Roundup: Talking About History
Robin Wilson: Blair's flawed approach to peace in Northern Ireland
Francis Beckett: Remembering the Blitz: Was It an Avoidable Tragedy?
Robert Travis Scott: The Enduring Mystery of Who Killed Huey P. Long killed
Matthew Omolesky: The Long Road ... France and the Roma Expulsions
Sudhir Hazareesingh: Why is de Gaulle suddenly back in vogue?
Neal Ascherson: Solidarity ... The strike that shook the Kremlin
Robin Wilson: Blair's flawed approach to peace in Northern Ireland
Source: openDemocracy (9-3-10)
[Robin Wilson founded the Belfast-based think-tank Democratic Dialogue. He now works as an independent researcher.]
From the moment Tony Blair arrived in Northern Ireland to save the talks at Castle Buildings in Easter week 12 years ago—detecting the ‘hand of history’ on his shoulder—it was evident that the political future of the region would play a key part in the history of Blair himself.
As the sheen burnished by Peter Mandelson quickly faded from ‘New’ Labour—more spin than substance was the cry from the disillusioned left-wing comic Ben Elton—Northern Ireland came to represent the Crown jewel in his government’s first term.
In the second terms, as Blair behaved more like an executive president and became mired down in his vainglorious project with George W Bush to topple Saddam Hussein, Northern Ireland if anything became even more critical to his narcissistic concern with image.
He wanted to go down in the history books, like his 19th century predecessor Gladstone, as the prime minister whose mission had been ‘to pacify Ireland’—not as the junior partner in an arguably illegal campaign in Iraq which cost tens or, more probably, hundreds of thousands of civilian lives and saw millions more displaced.
Northern Ireland is, happily, not Iraq—but then as a part of the western democratic world it was never going to be. What is remarkable is not how successful Blair was in resolving the Northern Ireland problem but the uniqueness in western Europe, outside of the Basque country, Corsica and Cyprus, of the region’s intercommunal violence—and, even among those comparisons, how long-lasting it has proved.
With no ‘peace process’ in the Basque country, ETA has been curbed much more seriously than Northern Ireland’s paramilitaries by simple pursuit of the rule of law without depredations of human rights.
In 1997, Northern Ireland was characterised by deep communal division and paramilitary violence at the margin and neutral but remote direct rule from Westminster. In 2010, Northern Ireland is characterised by deep communal division and paramilitary violence at the margin and an accessible but communalised and dysfunctional government at Stormont.
Why has so little changed despite all the hype?..
Jonathan Schneer: How Anti-Semitism Helped Create Israel
Source: Foreign Policy (9-8-10)
[Jonathan Schneer is the author, most recently, of The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.]
On Nov. 2, 1917, the British cabinet promised to support "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Today, we consider the Balfour Declaration, as that promise has been known ever since, to be the foundation stone of modern Israel. But the views and motives of the British politicians who approved the epochal document were hardly simple, let alone pure.
What British leaders wanted more than anything in November 1917 was to win World War I -- all other goals were secondary. Victory, however, seemed increasingly distant at the time. After three and a half terrible years of war, Britain's allies were shaky: French armies had mutinied, Italian armies had been catastrophically defeated, and the Russian Army stood upon the brink of total collapse. The United States had joined the conflict the previous June, but U.S. soldiers had not yet arrived in Europe in numbers sufficient to make much difference. Meanwhile, Germany was preparing to launch another great offensive on the Western Front.
In these circumstances, British leaders grasped at straws. They thought, for example, that they might bribe Germany's ally, Turkey, to leave the war. They offered territory and money. Turkey was interested but -- in the end, after numerous secret, back-channel meetings in Switzerland and elsewhere -- would not bite.
The British also sought new allies. In particular, they hoped to successfully attract to their side the one great power, as they mistakenly referred to it, that had remained on the sidelines: the forces of what they called "international Jewry." During the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration, Britain's leaders engaged in a sustained effort to woo Jewish support. With the declaration itself, they offered the engagement ring.
British leaders drew primarily on two anti-Semitic canards: that Jews simultaneously commanded the U.S. financial system and held the strings controlling Russian pacifism. In other words, they believed that American Jews could bring the United States into the war and that Russian Jews could keep their country from dropping out of it. They also believed that Jewish money could help finance the war effort. Moreover, they believed that all Jews were Zionists (which they weren't). That is why the bribe -- or rather, the engagement ring -- took the form of the Balfour Declaration...
Maureen Dowd: Lincoln’s Forgotten Fort
Source: NYT (9-7-10)
[Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the NYT.]
We went sledding there and played hide and seek, rolled Easter eggs and stole our first kisses. We could be dragged away only when we heard our mom’s vibrant whistle, signaling dinner.
When we were little, Fort Stevens was just a cool playground, with dry moats and tall mounds and a couple of cannons, located across the street from our Catholic grade school and down the block from our house.
My mom, an ardent student of the Civil War, explained that the fort was an important part of history — the scene of a battle in which a sitting American president came under enemy fire and the only time the nation’s capital was attacked by the Confederate Army....
Vladimir Ryzhkov: Modernizing Russia’s Tragic History
Source: Moscow Times (9-8-10)
[Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.]
In the Svirstroi village in the Leningrad region, there is a large bronze statue of a strong, stocky man in a long coat and cap on a high red granite pedestal, located behind brightly colored tents where the locals do a brisk business selling souvenirs at the Vepskoi market. The inscription reveals that this is a monument to Sergei Kirov, the leader of the Leningrad Communists who was killed under mysterious circumstances in 1934. It was his murder that gave Josef Stalin an excuse to unleash the Great Terror during the second half of the 1930s.
Higher up, beyond the statue of Kirov, stands the Svirskoi hydroelectric plant, built during Stalin’s reign by gulag prisoners, at least half of whom were imprisoned for political crimes. Estimates indicate that no fewer than 480,000 people in the northwestern region of the Soviet Union suffered during those horrendous years of repression, and tens of thousands of those — including a part of the workers who built the hydroelectric plant — were shot and killed. But the Leningrad region has only a few memorial cemeteries and monuments to those victims, while there are hundreds of monuments and streets dedicated to Lenin, Kirov, Bolshevik leader Moisei Uritsky and other Communist leaders.
The Svirskoi hydroelectric plant — and the entire town built around it — was built on bones and blood of political prisoners of the Soviet regime. And although at the nearby Alexander-Svirsky Monastery, founded in the late 15th century, visitors are occasionally told that during the Soviet period the monastery was closed and handed over to the local forced labor camps and was almost certainly the site of mass shootings, any mention or memory of the victims of state terror is barely discernible through the countless references to Soviet geographical names and pictures of the Soviet past.
Anatoly Razumov is a bibliographer and historian of the Leningrad region who pursues his task with almost religious devotion. Day after day, he has worked since 1991 to recover the names of the people shot and killed in the camps and prisons of northwest Russia. He and his colleagues have already assembled nine of the 15 volumes that will contain a list of the people shot in the Leningrad region. The Levashenskoye Cemetery near St. Petersburg alone holds the bodies of about 50,000 people who were shot by the NKVD between 1937 and 1954 and secretly buried there.
Razumov’s story about the bloody repression that affected every strata of the population and every city and town in the region without exception — and the attempt to “build socialism” at the cost of the lives and health of hundreds of thousands of people — served as an eerie backdrop for the annual Valdai Club meeting of Russia experts. At one of the Valdai functions, participants gathered on the Kronstadt ship and sailed down the waters of the Neva, Svir, Ladoga and Onega, passing by numerous gulags along the way, although few were aware of this fact.
Is modernization of Russia possible without revealing the whole truth about the Soviet period of Russian history, and without erecting monuments and memorial plaques to the victims of repression in every city and village? Most of the Valdai Club experts are convinced that it would it be impossible...
Lawrence White: The German Miracle ... Another Look
Source: WSJ (9-8-10)
[Mr. White is professor of economics at George Mason University. This op-ed draws on his forthcoming book, "The Clash of Economic Ideas."]
Earlier this summer George Soros and some leading Keynesian economists criticized what they regarded as Germany's overly strict fiscal discipline. Yet Germany's real output expanded at a robust 9% annual rate in the second quarter, while the U.S. economy grew at an anemic 1.6% rate. So is Germany now a role model for how to recover?
In a June op-ed, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble justified his government's decision to cut spending, citing "aversion to deficits and inflationary fears, which have their roots in German history in the past century." He was presumably making a reference to the destructive hyperinflation of the 1920s.
Yet Mr. Schäuble might have cited another relevant episode from his nation's history. Sixty-two years ago Germany became a role model for recovery from a very different crisis. In the aftermath of World War II, Germany's cities, factories and railroads lay in ruins. Severe shortages of food, fuel, water and housing posed challenges to sheer survival.
Unfortunately, occupation policy makers actually perpetuated the shortages by retaining the price controls the Nazi government had imposed before and during the war. Consumers and businessmen battled against the bureaucratic regime of controls and rationing in what the German economist Ludwig Erhard described as Der Papierkrieg—the paper war. Black markets were pervasive.
Germany's new Social Democratic Party wanted to continue the controls and rationing, and some American advisers agreed, particularly John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith, an official of the U.S. State Department overseeing economic policy for occupied Germany and Japan, had been the U.S. price-control czar from 1941-1943; he completely dismissed the idea of reviving the German economy through decontrol.
Fortunately for ordinary Germans, Erhard—who became director of the economic administration for the U.K.-U.S. occupation Bizone in April 1948—thought otherwise. A currency reform that he helped to design was slated to replace the feeble old Reichsmark with the new Deutsche mark in all three Western zones on June 20. Without approval from the Allied military command, Erhard used the occasion to issue a sweeping decree abolishing most of the price controls and rationing directives. He later told friends that the American commander, Gen. Lucius Clay, phoned him when he heard about the decree and said: "Professor Erhard, my advisers tell me that you are making a big mistake." Erhard replied, "So my advisers also tell me."
It was not a big mistake...
Gabriel Winant: The Revolution the South Forgot
Source: Salon (9-7-10)
[Gabriel Winant is a graduate student in American history at Yale.]
This is America, on Labor Day week in 2010. But in more ways than we like to notice, it feels like 1910. Somehow, the labor laws and basic protections that we once thought were part of the fabric of American democracy have been quietly excised. Of course, in the South, the postwar dream of free, prosperous, safe labor was never really there at all. The region has always been poorer. It's always had more rapacious bosses. And Southern workers (especially white ones) have always seemed mysteriously willing to take it, as far as often-condescending Northern liberals can tell.
It's the glaring question that sharp students always notice and want to ask about Southern politics: Why have poor white people, seemingly such obvious beneficiaries of progressive politics, never joined with their oppressed black neighbors to overthrow their outnumbered overlords?...
But, despite the temptation to liberal arrogance, it'd be a mistake to imagine that poor white Southerners are befuddled fools, with no understanding of their class identity and class interest. That's the view of someone who won't grant the courtesy of knowing some of the history of workers in the region. And there's no better week than this one to remember.
On September 6, 1934 -- 76 years ago Monday -- gunmen guarding Chiquola Mill in Honea Path, South Carolina opened fire on a crowd of picketing textile workers. They killed seven, and wounded about 30. If the history of industrial labor in the South has been a stage tragedy, this was the climactic moment; the rest, for white workers at least, is denouement....
A strike wave broke out in 1929, but it was spontaneous and ill-organized. A series of bloody crackdowns extinguished the flashes of protest easily enough -- most famously at Gastonia, N.C., where a fairly fraudulent trial followed a massacre, and ended with communist organizers fleeing to Russia.
Hope was renewed, after the failure of this first series of uprisings, by the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Mill-hands viewed the new president as a near-spiritual personal savior. In huge numbers, they wrote letters to him, to Eleanor Roosevelt and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. Wrote one, "I want you to know that I am for you in this most wonderful undertaking. I am a long ways from you in distance yet my faith is in you my heart with you and I am for you sink or swim." And they didn’t hesitate to tell him what they really thought. The mill bosses, wrote another, were "old slimy serpants crowling spiting their Poison fighting your program." In one now-famous letter, a mill-hand wrote to FDR, "You are the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch."...
Although they still felt the president himself was on their side, mill-hands understood that negotiations were over. After a summer of watching the textile companies flout their demands, Alabama workers decided they'd had it. The union, the United Textile Workers, was reluctant, but they walked off the job anyway in midsummer of 1934. Word spread up the Piedmont virtually overnight. Strikers piled into trucks and cars and raced from mill town to mill town to call mill-hands out to join them before the bosses could catch on. Since the strike was obviously happening one way or the other, the UTW -- a generally feeble and conservative union -- called a meeting, and endorsed the thing. On September 1, 1934, the general textile strike began. With participation between 200,000 and 400,000, from Maine to Alabama, it was the largest labor rebellion in American history to that point. The only prior uprising that exceeded it was the collapse of slavery during the Civil War.
But, while a general strike is an inspiring thing, it's not easy to pull off. Strikers quickly started finding themselves evicted from company houses, and homeless. As people who lived to hand-to-mouth, how could they last without paychecks? The UTW, broke and disorganized as it was already, was in no position to feed a few hundred thousand hungry people. The churches -- another common fallback -- were largely unfriendly. Worst of all, the federal government was nowhere to be seen, and state and local officials were getting their response ready....
...[A]t Honea Path, on the sixth day of the general strike, the inevitable massacre happened....
The basic tenets of 20th-century progressive politics in America -- unionism, the welfare state, public-safety regulations -- all failed the mill-hands, the largest class of industrial workers in the South. And the failure was spectacular, a once-in-a-generation trauma. The inability of New Deal liberalism to bring on board the Southern white working class was, it seems in retrospect, its ultimate undoing. Who was it that voted for Wallace, then Nixon, then Reagan? The depressing question points to the politically weak people for whom racism was the only bullet left in the chamber. We can't excuse their racism this way. But we can start to understand it.
The historian Robert Zieger has said that, although we are fond of thinking of the South as stuck in the past, when it comes to labor relations, Dixie is not where we have been. It’s where we are going. It is exaggerating, but not by too much, to say that the unraveling public safety state and the union-free country we know today emerged from the violence at Honea Path. This descent has been possible, in part, because we forgot about 1934. And we forgot about 1934 because the mill-hands did themselves. It was too painful to remember.
Francis Beckett: Remembering the Blitz: Was It an Avoidable Tragedy?
Source: Guardian (UK) (9-7-10)
[Francis Beckett's new book, Firefighters and the Blitz, is now in bookstores in the United Kingdom.]
...We think of [the blitz] as a time when cheerful cockneys defied the Nazi menace; and that's not wrong, but it is a small part of the story. People knew someone had blundered. Britain had had plenty of time to prepare: the Home Office had been thinking about mass bombing since 1933, and in 1937 German bombers supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war destroyed the town of Guernica and killed 2,000 citizens. Deep shelters had been built in Barcelona, which proved very successful, and there was a move to build them in London, but it was never done. Families were given Anderson shelters (named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson) instead. This, as the author Stephen Spender wrote in 1945 in Citizens in War, "overlooked the fact that in the majority of homes there was no room for an Anderson shelter". So Londoners forced the authorities to permit the use of tube stations as shelters....
About the only thing the government had got right was the creation in March 1938 of the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), which saw 28,000 auxiliary full- and part-time firefighters recruited for the London Fire Brigade alone. But even the AFS might easily have failed. Professional firefighters resented it, while AFS people grumbled that they were paid less and their conditions of service were inferior. The situation was saved by an alliance between London Fire Brigade chief Major Frank Jackson and the leftwing leader of the Fire Brigades Union, John Horner, who collaborated in persuading regular firefighters to accept the AFS as equals. Horner later wrote of "the complete lack of preparedness which left men isolated for hours without food or drink, which condemned men who had been wet through for days to return to their stations and turn out again, still in wet clothes"....
Robert Travis Scott: The Enduring Mystery of Who Killed Huey P. Long killed
Source: NOLA.com (9-5-10)
[Robert Travis Scott is Capital Bureau Chief of the New Orleans Times-Picayune.]
Who killed Huey Long? Was it an assassination? A fisticuffs turned fatal? A police cover-up?...
The official metal plaque marking the fateful spot in the state Capitol is careful not to take sides. It says only that Long "died September 10, 1935, from a bullet wound inflicted here on September 8, 1935. He was 42 years old."
On that, everyone agrees. The rest of the story has accumulated clouds of doubt for three quarters of a century and seems destined to remain without clear resolution.
"The only premise that I personally believe in, is that no matter what theory that you believe in personally, there exists serious and believable evidence that disputes your theory, as well as all the other theories," said Michael Wynn, a Louisiana historical collector and co-author of a play about the shooting in which the audience decides what happened....
The bullet that killed Long has never been produced as evidence. The gun used by the alleged assassin was picked up in the hall by the local coroner but it was not clearly and immediately established at the scene except by witness testimony. It went missing for more than 50 years....
Henry D. Fetter: How the 1960 Olympics Changed America
Source: The Atlantic (9-4-10)
[Henry D. Fetter is the author of Taking on the Yankees: Winning and Losing in the Business of Baseball and has written widely about the business and politics of sports.]
It is not often that sports intersect with the larger world in any meaningful way. But 50 years ago this week, at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, it did.
That year may now be viewed through the soft-focus lens of romantic nostalgia for the "American Century" at its peak, but that was not the prevailing mood of the moment. National confidence was still reeling from the shock of the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, reinforcing Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's boast the year before that "We will bury you." Pundits (not that they were called that at the time—there were so few of them that they could be identified by name) worried about America's loss of "national purpose" and lack of resolve to face the challenges ahead. A big power summit conference in May had broken up in the aftermath of the shoot down of the U-2 spy plane over Russia and the easily disproved cover story that had been the US's first response to that incident. The fate of two small islands off the coast of China ( "Red China," as we called it)—Quemoy and Matsu—was thought sufficiently momentous to merit going to the brink of all-out war. Cuba was slipping out of the American orbit, and it was Soviet collectivism rather than Western capitalism that was being embraced by the Third World as the surest route to economic development....
It was in this atmosphere that the US Olympic team assembled in Rome in the first week of September 1960, opening another front in the Cold War. "We don't feel at all abashed about urging our boys in Rome to go out and beat the pants off the Russians and everyone else," Sports Illustrated editorialized. And American prospects were bright. The men's 100 meters was viewed as national patrimony—no American had lost that event since 1928, and top American sprinter Ray Norton was pegged as certain to maintain that streak. The only room for debate about the 4 x 100 meter relay was whether the US team would set a new world record. As for the high jump, "the only question is second place" according to Sports Illustrated's preview. John Thomas, the world record holder who had cleared 7 feet thirty-seven times, was "incomparably the best."
Then in the space of a few days it all came apart....
Hampton Sides: Not-So-Charming Billy
Source: NYT (9-6-10)
[Hampton Sides is the author, most recently, of “Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin.”]
BILL RICHARDSON, New Mexico’s departing governor, is known for his studied sense of theater. But when he recently declared that he would hold a hearing to consider a posthumous pardon for the state’s most notorious resident — William Bonney, a k a Henry McCarty, a k a Billy the Kid — a lot of us wondered if he had lost his mind.
What’s to be gained by dredging up stories from a tired old shoot’em-up? Why should we care about a trigger-happy sociopath who’s been moldering in his grave for almost 130 years? New Mexico has a rich history, but some episodes from the past are best left there.
At issue is a deal made in 1879 by one of Mr. Richardson’s predecessors, Lew Wallace (later the author of “Ben-Hur”). Wallace promised to grant Billy the Kid amnesty for murders he committed during the so-called Lincoln County War if he would testify about a killing he had witnessed; the Kid testified, but Wallace’s men reneged on the deal. Two years later Pat Garrett, the sheriff of Lincoln County, shot and killed the outlaw....
Brendan I. Koerner: Why Do We Get Labor Day Off?
Source: Slate (9-6-10)
[Brendan I. Koerner is a contributing editor at Wired and a columnist for Gizmodo. His
first book, Now the Hell Will Start, is out now.]
The nation will observe Labor Day this coming Monday, allowing millions to enjoy the waning days of summer, as well their last chance to wear white pants without earning a "tsk tsk" from Miss Manners. How did this early September holiday get its start?
Though President Grover Cleveland declared Labor Day a national holiday in 1894, the occasion was first observed on Sept. 5, 1882, in New York City....
Christopher Orlet: Whatever Happened to the Murder Ballad?
Source: American Spectator (9-3-10)
[Christopher Orlet writes from Belleville, Illinois.]
Hearing the song "Lillie Shull" the other day made me wonder whatever became of murder ballads. A century ago there was scarcely a small town murder that wasn't memorialized in song. This was especially true of the non-literate musically inclined mountain folk of the Border States. It was a trait they carried with them from Scotland, but one that has not survived modernization, which is too bad.
Murder ballads seem to have died out around the time of the Great Depression. The genre underwent a brief resurgence during the '60s folk revival -- who hasn't heard the Kingston Trio's maudlin version of "Tom Dooley"? -- though few new ballads were written. From time to time, murder ballads are dusted off by contemporary singer-songwriters, which is how I learned about "Lillie Shull."
Murder ballads were cautionary tales, usually taking the point of view of the condemned man on the gallows as he expressed remorse for his awful deed. "Lillie Shull" is typical of the genre with its dire warnings against greed, lust, drink and infidelity....
Matt Purple: Glenn Beck: A Legend Fit for a King
Source: American Spectator (9-3-10)
[Matt Purple is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.]
[Glenn Beck] rings true in one sense. The left long ago abandoned [Martin Luther] King's dream of racial unity. Instead craven progressive operators use the word "racist" as an assault weapon against their political enemies, to the point that the word has lost its real meaning. The left has cynically exploited the civil rights movement to its advantage. Beck is completely correct about that.
He's also correct that, to the extent that King's dream was equal opportunity under the law, conservatives are again his heirs. The left, with its obsession over preferences for different groups, long ago abandoned this tradition.
But Beck also can't neatly fit his own agenda into King's dream. There's been a larger argument made implicitly by Beck and explicitly by a handful of other commentators that were King alive today, he would have been a conservative. David Horowitz has declared outright that "Martin Luther King, in my view, was a conservative."...
But in any hagiography, certain inconvenient details must be omitted. In Martin Luther King's case, our traditional understanding ignores the radical and collectivist thinking that defined his activism. As historian Clayborne Carson has noted, "The historical King was far too interesting to be encased in simple, didactic legends designed to offend no one."
King wanted agitation and action. Despite his pacifism, he fought the battle for civil rights as a hero fighting a villain. Those who didn't join his cause were either bigots or queasy liberals who needed to straighten their spines and choose sides. The issue for King was not earning liberty but seizing it. King wanted not to shake his opponents' hands, but squeeze them so tightly that they relented....
IT WAS NO COINCIDENCE that King was a radical and not a conservative. He was the heir of an intellectual clash within the civil rights movement almost a century earlier. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois locked horns over the future of the civil rights movement.
Washington, a Virginia slave freed after the Civil War, was a conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke. He contended that political rights for former slaves could only be achieved once the black community had bolstered itself from within. He believed that racism was an evil with roots buried deep in American history that had wreaked havoc on both blacks and whites. Any attempts to suddenly throw it off would cause chaos....
Du Bois, an educated black sociologist from western New England, initially admired Washington. But he eventually grew tired of the slow social progress of blacks, which he blamed on Washington's "accommodationism." He charged that Washington was harming the black community by portraying African-Americans as inferior and putting too much emphasis on the glories of manual labor. Du Bois was the idealist to Washington's realist. Washington wanted blacks to climb up the ladder. Du Bois wanted to knock the ladder over....
The most important way for conservatives to honor King is to understand him in his entirety, not just through the soothing legend we've written for ourselves. We can disagree with King's greater idea of economic revolution while still honoring his struggle to make America the very best that it can be....
Matthew Omolesky: The Long Road ... France and the Roma Expulsions
Source: American Spectator (9-3-10)
[Matthew Omolesky specialized in European affairs at the Whitehead School of Diplomacy's graduate program, and received his juris doctor from The Ohio State University's Moritz College of Law.]
On the morning of July 17, 2010, the residents of the French commune of Saint-Aignan awoke to the sound of rioting, though few in the picturesque Loire Valley village could have guessed the reason for all the tumult. The previous night, a Traveler and robbery suspect by the name of Luigi Duquenet had barreled through a police checkpoint in his car, injuring a gendarme in the process, and was accelerating towards a second checkpoint before he was shot and killed. Within hours, dozens of incensed fellow gens du voyage, armed with hatchets and crowbars, were rampaging through the medieval streets of Saint-Aignan, chopping down trees, setting cars alight, pillaging stores, and storming the village police station. "It was," as Mayor Jean-Michel Billon put it, "a settling of scores between the travelers and the gendarmerie." The coming weeks would provide ample evidence that the clashes had in no wise settled any scores.
By the next day three hundred soldiers were patrolling the streets of Saint-Aignan, and soon thereafter France's President Nicolas Sarkozy was vowing that the rioters would be "severely punished," and that the "the problems created by the behavior of certain Travelers and Roma" would be addressed once and for all. The ensuing measures, Sarkozy continued, would be part of the "implacable struggle the government is leading against crime" and the "veritable war" being waged against those "delinquents" threatening France's ordre publique. Pierre Lellouche, France's Minister for Europe, concurred: "we are faced with a real problem and the time has come to deal with it." It was not long before French ministers were considering corrective measures ranging from the tightening of immigration controls to the systematic evacuation and dismantling of illegal encampments, the better to deal with the "sources of illegal trafficking, of profoundly shocking living standards, of exploitation of children for begging, of prostitution and of crime."
Such rhetoric in reaction to the events in Saint-Aignan was altogether predictable, given the emphasis placed on matters of law and order by France's governing Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (with Sarkozy himself having made international headlines with his 2005 comments about the need to "hose down" lawless estates and root out criminal "scum"), but in this case it cannot be said that the French government was engaging in mere posturing for popular consumption. Some three hundred Roma camps were quickly targeted for demolition, and on August 12, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux announced that some 850 Roma would be systematically deported to Romania and Bulgaria (albeit each with 300 euros in hand). The first repatriations followed two weeks later, with more planned for the month of September. A lawyer for the Roma leadership, Henri Braun, cautioned that the government was "preparing to open a blighted page in the history of France," but Sarkozy's administration may in fact be setting a continental precedent. On August 21, the Italian Interior Minister, Roberto Maroni, told the daily Corriere della Sera that "if anything, it's time to go a step further," calling for outright "expulsions just like those for illegal immigrants, not assisted or voluntary repatriations."
For the various itinerant communities of France -- the tsiganes, the manouches, the gitanes, the Roma, and the Sinti -- the ongoing crackdown occurring in France, and now threatened elsewhere, is only the most recent chapter in a centuries-old story of tribulation and alienation. The zhalvini gilyi, or dirges, of the Roma folk tradition invariably stress the pitfalls of a peripatetic life on the lungo drom, the "long road." "Oh Lord," bemoaned Bronisława Wajs, the mid-twentieth century Polish-Romani poet, "Where can I go? What can I do?" now that "time of the wandering Gypsies has long passed." A Transylvanian dirge laments: "God, oh God! How you have thrashed me,/Perhaps nobody more than me," before concluding "Oh, what can I do, all alone?" The dislocation and unfocused nostalgia that are part and parcel of the itinerant lifestyle, coupled with centuries of persecution, in turn led to widespread fatalism, with one Serbian Gypsy song resignedly foreseeing that "The crack of Doom/is coming soon./Let it come,/it doesn't matter."
For the Roma and other Travelers, the "crack of Doom" has indeed sounded out with some frequency over the years, as European anti-ziganism is of considerable vintage. Anti-Gypsy sentiment, long a feature of the European social landscape, was first institutionalized in early modern Central Europe, with the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I outlawing the community in 1500, and with Ferdinand I expelling the scapegoated Roma from Prague after an unexplained 1541 fire. By 1548 the Diet of Augsburg had declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy, shall be guilty of no murder," and by 1710 the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I would go a step further, demanding "that all adult [Roma] males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever." Thirty-nine years later the Spanish monarch Philip V was still taking aim at "this multitude of infamous and noxious people" that needed to be "contained and corrected"; round-ups occurred in Spain and France up through the Napoleonic period. The situation for the Roma, Sinti, and Lalleri was even worse in the east, and it would not be until 1856 that the outright enslavement of Gypsies was abolished in Moldavia and Wallachia.
The 20th century would bring no respite...
Doug Ireland: Forget Mehlman — What About Lincoln?
Source: Gay City News (9-1-10)
[Doug Ireland is a longtime radical political journalist and media critic.]
While the gay media has been awash in unwarranted hosannas over the recent coming-out declaration by former Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman — who has not apologized for running the most homophobic presidential campaign in US history — the LGBT press has been ignoring an infinitely more significant development under way with vastly more important implications for the Republican Party: the increasing acceptance by historians that the loving heart of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and the first GOP president, found its natural amorous passions overwhelmingly directed toward those of his own sex.
This shifting consensus about Lincoln’s sexual orientation is certainly the most stunning and effective rebuke to the Republican Party’s scapegoating of same-sex love for electoral purposes, which came to fever pitch during the 2004 race that Mehlman spearheaded for George W. Bush.
“We are getting closer to the day that a majority of younger, less homophobic historians will at long last accept the evidence of Lincoln’s same-sex component,” John Stauffer, chair of Harvard University’s Department of American Civilization, told Gay City News, adding, “ We’re already seeing the beginnings of a trend that will amount to a major paradigm shift.”
Stauffer is one of the nation’s leading experts on the Civil War era, and in his latest — and best-selling — book, “Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglas and Abraham Lincoln,” he supports the thesis that Joshua Speed was, as he put it, “Lincoln’s soulmate and the love of his life.”
And in the latest issue of the scholarly journal Reviews of American History, Stauffer hammers home this point, writing, “In light of what we know about romantic friendship at the time, coupled with the facts surrounding Speed’s and Lincoln’s friendship, there is no reason to suppose they weren’t physically intimate at some point during their four years of sleeping together in the same small bed, long after Lincoln could afford a bed of his own. To ignore this, as most scholars do, is to pretend that same-sex carnal relationships were abnormal. It thus presumes a dislike or fear about such relationships, reflecting a presentist and homophobic perspective.”...
Sudhir Hazareesingh: Why is de Gaulle suddenly back in vogue?
Source: Foreign Policy (9-2-10)
[Sudhir Hazareesingh teaches politics at Balliol College, Oxford University.]
It increasingly seems that French statesman Charles de Gaulle was right when he proudly claimed in 1952 that "everyone has been, is, or will be a Gaullist." Certainly, France is experiencing a surge of interest in its former president: The country has just lavishly celebrated the 70th anniversary of de Gaulle's launch of the French Resistance on the BBC airwaves, and the public has been bombarded with conferences, exhibitions, radio and television programs, and publications of all kinds, from hagiographic works to novels (Benoît Duteurtre's Return of the General, in which de Gaulle comes back from the dead to save France once again) to comic-strip adaptations (Jean-Yves Ferri's De Gaulle at the Beach). The third volume of de Gaulle's War Memoirs has even been put on the standard high school curriculum.
But France is not alone in actively kindling admiration for its former president; political leaders around the world have long looked to de Gaulle's stalwart style of statesmanship for inspiration and guidance, and the last few years have seen a flowering of their interest in the old general. His memoirs have been translated into 25 languages, and statues have been erected in his honor in Brazzaville, Bucharest, London, Moscow, Quebec, and Warsaw. Along with Mahatma Gandhi and Che Guevara, de Gaulle is one of the few truly global historical figures from the post-World War II era: His fervent admirers include monarchists and conservatives in Europe, nationalists of various hues in the Arab world (Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi posthumously decorated de Gaulle with the highest medal of the Libyan state), and Marxist revolutionaries (Fidel Castro waxed lyrical about the general in his recent autobiography). The latest recruit to this eclectic band of admirers -- if the memoirs of his former bodyguard are to be believed -- is Osama bin Laden, who is apparently known to quote War Memoirs in conversation....
Daniel Henninger: If Saddam Had Stayed
Source: WSJ (9-2-10)
[Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.]
From the vantage point of history, Barack Obama's prime-time speech announcing the Iraq war's end is less important than the speech he gave eight years ago as a state senator in Illinois. This was the October 2002 "dumb war" speech to an anti-Iraq war rally in Chicago's Federal Plaza. Back then, Mr. Obama had a more complex view of the stakes in Iraq than he does now.
Today, the Iraq war has been reduced to not much more than a long, bloody and honorable gunfight between U.S. troops and various homicidal jihadists and insurgents inside Iraq, a war sustained by George Bush, Dick Cheney and some neocon advisers mainly to "impose" democracy on the Iraqis.
I think it is a profound mistake to confine the war's significance to the borders of Iraq. Mr. Obama himself raised the central question about Iraq in that 2002 speech: Did Saddam Hussein pose a danger beyond his borders, or not?
"Let me be clear," State Senator Obama told the Federal Plaza crowd, "I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. . . . He has repeatedly thwarted U.N. inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons and coveted nuclear capacity. . . . But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States. . . [H]e can be contained."
This is a widely held view. The Economist's editors this week said Mr. Obama was largely right that Iraq was a dumb war. What the war did, they say, was "rid the Middle East of a bloodstained dictator."
It did a lot more than that.
Let us assume that Mr. Obama's "smarter" view had prevailed, that we had left Saddam in power in Iraq. What would the world look like today?..
Alex Massie: Everybody Hates Tony Blair
Source: Foreign Policy (8-31-10)
[Alex Massie, a former Washington correspondent for the Scotsman, writes for the Spectator and blogs at www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie.]
During a visit to Kosovo this summer, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie met with a remarkable group of children. The young Kosovar boys had each been born soon after NATO's bombing campaign successfully drove Serbian forces from the province in 1999. More significantly, each child was named Tonibler in Blair's honor.
As one of the boys' mothers put it: "I hope to God that he grows up to be like Tony Blair or just a fraction like him."
The curiously touching scene was a reminder that reputation is a matter of perspective. In Kosovo, Blair's leadership of the campaign to oust Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic has made him a hero; in Britain his determination to deal with Saddam Hussein has had the opposite effect. You're not likely to find many young British boys named after Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
These days, Blair's name is mud on the eastern side of the Atlantic. The former prime minister has been entirely disowned. He stands accused of selling his soul and, worse, his judgment to a cowboy American president and, worse still, doing it on the cheap. But three years after his ignominious departure from public office, the most successful politician of his generation is back, touting his memoirs ahead of Wednesday's publishing date. In so doing, Blair has reopened some old wounds and reignited some restive quarrels. The process has also inspired a strange resurgence of what one might call "Blair Derangement Syndrome": an absolute and disproportionate hatred for the former prime minister, shared only by a certain group of Britons and found somewhat inexplicable by the rest of the planet.
In Iraq-war-era Washington, Blair was a beloved figure for interventionists both liberal and conservative, a proponent for their views who could be trusted -- unlike America's then-president. If the British prime minister -- so eloquent, so passionate, so persuasive, so British -- was convinced Saddam had to be confronted, then the case for pre-emptive action couldn't be so flimsy as it now, with chastened hindsight, seems. Even Republicans admitted that Blair was often more convincing than anyone in George W. Bush's administration. Not since the Beatles had a Briton been so popular in the United States.
Then came Blair's fall. The failure to discover the promised Iraqi weapons of mass destruction destroyed Blair's credibility in Britain. Meanwhile, the government was bitterly split between Blair's supporters and Gordon Brown's claque of resentful followers. Brown spent the best part of a decade harassing Blair, demanding that the prime minister resign and hand over power to his jealous chancellor of the Exchequer. The result was a broken government that, in its later years, achieved much less than it could or should have.
The Labour Party -- which Blair led to three historic, crushing election victories -- is now embarrassed by the most successful leader in its history...
Richard N. Haass: The Gulf war at 20; its lessons today
Source: Daily Star (Lebanon) (8-30-10)
[Richard N. Haass, a former director of policy planning at the US State Department, is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars.”]
It was 20 years ago this month that Saddam Hussein, then the unchallenged ruler of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. What ensued was the first great international crisis of the post-Cold War era, one that, in less than a year, led to the liberation of Kuwait, along with the restoration of its government. This was accomplished with only modest human and economic cost thanks to the extraordinary multi-national coalition assembled by President George H.W. Bush.
Since then, the United States has used military force numerous times for a range of purposes. Today, the US is working to extricate itself from a second conflict involving Iraq, trying to figure out a way forward in Afghanistan, and contemplating the use of force against Iran. So the question arises: What can we learn from the first Iraq war, one widely judged as a military and diplomatic success?
One important lesson stems from the rationale for war. It is one thing to modify the behavior of a state beyond its borders, but quite another to alter what takes place within another country’s territory. The 1990-1991 Gulf war was about reversing Iraq’s armed aggression, something that was fundamentally inconsistent with respect for sovereignty, the most basic of all rules governing relations among states in today’s world. Once Iraqi military forces were expelled from Kuwait in 1991, the US did not march on Baghdad to replace Iraq’s government – or remain in Kuwait to impose democracy there.
The 2001 war against Afghanistan and the 2003 war against Iraq were markedly different. Both interventions sought to oust the governments in place at the time, and both succeeded in that goal. I maintain that the effort against Afghanistan was justified (to remove the Taliban government that helped bring about the 9/11 attacks), and that ousting Saddam Hussein was not...
Neal Ascherson: Solidarity ... The strike that shook the Kremlin
Source: Independent (UK) (8-30-10)
[Neal Ascherson is a journalist and writer.]
Thirty years ago, ordinary people challenged an armed dictatorship, and won.
On 31 August 1980, the strikers in the Lenin Shipyard at Gdansk forced the Communist authorities in Poland to sign an agreement. It promised them – among many other lesser things – a free and independent trade union, the liberation of political prisoners, plural and uncensored media and the right to strike.
Within days, other strike committees all over Poland were winning the same sort of terms from their Party bosses. Soon all the local agreements ran together into a single movement covering the whole nation, which recruited 9 million members by the end of the year. Its leader was a fast- talking, pious, slightly rascally electrician called Lech Walesa. The name of the movement was "the Independent Self-Managing Trade Union Solidarity".
Everyone who was in that shipyard during the strike came out changed: wiser and perhaps with more faith in humanity. This was an occupation strike, asking strikers to forsake their homes and families for the sake of the common cause. The yard gates, almost hidden behind well- wishers' flowers and pictures of the Pope, were locked, and the workers forbade themselves to come out until they had won.
Inside, thousands of men in grey denim overalls lay on the grass listening to the Tannoy, as it broadcast the interminable negotiations in the Health and Safety hall. Outside the gate, women and children waited through long, hot August days. Sometimes they threw bread, salami and apples over the fence to their husbands, fathers and sons. There was paper and duplicator ink for smudgy bulletins in the yard, but not much to eat. Vodka was banned. In one of Europe's most cigarette-addicted nations, they banned indoor smoking too.
The stakes were very high. The workers inside and the families outside thought about the ZOMO riot police, itching to batter them with clubs. The foreign journalists in the yard thought more about the Soviet armoured divisions that had moved up to the Polish frontier. If they invaded, we assumed that the Poles would fight and there would be what the regime's euphemism called "a national tragedy". But that was a possibility the strikers refused to discuss. It was an extra fear they did not need.
The strikes spread and the government, riven by panicky arguments, finally gave way. On 31 August, Lech Walesa – enjoying every moment of it – took a silly monster pen, a souvenir from the Pope's visit the year before, and signed the Gdansk Accord. Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Jagielski, equally clearly hating every moment, signed too.
That was not the end of the story...
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