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Peace and safety we shall find.

But the chords of memory can also be understood in a less literal way. Perhaps Lincoln was saying that it was only common, shared memories of being American that could eventually bind the nation together again. He spoke with an undaunted certainty: even if civil war were to sunder them temporarily, those memories would be restored. By contrast much of this book describes memories that undoubtedly bind and unite but not in a good cause. The French poet Paul Valéry wrote, almost three quarters of a century ago, that “history inebriates nations … saddles them with false memories.” His words are the epigraph at the beginning of this book. Historical memory, for many oppressed minorities, is honored as a defiant act of resistance; but at the same time we now also know that memory, written and oral, is only at best a partial recollection. False memories, as this book has recounted, are often the means by which hatred is sustained or reinvigorated.29 Much of what describes the past today, particularly in popular formats—on television or in film—is a form of memory, oral rather than written, a concatenation of impressions. Few of the memorial connections I have described extending over many centuries conform to the paradigm of normal, documentary history. This gulf between history and memory is widening rapidly, and to our peril.30

JUST BEFORE WRITING THESE FINAL PAGES I WAS SENT A BOOK WITH (for me) an irresistible title. The joint authors of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror—David Frum and Richard Perle—are figures in the shadows of the Bush administration. Now, they have produced “a manual for victory.” At first sight it seemed just one of many hurriedly assembled “tracts for the time.”31 But this one is more interesting than most such productions, because it is written in a kind of Orwellian Newspeak. In his novel 1984, George Orwell analyzed the language of his new society. Here words were divided up into three categories: the A, B, and C vocabularies. A words were those “needed for the business of everyday life—for such things as eating, drinking, working, putting on one’s clothes, going up and down stairs, riding in vehicles, gardening, cooking, and the like.” C words were scientific and technical terms. But Frum and Perle write mostly in B words.

The B vocabulary consisted of words which had been deliberately constructed for political purposes: words, that is to say, which not only had in every case a political implication, but were intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them … The B words were a sort of verbal shorthand, often packing whole ranges of ideas into a few syllables, and at the same time more accurate and forcible than ordinary language.32

For Frum and Perle, France fulfills the role of the evil and despicable Eastasia (or Eurasia) in Orwell’s parable, while political enemies, and others who engage in “thoughtcrime,” are disposed of on every page. One fine Newspeak rodomontade concludes the first chapter:

For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation’s great cause. We do not believe that Americans are fighting this evil to minimize it or to manage it. We believe they are fighting to win—to end this evil before it kills again and on a genocidal scale. There is no middle way for Americans: It is victory or holocaust.33

The use of “holocaust” (without an initial capital) is pure Newspeak B. Neither author can be unaware of what “holocaust” means to a modern audience.34 In this context they elide the transient horror of terrorism with the unending horror of the Nazi exterminations. Is the alternative really “victory” or the careful, planned, systematic, efficient, and remorseless extermination of an entire culture? If that really is what they mean, there is not a shred of concrete evidence for it in the book. Yet if the language of An End to Evil is a string of neologisms, its structure, intention, and method are very old indeed.

In 1486 two Dominican monks,