By Donald W. Haynes

For the Salisbury Post

Are the pundits speaking a bit grandiosely in saying that Nov. 13, 2015, in Paris, France, was a date after which “the world will never be the same again?” Since that “game changer” evening, I have run my own “memory scanner” to other events that have re-hinged history.

In President Jimmy Carter’s book, “The Blood of Abraham ,” he rightly saw in Abraham the progenitor of  three great religions — all having a common DNA. Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Jesus was crucified by the Roman Empire in about 30 A.D., but in 313 A.D., Roman Emperor Constantine was baptized a Christian! Historian Will Durant interpreted that so well: “Caesar and Christ had met in the arena of human history and Christ had won.” The hinges of history were re-hung.

Mohammed was born in 570 and died in 632. In only two decades after his death, Christianity’s entire North Africa region had converted to Islam, including the homeland of St. Augustine in Carthage. The hinges of history were re-hung.

Except for the Coptic Christians, North Africa has remained Islamic since. Subsequently, Europe has almost become Muslim twice by military defeat, not conversion — in 732 in Spain by Charles Martel and again at the gates of Vienna in 1529.

In 1095, Pope Urban II called on the nobility and peasants of Europe to conquer Palestine and “take the Holy Land from the infidels.” The six crusades over the next century and a half invented three words that still haunt us — “Crusades,” “Holy Land,” and “infidels.” The ignominy of those words is indelibly etched in the cultural and religious memory of the Muslim world, and they are the inflaming battle-cry of jihadist Islam to this day. The pope re-hung the hinges of history.

Here in America, in 1619, 20 African slaves were unloaded in Jamestown, Va. One year later, 102 English and Dutch passengers landed at Plymouth Rock. Forty of them were called “Pilgrims.” By 1640, they were replaced culturally by another group called “Puritans.” One of their religious prisoners, Roger Williams, became the real father of American personal liberty. The slave ship, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and Roger Williams re-hung the hinges of American history.

The American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and the most amazing of all civil documents, the Constitution of the United States, were all written into the pages of history by one generation! Truly, the “Founding Fathers” re-hung the hinges of all history.

The firing on Ft. Sumter in 1861 revealed the sad truth that “a nation divided against itself cannot prevail.” The Civil War ravished the South for a century. The assassination of President Lincoln ended any hope that his generous and wise words might prevail: “With malice to none and charity to all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in — to bind up the nation’s wounds, care for him who have borne the battle, and his widow and his orphan. …” The hinges of segregation closed the door opened on bloody battlefields and proclaimed by Lincoln.

The hinges of history were again re-hung with shame when the victors of World War I were determined to rub the proud nose of Germany in the mud of defeat. With the “Treaty of Paris” in 1918, the hinges of history were again re-hung for the worse. That day they set in motion the rise of Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich, the Holocaust and the creation of totally artificial Islamic nations whose hatred killed more than a hundred in Paris.

President Roosevelt called the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor “the day that will live in infamy.” The “greatest generation” accomplished unconditional surrender in two theaters of war. Militarily, it ended with the dropping of history’s first atomic bomb on Aug. 6, 1945, saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese and Americans. That re-hanging of the hinges of history had a double impact — the victory of freedom over tyranny and the beginning of the Nuclear Age.

Contrary to most wars, 1945 was the beginning of an era almost without parallel — the era of “American exceptionalism.” America jump-started the economy of the vanquished, and, as Colin Powell reminded the nations of the world, the “only real estate we requested was a place to bury our dead.” General MacArthur set up a new political order, and W. Edwards Deming set up a Japanese economy, both of which became the marvel of the world. We fed Germany with the Berlin airlift in the winter of 1948, saving it from being another casualty of Russian communism. So it is that post-war American sheer goodness did what no victor in war had ever done before. History’s hinges were again re-hung.

However, in response to Hitler’s extermination of 6 million Jews, the United Nations partitioned Palestine, and took Arab land to create the state of Israel. The result has been a legacy of unrelenting hatred and conflict. The hinges of history were again re-hung.

When the Russians put “Sputnik” into orbit in 1957, the space age took on a new dimension. Even our public school curricula was dramatically revamped! “Sputnik” was a re-hinging of history.

The naive narratives of foreign policy under two American presidents has brought us to the present hour of fear, ethical predicaments, terrorism and the winds of war. One was that in President Bush’s response to the destruction of the World Trade Towers on 9/11/01, he seemed unaware of Arab memory of the Crusades and Treaty of Versailles. He also seemed uninformed about Shia and Sunni Islam and Sharia law. The other naive foreign policy narrative was President Obama’s promise of “peace in our time” based on his ideology and rhetoric.

The present and future will force us to replace American triumphalism with what Austrian Prime Minister Metternich long ago labeled “real politik.”  In the “great game” of diplomacy among the giants, real politik acknowledges that different cultures, religions and ethnicities see the world differently because of differing histories. When reality is denied, we sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

With Nov. 13, 2015, the absurdity of the cultural pygmies threatens civilization. That brand of evil has been the fate of humankind since Cain killed his brother, Abel, and “settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” (Genesis 4:16)

 

Dr. Donald W. Haynes lives in Ashboro and is an adjunct faculty member at Hood Theological Seminary.