Roundup: Talking About History
Dick Meister: The Man Who Didn't Die, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World
Thomas Omestad: Remembering the twitchy, terrifying final days of communist rule in Czechoslovakia
Robert McHenry: The (Editorial) Cost of Political Change: 1989 and Britannica
Drake Bennett: Did we learn the wrong lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Richard Halloran: Will Obama Apologize for Hiroshima & Nagazaki?
Marc Cooper: Tthe Fate of Cesar Chavez's Dream (review of 'The Union of Their Dreams')
Michael Socolow: Agnew speeches sparked move toward soft news
Ron Radosh: A Glimpse at Life in East Germany 20 Years After the Wall Fell
Samuel J. Redman: Dog Skeletons, Bigfoot, and American Intellectual History
Dick Meister: The Man Who Didn't Die, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World
Source: Truthout (11-19-09)
[Dick Meister is a San Francisco-based writer who has covered labor and politics for a half-century as a reporter, editor, author and commentator. You can contact him through his website, www.dickmeister.com.]
It's November 19, 1915, in a courtyard of the Utah State Penitentiary in Salt Lake City. Five riflemen take careful aim at a condemned organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Joe Hill, who stands before them straight and stiff and proud.
"Fire!" he shouts defiantly.
The firing squad didn't miss. But Joe Hill, as the folk ballad says, "ain't never died." On this 94th anniversary, he lives on as one of the most enduring and influential of American symbols.
Joe Hill's story is that of a labor martyr framed for murder by viciously anti-labor employer and government forces, a man who never faltered in fighting for the rights of the oppressed, who never faltered in his attempts to bring them together for the collective action essential if they were to overcome their wealthy and powerful oppressors.
His is the story of a man and an organization destroyed by government opposition, yet immensely successful. As historian Joyce Kornbluh noted, the IWW made "an indelible mark on the American labor movement and American society," laying the groundwork for mass unionization, inspiring the formation of groups to protect the civil liberties of dissidents, prompting prison and farm labor reforms, and leaving behind "a genuine heritage ... industrial democracy."
Joe Hill's story is the story of, perhaps, the greatest of all folk poets, whose simple, satirical rhymes set to simple, familiar melodies did so much to focus working people on the common body of ideals needed to forge them into a collective force...
Eric Stoner: A Conversation About Nonviolence
Source: Truthout (11-13-09)
[Eric Stoner wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit magazine that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Eric is an adjunct professor at St. Peter’s College and an editor at Waging Nonviolence. His articles have appeared in The Guardian, Mother Jones, and The Nation, among other publications.]
Eric Stoner responds to Stephen Zunes: Yes, nonviolent movements have achieved important democratic and political reforms. But if they fail to address the divide between rich and poor, are they really success stories?
Despite the amazing string of victories that “people power” movements have chalked up over recent decades, it’s surprising how little-known many of these stories still are, even to folks who are politically aware in many other respects.
That is why "Weapons of Mass Democracy," Stephen Zunes’ article in the Fall 2009 issue of Yes! Magazine, is so important, especially for those just discovering the hidden history and potential of nonviolence. He cogently lays out why nonviolent tactics—such as strikes, boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations—are the most effective way to resist oppressive regimes, and backs up his case with considerable evidence.
Lately, however, my thinking about how we should most honestly discuss many of the success stories that are regularly cited by advocates of nonviolence has been evolving.
Whether we’re talking about Gandhi and Martin Luther King, about the nonviolent movements that brought down dictators or repressive governments in South Africa, Poland and many other countries, or about the recent “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, the stories are actually far more complicated than we often admit.
While these nonviolent campaigns were undeniably successful at kicking the British out of India, gaining civil rights for blacks in the United States, and installing governments that were, at least on the surface, more democratic, we tend to overlook the economic effects of these victories.
The sad truth is that when it comes to fundamentally changing the distribution of resources or wealth in a society, these nonviolent movements were less successful.
In each of these cases, the economic elite that controlled the country before the nonviolent movement gained power continued to do so afterwards, and the plight of those at the bottom was in many cases exacerbated.
Both Gandhi and King sincerely fought for radical economic change, but their lives were cut short before their full vision could be realized.
Gandhi famously called poverty “the worst form of violence,” and stridently advocated for economic self-sufficiency. More than just about anyone in history, he struggled to practice what he preached, by spinning his own clothes and living a life of material simplicity.
After Gandhi’s assassination, however, his beloved homeland whole-heartedly embraced capitalism, which has forced two-thirds of India’s population to now survive on $2 or less a day...
Leon Wieseltier: Unmending Wall
Source: The New Republic (11-19-09)
[Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.]
The absence of Barack Obama from Berlin on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall may be explained in many ways, and one of the explanations may be his view of the world. He is kein Berliner. No, he is not soft on communism, not least because there is no longer any communism, at least of the classical kind, to be soft on. In the video message that was broadcast to the commemoration--it allowed him once again to have the stage to himself, and to describe his own election as a climactic event in “human destiny”--Obama spoke all the right words for all the right sentiments. But his portrait of the Atlantic alliance was curiously passive, as if it defeated totalitarianism by example, by believing what it believes, and not also by challenging the Soviet Union, and blocking it, and deploying missiles, and supporting dissenters, in ways that many progressives found “destabilizing.” Obama declared that “the work of freedom is never finished,” which is true enough, but the urgent question is what he means by “work.” Consider an example. A few days before the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin, there occurred the thirtieth anniversary of the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The dictators’ commemoration of that happy day in the history of their dictatorship was ruined by rallies of democrats and dissidents. Obama’s response was to intone wanly that “the world continues to bear witness to their powerful calls for justice.” So does “witness” count as “work”? Was the Soviet Union brought down by “witness”? We did not, on our own, bring the Soviet Union down--it collapsed, pathetically, on itself; but we assisted keenly in its collapse. Are we assisting in the mullahs’ collapse? I think not. Our Iran policy seems not to have discovered the connection between Iranian nuclearization and Iranian liberalization. The only sure solution to the former is the latter. It is no longer a fantasy to contemplate a new Iran. For this reason, American support for the democracy movement in Iran (he sounds like Bush! and he calls himself a liberal!) is not only a moral duty, it is also a strategic duty. Such support might indeed be “destabilizing,” but there is no stability in Iran anymore, there is only a vicious tyranny fighting for its life against a popular uprising that explains itself with principles that we, too, espouse. It makes sense that the man who takes no side in that fight did not make it to Berlin...
Kang Jian, Arimitsu Ken and William Underwood: Assessing the Nishimatsu Corporate Approach to Redressing Chinese Forced Labor in Wartime Japan
Source: Japan Focus (11-23-09)
[William Underwood, a Japan Focus coordinator, is an independent researcher of reparations for forced labor in wartime Japan. ]
Introduction: Wartime forced labor and the future of Japan-China-Korea Relations
WILLIAM UNDERWOOD
The Nishimatsu Settlement Controversy
Xinhua News Agency reported in October 2009 that Nishimatsu Construction Co. “secured a reconciliation” by voluntarily agreeing to compensate Chinese victims of wartime forced labor in Japan, after resisting the redress claim for more than a decade. But questions have arisen regarding the content of the settlement, and whether it might foreshadow greater Japanese willingness to address past injustices. (The Japanese text of the settlement is available.)
In the out-of-court pact finalized on October 23, Nishimatsu Construction Co. agreed to set up a trust fund of 250 million yen, or $2.5 million (based on an exchange rate of 100 yen per dollar). The money will be used to compensate the 360 Chinese men who were forcibly taken to Hiroshima Prefecture in 1944 to build a hydroelectric power plant at Nishimatsu’s Yasuno worksite—or their families, since most of the workers have already died. The amount breaks down to about 690,000 yen ($6,900) per worker, but the trust fund must also provide for erecting a memorial in Japan, holding memorial ceremonies and conducting historical investigations. Nishimatsu apologized as well.
Building on research begun by Japanese community activists, five survivors of forced labor at the Yasuno site sued Nishimatsu and the Japanese government in 1998, seeking apologies and compensation of 5.5 million yen ($55,000) each. The Hiroshima District Court rejected the claim in 2002, but two years later the Hiroshima High Court reversed that decision and ordered Nishimatsu to pay damages in full. The company appealed to the Japan Supreme Court, which ruled in 2007 that the treaty that restored Japan-China ties in 1972 extinguished the right of Chinese citizens to file war-related lawsuits against the Japanese state or Japanese firms. Yet the top court also stated that the defendants had jointly operated an illegal forced labor enterprise and measures to repair the plaintiffs should be expected.
The Nishimatsu Yasuno Settlement represents the response of the corporate defendant; the Japanese government has made no move toward reconciliation. At post-settlement public meetings in Hiroshima and China’s Shandong Province, elderly forced labor survivors and family members were depicted in media reports as well satisfied, speaking of personal closure and Chinese-Japanese friendship. Other participants in the Chinese forced labor redress movement, however, are more critical of the accord.
Beijing attorney Kang Jian dissects the Nishimatsu Yasuno Settlement in the first article below, calling it an insincere agreement devoid of accountability and appropriate compensation that cannot bring about authentic reconciliation. A prominent member of the All China Lawyers Association, Kang has been actively involved in most of the Chinese forced labor suits in Japan, from assisting with the initial selection of plaintiffs to making regular appearances in Japanese courtrooms. (See her previous article in The Asia-Pacific Journal on the eve of the Japan Supreme Court’s decision in the Nishimatsu case.) Kang continues to work closely with the Japan-based Lawyers Group for Chinese War Victims' Compensation Claims, which since 1995 has litigated dozens of lawsuits in Japan on a pro bono basis.
The Lawyers Group, in fact, is now in the final stages of negotiating a second compensation agreement with Nishimatsu Construction Co. stemming from forced labor by 183 Chinese at its Shinanogawa worksite in Niigata Prefecture. Nishimatsu presumably considers the recent Yasuno settlement to be the basic template for the Shinanogawa settlement that is expected by year’s end. Kang Jian and the Lawyers Group were not involved in the Nishimatsu Yasuno lawsuit or subsequent negotiations, and the Shinanogawa plaintiffs view that model as unacceptable.
Arimitsu Ken, in his commentary below, frames the Nishimatsu Yasuno approach more positively as a belated first step toward comprehensive settlement of the Chinese forced labor redress claim, and urges the Japanese government to break with its long pattern of inaction by accepting responsibility and providing fitting compensation. As executive director of the Tokyo-based Network for Redress of World War II Victims, Arimitsu interacts with reparations advocates in and out of Japan at both grassroots and legislative levels. His network aims to comprehensively address unresolved war legacies ranging from Japan’s system of military sexual slavery to the postwar internment of Japanese soldiers in Siberia. A second article by Arimitsu, reprinted from the Asahi Shimbun, makes the related case that Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio’s vision of an East Asian community will remain a pipedream unless his administration squarely faces Japan’s past.
However it is evaluated, the Nishimatsu settlement has important implications for the 20 or so other still-operating Japanese firms that likewise badly mistreated Chinese workers in Japan, profited from their uncompensated forced labor, and now enjoy legal immunity as a result of the Japan Supreme Court ruling. Following the 2007 ruling, even Mitsubishi Materials Corp., which earlier in the decade aggressively defended itself using revisionist historical arguments, has expressed willingness to settle claims stemming from Chinese forced labor—but only on the condition that the Japanese state participates in the process.
The Nishimatsu Settlement: Implications for Korean Forced Labor and Allied POWs
Nishimatsu’s shift from confrontation to conciliation also has meaning for backers of redress for forced labor by Koreans and Allied POWs, whose movements continue to make slow but significant progress. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans were conscripted into working in Japan for private companies that typically withheld the bulk of their wages; in the late 1940s the funds were quietly deposited in the Bank of Japan and remain there today. Having waived all rights to the money under its 1965 treaty with Japan, the South Korean government now needs details about the BOJ deposits in order to provide former conscripts with the state compensation it authorized in 2007.
In spring 2009 the Korean Broadcasting System aired a 50-minute documentary called “The Secret of the 200,000,000 Yen Financial Deposits” and charged Japan with perpetrating a “60-year cover up.” Pressure on Japan to come clean about the conscription-linked cash may grow next year as the two nations observe the one-hundredth anniversary of Korea’s annexation by Japan in 1910. Meanwhile, the remains of hundreds of military and civilian conscripts are being returned to South Korea from Japan at a glacial pace. Giving preferential treatment to cases of military conscription, the Japanese government has invited Korean family members to memorial services in Tokyo and made small condolence payments on a “humanitarian” basis. Corporate Japan is not cooperating with the location, identification and return of civilian remains.
Allied POW reparations efforts got a big boost last January when, following nearly two years of evasion and denial, then-Prime Minister Aso Taro was finally forced to admit that there were POWs at Aso Mining in 1945. An Australian survivor of forced labor at Aso Mining and the British son of an Aso POW who died after the war visited Japan in June 2009, attracting heavy media coverage and meeting with a sympathetic Hatoyama. Although Prime Minister Aso refused to meet the visitors or apologize to them, his administration was pressured into issuing official apologies in the Diet to “all POWs” in February and March.
In May 2009 the Japanese ambassador to the United States apologized in Texas at the final convention of the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor, then waded into the audience to shake hands with wheelchair-bound survivors of the Bataan Death March. But when the head of the American POW group asked the Japan Business Federation (Keidanren) for a similar gesture, citing the group’s charter on ethics and corporate social responsibility, his letter went unanswered.
Japan has announced that a new reconciliation program for American former POWs and their kin will begin in 2010. More than 1,000 British, Dutch and Australian ex-POWs and family members have been invited to Japan since 1995 through the Peace, Friendship and Exchange Initiative, while related programs have benefitted Canadians and New Zealanders. Yet these laudable initiatives and sustained attention to Allied POWs raise the bar for reconciliation with Asian forced laborers, especially since Tokyo’s relations with the West are already much smoother than those with China or Korea. Little is ever mentioned, or even known, about the millions of Asians pressed into harsh service for the Japanese empire outside of the home islands.
Chinese Forced Labor, Japanese Government Duplicity, and the Future of China-Japan Relations
The case of Chinese forced to work in Japan, the focus of this package of articles, best illustrates the extreme brutality of Japan’s wartime mobilization of labor and the basic dishonesty of the nation’s postwar approach to dealing with the aftermath.
Expecting widespread war crimes prosecutions by the Allied coalition that included the Nationalist Chinese government, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) in 1946 secretly compiled the so-called Foreign Ministry Report (FMR) with the active cooperation of all 35 companies involved, essentially as a tool for government and corporate self-defense. The 646-page FMR, while attempting to portray the labor program in the best possible light, details how beginning in 1943 a total of 38,935 Chinese men between the ages of 11 and 78 were brought to Japan to toil at mines, construction sites and docks from Kyushu to Hokkaido. The FMR states that 6,830 workers died, making for a death rate of 17.5 percent (more than one in six), but at some sites half of the workforce perished.
Due to Cold War priorities only two war crimes trials involving Chinese forced labor were held, prompting the Japanese government to suppress or destroy the Foreign Ministry Report and related records. Progressive Japanese citizens pushed the state to repatriate the remains of deceased victims to China throughout the 1950s and early 1960s—and to admit the inhumane reality of the forced labor program. Records declassified by MOFA in 2002 depict how the state consistently evaded responsibility by deceiving the Diet and citizen groups about its postwar production and possession of Chinese forced labor records.
This cover up peaked during the late-1950s administration of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke, who had been the wartime cabinet member formally in charge of Japan’s labor schemes and was later imprisoned for three years as a Class A war crimes suspect. Kishi as prime minister claimed the Chinese had voluntarily come to Japan and worked willingly; other postwar officials described the nature of the labor program as unknowable due to the lack of documentation.
That stance became untenable in 1993 when a Chinese civic group in Japan supplied the NHK broadcasting network with a dusty but complete copy of the Foreign Ministry Report, along with a mountain of records upon which the report was based. The documents describe worker recruitment in North China by means of deception and “laborer hunting,” which typically meant the abduction of farmers from their fields. The FMR also contains breakdowns of the large sums of money that companies received from the central government after the war as reimbursement for losses supposedly incurred while administering the program, even though workers were never paid wages. The Japanese government today concedes that the Chinese labor program was carried out in a “half-forcible” manner, using the same term it originally employed in the FMR.
Capping this pattern of insincerity, MOFA announced in 2003 that it had searched its own basement storeroom and discovered 20,000 pages of the worksite reports submitted in 1946 by the corporate users of Chinese forced labor. Prodded into checking its own in-house archives late last year, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare similarly unearthed various records confirming there were Allied POWs at Aso Mining, though the ministry cited privacy concerns in refusing to make the records public. It is hoped that Japan’s new government will reform the dysfunctional national archive system and declassify the wartime and postwar documents needed to clarify the historical record and enable redress work to proceed.
The Nishimatsu Model and the Road Ahead
Can Nishimatsu’s done deal with Chinese from the Yasuno worksite, along with the company’s pending pact with Chinese from the Shinanogawa worksite, serve as a wedge for producing greater post-LDP responsibility concerning Chinese forced labor, other classes of forced labor and perhaps the longer list of Japan’s wartime transgressions?
That seems unlikely, at least in the near term, for Japan shows few signs of following the German example. Set up in 2000 and funded in equal measure by the German federal government and corporate sector, the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and the Future” paid out some $6 billion in compensation to 1.7 million Nazi-era forced laborers or their heirs, mostly non-Jews living in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The foundation provided robust individual apologies and continues to emphasize truth telling through educational activities. However, Germany confronted the forced labor legacy only when faced with the public relations nightmare of class-action lawsuits in the United States, and only after the U.S. government helped broker a complex deal that granted the German state and companies legal immunity.
The Chinese forced labor claim, though, has been hamstrung by weak support from the Chinese government and generally low international awareness. Beijing authorities were slow to allow victims to file compensation lawsuits in Japan and have tended to view redress activists with suspicion. State media reported in the middle of this decade that similar lawsuits against Japanese firms would be allowed in the Chinese court system. The reports even named the first prospective plaintiff and defendant (Mitsu Co.), but such suits never materialized. Yet forced labor redress supporters occasionally have been permitted to directly present their demands at the Chinese offices of Japanese companies, and last year they held their largest-ever meeting in Shandong.
The Nishimatsu model clearly represents important forward motion for the compelling and comparatively resolvable Chinese forced labor issue. If the few hundred survivors of the injustice are to obtain reparations in their lifetimes, the company’s move is likely the “last best hope for a start.” To the extent that Japan’s political and economic leaders are moved to recalculate the costs of perpetual intransigence and the potential benefits of improved relations with Asian neighbors, the Nishimatsu settlement may contribute to eventual improvement in the nation’s mostly dismal record of atoning for its war misconduct.
Read more...
Ben Gelber: Ben Franklin on Global Warming
Source: NYT (11-17-09)
[Ben Gelber is a meteorologist at WCMH-TV in Columbus, Ohio, and the author of “The Pennsylvania Weather Book.”]
FEW would argue that the debate on global warming engenders a lot of emotion. What else are we to make of comments that “within the last 40 or 50 years there has been a very great observable change of climate,” that “a change in our climate ... is taking place very sensibly” and that “men are led into numberless errors by drawing general conclusions from particular facts”?
That these comments were actually tossed around back in the late 18th century by the Pennsylvania doctor Hugh Williamson, Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster reminds us that history has a tendency to repeat itself. (One can imagine what television talk shows would have been like then. Would Jefferson have promoted “An Inconvenient Treatise” only to be acrimoniously contradicted by Webster on “Hard Quoits,” assuming either could get a word in amid the jabbering of the host?)
In the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson opined in his “Notes on Virginia” that “both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory even of the middle-aged,” expressing views articulated as early as 1721 by Cotton Mather: “Our cold is much moderated since the opening and clearing of our woods, and the winds do not blow roughly as in the days of our fathers, when water, cast up into the air, would commonly be turned into ice before it came to the ground.”
The weather historian James R. Fleming has noted that the vexing scientific challenge in the climate debate has always been “the response of a large, complex, potentially chaotic system to small changes in forcing factors.” Benjamin Franklin understood climatic forcing factors better than anyone, surmising in a 1763 letter to Ezra Stiles that “cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker.” Franklin, our meteorologist emeritus for his seminal work on everything from lightning to northeasters, later surmised (correctly) that a prevailing haze over parts of North America and northern Europe was associated with the eruption of the Laki volcano in Iceland in June 1783, and was possibly the source for the exceptional chill experienced in the winter of 1783-84 in the new United States...
Mark Bowden: How Iran's Revolution Was Hijacked
Source: WSJ (11-18-09)
[Mr. Bowden, a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, is the author of "Guests of the Ayatollah" and, more recently, "The Best Game Ever," both published by Atlantic Monthly Press.]
It has been three decades since Iranian college students overran and occupied the American Embassy in Tehran, and we are still dealing with that country's revolution.
Americans at the time were understandably preoccupied with the fate of 66 countrymen who were held captive, accused of being spies, and threatened with prosecution and punishment—which in the Iran of those days tended to mean firing squads or the noose. We still refer to this outrage as the Iran Hostage Crisis. Yet this way of remembering the episode ignores its larger significance in Iran, and impedes our understanding of the political drama unfolding there today.
The movement to oust the Shah was primarily a nationalist one, albeit colored by the religious rhetoric of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Many of those who took to the streets in 1978 and 1979 were motivated not by a desire to establish a theocracy but by the same thing that stirs the reform movement there today—a desire to cast off authoritarianism and establish democracy. The seizure of the U.S. Embassy was the pivotal event in the takeover of the revolution by the mullahs of Qom.
The seizure of the embassy and the kidnapping of the American mission was not only a crime against it and the U.S.: It was a crime against international diplomacy. The pretense for the embassy takeover was false. The presence of a working U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 was not evidence that the U.S. was plotting to overthrow the revolution, as the hostage-takers claimed. It was evidence of America's acceptance of the revolution, and of its willingness to work with Iran's new leaders, whoever they turned out to be.
I say "whoever," because nine months after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled it was still unclear what kind of government Iran was going to have. Religion did play a big part in the Iranian revolution and Khomeini was its galvanizing figure. But the ayatollah was ambivalent about the idea of clerical rule.
When he returned to Iran from exile in Paris, he set up a secular provisional government in Tehran that was headed by Mehdi Barzagan, a liberal and a democrat. A constitutional convention was convened to sort out what permanent shape Iran's new government would take, and among those participating in that fundamental exercise were communists, socialists, democrats and plenty of other nationalists who did not pray five times a day for religious rule.
Young revolutionary Islamists, alarmed by this secular drift and recognizing that they were in a minority, banded together. Representatives from the five main universities in Tehran formed an organization they called "Strength in Unity." One of these men was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
Thomas Omestad: Remembering the twitchy, terrifying final days of communist rule in Czechoslovakia
Source: The New Republic (11-17-09)
[Thomas Omestad is a senior fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He covered the Velvet Revolution in Prague for the December 25, 1989, issue of TNR. Read his piece here]
The opening moments of what became known as Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution” did not feel so velvety. Nor did the outcome of those events--a largely peaceful triumph of the people over a stifling authoritarian system--seem certain. For those on the streets of Prague on the evening of Friday, November 17, 1989, it was easy to imagine a tragedy-in-the-making and perhaps a reprieve, of sorts, for a dying regime. The rosy glow of hindsight with which we remember the Velvet Revolution had not yet formed.
Instead, Prague’s old stone streets became a warren of fear, rumor, and violence, as state riot police brutally clubbed student demonstrators. The students had gathered elsewhere to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Nazi murder of young protesters, and then had marched into the city center. With many of the students cornered along Narodni Street, the police waded in with batons flying.
The atmosphere of danger extended beyond the main police attack. A couple of blocks away, and perhaps an hour later, I heard a sharp, metallic bang just behind me on the sidewalk. A policeman, holding one hapless protester by his shirt collar and his belt, slammed him headfirst into the side of a bus on which other police sat at the ready. Hearing the bang, the police grabbed their batons and rose up to do battle. When they saw what had just happened, however, they broke into laughter and leaned back into their seats.
Of course, within days, the laughs would be on them and their bosses, the once feared practitioners of repression so characteristic of East Bloc communism.
I arrived in Prague on the 15th, for what emerged as the final days of a sad era. I met dissidents in smoky cafés, their eyes still darting about to scan for eavesdroppers. By the time I left days later, Prague felt something like liberated territory. Politics broke into the open as the suffocating fear lifted.
The morning of the 17th, I went to the grand, old apartment of the late Jiri Dienstbier, a onetime journalist and dissident to whom the regime had assigned the job of stoking coal. He was later to become a foreign minister. On that morning, a handful of students in one of Dienstbier’s rooms were painting placards for the evening protest. I asked him when it might be Czechoslovakia’s turn to push out its rulers. “Who knows?” he said with a shrug and wistful smile. “Maybe tonight.”
He turned out to be right about that.
The Czechoslovak opposition, led by playwright-dissident and later president Vaclav Havel, had long been faulted--even from within its Charter 77 dissident core--as incapable of offering a coherent alternative to the ruling Communists, let alone of mounting a credible strategy of protest and political pressure. The mostly Prague-based intelligentsia had failed to connect with workers and the young in general, who in turn tended toward apathy and passivity, it was said. Yet for all their seeming indecision, these battered yet stubborn dissidents had held on in the face of harassment and indignities, surveillance and prison time. “We were passing a small candle through the darkness,” Dienstbier had told me...
Robert McHenry: The (Editorial) Cost of Political Change: 1989 and Britannica
Source: Britannica Blog (11-16-09)
[Robert McHenry is a former editor-in-chief of Encyclopaedia Britannica and author of How to Know.]
The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, celebrated here last week as everywhere around the globe, was a highlight of the astonishing transformation that came over Eastern Europe in the years 1989-90. Many less dramatic but perhaps more substantial events preceded and helped make possible the fall, among them the remarkable changes that occurred in Hungary earlier in 1989. I offer here a small anecdote from that time.
In October 1989 the editor in chief of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Philip W. Goetz, was leading a group of editorial personnel in a visit to the Rand McNally printing plant in Versailles, Kentucky, where the encyclopedia was printed. The 1990 printing was in progress. The books were printed on huge web-offset presses, with gigantic rolls of paper feeding in at one end and neatly folded signatures of 16, 24, 32, or 48 pages filing out the other. The whole process involved printing some 33,000 pages about (I’m reaching into foggy memory territory here) 150,000 times each.
The work took months and was scheduled down to the hour. Every page that had been revised by the editorial staff had to be delivered to Rand in time for film to be cut and spliced and a new plate to be made and mounted on the press at the right moment. Delays anywhere in the process caused hair to be pulled, sharp words to be exchanged, and unbudgeted dollars to be spent. The most dreaded words in the press room were “down time.”
At one point during the plant tour, word came that there was a call from Chicago for Goetz. His caller informed him of a momentous political upheaval in Hungary that involved, among other things, a change in the formal name of the state, from People’s Republic of Hungary to simply Republic of Hungary. The question was, could the article on Hungary be updated to reflect the new developments?
A quick check with the printers showed that the signatures containing the relevant pages had already been printed and were being held until time to begin gathering signatures into volumes. There was a brief discussion among the editors present, and then Goetz made his decision: Scrap what had already been printed (150,000 copies of a 32-page signature) and hold until Chicago could create and ship revisions. It was a bold move, given the cost, but it was only a hint of what was to come.
Like everyone else, the editors at Britannica watched history unfold in that memorable year with fascination and celebration. But their interest went a little further, for every turn in Eastern Europe also meant unanticipated work.
Although it was, at that moment, merely speculative and, as it turned out, still a year away, it was the prospect of the reunification of Germany that posed the greatest editorial challenge. It was anybody’s guess how many times the labels “West Germany,” “East Germany,” “West Berlin,” and “East Berlin” occurred in the encyclopedia. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary to guess, for the entire text had been reconstructed as an electronic database during the 1980s, sitting on an IBM mainframe computer in Chicago. The computer wizards queried the database and gave the editors the daunting news: They would have to examine and in most cases revise some 1,300 pages in the Micropædia volumes and another 500 or so in the Macropædia. That very nearly equaled the usual quota of pages to be handled for an entire annual revision.
The previously scheduled annual revision work would have to go on; but in addition, a special project to prepare for reunification would have to be planned and set in motion so that they would be ready should it actually come to pass.
The bulk of the work consisted of looking at every instance of any of those soon-to-be-outdated labels and deciding whether it required change. Most did. Uses of them in a historical context would remain, though, which is why it was not possible to simply tell the computer to change every one.
As the work progressed, the editors of course kept a close watch on the news. A good deal more work was created for them by the other falling dominoes in Eastern Europe, but it did not approach in quantity the German problem. One reason for this you probably have not thought of: the very large number of illustrations — of everything from Greek antiquities to modern painting — bearing a credit line to one of the great museums in one of the Germanies.
Tension mounted as the year 1990 progressed and the new annual print dates approached. Would they release all those extra pages to the printer, or would they hold them back? When would the decision have to be made? The West German government, doubtless in the pay of World Book, held off until the first week of October before making reunification official. The pages were sent to Kentucky. Just a few days more would have been too late. Wouldn’t this tale make a terrific movie?
Drake Bennett: Did we learn the wrong lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Source: Boston.com (11-15-09)
[Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.]
With the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall earlier this week, the news was filled with images of that epoch-ending night, and of the equally historic events that led up to and followed it. Those images, for the most part, are of crowds: strikers in Poland, the multitudes at the reburial of Hungary’s former prime minister Imre Nagy (executed in 1958 on orders from Moscow), the throngs in Prague chanting “Havel to the Castle,” the massed hecklers in Bucharest who forced Nicolae Ceausescu to try unsuccessfully to flee - and, of course, the thousands of East and West Germans who gathered restively at the Berlin Wall’s checkpoints on the night of Nov. 9 and flooded through when they opened.
Scenes like these vividly symbolize the popular conception of the upheavals of 1989: a mass uprising, rippling across Eastern Europe, that swept away the Berlin Wall and with it the brittle, corroded regimes that made up the Soviet empire.
It’s hardly surprising that this is the narrative that has taken hold. It’s a stirring idea, and a powerful one, comforting in the role it accords oppressed people to rise up and make their own fate. And the crowds in the streets are what the world saw at the time. But in the intervening two decades, as the participants themselves have written their
memoirs, as transcripts and memos have been declassified, and as documents have emerged from behind the former Iron Curtain, many historians have begun to emphasize a different account. In this telling, it’s not the marching of the crowds on the street that made the difference, but something less visible: the unprecedented inaction and acquiescence of those at the top. In country after country, leaders responded to open challenges to their power by essentially giving in.
“People power,” in other words, didn’t end the Cold War, not alone. And the extent to which the popular understanding of those revolutionary months centers on the masses in the streets suggests that we may have learned the wrong lesson from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Especially here in the United States, where rioting mobs helped spark the American Revolution and marchers spurred the Civil Rights movement, there is a particular faith in the power of taking it to the streets, and it was possible to see echoes of those American movements when mass protests erupted in Eastern Europe, or at various times in countries like Ukraine, Lebanon, Burma, the Philippines, or, most recently, Iran. But, historians say, what ultimately matters in authoritarian regimes is the resolve of those at the top, and that imposes stark limits on the power of the people.
It’s not just a question for Cold War scholars to debate. Misunderstanding the potential of popular protest can have tragic results, leading today’s dissidents, whether they’re in the Arab world or Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to risk life and limb in situations where there’s little prospect of success - where, unlike in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia in the late 1980s, the leadership is firmly committed to doing whatever it takes to maintain the status quo.
“Regimes collapse when there’s a loss of will at the top to do whatever’s necessary to do to stay in power,” says Mark Kramer, a historian and head of the Harvard Project for Cold War Studies. “The Chinese communists showed that if you were willing to kill huge numbers of people and resort to ruthless violence, you could stay in power.” In Eastern Europe, he argues, “If that had been done early in the process, in August or September, had the Soviet Union given a green light for it, it certainly would have worked.”...
Richard Halloran: Will Obama Apologize for Hiroshima & Nagazaki?
Source: Real Clear Politics (11-15-09)
[Richard Halloran, a free lance writer in Honolulu, was a military correspondent for The New York Times for ten years. He can be reached at oranhall@hawaii.rr.com.]
Within a couple of hours of landing in Japan on Friday, President Barack Obama walked into a political minefield by implicitly promising someday to visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the targets of American atomic bombs in 1945.
After meeting with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Mr. Obama was asked by a Japanese reporter in an evening press conference whether he would go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where no US president has ever been. "What is your understanding of the historical meaning of the A-bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" the Japanese asked. "Do you think that it was the right decision?"
"I certainly would be honored," the president replied. "It would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future."
The Japanese reporter persisted, asking again whether the US was right in dropping the atomic bombs. Mr. Obama slid off the question, turning to the charged issue of North Korea's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
A presidential journey to the only cities to have experienced a nuclear assault would underscore Mr. Obama's intent to rid the world of nuclear arms. If not handled with sensitivity, however, the visit could trigger emotional outbursts from Japanese victims of the bombings and from Japanese who experience a "nuclear allergy."
Many Japanese, particularly left-wing organizations, would most likely demand that the US apologize for dropping the bombs, which would stir up rancor in the US. That would call into question the judgment of President Harry Truman, who made the decision to drop the bombs. In turn, that would put President Obama in a politically difficult position.
Among Americans, veterans of World War II, especially survivors of Japan's surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, would be vigilant for any sign of remorse for an action that many believe ended World War II with Japan's surrender, sparing the lives of tens of thousands of Americans poised to invade Japan.
In addition, many American private citizens, whether they lived through the war or not, would insist that a US presidential visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki be preceded by the visit of a Japanese prime minister to Pearl Harbor. That has not happened so far...
Marc Cooper: Tthe Fate of Cesar Chavez's Dream (review of 'The Union of Their Dreams')
Source: Truthdig (11-13-09)
[Los Angeles-based writer and author Marc Cooper is director of Annenberg Digital News at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. ]
In the midst of a searing heat wave in the summer of 2005, three Mexican-born California farmworkers succumbed to the relentless sun within a few weeks of each other. Outraged local community groups, some with roots in but no longer affiliated with the legendary United Farm Workers union, organized a protest march and rally in the gritty town of Arvin, in California’s Central Valley.
At the last minute, a delegation from the UFW more or less commandeered the event from the original organizers. I was there reporting on the conditions in California’s fields (for a piece that would be published few weeks later in the L.A. Weekly) when I saw the UFW arrive. Accompanied by a caravan of shiny vans, with a high-tech mobile broadcast unit along from one of the union-run radio stations, UFW members in trademark red-and-black T-shirts disembarked from a couple of buses and joined the crowd assembled in a church patio.
The contrast couldn’t have been more stark. The farmworkers were dusty and rail-thin and mostly young men dressed in jeans and work shirts. Many, if not most, were fairly recent border-hoppers from the impoverished Mexican state of Oaxaca. And most of them were Mixtec Indians who spoke choppy Spanish. The UFW members, by contrast, were older, clearly middle-class, many of them Chicanos, many of them college-educated, thick around the middle and wearing neatly pressed chinos.
As one of their leaders used a bullhorn to shout “Viva La Causa! Viva Cesar Chavez!” many of the heat-weary farmworkers only politely clapped or just stood unmoved.
Among those who have worked as California farmworker advocates, or who have done any reporting among such advocates over the last decade or so, there’s a well-known and grim joke: Ask almost any farmworker today just who is Cesar Chavez and the answer is that he’s a great boxer—Julio Cesar Chavez, that is.
If one needed any proof of the waning influence of Chavez’s UFW, he or she would have to look no further than a momentous union election held shortly after this rally at the giant Giumarra vineyards. Even though the union had had one of its first contracts with the massive grower and was riding the crest of anger over the recent heat-related deaths (so dire that even California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger imposed an emergency order to give some relief to fieldworkers), the UFW was soundly defeated in a slap-dash drive to reunionize the Giumarra workers...
... The real problems begin, however, when in the mid-1970s then (and most likely future) Gov. Jerry Brown allies with the UFW and ushers into life the most advanced farm labor legislation and regulatory agency in America—the Agricultural Labor Relations Board.
Just when the decks are cleared for Chavez to push full steam ahead in organizing his union on an unprecedented even playing field, he balks. Moreover, he seems to sink into a paranoid depression and become prone to unpredictable and unprovoked tirades and lashing out at the closest of friends, suddenly branded as traitors.
Pawel can’t answer the central enigma surrounding Chavez—his true state of mind and motivation. No one can. Whether he was, as one aide put it, “a little crazy,” or whether he was more a utopian visionary or a Christian ascetic, or a simple megalomaniac, he told everybody around him he was definitely not interested in building one more “business union.” And that’s the theme Pawel repeatedly circles back to. Every time history offered him a choice between building a vigorous union or dreaming up a more amorphous social movement, Chavez always chose the latter. At least verbally...
Michael Socolow: Agnew speeches sparked move toward soft news
Source: Bangor Daily News (11-13-09)
[Michael Socolow is an assistant professor in the department of communication and journalism at the University of Maine.]
It remains the most influential indictment of American journalism ever made. Forty years ago today, this famous figure began railing against the corporate media. “A broader spectrum of national opinion should be represented among the commentators of the network news,” he argued, explaining that “men who can articulate other points of view should be brought forward, and the American people should be made aware of the trend toward the monopolization of the great public information vehicles and the concentration of more and more power over public opinion in fewer and fewer hands.”
American democracy's perilous dependence on the corporate, capitalist media had previously been detailed. Critics such as Upton Sinclair and artists like Orson Welles had warned of the dangers posed by concentrated media power. But this critic was a national politician, and his prominence insured the wide distribution of his populist critique. This spokesman for democratic media reform was none other than the Republican vice president of the United States, Spiro Agnew.
The attacks on the media perfectly encapsulate the cynical brilliance of the Nixon administration. Scripted by Pat Buchanan and Bill Safire, and vetted by President Richard Nixon, Agnew’s speeches (there were several) began in Des Moines, Iowa, on Nov. 13, 1969. They proved remarkably successful. Agnew appeared on the cover of Time and Life magazines, special features on his criticism aired on all three national broadcast networks, and invitations to speak to civic and community organizations flooded his office...
... The New York Times responded by implementing the OpEd page after years of internal debate. John B. Oakes, the editorial page editor of the Times who conceived the idea of the OpEd page (basing it upon a commentary page in the old New York World called the Page Op), had tried to launch the innovation for more than a decade. The publisher agreed only after the White House's criticism could no longer be ignored. Oakes later described Agnew as typical of the oppositional voices he wanted represented in the Times. The first edition of the OpEd page featured both a critical assessment of Agnew's speeches and an unflattering caricature of the vice president...
Patrick J. Buchanan: Polk: Forgotten Great
Source: CNSNews.com (11-13-09)
[Pat Buchanan has been a senior adviser to three presidents, twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000. Buchanan has written eight books, including four New York Times best-sellers. He is married to the former Shelley Ann Scarney, a member of the White House staff from 1969 to 1975.]
As America debates whether to send tens of thousands more troops to Afghanistan, in the ninth year of a war for ends we cannot discern, a riveting new history recalls times when Americans fought for vital national interests.
“A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War, and the Conquest of the American Continent” is Robert Merry’s brilliant biography and history of that time. Merry goes far toward righting the injustice done by historians who have denied this great man his place in the pantheon of presidents, because they believe “Jimmy Polk’s War” to have been a war of aggression against a Third World people.
As Merry relates, the problem is not with “Young Hickory,” the protege of Andrew Jackson, but with historians who ever allow political correctness to blind them to true greatness.
The Mexican War was as just a war as we have ever fought.
In 1836 at San Jacinto, Sam Houston had won the independence of Texas with his defeat of Santa Anna, butcher of the Alamo and Goliad. In eight years, Mexico had not tried to recapture Texas. For eight years, Houston and Texas had sought admission to the Union.
In 1844, Polk, twice defeated for governor of Tennessee, was seeking the Democratic vice presidential nomination on a ticket with ex-President Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s vice president.
But when the issue of annexation of Texas caught fire in the country, Van Buren opposed it, losing his patron Jackson. Polk rode the Texas issue to victory in Baltimore as the “dark horse” in the most dramatic convention in history. His opponent that November, the Whig Henry Clay, running a third time, was also fatally wrong on Texas.
Lame-duck president John Tyler, however, stole a march on Polk by annexing Texas by joint resolution of Congress. But where was the southern border of Texas?..
Duncan Currie: 1989 and All That
Source: National Review (11-13-09)
[Duncan Currie is deputy managing editor of National Review Online.]
In retrospect, the ending of the Cold War may seem inevitable. Of course the Berlin Wall eventually came down. Of course the long-subjugated peoples of Central and Eastern Europe eventually threw off the shackles of totalitarianism. Of course the chronically dysfunctional Soviet economy eventually plunged into a terminal crisis. Communism depended on lies and terror to survive; it produced miserably poor living standards; and it clashed with the most basic elements of human nature — so of course it was destined to collapse.
Well, not exactly. Communism was always doomed to fail in its stated mission; but the precise timing, circumstances, and nature of its implosion were hardly preordained. “At the beginning of 1989,” notes the eminent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis, “the Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe seemed as solid as it had been for the past four and a half decades.” (Or almost as solid: Poland had been rocked by a series of massive labor strikes in 1988, but instead of jailing Lech Walesa and the other leaders of the Solidarity trade union, the Communist government was negotiating with them.) Only later did we discover that “the Soviet Union, its empire, its ideology — and therefore the Cold War itself — was a sandpile ready to slide.” The unraveling of Communism was among the most remarkable geopolitical developments the world has ever seen. Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, we are still grappling with the significance of what transpired in November 1989.
The end of the Cold War “may well be one of the most misunderstood episodes in all of American history,” wrote the late intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins. Both liberals and conservatives are guilty of promoting overly simplistic narratives about the role played by Ronald Reagan. The latter tend to emphasize Reagan’s first-term hawkishness and tough rhetoric but neglect his crucial second-term diplomacy; the former, meanwhile, have long resisted giving the 40th president his due, though that is slowly changing.
Indeed, a growing number of non-conservative analysts have come to appreciate Reagan’s vital importance. In his 2007 book, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History, Diggins lauded Reagan as “one of the three great liberators in American history,” along with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. One might have expected conservatives to welcome such an assessment — except that Diggins rejected the standard conservative narrative of how the Cold War ended. In his view, Reagan brought the superpower conflict to a close “by creating what Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher insisted was the ‘essential trust’ that would be necessary to allow the peaceful exit of the Soviet Union from history.”
Earlier this year, veteran journalist James Mann published The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan, another thoughtful effort to counter Reagan mythology and explain the Gipper’s true Cold War legacy. As Mann notes, those who credit the Reagan administration with exhausting the Soviet economy generally point to a host of U.S. actions that strained Moscow’s finances, such as cranking up defense spending, proceeding with the Strategic Defense Initiative, collaborating with the Saudis to reduce global oil prices, limiting Soviet access to high-tech exports, and secretly aiding anti-Communist movements in Poland (Solidarity) and Afghanistan (the mujahedeen). While Mann dismisses the idea that Reagan’s policies caused the Soviet Union to collapse, he acknowledges that some of these policies — particularly covert support for the Afghan mujahedeen — did indeed weaken it.
Popular memories of President Reagan as a hawkish Cold Warrior stem chiefly from his first-term record: predicting that Communism was headed for “the ash heap of history,” rebuffing calls for a nuclear freeze, branding the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” invading Grenada, installing Pershing and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Mann’s book focuses heavily on the period from 1986 to 1988, when Reagan and Soviet boss Mikhail Gorbachev pursued sweeping arms-control negotiations. During those years, prominent Republicans of diverse ideological stripes expressed concern that Reagan had misread Gorbachev and gone perilously soft on the Soviet leader. These critics included Jesse Helms, Dan Quayle, Henry Kissinger, and Richard Nixon. Their anxieties were shared by leading conservative journalists and intellectuals.
Reagan’s appraisal of Gorbachev turned out to be the correct one: Gorbachev really was different from previous Soviet rulers, and he really was committed to transforming Soviet foreign policy. Reagan provided Gorbachev with the “time, latitude, and prestige” he needed to implement his reforms, says Mann. Absent Reagan’s deft diplomacy, Gorbachev might not have had adequate support in Moscow to make such momentous policy changes. Reagan gave Gorbachev “the breathing room he required.” In the end, Gorbachev established a partially liberalized Communist system that was unsustainable. As Mann puts it, “Gorbachev unintentionally destroyed the Soviet system. Reagan gave him the help he needed to do it.”
We should not overstate or misunderstand Gorbachev’s role in the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe. His chief contribution was refusing to suppress the indigenous revolts with violent force. As the unrest stirred, in 1989 and 1990, Gorbachev chose to avoid a replay of Hungary ’56 or Prague ’68. The momentum for liberalization came from the European reformers and activists, who were emboldened by Reagan’s and Thatcher’s democratic evangelism. But Gorbachev made the critical choice not to resuscitate the Brezhnev Doctrine, the longstanding policy that said Moscow would not allow Soviet-bloc countries to leave its sphere of influence.
In his 2005 book, The Cold War, Gaddis points out that the Brezhnev Doctrine had effectively died in 1981, when the Soviets chose not to intervene militarily in Poland. KGB chairman, Politburo member, and future general secretary Yuri Andropov told colleagues that even if the Solidarity movement gained control of Poland, the Kremlin would not dispatch troops. “I think we have reached a unanimous view here on this matter,” said chief Kremlin ideologist Mikhail Suslov, “and there can be no consideration at all of introducing troops.” As Gaddis writes, “Had these conclusions become known at the time, the unraveling of Soviet authority that took place in 1989 might well have occurred eight years earlier.”
Gaddis deems Reagan “one of [America’s] sharpest grand strategists ever.” Mann says he “played a crucial role” in ending the Cold War. Yet Mann remains dubious of the notion that Reagan sought intentionally to bankrupt the Soviet Union, emphasizing that “there is no consensus among Reagan administration officials that such a strategy was ever the driving force behind the American policy.” George Shultz, who served as secretary of state from 1982 to 1989, was asked in a 2000 PBS interview whether Reagan’s military buildup “effectively broke the back of the Russian economy,” and whether this was a “deliberate” U.S. policy objective. “I don’t think it was,” Shultz replied. “The policy was for us to be strong so that no one could contest our allies and us. That was the essence of the matter. And the other side had to respond.” In Shultz’s view, “the most important moment” came when the U.S. and its NATO partners deployed intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviet Union’s own weaponry.
What if Reagan had decided not to install the missiles? (Their installation spurred massive protests in both the U.S. and Europe, not to mention bitter opposition from the Kremlin.) How would that have affected Soviet policy? What if, a few years later, Reagan had backed away from arms-control talks with Gorbachev? Speaking of Gorbachev, what if he had been deposed by hardliners in, say, 1987? What if those hardliners had sought to revive the Brezhnev Doctrine? What if, alternatively, Gorbachev had embraced the strategy being followed by the Communist Chinese rulers and combined Leninist political controls with capitalist economic reforms? What if Moscow’s European satellites had followed suit?
As for the Berlin Wall, what if Hungary had not removed its barbed-wire fence along the Austrian border (thereby attracting East Germans hoping to emigrate)? What if East German security forces had opened fire on the tens of thousands of demonstrators who gathered in Leipzig one month before the Wall fell? What if famed German conductor Kurt Masur had not joined those demonstrators and helped prevent a violent crackdown? What if a clumsy East German Politburo member had not accidentally given his countrymen the green light to descend on the Wall and seek passage into West Berlin during a fateful November 9 press conference?
To pose these questions is to realize that the Cold War’s end game was not inevitable...
Ron Radosh: A Glimpse at Life in East Germany 20 Years After the Wall Fell
Source: Pajamas Media (11-12-09)
[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York.]
Perhaps because this was the very week of the fall of the Berlin Wall twenty years ago, attendance at the one year old Museum of the DDR (German Democratic Republic- the official name of the East German Communist government) was way above average. Virtually every space was packed this afternoon with German college students, older German adults, families with young children, and some foreign tourists. The museum sits by the River Spree in what was once a block from the People’s Palace, the now torn down entertainment and government complex where the parliamentarians of the old regime met and grandiose Communist events were staged. It is to be found on the appropriate Karl Liebknecht Street, a block named after the martyred Red leader of the 1918 attempt at a Bolshevik style revolution led by theSpartacists in the post World War I years.
The museum catalog sets out its purpose: “The DDR Museum is the only museum which concentrates on everyday life in the GDR. We don’t only show the crimes of the State Security or the border defences at the Berlin Wall but we display the life of the people in the dictatorship: Maybe you know the spreewald pickles, nudism beaches and the Trabi – the rest of the life in this socialist state is unfamiliar to most of the people in the world.”
Going through its space is a rather surreal experience. A major success after one year in operation, the museum combines what Germans call “ostalgie” or nostalgia for the old Communist state that divided the capital of Germany with a somewhat critical perspective revealing the failure of the socialist dream.
For example, one exhibit shows a Stasi operation- in which the secret police regularly took photos of attendees at rock concerts, whom they scrupulously sought to identify, assuming that at some future time they could emerge as regime critics:
Another exhibit covers the well known insistence of beachcombers to swim in the nude. The text explains that the nude beach movement was a form of rebellion against prudish Communist protocol, a way of asserting individuality for those who lived in a regime that sought to control most aspects of life, in order to break down any independent civil society and create as thorough a totalitarian regime as was possible.
Strangely, though, the museum curators do not seem to realize that nudism was to some extent favored by Marxist ideologues, who building on the attempt of Wilhelm Reich to fuse Marxism and Freudianism into a coherent ideology, believed that nudism was one mechanism for advancing the cause of socialist revolution. Indeed, in the 1960’s in this country, the late Lee Baxandall created a Nude Beach Movement in which he asserted just such an argument, and sought to translate the East German reality into protests in Cape Cod and elsewhere that he thought would easily move its adherents towards revolutionary socialism.
One of the most interesting exhibits takes place in a replica of an East German cinema, in which one gets to watch an official propaganda film made in the late 1970s that details the plans for future apartments and other dwellings prepared by State employed architects. The film emphasizes, as the narrator says in its closing moments, that socialism means “fulfillment of one’s dreams,” in which the Party plans massive and humane dwellings for the citizens of the future socialist Germany. By the year 2000, those who saw the film when it was made were told, the DDR would have built great new apartment dwellings in areas that were then vacant land, nicely landscaped centers that included ample space for greenery and children’s playgrounds.
In truth, those who have seen Brezhnev era worker’s homes in Moscow can see immediately that both the interior and exterior of the DDR homes and apartments were so far superior to that built by Stalin’s successors, that Russians who worked in East Germany must have been shocked at the disparity.
The apartment shown above is supposedly typical of what the interior of the cement block apartments were like in areas like Stalin-Allee, the massive complex of worker’s homes provided by the regime for its citizens in who worked in factories. Of course, the museum does not show us the mansions lived in by Erich Honecker and the top Party cadre, who lived in luxury in leafy suburbs like the Pankow area, or along Lake Wansee, where celebrity artists like the American born defector and country-folk singer, the late Dean Reed, lived.
The section on the arts tells museum goers that although the Party emphasized the need of the population to develop culture, and artists were at first enthusiastic supporters of the new socialist regime, they quickly found that to gain employment or commissions they had to adopt to the official Soviet brand of “socialist realism,” the philosophy of art demanded by Stalin’s acolyte Andrei Zhadanov through the 1950’s and beyond. But strangely, the Museum says virtually nothing about famous DDR dissidents in the arts, like the singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, an advocate of “socialism with a human face” who was given permission to tour West Germany in the 1970s, and once out of the country, was refused re-entry, although he wanted to return and fight within for what he thought was the possibility of a humane socialism.
Biermann came from a Communist family and moved from the West to the East early after the DDR was formead, as his Wikipedia entry shows. He did so to honor his belief in building a Communist future, but quick disillusionment made him a danger to the regime, although he still believed in its official rationale for being. Today, Biermann no longer seems to be a man of the Left; he supported both the Iraq War and the NATO intervention in Kosovo. But whence he was expelled from the DDR, his fate was covered in all the major American papers, an it made him an international cause célèbre. For many, it was the start of realizing that the political leadership of the East German government was hopelessly Stalinist and incapable of reform, and that its claims to have any ability to forge a better future for its citizens was simply propaganda.
Indeed, the museum gives its viewers scores of statistics proving that that the regime had no ability to even meet the daily needs of its citizens for sufficient food, goods and basic commodities necessary to lead a decent life. Its factories were in disrepair, its workers hardly worked, and loyalty was forced through its youth groups, propaganda apparatus, and the ever present and ever more powerful STASI, who made the nation that of a country of informers, in which one never new whose neighbor, friend or even spouse was working and reporting regularly for the secret police. If anything, the DDR Museum does too little to show visitors that aspect of the regime, nor does it even let its visitors know that one can go to two different STASI museums, one in the building that once headquartered the organization; the other in a residential neighborhood that housed its most infamous prison, in which those arrested were interrogated and tortured.
I toured the museum with my daughter and granddaughter, who live in a house that in the years of the DDR, directly faced the Berlin Wall and separated its inhabitants from being able to go to the Western sector they could see from their window. One of her friends grew up in the DDR, and as she told her, “If you didn’t care about anything, you could possibly enjoy life. After all, the government planned your future; you didn’t have to really work because it would lead to nothing, and your basic needs were met, although to a bare minimum.” So if you kept out of politics, did what you were told, marched in the mandatory parades like those on May Day, and mouthed the official required slogans no one believed, you could get by and not worry much. But for those who wanted to forge their own future, travel where they wished and think for themselves, the nanny state left them in a miserable state of being.
So is the museum a success? Does it really serve any purpose? As I said earlier, its very existence is somewhat surreal. After all, the regime it remembers is historically quite recent, and although the text accompanying the exhibits is critical of the old regime, at the same time it seems to be suggesting that I was not all bad, and that the DDR has got somewhat of a bad rap. It tells its visitors next to nothing about the Marxist-Leninist ideology of its rulers, of its aid to terrorists like the Red Army Fraction operating in the West (The Beider-Meinhoff gang) and the PLO in its terrorist heyday, nor the role it played as a surrogate for the Soviet Union and its attempt to gain control in Europe in the volatile days of the early Cold War.
For a museum that claims to teach its visitors something about history, it is strangely a-historical. Hence, it indeed feeds the views of the small minority of Germans who still believed that the collapse of Communism left a void, and that the disappearance of the DDR was something to mourn. Fortunately, polls show that a vast of Germans, including the DDR’s former citizens, are delighted that it no longer exists, and that they now live in a democracy practicing market capitalism that affords them a future of their own choosing.
Led by a Chancellor who herself was once a citizen of the DDR, the reality shows how far from those days the current Germany is. Perhaps the museum’s curators might have asked Angela Merkel for a video interview, in which Germany’s first female leader could reflect on her life and experience in the DDR, and tell visitors what it was really like, and how growing up in its realm, she could reject its ideology and goals and become a leader in a free and democratic Western nation. That they obviously did not even think of this is perhaps revealing of the major deficiencies of the DDR Museum.
Samuel J. Redman: Dog Skeletons, Bigfoot, and American Intellectual History
Source: Primary (Source) Colors (blog) (11-11-09)
[Samuel J. Redman is a Doctoral Candidate, Department of History, University of California, Berkeley]
This evening I finished reading a book by an anthropologist named Grover Krantz (1931-2002). The book, Only a Dog, is somewhat of a rare volume. I only learned of it from an intern at the National Anthropological Archives, where I am currently working on my dissertation. Krantz is most well-known for being one of the only professional scientists who supported the belief in the existence of Bigfoot or Sasquatch, a mysterious, human-like creature in the Pacific Northwest. Upon his death, Krantz donated his own body, and the body of his beloved Irish Wolfhound, Clyde, to science. Much of the book takes place in Berkeley in the 1960s, when Krantz worked at what is now the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. The book's honesty impressed me, as Krantz's story of his wonderful relationship with his dog is punctuated by struggles with alcohol. The vast majority of the book, however, fancifully centers on the enormous size of the dog. Perhaps due to the fact that I'm a graduate student at Berkeley or the fact that I miss my own dog, I was interested enough to read the book. The little, seemingly frivolous volume forced me to spend a little time contemplating how we view public intellectuals historically.
Krantz's book ends with an emotional description of the decline and death of his beloved dog, Clyde. The book details the emotional emptiness Krantz felt after Clyde's death. Krantz struggles though the dark weeks and months that followed. He broods through life, ending relationships, talking aimlessly to himself, and returning to booze. Eventually, Krantz returns to the site of Clyde's burial and he begins to disinter the grave of his beloved pet. Krantz recognized the value of Clyde's enormous skeleton and he hoped to add it to his growing collection of animal remains for study and teaching purposes. The process of digging up his deceased pet proved so emotional for Krantz that he forced himself back into his house before consuming a full gallon of wine, mustering up the courage to continue the work. Krantz's emotional difficulty in the task of digging up his former pet is understandable, he explains that prior to his acquisition of the dog, his life was virtually directionless. After ten years with his companion, he was an established scholar and less of a slave to alcohol.
Upon his death, Krantz donated his own remains to the Smithsonian Institution, with the condition that the remains of his dog be placed with his own in the museum. Today, Krantz's remains can be seen at the end of the Smithsonian's Written in Bone exhibit. In his book, Krantz details his amusement in seeing the reactions of passers by in observing his dog's enormous size, so I like to think Krantz would have appreciated the reaction of most visitors to his remains, which are articulated along with Clyde's skeleton; befuddlement, amusement, and interest. I am only so bold as to assume this because I recently spent some time observing visitor reactions to his remains at the Smithsonian.
Krantz's career in anthropology began in the 1960s and he therefore falls outside of the purview of my dissertation, which concludes at the end of the Second World War. What interests me about Krantz is the manner in which he is perceived by those interested in the history of anthropology. Krantz made several important contributions to the study of ancient man and played a role in the court proceedings surrounding Kennewick Man. Krantz also wrote extensively about the concepts of race and human evolution. He also built extensive personal collections of human and animal remains that would add to the collections of other public institutions upon his death. If pressed, my guess is that most contemporary physical anthropologists would recognize some of Krantz's intellectual contributions to their field, yet they would also probably chide his belief in the existence of Bigfoot above all else.
Contemporary physical anthropologists may not be alone in this assessment. When historians finally attempt to take Krantz into account in their own narratives (I've yet to see a treatment of his career by a historian of anthropology) my guess is that they, too, will focus mainly on his interest in Bigfoot Studies. Krantz's role as a public intellectual, frequently appearing on TV, popular magazines and in newspapers, typically surrounded this belief in the existence of Bigfoot. His embrace of the role of as "Scientist for Sasquatch," will no doubt shape his public memory.
As a student of intellectual history, I struggle with the tendency to place various intellectuals into boxes, or at least the desire to fit the ideas of specific intellectuals onto flash cards. As historians we often fail to draw more complete portraits of individuals unless we provide them with more extensive treatment in the form of intellectual biography. More often, intellectuals are represented in our works as representative of key ideas being espoused at particular moments, as pieces of evidence to prove our thesis. It is tempting to include details about the life history of intellectuals into our work, as though every scrap of information about their childhood informs their later intellectual contributions. Instead, perhaps it is best to aim for a broader understanding of the intellectuals we study, while informing our readers of our close reading of personal intellectual developments. No doubt, this is easier said than done.
A reminder that a controversial intellectual like Krantz was more than a Bigfoot theorist, or an expert witness in a heated trial, or an articulated skeleton at the end of an exhibition - is probably a good thing. My hope is that this more rounded portrait isn't lost on historians who hope to fit Kantz into their stories. Krantz's personal life was deeply afflicted his relationship to drink, and it was something as seemingly as trivial as a dog saved his entire life and career.
Jordana Timerman: What Karadzic Did to Bosnia
Source: Foreign Policy (11-11-09)
[Jordana Timerman is a researcher at Foreign Policy.]
Busted: Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is being tried on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, during which 150,000 to 200,000 people, mostly Muslims, died. He is accused of ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia, driving hundreds of thousands from their homes; a 44-month siege of the capital, Sarajevo, which left 10,000 dead; a massacre at Srebrenica, where about 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed; and the hostage-taking of 200 U.N. peacekeepers. Even as the trial proceeds, Bosnians and others in the region continue to struggle with his legacy.
Having his day in court: Karadzic is on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), in The Hague. Karadzic is representing himself, but boycotted the trial's start last month, arguing he needed more time to prepare a defense. Countering that 14 months of custody, not to mention the 14 years since the 1995 indictment, is more than enough, the court appointed a defense lawyer for when Karadzic decides to skip the proceedings. The trial has been postponed until March to allow the lawyer time to prepare.
Bones of contention: Bosnia continues to face ghosts and scars from the past. Above, a forensic team examines a mass grave site in Koricanske Stijene, near Travnik, on July 23. They are preparing to lower themselves into an abyss, in search of the remains of about 200 Bosnian Muslim and Croat civilians massacred in 1992. The victims were held in a detention camp and were told they would be part of a prisoner exchange. Instead, "The civilians were ordered to kneel by the edge of a road turned towards the ravine and then were shot with automatic weapons," reads the indictment of two police officers accused of participating.
Still in fashion: The fragility of the 1995 Dayton Accords -- which negotiated peace between Bosnia's ethnic groups by subdividing the country into a Croat-Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) federation and a Serb republic -- shows on the streets. Extremist memorabilia is common in Serb areas of Bosnia and Serbia...
Adam Kirsch: The November Pogrom
Source: New Republic (11-12-09)
[Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic.]
In our collective memory of the Holocaust, Kristallnacht occupies a central but ambiguous place. If you look simply at the statistics, there is little reason why the events of November 9-10, 1938, should loom so large. According to the Nazis themselves, 91 Jews were killed in the nationwide pogrom that became known as the “Night of Broken Glass.” That figure, as Alan Steinweis points out in his illuminating new study Kristallnacht 1938, “included neither Jewish suicides nor the significantly larger number of Jews who were arrested in connection with the pogrom and would die in concentration camps in the following weeks and months.” But even when we remember that 30,000 Jewish men were arrested--about 10 percent of the entire Jewish population of Germany--Kristallnacht pales in comparison with later Nazi crimes. Why do Jews--and, as Steinweis points out, Germans--continue to remember Kristallnacht as a uniquely terrible event, even though the broken glass was followed, within a few years, by gas chambers and death camps?
To capture the full significance of Kristallnacht, it is necessary to see the pogrom not in hindsight, but through contemporary eyes--and that is the achievement of Steinweis’s short but revelatory book. Knowing what came after, we tend to see the pogrom of November 1938 as a prelude to genocide; but to those who lived through it, it was precisely the unprecedented quality of Kristallnacht that made it so momentous. For the previous six years, Hitler’s regime had persecuted Jews, driven them from their jobs, segregated them socially and legally, and compelled almost half the Jewish population of Germany to emigrate. But not until the night of November 9 did it become clear that the Jews in Germany were doomed--that there was no way for them to continue living in the midst of a population that applauded and connived in their destruction.
Kristallnacht 1938 offers a succinct narration of the well-known events leading up to the pogrom. On Monday, November 7, at 9:35 in the morning, a 17-year-old Jew named Herschel Grynszpan “presented himself to the receptionist at the German Embassy in Paris. A few minutes later, Grynszpan shot Ernst vom Rath, a 29-year-old junior diplomat.” When the French police asked him why he had done it, he replied, “I acted because of love for my parents and for my people, who were subjected unjustly to outrageous treatment.”
Herschel’s parents, Sendel and Rifka Grynszpan, were among the 18,000 Polish Jews living in Germany who, two weeks earlier, had been rounded up and deported across the Polish border. Because the Poles didn’t want the Jewish émigrés any more than the Germans did, the two “were compelled to live in the no-man’s land between the two countries, subject to the elements and with little food,” Steinweis writes. It was this treatment--a vivid demonstration of the Jews’ pariah status in Europe--that led Grynszpan to protest to the police, “It is not, after all, a crime to be Jewish. I am not a dog. I have a right to live. My people have a right to exist on this earth.”
To Grynszpan, then, the shooting of vom Rath was intended to make a clear political statement: it was an act of Jewish revenge against the Nazis. Ironically, the Nazis were only too glad to take that explanation at face value. It allowed them to make the ineffectual lashing-out of a helpless refugee sound like a strategic offensive in the war between Germany and “international Jewry.” At around 9:30 p.m., Steinweis shows in his meticulous reconstruction, the German News Agency--an arm of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry--sent a memo to the nation’s newspapers, instructing them on how to report the crime. “Not only was the guilt of ‘international Jewry’ obvious,” Steinweis writes, “but so was its motive: ‘the extermination of National Socialist Germany.’” And if the Jews were collectively responsible for Grynszpan’s action, then “it would be ‘right and proper’ if ‘Jewry in Germany were to be called to account for the shooting in the Paris embassy.’” It is a characteristic example of the diabolical logic of Nazi anti-Semitism: the Nazis victimized German Jews, and if Jews abroad protested, it was proof of the international conspiracy that justified the victimization in the first place.
The news from Paris led to a few local anti-Jewish riots in Germany, notably in the city of Kassel. But it was not until November 9, when the news came that vom Rath had died of his wounds, that the highest Nazi leadership decided to call for a nationwide pogrom. One of the major strengths of Steinweis’s study is the way he places this decision in the context of contemporary politics, both domestic and international. It so happened that November 9, 1938 was the 15th anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler’s first attempt at a coup against the Weimar Republic, which ended with his imprisonment. Every year, veteran Nazis gathered in Munich to retrace the events of that day and remember the men who had been killed.
When vom Rath died, just as this blood ritual was underway, Steinweis writes, “he … became the newest martyr for the Nazi cause.” That afternoon, according to Goebbels’s diary, Hitler decided to declare open season on the Jews: “I describe the situation to the Führer. He decides: let the demonstrations continue. Withdraw the police. For once the Jews should feel the rage of the people.” As always, Hitler was acting with his larger political and military ambitions in mind. Less than six weeks earlier, he had won a diplomatic victory with the Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France acquiesced in Germany’s annexation of part of Czechoslovakia. This emboldened Hitler to prepare for the war that was soon to come and made him less concerned than ever about foreign reaction to Nazi persecutions of the Jews. As Steinweis writes, “Hitler no longer recognized a need for discretion in matters of Jewish policy.”..
Mark D. Tooley: Revisionism from the Religious Left
Source: Frontpagemag.com (11-11-09)
[Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.]
Leftist church elites are fondly remembering the Fall of the Berlin Wall as though they could claim some credit for its fall. Conveniently, they forget their own complicity with the former tyrants of East Europe and the Soviet Union.
“Christian hope and perseverance contributed significantly to the fall of the Berlin Wall”, World Council of Churches (WCC) chief Samuel Kobia recently declared. True enough. Millions of Christians and other people of faith, despite persecution and martyrdom, endured for decades under communist rule. But their perseverance owed little to groups like the WCC and other leftist Western church groups, who cheerfully demanded appeasement of the old Soviet Bloc as the price for peaceful coexistence. These church leftists prioritized world “peace” over solidarity with oppressed fellow religionists behind the Iron Curtain, whose suffering was too inconvenient for ecumenical public attention.
Leftist church groups in the West during the Cold War’s final decades dealt almost exclusively with government controlled, or coerced, church groups in the East Bloc, pretending they were exclusively legitimate voices for Christians under communism. That these East Bloc church bodies had little to no freedom to disagree with communist platitudes did not bother “peace”-minded Western prelates, who cherished the photo ops, superficial good will, and faux ecumenical solidarity of East-West church relations. Besides, stopping nuclear war, U.S. imperialism, and the Reagan Administration were all goals that leftist churchmen in the West could readily share with puppet or intimidated churchmen in the East.
“When we celebrate today twenty years of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which marked the end of the cold war era, let us remember the faith and the courage of all those people who gathered in the churches and became the nucleus for the movement of change,” the WCC’s Kobia further commented, as if the WCC could seriously claim credit for Christian resistance to Soviet Bloc repression. “They taught us that Christian faith can inspire a resistance movement against fatalism and despair – a lesson which is as important today as it was twenty years ago,” he continued. Shamefully, Kobia’s words must mean little to victims of today’s tyrants. Today, as 20 years ago, victims of communist rule in places like North Korea and Cuba must still endure the silence, and even active collaboration of the WCC and its friends with the victimizers.
Kobia boasted that prayers and candle light vigils in East German Lutheran churches “inspired and encouraged people to confront the power of police and secret service in a very effective and peaceful way.” But the WCC was not the source of this resistance to communism. Unfortunately, the WCC et al had previously seen these East Bloc Christians, or at least their government approved representatives, as little more than stage props for opposing Western resolve and rearmament during the Cold War’s final years.
Proving that the WCC has learned nothing over the last 20 years, Kobia intoned that there are “still many walls separating humankind: the ‘Demilitarized Zone’ between North and South Korea, the ‘Security Wall’ on the occupied territory in Palestine, but also the walls of injustice, racism and prejudice that separate rich and poor, stigmatize persons suffering from HIV and AIDS and destroy the lives of many people.” Of course, Kobia and his fellow leftist religionists cannot distinguish between a prison fence and security fence. Nor can he differentiate between Marxism-Leninism, which deliberately murdered tens of millions, and unintentional global economic disparities.
Revealingly, former WCC chief Konrad Raiser, in his own recent commentary about the Berlin Wall anniversary, carefully noted that groups like the WCC were discredited by their Soviet Bloc ties. “Ecumenical organizations came under scrutiny as well in view of their relationships with representatives of the former system and their lack of effective support for the struggles of dissident movements,” he admitted. “In some cases, ‘ecumenism’ even became a term to be avoided,” observing that the Orthodox churches in Georgia and Bulgaria withdrew from the WCC.
After the East Bloc fell, Romanian pastor Laszlo Tokes, who helped spark the anti-Ceausescu revolt, complained that groups like the WCC refused to “present the true conditions of churches Romania and [offered] a pretension that in our country everything is fine, the churches perform their mission in peace and freedom.” Meanwhile, he said, Romanian churches elites under Ceausescu’s boot obligingly misled the ecumenical movement and “under the label of ecumenism successfully represented the direct interests of an inhuman, ungodly and oppressive regime – all at the expense of their own believers.”
At least Roman Orthodox Church leaders, after Ceausescu’s fall, issued public “regret that under the dictatorship some of us may not always have shown the courage of the martyrs, and have not publicly acknowledged the suffering of the Romanian people,” instead “praying the obligatory tribute of artificial praise to the dictator.” The WCC offered less sorrow, only admitting its “mistaken judgment in failing to speak adequately” about Romania. More defiantly, the WCC’s then chief Emilio Castro, a long-time virtual fellow traveler, unapologetically opined: “What do we need to repent of if we were trying to help the Romanian people?”
Within hours after the Berlin Wall fell, United Methodist official Janice Love of the WCC’s Central Committee starkly warned against a “new-found triumphalism about capitalism” that is “uncritical, unwarranted and chauvinistic.” Naturally, she urged “more creative work” on “alternative economics futures for our selves in the United States as well as other parts of the world.”
Love was speaking to United Methodist Council of Bishops, who were literally meeting as the Berlin Wall crumbled. The bishops dutifully commended East Europeans for “openness and growing self-confidence” while ominously warning against imposition of Western value systems. Bishop Rudigor Minor of East Germany told his fellow bishops, meeting in North Carolina, that he hoped Marxism was not dead. “Marxism has insights into power that we can learn from,” he assured his colleagues, such as its critique of capitalism’s “competition structures.” He suggested Christians should remain alarmed about the free market’s “profit-maximizing at the expense of the Third World.” Admitting that Marxism as practiced in East Germany was a “flop,” Minor still hailed Marxism’s “utopian element” and assured his fellow bishops that, “Marxists are still relevant.”
Very few on the east side of the Berlin Wall agreed with the Methodist bishop. And fewer still have illusions that leftist Western church elites cared about oppressed Christians under the old Soviet Empire, any more than they care about today’s victims of remaining communist regimes or Islamic theocracies. Christians who suffer persecution and labor against tyranny around the world fortunately look to higher and more reliable inspirations than discredited Religious Left groups like the WCC.
Walter Isaacson: How Einstein Divided America's Jews
Source: The Atlantic (11-10-09)
[Walter Isaacson is the president and chief executive officer of the Aspen Institute and the author of Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007).]
Albert Einstein’s first tour of America was an extravaganza unique in the history of science, and indeed would have been remarkable for any realm: a grand two-month processional in the spring of 1921 that evoked the sort of mass frenzy and press adulation that would thrill a touring rock star. Einstein had recently burst into global stardom when observations performed during a total eclipse dramatically confirmed his theory of relativity by showing that the sun’s gravitational field bent a light beam to the degree that he had predicted. The New York Times trumpeted that triumph with a multideck headline:
Lights All Askew in the Heavens / Men of Science More or Less Agog Over Results of Eclipse Observations / EINSTEIN THEORY TRIUMPHS / Stars Not Where They Seemed or Were Calculated to Be, but Nobody Need Worry
So when he arrived in New York in April, he was greeted by adoring throngs as the world’s first scientific celebrity, one who also happened to be a gentle icon of humanist values and a living patron saint for Jews.
Newly published papers from that year, however, show a less joyful aspect to Einstein’s famous visit. He found himself caught in a battle between ardent European Zionists led by Chaim Weizmann, who was with Einstein on the trip, and the more polished and cautious potentates of American Jewry, including Louis D. Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter, and the denizens of established Wall Street banking firms. Among other things, the disputes about Zionism apparently caused Einstein not to be invited to lecture at Harvard and prompted many prominent Manhattan Jews to decline an invitation from him to discuss his pet project, the establishment of a university in Jerusalem.
The full extent of this controversy, which has been only touched upon in previous books (including a biography I wrote in 2007), is revealed in a volume of Einstein’s correspondence and papers for 1921 that was recently published by the Princeton University Press. None of the letters is newly discovered (all are available in public archives), but most have not been published before. The 600-page volume, the 12th compiled so far by the editors of the Einstein Papers Project, pulls all of the letters and related documents together in a way that allows us now to see, even more clearly than Einstein did at the time, the political and emotional struggle he stumbled into.
Einstein was raised in a secular German Jewish household, and (except for a brief fling with religious fervor as a child) he disdained religious faith and rituals. He did, however, proudly consider himself Jewish by heritage, and he felt a strong kinship with what he called his fellow tribesmen or clansmen. His outlook in 1921 can be seen in the brusque answer he sent early that year to the rabbis of Berlin, who had urged him to become a dues-paying member of the Jewish religious community there. “In your letter,” he responded, “I notice that the word Jew is ambiguous in that it refers (1) to nationality and origin, (2) to the faith. I am a Jew in the first sense, not in the second.”
German anti-Semitism was then on the rise. Many German Jews did everything they could, including converting to Christianity, in order to assimilate, and they urged Einstein to do the same. But Einstein took the opposite approach. He began to identify even more strongly with his Jewish heritage, and he embraced the Zionist goal of promoting a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
He had been recruited by the pioneering Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld, who paid a call on Einstein in Berlin in early 1919. “With extreme naïveté he asked questions,” Blumenfeld recalled. Among Einstein’s queries: With their intellectual gifts, why should Jews create a homeland that was primarily agricultural? Why did it have to be its own nation-state? Wasn’t nationalism the problem rather than the solution? Eventually, Einstein came around. “I am, as a human being, an opponent of nationalism,” he told Blumenfeld. “But as a Jew, I am from today a supporter of the Zionist effort.” He also became, more specifically, an advocate for the creation of a Jewish university in Jerusalem, which became Hebrew University.
Einstein had initially thought that his first visit to the United States, which he jokingly called “Dollaria,” might be a way to make some money in a stable currency. He and his first wife had gone through a bitter divorce, and they were still fighting over finances. Hamburg banker Max Warburg and his New York–based brother Paul tried to help Einstein line up lucrative lectures. They asked both Princeton and the University of Wisconsin for a fee of $15,000. In February of 1921, Max Warburg informed him, “The amount you wish is not possible.” Einstein was not terribly upset. “They found my demands too high,” he told his friend and fellow physicist Paul Ehrenfest. “I am glad not to have to go there; it really isn’t a pretty way to make money.” Instead, he made other plans: he would go to Brussels to present a paper at the Solvay Conference, the preeminent European gathering of physicists.
It was then that Blumenfeld came by Einstein’s apartment again, this time with an invitation—or perhaps an instruction—in the form of a telegram from the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chaim Weizmann. A brilliant biochemist who had emigrated from Russia to England, Weizmann asked Einstein to accompany him on a trip to America to raise funds to help settle Palestine and, in particular, create Hebrew University in Jerusalem. When Blumenfeld read the telegram to him, Einstein balked. He was not an orator, he said, and the idea of using his celebrity to draw crowds to the cause was “an unworthy one.” Blumenfeld did not argue. Instead, he simply read Weizmann’s telegram aloud again. “He is the president of our organization,” Blumenfeld said, “and if you take your conversion to Zionism seriously, then I have the right to ask you, in Dr. Weizmann’s name, to go with him to the United States.”
“What you say is right and convincing,” Einstein replied, to the “boundless astonishment” of Blumenfeld. “I realize that I myself am now part of the situation and that I must accept the invitation.” Weizmann was thrilled and somewhat surprised. “I wholeheartedly appreciate your readiness at such a decisive hour for the Jewish people,” he later cabled Einstein from London.
Einstein’s decision reflected a major transformation in his life. Until the completion of his general theory of relativity, he had dedicated himself almost totally to science. But the anti-Semitism that was oozing up around him in Berlin led him to reassert his identity as a Jew and to feel more committed to defending the culture and community of his people. “I am not keen on going to America, but am just doing it on behalf of the Zionists,” he wrote to his French publisher. “I must serve as famed bigwig and decoy-bird … I am doing whatever I can for my tribal brethren, who are being treated so vilely everywhere.”
And so Einstein and his new wife, Elsa, set sail in late March 1921 for their first visit to America. On the way over, Einstein tried to explain relativity to Weizmann. Asked upon their arrival whether he understood the theory, Weizmann gave a puckish reply: “Einstein explained his theory to me every day, and by the time we arrived I was fully convinced that he really understands it.”
When the ship pulled up to the Battery in Lower Manhattan on the afternoon of April 2, Einstein was standing on the deck, wearing a black felt hat that concealed some but not all of his now-graying profusion of uncombed hair. One hand held a shiny briar pipe; the other clutched a worn violin case. “He looked like an artist,” The New York Times reported. “But underneath his shaggy locks was a scientific mind whose deductions have staggered the ablest intellects of Europe.”
Thousands of spectators, along with the fife-and-drum corps of the Jewish Legion, were waiting in Battery Park when the mayor and other dignitaries brought Einstein ashore on a police tugboat. The crowd, waving blue-and-white flags, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then the Zionist anthem, “Hatikvah.” The Einsteins and the Weizmanns intended to head directly for the Hotel Commodore, in Midtown. Instead, their motorcade wound through the Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side late into the evening. “Every car had its horn, and every horn was put in action,” Weizmann recalled. “We reached the Commodore at about 11:30, tired, hungry, thirsty, and completely dazed.”
One group was missing at most of the subsequent welcoming ceremonies and celebrations: the leaders of the Zionist Organization of America. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, who was its honorary president, did not even send pro forma official greetings or congratulations. Brandeis had traveled with Weizmann to Palestine in 1919, and the following year had gone to London to be with him at a Zionist convention. But shortly afterward they began to feud. Their fight partly stemmed from a few differences over policy; Brandeis wanted the Zionist organizations to focus on sending money to Jewish settlers in Palestine and not on agitating politically. It was also partly an old-fashioned power struggle; Brandeis wanted to install efficient managers and take power from Weizmann and his more ardent eastern European followers. But above all, it was a clash of personalities. Weizmann was born in Russia, emigrated to England, and shared Einstein’s disdain for Jews who tried too hard to assimilate. Brandeis was born in Louisville, Kentucky, graduated from Harvard Law School, prospered as a prominent Boston lawyer, and was appointed by President Wilson to be the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. His crowd tended to look down on unrefined and unassimilated Jews from Russia and eastern Europe. In a letter to his brother in 1921, Brandeis revealed the cultural and personal underpinnings of his rift with Weizmann:
The Zionist [clash] was inevitable. It was one resulting from differences in standards. The Easterners—like many Russian Jews in this country—don’t know what honesty is & we simply won’t entrust our money to them. Weizmann does know what honesty is—but weakly yields to his numerous Russian associates. Hence the split. ...
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