Forgotten Things: #1

All week I've been reading Churchill - Three of his books are on the web now at Gutenberg. They are: The Malakand Field Force (about the Northwest Frontier), The River War (about the Sudan including Darfur), and From London to Ladysmith via Pretoria (about the South African war). Aristotle has said that men have found out most things but some of them have been forgotten. And that keeps coming back to me as I read these books.

For instance, one real cause of the war in the Sudan was the slave trade the Mahdi and the Dervishes were conducting in and through the Sudan. And one real cause of the Boer War was the Afrikaners determination not to treat the other Africans as equals as they would be obliged to do under English law. Even admiring biographers like William Manchester in The Last Lion, simply disregard all Churchill's statements on the subject because of a conviction that these statements are just a cover for imperialism.

But we see that when the British left the Sudan, the Moslems resumed the forcible conversion of the southern Sudan and the enslavement of those who refused to convert. And this is still going on and has escalated into the crimes going on in Darfur. As if the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries had never been. And we see that as soon as the British influence was removed from South Africa the whole apartheid system was instituted which made the eventual rise to power of the African majority a bitter and terrible experience.

And Manchester and others do not even discuss the reasons for the troubles on the NorthWest Frontier whereas Churchill explains that a jihad is going on. When we consider that it is thought that Osama Bin Laden, the leader of a jihad, is hiding in the same area that Churchill was writing about or when we realise that the Russians were opposed in Afghanistan by a jihad based on the Northwest frontier, it seems amazing that Manchester and other biographers devote no thought to Islamic jihads. And the war in the Sudan was a war against the followers of a Mahdi, a messiah preaching jihad against the Egyptians aka the Turks.

But in the days of the Cold War the only issue seemed to be Communism or non-Communism. So that seeing these other issues is one of those "forgotten things" of which Aristotle speaks. I think that reading these books by Churchill gives a valuable perspective on our present struggles. For instance, it is ridiculous to say that the Americans have "caused" Osama when history shows that the peoples of the areas (Afghanistan, the Sudan and the Northwest Frontier) in which Osama began and and ended are perpetually launching jihads.