Roundup: Talking About History

Rudolph Herzog: War Jokes: Humor In Hitler's Germany

Rudolph Herzog is the author of Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany (Melville House Publishing), a groundbreaking look at the role of humor in Nazi Germany that Der Spiegel described as "a thrilling book."

Sergey Markedonov: Partitioning the Soviet Legacy

Sergey Markedonov is a visiting fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This August marks the fourth anniversary of the five-day Russo-Georgian war of 2008. As usual, there has not been any lack of commentary on this event. There is still a dispute over who fired the first shot. And the issue of responsibility of Russian and Georgian leaders is still very much alive. This time, Vladimir Putin’s feelings about Russia’s preparations for the war have been the focus. Even without Putin's comments, it is clear that Moscow was reacting to Georgian attempts to violate the status quo established in the 1990s and that the responsibility for "unfreezing the conflict" can’t be "awarded" to only one side. Meanwhile, the debates about the "bad guys" and "victims of aggression" create serious obstacles for adequate understanding of the broader political processes that led to the five-day war, an event which was not unique and generated ill will among leaders in Russia and Georgia. It is time to stop looking at the complex phenomenon through the prism of great personal animosity between Putin and Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, or vice versa.

John R. Schindler: Forgotten Failure in Bosnia

John R. Schindler is professor of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer with the National Security Agency. He has written widely on Balkan affairs and blogs at The XX Committee. Twenty years ago this August, there was no hotter story in the emerging global media than Bosnia and its terrible civil war, which was unfolding gorily in near real time. CNN in particular made great copy on the conflict, and worldwide its emerging star Christiane Amanpour became an icon with her "live from Sarajevo" pitch. Just how accurate much of the reportage out of bloody Bosnia was that fateful summer remains an open question. The war’s position as the first extended conflict to take place in the context of 24/7 global TV coverage before the rise of Internet fact-checking seems historically important.

Rémi Brulin: Terrorism is Terrorism and States Sometimes Engage in Terror, Too.

Rémi Brulin is research fellow and adjunct associate professor at New York University. In his rebuttal to Glenn Greenwald's critique of the "terrorism expert industry," Daniel Trombly profoundly mischaracterizes both my research and the specific points on which Greenwald's post quoted me verbatim. Trombly writes: "[Greenwald] rejects 'terrorism' as a useful term altogether, arguing, along with scholar Remi Brulin, that the term terrorism is primarily 'propaganda' for 'justifying one's own state violence'-- especially of the American and Israeli variety -- rather than a possible subject of expertise." My research, presented in my recently completed Ph.D. dissertation, in a book chapter, and in an extensive 2010 conversation with Greenwald at Salon, addresses the definition and deployment of the concept of terrorism in American political discourse since 1945 and, more specifically, between 1972 and 1992, when this discourse was born.

Emily Whitaker: Stalin’s Resurrection

Emily Whitaker is completing a masters degree in Public History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Since Josef Stalin’s death in 1953, and especially following the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, historians and the public worldwide have been united in condemnation of the Soviet leader and his regime. His ruthlessness, the purges, gulags and famines that left millions of his own people dead have meant that at best he has been viewed as a necessary evil, in recognition of his drive to modernise and industrialise the USSR. Yet, in spite of the millions who suffered and died as a result of his policies, Stalin has long been revered in Russia for leading the country to victory against the Nazis in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, an achievement which was remembered during 60th anniversary celebrations in 2005. Since then the movement in Russia for Stalin’s rehabilitation appears to be broadening and a more disturbing picture is emerging, one in which the Little Father’s actions, character and legacy are being reconfigured and given altogether different attributes. In 2007 the Putin government directed an initiative to restructure the national curriculum, teaching schoolchildren that Stalin’s actions were ‘entirely rational’. In the same year the archives of the eminent human rights organisation, Memorial, were raided.

Lien-Hang Nguyen: Exploding the Myths About Vietnam

Lien-Hang Nguyen is an associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky and the author of “Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam.”AS the war in Afghanistan drags on with no definitive victory in sight for the United States and American troops begin to withdraw, comparisons to the Vietnam War are once again in the air, 50 years after both Washington and Hanoi decided to beef up their forces in South Vietnam. “Just take a run through the essential Vietnam War checklist,” wrote Tom Engelhardt in Mother Jones magazine, noting “there’s ‘quagmire’ ” and “the idea of winning ‘hearts and minds’ ” as well as “bomb-able, or in our era drone-able, ‘sanctuaries’ across the border” and even “a one-man version of My Lai.” Although these analogies are particularly attractive to critics — who see America’s battle in Afghanistan as even more futile than Vietnam and advocate a quick exit — they are deeply flawed.

Lawrence Downes: As Woody Turns 100, We Protest Too Little

Lawrence Downes is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times.In October the Kennedy Center will throw a centennial party for Woody Guthrie, a star-studded concert with tickets topping out at $175. It will be America’s ultimate tribute to a beloved troubadour. “Through his unique music, words and style,” the Kennedy Center says, “Guthrie was able to bring attention and understanding to the critical issues of his day.”Poor Woody. The life and music of America’s great hobo prophet, its Dust Bowl balladeer, boiled down to this: He brought attention to the critical issues of his day.Maybe that’s what happens to dissidents who are dead long enough. They are reborn for folk tales and children’s books and PBS pledge drives. They become safe enough for the Postal Service. “For a man who fought all his life against being respectable, this comes as a stunning defeat,” Arlo Guthrie said in 1998, when his father was put on a 32-cent stamp....

Daniel Mande: The British Mandate in Palestine ... A Lost Opportunity of Historic Proportions

Daniel Mandel is a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and author of H. V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist (Routledge, London, 2004). 

Neelam Deo: Independent India's Unfulfilled Promise

Neelam Deo is India's former ambassador to Denmark and Ivory Coast, and served in Washington and New York. She is the director and co-founder of Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations.

Seth Rosenfeld: The FBI's Vendetta Against Berkeley

Seth Rosenfeld was for many years an investigative reporter for The San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle. This essay is adapted from Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power, to be published next week by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Curtis O. Lynum, the special agent in charge of the FBI's San Francisco field office, rang the bell by the front door of the governor's mansion in Sacramento. By his side stood Glenn A. Harter, his top domestic-security agent. They had been summoned by the new governor, Ronald Reagan.Waiting on the portico of the century-old grand Victorian that gray Monday morning in January 1967, Lynum felt some trepidation. He admired Reagan, but secrecy was crucial. He was carrying confidential information about the student protests that were disrupting the University of California's Berkeley campus and making headlines across the country. He had intelligence about Mario Savio, who had been a leader of the Free Speech Movement and was Berkeley's most notorious campus agitator, and Clark Kerr, the president of the university.

Julie Wark: The History of the West is Not the History of the World

Julie Wark is the author of Manifiesto de derechos humanos (The Human Rights Manifesto – Ediciones Barataria, 2011) and is an advisory board member of the international political review Sin Permiso.In a recent interview at the London School of Economics, Pankaj Mishra describes the basic aim of his new book, From the Ruins of Empire, in the following terms: "The least this book can do is to impart a sense of how some of Asia’s most educated people responded to Western encroachment on their lands, how intelligent and sophisticated their response was to that encroachment, and how that response has shaped the world we live in today for better and for worse. In short, the history of the West is not the history of the world."

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey: How (George) Romney Championed Civil Rights and Challenged His Church

Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey are co-authors of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America.When Mitt Romney named Paul Ryan as his running mate this weekend, he not only underscored his commitment to Ryan's financial ideals -- he also sharpened the divide between his political outlook and that of his father. George Romney, the former governor of Michigan, was well known for supporting Civil Rights, not just through words but through financial policies. During his gubernatorial term, he expanded state social programs, including for programs for the poor and unemployed, and created an income tax levy.In short, George Romney's programs resembled those of his son Mitt when he was governor of Massachusetts, but diverge nearly entirely from those advocated by his son, and his new running mate, during the current presidential campaign. A closer look at the arc leading from father to son illustrates the Republican Party's change in social outlook from the 1960s to the present.

Michael Pinto-Duschinsky: Holocaust Reparations: The Back Story

Dr. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky is a British political scientist who was appointed in 2011 by Prime Minister David Cameron to the UK Commission on a Bill of Rights. A Holocaust survivor, he was honorary academic advisor to the London-based Claims for Jewish Slave Labor Compensation.On July 10th, dignitaries from the U.S., German, and Israeli governments attended a curious ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.  The gathering marked the 60th anniversary of the first agreement by the West German government with the Israeli government and the Jewish "Claims Conference" to grant modest financial compensation for the Holocaust.  Some of the Jews in the room had spent the years since the agreement in seemingly interminable haggling.

John Lee: China's Selective, Deceitful History

John Lee is the Michael Hintze fellow and adjunct associate professor at the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney and a non-resident senior scholar at the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. For the past week, prominent voices in Australia have urged Washington to get used to the reality of China imminently reclaiming its long-held status as the most powerful Asian country in the region ahead of the US. Many strategists such as Hugh White and former prime minister Paul Keating, who launched White's The China Choice, are asking whether established regional powers can sensibly adjust to the restoration of Chinese economic and military power. It is a fair and timely question. But at least as important an inquiry is whether the Chinese Communist Party can itself adjust to China's rise.

Michael Averko: Cherry Picking The Soviet Past And Russian Present

Michael Averko is a New York based independent foreign policy analyst and media critic. The July 12, 2012 Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) photo gallery of some past Olympians emphasizes an exclusive non-Russian categorizing of selected Soviet athletes – something noteworthy, given the high degree of Russian athletic participation and success in Soviet era sports. The RFE/RL photo gallery serves as evidence that the Soviet legacy was not just about Russia and Russians.In this exhibit, Russian Sergei Belov is referred to as a “Soviet basketball great” and “Moscow resident”, unlike the other featured Soviet athletes, who are identified by the origin of their given non-Russian republic. Along with “Soviet”, the category of “Moscow resident” is not necessarily synonymous with a Russian identity. (For quite sometime, Moscow has had a considerable multiethnic dynamic.) Nevertheless, Soviet and derivatives of Moscow (like “Moskal”) have been periodically used by some anti-Russian leaning elements as interchangeable equivalents for describing Russians in general.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Give John Major the Credit He's Due

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of The Controversy of Zion, The Strange Death of Tory England, and Yo, Blair! We saw David Cameron all too often, at one point playing uneasy host to Vladimir Putin. We saw Boris Johnson entertaining Rupert Murdoch, a sight to terrify any sensitive soul. We saw a smirking Tony Blair. But the most reticent visitor to the Olympics was the man who might be thought the begetter of the gold rush: Sir John Major. After the unknown soldier, they were burying "the unknown prime minister", Herbert Asquith quipped at the funeral of Andrew Bonar Law, and the tag sometimes seemed to apply to Major.

Erin Aubry Kaplan: Obama's Slave Link

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing writer to The Times' Opinion pages and the author of Black Talk, Blue Thoughts, and Walking the Color Line. There's a new twist in the ongoing story line of our post-historical racial age allegedly represented by Barack Obama. Last week, genealogists at Ancestry.com announced the strong likelihood that Obama is a descendant — the 11th great-grandson, to be exact — of John Punch, who in 1640 became the first black person to be legally defined as a slave. This lineage comes not through Obama's African father but through his white mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who is apparently descended from children Punch had with a white woman. The researcher's conclusions are not ironclad. But even if Obama turns out not to be related to Punch — which is highly unlikely — researchers have established beyond doubt that Dunham's family has black ancestry that almost certainly can be traced back to American slaves. Which means that Obama is more black than we imagined. A familiar kind of black...

Julie Cart: Unraveling Her Father's Cold War Secrets

Julie Cart writes for the Los Angeles Times....Growing up, we never knew exactly what my father did when he left for work. All we knew was that he worked long hours and was sometimes gone for days, leaving my mother with the cryptic salutation: I can't tell you where I'm going, what I will be doing, who I'll be with or when I'll be back. Love you.A half-century later, a phone call flung open a door to the past. Here at last was a way to find answers to years of questions that a curious little girl had thrown at her father — and kept wondering about to this day.I started researching Corona. It turned out that quite a bit of information was available. My father and men like him had a hand in creating the world's first photo reconnaissance satellite during the Cold War and, without the use of sophisticated computers, ginned up a remarkable orbiting tool to gather intelligence on Communist countries, especially China and the Soviet Union.Although details of Corona were declassified in 1995, the men who worked on it and two subsequent programs — Gambit and Hexagon — were still bound by their 50-year pledge of secrecy until the U.S. government freed them to talk several months ago....

Jonathan Dresner: Atomic Bomb Symposium at Federation of American Scientists

Jonathan Dresner is a professor of history at Pittsburg State University and assistant editor at the History News Network.There’s almost no new historical content here, aside from some biographical ruminations. Stanley Kutler’s, reprinted at HNN, is the most historically interesting, highlighting the “all or nothing” fallacy in many debates about the use of the bombs versus other tactical options. 

Mary Kenny: The End of Catholic Ireland

Mary Kenny is the author of Crown and Shamrock - Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy. In the historic sense, Ireland's long love affair with the Catholic church was, as Ella Fitzgerald once sang, "too hot not to cool down". Catholicism was once so all-pervading in Irish life that it seemed a definition of Irishness: but now, according to a survey by the pollsters Red C, the Irish are losing their faith quicker than most: seven years ago, 69% of Irish people described themselves as "religious": this has now fallen more than 20 points to 47%. Something had to give, and even before the clerical scandals broke into the public realm – in the 1990s – this intermingling of faith and fatherland was in decline. There was the effect of the 1960s. There was the effect of the pill, which, contrary to legend, was legal in Ireland. There was television.