“We can never close the door on history,” Robert Fisk, Britain’s highest decorated foreign correspondent, announced last Sunday afternoon to a packed Cubberley Auditorium. His talk, “History Unlearned: The Wars of the Middle East,” relived much of his own personal history as a reporter based in the Middle East for 30 years and also discussed history’s large role in the present and future of the Middle East.

Fisk said that if politicians and journalists “carried a history book in their back pocket” the current-day events unfolding in the Middle East could be seen in a more lucid, and, at times, ironic way.

Fisk pointed to the “parallels of history” in the region by citing Napoleon’s declaration that he would “rescue the Egyptians” by invading Egypt and Britain’s claim to be civilizing Iraq by occupying the country. Fisk told the audience that when he told U.S. soldiers in Iraq about how the British succumbed to an unrelenting Iraqi insurgency, they understood how history would perhaps repeat itself.

Fisk argued that all empires seek to keep expanding the domain under their control because of their fear of being “perceived as weak.” In light of this, Fisk said he believes that central to journalist’s job is “monitoring the centers of power,” especially “when they go to war.”

He referenced President George W. Bush’s repeated assertion that the “world was changed forever” after Sept. 11.

“Why should the world be changed forever?” Fisk asked the audience. He argued that Sept. 11 doesn’t have to be world-altering if the public condemns government’s political exploitation of it — curtailing civil liberties, rousing suspicions to “divide the innocent from the innocent,” and rendering the reasons for war in Iraq a “taboo” of discussion. Fisk also argued that Osama bin Laden only has power only in as much as nations allow themselves to be remade into less liberal, less democratic, and more fearful societies.

Fisk’s projections for the region’s future are dire based on his own experience reporting from Baghdad. He remarked that most coverage of the Iraq war is unhelpful because reporters usually resort to “hotel journalism,” fearing to venture out of their hotel rooms.

Fisk said he feels that risking his life to talk to ordinary people “is worth it,” because it is essential to “show that Iraqis are humans too.” Fisk emphasized the high human costs of the war, citing that officially 1,100 Iraqi civilians were killed in Baghdad in July alone.

At the end of his talk, Fisk addressed the Arab-Israeli conflict, an issue that he believes the media does not accurately depict. Fisk argued that the media wrongfully casts the Palestinians as “generically violent” rather than seeking to convey the longer history of the conflict. Fisk remarked that, for the Palestinians, “the Balfour Declaration is still very much alive,” alluding to what he believes is the legacy of imperialism and colonialism that is still present in the collective memory of the region.

Several members of the audience said they enjoyed Fisk’s speech.

Freshman Felicity Grisham said that the combination of Fisk’s fiery speaking style, narrative accounts and historical acumen made for “an amazing event.”

Tala al-Ramahi, a junior and member of the Coalition for Justice in the Middle East (CJME), the student group that organized the event, agreed that the event was “a great success.”

“Fisk sent a clear message that Middle Eastern people are human beings and that, in the end, we all belong to one race — humanity,” she said.