Three of the nine finalists for 3 Quarks Daily's Politics and Social Science Prize: 2011 are of particular interest to historians:

Ruchira, "The mideast uprisings: a lesson for strong men, mad men and counterfactual historians," Accidental Blogger, 23 February.

Corey Robin, "Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism," Corey Robin, 27 September.

Andrew Hartman, "‘When the Zulus Produce a Tolstoy We Will Read Him': Charles Taylor and the Politics of Recognition," U. S. Intellectual History, 2 June.

1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners of the competition will be decided by its judge, Stephen M. Walt.

The legal blog Letters Blogatory has a post (a few days old, but I just noticed it) on the newest development regarding the Boston College subpoena. Blogger Ted Folkman, a lawyer who does this kind of thing for a living, isn't impressed with the latest: "I’ve been wrong before and I’ll be wrong again, but the effort to intervene here seems to me to be clearly unfounded. That’s not to say that I think that BC’s position lacks merit. As I’ve written before, I think the case is up for grabs given the lack of First Circuit precedent cited by the parties."

[Cross-posted at Airminded.]

Just a brief note on a conference I attended earlier this week at Monash University,'The Pacific War 1941-45: Heritage, Legacies & Culture'. I wasn't presenting, just listening; in fact I only decided to go at the very last minute, mainly on the basis that it seemed silly not to given that it was held in my own town!

And I'm glad I did go. Although the area is just outside my own (same war, different theatre) there were plenty of interesting comparisons and contrasts to be made. For example, there was a paper by Jan McLeod (Newcastle) analysing one air raid, the Japanese bombing of an Australian army hospital at Soputa in Papua in 1942. The following year the incident was studied by a retired judge to see if it should be referred to the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. Despite understandably heated emotions, it was decided not to since the hospital was situated right next to a valid target, 7th Division HQ, and a road carrying supplies to forward areas went straight past it. Now I want to know if anyone in Britain debated referring the Blitz or portions thereof to the Commission. (Goering was tried at Nuremberg, of course, but the tribunal's judgement makes no reference to aerial bombardment at all, save his threat to Hacha in May 1939 to bomb Prague if Czechoslovakia resisted German occupation.) Richard Waterhouse (Sydney) gave an overview of his research into the mood in Australia in the months following the start of the Japanese offensive. Initially it was fairly complacent thanks to the confidence in Fortress Singapore, but as the Japanese advance began to seem irresistible and the prospect of bombing and invasion opened up, signs panic began to appear. In fact, what he described reminded me very much of the Sudeten crisis in Britain a few years before: people fleeing the cities, trenches being dug in public spaces. Maybe somebody needs to look at such panics from a transnational perspective...

As always, one of the best things about going to conferences is being able to put faces to names, such as Ken Inglis and Joan Beaumont (ANU): big names in Australian military history. (I found Joan's talk, on Thai memorialisation of the Thai-Burma railway, one of the most interesting of the conference.) I'd already met Jay Winter (Yale) -- not that he'd remember me! -- at Exeter; he was very kind about my book news. And of course it's good to meet other 'early career researchers', as the official jargon goes here in Australia (shout out to Elizabeth Roberts, Lachlan Grant, and Adrian Threlfall goes here). It's starting to feel a bit odd though, turning up to conferences and having to explain to everyone I talk to that I'm an independent historian (and looking for work... slightly hysterical laugh goes here); I always seem to be the only one doing that, except for people at the other end of their careers, who have retired but are still researching and writing. It's just me, nobody made me feel in the slightest unwelcome, but I worry about it.

To get back to the history: the conference wasn't only about memory, but that seemed to me to be the largest thread running through it. My sense is that Australian historians are as interested in the memory of war as their British counterparts, but have perhaps been more interested in official forms of memory such as war memorials. (Aside from Jay's keynote, for example, there wasn't anything on films; though I was pleased to hear Paula Hamilton (UTS) in her own keynote mention the importance now of computer games in forming ideas about war.) And of course we remember different things here: POW means Changi not Colditz; Janet Watson's (Connecticut) keynote showed that V-J day commemorations in Britain in 1985 and 1995 were very much tacked on to V-E day ones, and in fact barely discussed at all due to the difficult issues involved; in Australia we tend to ignore our role in the war against Germany and Italy and focus on the one against Japan, meaning that Kokoda comes to rival Gallipoli and subjects like Australian participation in area bombing are completely ignored (as Bruce Scates (Monash) noted in passing -- it's not just me!) The upcoming series of 70th anniversaries will be very interesting to watch.

The Navy Times notes that Pearl Harbor survivors are returning to their dead shipmates, decades later:

On Tuesday, seven decades after dozens of fellow sailors were killed when the Utah sank on Dec. 7, 1941, Navy divers took a small urn containing [Graham Soucy's] ashes and put it in a porthole of the ship. The ceremony is one of five memorials being held this week for service members who lived through the assault and want their remains placed in Pearl Harbor, out of pride and affinity for those they left behind.

I don't know of another battle site where people are returning to be buried, though it's not something I've researched. "Pearl Harbor interment and ash scattering ceremonies began in the late 1980s and started growing in number as more survivors heard about them." Now, the article says, 265 survivors are interred there. In Soucy's case, his ashes were split, with some going to Pearl and some being buried in a plot at home to be shared with his wife. Both family, if of a different sort.

George Lakoff isn't a historian. But that excuse only goes so far.

Lakoff's endlessly simpleminded political noodling disappears whole vast swaths of history, entire conceptual categories, and every thin final molecule of nuance from human existence. His writing couldn't be more of a cartoon if Snoopy showed up and got into a dogfight with the Red Baron. (Is this a Berkeley thing? How can one campus have George Lakoff and John Yoo and Robert Reich? Practical joke, or cosmic accident?) Speaking of cartoons, Lakoff says things about the origins of his political conceptions that no self-aware being could utter without blushing the color of a fire engine.

Look at this bizarre and drifting conception of "the Public" from a recent blog post Lakoff coughed up on a blog hosted by UCLA:

All the hundreds of the occupiers’ legitimate complaints and important policy suggestions follow from a simple general moral principle: American democracy is about citizens caring about one another and acting responsibly on that care. 

The idea is simple but a lot follows from it:  a government that protects and empowers everyone equally, a government of the Public — public roads and buildings, school and universities, research and innovation, public health and health care, safety nets, access to justice in the courts, enforcement of worker rights, and practical necessities like sewers, power grids, clean air and water, public safety including safe food, drugs, and other products, public parks and recreational facilities, public oversight of the economy — fiscal and trade policy, banking, the stock market —  and especially the preservation of nature in the interest of all. 

The Public has been what has made Americans free — and has underwritten American wealth. No one makes it on his or her own. Private success depends on a robust Public. 

The rationale for the Occupy movement is that all of this has been under successful attack by the right wing, which has an opposing principle, that democracy is about citizens only taking care of themselves, about personal and not social responsibility.  According to right-wing morality, the successful are by definition the moral; the one percent are taken to be the most moral. The country and the world should be ruled by such a “moral” hierarchy.  Except for national security, the Public should disappear through lack of funding.

So Lakoff begins with a "government of the Public" (emphasis added), constituted from the will of and serving the whole body of "citizens caring for one another." The "Public," here, is something very much like civil society by another name. Isn't that a fair reading? Not a dozen sentences later, though, "the Public" can "disappear through lack of funding." Civil society can cease to exist if you don't send it a check drawn on the Treasury? In between these two competing notions of "the Public," we have a "robust Public" that creates private success. The public sector? Or the "public" that creates it and calls upon it?

A professional linguist, who writes about the importance of calculated political framing, muddles the definition that sits at precisely the very center of his argument: government is of the public, and government is the public, and the public ceases to exist if it's defunded, which appears to suggest that government calls civil society into being and can also switch it off with the merest appropriations bill. I'm sorry, society, we pulled your funding for FY 2013. Please cease to exist on or before 30 June.

But then here comes Lakoff with another post at my favorite cartoon syndication site, explaining what Good People want and Bad People hate (until a house falls on the bad people, and they melt):

Progressives need to be both thinking and talking about their view of a moral democracy, about how a robust public is necessary for private success, about all that the public gives us, about the benefits of health, about a Market for All not a Greed Market, about regulation as protection, about revenue and investment, about corporations that keep wages low when profits are high, about how most of the rich earn a lot of their money without making anything or serving anyone, about how corporations govern your life for their profit not yours, about real food, about corporate and military waste, about the moral and social role of unions, about how global warming causes the increasingly monstrous effects of weather disasters, about how to save and preserve nature.

Lakoff frames his discussion as Left versus Right, a clear set of distinctions between precisely binary choices. So let's only reference sources from the Left: Would Gabriel Kolko agree with the concept of "regulation as protection," or would he maybe complicate it a bit? Would William Appleman Williams agree that the "moral democracy" of a "robust public" -- that word again, whatever Lakoff means by it this time -- provides for unambiguously just and decent outcomes?

Anyway, yes: If Lakoff wants to argue that "a robust public is necessary for private success," I encourage him to jump on a BART train and go make that argument in front of Leland Stanford's mansion. Or Henry Kaiser's house. I agree with you, George, but I don't mean it as a prescription.

If you start by framing the world in terms of "Left" and "Right," or whatever variation on that binary choice you use, then you're already forcing complications out of the frame. Poke at anything Lakoff writes, it gives way like it was never there. I am, again, disappointed by the thinness of argument from what currently passes for public intellectuals. If people at the dance think George Lakoff has great moves, I'd rather just hang out in the parking lot.

ADDED LATER: See also.

Biblical Studies Carnival #69 is up at Deane Galbraith's Remnant of Giants.

Charles Moore, "A gentleman and a scholar, or just a good story?" Telegraph, 12 July 2010, and Dwight Garner, "A Reputation Staked, and Shattered, on the Forged Diaries of Hitler," NYT, 6 December, review Adam Sisman's An Honourable Gentleman: The Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper.

Dan Hofstadter, "The Heirloom City," WSJ, 3 December, reviews R. J. B. Bosworth's Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories, Robert Hughes's Rome: A Cultural, Visual, And Personal History, and Franco Mormando's Bernini: His Life and His Rome.

Hugh Thompson, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," WSJ, 3 December, reviews Gerard Helferich's Stone of Kings: In Search of the Lost Jade of the Maya and Bill Yenne's Cities of Gold: Legendary Kingdoms, Quixotic Quests, and Fantastic New World Wealth.

Edward Rothstein, "The South Reinterprets Its ‘Lost Cause'," NYT, 5 December, visits Richmond's Virginia Historical Society and its Museum of the Confederacy.

Nicholas Thompson, "Ideas Man: The Legacy of George F. Kennan," Foreign Affairs, 6 December, reviews John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan: An American Life.

Simon Schama, "Why America Should Care About the Collapse of European Unity," Daily Beast, 5 December, argues that we might have learned from past experience that Europe's health is the health of nations.

(*Knock on Wood)

Below, a brief filed in federal court today by lawyers for two of Boston College's Belfast Project researchers, who were responsible for conducting oral history interviews with former members of paramilitary organizations in Northern Ireland. The Department of Justice continues to pursue subpoenas for materials from confidential interviews with former members of the Provisional IRA, acting on a request from the government of the United Kingdom (which almost certainly originated in the PSNI). Most recently, the DOJ had asked a judge to refuse to allow BC's researchers to join the discussion before the court. This new brief continues the argument for that intervention, and is important for the claims it makes about the legal rights of individuals following requests made by foreign governments under the terms of mutual legal assistance treaties (MLATs).

Again, I'm no longer providing detailed background for what has become a very long series of posts, on the assumption that anyone who cares has been following the story for a while. But go back and take another look at the government brief that prompted this reply. The DOJ, I wrote, was arguing for a position that MLATs effectively create "legal proceedings with secret origins, undeclared purposes, and no right to challenge, limit, or appeal them." A foreign government makes a request; the DOJ decides to honor it; the end.

The brief below makes detailed arguments about federal statutes and case law that I won't claim to understand or to analyze. But the heart of the argument is that the DOJ has unreasonably invented a set of legal standards that shield it from scrutiny, and that cannot be found in the treaty that governs the matter: "The US-UK MLAT neither extinguishes the Intervenors’ rights under domestic law, nor permits the Government to circumvent the Federal Rules in its pursuit of a Subpoena."

This argument continues to be important for many reasons, not the least of which is the DOJ's outrageous claims about executive power that cannot be limited or reviewed.

Related, a quick note about another source for information: Letters Blogatory, a legal blog focused on international judicial assistance, has created a page just for updates on the Belfast Project subpoenas.

Today's brief follows.

Dec 5 Intervenor Reply

Carnivals: History Carnival CV is up at Chick History. Military History Carnival #29 is up here at Cliopatria.

Middle Stuff: Blair Worden reviews Thomas Penn's Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England for the Guardian, 25 November. Jed Perl, "The Discoverer," The Book, 1 December, reviews Weston Naef's and Christine Hult-Lewis's Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Photographs.

Later Stuff: Joanna Bourke, "Pity and War Histories," TLS, 30 November, reviews Peter Englund's The Beauty and the Sorrow: An intimate history of the First World War and Max Hastings's All Hell Let Loose: The world at war 1939–45. Matt Novak, "'A Robot Has Shot Its Master': The 1930s hysteria about machines taking jobs and killing people," Slate, 30 November, finds mechanization a threat in the Great Depression. William Giraldi reviews Adam Kirsch's Why Trilling Matters for the Daily Beast, 1 December.

Last Things: Romy Oltuski, "Famous Authors' Harshest Rejection Letters," FlavorWire, 17 November, may salve the wounds inflicted on you by meatheads in editorial offices. Jan Swafford, "Last Notes: the wild, sublime music that composers write on their deathbeds," Slate, 29 November, looks at musicians' last compositions. Finally, congratulations to Siddhartha Mukherjee. His book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, has overcome the challenge from four novels to win the Guardian's First Book Prize for 2011.