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Roundup: Talking About History

This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.

With the Internet, Every Man's His Own Historian

Edward L. Ayers, author of The Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 and professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he created the Valley of the Shadow Project, writing in Newsday (Jan. 25, 2004):

Unlike any medium before - from books and museums to film and television - the World Wide Web is profoundly changing our relationship to history. Unlike a museum, the Web is open all the time to people everywhere. Unlike a television show, movie or book, it does not tell only one story. Unlike a textbook, it encourages exploration, challenge and dissent.

Most radically, the Web allows every person to be his or her own historian. By giving easy access to a deep set of historical records, people can handle the pieces of the past for themselves. The Web puts diaries, letters, newspapers, censuses, military records, memoirs, photographs and maps into the hands of visitors, letting them go as far into the details of individual lives as they choose.

Everything from the founding of Jamestown to the Civil Rights movement, from the witchcraft trials of Salem to the inventions of Thomas Edison, from the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the history of television news has been opened to this experience. Historians have built large projects on women's lives, on Abraham Lincoln, on Harpers Weekly, on the Mississippi River, on the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on the histories of Los Angeles and Chicago. Historians constructed an instant archive on the attack of Sept. 11, 2001, chronicling personal responses to tragedy in real time.

In the process, the doors of the historical record are opened. Individuals can wrestle for themselves with some of the great questions of American history, such as what caused the Civil War.

I cite the Civil War not just because that period happens to be my specialty. No part of American history has seen more action on the World Wide Web. Hundreds of sites document every facet of the conflict. The Library of Congress has mounted famous photographs and official documents, while distinctly non-academic sites trumpet their political beliefs under waving flags.

The Valley of the Shadow project, which I originated at the University of Virginia, displays the records of every person in two counties, one in the North and one in the South, throughout the Civil War era. These records cover the lives of blacks as well as whites, females as well as males, deserters as well as heroes. Political, economic and military history is documented alongside the history of emotion, intimacy and death. Thus it is possible for anyone with Internet access to study, for example, what difference slavery made in leading to the Civil War in greater detail and precision than has ever been possible.

This ongoing study is causing us to re-evaluate the conventional story of the war as a conflict between a modern, industrialized North and a backward, agrarian South. This standard interpretation, it turns out, is misleading and evasive.

White Americans found it possible to reconcile slavery with technology, towns, white democracy and profitable business - all considered key aspects of modern life in the mid-19th century. The Civil War was not the inevitable clash of the future against the past, as many of us have been schooled - and might prefer - to believe.

Slaveowners took out insurance policies on the people they claimed as their property. Slaves worked in factories as well as on farms. The Confederacy gathered the confidence to leave the United States, forging a new nation based on slavery, in part because of its network of railroads, newspapers, telegraphs and steamships. The history of the 20th and 21st centuries has shown all too clearly that forms of modern life can easily co-exist with forced labor and racial domination. The American South pioneered in this fusion.

Americans like to think that slavery was merely an accident in our development as a nation, a brief mistake, a wrong turn. But in 1860 slavery already had been established for two centuries. Slavery drove much of the American economy, providing more than half of all the nation's exports. Slavery generated the war against Mexico of 1846-48 and thus the addition of a vast part of our territory. Before the Civil War, slaveholders held the presidency more often than not.

These are uncomfortable facts that contradict our sense of ourselves. But it does no good to ignore them or brush them aside. The point of studying the past is not merely to make us feel good about ourselves, but to let us view ourselves honestly. The Civil War did end up ending slavery, of course. The challenge is to see how that profound good grew out of a war that did not begin with that purpose in mind.

Documents have a way of making that challenge come vividly to life. Already over the past 10 years, we have had millions of hits on the Valley Project Web site - from students in middle and high schools, in community colleges and graduate schools, and from some people who have not been in a classroom for a long time.

Of course, not everyone has the time or the interest to study the primary sources, and the Web does not remove the responsibility of the historian to make sense of the past, any more than government documents on the Web make journalists who interpret them obsolete.

Those who study history carefully have conclusions to make that casual browsers of documents cannot. Historians still need to tell stories that dramatize the most important meanings of the past, as they always have.

 

Posted on Friday, January 30, 2004 at 9:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

On the 100th Anniversary of the Japanese Attack on Russia, Japan Still Wondering If War Was Defensible

Hiroyuki Fuse Yomiuri Shimbun, writing in the Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo) (Jan. 29, 2004):

Through a break in rain clouds, mountains on the Korean Peninsula emerged on the shore. Through my binoculars, I saw a flapping flag placed above the foremast of a large vessel that is sailing along the coast.

Located in the northwest of the Tsushima islands in Nagasaki Prefecture, Mt. Eboshi faces the Korea Strait. From the top of the mountain to the South Korean city of Pusan is only 49.5 kilometers as the crow flies.

Hiroo Takesue, a 59-year-old local historian in Nagasaki Prefecture, said, "I've heard that during the Korean War, the sounds of gunfire could be heard here."

North Korea's nuclear threat increases in realness.

Tsushima, which used to be called Sakimori no Shima (Coast Guards' Island), has had strong links with Russia.

In 1861, shortly before Japan opened to the world, Russian vessels approached Japan demanding territory. A century ago, the Tsushima Strait, located south off the island, became a stage of the decisive Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).

Sandwiched between the Tsushima Strait and Korea Strait, the location of the Tsushima islands played an important role that Takesue called "a strategic point to protect the nation from foreign enemies coming from the continent."

Julian Corbett (1854-1922), a British naval historian and military theorist in the early 20th century, likened the geopolitical situation in which Japan faced off against the Korean Peninsula to that between Britain on the one hand and the Netherlands and Belgium on the other.

The linkage was mentioned in 1914 in a report that analyzed maritime operations used in the Russo-Japanese War. But the report was publicly unknown until it was published recently in the United States because the British maritime intelligence authorities had treated it as a confidential document.

Corbett said Japan's policy on the Korean Peninsula was similar to British concerns of "securing the control of those intervening waters and particularly with efforts to prevent any great continental power from obtaining a footing on the Dutch or Flemish coasts."

For Japan at that time, "continental power" primarily referred to Russia, Corbett said, describing the war as a battle between Japan, an island nation, and Russia, a continental power.

Corbett also pointed out that "the Korean Peninsula, in the very jaws of the Straits," was difficult to attack with continental operations but easy to defend by maritime action.

An island nation was therefore "an area into which an insular and naval power could expand without...losing the advantages of our insular position," he added.

Further, Corbett argued Japan's advance into the Korean Peninsula was inevitable.

The war was triggered by a struggle for leadership over Korea and Manchuria (presently a northeastern part of China).

Japan feared Russia's southward advance and possible control over the peninsula would threaten its national security.

When Russia launched a forest project on the Yalujiang River, the Japanese government took the initiative in negotiating with the country a year before the outbreak of the war.

Yet Japan opted to wage war as negotiations with Russia came to a deadlock.

Corbett's analysis of the war does not just show that Britain, a partner in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (signed in 1902), had a good understanding of Japan's standpoint. The analysis indicates that geopolitical thinking in which the geographical situation of a nation is linked with security policies was widely accepted among officials of European powers.

Similar thinking was seen among Japanese political leadership.

Shinichi Yamamuro, a professor at Kyoto University, said such a geopolitical idea was presented in a well-known opinion paper --"Gaiko Seinryaku Ron" (A Theory on Diplomatic and Political Tactics) --written in 1890 by Aritomo Yamagata (1838-1922), a statesman and founder of the modern Japanese army. Yamagata is known to have called on Japan to protect not only its sovereignty but also its interests in a bid to assure national security.

According to Yamamuro, the person who first introduced geopolitics systematically to Japan is Manjiro Inagaki, a diplomat who served as an envoy to Spain after studying in Britain.

In his book, "Tohosaku" (Eastern Policy), which was published in about the same period as Yamagata's proposal, Inagaki envisioned for the first time how Japan should develop as a maritime nation and argued the importance of sea lanes connecting north and south, located adjacent to railheads of a rail networt running east and west.

In step with remarkable developments in such areas as transportation, communications, navigation and arms technology, national defense theories were created between the late 19th century and the 20th century. Japanese politicians and military officials held ideas similar to Corbett's maritime strategy and a philosophy of geopolitics derived from the viewpoint of U.S. naval historian Alfred Mahan (1840-1914).

There has been endless dispute over the Russo-Japanese War as some people call it an imperialist war, while others assert it was a defensive war for the homeland.

This year marks the centennial of the outbreak of the war. Taking such an occasion, some people have tried to link the war to the subsequent Pacific War by emphasizing the negative side of Japan's ambition to expand its power into the continent.

But it is rather natural for an island nation like Japan in the early 20th century to have taken a strong interest in securing its national security by expanding its power beyond the straits, fearing the possible influence of a continental power.

The report by Corbett, which was not available to the public for nearly a century, suggests the real picture of the world when such geopolitical thinking was common sense.

To understand how people in Meiji era (1868-1912) overcame national hardship, namely the war with Russia, we have to go back to the spirit of the times.

 

Posted on Friday, January 30, 2004 at 8:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Samantha Power Takes the NYT to Task over Its Supposedly Evenhanded Account of the Armenian Massacre

From a letter to the editor of the NYT:

To the Editor:

"Movie on Armenians Rekindles Flame Over Turkish Past" (Arts pages, Jan. 20) says "Turkish and Armenian historians have given widely differing accounts of what happened in 1915." But that is not a matter of ethnic perspective. The extermination of the Armenians is recognized as genocide by the consensus of scholars of genocide and Holocaust worldwide. The failure to acknowledge this trivializes a human rights crime of enormous magnitude.

The Ottoman Turkish government's meticulously planned extermination of its Christian Armenian citizens took the lives of more than a million Armenians in 1915 and 1916. Another million Armenians survived the death marches but were permanently exiled from their homeland of 2,500 years. It is denigrating to refer to these facts as Armenians being "chased from their ancestral homelands."

It is ironic as well, because in 1915 The New York Times published 145 articles about the Armenian genocide and regularly used the words "systematic," "government planned" and "race extermination."
PETER BALAKIAN
SAMANTHA POWER
Hamilton, N.Y., Jan. 20, 2004
The writers are, respectively, a professor of humanities at Colgate University and a lecturer at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Posted on Friday, January 30, 2004 at 6:32 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Pro and Con: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ

From CNN (Jan. 23, 2004):

ZAIN VERJEE, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR : Welcome to Q&A. Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" has been applauded for its portrayal of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. But it's also been criticized for fueling bigotry and anti-Semitism and for opening up old wounds that were on the way to being healed. It's an old debate, but now it could begin anew.

With us from Orlando in Florida is Ted Haggard. He is the president of the National Association of Evangelicals and the founder of the New Life Church. He is a board member for the Center of Christian-Jewish dialogue. Ted Haggard, you've seen this film. Is it a good film? Is it historically accurate?

TED HAGGARD, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF EVANGELICALS: It is a good film, it's a work of art, it's a piece of art that Mel Gibson has put together, based on historical facts. But of course, it's just like "Braveheart" or "Saving Private Ryan" or many other movies. There are additions that he's made to it, of course, for artistic appeal and for what any producer does in producing a movie. And so, we as Evangelicals love it. We love the scriptures, and we think it's -- it's a tool that will communicate the primary issues that happened to Christ in the final hours of his life.

VERJEE: Rabbi Marvin Hier, with the Simon Wiesenthal Center, joins us. Marvin Hier, how do you ...

RABBI MARVIN HIER, SIMON WIESENTHAL CENTER: It's Rabbi Hier, Hier.

VERJEE: Rabbi Hier, I beg your pardon. You've seen this movie as well. What do you think?

HIER: I think that this movie is an incendiary device that will create a faster anti-Semitism all over the world, particularly in Europe, in the Arab world, and in South America. And I say this as a filmmaker myself. I've made six films. And I say that this film will engender hate against the Jewish people.

VERJEE: Ted Haggard...

HAGGARD: Yeah.

VERJEE: Do you think that this will incite hatred against Jews?

HAGGARD: No, Zain. I think there are a couple of things that are very important there. One is, there is no evidence that any time in our generation, since there has been this explosion of Evangelicalism, that anything associated with the passion has done anything but engender love for the Jewish people, and -- and it's Christians who are the number one supportive of the concerns that Jewish people have. And the ones who love the story the most seem to be the most supportive of Israel and Jewish concerns, and civil liberties and things like that.

Interestingly enough, there is a rise right now of anti-Semitism in Europe and in South America, and it's before this movie comes out. And -- so, it's important that we understand that. I actually don't think, Rabbi, that your primary concern is a concern about violence. The movie you produced, "Genocide," you weren't concerned about stirring up hatred against the Germans. And it didn't stir up hatred against the Germans, it was a study of historical fact, which the passion is, which genocide was, and both of those cause everyone of us to search our own hearts and our own societies and do everything we can to make sure hatred like this does not happen in our own generation.

VERJEE: Rabbi Hier.

HIER: With all -- with all due respect, the comparison is quite preposterous. First, let me say, the single cause of anti-Semitism around the world for 20 centuries is the false accusation of deicide, that the Jewish people are responsible for the death of God, the son of God. And this has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and tortures through the ages, and admitted so by every modern pope, especially the current pope, who took responsibility for that on behalf of the Christian Church.

So to say that deicide, which is the central theme of this film, has not caused any damage to the Jewish people and Jewish history is really, you know, a complete fabrication. And I would also like to add one other important point -- in this film, the passion of -- the passion that I saw, the Romans come out as wonderful people, with the exception of the four whippers. From Pontius Pilate down, they are all displayed in this film, Pontius Pilate is a character who says, why are you making me do this? I really don't want to do this. And Pontius Pilate was one of the most vicious tormenters that historians have noted. Yet in this film, he's portrayed as timid and he's portrayed as a person who says, I am being forced to do this, please don't make me do this. That is preposterous.

HAGGARD: Well, I think it's important for you to recognize the facts of our generation. Now, it's true, there have been things that have happened in Jewish history and in Christian history that are embarrassing to all of us, and we Christians and the Jewish people are all responsible to look at history to make sure we don't repeat the negative portions of history that are in all of our pasts.

But for our generation and the previous generation, it's not then Christians that have been the primary promoters of anti-Semitism. I mean, Evangelical Christians, Bible-believing Christians; Christians who love the story of the Christ and love the Jewish people. So, we know right now, the number one viewed movie during our generation is the Jesus video that was produced by Campus Crusade for Christ. Five billion people have seen that movie. There is a little over one billion people on the Earth that have not seen that movie. Everywhere that movie has been well received, there has been a heightened respect for Jewish people and love for Jewish people and...

(CROSSTALK)

HAGGARD: And here's why, let me finish. The reason why is because Evangelical Christians are so strong in emphasizing the fact that it was God who gave his own life, and in this movie, "The Passion," Jesus crawls onto the cross himself. He's not thrown onto the cross. He does it himself, because, the Scripture says that Jesus gave his own life. And so we, Evangelical Christians, believe and promote all over the world, and I represent 23 million of them myself, we believe and we promote all over the world that it was our sins that crucified Christ, and that we're responsible for the death of Christ, and we see this movie...

VERJEE: All right.

HAGGARD: ... as a love story. It's not a movie that focuses on Jews and Romans, it's a movie that focuses on Christ.

VERJEE: All right.

HAGGARD: And I think you are making a mistake ...

(CROSSTALK)

VERJEE: Go ahead.

HIER: Let me respond to that. It must have been a different movie then that I saw. I saw a movie that the only bad people in the entire movie is everyone that is Jewish. Everybody else comes off as a compassionate, decent person. The new Christians, who believe in Jesus, the Romans, with the exception of the four whippers, wonderful people.

And I will further say, I don't think women in particular and children will stay for this movie. This movie is the epitome of torture and violence. I have never seen a movie with more torture and violence than this movie. And I would say want you to know that despite your assurances, and we have no quarrel with Evangelical Christians, they've been supporters of Israel, but despite your assurances, let me counter-reassure you that the overwhelming majority of the Jews throughout the world will say of this film, it's absolutely horrible.

HAGGARD: Well, I think it's important to understand that it is rated R. I encouraged being rated R so that parents could make the choice about whether people saw the movie or not.

But see, for us, this is a very important story about the suffering of Christ. We celebrate it every Easter. We talk about it in our churches. We study the scriptures, because to the degree that Jesus suffered, that shows the degree of his love for us, to redeem us of our sins and forgive us of our sins. And this is a story that launches out of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And the people themselves can get a copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, read it, compare it to the movie, and come to their own conclusions.

Posted on Friday, January 30, 2004 at 6:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Egregious Examples of Sloppy Thinking Mar Georgia's New History Standards

Clifford Kuhn, professor of history at Georgia State University, writing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Jan. 30, 2004):

As a scholar of American history, as a professor to many teachers-in-the-making and as a parent of two children who have gone through the public schools, I have a deep, abiding interest in how history and social studies are taught and learned.

Accordingly, I'm disturbed by various aspects of the recently announced proposed state standards for social studies. In addition to their often dubious ideological underpinnings and associated teaching exercises, many of the standards suffer from unclear, sloppy phrasing and just bad history.

For instance, Standard SS8.33 for the eighth-grade unit on "Reconstruction and the New South" reads, "The student will identify events in Georgia and the South that denied African-Americans their newly won rights and explain why these changes occurred, including Jim Crow legislation, terrorism and Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896 ('separate but equal' doctrine)."

This is an unexceptionable, even commendable goal. Yet, one of the three tasks associated with the standard has students "research the anti-lynching legislation passed during this period of history and the events that made this action necessary."

Which legislation are we talking about? Despite the efforts of the NAACP and others from the 1920s forward (a period well past the late 19th century time frame of the unit, by the way), Congress, let alone state legislatures, never passed an anti-lynch law. On the contrary, in Georgia and elsewhere, local and state officials often were complicit in lynchings. So the assignment is completely meaningless....

While it may be unfair to pick apart a couple of egregious cases, and while in some respects the proposed standards do mark an improvement over the existing curricular objectives, ... [the above example] -- and many others -- make one cringe at what might be taught (or not taught) should the standards as written be adopted.

It behooves teachers, students and scholars of history, and all concerned Georgians to carefully review and critique the standards over the next few months, so that our children might best appreciate history and most fruitfully engage with the past.


Posted on Friday, January 30, 2004 at 1:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lewis & Clark: Vanguard of an American Imperialist Mission

Robert J. Miller, associate professor of Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, writing in the Seattle Times (Jan. 28, 2004):

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark sit high in the pantheon of American folk heroes. Even today, Lewis and Clark are viewed as brave adventurers who went where no one had gone before, exploring and conquering the wilderness for the betterment of America.

There is another way to view Lewis and Clark, however, which is nearer to the truth. Lewis and Clark were military officers serving American empire and manifest destiny and they were the vanguard of American policies that ultimately robbed the indigenous peoples of nearly everything they possessed.

Historian Bernard DeVoto stated, "The dispatch of the Lewis and Clark expedition was an act of imperial policy." This imperialism was directed at the Indians who inhabited the Pacific Northwest and the Louisiana Territory.

The expedition was primarily concerned with Indian affairs. ....

The expedition operated under a European legal principle called the doctrine of discovery. This legal principle rationalized the domination and outright conquest of indigenous, non-Christian, non-white populations because it provided that the first European country that "discovered" new territory gained an interest in the natives' property and became the sole government eligible to buy their lands and the sole government that could deal diplomatically with the natives. Thus, indigenous peoples lost property and sovereign rights without their knowledge or their consent to the "discovering" nation.

Jefferson demonstrated his agreement with the doctrine when he wrote that after buying the Louisiana Territory, the United States had become its "sovereign" but that the purchase had not diminished Indian "occupancy rights" until the United States bought the land itself from the "native proprietors." Jefferson also showed his understanding of the doctrine when he sent Lewis and Clark beyond the Louisiana Territory into the Pacific Northwest to strengthen the American discovery claim to the Oregon Territory. Jefferson obviously had American empire in mind for the Pacific Northwest and for the Louisiana Territory....

The ultimate goal, then, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the subjugation of Indian property and commercial rights. The expedition helped the United States claim its discovery sovereignty over the Louisiana Territory, institute concrete plans to begin exercising that authority and extended America's claim to the Northwest. The expedition was a major part of Jefferson's plan to assimilate Indians and their assets into American society, to remove the tribes from the path of American continental expansion and, if necessary, to exterminate the tribes to advance the American empire.

 

Posted on Friday, January 30, 2004 at 12:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

James McPherson: Another Phony Account of Lincoln's Death

AHA president James McPherson (2003), writing in the AHA's Perspectives, about Lincoln books that falsify history (Jan. 2004):

The latest entry in the field is Dark Union: The Secret Web of Profiteers, Politicians, and Booth Conspirators That Led to Lincoln’s Death, by Leonard F. Guttridge and Ray A. Neff (John Wiley & Sons, 2003). The subtitle summarizes the thesis, which incorporates and augments all of the apocryphal interpretations of previous sensational exposés except the Jesuit-conspiracy theory. Among the new revelations, Dark Union claims that Booth not only escaped but also made his way to India where he changed his name to John B. Wilkes and accumulated a fortune by the time he died there in 1883.

Dark Union, written mainly by Guttridge, an author of books on naval history and the history of exploration, was based on an archive of copies of documents and manuscripts accumulated over several decades by Neff, a retired chemist. In their introduction, the authors maintain that the orthodox interpretation of Lincoln’s assassination “is substantially rooted in pure myth and faked or incomplete testimony” (p. 3). These words ironically describe their own book, as Edward Steers Jr. (author of a solid study of the assassination, Blood on the Moon, published in 2001 by the University Press of Kentucky) and Joan L. Chaconas demonstrate in a devastating review essay published in the current issue of North & South, the best of the popular Civil War history magazines. The “evidence” for Dark Union’s breathless revelations of conspiracies consists mostly “of transcribed documents, allegedly copies of originals that have been lost or destroyed. However, there is no credible evidence that any of the original documents ever existed,” write Steers and Chaconas.

Two examples among many of this illusory evidence: Dark Union quotes (on page 20) a letter dated August 29, 1864, from the Southern physician Luke Blackburn to Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin. The provenance of the typescript copy of this letter is said to be a copy in the Filson Club Historical Society in Louisville of the original in the National Archives. A search of the Filson Club’s collections and of the National Archives by historian Jane Singer, who is writing a chapter on Blackburn in a book about covert operations in the Civil War, failed to turn up either the copy or the original. Neff first claimed that Blackburn’s biographer gave him the copy; but because the biographer denied having done so, Neff now says he does not remember where he got the copy. Second, the most important “documents” cited in Dark Union are from the papers of Andrew Potter, a supposed member of Lafayette Baker’s National Detective Police who allegedly carried out a thorough investigation of the assassination and then took his papers with him when he left the agency. An exhaustive search by Steers and research assistants of the records of this agency and every related agency in the National Archives plus census and birth and death records for the states where Potter allegedly lived and died turned up no evidence that he ever existed, much less worked for the National Detective Police.

Why should historians be concerned about such fiction passing as history? Precisely because the authors and their publisher repeatedly insist that it is the only true story of the assassination—and thousands of readers will continue to believe them if historians merely ignore or dismiss the book without seriously engaging its egregious claims. We have a responsibility to the history-reading public beyond our guild.

Posted on Wednesday, January 28, 2004 at 5:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

McNamara Reveals Himself in New Documentary

Writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn, reviewing the Fog of War in Metro, Silicon Valley's Weekly Newspaper (Jan. 2004):

The Fog of War opens with a classic McNamarism. As the octogenarian is getting seated for another interview session, he checks in with Morris about sound levels, then declares: "Now I remember exactly the sentence I left off on, I remember how it started. You can fix it up some way. I don't want to go back and introduce the sentence, because I know exactly what I wanted to say."

It is the McNamara of old. Didactic, always in control, asserting his intelligence and the perfect command of memory. The changes are subtle. He is clearly in the autumn of his years, slightly frailer, grayed, his hair thinned, a touch vulnerable, certainly more reflective, but he is nonetheless vital, engaged, articulate and, perhaps now, even wise. At least wiser. What's more, he's charming, almost likable.

During the course of the film, McNamara, something of an American Zelig, recounts various episodes of his life dating back to the end of World War I up until the present, a period that covers the second world war, his years at the Ford Motor Company and the postwar revitalization of the auto industry, the Cuban Missile Crisis and, most centrally, the Vietnam War.

He breaks down when he recalls the assassination of President Kennedy. At another point, he acknowledges that he and General Curtis LeMay, under whom he served during the World War II firebombings of Tokyo, which left 100,000 Japanese civilians dead in a single night, could be viewed as "war criminals."

He breaks down again when he recalls the impacts of the Vietnam War on his family--his wife and three children were opposed to the war--and he goes so far as to acknowledge that the traumas associated with his tenure as secretary may have "ultimately" even killed his wife. It is a painful and poignant moment, but McNamara feels compelled, even when stricken with grief, to footnote that moment with the disclosure that they "were some of the best years of our life" and that "all members from my family benefited" from his days in Washington.

Posted on Tuesday, January 27, 2004 at 3:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

How Herodotus Led a Canadian Exploration Crew to an Ancient Persian Invasion Fleet that Sank (And Saved Greece)

Randy Boswell, writing in the Ottawa Citizen (Jan. 21, 2004):

With help from Herodotus and an Aegean Sea octopus, a Canadian-led scientific expedition appears to have discovered the site of a turning point in world history: the sinking of a massive Persian invasion fleet in a fierce storm that saved Greece at the dawn of western civilization.

During an October dive off the country's northeast coast near Mount Athos -- a site pinpointed by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus -- archeologists retrieved ship storage jars dating from the 5th century BC and the metal butt of a spear that matches those carried by Persian warriors.

The researchers also learned of an earlier find in the same waters by a fisherman that clinches the significance of the site: two bronze battle helmets that the Persians would have worn at the time of the world's first great clash between East and West.

Project co-leader Shelley Wachsmann, the Regina-born marine archeologist who earlier excavated a Sea of Galilee fishing vessel dubbed the "Jesus Boat," says the foiled Persian attack of 492 BC ranks "among the greatest maritime ventures of the ancient world, both in terms of the scale of the operations and the historical outcome to Greece in particular and western civilization in general."

The discovery of the artifacts, along with sonar scans revealing a "target-rich" field of debris on the rocky floor of the Aegean Sea , is fuelling excitement that remnants of the Persian warships might be raised during the next search this summer.

"This opens up a whole new world," said Mr. Wachsmann, now a professor with Texas A&M University . "We've got what appears to be a shipwreck that sank above the rocks and is now buried in sediment."

Stefanie Kennell, an antiquities expert from Toronto and director of the Canadian Archaeological Institute at Athens , helped assemble the international team of scholars searching for the sunken fleet.

She says the project is shedding light on "one of those crucial moments in western history. For the Greeks, this was a seminal event in their national consciousness, something they never forgot."

The destruction of the Persian armada is recorded in the writings of Herodotus, who was born about 484 BC and is widely known as the "father of history." In fact, his 2,500-year-old chronicle of the Greco-Persian wars gave the Canadian-led team its key clue as to the whereabouts of the sunken armada.

Mr. Wachsmann proposed a search for traces of the lost Persian armada in late 2002. The CAIA, a network of Canadian scholars that oversees all of the country's archeological research in Greece , scrambled to give its support to the project in time for 2003 field research.

Greek archeologists, including project co-leader Katerina Dellaporta, embraced the proposal. Soon after, news broke that a fishing net had snagged two ancient helmets in the waters off Mount Athos .

"That came as a surprise to everyone," recalls Ms. Kennell. "I saw this on the news and called Shelley. It was all very exciting. We knew these helmets could have been part of the armada."

The fisherman led scientists back to the site of his find. Using a submersible craft, Mr. Wachsmann and his colleagues discovered an ancient storage jar -- probably used to transport oil or wine for the Persian forces -- and another, much younger vessel.

That jar, says Mr. Wachsmann, was "apparently the home of an acquisitive octopus, which had drawn into the jar mouth a potpourri of seabed detritus, including a pyramidal bronze weapon point with part of its wooden shaft still lodged in its socket."

The tapered bronze spike -- known as a sauroter or "lizard killer" -- would have balanced the spearhead and served as a secondary stabber in close battle.

"The discovery of this rarely found artifact at the location where the helmets had been raised suggests that a warship sank in this area," Mr. Wachsmann concludes.

Posted on Thursday, January 22, 2004 at 6:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

McNamara--Does He Feel Guilty?

Tom McNamee, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times (Jan. 18, 2004):

In the movies, people change. George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life." Phil Connors in "Groundhog Day." All those jerks in those Adam Sandler movies who turn sweet. So thank God for documentaries, where people almost never change. At least that's honest.

Watch enough documentaries and it's easy to doubt the transformative powers of growing older. Documentaries tend to confirm what most of us secretly suspect on our way to grammar school reunions -- the dreamer will still be dreaming and the apple polisher will still be sucking up.

In the 1989 documentary "Let's Get Lost," jazz trumpeter Chet Baker is forever the romantic and manipulative brooder. In "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl" (1993), the Nazi filmmaker remains resolutely disconnected from horrific consequences of her art.

And in Michael Apted's celebrated "Up" documentaries -- a series of films in which a group of British children are followed through their lives, revisited every seven years -- it's either reassuring or scary (depending on how much you, the viewer, approve of the kid you once were) to detect so much of the former child in these adults. They grow up and move along in their lives, changing careers and spouses and political views. But something fundamental to who they were at the mere age of 7 -- whether a sense of haughtiness or loneliness or gentleness or inquisitiveness -- remains in their adult incarnations.

Which brings us to Bob McNamara.

In "The Fog of War," by the documentary filmmaker (and former anti-war protester) Errol Morris, former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who served under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, wrestles with deep moral questions about his roles in the Vietnam War and, before that, World War II.

Questions such as, did he behave like a war criminal?

He breaks a bit of news, offers a tutorial on hard lessons learned and bends over backward to explain himself.

He's not apologizing, mind you. That's not what this is about. As he stares into the camera, tears well up. But he's just explaining a few things.

So he explains. And explains. And explains some more. And before long the Bob McNamara of 2003 starts looking like the Bob McNamara of 1965. All that's missing are the charts and the pointer. The words are precise, the logic seemingly unassailable. Every decision had its reasons. But as you listen to McNamara talk, you begin to wonder: At what point does all this explaining begin to sound like the workings of a guilty mind? And if McNamara is wracked with guilt, does he even know it?

"My wife compares Bob McNamara to the Flying Dutchman -- the person destined to travel the entire world looking for redemption," said Morris. "I would say he's traveling the world looking for some kind of understanding of himself."

Besides, Morris said, it's harder to analyze an error than apologize for it.

Posted on Monday, January 19, 2004 at 10:36 PM | Comments (1) | Top

The Most Important Case Ever Decided by Any Court Began with a Petty Dispute Over a Patronage Job

Michael J. Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, writing in the Wilson Quarterly (Summer 2003):

The most monumental case ever decided by any court in any country began as a petty dispute over a patronage job. The underlying controversy quickly blossomed into a clash between two titans of the early American republic, and it ended with the unveiling of a new judicial doctrine that would alter the course of American history and spread around the world to protect the liberty of hundreds of millions of people.

The doctrine was judicial review—the practice by which courts strike down acts of other governmental entities—and it led to such epoch-making Supreme Court judgments as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended the legal racial segregation of public schools, and United States v. Nixon (1974), in which the Court ordered Pres­ident Richard Nixon to turn over certain potentially relevant audiotapes to the Watergate court. It also gave the nation Roe v. Wade (1973). Judicial review is American constitutionalism’s greatest gift to the world—an arguably greater gift than the U.S. constitutional model itself. Unlike many other features of the new American government, the practice was virtually without precedent when the Supreme Court announced it in Marbury v. Madison (1803). An English case in 1610 had intimated that an act of Parliament “against common right and reason” was void under the common law, and the English Privy Council was later empowered to invalidate colonial statutes that ran counter to the colonial charters or English law. But nowhere in the world before 1803 did the courts of any country engage in the practice of striking down laws inconsistent with the national constitution.

William Marbury (1762–1835), a prominent Maryland land speculator who sued the U.S. government to claim a job as a federal justice of the peace, was only a bit player in the high drama to which he gave his name. Two larger figures—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), the third president of the United States, and John Marshall (1755–1835), who was chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835—dominated the stage....

Click here to read the rest of this essay.

Posted on Monday, January 19, 2004 at 9:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Spain Pays Tribute to British Role in Defeating Napoleon

Isambard Wilkinson, writing in the Daily Telegraph (London) (Jan. 17, 2004)

AFTER two centuries of bitterness over Britain's role in ousting Napoleon's forces from the Iberian Peninsula, Spain yesterday honoured the soldiers' efforts by commemorating one of the most famous retreats in the British Army's history.

Cannon fire and muskets rang out across the bay of Corunna as Spanish, French and British officials yesterday marked the 195th anniversary of the "Retreat to Corunna" led by Sir John Moore during the Peninsular War.

Spanish officials put aside residual enmity over the action, which led to British soldiers drinking, raping and pillaging their way across the Spanish countryside.

"This commemoration contributes to the unity of the European nations," said Francisco Vazquez, the mayor of Corunna.

"We must bury past conflicts and celebrate a lasting peace."

The head of the expeditionary force, Sir John managed to march 15,000 of his men across Spain for two weeks with little rest and no rations and then embark them while under heavy fire in January 1809.

He is credited with saving the British Army, which was able to return to the peninsula under the command of the Duke of Wellington, who drove the French from Spain in what the Spanish call the War of Independence.

A bust of Sir John Moore was unveiled by the British ambassador to Madrid, Stephen Wright, and flowers were laid to commemorate the thousands of soldiers and sailors who died during the retreat.

During the last phase of the retreat Sir John was fatally wounded by a cannonball but he continued to rally his troops in a counter-attack. He died that evening and was buried in the ramparts of the city, where there is now a walled garden.

Sir John lost 2,000 men and one fifth of his army was missing. The streets of Corunna ran red with blood as orders were given to slaughter hundreds of cavalry horses in case they fell into French hands.

"Its wonderful that the Spanish people appreciate the efforts of Sir John Moore and that they can put aside the rather poor popular image of the British soldier there," said Ian Fletcher, a noted historian on the Peninsular War.

The remnants of the expeditionary force arrived back in Portsmouth, bedraggled and haggard, to the horror of townspeople.

Posted on Monday, January 19, 2004 at 9:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Historians in Asia Debate the Sino-Japanese War ... But Run into Political Divisions

Brad Glosserman, director of research at Pacific Forum CSIS, in the South China Morning Post (Jan. 15, 2004):

For most Americans, the second world war began on December 7, 1941, when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbour. Europeans date the beginning to the 1939 invasion of Poland. Few westerners appreciate the length and savagery of the Sino-Japanese war that was already in full force.

More than 50 years after its conclusion, that war and its aftermath continue to define Sino-Japan relations. The conflict claimed an estimated 20 million lives, bringing out the very worst in soldiers and leaders of both countries. Periodically, leftovers from the war are discovered, such as the poison-gas shells uncovered in China last year that killed one person and sickened dozens of others. Japanese courts are still hearing cases regarding the treatment of prisoners of war and forced labour.

Yet despite the centrality of the Sino-Japanese war to contemporary Asia, there is still no agreement on what transpired during those eight years, its meaning and why it happened.

To remedy that situation, some two dozen scholars from China, Japan and the west met last week to discuss the military history of the Sino-Japanese war. The project is the brainchild of Harvard scholar Ezra Vogel.

Understanding the war is not just an intellectual exercise. Some of Japan's biggest disputes with its neighbours in recent years have been generated by controversies over history. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visits to Yasukuni Shrine - where the country's war dead are commemorated - are the most obvious manifestation of the festering sore. There are hopes that finding common ground on these issues could provide a foundation for a wider-ranging reconciliation.

"We want to bring together these scholars to see if they could agree on what actually happened during the war," Dr Vogel said. "Hopefully, they can contribute to resolving the history issue. Scholars can't solve political problems, but they can provide a basic message to politicians who want to promote reconciliation and solve these problems."

While it is difficult to be optimistic about the prospects for such exercises - at least in my lifetime - last week's meeting provided some grounds for hope. It was very civil: no raised voices, no nasty swipes. Bitter topics such as the atrocities in Nanking (now Nanjing) or the use of chemical weapons by imperial Japanese troops were notable by their absence. But there was a critical divergence. For the Chinese participants, the starting point for each discussion was an indisputable fact: the Sino-Japanese war was one of aggression. Thus, there was a moral dimension to the study that had to be established before any factual components could be discussed.

One Japanese participant expressed frustration with the need to reiterate that point; "to begin each comment with a political position". A historian, he agreed that the war was one of aggression. But he complained that he was not responsible for the events. He observed that many Japanese felt the same way and that China's continuing emphasis on the moral issue was alienating people who were sympathetic to the Chinese position. They are starting to wonder what the real point is. Is China trying to claim the moral high ground? If so, why?

Some of the western historians expressed similar frustrations. For them, attempts to frame the war in moral terms obscure important historical lessons. For example, despite the high number of casualties, the Sino-Japanese war had little impact on the outcome of the war in the Pacific. The critical determinant in the allied victory over Japan was a shortage of ships: even if one million imperial soldiers had not been tied down on the mainland, they could not have stopped the allied march. The Sino-Japanese war was a life-or -death struggle for the Chinese nation, but it is considered by most historians to be a "peripheral theatre" during the second world war.

Chinese historians were also disinclined to debate Chiang Kai-shek's thinking during the war. Historians have asked whether he put a higher priority on fighting the communists or the Japanese, and how that affected his conduct during the war. The Chinese insisted that whatever the internal divisions, all Chinese would come together for the sake of the nation in times of crisis. As a result, they seemed quicker to defend Chiang than did the Taiwanese. While the nationalist instinct is understandable, it is also an obstacle to an objective and accurate portrait of the war.

Posted on Friday, January 16, 2004 at 7:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Ongoing Whitewash of Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty in 1967

George Beres, in an article submitted to HNN on January 16, 2004. (Mr. Beres served three years on Oregon's Interreligious Committee for Peace in the Middle East. He also has been a member of the Oregon Greek Orthodox Committee for Peace & Justice.)

History becomes painfully vivid when it deals with violent death-- especially when the reason for death remains a matter of dispute decades later. That was the uncomfortable setting when a U.S. Naval inquiry in early January went through the motions of considering what happened on June 8, 1967, when Israeli warplanes attacked the U.S. spy ship, Liberty, in international waters off the coast of Egypt. Those motions were reminiscent of a similar pattern followed in a 1967 inquiry into what happened. Conclusion of the Bush government today remained unchanged from that of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration of 1967, which ruled the cause was "negligence on the part of Israel-- and the United States."

The passing of 37 years did nothing to cool the anger of navy veterans who believe their well-being in the line of fire is compromised when their government gives higher priority to controversial alliances with other nations. One, Paul Findley of Jacksonville, Ill, has special perspective. The navy veteran of World War II was a U.S Congressman from Illinois in the 1970s and '80s. He also wrote the definitive book -- They Dare to Speak Out -- about what he describes as the successful effort of Israeli lobbiests to control U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. In his view, the "whitewash" of the Liberty attack is the product of U.S. subservience to Israeli demands in the Middle East.

Findley has made a study of what happened to the Liberty, and still is in disbelief over what he sees as the failure of the U.S. to speak out against, and seek redress for, what happened that tragic spring day. He has spoken with survivors of the attack, hearing firsthand about: the two-hour surprise attack on the unarmed "spy" ship of an ally by Israeli warplanes; how repeated sorties, plus torpedo strikes, attempted to sink the ship; how U.S. sailors in lifeboats were sprayed by machine gun fire from Israeli planes.

Then he reads-- again-- the claim of the Israeli military that the ship, flying U.S. flags and wearing markings in English instead of Arabic, was mistaken for an Egyptian ship as the Six-Day war between Israel and Arab states was escalating. His anger peaks as he says:

Of all the reasons for moral condemnation that have emerged from the Middle East during the 40 years I have closely observed the region, the assault on the USS Liberty ranks as most despicable. It was ugly barbarism when Israeli air and sea forces assaulted the Liberty for two hours on a clear and sunny day, attempting to destroy the clearly marked U.S. vessel and its entire crew.

When Findley asks why negligence is attributed to the United States, he is told the ship failed to notify Israeli authorities it would be in the waters off Egypt. When the explanation is challenged, a U.S. spokesman, anonymous, replies: "The mistaken identity was an example of Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will."

Navy Captain Ward Boston, senior legal counsel for the 1967 inquiry, places no stock in Murphy's Law. Now 80, Capt. Boston said: "President Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara told me to conclude it was an accident, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary." Boston today repeats his earlier contention that "the evidence conclusively showed deliberate effort to sink the ship and kill its crew," and that its clearly visible markings precluded any possibility of mistaken identity.

As one who once was involved in legislative assistance to Israel, Findley points out: "The deliberate butchery came at the very moment the U.S.
government was donating critical military assistance to Israel in its war against Arab states. Israel's reasons for this perfidy may be disputed, but further debate over the baseless excuse of mistaken identity is not needed. It was a deliberate scheme for total destruction.

As a World War II navy veteran, I feel like screaming in outrage whenever I think of the plight of Liberty shipmates and the merciless agony inflicted on them by the Israelis. As a veteran of the Congress, I am ashamed neither side of the House has the patriotism and decency to authorize a thorough hearing to lay out the truth for us to see. What a terrible price our government is paying to shield the government of Israel from the condemnation it richly deserves.

Ray McGovern put the Liberty controversy into current context in a recent speech in Taos, N.M. The longtime veteran of the CIA said in a broadcast
address: "Our one-sided support of Israel is the main reason for the mess in the Middle East and our attack on Iraq." He said the influence Israeli lobbiests have on both political parties is seen by the reaction of Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, leader for the Democratic presidential nomination, when they said one of his statements placed Israel in jeopardy: "Gov. Dean had to be out of his mind when he agreed to retract his statement that the U.S. needs a more even-handed policy in the Middle East."

Paul Findley would take a more realistic view of that turnaround, describing the reversal as only the latest response to many years of intimidation by Israel of U.S. political figures.

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Posted on Friday, January 16, 2004 at 3:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hercules Invented the First Biological Weapon

Bryn Nelson, writing in Newsday (Jan. 13, 2004):

The superhero and the serpent waged a battle of mythic proportions. Mythic, of course, since the protagonist was Hercules and his opponent was the many-headed hydra, a venomous sea monster that had left the inhabitants of southern Greece utterly terrified.

As recounted by Homer in the eighth century BC, Hercules finally prevailed, but only after cauterizing the serpent's neck wounds to prevent its multiple heads from regrowing, and only after burying its immortal central head under a boulder. Then Hercules did something that may have proven much more profound: He dipped the quivers of his arrows in the deadly hydra poison, opening up "a world not only of toxic warfare, but also of unanticipated consequences."

So writes classical folklorist Adrienne Mayor, whose declaration may come as something of a surprise: "Hercules, one of the great heroes of Greek myth, actually invented the first biological weapon."

From Hercules' poisoned arrows to early germ warfare and attacks with scorpion bombs and red-hot sand, she contends, cultures around the world have grappled with the revulsion and justification of using these unconventional weapons ever since they began creating their own myths and recording their histories. Mayor has compiled a slew of examples in her new book, "Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World" (Overlook Press).

The image of the hydra in particular has become a potent symbol of the age-old dilemma over unconventional weaponry, Mayor says.

"It's a proliferating monster, and that's why we use the hydra to symbolize a difficult problem," she says. "I think it's a great symbol of the practice of biological warfare. Such weapons start taking on a life of their own, and they start proliferating and there's no way to get rid of them."

In a similar vein, Mayor says the account of Hercules burying the immortal central hydra head in many ways foreshadows the geological solution to containing radioactive nuclear waste by burying it underground.

Implicit in the enduring hydra analogy are theancient moral quandaries over the use of unconventional arms. Although vehement criticism did exist in the ancient world, Mayor says her research shows that it did not prevent armies from using these weapons to gain the upper hand and then justifying their actions afterward. Despite the nostalgia for an age of relative innocence, she says, "there probably never was a time or a place that was innocent of biological tactics. It's sort of a Pandora's box that was opened millennia ago."

Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 4:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

State Department Condemns Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty

Elise Labott, writing in CNN.com (Jan. 12, 2004):

After reviewing documents dating back 36 years, the State Department has concluded that Israel's attack on a U.S. spy ship in 1967 was an act of gross negligence for which it should be held responsible.

The USS Liberty was attacked off the Egyptian coast June 8, 1967, during the Six-Day War, while gathering electronic intelligence. The attack killed 34 Americans and injured another 171.

"In many respects this is kind of a classic bi-national case of Murphy's Law," a State Department official said Monday. "Everything that could possibly go wrong, on either side, did."

The official said that though Israel should be held responsible for the attack, the United States was also negligent for failing to notify Israel the Liberty was in international waters and for failing to withdraw the ship from the war zone.

"This is a ship that should have been hundreds of miles away from the war zone," the official said.

Israel fought the combined forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and other Arab states, emerging victorious after six days.

The State Department opened a two-day conference on U.S. foreign policy during the period, with a panel dealing with the USS Liberty attack. The conference was scheduled around the release of historical documents about the war.

The Israelis have always said the attack on the Liberty, which was monitoring communications in the war, was a tragic accident. The Johnson administration never formally challenged the Israelis' account. But some survivors and senior U.S. officials at the time have said they believe the attack was a deliberate effort to stop American surveillance of Israeli activities during the conflict.

In July the National Security Archive released tapes of Israeli pilots and ground control speaking in Hebrew, along with English transcripts. The recordings were made by a nearby American surveillance aircraft after the attack. ( Full story )

The NSA released the tapes and transcripts under the Freedom of Information Act in response to a request from Judge Jay Cristol of Miami, Florida. Cristol, who wrote a book about the attack, said the tapes show it was a tragic accident in a time of war -- that the Israelis mistook the ship for an Egyptian one.

"There was no indication they had any knowledge they were attacking a U.S. ship," Cristol told participants at the conference.

The State Department official said that though some maintain the Israeli military was too good to make such a mistake, "if they were that good and if they were that efficient and they deliberately sought to sink a ship, they damned well would have sunk it."

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Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 3:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

A Biologist Provides a Frightening Tour of The 20th Century's Most Evil Science Experiments on Human Beings

Farhad Manjoo, writing in Salon (Jan. 2004):

In 1932, the United States Public Health Service alerted hundreds of poor black men in Macon County, Ala., to a new treatment for "bad blood," a term locals used to refer to a wide range of sexually transmitted diseases. The "special treatment," the government said, would be offered by doctors at the Tuskegee Institute, the Alabama college founded by Booker T. Washington; the men would be treated for free as long as they allowed doctors to observe their condition.

Almost 400 men responded, and when they arrived at Tuskegee, doctors from around the country descended on the school to monitor them. But the men who checked in to Tuskegee for salvation from bad blood were not offered any new medicine there. Instead, doctors administered aspirin and an "iron tonic" placebo and, over four decades of annual visits, watched the men descend to grisly deaths from a well-known disease -- syphilis -- that the government knew could easily and effectively be treated with penicillin.

Since 1972, when details of the program were first uncovered in the press, the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male," as the government called it, has come to stand as a monument for all that can go wrong in science -- a horror committed not only by a racist government but also by doctors sworn to the highest ethical conduct. The Tuskegee study might seem to most of us like an aberration, a product of a place and time particularly lacking in ethics. The scientists who organized the program may have been mad, but surely all scientists aren't so, you might think.

While that's a sensible way to look at the world, Andrew Goliszek, a biologist at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, cautions that it's not always wise to give science the benefit of the doubt. In his new book, "In the Name of Science: A History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human Experimentation," Goliszek recounts dozens of unethical and sometimes ghastly experiments conducted on humans, many much worse than what occurred at Tuskegee. Some of these -- like the crimes of Dr. Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" who presided over prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp -- are infamous; others, such as the CIA's experiments with LSD, the Defense Department's Cold War-era radiological experiments on unsuspecting soldiers or the Japanese government's germ-warfare program of World War II, have been nearly forgotten by history.

Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 2:39 PM | Comments (3) | Top

A Historian Discovers that Students Today Don't Know that AIDS Originally Was Regarded as a "Gay Disease"

Michael Bronski, writing in the Boston Phoenix.com (Jan. 9-15, 2004):

[T]his past fall, while teaching an undergraduate course called "Plagues and Politics: The Impact of AIDS on US Culture" at Dartmouth College, I was shocked — profoundly shocked — by the fact that only three of the 34 students in the class had any idea that AIDS was once widely regarded as a gay-male disease. As someone who lived through the AIDS epidemic, who has lost lovers and friends too numerous to count, I was literally stunned: how could this be?

As much as I had prepared for this class, it never occurred to me that the students would not share one of my own basic assumptions about AIDS, not to mention about US history. But in matters both large and small, the students had almost no concept of the relationship between AIDS and gay men. They had no idea that a homophobic stigma was once attached to AIDS. They had no idea that mainstream magazines, such as New York , routinely referred to AIDS as "the gay plague." They had no idea that William F. Buckley Jr., that most respected of moderate conservatives, in a March 18, 1986, New York Times op-ed piece called for mandatory HIV testing of gay men and for those who were HIV-positive to have this information forcibly tattooed on their buttocks. They had no idea that the religious right (as well as high-ranking officials in the Reagan administration, such as chief domestic-policy adviser Gary Bauer and Secretary of Education William Bennett, and politicians, such as US Representative William Dannemeyer of California and Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina) did its best not only to blame gay men for the growing epidemic, but to vigorously, and successfully, fight to impede government funding for research and AIDS education. But most important, they had no idea of the catastrophic effect AIDS had on the gay-male community in the United States, nor of the amazing and resilient fight the community waged against these onslaughts while dealing with massive death and unbroken mourning.

Maybe, as a friend pointed out, such ignorance of AIDS's early years is a good thing, a sign of positive social change. After all, from the beginning of the epidemic in 1981, gay activists had insisted that AIDS was not a "gay disease" even as they were forced to fight tooth and nail for gay men affected by AIDS who were being denied basic services because of social and institutionalized homophobia. "De-gaying" of AIDS has always been tricky because, while AIDS has never been a "gay disease" in a clinical sense, for the epidemic's first decade it was primarily gay men, and men who had sex with other men, who were affected by it. For those of us who lived through that horrifying period between the early '80s and the early '90s, de-gaying the disease, while welcome, would strip us of a momentous part of our history. Now that I was standing before a group of people for whom the disease had been, in fact, de-gayed, I was also standing face to face with my own ambivalence.

Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 2:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Gavin Menzies: What Historians at the AHA Made of His Claim that the Chinese Discovered America

Ken Ringle, writing in the Wash Post (Jan. 12, 2004):

If the Chinese discovered America before Columbus , wouldn't they have hungered an hour later to discover someplace else? This is only one of the galaxy of intriguing questions provoked by Gavin Menzies, a former submarine commander in the British Royal Navy, who since retirement has submerged himself in the maps and mysteries of China 's short-lived and little-known age of nautical exploration.

Last year he hit the New York Times bestseller list with a 550-page book asserting (with a fair amount of rhetorical arm-waving) that a fleet of Chinese treasure ships led by a eunuch admiral named Zheng He reached the New World 71 years ahead of Columbus and, just for good measure, circumnavigated the globe, discovered how to calculate longitude and maybe even stumbled upon Antarctica as well.

Saturday at the Omni Shoreham, as part of the American Historical Association's annual meeting, Menzies defended his sensational thesis before a politely skeptical audience by proclaiming yet more groundbreaking developments in the story. New genetic studies, he asserted, show the Chinese colonized everywhere from New Zealand to Oregon and left traces of their DNA in such isolated locales as the Azores, Greenland and Scotland's Outer Hebrides islands.

No one fluent in DNA methodology was on hand to examine, much less challenge his latest claims, and the historians did their best to remain unprovoked in the face of Menzies' less-than-critical, grab-bag approach to every e-mailed rumor that might tend to buttress his case -- even when the author breezily confessed to deliberately oversimplifying his argument "so the book would sell," adding, "I wanted huge sales and a lot of money" to finance continued research.

John E. Wills Jr. of the University of Southern California said he usually found books like Menzies' "1421: The Year China Discovered America" "entertaining and generally harmless." But, he said, since the author's "notorious" 2002 lecture before the Royal Geographic Society in London and its subsequent dissemination by the BBC, Menzies has been trumpeting more and more purported evidence for his argument with little apparent regard for its reliability or its context.

Chinese chickens in South America, Chinese stone anchors off Los Angeles and third-hand reports of ancient "yellow" visitors in Mexico have all been put forward by Menzies as proof that he knows what he's talking about. "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link," Wills told the audience, and Menzies' links of evidence "are amazingly varied in quality."

Yet the author's dismayingly unscholarly methodology does not necessarily mean that he's wrong, Wills said. Professional historians should welcome the questions raised by the "obsessed amateur," such as Menzies, he said, because they help focus public attention on debates that might otherwise remain arcane disputes in academia.

What helps make Menzies' arguments so intriguing, said Valerie Hansen of Yale University , is that Adm. Zheng He really did exist. His extraordinary voyages, though little known generally in the West, are painstakingly documented in the official chronicles of the Ming Dynasty, for which they apparently were intended to provide proof of divine validation.

Zhu Di, the third Ming emperor (1403-24), was in fact a usurper, she said: a kind of Chinese Macbeth who instead of stabbing his 25-year-old nephew, the legitimate ruler, burnt him alive in the palace after a four-year civil war. To convince the Chinese people that he was really only acting out his destiny, Zhu, who also built Beijing and its famous Forbidden City , dispatched Zheng He on seven trading voyages to bring back exotic animals such as lions and giraffes, whose arrival, according to Chinese mythology, signals divine approval.

Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 1:20 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Scholars Now Argue that Art Did not Evolve--It was in Evidence from the Beginning of Human Development 30,000 Years Ago

Guy Gugliotta, writing in the Washington Post (Jan. 12, 2004):

What does it take to become an artist?

Do you need to study it first, or do you just pick up a brush or a knife and do it?

This question lies at the heart of a prolonged debate among archaeologists and anthropologists over the origin of figurative art -- drawing, sculpting or otherwise creating recognizable images of figures or objects -- and what it implies about human cultural development.

For years, scholars regarded the appearance of figurative art as the initiation of an evolutionary process -- that art became progressively more sophisticated as humans experimented with styles and techniques and passed this knowledge to the next generation.

But a growing body of evidence suggests that modern humans, virtually from the moment they appeared in Ice Age Europe, were able to produce startlingly sophisticated art. Artistic ability thus did not "evolve," many scholars said, but has instead existed in modern humans (the talented ones, anyway) throughout their existence.

Last month in the journal Nature, anthropologist Nicholas J. Conard, of Germany 's University of Tuebingen , added to this view, reporting the discovery in a cave in the Jura Mountains of three small, carefully made figurines carved from mammoth ivory between 30,000 and 33,000 years ago.

The artifacts at Hohle Fels Cave -- of a water bird, a horse's head, and a half-human, half-lion figure -- made up the fourth such cache of ancient objects found in Germany . All are more than 30,000 years old, and, taken together with cave paintings of a similar age in France 's Grotte Chauvet, constitute the oldest known artworks in the history of modern humans. A handful of other sites more than 30,000 years old are under study.

"It was a big cave, filled with ivory-making debris," Conard said in a telephone interview from his Tuebingen office. "We found 270 pieces of ivory waste, a half-dozen beads and a good number of bone and ivory tools. Whoever made the figurines spent a lot of time there."

And did remarkable work with primitive implements. All three figurines are skillfully shaped, and the water bird is exquisite -- its long neck extended in flight and its wings swept back with decorative ridges to mark layers of feathers.

Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 1:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tempers Flare Over Inquiry on Israeli Attack on U.S. Spy-Ship

Guy Dinmore, writing in the Financial Times (London) (Jan. 13, 2004)

Survivors of one of the most hotly disputed incidents in American military history - the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty spy-ship in 1967 - yesterday accused the US authorities, past and present, of a cover-up in backing Israeli claims that it was a tragic mistake.

Emotions boiled over in the basement of the State Department as the Office of the Historian opened a public conference on the six-day Arab-Israeli war with heated debate over newly released intercepts from the archives of the secretive National Security Agency.

Most of the basic facts are undisputed. On June 8 1967, Israeli aircraft and later torpedo boats struck the Liberty just off the Mediterranean coast, killing 34 crew and wounding 172. The ship, one of the world's most sophisticated listening vessels but only lightly armed, limped into port.

From there the controversy begins. An immediate US Navy court of inquiry backed the Israeli claim that it had been mistaken for an Egyptian warship. The US accepted Dollars 12m (Euros 9.4m, Pounds 6.5m) in compensation.

While some historians have accepted this, survivors and a varied group of academics and former military officials insist the attack was deliberate.

"You're trying to whitewash it," one survivor shouted from the audience as Marc Susser, the State Department's historian, acted as moderator and sought to keep order, refusing to allow speeches from the floor. Even debate on the panel of invited historians descended into acrimony.

Two recent developments added fuel to the controversy. Last week Ward Boston, a naval captain who acted as senior legal counsel for the Navy's court of inquiry in 1967, signed an affidavit declaring that the late Admiral Isaac Kidd, president of the court, had told him that President Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, defence secretary, had ordered a cover-up.

And yesterday, David Hatch, the National Security Agency's own historian, elaborated on the recently declassified NSA material, the first time the eavesdropping agency had released real voice intercepts.

Mr Hatch confessed that the information "doesn't settle much". But his analysis of the conversations between an Israeli air controller and two helicopter pilots "suggested strongly" that the Israelis did not know at first they were attacking a US vessel, although there was mention of a US flag flying.

Posted on Tuesday, January 13, 2004 at 1:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Africa's Vikings: The Indonesians

Rory Carroll , writing for the Guardian (Jan. 12, 2004)

They were Africa's Vikings. Tough, daring voyagers who sailed thousands of miles to pluck riches from unmapped lands known today as Zimbabwe, Mozambique, South Africa and Nigeria.

Centuries before Europeans, mariners from Indonesia raided and traded across the continent, filling their vessels with gold and silver for the princes of Java and Sumatra.

In return they gave Africa the secrets of iron and bronze, exotic plants such as banana and yams, and a new culture enriched with music, architecture and spirituality.

And then the seafarers vanished. Some died, some returned home, others inter-married with the locals. So absorbed was the Asian influence that by the time the white man came he never noticed it.

So says a controversial new theory about Africa's development more than 2,000 years ago which could revive a racially tinged debate about whether outsiders fathered certain advances in technology, agriculture and art.

The researcher making these claims is no professional historian. Robert Dick-Read never finished university and has no academic qualifications.

But his self-confessed "obsession" with Indonesia's influence has fuelled more than 50 years' lonely slog collecting evidence which has been turned into a manuscript which will, he hopes, prove his case.

Some experts have rubbished Mr Dick-Read as misguided, but others say the "Indonesia Jones" thesis is plausible.

An unrelated attempt to demonstrate that mariners from south Asia could have reached west Africa is halfway to success: an expedition which reconstructed a ship illustrated in the reliefs of an 8th century Buddhist temple in Java has crossed the Indian Ocean and reached South Africa, destination Ghana.

After stopping in Cape Town last week the 15-strong crew will resume the voyage today, said Mujoko, an Indonesian crew member. "We believe our ancestors came here. When we finish I think historians will appreciate that this voyage would have been possible."

It is generally agreed that approximately 1,500 years ago sailors from Indonesia and Malaysia, famed navigators who roved the Pacific, also sailed 3,700 miles west and settled Madagascar, a vast island off Mozambique.

It might be expected that they also explored the African mainland, just 150 miles further away, but unlike Madagascar there is little evidence: people on the continent do not resemble or talk like Indonesians.

Historians have noted fragments of Asian influence across Africa - plants, craftwork, instruments - but largely rejected the notion that it came via fleets of Indonesian double-outrigger canoes.

Inspired by a 1959 seminar at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, Mr Dick-Read, 73, has spent decades travelling the continent bolting those fragments into a radical theory of "Africa's vikings" which he hopes to publish this year.

Indonesian spices such as cassia and cinnamon which ancient Rome imported came not via India but east Africa after an epic sea voyage, he says, which would also explain how early iron age pottery spread so quickly in the first and second century AD down the coast from Kenya all the way to South Africa.

Plants such as banana, plantain and yam are widely believed to have originated in Indonesia and Mr Dick-Read cites oral and written accounts of rituals related to the food which suggest they reached west Africa too early for overland travellers.

Mr Dick-Read says pottery and bronze sculptures found in Nigeria also came from seafarers since they were too far from Saharan trade routes and too sophisticated for indigenous artwork of that time.

Sir Mervyn Brown, Britain's former ambassador to Madagascar and a historian of the region, found Mr Dick-Read's conclusions "generally plausible" and urged fresh research.

"Dick-Read has not provided any great new revelations in this area but has produced more detailed supporting evidence," he said. "The influence in west Africa is not generally known, even among academics."

Other historians disagree. Robert Soper, an authority on east Africa, said there was no known evidence from artefacts, for example, of Indonesians spreading the iron age down the coast.

Posted on Monday, January 12, 2004 at 4:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mexico Has Not Forgotten Its War With the States

Tim Weiner, writing in the New York Times (Jan. 9th, 2004)

In the American South, William Faulkner once wrote, the past isn't dead. It isn't even past.

This may become truer the farther south one goes.

In the United States, almost no one remembers the war that Americans fought against Mexico more than 150 years ago. In Mexico, almost no one has forgotten.

The war cut this country in two, and "the wound never really healed," said Miguel Soto, a Mexico City historian. It took less than two years, and ended with the gringos seizing half of Mexico, taking the land that became America's Wild West: California, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah and beyond.

In Mexico, they call this "the Mutilation." That may help explain why relations between the nations are sometimes so tense.

As President Bush prepares to fly down to Mexico from Texas, where the war began back in 1846, the debate here over how to relate to the United States is heating up once again.

The question of the day is the more than 20 million Mexicans who now live in the United States.

But sensitivities about sovereignty surround every thorny issue involving Americans in Mexico. Can Americans buy land? Sometimes. Drill for oil? Never. Can American officers comb airports in Mexico? Yes. Carry guns as lawmen? No. Open and close the border at will? Well, they try.

To realize that the border was fixed by war and controlled by the victors is to understand why some Mexicans may not love the 21st-century American colossus. Yet they adore the old American ideals of freedom, equality and boundless opportunity, and they keep voting, by the millions, with their feet.

In "a relationship of love and of hatred," as Mr. Soto says, bitter memories sometimes surface like old shrapnel under the skin.

Fragments of the old war stand in the slanting morning sunlight at an old convent here in Mexico City, a sanctuary seized by invading American troops in 1847, now the National Museum of Interventions, which chronicles the struggle.

"The war between Mexico and the United States has a different meaning for Mexicans and Americans," said the museum's director, Alfredo Hernandez Murillo. "For Americans, it's one more step in the expansion that began when the United States was created. For Mexicans, the war meant we lost half the nation. It was very damaging, and not just because the land was lost.

"It's a symbol of Mexico's weakness throughout history in confronting the United States. For Mexicans, it's still a shock sometimes to cross the border and see the Spanish names of the places we lost."

Those places have names like Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio; the list is long.

The war killed 13,780 Americans, and perhaps 50,000 or more Mexicans -- no one knows the true number. It was the first American war led by commanders from West Point. These were men like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. A little more than a decade later, Grant and Sherman battled Lee and Davis in the Civil War.

Historians are still fighting over how and why the battles of the Mexican War began. Some say it was Mexico's fault for trying to stop the secession of what was then (and to some, still is) the Republic of Texas. Some say it was an imperial land grab by the president of the United States.

President James K. Polk did confide to his diary that the aim of the war was "to acquire for the United States -- California, New Mexico and perhaps some other of the northern provinces of Mexico." When it was won, in February 1848, he wrote, "There will be added to the United States an immense empire, the value of which 20 years hence it would be difficult to calculate." Nine days later, prospectors struck gold in California.

Aftershocks still resonate from the Mexican War -- or, as the Mexicans have it, "the American invasion." The students who walk through the National Museum of Interventions still gasp at a lithograph standing next to an American flag.

It shows Gen. Winfield Scott riding into Mexico City's national square -- "the halls of Montezuma," in the words of the Marine Corps Hymn -- to seize power and raise the flag. He had followed the same invasion route as the 16th-century Spanish conquerors of Mexico. The American occupation lasted 11 months.

Many of the 75,000 Mexicans living in the newly conquered American West lost their rights to own land and live as they pleased. It was well into the 20th century before much of the land was settled and civilized.

Now, that civilization is taking another turn. More than half of the 20 million Mexicans north of the border live on the land that once was theirs. Some 8.5 million live in California -- a quarter of the population. Nearly half the people of New Mexico have roots in old Mexico. Mexico is, in a sense, slowly reoccupying its former property.

"History extracts its costs with the passage of time," said Jesus Velasco Marquez, a professor who has long studied the war. "We are the biggest minority in the United States, and particularly in the territory that once was ours."

Posted on Monday, January 12, 2004 at 3:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Canadian Navy Book to Chronicle Their Role in the War on Terror

Jim Bronskill writing for the Canadian Press (Jan. 8, 2004)

The navy plans to tell Canadians about its secret role in the war on terrorism -- for a price.

The Defence Department has commissioned a book on the navy's overseas missions, based partly on classified material, with the aim of hitting store shelves by summer.

The government is seeking a co-publisher for the volume, tentatively titled Operation Apollo: The Golden Age of the Canadian Navy in the War Against Terrorism.

An outline of the book claims it will reveal "significant but unreported operations" undertaken abroad by Canadian sailors following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.

The federal plan to chronicle Canada's efforts against terrorism rankles Jay Hill, the Canadian Alliance defence critic.

"I see this as just an effort at blatant propaganda on the part of the department," Mr. Hill said yesterday in an interview.

Maj. Tony White, a navy spokesman, defended the project as a worthwhile review of a major military operation. "It was a monumental undertaking, and in our minds warranted a real good historical perspective," he said. "We feel strongly about that."

At its peak two years ago, the Canadian naval task group active in the area stretching from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia included six warships and about 1,500 navy personnel.

The author, historian and retired navy officer Richard Gimblett, also helped write a 1997 account of the Canadian Forces' role in the Persian Gulf War.

The book about Operation Apollo is an "authorized account." But to discourage "charges of propaganda," the navy gave Mr. Gimblett "complete freedom" in preparation of the manuscript, the federal notice says.

Posted on Monday, January 12, 2004 at 1:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

How Sherman's March Has Been Used by Southerners to Explain Events

From the Chronicle of Higher Education (Jan. 5, 2004):

The destructiveness of the Civil War is the subject of many local legends among the narratives of white Southerners collected by Elissa R. Henken, a professor of English at the University of Georgia. Many of the stories involve Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 30-day March to the Sea, in 1864, and "narratives about hardship and suffering -- and just plain meanness -- on the part of Sherman's troops certainly occur,"
she writes.

More frequently, however, she encounters a different theme:
"stories about the places Sherman did not destroy." In these local legends, "towns each have a story about why that town, and that town alone," escaped burning and pillaging by "that Devil Sherman."

While emphasizing that the march was destructive, she also finds antecedents for the ruthlessness attributed to Sherman in tales of military leaders throughout history. She cites, for example, Welsh legends that credit any ruins to burning by the early-15th-century rebel Owen Glendower, even when the buildings were erected long after his death. "Sherman similarly provides explanation, or at least historical context, for otherwise unexplained events," she writes.

Against such a ruthless -- hence, worthy -- foe, she says, "there must be an explanation for why any individual town survived." The reasons given in local legends vary, but they "often fit a few categories involving friendship, women, exchange, or beauty," she writes.

Many of the stories involve female intercessors, for whom Ms.
Henken notes biblical parallels in Judith and Esther. Such fiercely determined women not only provide models for their narrators, she says, but also are expressions of pride. "The South may have lost the war," she concludes, "but it was never
defeated: The town and its womenfolk conquered the conqueror."

Posted on Tuesday, January 6, 2004 at 4:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

An Alger Hiss Chair in Social Studies?

Robert Fulford, writing in Canada.com (Jan. 3, 2004):

The faculty at Bard College , a liberal arts school at Annandale , NY , includes a scholar who glories in the title Alger Hiss Professor of Social Studies. Anyone aware that Hiss was a Washington bureaucrat who spied for the Soviet Union will consider this as sensible as a John Dillinger Chair in Business Ethics or a Jack the Ripper Chair in Criminology. But at Bard College no one is laughing, least of all the occupant of the chair, Joel Kovel, who believes the Soviets were never a threat to the Americans and that U.S. criticism of communism was the product of hysteria. His views resemble those of Hiss, and he's not lonely. Hard as it may be for outsiders to imagine, a lingering affection for communism remains part of American university life.

Elements of farce have been threaded through the history of this issue since the 1940s. Half a century ago, the late Leslie Fiedler, who had a nasty way of stating truths many of us would rather have avoided, remarked on the peculiar double bookkeeping of those who defended accused Soviet spies. They somehow found it comfortable to say both "They didn't do it -- it's a frame-up!" and "After all, they had a right; their hearts were pure."

History has played out precisely according to Fiedler's script. American leftists insisted for decades that Hiss was falsely condemned. When a mountain of evidence proved the case against him (and many others), the defenders began suggesting that maybe spying actually didn't matter. In the pages of The Nation, the innocence of Hiss was proclaimed obsessively for four decades. When that position finally became untenable, Victor Navasky, long-time editor of The Nation and now also a Columbia journalism professor, asked: "Espionage, is it really so wrong?" (If he'd thought of that 25 years earlier, his writers could have been saved the trouble of producing all those Hiss-exonerating articles.)

In the 1990s the American historian Eugene Genovese, having turned against Communism, wrote: "In a noble effort to liberate the human race from violence and oppression, we broke all records for mass slaughter ... we have a disquieting number of corpses to account for." But many historians have worked hard to avoid that moral accounting. Their studied, purposeful evasion of reality is the subject of a persuasive study by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr , In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage (Encounter Books).

Haynes and Klehr have written books on American communists as they appeared in the Soviet archives and in the intercepted Venona transcripts from the 1940s. But despite everything, many other historians persist in showing American communists as good-hearted, noble citizens who often sacrificed themselves for a great ideal. It's like the romantic myth of the Old South, Haynes and Klehr argue, an attempt to cast a favourable light on a despicable cause by arguing for the nobility of those who pursued it. Haynes and Klehr also compare these historians to Holocaust deniers who invent fanciful explanations for damning evidence and ignore inconvenient testimony.

Even when these historians accept the newly re-affirmed facts, they may retain their old prejudices. Haynes and Klehr quote Gerda Lerner of the University of Wisconsin, who confessed two years ago that as a Communist she "wanted the Soviet Union to be a successful experiment in socialist democracy and so I checked my critical facilities ... It is easy to see now, in hindsight, that that was a serious mistake, but it was not so easy to see it then." (Actually, it was, for those who were not brain dead; but that's another issue.) It goes without saying, but Lerner says it anyway, that she continues to despise the United States . The fact that the communists were wrong about everything doesn't mean that the Americans were right about anything.

Long ago, Senator Joseph McCarthy did American communists the enormous favour of setting himself up as their enemy. He stamped anti-communism with his personality (which on his very best days was unappetizing) and it has never freed itself from his smarmy embrace.

Posted on Tuesday, January 6, 2004 at 3:19 PM | Comments (1) | Top

The Modern Western World ... So It Began with the 16th Century Renaissance?

Richard E. Rubenstein, professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University, in Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages (rpt. from Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 9, 2004):

The struggle between faith and reason did not begin, as is so often supposed, with Copernicus's challenge to earth-centered cosmology or Galileo's trial by the Inquisition but with the controversy over Aristotle's ideas during the 12th and 13th centuries. For decades, specialists in medieval history have understood that the awakening of the West began during this "medieval renaissance." Many believe that the conflict among Christians over whether to accept or reject Aristotelian science marks a turning point -- perhaps the turning point -- in Western intellectual history. But this understanding has not become part of our generally accepted cultural "story." On the contrary, we continue to tell the story of modernism as if it began with the 16th-century Renaissance, and with scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, and Isaac Newton.

Why? One reason involves the myth of cultural authenticity: the notion, common to many cultures, that a particular civilization developed on its own from original sources rather than being borrowed from or imposed by outsiders. "Our" culture is authentically native, the partisans of every nation insist, while "theirs" is merely derivative or imitative. For those anxious to establish the superiority of Western culture to all other traditions, the story of Europe's first intellectual revolution is something of an embarrassment. Not only was the chief transmitter of these advanced ideas a non-European civilization, it was the civilization that Christians long considered their nemesis: the Muslim empire that occupied the Holy Land, dominated the Mediterranean sea lanes, and challenged Europe militarily for almost a thousand years.

Worse yet, as the Crusaders discovered, this "infidel" culture was clearly more advanced in significant respects than that of the Latin West. Not only had the Arabs and Jews acquired Aristotle's philosophy and natural science, they had also absorbed Euclid's mathematics, Ptolemy's astronomy and optics, Archimedes' engineering principles, the medical science of Hippocrates and Galen, and other classical treasures. In addition to translating these works, they had interpreted, applied, and improved upon them, as well as adding new sciences of their own, such as chemistry, algebra, and history. Little wonder the Arabs considered the Crusaders barbarian raiders, or that Europeans looked upon the Islamic world with that peculiar combination of fear and admiration, hatred and envy, that poorer, less "civilized" peoples often feel for those more prosperous and refined than themselves.

Posted on Monday, January 5, 2004 at 6:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Powell: FDR Made the Depression Worse

Jim Powell, writing for National Review (Nov. 20, 2003):

It has been 70 years since Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched his New Deal in an effort to banish the Great Depression — perhaps the most important economic event in American history. The New Deal was controversial then, and still is, because it failed to resolve the most important problem of the era: chronic unemployment, which averaged 17 percent throughout the New Deal period.

Newsweek columnist Robert Samuelson acknowledged that if World War II hadn't come along, America might have stumbled through many more years of high unemployment. Samuelson, however, is among those who give FDR high marks for handling the political crisis of the 1930s, the worst this country has faced since the Civil War.

But this crisis was caused by the double-digit unemployment rate, and in my new book, FDR's Folly, How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression , I report mounting evidence developed by dozens of economists — at Princeton, Yale, Brown, Stanford, the University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of California (Berkeley), and other universities — that double-digit unemployment was prolonged by FDR's own New Deal strategy.

How can that be? Consider just a few of FDR's policies. The New Deal tripled federal taxes between 1933 and 1940 — excise taxes, personal income taxes, inheritance taxes, corporate income taxes, dividend taxes, and excess profits taxes all went up — and FDR introduced an undistributed profits tax. A number of New Deal laws, including some 700 industrial cartel codes, made it more expensive for employers to hire people, and this fed unemployment. Frequent changes in the tax laws, plus FDR's anti-business rhetoric ("economic royalists"), discouraged people from making investments essential for growth and job creation. New Deal securities laws made it harder for employers to raise capital. FDR issued antitrust lawsuits against some 150 employers and companies, making it harder for them to focus on business. He also signed a law ordering the breakup of America's strongest banks with the lowest failure rates. New Deal farm policies destroyed food — 10 million acres of crops and 6 million farm animals — thereby wiping out farm jobs and forcing food prices above market levels for 100 million American consumers.

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:34 PM | Comments (2) | Top

How Major Events of History Can Be Affected by Seemingly Small Decisions

John Schwartz, writing in the NYT (Dec. 28, 2003):

History is the story of the mighty oaks; the acorns get little ink. There are too many seeds, and their existence is too transient. So historians, in professional retrospect, tell us which of the acorns got lucky.

We go forward armed with the lessons of the past: it's not always the obvious things that change the course of the world. Sometimes they are small, or overlooked. The best sellers of pre-Revolutionary France were largely ignored by literati of the time and by literary tradition since. They tended to be roughly drawn and raw, even pornographic. But those works have been rediscovered by historians like Robert Darnton of Princeton University who see the possible causes of social movements in the bawdy tales, "certain books that were never reviewed, that appeared and were ignored by the media of the time, but that made a tremendous difference," he says.

In Professor Darnton's 1995 book, "The Forbidden Best Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France," he writes about racy works like "Anecdotes About Mme. la Comtesse du Barry," the story of the courtesan to King Louis XV. It was, he says, "a book that presented the king as a very flawed human being" - in fact, "a dirty old man, incompetent and decadent." Thus a book overlooked by the elite helped to strip the monarchy of its sacred aura and may have ultimately helped to open the royal path to the guillotine.

Revolutions have come from less.

Sometimes big changes start with something as simple as drawing a line. The statesmen and bureaucrats who devised the modern Middle East from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and just after did not foresee the decades of bitter conflict that would ensue along every border. What the historian David Fromkin called "a line drawn on an empty map by a British civil servant in the early 1920's" between the nations now known as Iraq and Kuwait was disregarded by Saddam Hussein when he invaded in 1990. The attempt to rebuild Iraq depends on the meshing of three provinces of the Ottoman empire, sewn together as part of the same effort to divvy up the region and create British and French spheres of interest that eventually defined the outlines of Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:33 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Jon Meacham: Why Reagan Is So Popular Now

Jon Meacham, writing in Newsweek (Dec. 29, 2003):

[T]he reverence in which Reagan's held seems confounding to critics of his administration. Many liberal-leaning people who still can't get over the move to count ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches find themselves flummoxed by Reagan's rising reputation: he is outpolling Washington, Lincoln and FDR in some surveys of great presidents.

Presidential hero worship is nothing new—FDR's death brought tears to the eyes of millions, and Kennedy memorials proliferated in the grief after Dallas—but the intensity of the affection for Reagan is remarkably wide and deep for this more cynical age. The fury over the soap-operatic CBS mini-series about the president and Nancy roiled the nation for weeks in this year of hot wars and fears of terrorism; other docu-dramas with fictional elements, from a heroic rendering of Bush 43's 9/11 performance to Kennedy shows with bad Boston accents and faked sex scenes, failed to produce similar levels of outrage.

Why? I think part of the explanation lies less in the experience of the 1980s and more in what happened to Reagan in the 1990s, as Alzheimer's took hold. The public's esteem stems not only from respect for the substance of what he accomplished in office or from sympathy, but from a subliminal respect for the strength of a man to endure so much so long. Detractors can question what he stood for; fans can airbrush his legacy (which is itself dangerous; turning great men into monuments robs them of their humanity and, often, their ability to resonate in future generations). But no one can gainsay his pure will to live in tragic circumstances. As he clings to life, much of the nation is not yet ready to begin a cold assessment of his vices and his virtues. Let him go in peace, America was saying this year: let him go in peace. After that, there will be plenty of time to fight the wars of biography and history. But only after.

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:33 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Jefferson Is Now Underrated

Sean Wilentz, writing in the NYT (Dec. 27, 2003):

Recently, Thomas Jefferson has been viciously maligned in ways normally reserved only for modern American presidents and liberals. Jefferson-bashing historians criticize Thomas Jefferson for having a secret affair with a slave, slight his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, compare him badly with John Adams (who mistrusted democracy and signed the Alien and Sedition Acts) and call Jefferson the forerunner of Pol Pot. A prominent new book disparages him as a callous pro-slavery politician, and celebrates, as the anti-Jefferson, one Timothy Pickering — a raving antidemocratic plotter with a dubious record on slavery.

Eventually, critics will catch up with these writers' distortions and basic factual errors. Historians will retrieve Abraham Lincoln's judgment that "the principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society."

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Garry Wills: I Am Astounded!

Garry Wills, in a letter to the NYT (Dec. 27, 2003):

I am astounded that Gordon Wood, reviewing my '' 'Negro President' '' (Dec. 14), can defend slavery -- which is what defending the three-fifths clause in the Constitution amounts to. Wood says that the fact that slaves were counted but could not vote is ''irrelevant'' because free women and children were also counted but could not vote. This is like saying that the fact that trains carried Jews to death camps is irrelevant because trains carried passengers to other destinations as well. The different goals determine our evaluation of the trips.

In the same way, the different aims in counting slaves and in counting white families are the test of their ''relevance.'' In the sexist 18th century, men voted for their wives, but they consulted the interests of their wives. They used the slave count, on the contrary, against slaves in bill after bill. A Northerner had one vote for the House of Representatives, for himself and his family. Pierce Butler in South Carolina had one vote for himself and his family, and added 600 votes to his district because he owned a thousand slaves. Extra votes like his -- giving the South a third more representatives in Congress than its white population merited -- were the margin of difference in passing laws that extended slavery into new districts, in passing the gag laws that prevented Congress from even discussing abolition, and in determining the caucus nomination of candidates friendly to slavery. That was hardly ''irrelevant.''

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:32 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Why The Erection of a Statue to Lincoln in Richmond Caused Such a Storm

Andrew Ferguson, writing in the Weekly Standard (Dec. 29-Jan. 5, 2003):

Abraham Lincoln, with his son Tad in tow, walked around Richmond, Virginia, one day 138 years ago, and if you try to retrace their steps today you won't see much that they saw, which shouldn't be a surprise, of course. The street grid is the same, though, and if you're in the right mood and know what to look for, the lineaments of the earlier city begin to surface, like the outline of a scuttled old scow rising through the shallows of a pond. Among the tangle of freeway interchanges and office buildings you'll come across an overgrown park or a line of red-brick townhouses, an unlikely old belltower or a few churches scattered from block to block, dating to the decades before the Civil War and still giving off vibrations from long ago....

No one knows for sure whether Lincoln and Tad visited Tredegar [Iron Works], or whether they passed by the Works during a carriage ride they took later the same day, but they're there now--so a romantic would say--in the form of a bronze statue. The statue was installed last spring, at the headquarters of the National Park Service's Richmond Civil War battlefield park, which is housed in Tredegar's surviving buildings. In the months leading to its unveiling, the statue created a controversy that reached far beyond Richmond, beyond the United States even, to become an object of international interest--improbably enough, during that season when the world's attention was diverted by another war looming in Iraq. One Richmond official, traveling through Barbados last winter, happened to pick up a newspaper on an excursion plane. "Lincoln Comes to Confederate Capital," read the headline on the back page.

What made the controversy newsworthy was that there should be a controversy at all. To many people, including members of the Richmond establishment--the businessmen, journalists, politicians, rich people, and other well-wired doers of public good, who unanimously supported the statue as both a tourist attraction and a statement of civic resolve--it came as a surprise that anyone should find a tribute to the sixteenth president objectionable. Who could object to Lincoln? As a national symbol he is unavoidable; the piece of real estate he occupies in the American imagination is immeasurably vast. He seems too big even to have an opinion about. It would be like objecting to the moon.

But many people do object, it turns out, and they are almost always well-spoken and well-read and, in percentage terms, not very often crazier than the general population that tends to accept Lincoln's greatness as a fact of life. When I first visited Richmond last March, three months after plans for the statue had been announced and one month before its unveiling, I went to see Bragdon Bowling, who had been stoking the controversy like a steam engine. He gathered petitions, promoted websites, pestered politicians with mail and phone calls and encouraged others to do the same. He enlisted Thomas DiLorenzo, author of a new anti-Lincoln book called "The Real Lincoln," to help him organize a scholarly conference, with the title "Lincoln Reconsidered," to lay out his case as soberly and comprehensively as possible.

This was his duty, he felt. Bowling is division commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Sons of Confederate Veterans, and at those moments when he decides that the heritage of the South is being abused, as it was with the placement of a Lincoln statue in the former capital of the Confederacy, he becomes an agitator ex officio. "It's a responsibility you have," he said. "You've got to try to stop it."

"Ten years ago I started to learn about my family. I read intensively, everything I could--not just politically correct history but also other history that's been suppressed. That's the way this learning process often starts. My great grandfather served in the Army of Northern Virginia as private under General Robert E. Lee. He was at Sharpsburg--Yankees call it Antietam--at Chancellorsville, other places. And like 90 percent of the soldiers who fought for and served the South, he never owned a slave.

"So--just to show you how the thought process works, for people who are still capable of thinking for themselves--so I thought, well, why is that? If the war is all about slavery, why's he fighting so hard? It didn't fit, you see, with everything I'd been taught about the Civil War. Like all his comrades, my great-grandfather gave everything he had. Why? He did it for his country. The South had bad everything--bad munitions, bad clothing, bad food. But they had the best men. They gave everything they had. And they did not do that to defend slavery."

The war wasn't about slavery for Lincoln, either, Bowling explained. He ticked off the particulars of his indictment of Lincoln. With his generals he invented the concept of Total War, and waged campaigns of unprecedented savagery against noncombatants and private property in the Shenandoah Valley, the March through Georgia, and elsewhere. He was the father of Big Government, vastly expanding the reach of Imperial Washington in ways unthinkable to the country's founders. The Northern victory was a triumph for a commercial culture, controlled by Big Business, over a Southern culture of farms and small towns that asked only to be let alone.

"It was all about power," he said. "Six hundred thousand dead. All so Lincoln and his friends could consolidate their power to tell other people how to live their lives."

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Why I Discounted Rumors About Strom Thurmond

Nadine Cohodas, biographer of Strom Thurmond, writing in the NYT (Dec. 27, 2003):

Now that we all know about Ms. Washington-Williams, there has been much conversation about how such rumors remained unexplored, especially on the part of the many journalists who followed Mr. Thurmond's long career. As one of them, I have to say that things weren't as obvious as they may now seem. If the existence of Mr. Thurmond's daughter was an article of faith in the black community of South Carolina, it was not fodder for the rumor mill on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, even during Mr. Thurmond's re-election campaigns.

During my research between 1989 and 1992 for a political biography of Mr. Thurmond, this matter was occasionally mentioned but was hardly the focus of any conversation I had with the politicians, activists and ordinary citizens — white and black — I spoke to. It seemed like the kind of lore that would naturally attach itself to a man of his generation.

Furthermore, Mr. Thurmond's staff did not seem worried about the matter. Close aides who handled much of his personal business conceded they had heard the rumor but made a convincing case that they saw no evidence that it was true. They were loath to bring it up with anyone and told me they never directly asked Mr. Thurmond about it.

Not even an electorate transformed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act made a difference. The new law ensured that blacks were no longer without a voice or without power. Any politician who hoped to remain in office had to pay attention to these newly enfranchised constituents, and Mr. Thurmond set the standard for making the transition from one era to another. In addition, Carrie Butler had died of kidney disease many years earlier. Her voice was stilled. Ms. Washington-Williams chose silence as well, keeping the decades-long contact with her father discreet and private.

Until Dec. 14, when she spoke frankly to a Washington Post reporter, Marilyn Thompson, Ms. Washington-Williams insisted to any who asked that she was only a Thurmond family friend. While others might have provided a roadmap to her door, no one was going to reach the final destination unless and until she made her story public.

Mr. Thurmond apparently remained unconcerned that his secret would become public. When one confidant brought up the matter during his final re-election campaign, the senator waved him off: "Don't worry about it." In part because of his daughter's acquiescence, he went to his grave without having to confront the truth.

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Historians in Hong Kong to Debate Role of Catholic Church in the Boxer Rebellion

Ambrose Leung, writing in the China Morning Post (Dec. 29, 2003):

Historians and clerics from Hong Kong, the mainland, Taiwan and overseas will gather in the city for the first time next year to discuss the role of Christian churches in China during the Boxer Rebellion.

The topic has long been considered sensitive due to the links between foreign missionaries and western nations that were expanding their influence over the declining Qing dynasty.

The canonisation of Christians killed during the rebellion has been the source of friction between China and the Vatican .

Organisers say about 30 historians and clerics will attend the June conference, which aims to shed new light on religious developments in contemporary China .

Peter Ng Tze-ming, director of Chinese University 's Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society, which is organising the conference with the Catholic Church's Holy Spirit Study Centre, said talks would be "purely academic".

"We don't want it to become politicised," Professor Ng said. "In a way the focus is beyond the Boxer Rebellion as we will look at the evolution of the Christian churches before and after the period .

"The incidents at the time actually helped the churches to increase their wisdom, and changes introduced after the incidents were positive and helped the Christian movement."

The Catholic Church in Hong Kong was plunged into a row with Beijing in October 2000 after Pope John Paul canonised 120 Chinese martyrs - many killed during the 1898 to 1900 Boxer Rebellion.

The central government denounced the move as an insult to the Chinese nation, saying most of the missionaries and believers were executed at the time for committing crimes when imperialists were invading China .

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Word "Empire" Should Be Honored

Robert Jackson, writing in the London Times (Dec. 29, 2003):

It is another dreary sign of present-day historical disconnection that even William Hague should join in the modish campaign against honours referring to the " British Empire ".

The idea that empire refers only to one of the most recent episodes of our history -the overseas expansion of England/Britain after 1600 -shows a profound lack of historical insight, information and imagination.

In fact, the notion of "Empire" connects us with the most remote origins of our civilisation, and with many of its highest values.

With regard to the overseas expansion of "Empire", I think that the future will agree with the judgment of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, that this was a profoundly progressive development in the history of mankind.

But behind the 19th-century " British Empire " there is an older history which most people will still want to honour. There is, for example, the first mention of "Empire" in an Act of Parliament -the "Act in restraint of appeals" of 1533, which forbids appeals to (papal) courts on the ground that "this realm of England is an empire ... governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same ..." Here "Empire" means, quite simply, "national sovereignty".

Behind this notion of "Empire" there is the still older idea recorded by the Venerable Bede in the early 700s, that of an Imperium Anglorum in which a single king rules over a number of different peoples. Here "Empire" simply means "unity in diversity", or "unity under the crown" -more relevant than ever, now that the United Kingdom of England , Scotland , Wales and Northern Ireland is no longer a full parliamentary union.

But Bede did not invent this idea of "Empire". Behind his thinking is the great fact of the Roman Imperium as a force for unity and culture on an ecumenical scale. And behind this, in turn, there are Alexander the Great and his union of Macedon with Persia , and the successor Hellenistic monarchies. And behind these, finally lie the great imperial monarchies of Mesopotamia and Egypt .

So "Empire" is a word with a potent echo for those with ears to hear. Let the critics who would dispense with it suggest another with only half its resonance.

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Top Schools Aren't Requiring History

Jennifer Dekel, writing for Accuracy in Academia (Dec. 2003):

Universities today routinely scrap history courses in favor of politically correct attitude-adjustment seminars, witnesses from academia itself told U.S. senators at a congressional hearing last month. Three out of four of the witnesses identified themselves politically as liberal.

Anne Neal, J.D., the President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) noted, "In two studies conducted by ACTA, Losing America's Memory and Restoring America's Legacy, we discovered that not one of the top 50 [colleges and universities] require a course in American history of their graduates."

Only five institutions required any history at all. Instead, students are picking from course offerings that include "From Hand to Mouth: Writing, Eating and the Construction of Gender" at Dartmouth, "Witchcraft, Sorcery and Magic" at Williams College, and "Global Sexualities" at Duke.

Robert David Johnson, a Professor at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, explained that "a federally funded grant, distributed to 12 colleges through the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), with an apparently non-controversial name (The Arts of Democracy)… promises to produce students who will understand the heritage of American civic ideals; be able to resolve moral dilemmas posed by U.S. foreign policy; and comprehend the fundamental premises of U.S. democracy."

"Despite these promising claims, the program contains not even one political science, history, economics, or philosophy course exploring American government or international relations."

Neal said that a course description for "The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance" at the University of California, Berkeley stated, "conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections." Although the University called the description "a failure of oversight," the professor, also a leader of the Students for Justice in Palestine, was not reproached.

Johnson described his own personal account of an attempt by Brooklyn College of the City University of New York to deny him tenure.

The college based its case against Johnson upon a handful of senior colleagues' secret letters, which were known as the "Shadow File." The "Shadow File" letters attacked Johnson "for three violations of prevailing campus orthodoxy," including Johnson's objection against a college post-9/11 forum in which no speakers supported U.S. or Israeli foreign policy, Johnson's attempt to search for a new professor in European history based upon the candidates' scholarly record rather than their personality or gender, and Johnson's particular scholarship and teaching, of constitutional history.

According to Johnson, one of the file's contributors degraded his teaching because he taught courses dealing with "political history, focused on figures in power." Such an "old-fashioned approach to our field [attracts only] a certain type of student, almost always a young white male [with an interest in] narrow [topics]," the contributor wrote.

Anthony Dick, a student at the University of Virginia (UVA), said that a highlight of the schoool's politicized agenda is manifested in the University's efforts to establish a mandatory "diversity training program." Dick said that the proposed program "centers on topics such as race, ethnicity, gender, identity, and other controversial issues. One UVA administrator has described its purpose to me as 'instilling community values' in students."

Although at UVA the administrators do not take such initiatives themselves to implement diversity programs, they do so while succumbing to "significant pressure from vocal student groups who champion so-called progressive causes," Dick said. Dick explained the effects of such a program, referring to similar training implemented at other colleges and universities:

"In an invasive exercise at Swarthmore College in 1998, students were lined up in their dormitories according to their skin color, from lightest to darkest, and asked to speak about their feelings regarding their place in line. In Skin Deep, a nationally distributed diversity-training film, students are summarily informed 'intolerance has once again become a way of life' on American campuses. The movie's 'study guide' goes on to assert dogmatically the necessary and proper role of racial preferences in higher education, the undeniable problem of white privilege, and the need for students to fight against the 'internalized oppression' that lurks within each of them."

At the hearing on October 29th before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Chairman Senator Judd Greg (R-NH) called the lack of intellectual diversity on college campuses both "pervasive and damaging," but said that this problem diminished significantly over the last 30 years.

Neal said, "half of American professors identify with the Democrats, a third call themselves independent, while a tenth of the respondents identify with the Republicans. A much higher percentage of faculty members surveyed - 72% - describe their own ideology as 'left,' while 15% self-describe their ideology as 'right.' Even in the science, math, business and medicine sectors, faculty who identify themselves as Republican are in the minority," according to an Academic Study Survey conducted by Stanley Rothman, Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Smith College.

 

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Never Forgetting What Happened at Wounded Knee December 29, 1890

Tim Giago (Nanwica Kciji), a Lakota Indian, writing in the Baltimore Sun (Dec. 28, 2003):

On crystal-clear nights, when winter winds whistle through the hills and canyons around Wounded Knee Creek, the Lakota elders say it is so cold that one can hear the twigs snapping in the frigid air.

They called this time of the year "the Moon of the Popping Trees." It was on such a winter morning on Dec. 29, 1890, that the crack of a single rifle brought a day of infamy that still lives in the hearts and minds of the Lakota people.

After the rifle spoke there was a pause and then the rifles and Hotchkiss guns of the 7th Cavalry opened up on the men, women and children camped at Wounded Knee. What followed was utter chaos and madness. The thirst for the blood of the Lakota took away all common sense from the soldiers.

The unarmed Lakota fought back with bare hands. The warriors shouted to their wives, their elders and their children, "run for cover," Iynkapo! Iyankapo!

Elderly men and women, unable to fight back, stood defiantly and sang their death songs before falling to the hail of bullets. The number of Lakota people murdered that day is still unknown. The mass grave at Wounded Knee holds the bodies of 150 men, women and children. Many other victims died of their wounds and of exposure over the next several days.

The Lakota people say that only 50 people out of the original 350 followers of Sitanka (Big Foot) survived the massacre.

Five days after the slaughter of the innocents an editorial in the Aberdeen (S.D.) Saturday Pioneer reflected the popular opinion of the wasicu (white people) of that day. It read, "The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth."

Ten years after he wrote that editorial calling for genocide against the Lakota people, L. Frank Baum wrote that wonderful children's book, The Wizard of Oz.

The federal government tried to forever erase the memory of Wounded Knee. The village that sprang up on the site of the massacre was named Brennan after a Bureau of Indian Affairs official. But the Lakota people never forgot. Although the name "Brennan" appeared on the map, they still called it Wounded Knee. In the 1920s, Clive and Agnes Gildersleeve built the Wounded Knee Trading Post there to serve the Lakota people.

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

FDR Prolonged the Great Depression

Jason Livingood, writing for Accuracy in Academia (Dec. 2003):

Although historians and educators tell us that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended the Great Depression, in reality, the New Deal prolonged chronic unemployment in the U.S. in the 1930s, Cato Institute scholar Jim Powell said early this month.

"The New Deal was substantially financed on the backs of the middle class and the poor," Powell said at a Cato Institute Forum. The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank.

Powell spoke, along with Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report, on the findings of his new book, FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (Crown Forum, 2003). Powell's book brings together evidence from the recent findings of several dozen economists at Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Brown, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at Berkeley.

Throughout the Depression, unemployment rates averaged about 17 percent. What help the New Deal did provide did not go to those who needed it most. Meanwhile, other New Deal policies impeded, rather than helped, the creation of new jobs, particularly for unskilled workers.

New Deal policies, Powell said, were especially harsh on black Americans. Wages set by the government above market level meant that 500,000 black Americans lost their jobs. By lowering farm production the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 cost thousands of poor black sharecroppers their jobs while increasing food prices.

The many public works projects FDR introduced became an active drag on the U.S. economy, while doing little to help, Powell said. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), for example, probably did much more harm than good. The TVA flooded an estimated 730,000 acres of land. Thousands of citizens lost their property and homes to the flooding waters. Tenant farmers were not given compensation for their loss of land and property.

At the same time, the electricity that the TVA eventually provided did almost nothing to benefit Tennessee farmers that had been most affected by the project's construction. Tennessee farmers did not need electricity, Powell pointed out. They needed gasoline or other engine fuel for farming equipment. Moreover, electricity prices from the TVA were overly high, thus further restricting its usefulness to lower and middle class workers.

FDR referred to investors and corporate leaders with contemptuous language, calling them "economic royalists." This habit made businessmen more worried about making investments for it implied that the fruit of their efforts might be taken from them by some future reform. The values of hard work were similarly played down.

Powell recounted a few of the lines of a Louis Armstrong song of that era: "Sleep while you work, rest while you play, lean on your shovel to pass the time away, at the WPA [Works Progress Administration]."

Many historians praise FDR for his political abilities, and his success in boosting the morale of Americans during the Depression. Powell and Barone mildly disagreed on this matter. Barone believed that Roosevelt did have a sizable accomplishment in this regard, and that Roosevelt may have helped save capitalism in the U.S. by moderating the radical revolutionary feelings among some parts of the American population. Powell, on the other hand, argued that the best answer to those advocating revolution was for the U.S. economy to regain its vigor as soon as it could. Notorious figures such as Father Charles Coughlin and Louisiana Governor Huey Long would never had had the following that they did, Powell suggested, were it not for the sputtering American economy.

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Myth of Pavlik Morozov, Stalin's Poster Boy for Patriotism, Unravels

Julius Strauss, writing in news.telegraph.co.uk (Dec. 27, 2003):

Even by the high-octane standards of Stalinist-era propaganda, the storyline was a powerful one.

Pavlik Morozov was a handsome 14-year-old schoolboy who lived in a tiny Siberian village, never played truant, always did his homework and was polite to his teachers. He loved communism so much that when his own father broke the law he informed on him to the authorities.

When Pavlik's vengeful relatives found out, they sneaked up on him as he was picking berries in the woods with his little brother and stabbed him to death.

For generations the story of Pavlik the boy martyr was taught to tens of millions of schoolchildren throughout the Soviet Union.

The embodiment of fierce Soviet patriotism, he was pronounced Pioneer-Hero No 1 and elevated to the rank of communism's untouchables.

But now, 70 years later and more than a decade after communism fell, a quiet debate is raging over Pavlik Morozov that runs right to the heart of Russia's post-Soviet identity.

It has pitted a handful of human rights advocates scattered in the regions against the monolithic power of the Russian state: the country's supreme court and the FSB, formerly the KGB.

Anna Pastukhova, who works with the Russian human rights group Memorial in the regional capital, Yekaterinburg, said: "Pavlik is one of the cornerstones of the entire Soviet foundation. If Pavlik was faked it means the whole myth of the Soviet Union was faked."

For the Stalinist propaganda machine of the 1930s the story of Pavlik was too good to miss.

From the day he was killed, Sept 3, 1932, he was built up as a paragon of virtue and a model for the Soviet youth.

Four relatives of Pavlik - his grandfather, grandmother, cousin and uncle - were rounded up for his murder, hauled in front of a hastily convened regional court and charged with terrorism.

As hundreds of telegrams flooded in from around the country demanding that they be shown no mercy, they were convicted and shot. After the trial, the propaganda offensive began. The communist regime dubbed him Pioneer-Hero No 1 and erected statues in his memory. A collective farm was named after him, songs were composed in his memory and an opera was written about him.

Pavlik's village, the dirt-poor, one-street settlement of Gerasimovka, a day's drive east of Yekaterinburg, became a shrine to his memory and his virtue.

For more than 50 years, hundreds of thousands of Soviet children from all over the country were taken to the tiny schoolroom where Pavlik studied and instructed to emulate him. They were taken to the spot where he apparently died, now marked with a plaque surrounded by a metal fence.

In winter there was even a three-day ski contest in the village and the winner would be awarded the Pavlik Morozov prize. Today the heroism of Pavlik has been quietly dropped from the school curriculum, the buses no longer line up and Gerasimovka is once again dirt-poor.

The road to the settlement is deserted and the huge concrete letters erected to mark the Pavlik Morozov Collective Farm are crumbling.

Irina Yevdokimova, the director of the region's museums, said: "We used to have Pioneers coming here from all over the Soviet Union. For the past 10 years there has been almost nobody, only a few academics." For decades anyone who questioned the official version of the Pavlik story would receive a knock on the door or a phone call from the KGB warning them off.

But during the past decade a few solitary individuals have set out to probe the myth. The sketchy picture that has emerged is very different from the official version.

They have concluded that far from being a model schoolboy, Pavlik was a poor student and a troublemaker.

Some people say he could barely read. The one surviving photograph of him shows a malnourished, almost feral, child, a far cry from the strapping lad of the statues and portraits. The explanation for his heroic deed has also been discredited. His father had walked out on his mother when the children were still young, leaving her to bring them up as best she could.

In revenge, Pavlik's mother urged her son to inform on his father for allegedly selling sought-after documents granting permission to travel.

As for the boy's murder, no proper investigation was carried out. A secret police officer simply arrived in the village and arrested those he decided were the culprits, claiming to have found a bloody knife in the home of one of them.

In 1932, Stalin's infamous forced collectivisation, which resulted in the death of millions of farmers, was just getting under way. In the terror and uncertainty of the time, legal process, even when it was applied, was pared back to a bare minimum.

When the truth began to emerge, Inokenty Khlebnikov, a local man, wrote to the courts and asked that Pavlik's alleged killers be rehabilitated like hundreds of thousands of other victims of Stalin's purges. But in 1999 the supreme court ruled that the conviction was safe. The FSB refused to release the files on the case.

In Gerasimovka many local people, who spent decades believing in the Pavlik myth, are confused and defiant.

Posted on Friday, January 2, 2004 at 8:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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