When the study of history, politics, and society is policed by regimes which limit, or even discourage, freedom of speech in general and academic freedom in particular — and the current wars in the Middle East, which attract criticisms of Zionism and the policies of Israel, are a few cases in point — the preconditions for quietism and scholasticide – are established.

Over time, the past will be acknowledged only according to whatever versions of it receive the imprimatur of authority. Society, as a whole, will suffer from what the poet Czeslaw Milosz, diagnosed as “historical amnesia".

This refusal to remember will be the desired outcome of those who successfully pleaded unscrupulously in the name of a special cause at the expense of the whole truth.

It will enable all who are ruled by this regime to live in an eternal, agreeable and guilt-free present oblivious to how they got here and what the costs were.

It will also make them prone to reacting savagely to any disruptions — not least those described as terrorism (however poorly defined) — and embracing a war against it whenever the call is made. Lost will be the ability to see the absurdity of it because historical amnesia has negated the imagination and the power of seeing connections.

In what follows below, I have selected the US as a suitable but not exclusive case study because it proclaimed the global crusade which was the War on Terror and which, unquestioningly, Australia followed. Indeed, despite giving notice that Palestine will quite soon be recognised as a state, the evidence indicates that Canberra is still incapable of understanding the US as an author of terrorism.

No? Then where is the reflection in the lack of recognition that should accompany the following (very abridged) history?

Consider the national celebration which is Thanksgiving. It is popularly thought of as a harvest festival; its specific origins are in the proclamation of a holiday by the Governor of Plymouth after a colonial militia had returned from a massacre of the men, women and children of a village of indigenous people.

Nor was this an isolated case. Numerous travesties and massacres were to follow in later years throughout North America – at Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Fallen Timbers and on the Trail of Tears, just to name a handful. At the Sand Creek massacre, the genitals of indigenous women were carved from their corpses and retained as souvenirs.

Terrorism, even genocide, were both official policies and a military strategies, whether it was in the aforementioned events, or in the following representative examples:

• Washington’s instructions to General John Sullivan in 1779 to lay waste to, and terrorise the Iroquois Federation;

• Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 decision to approve the terror and extermination campaigns of Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant;

• Sherman’s instructions, two years later, to Grant, to exterminate the Sioux;

• President Theodore Roosevelt’s sanctioned massacres by the US Army in the Philippines in 1901;

• Further officially sanctioned campaigns of the same nature in Vietnam known to us as the Phoenix Program, or the My Lai and Tiger Force massacres;

• The plausibly deniable (and botched) assassination attempt on Sheik Fadlallah in Beirut which killed 80 and wounded 200 in 1985..

Clearly, if references to them is any guide, these events are not considered instructive. What, then, are the prospects for educating people through examinations of even more recent history?

Given both the widespread proscription of critcising Israel under the IHRA definition of antisemitism and, additionally, the Trump administration’s campaign against whatever it considers to be anti-American, how credible is the proposition that universities could offer undergraduate courses in which the following are included, juxtaposed, and critically understood?

That Muslim terrorists comprise only part of the terrorist spectrum.

Timothy McVeigh was convicted of detonating a truck bomb in front of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, which resulted in 168 deaths. He was Catholic.

In 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler in the West Bank city of Hebron, opened fire on Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding 150. He died at the scene, and his grave later became a pilgrimage site for extremists in Israel. He was a Jewish-American

Murderers of abortion doctors in the US frequently carry out their crimes in the name of evangelical Christianity.

That the Obama Administration claimed to have unreviewable authority to kill American citizens outside combat zones in the Global War on Terror if they are deemed a threat.

In November 2010, the Obama Administration argued before a federal court that it had, and should have, sweeping powers to target and to kill US citizens anywhere in the world, and that no court had any role in reviewing that power, or the legal standards that apply. And Obama acted accordingly.

That some of the most revered figures in US political life are, based on abundant and available evidence, war criminals or terrorists and guilty of atrocities which include:

Three names will suffice. Ronald Reagan, who defended the “dirty war” waged by the military junta in Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, armed the Guatemalan military in their internal genocidal and terroristic military campaigns against the Mayans, and declared the military dictator who unleashed death squads upon them, General (Efrain Rios Montt), to be “a man of great personal integrity.”

Henry Kissinger, for (very briefly) his “involvement in the war in Indochina, mass murder in Bangladesh, planned assassinations in Santiago, Nicosia, and Washington DC, and genocide in East Timor”.

Richard Holbrooke, who began his career in the infamous assassination program, which then became genocidal, known officially as Phoenix, graduated through executive control of US support for the Islamic mujahedeen in Afghanistan, and a coalition of exiled Cambodians (which included a mass murderer), to a central role in organising the military and institutional framework responsible for the mass slaughter of Yugoslav people, and the creation of a statelet — Kosovo — synonymous with heroin trafficking, white slavery and the international trade in human organs.

That terrorism in a cause favoured by the United States will be indulged. 

The most obvious case in point is hard line anti-Castro personality and former CIA agent, Luis Posada Carriles, identified by US intelligence and Immigration and Customs Enforcement as a terrorist, specifically, as the mastermind of the 1976 midair destruction of a Cuban airliner carrying 73 people and a series of hotel bombings in Havana, all of which he boasted about: when arrested in 2005 and finally charged, it was only on counts of making “false statements” and the fraudulent use of documents to enter the US. The US refused to extradite him to the Venezuela – which had a legitimate claim to him in relation to the bombing of the airliner.

That Jewish terrorism in the 1940s was both tactically and strategically significant.

Zionist groups committed attacks against the British and Palestinian civilians, and were described as terrorists by prominent figures and organisations at the time. Their leaders included two future prime ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. Two such groups, the Irgun and Lehi, were involved in the 1948 massacre of Palestinian villagers in Deir Yassin.

The question asked above requires no answer; the recent record shades it as rhetorical.

And Australia in all of this?

• Lest we forget, long before Australia was “settled,” it was in reality invaded and it would be historical nonsense to deny that this was violent — terroristic in all honesty — and the country’s history since then is embedded in that violence even as, to a greater of lesser extent, so many benefit from it.

• Beyond these shores, it is well to remember the Surafend massacre committed against the inhabitants of Sarafand al-Amar and a Bedouin camp by Australian, New Zealand, and Scottish soldiers on 19 December 1918.

Where might this leave us?

“You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you.” The point of the exercise is not just to provide us with an affirmation of a preferred image, but to create an encounter to see the self deeper – as Michael Walzer writes of it, to see ourselves “all pretence shattered, stripped of our moral makeup, naked".

The experience is a reckoning with the truths, partial truths, untruths and outright lies that fortify our respectability and, worse, our sense of superiority. By definition it should be a mortifying process. It should be excruciating. It requires rejection.

But it should not lead to paralysis. Time and space will be created and a clearer vision of the surrounding topography will be apparent. Within them, the possibilities for turning away from deformed habits of mind that dominated in the past will arise. A field of choice perhaps?

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.