We Need New Stories: The Myths That Subvert Freedom by Nesrine Malik

Author:Nesrine Malik [Malik, Nesrine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781324007296
Google: wQcDEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 132400729X
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Published: 2021-05-10T23:00:00+00:00

5

The Myth of National Exceptionalism

What we choose to forget often reveals the limits of justice in our collective imaginations. What we choose to memorialize reflects what we actually value.

—Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

If you take down monuments to evildoers, people will forget the dark parts of history, which is why nobody knows who Hitler was.

—Philomena Cunk

There is no mainstream account of a country’s history that is not a collective delusion. The present cannot be celebrated without the past being edited. For the United States to believe in its American dream, in its land of opportunity, where all men are equal before God and able to achieve whatever they wish through toil and virtue, it cannot be acknowledged that it was built on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and Europe’s poor. If the United Kingdom is to have a sense of pride in its contemporary self, there is no way it can be acknowledged that the country was built on global expansion, resource extraction, and slavery. For Sudan, my country of birth, to believe that it is a unique blend of African and Arab tribes that have thrived by the River Nile for millennia, it cannot be acknowledged that it has been engaged in ethnic warfare for the better part of a century.

Every country has its airbrush. Some airbrushes are universal banal fictions; others are central to a hubris that is internally corrosive and externally predatory, feeding domestic division and global aggression.

And so, our historical heroes too must be edited. Everything from their human rights records and prejudices, to their minor foibles and imperfections, is cleansed. An assassinated Egyptian president is remembered as a pious Muslim, even though he had poured himself a stiff glass of Scotch whisky after every evening prayer. Barack Obama is the healthy basketball-playing president but was reportedly a chain smoker. His image is that of swaggering virtue, giving a fist bump to janitors and channeling the conscience of the nation when he shed tears for the young victims of gun crime, all while he rained hell on civilians in an intensified drone campaign in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. In Sudan, Al Mahdi, the glorified founder of the first Sudanese quasi-nation state and vanquisher of the Anglo-Egyptian occupation, led an army which, as well as defeating the occupying forces, plundered, murdered, raped, and sold into slavery tens of thousands of its own people. This was a man who believed that he was the messiah, sent by Allah himself to purify his land. He is revered in history books and his progeny continue to hold political sway. If he were born in present-day Sudan and announced he was God’s messenger, he would be tried for apostasy.

The past is rewritten in broad strokes, but the present is revised in small amendments or omissions. George W. Bush, a president who, in his time, was seen as a reckless warmonger and the intellectually challenged beneficiary of a trust fund, became the subject of a curious rebrand that began precisely at Donald Trump’s inauguration.

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