During the occupation, thousands of houses and buildings in Kuwait had been ransacked of their furniture, office supplies, jewelry, artwork, cultural artifacts, electronics, and anything considered of value. The large scale looting of the Kuwait National Museum and its humongous collection of Islamic memorabilia is just one example of what the occupiers did
In recent years, there has been a positive trend to put the Kuwait experience into a larger context of the ruthlessness of war and suppression of minorities in neighboring Iraq. This is reflected in the by the efforts at the Kuwaiti Memorial Museum to link its memories of occupation and rape of the homeland to the other abuses of Saddam Hussein, such as the gassing and chemical bombing in the 1980s in Kurdish areas Inside there is a vivid display of life-sized figures of villages who are left slaughtered and gassed in their Kurdish townships.
The focus of such a memorial museum is first of all to serve as a witness to what the people in Kuwait in their current mad-paced attempt to build a new world in the post Saddam era are likely to forget-that is, not pass on to their offspring in decades ahead.
The second focus is to remind visitors of the alliance that really did create for Kuwaitis a New World in February 1991: This is a world described in one brochure as a place "that discards the theory of survival of the fittest or the weak being eaten by the strong." The founders of the museum want to remind the peoples of the world and their national leaders that in the end there is no room in this world for tyranny and dictators.
AMERICAN, GERMAN, AND JAPANESE MEMORIES 2007
As alluded to above, I am a life-long historian and educator who has had the opportunity to teach in many countries, including public schools or universities in Germany, Japan, Nicaragua, Mexico, the USA, and several Middle Eastern lands over the past two decades.
My sojourns have taken me to many places of memory over the same period. My most recent stop was to Cambodia, which is still trying to recover from the loss of millions of its citizens in the great genocide campaigns there in the 1970s. Some months earlier, I had visited Indonesia where so many had died in the anti-communist and ethnocidal programs of the mid-1960s.
Naturally, back in Europe, I observed the buildings of many new monuments in the 1980s to the atrocities of Nazi-era and fascist occupation of most of the continent in the 1930s and 1940s.. Many of these new monuments, including one at the entrance to the railway station nearest my apartment in Wuppertal City, Germany commemorated the holocaust and trainloads of local Jews who were loaded into box cars there in the 1940s and shipped to Poland.
In the 1980s and 1990s, I admired the growth in public consciousness in Germany of what had transpired under the Nazi Empire of the earlier part of the 20th Century. I also admired the fact that shame no longer seemed to drive the populace in Germany. That is, the Germans whom had seen themselves in the U.S. occupation period (from 1945-1953) primarily as victims of history were no longer doing so.
Long years of silence had ended by the time I arrived in Germany to teach part-time in 1986. In those years, the Parliament in Germany discussed the facts of history again and again-trying to deal with horrible things done in the name of nationalism and fascism. Throughout Germany governments at the town-, city-, state-, and federal levels have continued investing money, time, debate, and critical thought into how to remember and be witness to crimes against humanity. The new holocaust memorial in Berlin near the former Reichstag is just one manifestation of such public thought.
In contrast, as an American, I have often been dismayed at how such evolution of historical memory and historical debate had been missing in U.S. public debate, especially since April 30, 1975-when my own junior high school teacher told us students that Americans would remember that day and its infamy forever.
For that particular instructor, who had served in the Vietnam War flying helicopter, the loss of that war by America was a shame that we Americans would always remember. Even at that time, I didn't buy that naive version of history of America in war. This is because as a teenager I was already pursuing an ideologies of pacifism and non-violence. My heroes were Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sadly, most Americans were out of step with me.
While I spent my first freshman year at college in 1980 writing a paper on the vast use of chemical weapons in the Vietnam War, most Americans were being led into supporting the biggest arms build-up in American history to that date. This is why, despite having a very painful Vietnam War experience, Americans likely falsely perceived that the end of the Cold War in the 1989-1991 period was the result of America's willingness to threaten, bully and defeat others through superiority in weapons.
Meanwhile, I had the honor of climbing over the Wall at Brandenburg Gate and walking down the Unter-den-Linden Street on December 31, 1989. At that time, I knew through my own activities in the Peace Movement that the collapsing of the East block had more to do with (1) bad economic planning in the East and (2) a common and uniting desire for peace demonstrated on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1980s. In that decade millions had marched in the West against the escalation of weaponry. Thousands more were working for peace on both sides of Iron Curtain through people-to-people public diplomacy to create a sense of trust among the European actors as that very decade ended. In short, it was when the politicians and military leaders got out of the way of the people that the walls came down.
Alas, that is not how American media and textbooks have taught such recent history. Due to this inadequate approach to history and memory, America recently tried to march into the Middle East and Afghanistan in the first decade of the 21st century with the peculiar expectation that firepower can rights all wrongs and creates peace.
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