True memory, real history, and Western civilization

Some weeks ago, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation demonstrated exactly why historical memory requires deliberate protection when its internal guidance instructed journalists to avoid independently describing 9/11 as a “terrorist attack.” This followed a decades-old CBC policy of requiring attribution for terms such as terrorism even when describing an event whose perpetrators deliberately hijacked civilian aircraft for an ideologically motivated mass-casualty attack.

This was just twenty-five years after September 11, 2001.

After substantial public criticism, CBC reversed that specific guidance and permitted its journalists to describe September 11 directly as terrorism. It was a welcome correction because linguistic delicacy becomes absurd when everyone involved already knows exactly what occurred, and the principal historical question concerns whether the next generation will know it too.

Civilizations live through memory. When a society becomes embarrassed by accurate descriptions of its own catastrophes because somebody somewhere might dislike the terminology, historical education slowly becomes therapeutic storytelling. Then, everyone receives emotional protection while the truth waits politely outside.

The biblical world understood the danger of forgetfulness with considerably greater sophistication than many modern institutions. Israel received an entire covenantal culture structured around remembering what God had done within actual history and teaching those deeds deliberately to children who had not witnessed them.

At Passover, the Jewish family enters into the foundational story of deliverance through the Haggadah, and the youngest participant traditionally asks the famous question derived from the ritual structure of Exodus 12 and 13: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Children eventually inherit events they never experienced, and so the survival of a people requires parents to transform inherited history into living memory through ritualized narration that gives the next generation an intelligible account of who they are.

Deuteronomy repeatedly commands Israel to remember because covenantal amnesia produces moral disintegration, and Moses therefore warned the people to “take heed, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things which your eyes have seen” while explicitly commanding them to teach these things “to your children and your children’s children” (Dt 4:9).

Consequently, the biblical command to remember reaches far beyond nostalgia. Israel remembers Egypt so that freedom retains moral content. Israel remembers Sinai so that liberty remains governed by truth. And Israel remembers divine judgment so that prosperity never persuades the nation that history began yesterday.

Christianity inherited this profoundly Jewish understanding of memory because Jesus instituted the Eucharist with the command “Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19), while Saint Paul handed on the same memorial structure when he taught the Corinthians that the Church proclaims the Lord’s death whenever she eats the bread and drinks the cup (1 Cor 11:23–26).

Western civilization developed within a Judeo-Christian understanding. Memory became a moral responsibility because human beings require truthful accounts of the past in order to understand inherited institutions and recognize recurring forms of evil.

September 11 requires deliberate remembrance precisely because an American who was born on September 12, 2001, can now be a twenty-four-year-old teacher, police officer, or soldier who possesses no personal memory of watching the second aircraft strike the South Tower.

Within another generation, millions of Americans will know September 11 exclusively through what parents, teachers, journalists, and historians choose to tell them, which means every euphemism introduced today becomes part of the memorial inheritance received tomorrow.

The historical facts themselves are brutally straightforward. Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four passenger aircraft and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while passengers aboard Flight 93 resisted their captors before the aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission consequently described September 11 as a day of “unprecedented shock and suffering” that transformed the United States.

This event is unique among historical events in recent American history. Its perpetrators selected internationally recognizable symbols of American economic and military power and converted commercial technology into instruments of spectacular violence intended for a global audience. It was willfully and deliberately globally performative.

It differed geopolitically, too, because a transnational terrorist organization operating from a sanctuary thousands of miles away demonstrated that a comparatively small network could inflict significant strategic damage upon the world’s foremost military power without possessing conventional armies or territorial sovereignty, thereby rocking not just the US but the entire world.

It differed ideologically because al-Qaeda understood its violence through an explicitly Islamic framework in which Osama bin Laden invoked jihad and employed Islamic history along with Qur’anic references. The United States was presented as an enemy within a religiously framed struggle.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s description of America as the “Great Satan” emerged from the revolutionary Shiite ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Al Qaeda is part of Sunni Islam. Yet both treat America and the West as enemies.

Bernard Lewis, in his 1990 essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” wrote, “This is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.” Samuel P. Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), wrote that “the underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.” Sharia law and the Quranic worldview denies equal citizenship and religious and individual liberty, and directly conflicts with the constitutional inheritance of the West.

Civilization survives through truthful distinctions, and remembering September 11 requires enough intellectual maturity to identify the ideology of its perpetrators and their religious designation. A society committed to freedom of conscience must recognize that Islam is a religious legal system that demands civil penalties for apostasy. A Western constitutional order that is committed to equality before the law cannot accommodate syariah and textual Quranic social worldviews. The crash was always imminent, and we are ignorant if we don’t recognize it.

The 9/11 Commission reached essentially the same strategic conclusion when it warned that the enemy could never adequately be described through the generic abstraction of “terrorism” because the actual danger involved Islamist terrorism and the ideological movement capable of inspiring future violence long after individual terrorist leaders disappeared.

Yet the greatest danger after twenty-five years may increasingly become something far more ordinary than another aircraft because ordinary forgetfulness can accomplish culturally what violence frequently seeks politically by severing a people from the history that explains why their institutions exist.

Parents need to tell their children what happened on September 11, and teachers need to explain who attacked the United States, along with what those perpetrators believed and why the attacks changed the international order.

Show them the photographs when they are old enough to understand them and tell them about firefighters climbing stairwells toward people desperately descending because heroism becomes intelligible through particular human beings rather than sanitized abstractions.

Tell them about Flight 93 because courage requires examples. Explain why ordinary passengers understood within minutes that their decisions could determine whether another American landmark filled with innocent people would be destroyed.

Explain the civilization that those victims inhabited because remembering what was attacked eventually requires remembering what deserves preservation, including constitutional government and religious liberty, together with the Christian understanding of the human person that profoundly shaped the West.

Every civilization eventually receives the question asked around the Passover table in another form because every generation of children asks why this day is different from other days. Our answer determines what they inherit.

September 11 is different because nearly three thousand people were murdered through a coordinated terrorist operation whose architects wanted the world to understand that the attack represented an ideological declaration against America and the civilization it represented.

Twenty-five years later, our obligation therefore remains painfully simple because memory protects truth while truth protects civilization, and a people that teaches its children what happened possesses at least the possibility of recognizing the forces that produced it.

The biblical command remains urgent for precisely this reason: “Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you; your elders, and they will tell you” (Dt 32:7).

And never surrender the inheritance merely because accurate memory has somehow become impolite.