The Future of Nostalgia

Margalit Fox’s Times obituary of Svetlana Boym, the Curt Hugo Reisinger professor of Slavic languages and literatures and comparative literature at Harvard (“Svetlana Boym, 56, Scholar of Myth and Memory Dies, NYT, 8/22/13) discusses one of her works, The Future of Nostalgia. Fox writes,  “Throughout the book, Dr. Boym grappled with two essential questions. Can a past that has slipped out of reach be reclaimed by means of nostalgia? Should it ever be?” Fox goes on to elaborate on two kinds of nostalgia that Boym identifies, "one salubrious” and affording consolation and one dangerous in its attempts to be “restorative.” Fox quotes Boym about the latter case to the effect that, “This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the anti-modern mythmaking of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths.” Thus one type of nostalgia for the past might result in works art like Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity and the other the other the treatment of historical wounds by the excavation and elevation of the Swastika. A similar tendency infused the Serbian crusade for ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and in particular the siege of Sarajevo, a city of both historic and mythic significance for both Bosnians and Serbs. The same might be said of the slaughter of Tutsi by Hutus and of Shiites by Sunnis (and the reverse) and of Armenians by Turks to name only a few modern holocausts. Boym’s fascinating obit describes a deracinated existence which must have provided the existential experience for the creation of her theories and her premature demise only adds a bittersweet ending to a dramatic story of survival in the Soviet era. The brilliantly oxymoronic title of the book epitomizes the historical conundrum that Boym explores. And what is fascinating is how unclear the divide is between the two forms of memory that Boym underscores. At what point is melancholy turned into militant idealization? When does the reliving of the past, with its litany of depredations, turn into a crusade against imagined slights that have no real relation to present reality and life?

Iraqistan

Irrendentism is a poli-sci term which refers to the propensity of Balkanized states to reconstitute themselves as part of the larger political entity to which they once belonged. Vladimir Putin is an irrententist to the extent that he would essentially like to bring back the U.S.S.R. (as is evidenced by his aggressive actions in the Ukraine). The problem with Iraq, despite being the cradle of civilization, is that it never really was a political entity with a history of sociopolitical homogeneity. Iraq was a creation, the troubled legacy of British colonialism. It’s basically a tribal society which has always been divided. So when President Obama considers the once unthinkable return to interventionism in Iraq—igniting airstrikes against ISIS in the hopes of preventing an al-Qaeda type insurgency (actually ISIS is a more radical group which had been expelled from al-Qaeda), he should think about the potential nominees. Nouri al-Maliki supported Shiite interests, but who is to say that more moderate Sunni cadres will be any more dependable? The Sunnis were the faction from which Saddam Hussein emanated. Kurdish leaders used the impending overrunning of Kirkuk by ISIS to take control of the city and it’s hard to think that ISIS could easily threaten the well-organized Kurdish military. As The Washington Post pointed out,  Iraqi Kurdistan is emerging as one of the more stable parts of the country (“Amid turmoil, Iraq’s Kurdish region is laying foundation for independent state,” 6/12/14). Why not put all our cards on the Kurds? Kurdish society, with its relatively more democratic institutions seems like a perfect proxy for the kind of democratic initiatives the US supports.  While the Kurds have a checkered history when it comes to human rights and the rights of women n particular, (“Rights report cites abuses in Kurdish Iraq,” CNN, 4/14/14), Kurdistan could be to Iraq what Israel, in a good sense, is to the Middle East in general. Instead of courting further international sanctions and the disapprobation of those elements of the Iraqi population that will be endangered by air strikes against ISIS, why not simply shore up Kurdistan? It may sound like the old cold war policy of spheres of influence, but as we can see in the instance of Kirkuk, a strong Kurdistan seems to be the best insurance against making Iraq into a major outpost of Islamic extremism.