More Noted ...

by Cliopatria

No Comment: I am, frankly, a prude, but you may want to know about Toilet Papers: The Gendered Construction of Public Toilets. No submissions accepted on tissue paper and no writing suggestive remarks on the walls, please. I wish Olga and Barbara good luck with their trans-Atlantic toilet project and thank Hiram Hover for the – ahh – the heads up.

Gitmo: Speaking of toilets, by now we all know that Newsweek has retracted its story about prisoner interrogators at Gitmo flushing a Koran down the toilet. As Tim Burke suggests, the reactions in the media and on the net are tiresomely predictable. But even this sad story had its lighter moments. Juan Cole says that a colleague heard one student report that prison guards at Gitmo had flushed a Korean down the toilet. More seriously, he writes,"As a professional historian, I would say we still do not have enough to be sure that the Koran desecration incident took place. We have enough to consider it plausible. Anyway, the important thing politically is that some Muslims have found it plausible, and their outrage cannot be effectively dealt with by simple denial." The fact is that there were prior published reports of the desecration of the Koran and they did not lead to riot and death. The fact is that the administration had prior access to the story and did not object to its publication. The fact is that no one can prove that Newsweek's story is false. What is disturbing is that the administration is now, not only giving government contracts to columnists and journalists to report favorable stories, but it is demanding retractions of stories that it doesn't approve of – after having cleared the story on national security grounds.

Yalta: At Crescat Sententia, the University of Chicago's Amy Lamboley challenges the claims of Stephen Bainbridge that the United States could have prevented the Soviet Union from dominating eastern Europe at the end of World War II. In my humble opinion, Professor Bainbridge should stick with corporate law. Lamboley thinks like a historian and you can put her"What If?" right there beside Alan Allport's"More War Bunk" and Greg Robinson's George W. Bush, Historian?"

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John H. Lederer - 5/17/2005

Touche'

Ralph E. Luker - 5/17/2005

Mr. Lederer: Read "weapons of mass destruction in Iraq" in place of "Koran down the toilet" in all of your commentary.

John H. Lederer - 5/17/2005

I must say I am bothered by the implications of some the statements , both quoted and direct :

"As a professional historian, I would say we still do not have enough to be sure that the Koran desecration incident took place."

-- but, what?.. hopefully if we keep trying really, really hard we will eventually find enough to shore up this anti-US story that confirms our prejudices?

"The fact is that there were prior published reports of the desecration of the Koran and they did not lead to riot and death." --because they were not believed since not from credible sources unlike the alleged source of the Newsweek report, a report on a military investigation?

"The fact is that no one can prove that Newsweek's story is false." Newsweek has now conceded that it is false. Newseek's human source says he can no longer say it was in the report. The military says it was not a matter investigated in the report Newsweek asserted it to be in. No one will say that it was in the report. What would constitute proof?

"What is disturbing is that the administration is now, not only giving government contracts to columnists and journalists to report favorable stories, but it is demanding retractions of stories that it doesn't approve of – after having cleared the story on national security grounds." -- they may have also not liked the color of the paper or the split infinitive on line 342. They did not seek retraction bevause they did not "approve" of the report, but because it is a false story.

This seems to be a case of "ok, so it wasn't true, but it ought to have been".

Alan Allport - 5/17/2005

Maarja: first of all, I should clear the record by saying that it's plain old Mr. Allport, not Dr. Allport. (Though I am tempted to echo the words of a Congressman whose name I now forget who, when accurately addressed as Dr. so-and-so, retorted: ah, so the mudslinging begins here!).

On a more serious note, I am going to begin teaching a summer class in less than an hour from now, so please understand that my response and any subsequent responses are going to have to be necessarily brief. However, as far as your questions go:

1) Very few, I expect (not really sure what point you're making here).
2) Not much, though it's worth mentioning in passing that the Balt leaderships were not opposed to dealing with the devil in certain opportune circumstances e.g. the absorption of Vilnius by Lithuania in October 1939 (much the same goes for Poland's attitude towards Teschen earlier the same year). I say this not to single out the Balts, who goodness knows found themselves in a bad enough situation, but simply as a reminder that every government is forced, or tempted, from time to time to make hard-nosed decisions that don't always look attractive in hindsight.
3) I honestly don't know. That is why I'm a historian and not, thankfully, a politician. I accept the difficulties of diplomatic language over such a hot-button issue. I hope that I would have been able to craft a statement that would have expressed regret for the tragedies of 1945 (and the need for Russia to properly acknowledge its role in them) without distorting the historical record. But let's not be too naive here. Bush was not really apologizing on his own behalf. He was berating the long-dead leader of an opposition party whose reputation many of his own allies are keen to rip apart. This is not the kind of apology that requires a great deal of political courage. Still, I'm glad I didn't have to make the decision.

Thanks for your comments.

Maarja Krusten - 5/17/2005

Dr. Allport, you wrote earlier in your article "More War Bunk" that "That the repatriation of Soviet prisoners, however gruesome, was a tacit but necessary precondition for the release of thousands of British and US ex-PoWs accidentally swept up by the Soviet armies at the end of WWII I will mention only in passing."

I've been thinking about that comment in the context of Chris Bray's recent call-up orders. Chris of course is serving in the uniform of his own nation in an all-volunteer army. The juxtaposition of Bray's post and the Yalta debate opens up an interesting opportunity for us comfortable armchair analysts to consider some of the darker images in history, ones from which many might rather avert their eyes.

Not every man eligible for military service finds himself in a situation such as Bray's. As you know, the Baltic nations (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia)had been sovereign republics during the 1920s and 1930s. They then were occupied first by the Soviet Union in 1940, then by the Nazis from 1941 to 1944, and then again by the Soviets from 1945 to 1991. Many young men in the Baltic countries faced the horrible prospect during World War II of being forcibly inducted into the Soviet or the Nazi armies, neither of which represented their own nations. And some people who managed to flee those countries were forcibly repatriated after the war.

Since you previously have used the argument about FDR, what options did the western powers realistically have at Yalta, may I pose that same question to you in a three different questions?

(1) Rick Shenkman at POTUS remarks of Yalta that history means putting yourself into the places of principals in historical scenarios and considering events from their perspective. Put yourself in the position of a young man of military age in the Baltic nations. They were just as human as Chris Bray is. What options would the young men in the occupied Baltic nations realistically have had during World War II to avoid military service or generally to emerge unscathed at the end of the war?

(2) Given the tiny size of the three Baltic republics and their geopolitical positions, what realistically could their prewar leaders have done in diplomatic or military terms during the late 1930s to avoid the horrible consequences of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact and Yalta?

(3) What would you have said in Riga, had you been Bush? How would you have marked the end of the war without ignoring the tragic fate of the Baltic nations and Eastern and Central European countries which did not come through WWII as well as we lucky -- but hopefully not overly smug -- people in the U.S.?

posted from home on personal time

Alan Allport - 5/17/2005

While I could argue about a few of Lamboley's comments, I think her dissection of Bainbridge's absurd thesis is more or less spot-on. I would make two follow-on remarks.

First, this metaphor of Yalta as a card-game. Where did it come from, and more to the point, why does it endure? This wasn't The Sting, folks. FDR wasn't some innocent rube milked for everything he was worth by the wily Stalin. Stalin's advantage wasn't in finesse, it was in brute force. The simple unpleasant fact is that there wasn't all that much to discuss at Yalta except the ratification of concrete realities (and there wasn't even much of that).

Second, I have been doing a lot of reading about the British Army in 1945, and particularly the mood of the army, and I have now become convinced that if Churchill or anyone else had tried to use it against the Red Army that year there would have been widespread outbreaks of mutiny. I cannot speak for the US Army but I have my suspicions there too.