has worsened the West's situation.

The flight crews and passengers on three of the four hijacked planes remained passive while Mohammed Atta and his accomplices took control, because they could not imagine that terrorism was taking a giant leap that fateful day, in terms of the scale of destruction and its ruthless fanaticism. They did not guess, as we would today, that it was a suicide mission. Today we recognise that there are many thousands of people who would not hesitate to cause widespread devastation regardless of its moral enormity.

The establishment of a paranoid Islamist narrative, the explosion of imagination and the risk of WMD proliferation together constitute an existential threat.

It must be admitted that, despite success in some areas, the Western world's anti-terror campaign has achieved little progress of strategic significance since 2001:

* The risk of significant terror attacks remains high.

* Violent extremists retain the support of a substantial minority of Muslims.

* It remains a distinct possibility that states with WMD capacity support terrorists or that armed states will develop in a radical Islamist direction.

Quick and decisive progress in influencing the behaviour of Islamists and their supporters was never going to be easy to achieve because of the irrational and viral nature of the ideology. The most unnecessary setback in the struggle against terror has been the divisions within and between Western nations.

The divided West's impotence in confronting Islamist extremism and terrorism is underlined by the failure of many Westerners to distinguish between political opponents (in their own country and in allied democracies) and real global enemies. There is no consensus in the West about who the real enemy is. According to some surveys, many people in Western nations believe the US is the world's most dangerous power.

The Right blames this lack of consensus on the influence on public opinion of leftist relativism. Progressive analyses contend that power structures in the West are responsible for most of the world's problems and conflicts. However, the Right carries a large part of the blame for the West's disunity. Internationally, there has been a change for the worse in the way political battles and campaigns are fought. At the turn of the millennium, an increasingly ascendant Right employed divisive tactics in their quest for domestic power.

This new style of political campaigning was pioneered in the US by strategists such as Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

In the November 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Green's profile captured the essence of Karl Rove's ruthless political methodology: "(Rove) seems to understand - indeed, to count on - the media's unwillingness or inability, whether from squeamishness, laziness or professional caution, ever to give a full estimate of him or his work. It is ultimately not just Rove's skill but his character that allows him to perform on an entirely different plane. Along with remarkable strategic skills, he has both an understanding of the media's unstated self-limitations and a willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others."

In last month's cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, on Rove's (and thereby George W. Bush's) fatal mistakes, Green identifies the Right's terrible error: "Rove, forever in thrall to the mechanics of winning by dividing, consistently lacked the ability to transcend the campaign mind-set and see beyond the struggle nearest at hand. In a world made new by September 11, he put terrorism and war to work in an electoral rather than a historical context (my emphasis), and used them as wedge issues instead of as the unifying basis for the new political order he sought."

The hyperbole and ruthlessness of the Right's political philosophy and methodology, recognised in Green's analysis of Rove, has created a situation in which the Right does not have a consensus behind the war on terror and the Left has turned mad with disorientation, so blinded by anger at the Right's political tactics that terror suspect Jack Thomas and David Hicks are portrayed as latter-day Rosa Parkses and Nelson Mandelas in the struggle against rightist Western tyranny.

The West's domestic response to terror was originally one of national unity. The response of respected jurist and humanitarian Hal Wootten QC, in a letter to The Australian following the Bali bombing in 2002, struck me as correct from the beginning. He wrote: "Archbishop (Peter) Carnley's suggestion that Australian policies may have influenced the choice of Bali targets is plausible but unhelpful. If policy is bad, it should be revised for that reason, not in deference to terrorism. If it is good, it should not yield to intimidation. The real lesson is the importance of framing good, long-term policies." Alas, the political discussion about terror then turned into just another front in the culture wars between the Left and the Right.

This has been a tragedy and in 2007 we find ourselves a country starkly divided, not over how the threat of terror should be dealt with but over the nature of the threat and the identity of the enemy. In the minds of too many it is the US and Bush who are the threat, not radical Islamists.

It is appropriate that there should be vigorous democratic debate about how a campaign against Islamist terrorism should be conducted, but Australia and Western nations generally are still impotently grappling with basic questions about whether there is a threat and who the enemy is.

In a common law country such as Australia, the question of civil freedoms has been particularly fraught. Paul Kelly, in The Australian, has expressed the profound antagonism between Australia's executive government and the legal establishment. In my view, whatever the merits of Julian Burnside QC's criticisms of the Howard Government's treatment of refugees and its many sins, I would hate to live in a country where Burnside was in charge of national security.

The relationship between the rule of law and security is one that requires a balanced resolution. For this reason, the speech by former High Court chief justice Gerard Brennan to a conference in Brisbane in August was an important step in moving beyond the present impasse.

Brennan said: "Incursions on the rule of law may be essential to combat the risk of terror. Only a modicum of freedom can be traded for security without affecting the rule of law. The legal profession can seek to ensure that the values of the common law are preserved to the extent possible at the time when we are concerned by the threat of terrorism."

However, he continued, "That is not to suggest that it is the function of the institutional profession to oppose any law simply because it trespasses upon one of the values of the common law. Most lawyers are familiar with the danger created by ordinary criminal conduct (but) lawyers generally do not know the true nature and extent of the threat posed by terrorism today."

There is an urgent need for transcendent leadership to emerge in the West. Cultural war is not the means to wage an effective war againstterrorism.

The Civil War: A Narrative
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
The Civil War: A Narrative (1974), a three volume, 3,000-page, 1.2 million-word history of the American Civil War by Shelby Foote, is the work for which he is best known. While it touches on political and social themes, the main thrust of the work is military history. The individual volumes include Fort Sumter to Perryville (1958), Fredericksburg to Meridian (1963), and Red River to Appomattox (1974).

Contents
1 Writing
2 Volumes
2.1 Fort Sumter to Perryville
2.2 Fredericksburg to Meridian
2.3 Red River to Appomattox
3 Shelby Foote's comments on writing
4 Detailed release information
5 References



[edit] Writing
On the strength of the novel Shiloh, Random House asked Foote for a short Civil War history. Foote soon realized that the project would require much more time and energy. Random House agreed, and using the money from his 1955 Guggenheim Fellowship (Foote won Guggenheims also in 1956 and 1959), Foote set out to write the trilogy's first volume, Fort Sumter to Perryville. This 400,000-word account was published in 1958. By 1963 Foote had finished the second volume, Fredericksburg to Meridian.

In 1964 he began Volume 3, Red River to Appomattox, but found himself repeatedly distracted by the ongoing events in the nation and was not able to finish and publish it until 1974. Writing the third volume took as many years as had the first two combined.


[edit] Volumes

[edit] Fort Sumter to Perryville
The first volume covers the roots of the war to the Battle of Perryville on October 8, 1862. All the significant battles are here, from Bull Run through Shiloh, the Seven Days Battles, Second Manassas to Antietam, and Perryville in the fall of 1862, but so are the smaller and often equally important engagements on both land and sea: Ball's Bluff, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island No. Ten, New Orleans, Monitor versus Merrimac, and Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign.


[edit] Fredericksburg to Meridian
The second volume is dominated by the almost continual confrontation of great armies. The starting point for this volume is the Battle of Fredericksburg, fought on December 13, 1862, between General Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac commanded by Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside. For the fourth time, the Army of the Potomac attempts to take Richmond, resulting in the bloodbath at Fredericksburg. Then Joseph Hooker tries again, only to be repulsed at Chancellorsville as Stonewall Jackson turns his flank, resulting in Jackson's death.

In the West, one of the most complex and determined sieges of the war has begun. Here, Ulysses S. Grant's seven relentless efforts against Vicksburg demonstrate Lincoln and Grant's determination.

With Vicksburg finally under siege, Lee again invades the North. The three-day conflict at Gettysburg receives plenty of attention in the book. (The lengthy chapter on Gettysburg has also been published as a separate book, Stars in Their Courses.)


[edit] Red River to Appomattox
Foote brings to a close the story of four years of turmoil and strife that altered American life forever. The final volume opens with the beginning of the two final, major confrontations of the war: Grant against Lee in Virginia, and Sherman pressing Johnston in North Georgia in 1864. The narrative describes the events and battles from Sherman's march to the sea to Lincoln's assassination and the surrender of Lee at Appomattox.


[edit] Shelby Foote's comments on writing
I am what is called a narrative historian. Narrative history is getting more popular all the time but it's not a question of twisting the facts into a narrative. It's not a question of anything like that. What it is, is discovering the plot that's there just as the painter discovered the colors in shadows or Renoir discovered these children. I maintain that anything you can possibly learn about putting words together in a narrative form by writing novels is especially valuable to you when you write history. There is no great difference between writing novels and writing histories other than this: If you have a character named Lincoln in a novel that's not Abraham Lincoln, you can give him any color eyes you want to. But if you want to describe the color of Abraham Lincoln's, President Lincoln's eyes, you have to know what color they were. They were gray. So you're working with facts that came out of documents, just like in a novel you are working with facts that came out of your head or most likely out of your memory. Once you have control of those facts, once you possess them, you can handle them exactly as a novelist handles his facts. No good novelist would be false to his facts, and certainly no historian is allowed to be false to his facts under any circumstances. I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way. ― Shelby Foote seminar excerpt, New York State Writers Institute, March 20, 1997.