History People Are Talking About Archives 4-03 to 5-03

Most GLOBE READERS probably don't have a particularly strong view on whether the word ''genocide'' or ''massacre'' should be used to describe what happened to Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire nearly 90 years ago. But for those who do care, the passions run extraordinarly deep.That is especially true for Armenian-Americans this time of year; April 24 is the anniversary of what they say was, by any reasonable measure, a campaign of genocide started against them in 1915 by the Ottoman Turks. In all, 1.5 million Armenian men, women, and children were slaughtered or died in forced marches, Armenians say. To call it anything other than genocide, they say, is a dangerous denial of history and is an insult to humanity.

To the contrary, say the Turks. They argue that while 600,000 Armenians may have died, it was simply the consequence of war, not an attempt to wipe out an a entire people. (The United Nations defines genocide as ''acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.'')

Newspaper editors around the country -- not to mention would-be presidents and Washington politicians -- have, like it or not, been drawn into the debate. The Boston Globe, like other papers, had to pick sides.

For 15 years the Globe has, to the dismay of its large Armenian-American readership, shunned the use of ''genocide'' unless it's used in quotes. The paper prefers ''massacre,'' and routinely includes Turkey's version of events.

Several other papers with large Armenian-American readership use ''genocide'' more freely. For example, the Los Angeles Times's main headline on its story about the April 24 anniversary read, ''Thousands march to denounce genocide.''

The Providence Journal routinely refers to Armenian genocide in both text and headlines. (California and Rhode Island are the states with the largest share of the population reporting Armenian ancestry. Massachusetts is third.) The list goes on....

The Globe is reviewing its 15-year practice of avoiding the word ''genocide'' next to Armenian. It is possible, although not a given, that sometime soon it will be used more freely.

The review is wise and timely.

A book describing the genocide -- Samantha Power's ''A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide'' -- just won the Pulitzer Prize. In Washington, members of Congress grow more willing to acknowledge the genocide, although they are still wary of a resolution saying so for fear of angering Turkey, a NATO ally. (That concern may fade since Turkey's parliament refused to let the United States use bases there in the war against Iraq.)

Going back a few years, there are other signs of change: France officially acknowledged the genocide. George W. Bush as a candidate, although not as president, used the g-word.

''A combination of new and better scholarship, along with a wider recognition of a fuller definition of genocide that grew out of the debate over the Balkans, have combined to lead most knowledgable historians of the period to conclude what happened to the Armenians was genocide,'' says Paul Glastris, senior fellow at the Western Policy Center in Washington and editor of The Washington Monthly, who has studied the Armenian genocide.

Not being a historian, I can not claim personal knowledge of what happened to Armenians, or why. But I find it telling that 126 Holocaust scholars have signed a petition calling the Armenian genocide ''an incontestable historical fact.''

McCarthy subversion hearings to go public(posted 5-4-03)

Joanne Kenan, writing for The Reuters News Service (May 3rd, 2003):

WASHINGTON - Fifty years after Sen. Joe McCarthy conducted some of the most infamous hearings in Senate history, thousands of pages of his secret investigations into alleged Communist subversion will finally be made public.

Some 5,000 pages of 1953-1954 closed-door hearings from McCarthy's Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will be released Monday by Sens. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, and Susan Collins, a Maine Republican. Levin and Collins have both chaired McCarthy's former committee during the past two years as the documents were prepared for release.

They plan to issue them in the same Senate hearing room where McCarthy himself once held court.

Historians believe the five volumes of transcripts will shed light on what many regard as one of the most shameful episodes in Senate history - a time when Cold War anxiety about the Soviet Union, Communist China and a perceived domestic Communist threat led to political witch hunts at home.

"This is the first time historians have had access to raw documentation," said Donald Ritchie, the associate Senate historian."I think it will really stimulate scholarship. They'll have much more substantive information to go on."

Most of the people who took part in the hearings are now dead.

McCarthy himself, a Wisconsin Republican who catapulted himself to fame with his headline-grabbing but ultimately fabricated allegations of vast Communist conspiracies tainting the State Department, the Government Printing Office and parts of the U.S. military, died in 1957. He was censured by the Senate in 1954.

McCarthy's most notorious hearings, the Army-McCarthy hearings, were held in public and the secret portions of that investigation were released long ago.

Reparations for Victims of the Tulsa Race Riot? (posted 5-1-03)

Adrian Brune, writing in the Village Voice (April 30-May 6, 2003):

Otis Clark is a man who doesn't expect much. In fact, he is grateful for everything he gets, whether it's a small apartment in Tulsa public housing—where he has lived since coming home from Los Angeles 10 years ago at the age of 90—or a medal from the state of Oklahoma signifying him as a survivor of the Tulsa race riot of 1921.

When asked what he would do with money from a reparations lawsuit filed last month on his behalf by Johnnie Cochran and Charles Ogletree Jr., Clark says he would write a book based on what he calls his "good, long life," in which he served as a butler for the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and Stepin Fetchit.

Given his good health, even at 100 he might get his chance despite the length of the legal process. The complaint filed by Ogletree and Cochran in federal court in the Northern District of Oklahoma basically alleges that in 2001, the Oklahoma State Legislature, through the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot, admitted city and county officials failed to take actions to calm or contain the riot and, in some cases, became participants in the violence, which took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921. These officials, according to the complaint, even deputized and armed many whites who were part of a mob that killed 300 African Americans, looted, and burned down the black-owned Greenwood area, leaving 3,000 people homeless. There are now fewer than 100 known survivors.

"Almost two years have elapsed since the commission's report was filed. Nonetheless, the state of Oklahoma and the city of Tulsa have failed to compensate the victims of the riot," Ogletree says. "We are asking the court to require the state and the city to honor their admitted obligations as detailed in the commission's report."

On April 14, the court agreed to give Ogletree's team 120 days to determine whether or not the state and city misled or otherwise prevented riot victims from filing lawsuits in 1921. The complaint charges that both governmental bodies did so. ...

Between the late 19th century and World War I, tens of thousands of former slaves left the South for better lives in the industrial economies of northern cities. A nationwide recession gripped the country just before WW I and blacks and immigrants competed for jobs. As the newspapers of the times attest, many blacks bore the brunt of the poverty and the blame for the tight job market.

While lynchings and massacres became the weapons used against African Americans, one element makes what happened to them fall into the arena of a holocaust—the participation of militias and law officers sanctioned by state and city governments. Starting in the 1890s, these riots suppressed rising black political power and destroyed whole communities.

60th Anniversary of the Katyn Polish Massacre(posted 4-30-03)

Kevin Myers, writing in the Sunday Telegraph (London) (April 27, 2003):

Today Poles all over the world will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the discovery of the war crime which didn't occur. And the non-existence of this atrocity constituted democracy's most sordid exercise in realpolitik of the entire 20th century. The Soviet Union captured 180,000 Polish soldiers during its invasion of Poland in 1939. Most were herded off to slave-camps in Siberia, but 22,000 officers were not. In April 1940, on Stalin's orders, each was bound with barbed wire and executed with a single shot to the head.

This was a colossal undertaking: the death toll was greater than that on the most calamitous day in British military history - the Somme, July 1, 1916. More importantly, the massacres occurred before the German invasions of France and the Low Countries. And although hundreds of Jews in Poland had been murdered, these were improvised butcheries, essentially unrelated to The Final Solution, which had not yet begun.

So the first systematic mass murder of defenceless innocents in the Second World War was not by the Nazis, but by the Soviet Union, just over a year before the USSR became Britain's official best friend. This shouldn't surprise us: after all, it had been the Soviets, and not the Nazis, who invented industrialised murder. From the revolution on, they freely used the word "exterminate" of their enemies. Hitler listened; and Hitler learned, as dictators do. Moreover, the careful murder of so many officers from a single narrow stratum of Polish society was truly proto-genocide: its intent was to eliminate Polish identity by the extermination of all its perceived guardians.

In 1943, via two sources - through a population census within the exiled Polish community living in the USSR, and from the Germans, who had discovered the site of one of the massacres, in the woods of Katyn, outside Smolensk - the British discovered the fate of the Polish officers. A devastating report from the British ambassador to the Polish government-in-exile, Owen O'Malley, left no doubt about the matter.

The British Government's public response was to dismiss the Nazi discoveries as propaganda and tell the Polish government-in-exile to forget Katyn and to proceed with beating the real enemy, Germany....

That is what happened when the three leaders - Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin - met at Teheran in November 1943. Far from berating the Soviet Leader for the massacres, the two democratic leaders propitiated him, awarding him the Polish land he had stolen even as he seized his future murder victims. And when Stalin jested that they should settle the German problem once and for all by killing 50,000 German officers, Churchill merely protested sulkily, and Roosevelt light-heartedly suggested killing only 49,000.

But nobody mentioned Katyn. How was this possible? For the massacre of the Poles was surely the secret subtext to this grisly exchange, and one by which Stalin was taking the measure of his two confreres. All three knew of the murders, and the bodyguard of lies around them: and silently, all three - two of them abjectly, the third triumphantly - assented to those lies.

Teheran was the true nadir of international diplomacy, morally far more ignoble and strategically far more catastrophic than either Munich five years before or Yalta a year later. And the key to Teheran was Katyn: once Stalin had got away with that, he realised he could get away with almost anything.

The New Debate Over Empire (posted 4-30-03)

Matthew Price, writing in the Boston Globe (April 27, 2003):

The British empire is undergoing something of a rehabilitation, these days. In America, neoconservative pundits like Max Boot promote the benefits of British-style imperialism. In Britain itself, several leading historians, among them Linda Colley, David Cannadine, and Niall Ferguson, have recently published revisionary books that contest, in different ways, the dim version of empire as a squalid tale of racism, arrogance, and dispossession that reigns in many a postcolonial studies seminar.

Of course, not all Englishmen look back fondly on their imperial past. In the pages of the London Review of Books, the journalist Richard Gott suggested last year that the empire's real legacy is "the construction of military dictatorship thorough martial law; the violent seizure and settlement of land [and] the genocidal destruction of indigenous peoples." Indeed, such is the squeamishness in some liberal circles that the director of the progressive London-based think tank Demos recently proposed a bold initiative for Queen Elizabeth: a world tour in which she would apologize for the ills of the British empire.

If Ferguson had his way, however, Queen Elizabeth's tour would be a celebration of the British empire as the global harbinger of free trade and prosperity. This is the argument of his robust defense of British imperialism, "Empire: How Britain made the Modern World," which appeared in the UK earlier this year as a companion to a five-part Channel 4 TV series, and which has just been published by Basic Books on these shores, with the pointed subtitle "The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power."

Ferguson is not shy about drawing British-American analogies. He believes the United States is currently an "empire in denial" and would do well to follow what he sees as the British example, promoting-by force, if necessary-open markets, liberal ideals, and global stability. And he is eager to convert Washington's policy elite to this mission.

Now a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business, the 38-year-old Scotsman is among the brashest and most prolific historians of his generation. The author of well-received (and boat-rocking) books on the history of global finance and World War I, Ferguson often parades his generally right-of-center politics on the opinion pages of leading British and American newspapers. "Empire" itself is an unabashedly didactic book: part Op-ed, part tour d'horizon. While Ferguson does note some of the British empire's uglier aspects-its origins in a 16th-century "maelstrom of seaborne theft and violence," the genocidal inclinations of settler populations in Australia and North America-he argues that it was ultimately a beneficent phenomenon, especially at its height around the end of the 19th century. Its institutional genius, he claims, was a "triumph of minimalism" that depended as much on the use of indigenous elites as of British administrators....

Ferguson's bold claims have met with some stiff criticism. In The Guardian, Jon E. Wilson, a historian at King's College, London, pounced on Ferguson, calling him the "Leni Riefenstahl of George Bush's new imperial order," and a shill for "the acceptable face of imperial brutality." Wilson derided his economic interpretations as flatly incorrect, adding that the British empire was "run on the cheap," did little to enrich its colonies, and upheld the rule of law only when convenient-looking the other way, for example, when Indian landlords used violence against their tenants. British imperialism, he argued, merely advanced the short-term interests of a few, and impoverished the world in the long run.

White's claims have a century-long lineage. In 1902, the radical British journalist J.A. Hobson argued that the British empire wasn't even beneficial to the British: It was, among its many other sins, a waste of the taxpayer's money. Indeed, one historian recently suggested that Britain could have reaped a substantial "decolonization dividend" had it wound down its empire in 1850. As for the colonies themselves, many historians, like Wilson, contend that Britain's legacy in places like India was pauperization, or worse. One need only consult the American historian and social critic Mike Davis's 2001 book "Late Victorian Holocausts," which argues that the shiny new infrastructure Ferguson champions led to the deaths of millions of Indians during a series of late 19th-century famines, when merchants used trains to ship grain away from drought-stricken areas.

But Ferguson strenuously defends both his data and his political intentions. The postcolonial-studies crowd, he says, "can't put the frighteners on me." ...

Anthony Pagden, a historian at UCLA and the author of the 2001 book "Peoples and Empires," also stresses the British rulers' relative lack of coercion. British conquests in India and around the Great Lakes of North America in the 17th century, Pagden points out, often involved a series of protracted negotiations with indigenous elites. And while British rule was hardly democratic in its northern African outposts, the British often governed indirectly, by relying on a fusion of local custom, British law, and tribal proxies. He concludes: "You cannot build an empire on might alone."

But David Arnold, a professor at London's School of Oriental and African Studies, believes Ferguson's thesis is badly blinkered. He contends that Ferguson's emphasis on the exploits of white men represents an outmoded view of an empire that was, after all, as "much about black guys and white women doing things" as it was about regal men in ostrich-plumed hats. Contemporary Britons, says Arnold, have multiple imperial legacies: West Indians whose ancestors were slaves, whites whose ancestors were plantation owners. "Are we on the side of the oppressed or the oppressors?" he wonders pointedly. "If you're talking about empire from the perspective of England, right now we're both."

The work that perhaps best captures this sense of contemporary ambivalence is Linda Colley's 2002 book "Captives," an inventive history of the British empire's early years. In a dazzling series of psychodramas based on captivity narratives, the London School of Economics historian depicts the early empire as a vulnerable beast whose flanks were always exposed. In India, for example, the British were outmanned and outgunned-hardly a match for the ferocious Mughal warriors....

Colley believes that "empires are the oldest and most durable political system in history." But she also considers herself a critic of American power and imperialism and remains skeptical about Ferguson's politicized scholarship, bristling at his balance-sheet-style approach to the question of empire. "So much time has been spent debating whether the empire was good or bad," she notes, "that people have failed to investigate just what a complex beast it was."

But for a leftist critic like Edward Said, the works of Ferguson and Colley are together part of a larger reaction against postcolonial regimes. In a recent essay, Said argued that focusing on the traumas of imperialists, as Colley does, is "unhelpful." He worried that Ferguson's "perplexingly affirmative" work trivializes "the suffering and dispossession brought by empire to its victims."

Was Reagan Always Honest? (posted 4-30-03)

Rick Perlstein, in a post on Richard Jensen's conservative net list (April 30, 2003):

One thing that always stuns us liberals about Reagan is the high level of deceptiveness in his rhetoric, even compared to the normal run of politicians (I honor RR's intelligence in calling it deceptiveness, not stupid mistakes). For instance he would say:"The $5 you saved 20 years [ago] will only buy you $1.85 in groceries today"--as if that $5 saved in 1946 hadn't grown to probably three times that in 1966! Or he would repeat that you could receive welfare in California after only 24 hour residence in the state long, long after he was informed that for all programs except aid to the blind the residency requirements were 1-5 years.

Allowing that this is an emotional matter--obscured, fairly so, in conservatives' minds by the profound unfairness and patronization with which Reagan was treated in the media beginning with the 1966 gubernatorial race--how do conservatives acknowledge this dissonance in their vision of Reagan's purity? By ignoring it? By a Machiavellian divided consciousness, willfully ignoring it for the sake of the cause? With shame? With indifference? With a Watergate-ish"everyone does it"?

In response to Perlstein's post, David Horowitz wrote:

In the first place, no conservative would regard any politician as"pure" -- that's a delusion reserved for the social redemption crowd. Secondly, any liberal who claims to be"stunned" by the"high level of deceptiveness" described here -- given Clinton's and Gore's and Hillary's brazen public lying is either a hypocrite or needs a strong adjustment for whatever lenses he's using to view these matters.

Burning Books in Hitler's Germany (posted 4-30-03)

Jacqueline Trescott, writing in MSNBC (April 30, 2003):

On May 10, 1933, German students held a series of torchlight parades. At the end of their march, these newly minted Nazis stood around raging bonfires and threw thousands of books into the flames. At a fire in Munich, as many as 70,000 people watched volumes of history, fiction and science go up in flames.

THE BONFIRES energized the youthful followers of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, which had taken over as Germany’s ruling party in March 1933. The fires were also a step in an official purge of intellectuals and suppression of freedom of the press and speech. But the fires were denounced quickly by American activists, writers and scholars.

The chilling history of the book burnings is the subject of a new exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings” shows how the bonfires foreshadowed the Nazi atrocities against humans. Opening today, the show is part of a series of activities marking the museum’s 10th anniversary.

Stephen Goodell, the museum’s director of exhibitions, and Guy Stern, a professor at Wayne State University and a refugee from Nazi Germany, did the research for the show. The exhibit they produced tells the story mainly through the memos, posters and news dispatches that capture the urgency of the Nazis’ campaign.

The researchers found there were approximately 34 book burnings, most during the spring and summer of 1933.

“The book burnings were an escalation of the Nazis’ putting into effect a cleansing of German culture,” says Stern. He remembers those days well. Stern describes how Nazi functionaries walked into his classroom in Hildesheim and handed the teachers razor blades. The students were ordered to cut out sections of their history books and replace them with new interpretations more in line with Nazi propaganda.