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Roundup: Talking About History

This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.

Mark Levene: The Political Misuse of Holocaust Memorial Day

Mark Levene, in the London Independent (1-25-05):

[The writer is Reader in Comparative History at Southampton University. The first two volumes of his Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State' (I B Tauris) is published this summer.]

There has always been something rather odd about Holocaust Memorial Day. Its main purpose, so runs the mantra, is to increase public awareness of "the ideals of peace, justice and community for all", and in the words of David Blunkett, the Education Secretary at the time of its inception four years ago, "to ensure that our children understand the value of diversity and tolerance".

All good universal stuff, and who could possibly demur? Yet using the Holocaust as a tool for the achievement of this goal seems to cut in a rather different direction. In a century which arguably saw scores of genocides, the attempt to exterminate an entire community across a whole continent, relentlessly pursued over four years, was exceptional. One can make connections between the Jewish genocide and others and, in the case of what was also done by the Nazis to the Roma people - gypsies - very close parallels indeed. But this might also lead one to wonder why the latter rarely seem to be embraced within that "sense of belonging" to which Blunkett in his original encomium claimed to aspire.

The discrepancy here, however, is not just a matter of what the government says and what it does with regard to its multi-ethnic citizenship. It also is at the core of the Memorial Day itself. As the American historian, Peter Novick, has pointed out, if you genuinely want to teach lessons to young people on how properly to engage with one another across religious and ethnic divides, you don't go about it by throwing at them the most extreme example of man's inhumanity to man imaginable.

Could it be then, that what the government says Holocaust Day is about is actually a smokescreen for a rather different agenda? Let's just review its history for a moment. Or rather its absence. The British Jewish community spent several decades attempting to get official commemoration of their communal catastrophe. To no avail. This also happened to be the period of the Cold War in which the British government, as a leading light in the Western alliance, sought to focus public attention on the evil Soviet empire,.

In the 1990s all this suddenly began to change. The nasty Russian enemy had been defeated. With the United States as the primary engine, Holocaust awareness began to take on a public role far beyond the reaches of the Jewish community. But interestingly, as it became more official, and more de rigueur for other countries to follow, its representation also began to change. Not only did it begin to be shorn of its more problematic elements - not least the 1941-45 Allies' record of failure to recognise its very exceptionality, or provide safe havens for those fleeing it - at the same time it became so ritualised that any challenge to its incantation began to look like a case of serious bad taste.

This ritualised narrative is, arguably composed of the following key characteristics: The Holocaust was an extraordinary life-changing event in the history of mankind; nothing like it has happened before or since. The event itself was one of unspeakable and monstrous evil - those who perpetrated it were "evil". Britain and America, however, were not tarnished but strove to defeat the evil - they were the "liberators". Jews - victims and survivors - are identifiable with the liberators, and hence with "ourselves". "Never again" must an atrocity of this sort be allowed to take place. The guarantee of our freedom against tyranny and atrocity lies with Western states whose value-system is built upon this fundamental principle.

The West had found its "right" atrocity for the contemporary age. One which, on the one hand, was safe because it was contained within a concretised and politically defused past. And, on the other hand, could be selectively wheeled out every time the government - when taking on a Saddam, for instance - wanted to have its actions on the world stage given a legitimating imprimatur.

The Day, far from being a tool of remembering and commemorating, is actually all about forgetting and avoiding: forgetting Britain's own potential for mass violence inherent in its nuclear weapons programme; avoiding too close a scrutiny not just of its many failures to halt genocide in recent times, but much worse, of its actual military, technological, and financial support for genocidaires, most strikingly, Saddam at the height of his 1988 exterminatory campaign against the Kurds....

Posted on Saturday, January 29, 2005 at 1:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Martin Gilbert: Should the Allies Have Bombed Auschwitz?

Martin Gilbert, in the London Times (1-27-05):

SHOULD WE have, could we have, bombed Auschwitz? Some believe that if the Allies had acted some of the horrors could have been prevented. On the 60th anniversary it is worth examining the historical evidence. Apart from anything, it reveals the identity of an overlooked heroine.

From the summer of 1942 until the spring of 1944 more than a million Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where they were either murdered or kept as slave labourers.

Deliberate German deception kept the secret of Auschwitz's location and purpose hermetically sealed for almost two years. For the deportees, it was "the unknown destination", "somewhere in the East", or "somewhere in Poland".

Throughout that time, Auschwitz lay beyond the range of Allied bombers. It was first overflown by an Allied reconnaisance aircraft on April 4, 1944. The South African pilot later showed me his logbook. His mission was to photograph the synthetic oil plant at Monowitz, three miles east of the gas chambers of which he, and those who sent him, knew nothing. By coincidence, three days later two Slovak Jewish prisoners, Alfred Wetzler and Rudolph Vrba, escaped and brought the news that the "unknown destination" was Auschwitz, and that up to a million Jewish deportees had been murdered or incarcerated there.

Even as Vrba and Wetzler were presenting their report to the Jewish leaders in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, the SS began the first deportations from Hungary to Auschwitz, dependent for their speed and efficiency on Hungarian police and railway workers. The intended gassing of more than half a million Hungarian Jews began at Auschwitz on May 17. Among those who witnessed it were two Jewish prisoners, Arnost Rosin and Czeslaw Mordowicz, who escaped from Auschwitz on May 27. They too reached Bratislava.

From Bratislava, a summary of the information from the four escapees reached Washington on June 18. It was examined by the War Refugee Board, whose brief was to help Jews wherever it could. The telegram asked for the bombing of the railway lines leading from Hungary to Auschwitz. But the head of the War Refugee Board, John W. Pehle, did not see bombing as a priority. He told John J. McCloy, the Under-Secretary for War, that the board was not, "at this point at least", requesting the War Department to take any action other than to "explore" it. In turning down the request, McCloy wrote that it could "only be executed by diversion of considerable air support essential to the success of our forces now engaged in decisive operations". Thirty-five years later, McCloy told me that his worry was that once a request from the Jews was accepted, all sorts of other captive peoples -he specifically mentioned the Greeks -would ask for similar diversion of Allied air resources, then fully stretched by the D-Day landings three weeks earlier.

On June 24, two days before McCloy's negative response, the escapees' reports reached the Jewish and Allied representatives in Switzerland. "Now we know exactly what happened, and where it has happened," wrote Richard Lichtheim, the senior representative in Switzerland of the Jewish Agency, to his superiors in Jerusalem.

The reports made clear, he noted, that Jews had been sent to Auschwitz not only from Poland but also from Germany, France, Belgium, Greece and elsewhere, and that they had been murdered there.

One of the British agents in Switzerland, Elizabeth Wiskemann -later a distinguished historian of interwar Europe -supported the dispatch of a telegram from Lichtheim to the Foreign Office in London, giving full details of the hitherto "unknown destination" and making six requests.

The first request was to give the facts the "widest publicity". The second was to warn the Hungarian Government that its members would be held responsible for the fate of the Jews being deported from Hungary. The third that reprisals be carried out against Germans being held in Allied hands. The fourth request was for the "bombing of railway lines" from Hungary to Auschwitz, and the fifth for the precision bombing of the death camp installations. The final request was for the target bombing of all collaborating Hungarian and German agencies in Budapest. The telegram gave the names and addresses of 70 Hungarian and German individuals who were stated to be most directly involved in sending Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz.

On Wiskemann's inspiration, this telegram was sent uncyphered, to enable Hungarian Intelligence to read it. They did so, and took it at once to the Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, and his Prime Minister, Dome Sztojay.

The request for bombing was followed six days later, on July 2, by an entirely unconnected and unusually heavy American bombing raid on Budapest. The target was the city's marshalling yards, but many bombs fell in error on government buildings -some mentioned in the telegram.

This seemingly rapid response to the Swiss appeal caused consternation in Budapest. On July 4, Admiral Horthy summoned the senior German official in Budapest, SS General Edmund Veesemayer, and demanded an immediate end to the deportations. Veesenmayer hesitated. Two days later, the Prime Minister repeated the demand. Lacking the military power to force the Hungarian police and railway workers to continue the deportations, Veesenmayer ordered that they end. The last deportation from Hungary took place that day and with it the last major forced removal of Jews to Auschwitz. A chance American bombing raid had stopped the deportations: 380,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered there.

Also on July 6, a further request for bombing reached London, brought by Chaim Weizmann, head of the Jewish Agency. The next day, Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, put it before Winston Churchill, who responded: "Get anything out of the air force you can, and invoke me if necessary." Eden passed on Churchill's request to the Air Ministry at once, noting: "I very much hope that it will be possible to do something. I have the authority of the Prime Minister to say that he agrees."

But bombing was no longer needed. The deportations to Auschwitz from Hungary had ceased. The 150,000 Hungarian Jews who had escaped deportation by only a few days now had another priority: international protection inside the city from further German or Hungarian Fascist assault. This protection was provided by the neutral embassies in the city: the Swiss, the Portuguese, the Spanish and the Swedish. At the request of the War Refugee Board, the Swedish government sent Raoul Wallenberg to Budapest to take part in this protective work. He reached the city three days after the halt of the deportations to Auschwitz. This rescue effort, of which he became a central part, was coordinated by the Vatican representative in Budapest, Cardinal Angelo Rotta. In recent years, Wallenberg and the other diplomats have all received recognition for their work. Now, Wiskemann, a Briton, deserves hers, as we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

What Many People Don't Realize About the Holocaust Death Camps

John Lichfield, in the London Independent (1-27-05):

... In truth, the story of the Holocaust is imperfectly understood, even by many of us who think we know what happened. (I was astonished by my own ignorance when I visited Auschwitz, even though my father was Jewish, even though some of my distant, Slovakian-Jewish relatives almost certainly died there.)

The details are imperfectly known, even to honest, specialist historians, because so much of the evidence was destroyed by the Nazis themselves in 1943-44. The story was further muddied by the Soviet domination of Poland up to 1990 - years when Auschwitz was turned into an "anti-fascist" shrine and the suffering of the Jews was pushed into the background.

Did 5,000,000 Jews die in the Holocaust or 6,000,000? Even now, honest historians disagree. The generally accepted figure of 1,100,000 dead in Auschwitz alone (including 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Poles and 21,000 gypsies) is a "conservative estimate", according to the head archivist of the Polish state museum on the site, Piotr Setkiewicz. "It was almost certainly more than that. These are just the people that we can say with absolute certainty died here."

One of the perverted oddities of the Final Solution is the mixture of brazen pride and shame with which it was implemented. Intelligent, educated men believed that they had a right to destroy millions of fellow human beings. At the same time, they felt it was necessary to lie about, and cover up, what they were doing. The same twin impulses - denial on the one hand, and pride in the Holocaust on the other - persist among Nazi apologists to this day.

The 60th anniversary has brought an abundance of new studies, including the excellent BBC television series on Auschwitz, and the accompanying book by Laurence Rees. All the same, confusions remain in many educated and unprejudiced minds: confusions which are often exploited by Holocaust- deniers and relativisers. There is, especially, an abiding confusion about the different kinds of camps which existed in the Nazi archipelago of evil.

Broadly speaking, there were labour camps, concentration camps and death camps. Life in the labour and concentration camps, such as Belsen, south of Hamburg, and Dachau, north of Munich, was barbaric. Life expectancy was short. These camps had tens of thousands of political prisoners, and resistance activists, from Germany and from occupied countries - and some high-profile Jews.

Much of the confusion, in the West, arises because these camps, in the western part of Germany, were liberated by the British and the Americans. They provided the images which were first seared onto the world's memory and conscience: images of walking skeletons in striped uniforms and heaps of emaciated bodies being cleared by bulldozers.

But these were not the death camps. There were no planned mass killings - no gas chambers or crematoria - in Belsen or Dachau or Ravensbruck or Mauthausen or anywhere within Germany's pre-war borders.

The Holocaust happened further east, in Poland, notably at Auschwitz but also in five other camps, some of which were no larger than three or four football pitches: Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Chelmno and Majdanek.

The unfamiliarity of these names - apart from Treblinka - is significant, and deliberate. They were dismantled, and the ground ploughed over and planted with trees, by the SS at the end of 1943. By that time, it is estimated that 1,700,000 people had been murdered there, mostly Polish Jews, mostly killed by carbon-monoxide poisoning (Zyklon- B gas was an Auschwitz speciality.)

Mr Setkiewicz says: "We have very, very little direct information on what happened in these places. There are few records, few eyewitness accounts, no survivors. We know only that transports took Jews out of the ghettos established by the Nazis in Warsaw and other cities and they took them to these camps, which were set up as extermination centres. There was no room for people to live or work in these places. No one came back."

Auschwitz was unique. It was the only site which contained both an extermination camp and a labour camp (in fact 40 different camps, spread over an area covering 40 square kilometres, the Auschwitz "zone of interest").

Because both kinds of camp existed side by side, there are survivors, Jewish survivors and Polish survivors, to tell us what happened in Auschwitz. But the existence of both kinds of camp on one site, or at one complex of sites, is also fertile ground for the negationists....

Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 at 11:04 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Melanie Phillips: About the Muslim Boycott of the Auschwitz Anniversary in Britain

Melanie Phillips, at frontpagemag.com (1-28-05):

[Melanie Phillips is a British social commentator and author and a columnist for the Daily Mail. Her articles can be found on her website, www.melaniephillips.com.]

Countries around the world marked the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz yesterday – but the Muslim Council of Britain did not take part in the commemorations for reasons that belie an underlying anti-Semitism. The Muslim Council of Britain did not attend Britain’s Auschwitz commemoration in Westminster Hall, because, according to its Secretary-General Iqbal Sacranie, the event excluded “ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine.” In a subsequent radio interview, he attempted to undo the damage. The report, he claimed, had been “misleading and distorted.” The MCB was not boycotting the event, just displaying its “unwillingness to attend.” The MCB stood alongside British Jews, he claimed, in their “pain and anguish” at the “evil crime” of the Holocaust. It simply wanted other suffering to be included.

No Comparison

The Holocaust was principally a crime against the Jews. It was only the Jewish people who were specifically singled out for the extermination of an entire race. Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally handicapped people, and others were murdered too, and we should remember that. But the Nazis did not try to chart every last great-aunt by marriage who might have been a Gypsy, homosexual, or mentally handicapped person in order to remove all those groups from the face of the earth; that terrible fate was reserved for the Jews alone. It was not merely people who were being exterminated, but a people.

That crucial distinction is why the Holocaust is in a different category from other terrible examples of man’s inhumanity to man, such as Stalin’s gulags or Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is only by understanding that the Holocaust against the Jews was sui generis that we can respond more appropriately to all tyranny, whatever form it takes. Unfortunately, not only is this distinction not widely understood, leading to the casual use of the terms “holocaust” or “genocide” to describe lesser acts of mass violence, but active Holocaust denial is increasing. The motive is to inflate other pet causes by placing them on par with the Nazi eradication program, and to deny the specifically Jewish nature of the Holocaust, thus denigrating the unique role of the Jews in human history.

With anti-Jewish hatred rampant in the Arab and Muslim world and on the rise in much of Europe too, the unique place of the Holocaust in the history of human infamy takes on an even greater significance; so much so that even at the United Nations, where efforts to condemn anti-Semitism and commemorate the liberation of the camps have been blocked for years, General-Secretary Kofi Annan actually made a point of recognizing the Jews as the primary victims of the Holocaust. “We must be on the watch for any revival of anti-Semitism, and ready to act against the new forms of it that are appearing today,” he said.

Just such an ugly phenomenon has been on display in Great Britain with the Muslim Council of Britain.

...

Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 at 9:34 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Weekly Standard: C.A. Tripp's Support for Child Molestors

From the "Scrapbook," in the Weekly Standard (1-31-05):

'A Rigorous Scholar Who Cannot Defend Himself' That's how blogger Andrew Sullivan has now described the late Clarence Arthur Tripp in the course of a long, serial complaint against The Weekly Standard's recent "hatchet-job" review of Tripp's posthumous book, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln ("Honest, Abe?" by Philip Nobile, January 17). Our reviewer thought the book--an attempt to establish that America's 16th president was gay--a "hoax and a fraud." But Sullivan rejects that charge as a piece of "character assassination" against a highly regarded "Kinseyite social scientist" with a "Ph.D. in clinical psychology" and a "superb and invaluable" collection of documentary evidence. For this (and for what he contends was our reviewer's failure to disclose a professional conflict of interest) "they need to apologize," Mr. Sullivan insists. "Will The Standard correct?"

Because Philip Nobile's Standard essay about Dr. Tripp did, in fact, quite clearly and at great length discuss his personal interest in Tripp's work--and because Andrew Sullivan's demand for an apology otherwise fails to allege even a single substantive error in the piece--The Scrapbook hasn't yet been able to find anybody here at the magazine who understands what it is precisely we're supposed to correct.

The Scrapbook can report, however, that everybody here at The Standard now seems fully inclined to endorse Mr. Sullivan's judgment that C.A. Tripp "cannot defend himself." And not just because Tripp is dead. Instead, we're inclined to think Tripp defenseless because it's come to our attention that most other "Kinseyite social scientists" gave up defending the man as far back as 1998, when he was still very much alive and active. It was then that Tripp made a star-turn appearance in a British television documentary about the great Alfred Kinsey's reliance, for "scientific data" concerning pre-adolescent sexuality, on men like Rex King. Beginning in 1943, King gave Kinsey access to the diary in which he'd kept detailed records of sexual assaults he'd committed against roughly 800 minor children, both boys and girls, some as young as five months old. Kinsey, to his eternal disgrace, thought the world of King.

And so, it devolves, did Kinsey's staff photographer, C.A. Tripp, who fondly reminisced about this "super-scientific" pedophile--among other things--in May 1998:


The children all thought he was wonderful, all the mothers thought he was wonderful. There was no force, no harm, no pain . . . [just] two instances in which a young boy or girl--agreed to the sexual contact but then they found it very painful and yelled out when it actually took place. This was because they were very young and . . . there was a fit problem. But even there, there was no--never enough complaint to get him into any trouble.

At this point in his interview, Tripp momentarily digressed to make a "very important observation" about what happens "if you go out and masturbate dogs--I was very good at this when I was a boy." But then he returned to the subject of King, pronouncing him "totally" ethical, "clean as a whistle." The man "had sex with all the relatives and brothers and sisters and aunts," Tripp explained, "but nobody is objecting. He makes it pleasant. . . . And very few pedophiles make any damage anyway, it almost never happens."

No point beating around the bush, here: Clarence Arthur Tripp was not a "social scientist." He was a lunatic.

Will Andrew Sullivan correct?

Posted on Friday, January 28, 2005 at 8:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tom Palaima: MLK, Tony Bennett and Truth

Tom Palaima, in the Austin American-Statesman (1-27-05):

[Palaima teaches classics and war and violence studies in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.]

Every Martin Luther King Day, I make sure to reread a few speeches and sermons by this great man of God. His words remind me that a great political figure can stand bravely for peace and justice.

This year I also rented the just-released DVD of Abby Mann's classic docu-drama "King." In one of the extra short documentaries, Mann and singer Tony Bennett talk about their own personal impressions of King. Their memories are vivid after 40 years.

Tony Bennett? Who knew? Or rather, how easily we forget.

Mann and Bennett speak simply as American citizens. They are not intellectuals. They say what they know and what they still feel about the Martin Luther King they knew and loved.

Bennett recounts what made him see the racism that he believes still permeates our country. At the end of World War II, the then Tony Benedetto was a corporal in Germany. In Mannheim, he ran into an old friend from the High School of Industrial Arts in New York City, where, as Bennett explains, poor Depression kids got a chance to "pull ourselves up by our bootstraps."

Bennett's old friend Frank Smith was African American. They had played music together in high school and were overjoyed to find each other in the wreckage of Europe. Bennett says simply, "We loved one another very much."

Bennett invited Frank back to dinner. There a captain called Bennett over, took out a razor blade, cut off his corporal stripes, threw them on the ground, spat on them and declared, "You're shipping out in 20 minutes. We don't like the company you keep." Bennett was reassigned to graves registration, a gruesome job, digging up and identifying bodies - all because his friend was black.

Years later, Bennett "bristled up" at such injustice, "just couldn't stand it," and he was among the public figures who accompanied King on his freedom marches in the South. Ironically, at the end of one day, local authorities denied the marchers permission to use a stage so that Bennett could perform. They found 18 unused coffins in a funeral home and stacked them. Bennett sang for the marchers, who were exhausted by the tension and real violence of the day, standing atop what for him were collective symbols of war and racism.

Bennett explains his performance philosophy: "Life can be tough for anybody. I am glad I can make people forget their problems for an hour and a half." He also observes, "It's funny how politics gets in the way of humanity. How difficult it is for one person to stand up for what's right" because "greed makes everyone forget the rules of this country." He also wonders why it is that the rare figures, such as Jesus Christ and Martin Luther King, who "speak truth and beauty and show us how to live are the ones who get assassinated."

Both Mann and Bennett are aware that in the last year of his life King had shifted his focus away from civil rights. He was speaking out and rallying people against wealth disparity, the war in Vietnam and our other foreign wars. His writings and speeches between April 1967 and April 1968 are full of strong criticisms of American war-making. He demands, again and again, that "America address itself to the problem of poverty." He was in Memphis in April 1968 in support of the labor rights of 1,300 sanitation workers.

Abby Mann marvels that King persevered in criticizing the war in Vietnam, despite serious warnings about its impact on his civil rights work: "If you come out against Vietnam, that's over, you're destroyed. And to say 'No, I'm gonna do it.' And then they say, 'What's that gonna mean? You're not gonna change things.' And he says, 'Yes, but I'm not gonna keep quiet.' And he did it out of (his) basic decency."

And now we still have war and poverty and growing wealth disparity. The president has vowed that we will "end tyranny" and help "the force of human freedom" in Iraq and around the world. Who knew? How easily we forget.

Pick up Michael J. Sullivan III's recent "American Adventurism Abroad." It analyzes the 30 major American foreign interventions between 1947 and 2001. In 26 cases, "terrible disasters have been visited upon the local societies targeted by U.S. interventions." These include 500-plus cumulative years of disrupted politics and dictatorships, nine cases of direct coups leading to military regimes, nine cases of tolerated overkill even to the point of genocide, and a conservative total of 6.6 million deaths. This is how we spread human freedom.

This is our track record since World War II, in plain fact. It is what King was trying to make us see when he was martyred. And Vietnam was not even the midway point.

Sullivan and King both argue that the United States does not make the world safe for democracy, but for capitalists, who, according to King, "take the profit out with no concern for the social betterment of (other) countries."

King then supplied the vision and the courage. Sullivan, Bennett and Mann now provide some of the proof.

Posted on Thursday, January 27, 2005 at 8:55 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Why Was Public Acknowledgement of the Suffering of the Jews Delayed Until the 1960s?

Olivia Ward, in the Toronto Star (1-26-05):

... The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals brought the murder of Jews to international attention after World War II. But, points out Yale University historian Jay Winter, the full impact of their revelations was delayed. The complexities of memory in a war that traumatized and exhausted millions - while forging a new geopolitical order - allowed the Holocaust to recede from the foreground of history.

"Until the 1960s, World War II was seen as one of good and evil, with a clear moral choice," he says. "But the emphasis was on the victors, and the rebirth of nations, not the victims of the violence."

However, he says, the morally ambiguous later wars in Vietnam and Algeria reminded the world of the suffering of war's victims, and brought the tragedy of the European Jews back into focus. Israel's 1961 trial of Hitler's henchman Adolf Eichmann, opened the floodgates of memory for thousands of Holocaust survivors.

"The trial was broadcast in North America. It was a memory boom, and from that moment on, the identification of World War II as genocide took over from the idea of the war as mainly about nations," he said.

War was no longer a glorious struggle, says Winter, a history professor at Yale University. The suffering of war victims replaced the triumphalism of the victors as the focal point of remembrance.

"Victimhood is inalienably associated with violence," he says. "Nations are born out of suffering, but sharing that suffering through remembering enables them to live as nations."

...

Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 8:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

How Censorship Shielded the Neutral Irish from Knowledge of the Holocaust

Joe Carroll, in the Irish Times (1-26-05):

[Joe Carroll is the author of Ireland in the War Years 1939-1945 and is former Washington correspondent of The Irish Times.]

The mass extermination of Jews revealed as concentration camps such as Auschwitz were liberated could not be reported in Irish newspapers until after the war. Despite photographic evidence, such horrific scenes were regarded as "propaganda" and banned under the official censorship system.

When the censorship was lifted after the German surrender in May 1945, many Irish people found it hard to grasp the scale of the atrocities they had been shielded from during what was officially described as the "Emergency". Some still clung to the belief that it was Allied propaganda at work. A newspaper reader in Kilkenny wrote that the British had faked the newsreel showing victims of Belsen by using "starving Indians".

The censorship of newspapers, radio and films brought into force in September 1939 to protect Ireland's neutrality was so strict that by the end of the war the censors were sounding like parodies of themselves. The chief censor, Thomas Coyne, was writing in May 1945 as the Nazi death camps were being revealed to the world: "The publication of atrocity stories, whether true or false, can do this country no good and may do it much harm." When an Irish Jesuit publication tried to publish an account of how hospitals in the Pacific area were being bombed by the Japanese, the editor was told by the Irish censor that "the Censorship does not allow hospitals to be shelled or bombed in our press by either side whatever the facts may be".

This was the logic of the censorship system carried to Orwellian lengths by bureaucrats with enthusiastic support from the minister responsible, Frank Aiken. He frequently censored war reports himself and fought with The Irish Times and other newspapers as they tried to give their readers a coherent account of the struggle of the Allied powers against dictators in Berlin, Rome and Tokyo.

When I interviewed Aiken years later for my book on Irish neutrality, he brushed aside the charge that he prevented the Irish public from judging which side was in the right by suppressing reports of German and Japanese atrocities. "One side was as bad as the other," he said....

Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 8:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

James Sheehan: What We Learn from History Depends on How We Do It

James Sheehan, in AHA Perspectives (January 2005):

[Mr. Sheehan is president of the AHA 2005.]

... It seems to me that one of our primary responsibilities as professionals is to subject the alleged lessons of the past to persistent critical scrutiny. Let me illustrate what I have in mind with two contemporary examples.

First, a relatively easy and straightforward one: the lessons drawn from a comparison between the American
occupation of Germany in 1945 and the occupation of Iraq in 2003. Resistance to American forces in Iraq, it was suggested, should neither surprise nor discourage us since similar resistance could be found at the beginning of the United States' extraordinarily successful project of nation building in postwar Germany. With the proper patience and resolve, this resistance would be overcome and a stable democratic state could emerge in Iraq, just as it did in Western Germany in 1949. This is an easy case because it rests on a single, empirically verifiable piece of misinformation: there was not, in fact, any violent opposition to American forces in Germany after May 8, 1945; indeed, the postwar German situation, as desperate as it was in many ways, was notable for the population's passivity and its lack of resistance to occupation authority. Not surprisingly, we have not heard much about postwar Germany in recent months.

While this particular lesson drawn from the two occupations was clearly wrong, to compare them might well have been illuminating. But such a comparison would have had to be intellectually rigorous and critically analytical, one that took into account the complexities of each case and carefully weighed their similarities and differences. It would have required comparing the two wars that led to the occupations, the character of the occupied societies, and size and structure of the occupying forces and the particular policies they implemented. Such a comparison would not have yielded any easy answers about what to do in Iraq (although it might have suggested some things not to do), but it would have helped us to grasp the difficulties Americans forces faced in 2003 and perhaps to uncover aspects of the German situation that we had not noticed before. In learning lessons from the past, differences are often as valuable as similarities.

My second example, also from the debate on the Iraq war, is rather more complicated: it is the use of the "Munich analogy" to explain why preemptive military action against Iraq was both necessary and justifiable. To continue to appease Saddam Hussein in 2003, this argument runs, would have had the same unfortunate consequences as appeasing Hitler in 1938; both were signs of weakness and miscalculation, in which an unavoidable conflict was imprudently postponed. The lesson of the Munich analogy rests on at least two claims. The first is that Saddam and Hitler were alike, not simply because both were vicious tyrants (a proposition that is undoubtedly true), but also because they both could only be defeated by military force—that it would, in other words, have been necessary to fight them sooner or later. The second claim is counterfactual: if the democracies had fought Hitler in 1938, the Munich analogy assumes, they could have defeated him with less effort than was required a year later. A good (if, to my mind, not totally convincing) argument can be made for both these claims, but the value of comparing the two situations requires that the argument be made and tested, that is, that we carefully weigh the policies and performance of the two dictators and examine the balance of military forces in Europe in 1938 and the Middle East in 2003.

To public debates on the lessons of history, historians should bring our discipline's traditional virtues: a strict adherence to research methods that are public, transparent, and open to critical scrutiny; a commitment to examining as much of the relevant evidence as possible, even if it threatens our own interpretation; a critical approach to all sources, and especially those that seem to confirm conventional wisdom; the struggle to overcome personal bias, a struggle that should be no less persistent because it is unavoidably imperfect; and, last but not least, the resolute refusal to believe something merely because we wish it to be true. I can think of nothing more politically useful and practically important than these habits of mind. Without them what we extract from history will not be grains of wisdom but the fool's gold all too often offered as precious lessons from the past. What we learn from history depends entirely on how we do it.

Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 6:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Horowitz: Why I Am Not Celebrating John Hope Franklin's Birthday

David Horowitz, in a communication to HNN (1-25-05):

I will be one of those not celebrating John Hope Franklin's 90th birthday. Four years ago this spring I attempted to place an ad challenging the proposal to pay reparations 135 years after the fact to black Americans who had never been slaves. A massive effort to suppress this ad was mounted by the anti-intellectual left on campuses across the country. The ad was censored in 40 college papers. At Duke University where John Hope Franklin is the most honored professor emeritus on campus, the editors of the Duke Chronicle and I were denounced as "racists" and demands were made to destroy the paper for having the temerity to print the ad. Franklin supported these despicable attacks on freedom of speech and freedom of the press and intellectual discourse. He even provided an historically illiterate attack on my ad which was printed in the Chronicle and posted on the website of the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke. I wrote up this incident in my book Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations For Slavery, Encounter Books 2001:

An even more troubling source of the hyper-sensitivity over race comes from the ideological message pervading the university curriculum in several varieties of racial Marxism including “critical race studies” and other post-modern fields. Through these prisms, the American past and present can look very grim and menacing to undergraduates innocent of the historical record. The powerful influence of this intellectual perspective at Duke was made clear by the first published “rebuttal” of my ad, which appeared in the March 29th Chronicle as a “letter to the editor.” The author was one of the university’s most celebrated academic figures – the former head of President Clinton’s Commission on Race, the author of a classic text, From Slavery To Freedom, the only faculty member to have an academic Center at Duke named after him, and the most honored and generally revered African American historian of slavery alive -- John Hope Franklin. One of the ironies of the events surrounding the placement of my ad, in fact, was the Duke Administration responded to the protests it inspired, by increasing the university’s financial support for the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies.[1]

The 500-word statement written by the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus’ was circulated via the Internet, and its ideas appeared in published and posted responses to my ad on campuses across the country:

Horowitz's Diatribe Contains Historical Inaccuracies

By John Hope Franklin

Here are a few things to bear in mind when reading the diatribe on slavery and reparations that appeared in the Chronicle a few days ago.

All whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery. All blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own. All whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control.

If David Horowitz had read James D. DeBow's The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-slaveholder, he would not have blundered into the fantasy of claiming that no single group benefited from slavery. Planters did, of course. New York merchants did, of course. Even poor whites benefited from the legal advantage they enjoyed over all blacks as well as from the psychological advantage of having a group beneath them. Meanwhile, laws enacted by states forbade the teaching of blacks any means of acquiring knowledge -- including the alphabet -- which is the legacy of disadvantage of educational privitization and discrimination experienced by African Americans in 2001.

Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery. They have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are white, or the loathsome disadvantage, if they are black; and those positions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century. The pattern of housing, the discrimination in employment, the resistance to equal opportunity in education, the racial profiling, the inequities in the administration of justice, the low expectation of blacks in the discharge of duties assigned to them, the widespread belief that blacks have physical prowess but little intellectual capacities and the widespread opposition to affirmative action, as if that had not been enjoyed by whites for three centuries, all indicate that the vestiges of slavery are still with us.

And as long as there are pro-slavery protagonists among us, hiding behind such absurdities as "we are all in this together" or "it hurts me as much as it hurts you" or "slavery benefited you as much as it benefited me," we will suffer from the inability to confront the tragic legacies of slavery and deal with them in a forthright and constructive manner.

Most important, we must never fall victim to some scheme designed to create a controversy among potential allies in order to divide them and, at the same time, exploit them for its own special purpose.

John Hope Franklin

James B. Duke Professor Emeritus,

John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies

When I first read this statement, I felt embarrassed for the author, and did not respond. But when its ideas kept cropping up in other contexts, in letters to the editor and in statements attacking the ad, I decided it could not be ignored any longer.

The statement that “all whites and no slaves benefited from American slavery,” is the claim of a racial ideologue rather than an historian. It is, moreover, irrelevant to the dispute at hand, since neither I, nor the ad ever claimed that any slaves benefited from slavery. The first question my ad raised was that if all whites benefited economically from slavery (and a responsible historian would certainly want to keep an open mind on this question) could one also maintain that free blacks did not? More importantly, the question was: if all whites alive today were beneficiaries of the wealth that slavery produced, how could one say that blacks alive today were not?

Franklin’s second statement that “all blacks had no rights that they could claim as their own” is historically false. Even the African slaves of the Amistad, who were not American citizens, had rights that were recognized by the United States Supreme Court, which resulted in their freedom. Free blacks in America had citizen rights, including the right to vote and to own slaves, as more than three thousand did. Some free blacks like Frederick Douglass, were respected statesmen in their own right. Even chattel slaves in the Deep South had rights as human beings that the law bound their masters to respect. In fact, as a historian like Franklin should know (and acknowledge), the American Revolution changed the law of British slavery specifically to recognize the humanity and natural rights of African slaves:

In North Carolina, in 1774, the punishment for killing a slave “willfully and maliciously” was a year’s imprisonment; and the murderer was required to pay the owner the value of the slave. In 1791, the state’s legislature denounced this law as “disgraceful to humanity and degrading in the highest degree to the laws and principles of a free, Christian, and enlightened country” because it drew a “distinction of criminality between the murder of a white person and of one who is equally an human creature, but merely of a different complexion.” Thereupon, by law, it was murder to kill a slave willfully and maliciously. (emphasis added)[2]

Franklin’s third statement, -- “all whites, including the vast majority who had no slaves, were not only encouraged but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves, thereby adding strength to the system of control” is meaningless, since whites who were so encouraged, took the opposite course of resistance to, subversion of, and finally war against slavery in enough numbers to put an end to the system. It is the denial of this reality by reparations supporters that is the heart of the dispute between us.

Franklin’s fourth claim is also irrelevant since the statement in the ad was not that no whites benefited from slavery, but that free blacks and the free descendants of blacks did. Franklin does not even attempt to refute this argument.

Franklin’s fifth claim that “most living Americans do have a connection with slavery” is really two claims: that slavery and racism are identical – which is a problematic thesis -- and that racism in American society has remained virtually unchanged since the 19th Century, which is maliciously false.

There is, finally, something almost pathological in Franklin’s statement that all blacks inherit “the loathsome disadvantage” of being black. This from a man who has been honored all his adult life, and above all his white colleagues at Duke. John Hope Franklin is the most celebrated figure in a southern institution named after James B. Duke, the benefactor of Franklin’s own professorship, and a man whose fortune was built on tobacco wealth, one of the chief crops of the very system that had brought Franklin’s ancestors to this continent in chains. Franklin’s inability to appreciate these ironies is a disconcerting failure of historical imagination.

Franklin’s sixth claim is the ludicrous insinuation that I (and by extension anyone who disagrees with his views on reparations) is a “pro-slavery antagonist.” It requires no comment.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of this bitter and graceless document is reserved for last. Franklin advises black students to avoid “controversy” among themselves, stamp out the diversity of viewpoints, and essentially to embrace a totalitarian unity instead. It is a summary statement of the subtext of all the attacks on the ad, and on the editors who braved the attacks to give it a hearing.

[1] “Keohane Issues Report On Racial Issues At Duke,” op cit

[2] Lawrence M. Friedman, Crime and Punishment in American History, NY 1993, pp. 90-91. Cited in Thomas G. West, Vindicating The Founders, NY 1997 p. 13

Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 5:22 PM | Comments (5) | Top

Stephen Hess: 3 Great Books About the Presidency

Stephen Hess, in the Globe & Mail (1-15-05):

Choosing just three books that might best explain the U.S. presidency as George W. Bush takes his second oath of office is a formidable if irresistible challenge.

We cannot expect much enlightenment from the self-serving memoirs of ex-presidents, as anyone who waited in line last year in Toronto to buy Bill Clinton's big mess of a book should now be able to attest. The one former president -- George H. W. Bush -- who might have cast light on George W. Bush was the only modern president to resist writing a memoir.

There are often useful insights into how presidents operate in the recollections of former aides, of which my favourite are two from the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt -- Samuel I. Rosenman's Working with Roosevelt and Robert Sherwood's Roosevelt and Hopkins -- and two from Richard Nixon's presidency -- William Safire's Before the Fall and Leonard Garment's Crazy Rhythm .

Biography is the great mother lode of 20th-century presidential literature. There are magisterial works, though still in progress, by Edmund Morris on Theodore Roosevelt and by Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson. Plus splendid one-volume biographies of Harry Truman (David McCullough), John Kennedy (Robert Dallek) and Ronald Reagan (Lou Cannon). It may be a long wait for the big Nixon book, because the release of his papers has been tied up in legal wrangling; in the meantime, I am fond of a study by Tom Wicker, One of Us: Richard Nixon and the American Dream. Biographies, however, are too singular for my list, which should be about the collective presidency.

So having now cleared the underbrush, it is time for the drum roll.

Book No. 1: Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (John Wiley, various editions). Neustadt was a young professor at Columbia University when his book was published in 1960. He had also served on President Truman's staff. I remember well the shock waves in the academy's political science community caused by this slim volume, which seemed to reek of the real world of power politics. This was not the usual study of the presidency as Article II of the Constitution. Nor another Great Men as History tome. It was about how a president has to operate in a fragmented system of shared authority. It was about the "art" of leadership. It all had to do, in Neustadt's presidential model, with "techniques" of persuasion.

Neustadt chose not to revise his book. Over time, his case studies -- the Marshall Plan in 1947, the Korean War in 1950, Eisenhower sending troops to Little Rock -- began to look a bit musty. The author's solution was to keep adding essays to subsequent editions, as the nation added other presidents with other power problems. Readers should keep this in mind. For instance, the 1976 edition includes reflections on the troubled presidencies of Johnson and Nixon.

Book No. 2: Irving L. Janis's Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Houghton Mifflin, 1972). Janis was a professor of psychology at Yale. His research involved psychological stress, much having to do with such personal decisions as dieting and giving up smoking. But after reading Arthur Schlesinger's account of the Bay of Pigs, Janis was puzzled: "How could bright, shrewd men like John F. Kennedy and his advisers be taken in by the CIA's stupid, patchwork plan?"

From this puzzlement, he developed the theory of "groupthink," an explanation of the intense conformity pressures within groups making important foreign-policy decisions that limit the range of options considered, bias analysis of information and promote simplistic stereotypes.

His 1972 book contained four prime examples of questionable decisions by presidents: Roosevelt (failure to be prepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor), Truman (invasion of North Korea), Kennedy (Bay of Pigs) and Johnson (escalation of Vietnam War). Janis died in 1990. Others will have to apply his theory to the current President Bush (invasion of Iraq and/or failure to be prepared for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein).

Book No. 3: Fred I. Greenstein, The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to George W. Bush (Princeton University Press, 2004). Princeton professor Greenstein, best known for a brilliant 1982 study of Eisenhower's leadership style, The Hidden-Hand Presidency, asks why presidents succeed or fail, in this popular account of the 12 most recent presidents. He measures them on six scales: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, vision, cognitive style and emotional intelligence. What is necessary, Greenstein says, is a proper mix of these skills. George H. W. Bush did not have "the vision thing." Political skills could not save Lyndon Johnson. Organizational skills did not do much for Jimmy Carter. Greenstein does not rate cognitive skills -- Nixon's, for example -- at the top of what a president needs. Highest is emotional intelligence (or what I think of as "psychological wellness").

The professor avoids academic jargon, has a breezy writing style, and even throws in an appendix filled with useful presidential information, including each president's key appointments, election results and the political composition of Congress. If I were to assign just one short book on the modern presidency, this would be it.

Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 3:58 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Adam Cohen: Now a Bestseller ... A Rightwing History book that Celebrates Politically Incorrect History

Adam Cohen, in the NYT (1-25-05):

If you're going to call a book "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History," readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint. He fulminates against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, best known for forcing restaurants and bus stations in the Jim Crow South to integrate, and against Brown v. Board of Education. And he offers up some curious views on the Civil War - or "the War of Northern Aggression," a name he calls "much more accurate."

The introduction bills the book as an effort to "set the record straight," but it is actually an attempt to push the record far to the right. More than a history, it is a checklist of arch-conservative talking points. The New Deal public works programs that helped millions survive the Depression were a "disaster," and Social Security "damaged the economy." The Marshall Plan, which lifted up devastated European nations after World War II, was a "failed giveaway program." And the long-discredited theory of "nullification," which held that states could suspend federal laws, "isn't as crazy as it sounds."

It is tempting to dismiss the book as fringe scholarship, not worth worrying about, but the numbers say otherwise. It is being snapped up on college campuses and, helped along by plugs from Fox News and other conservative media, it recently soared to No. 8 on the New York Times paperback nonfiction best-seller list. It is part of a boomlet in far-right attacks on mainstream history that includes books like Jim Powell's "FDR's Folly," which argues that Franklin Roosevelt made the Depression worse, and Michelle Malkin's "In Defense of Internment," a warm look back on the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

It is not surprising, in the current political climate, that liberal pieties are being challenged, and many of them ought to be. But the latest revisionist histories are disturbing both because they are so extreme - even Ronald Reagan called the Japanese internment a "grave wrong" and signed a reparations law - and because they seem intent on distorting the past to promote dangerous policies today. If Social Security contributed to the Depression, it makes sense to get rid of it now. If internment was a good thing in 1942, think what it could do in 2005. And if the 14th Amendment, which guarantees minorities "equal protection of the law," was never properly ratified - as Mr. Woods argues - racial discrimination may be constitutional after all....

 

Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 2:32 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Martin Kramer: Columbia University's Darkest Hour

Martin Kramer, at his blog (1-26-05):

On Sunday, I posted an entry at my weblog Sandbox, on a conference scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, at Columbia University. The conference was to deal with the Arab-Israeli peace process, and the advertised speakers included the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon.

The event looked to me like a public relations set-up and a disaster in the making. For months now, the national press has reported Columbia's mishandling of the crisis prompted by the documentary film Columbia Unbecoming, in which Jewish students tell of faculty intimidation over Israel. In the midst of this maelstrom, at the last possible minute, and out of the blue, came the announcement of the conference. In a planned day-long event, to be punctuated by a luncheon and capped by a reception, the Israeli ambassador would be rubbing shoulders with three key players in the controversy: President Lee Bollinger, Dean Lisa Anderson, and Middle East Institute director Rashid Khalidi.

I believed that an all-smiles photo of the ambassador with these people, at this time and place, would undermine the courageous students who have come forward with their accounts. So I urged the ambassador to reconsider his appearance, and he did. According to a press report, he consulted with Jewish community leaders, reviewed the situation at Columbia, and decided to cancel the engagement. (According to that same report, Columbia has "postponed" the entire event until September.)

I applaud the ambassador's decision. It must have been a difficult call. It's the mission of Israeli diplomats to make Israel's case, and in pursuing that mission they seek to sit at any table, stand on any podium, and enter into any dialogue. Only the most extraordinary circumstances would justify a decision to cancel an engagement to speak to a distinguished audience in a prestigious setting. And a speech in the Low Library Rotunda of Columbia University, preceded by greetings from the university president, is precisely the sort of event that an Israeli ambassador covets—in normal times.

Alas, these are not normal times at Columbia. In his consultations, the ambassador would have heard this: Columbia's leaders have failed to lay out a roadmap for resolving the problems exposed by the film. One American Jewish leader, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), has gone on record expressing disappointment with Bollinger's performance. "We haven't seen anything except talk," Foxman said earlier this month. "It's a process without an end." Ambassador Ayalon's gesture amplifies that message of discontent.

This is Columbia's darkest hour so far, and it's mind-boggling to think that it's come to this. Many facts surrounding the affair are disputed, but one of them isn't: the university's leaders failed to detect the problem early, diagnose it in a timely way, and act decisively to solve it. I first wrote in some detail about dysfunction in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) way back in the summer of 2002. A year later, the distinguished composer John Corigliano caused a stir by criticizing MEALAC during an acceptance speech at a Columbia award dinner—and he got a round of applause for it. Corigliano, I wrote the very next day, "said out loud what untold numbers of friends of the university are saying in private. This time the criticism was in a minor key. The next time, the university may not be so lucky." Columbia has been very unlucky since I posted those words, but MEALAC would never have attracted the attention of the filmmakers if the administration had opened its eyes earlier.

Indeed, if the administration had only listened to other faculty, it might have heard the oncoming train. "The university should have looked at MEALAC five or ten years ago." Those aren't the words of the Hillel rabbi or a med school professor or the head of a Jewish organization. They belong to Professor Richard Bulliet, who for nearly thirty years has taught Islamic and Middle Eastern history in the History department. It's safe to assume there was similar grumbling in the faculty lounges. Sure, you would have had to strain to hear it above the noisy doings of Edward Said and his acolytes. But registering rumbles before they become roars is what administrators are paid to do.

Even now, Bollinger's strategy for managing the crisis has been inept. Only in the bubble of Columbia would anyone think to create the kind of committee that Bollinger created to investigate the problem. This contraption, flawed in its composition, vague in its brief, shot through with conflicts of interest, is precisely the sort of half-measure that would send stockholders fleeing if Columbia were a corporation. Far from easing the credibility crisis, it has exacerbated it.

What should Columbia conclude from the ambassador's gesture and the collapse of the conference? It's this: the worst isn't over just because the New York Times has done its article. Columbia's situation can worsen, and I believe it will worsen, unless and until the university comes up with an operational plan for addressing the grievances of students and breaking up the cult that pretends to be Middle Eastern studies. That takes leadership. As soon as Bollinger's committee finishes its work next month, it'll become irrelevant to the bigger question. And at that point, Columbia's president will need his own plan, and the determination to see it through.

Let there be clarity on this final point: no one advocates a boycott of Columbia. The Israeli ambassador isn't an academic, he represents his government, and it's his duty to act in a way that upholds the dignity and interests of the State of Israel. At this moment, he believes this duty is best served by avoiding Columbia, and I think he's absolutely right. But his act implies nothing for the regular academic traffic in which Columbia is so central. I can't commend Columbia to aspiring students of the Middle East, but I wouldn't hesitate to participate in a purely academic activity of the university. And if I were advising Bollinger, I'd tell him to begin to engage prominent Israeli scholars in an academic discussion of Columbia's problem. (By "Israeli scholars," I don't mean the Israel-bashing post-Zionists regularly feted at MEALAC and Rashid Khalidi's Middle East Institute. I mean people in positions of academic leadership.)

I'm rooting for Columbia, and I have a vested interest in its redemption. I earned a master's degree in history there (thirty years ago), and Columbia University Press published my tenure book (twenty years ago). The enduring value of these credentials depends partly on the enduring good name of the university. I pray the day isn't far off when the ambassador of Israel can ascend the stairs of Low Library without pangs of conscience. It'll be the same day I put my Columbia diploma back on the wall of my campus office.

Posted on Wednesday, January 26, 2005 at 1:41 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Rewriting American History from the Pacific

From the newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Ed (1-25-05):

Some historians are approaching American history from a new direction -- from the West, via the Pacific Ocean.

From that perspective, the cast of characters in the nation's past is less familiar, say Edward G. Gray, an associate professor of history at Florida State University, and Alan Taylor, a professor of history at the University of California at Davis, in an introduction to an issue on the topic.

Instead of the Pilgrims and colonists of the Atlantic Coast, Pacific history is peopled by "Russian fur traders, Spanish missionaries, Japanese fishermen, French and Spanish explorers, British naval officers, American travelers, German naturalists, Tahitian translators, Aleutian hunters, Polynesian navigators, Yankee merchants, and that peculiar species of Pacific go-between, the beachcomber," they write.

Such figures were relatively obscure for too long, but they are now starting to get their due, says Peter A. Coclanis, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in an essay.

"Scholars have begun to take seriously, really for the first time, historical actors, actions, and processes both on the ocean itself and around and along the entire Pacific Rim," Mr. Coclanis writes.

"Almost 500 years after Balboa," he says, "American historians have themselves discovered the Pacific."

The issue is online at http://www.common-place.org

Posted on Tuesday, January 25, 2005 at 3:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Casualty of War ... Iraq's Historic Treasures

From the South China Morning Post (1-23-05):

The occupation of Iraq has compounded the looting of historically priceless sites and artefacts, literally trampling the roots of western history. Peter Kammerer reports
The longer the war in Iraq grinds on, the more worried historians are becoming. Western civilisation's roots are disappearing at an ever-increasing pace because of the conflict and they are powerless to do anything about it.

Beneath Iraq's sands lie more than 6,000 years of history - the ruins of what archaeologists have determined to be the oldest-known cities and towns. Few have been discovered and study of those that have been found is sporadic because of war and the stifling rule of dictator Saddam Hussein.

But the end of Hussein's rule, with United States-led military intervention in March 2003, only exacerbated the situation: with the ensuing chaos came destruction of the sites.

A British Museum report last week revealed the seriousness of the situation at one of the country's best-known historical sites, Babylon. A military camp set up by American troops and later taken over by Polish soldiers had caused irreparable damage and contamination.

It found that a 2,600-year-old pavement had been crushed by vehicles, bricks smashed, artefact-laden dirt packed into sandbags and gravel spread and compacted over ruins for a car park and helicopter landing pads.

The report's author, the head of the museum's ancient and Near East department, John Curtis, said: "This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain."

He explained that although the presence of the soldiers had prevented looting, which had been rampant since the start of the war, they had shown little regard for the history they were encamped upon. He recommended a full international investigation.

Babylon, 50 km south of Baghdad on the east bank of the Euphrates River, is the best-known ruin in what has become known as the "cradle of civilisation". The capital of Babylonia, it thrived between 1,800BC and 600BC and was the site of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Hanging Gardens, and the tower of Babel, mentioned in Christian and Jewish scriptures.

Unknown numbers of other ruins pockmark Iraq, especially in the fertile crescent of ancient Mesopotamia between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. The rich soil deposited by the rivers during annual floods apparently led to farmers ending nomadic existences and settling down to create communities that evolved into towns and cities.

For American archaeologist Elizabeth Stone, Iraq's sites were crucial to understanding civilisation. In her estimation, their importance was greater than those of sites in China and Egypt.

"All our ideas of how we live in cities came from there," Professor Stone, of New York state's Stony Brook University, said. "They had the first law, they invented writing and even beer - all these things happened in the cities in the south, which are the ones being targeted by the looters and damaged. For these sites to be destroyed like this is tragic."

The first major excavations in Iraq began in the 1930s and continued sporadically until the first Gulf war in 1991. International sanctions against Hussein's regime kept foreign archaeologists out until 2000, but their work was again interrupted by the war in 2003.

Experts said that looting began in the 1930s, but accelerated dramatically after sanctions took effect and Iraqis sank deeper into poverty. Since March 2003, the scramble for riches in the ruins had reached unprecedented levels.

The chairwoman of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, Harriet Crawford, contended last week that economics were behind the upsurge.

"Antiquities are almost as good as cash and are being sold in Iraqi markets and smuggled out of the country and into the international market, where they are sold to unscrupulous collectors," Dr Crawford said. "Sometimes, papers are forged and they are sold on the open market."...

Posted on Monday, January 24, 2005 at 6:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Why Did Denmark Jews Survive While Dutch Jews Died in the Holocaust?

Simon Kuper, in the London Financial Times Weekend Magazine (1-22-05):

[Two responses to the Nazis.]

... Tens of thousands of Danes - politicians, pastors, fishermen, ambulance drivers - helped smuggle 7,300 of the country's 7,800 Jews into Sweden. Many more helped by not betraying the operation. Only 116 Danish Jews, or 1.5 per cent of the total, died in the Holocaust.

The other extreme in western Europe was the Netherlands. More than 100,000 Dutch Jews - three-quarters of the total - were massacred. This was nearly twice the proportion killed in Belgium, where Jews had far more chance of finding hiding places, and three times as high as in France. Only in Poland were proportionately more Jews murdered. The Dutch had a reputation for wartime heroism, even - until recently - among themselves. But they owe it chiefly to the hiding of Anne Frank....

In the spring of 1940, Denmark and the Netherlands looked alike: two small democracies, with negligible armies, both overrun almost instantly by the German army. Neither had much history of anti- Semitism. Both were quiet places: it had been decades since people in either country had shot at humans. Both nations initially sought to keep the peace under the Nazis. Hitler praised Denmark as a "model protectorate". In both countries, most gentiles experienced a relatively placid war. Yet, on the Jewish question, the Danes and Dutch took opposing positions from the start of their occupations.

The Danish historian Therkel Straede writes that the German occupation of Denmark "passed off more mildly than in any other country". Germany had recognised it as a "sovereign state". Until 1943 the Danes ran their own domestic affairs, even holding elections. Every day, King Christian X rode his horse through Copenhagen, greeting his subjects as he went, living proof that the Danish establishment continued. Furthermore, the Danes were more homogeneous than the Dutch. You could see it in their paucity of surnames: Hansen, Petersen, Jensen and a few others covered most of the population. The German immigrants who had arrived the previous century, and the few Jews, had integrated to the point of invisibility. Nor did Denmark have great regional divides.

The crucial shared heritage, though, was that almost everyone belonged to the Danish Lutheran church. Not only were there just 7,800 Jews in Denmark, there were hardly any Catholics either, nor many non-Lutheran Protestants. In 1940, although the percentage of churchgoers was perhaps the lowest in Europe, most Danes still used the church for baptisms, weddings and funerals. Pastors remained moral authorities, each year inspecting their local schools....

In the autumn of 1940, the pipe-smoking theologian Hal Koch gave a series of lectures on Grundtvig to packed halls around Denmark. Koch's audiences understood that he was not simply talking about theology. He emphasised "the need for the entire nation to combine politicisation, individual and collective responsibility, knowledge of all facts, and negotiations with the Nazi, as long as that was possible". Danes must act as a group, Koch said. A year later, he moderated a public debate on the "Jewish question", itself an astonishing fact, in which he called on Danes to reject any suggestion of discrimination. Other churchmen took a similar line.

Though the Danes collaborated with Hitler on most matters, they always refused to take any measures against Jews. The myth that King Christian X wore a Jewish star to show his solidarity is false, because the star was never imposed in Denmark....

In August 1943, after a wave of Danish strikes and acts of sabotage, the Germans declared martial law. In September, Germany's Reich plenipotentiary, Werner Best, decided to deport the Danish Jews. His plans were leaked to Danish politicians. It is now believed that Best himself instigated the leak, probably because he thought that deportation would make his rule in Denmark untenable. On the morning of September 29, the day before the Jewish New Year, Denmark's chief rabbi, Marcus Melchior, alerted his congregation: "You must leave immediately, warn all your friends and relatives and go into hiding."

On the night of October 1, when German special police units (the Danish police refused to help) knocked on Jewish doors, they found almost nobody home....

The Danes protected the Jews because they considered them part of the homogeneous Danish collective. Bent Melchior, son of the wartime chief rabbi, told me: "This was the result of a development of over 200 years. We had become part of forming this society." Or as Uffe Ostergard, director of Denmark's Holocaust and Genocide Studies Centre, says: "The Jews were rescued not because they were Jews but because they were not seen as Jews."

Denmark had a haven just across the sea, and the Netherlands didn't. However, the Dutch as a group - as opposed to a few thousand isolated individuals and cells - never even tried to protect the Jews. In the Netherlands, some companies sacked their Jews without waiting for the Germans to tell them to. AVRO, a leading radio broadcaster, did so on May 21 1940, six days after the capitulation. Anti-Semitism lacks explanatory force here: before 1940, there had been no discernible Dutch impetus for measures against Jews....

The Dutch for decades propagated a false myth of having saved the Jews. The Danes, who really did save their Jews, rarely talk about it. In part, this is precisely because the Holocaust didn't hit Denmark. Here there was no rupture. This struck me in Bent Melchior's comfortable bourgeois living room. On his walls were photographs of children and grandchildren, Jewish art, and a copy of a letter of support from Christian X to his father. There is no trauma to relive as in the Netherlands.

In the 1990s, when Danish historians finally turned to the rescue of the Jews, they debunked the heroism. For instance, they emphasise the large sums charged by fishermen to ferry Jews, even though most of the rescuers demanded nothing, and others contributed their own money. The historians note that Danes who helped Jews weren't sentenced to death, as happened in the Netherlands, but the rescuers didn't know that in advance. Every Dane I spoke to about the rescue added some caveat apparently intended to diminish it.

I asked Straede, the historian, why this was. He said: "There is a consensus to feel unease about it, because whenever you are confronted with it, it is always because some American Jews bring it forward to you with ridiculous ideas of heroism, a simplified view of history that the good guys are fighting the bad guys, and so on. We know that our motives are more tainted."

Posted on Monday, January 24, 2005 at 6:23 PM | Comments (4) | Top

Did We Fight World War II Fair?


David Pugliese, in the Ottawa Citizen (1-23-05):

For the last 60 years, most history books on the Second World War have concentrated on the battles, tactics and leaders of that global conflict. But now, some historians are turning their attention to the war's social impact and are examining such controversial topics as sex, alcohol, patriotism and crime, on the battlefield and at home.

The result is a worm's eye view of the lives of the Allied troops who defeated the Nazis. And while these new books help drive home the brutality and terrible conditions endured by those soldiers, some veterans question why historians would go down that road.

British author Max Hastings' new book, Armageddon, chronicles the last years of the war, highlighting bravery, cowardice and abuses on both sides. Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin, published in 2002, unveiled detailed information about the mass rapes committed by Russian troops against German women.

The newly released To the Victor the Spoils looks at the day-to-day lives of frontline British and Canadian soldiers. Author Sean Longden writes about how troops went months without washing and days without sleep, living in trenches along with rotting corpses and human waste.

But he also chronicles widespread looting by soldiers as well as the execution of prisoners. In addition, the book examines the sexual encounters troops had with women in the countries they liberated. One case Mr. Longden cites involved a French farmer, ecstatic over the defeat of the Nazis, offering a Canadian unit his two daughters for sexual relations. The unit used a lottery to determine which two soldiers would be selected to sleep with the women.

Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers, by University of Ottawa historian Jeffrey Keshen, goes into depth about the social effects of the war on Canadian troops and civilians. The book, released last year, contains details about the high rates of venereal disease among soldiers, black marketeering and the less than patriotic responses by some Canadians at home to the war effort.

Veterans argue that in a war of such magnitude and scope there are bound to be a few questionable or embarrassing incidents unearthed but people shouldn't forget Allied troops sacrificed much and ultimately defeated an evil Nazi regime. In addition, they argue that any lapses in discipline were few and far between and pale in comparison to the crimes of the Nazis.

But Mr. Keshen says books that examine social and military history of the times shouldn't be seen as slight to veterans or what they accomplished.

"It doesn't mean our cause wasn't right," he said. "It didn't mean that we didn't fight the good fight and that most of our troops were decent folk, but we have sort of engaged in this idea of the Canadian soldier as the antithesis of what the enemy was."

Mr. Keshen notes that information available during the war, as well as some memoirs of soldiers released shortly after the conflict, didn't gloss over problems. But over the decades such information has been forgotten. "It was like there was a collective amnesia," he said. "In a lot of records at the time and a lot of the memoirs, they were talking about Canadian troops as hardly being the paragons of virtue."...

Posted on Monday, January 24, 2005 at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

So We Live in an Age of Violence? Compared with When?

Kelly Patterson, in the Ottawa Citizen (1-23-05):

It is past midnight. A forbidding house bathed in moonlight looms in the background. At the centre, a grisly scene -- a glowering psychopath stands over the body of a pregnant woman he has just killed and mutilated.

Hannibal II? Halloween? Friday the 13th? The possibilities are endless: After all, gory movies are still all the rage. And that's hardly surprising: These are violent times, so they say. We live in an age of serial killers, gang wars, drug lords, sexual predators. This is, in short, an age -- the age -- of violence.

But our psychopath is not the latest Quentin Tarantino creation; rather, he figures in a 17th-century engraving by English artist William Hogarth. And Hogarth's Cruelty in Perfection reflects a level of real-life, everyday brutality that our supposedly savage society can't even begin to imagine, for all our talk of modern violence.

In fact, criminologists and historians say that, when it comes to everyday life, never has there been a more peace-loving, less violent society in western civilization. True, our entertainment can be gory, but compared to our great-grandparents, we're pussy-cats.

Imagine the modern-day reaction to the annual May festival in Ypres, Belgium, where people threw live cats from the belfry of the town hall to purge evil from the city -- a practice that persisted until 1817. Barroom brawls were routine for most working men through to the early 1900s; wife-battering was once "universal," as the celebrated social historian Edward Shorter put it, and child-beating was de rigueur in most households well into the 20th century.

"There has been a sea-change in attitudes toward violence," says American crime historian Julius Ruff.

In everything from our penal system to the way we treat our pets, modern society has shown "a growing repugnance for violence," Ruff notes in his 2001 book, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800.

Many countries have even gone so far as to ban the spanking of children. Last fall, a host of health organizations across Canada called for such a ban; Austria and the Scandinavian countries have already outlawed it....

Manuel Eisner points to a "decisive shift" in the way traditional blood feuds and honour killings -- the hallmark of a society that lives by the sword -- were dealt with. Starting in the 16th century, he says, states moved to ban the vigilante-style justice of duels and other forms of honour killings, reserving retributive violence for themselves through executions, prison and torture. As early as 1667 in Paris, authorities had invented the urban police force, with the first full-fledged modern-style force emerging with London's "bobbies" in 1829.

But the anti-violence movement was not simply imposed by the state: It also came from within, as the religious movements of the 16th and 17th centuries revolutionized the way people saw themselves and others.

Led by the early Protestants, a wave of religiosity swept Europe after the Reformation, replacing a culture of duelling and dust-ups with one that "stressed introspection and the cultivation of shame and guilt," Eisner writes.

As Bible-thumping began to replace head-bashing in popular culture, another important development was under way: the rise of individualism. With both Catholics and Protestants worrying more about their personal relationship with God and less about their clan's status, the high violence of a blood-feud society began to give way to a gentler culture preoccupied with "issues of human dignity and empathy for the weak," as Eisner puts it.

Soon the public began to develop a distaste for blood sports. In Britain, the practice of bull-running, once popular across Europe, had died out by the last half of the 19th century. Men and women whose ancestors had ripped apart live geese with their bare hands, or burned sacks of cats alive as part of annual festivals, founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1824. Public executions, once considered festive occasions, were done behind closed doors as of 1867 in Britain.

In short, the state, with help from the church, transformed its bloodthirsty subjects into more law-abiding -- and much more squeamish -- citizens....

Posted on Monday, January 24, 2005 at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Roger Pulvers: The Japanese Have Never Taken Responsibility for Their History

Roger Pulvers, in Japan Times (12-19-04):

[Roger Pulvers -- who translated all the Japanese writings quoted in this article -- is an American-born Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. A collection of his fiction and nonfiction writings, "Half and More," will be published by Shinchosha in March 2005. His website is: http://homepage2.nifty.com/uesugihayato]

In many senses the Japanese people have been in denial since the end of World War II.

With the Tokyo War Crimes Trials they blamed their leaders for the catastrophes of war, so allowing themselves to believe that the atrocities were committed by their soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats and entrepreneurs in their name. They themselves could be carefully let off the hook.

The postwar thinking of the vast majority of Japanese was: It may have been "us," but it wasn't "me" who did those awful things. "We" were forced to do those things by underhanded politicians and cruel military men. "I" was a kind of victim, too, a victim of sweeping historical circumstances beyond my control; and now all "I" want to do is buckle down and look after my little personalized circle.

Emperor Hirohito, announcing on Aug. 15, 1945 Japan's capitulation to the Allied Forces, asked his people, in his first-ever broadcast to the nation, "taegataki wo tae (to endure the unendurable)." The unendurable was, of course, defeat and surrender, not the awful pangs of conscience that all Japanese should have felt and redressed individually, for their nation's crimes.

This, in one way, is what is behind the controversy today over the prime minister's visits to Yasukuni Shrine. If some of the soldiers whose souls are revered at the shrine are among those held responsible for Japanese atrocities in World War II, then the prime minister may be seen to be paying homage to the perpetrators of crimes. The fact that the question of personal guilt and acknowledged responsibility was left ambiguous and never clarified after the war makes this an issue that affects Japan's position in Asia to this day. Asians may well ask: What have individual Japanese people done to acknowledge their complicity in their nation's as yet unresolved past?

But as long ago as the 1940s there was a single voice, loud and unequivocal, that rang out, as if to warn the Japanese people that there was no all-clear signal now for a smooth sailing on a calm postwar sea. That voice came from Ango Sakaguchi, who wrote, in his essay "Zoku Darakuron (Decadence Revisited)" in December 1946:

Endure the unendurable? Who are they kidding? By giving ourselves over to historical fakery we have lost all semblance of humanity. What is the proper precondition of humanity? In short, it is to frankly express the desire for that which you desire and to declare offensive that which you find offensive. It's that simple.

What was Ango telling his people? He was telling them that their personal wants and predilections are what should motivate them in life, not some dictum from an emperor that turns them into meek and pliable followers.

According to Ango, the Japanese people could move on from their self-imposed tragedy only if they came to terms with the truth of their misdeeds. He labeled the blinkered view of history by the state Lies, lies, lies! He saw as reprehensible the cynical whitewashing of the past. For Ango, the only way to honestly re-create the Japanese nation after the war was for Japanese people to come out and express their real opinions and act upon them, even if it meant risking polemical confrontation....

Posted on Saturday, January 22, 2005 at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jon Wiener: The Chemical Industry Attack on 2 Historians

Jon Wiener, in the Nation (2-7-05) (subscribers only):

Twenty of the biggest chemical companies in the United States have launched a campaign to discredit two historians who have studied the industry's efforts to conceal links between their products and cancer. In an unprecedented move, attorneys for Dow, Monsanto, Goodrich, Goodyear, Union Carbide and others have subpoenaed and deposed five academics who recommended that the University of California Press publish the book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner. The companies have also recruited their own historian to argue that Markowitz and Rosner have engaged in unethical conduct. Markowitz is a professor of history at the CUNY Grad Center; Rosner is a professor of history and public health at Columbia University and director of the Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia's School of Public Health.

The reasons for the companies' actions are not hard to find: They face potentially massive liability claims on the order of the tobacco litigation if cancer is linked to vinyl chloride-based consumer products such as hairspray. The stakes are high also for publishers of controversial books, and for historians who write them, because when authors are charged with ethical violations and manuscript readers are subpoenaed, that has a chilling effect. The stakes are highest for the public, because this dispute centers on access to information about cancer-causing chemicals in consumer products.

For Rosner and Markowitz the story began in 1993, when they traveled to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to look at what they were told was "a warehouse of material" about vinyl chloride and cancer. The address they were given turned out to be a "decrepit hovel in the desolate center of town," as Markowitz describes it. They found it "full of chemical industry documents, lining every wall and filling every corner." The material, Rosner told me, was "incredible. Not just company documents but records of meetings of the trade association for the chemical companies. No one had ever seen anything like it."

The material had been obtained through the discovery process by a local attorney, Billy Baggett Jr., who was working alone with a single client: A woman whose husband, a former worker in a chemical plant, had died of a rare cancer, angiosarcoma of the liver, caused by exposure to vinyl chloride monomer. ...

At issue now in US district court in Jackson, Mississippi, is the claim by another former chemical worker that Airco and other companies are liable for his liver cancer because he was exposed to vinyl chloride monomer on the job. Markowitz is a key expert witness for the plaintiffs, because of the research he and Rosner published in Deceit and Denial. But the judge is being told that Rosner and Markowitz's research is "not valid," that the publisher's review process was "subverted" and that Rosner and Markowitz have "frequently and flagrantly violated" the American Historical Association's code of ethics.

Those charges come from another historian enlisted by the chemical companies: Philip Scranton of Rutgers University, who wrote a forty-one-page critique of Deceit and Denial and of the ethics of the historians who wrote it. Scranton teaches business history at Rutgers-Camden, where he is University Board of Governors Professor of the History of Industry and Technology. He also works at the Hagley Museum, a museum of early-American business history at the "ancestral home" of the Du Pont family, as it's described on the official website. Scranton directs the museum's research arm, the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society. He also testified recently for the asbestos companies in their liability litigation.

Although Scranton is serving in this case as an expert witness for the chemical companies, he's not an expert on cancer-causing chemicals; he's best known for his prizewinning book on the textile industry in Philadelphia. In this case, he doesn't claim to be an expert on the postwar chemical industry; instead, he offers himself as an expert on Markowitz's ethics. Markowitz, in contrast, is a genuine expert on the central issue in the case: the question of what the chemical companies knew, and when they knew it.

Scranton in his forty-one-page statement for the chemical companies charges that Markowitz violated "basic principles of academic integrity, historical accuracy, and professional responsibility" and engaged in "sustained and repeated violations" of the official "Standards" of the American Historical Association. Scranton's argument: Markowitz knew the names of the people reviewing his manuscript for the publisher and had suggested names of possible manuscript reviewers to the publisher. "Such practices," Scranton writes, "subverted confidential, objective refereeing of scholarly manuscripts."

But it's a common practice of university presses to ask authors to suggest reviewers, often because authors know better than editors who the most knowledgeable experts are, especially on an obscure topic like vinyl chloride. There's nothing unethical about this practice and nothing in the AHA standards about it. It is true, as Scranton suggests, that university presses typically offer manuscript reviewers the option of keeping their report confidential from the authors, and that in this case the publisher revealed the identities of the reviewers to the authors. But that was part of a review process that was much more demanding than the typical case. Instead of the usual two or three manuscript reviewers, Rosner and Markowitz's manuscript had eight outside reviewers, including the former head of the National Cancer Institute and the former chair of the Centers for Disease Control's Lead Advisory Panel. And instead of simply forwarding the written evaluations to the authors, as is the usual practice, Milbank Memorial Fund, the public health nonprofit that co-published the book with the University of California Press, sponsored a two-day conference that brought together the reviewers, the authors and their editors to go over the manuscript chapter by chapter. To describe this rigorous scholarly process as "unethical" because it revealed the identities of the reviewers to the authors is absurd. ...

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Posted on Saturday, January 22, 2005 at 1:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

John Tierney: Bush's Speech Reflected the Main Themes of America's Civil Religion

John Tierney, in the NYT (1-21-05):

A week before Mr. Bush's inaugural speech was delivered, Rick Shenkman had a good idea of what he would say. Professor Shenkman, a historian at George Mason University and editor of the History News Network Web site, had concluded that inaugural addresses sound so much alike because America has a "civil religion" that forces presidents to recite tenets from "a national template first cast at the time of the founding fathers."

Professor Shenkman helpfully published a scorecard for the speech, a list of the recurring themes in previous addresses. Sure enough, by our count, yesterday's speech touched on seven of the themes: deference to God; America's mission to spread freedom, democracy and peace around the globe; America as an example for the world; commitment to tolerance; requirement for national unity; faith in the people's wisdom; and worship of the founding fathers.

Two other themes on the list were the idea that the president is the instrument of the people (which Mr. Bush left unsaid) and the requirement that Americans make sacrifices. While Mr. Bush praised the sacrifices made by soldiers, he didn't explicitly call on the public to make sacrifices - an omission that did not surprise Professor Shenkman.

Before the speech, he predicted that Mr. Bush would leave out that particular tenet. As he reasoned on Tuesday, "Can't call for sacrifice with all those tax cuts."

Posted on Saturday, January 22, 2005 at 12:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

King Juan Carlos Snubs Moorish Plea For Apology

Isambard Wilkinson, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON), 1/20/05

Descendants of the Moors expelled from Spain 500 years ago failed to receive an apology from King Juan Carlos as he toured Morocco yesterday.

Residents of Tetouan, many of whose ancestors were driven from the Iberian peninsula by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, said an opportunity had been lost to heal an historic wound, which has become all the more sensitive in recent years.

Osama bin Laden has often talked of the tragedy of the loss of al-Andalus, the Moorish region of Spain. The terrorists who attacked Madrid last year, killing 192 people and wounding 1,900, spoke of Spain with the same sense of historic vengeance. Three million Muslims were expelled in 1501.

The king, who is on his first state visit to Morocco since 1979, cancelled his visit to Tetouan at the last minute. The official reason was lack of time but unofficially it appeared that sensitivities had arisen because Tetouan was the old Spanish colonial capital.

King Juan Carlos said in a speech earlier this week that the legacy of an Arab and Andalusian heritage was a key to "the positive image" in Spain of "Arabic culture and Islam".

The king has apologised for the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, and the descendants of the expelled Moors say he owes Muslims the same respect.

An eminent historian, Mohammed Ibn Azzuz Hakim, who has led the campaign, said: "We want moral reparations for the wounds we suffered.

"Mentally we feel linked to the same customs and history. Spanish traditions are ours too. I have traced more than 7,000 surnames in this town which derive from Spanish names."

The campaign is backed by Ian Gibson, biographer of the dramatist Frederico Lorca, and the popular historian Amin Maalouf.

"Five centuries ago they expelled Spanish Jews and Spanish Muslims. The petition to the Spanish king will hopefully change this historic injustice. They were betrayed," said Mr Gibson.

Mr Azzuz believes that the arrival of a socialist government in Spain has increased the chances of an apology.

Relations between Spain and Morocco took a serious downturn under the Right-wing government of Jose Maria Aznar.

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 1:02 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Hitler's Mentally Ill Cousin Killed In Nazi Gas Chamber

Kate Connolly, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON), 1/19/05

Adolf Hitler's cousin was gassed under the Nazi policy of eliminating mental health patients, according to recently discovered documents.

The woman, identified only as Aloisia V, died in a room pumped full of carbon monoxide in December 1940 at a medical institute in Austria. A stamp on her file was proof of her killing, said Timothy Ryback, an American historian.

Historians say the discovery may explain why Hitler never wanted to talk about his family. Aloisia was 49, two years younger than Hitler, when she was murdered. She was related to him through his father's family, the Schicklgrubers.

The documents, discovered at the Vienna institution where she was treated, reveal that Nazi doctors diagnosed her as suffering from "schizophrenic mental instability, helplessness and depression, distraction, hallucinations and delusions".

She told doctors she was haunted by ghosts and the presence of a skull. She spent most of her time chained to an iron bed.

At one point she pleaded in a letter to be provided with poison so that she could kill herself. "I'm sure it would only require a small amount to free me from my appalling torture," she wrote.

Mr Ryback said: "Hitler's secrecy about his own family was legendary. After 60 years we now know why.

"This man really did have something to hide."

Nazi policy decreed that anyone with a mental or physical defect, even something as minor as a harelip, should be annihilated in pursuit of a pure and flawless Aryan race.

On his father's side, mental problems were rife in Hitler's family, with one relative committing suicide.

It is not clear if Hitler was aware of Aloisia's death.

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Move Afoot To Reopen Case Against Sirhan Sirhan

John Hiscock, The Independent (London), 1/18/05

Robert Kennedy lies dead in the Ambassador Hotel, main picture, after being shot by Sirhan Sirhan, who was immediately arrested, top. Right: a recent picture of Sirhan, whose case has been taken up by the actor Robert Vaughn, above

It happened nearly 38 years ago, but doubts and suspicions have lingered on. Now the circumstances surrounding the assassination of Robert Kennedy are being resurrected and re-examined in an attempt to establish the truth of what happened that night in the cramped pantry of a Los Angeles hotel.

New evidence has emerged and pressure is mounting on authorities to reopen the case of Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of the assassination and who remains in the California state prison in Corcoran.

Celebrities and journalists are joining the campaign for a federal investigation, which has been sparked in part by a new book, Nemesis, by the British author Peter Evans. Evans, who spent 10 years researching the book, has unearthed evidence to support Sirhan's contention that he was hypnotised into being the "fall guy" for the murder. Evans identifies the hypnotist, who had worked on CIA mind control programmes and who was later found dead in mysterious circumstances.

In another move to reopen the case, a lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles Superior Court to stop the pantry at the Ambassador Hotel being destroyed with the rest of the hotel because, it is claimed, bullet holes in the walls and ceiling demonstrate conclusively that more than one gunman fired shots at Senator Kennedy.

Both Evans and Sirhan's lawyer, Larry Teeter, are convinced that the Palestinian activist was chosen to be a Manchurian Candidate-style assassin. In the 1962 film, remade last year, and based on a novel by Richard Condon, a former prisoner of war from the Korean conflict is brainwashed by Communists into becoming a political assassin.

Evans and Teeter believe that while Sirhan fired several shots, none of them hit Kennedy. The assassination, they say, was carried out by a professional hitman who fled immediately, leaving Sirhan to take the blame.

It was only because Kennedy had dismissed his Los Angeles police bodyguards that Sirhan survived and was not gunned down on the spot as his controllers had intended, reports Evans.

The actor Robert Vaughn, who starred in the long-running television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E and who was a good friend of Robert Kennedy's, has sent a copy of Evans' book to Sirhan and his lawyers. In his letter to Sirhan, Vaughn wrote: "It contains important new information about your case that I believe substantiates your claims of having been hypnotised at the time of the shooting and also produces the first credible evidence of motivation and method. I can tell you that, like me, important people in the US media are persuaded by Mr Evans' revelations; some are talking of it opening the door to a long overdue federal investigation into the assassination. I also believe that it could give you the grounds for a new appeal."

The author Dominick Dunne, in his Vanity Fair column last month, described Nemesis as presenting "a startling revision of American history".

Robert Kennedy was the senator for New York, the head of the Kennedy clan and, according to Evans, the occasional lover of his sister-in-law, Jackie Kennedy, when his snowballing presidential campaign rolled into California. He triumphed in the California primary, and around midnight on 5 June 1968 in the Embassy Room of the Ambassador Hotel he thanked his supporters. Then, surrounded by aides, hotel employees and newsmen, with his wife, Ethel, a few yards behind and with the cheers still ringing in his ears, he left for a press conference in the Colonial Room on the other side of the hotel.

The route they took, from the stage to an anteroom and into the service corridors, led them through a narrow serving-kitchen known as the pantry. As the senator approached, a dark, slim young man stepped from behind a tray rack. He raised a .22 calibre revolver and squeezed the trigger. The gunman continued firing, wounding five other people as Kennedy aides and hotel employees wrestled him down on to a table for steaming food, where he was held until police arrived.

On 17 April 1969, after 64 sequestered days and nights, and 16 and a half hours of deliberation, the jury of seven men and five women found Sirhan "alone and not in concert with anyone else" guilty of murder in the first degree. He was sentenced to death in the gas chamber, but the sentence was reduced to life imprisonment when the United States Supreme Court declared the death penalty unconstitutional.

Those facts are not in dispute. Nearly everything else is.

"There was no way Sirhan Sirhan killed Kennedy," says Teeter, who has filed the lawsuit to preserve the pantry for further forensic examination. "He was the fall guy. His job was to get busted while the trigger man walked out. He wasn't consciously involved in any plot. He was a patsy. He was unconscious and unaware of what was happening - he was the true Manchurian Candidate.

"He is absolutely innocent. He is not the person who did the shooting. He was out of position and out of range and he couldn't have done it."

Teeter does not know for certain who hypnotised Sirhan, but, he said: "I know it was done. It was consistent with the US government's programme developed by the CIA and Military Intelligence to enable handlers to get people to commit crimes with no knowledge of what they are doing."

Evans goes further and names the hypnotist as a Dr William Joseph Bryan Jnr. He had worked on a CIA mind-control programme called MKULTRA and claimed to have moonlighted as a technical adviser on The Manchurian Candidate. The hypnosis, says Evans, had been done over three months, a period known as the "white fog" when the Los Angeles police task force later investigating the assassination - and trying to construct a meticulous timetable of Sirhan's activities up to the shooting - lost track of him.

Sergeant Bill Jordan, the detective who was Sirhan's first interrogator, told Evans: "We took him back for more than a year with some intensity - where he'd been, what he'd been doing, who he'd been seeing. But there was this 10- or 12-week gap, like a blanket of white fog we could never penetrate, and which Sirhan himself appeared to have a complete amnesia about."

Dr Bryan was found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room in 1978. He had either shot himself or was murdered. The case remains unsolved.

[Editor's Note: This is only a portion of a much longer piece. Please see The Independent's website for the entire story.]

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 12:33 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Napoleon Anniversary Renews Debate Over Legacy

John Thornhill, Financial Times (London, England), 1/18/05

In 1882, Ernest Renan, the French historian, gave a lecture at the Sorbonne university in which he posed the question: what is a nation?

His answer was that nations were about far more than customs posts or geographical frontiers, or even races, religions or languages. They were, he claimed, the accumulation of shared glories and sacrifices and a common desire to achieve future goals. "A heroic past, great men, glory . . . this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea," he said.

Few individuals can have created so much national social capital so quickly as Napoleon. In two frenetic decades, the Corsican-born petit caporal (little corporal) drove France to the heights of glory and the depths of despair, leaving behind a rich legacy: the civil code, the Bank of France and the beauty of Paris.

Napoleon has remained a figure of huge fascination and controversy. Last month's bicentenary of his coronation as emperor occasioned a fresh flurry of historical debate and national self-analysis.

Dozens of books have been printed to mark the event, adding to the library of 60,000 already published (more than three for every day of his life). Several exhibitions, most notably in the Louvre and the Jacquemart-Andremuseum in Paris, have also commemorated Napoleon's vaulting act of ambition, when he invited the Pope to his coronation and then proceeded to crown himself.

"Napoleon was a self-made man," as one of his recent biographers, Steven Englund, noted, "and he worshipped his creator."

Napoleon remains such a contentious figure in France because almost every political tradition, from Gaullist nationalists to internationalist republicans, stakes some claim to him, however tenuous.

But Thierry Lentz, director of the Napoleon Foundation, a private institution devoted to the study of the emperor, says that interest in Napoleon spans all strata of the French population, from business magnates who are captivated by his genius for leadership, to workers who turn out at weekends to re-enact his victorious battles.

The French emperor has also become a subject of international controversy, highlighting the extent to which the history of a single nation can become a global property. Inevitably perhaps, there is a marked divide between predominantly French and "Anglo-Saxon" interpretations of his legacy.

For some (with a selective memory), Napoleon is viewed as the inheritor of France's anti-monarchical republican traditions who used force to promote revolutionary values and national liberation movements across Europe.

To others with a national bias, he was nothing more than a warmongering, dictatorial, proto-Hitler who left hundreds of thousands of corpses scattered across Europe's battlefields.

These divergences of view are reflected in an opinion poll published by Le Figaro magazine to coincide with the bicentenary. Almost half of the 1,000 French respondents agreed with the proposition that Napoleon was above all a great political figure in advance of his times; 39 per cent said he was a dictator who had used all means to satisfy his thirst for power.

This ambiguous legacy helps explain why the French state has been so wary of embracing the latest frenzy of Napleonmania. While the French government went to extraordinary lengths in 1989 to promote the bicentenary of the French revolution, it has steered well clear of endorsing any celebrations of Napoleon's coronation.

Some French historians suggest that much of the fuss about Napoleon is the fault - albeit inadvertent - of the British. During Napoleon's years in exile on St Helena, his British jailers allowed him to dictate his memoirs, enabling him to justify his actions and create his own legend. The "illustrious villain" was transformed into a "practical genius" and the militaristic aggressor was turned into a national hero forced into fighting defensive wars.

Napoleon skilfully used his time on St Helena to reinvent himself as a liberal emperor and one of history's victims, says Mr Lentz: "Napoleon himself used to say that Christ would not have been God had he not been crucified."

In this sense, Napoleon's enduring power as a national symbol lies as much in his humiliation as in his glory - he triumphed even in defeat.

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hitler Ordered Pope's Kidnapping

Unsigned, Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), 1/17/05

Adolf Hitler ordered one of his generals to kidnap Pope Pius XII but the officer did not obey, Italy's leading Roman Catholic newspaper reported yesterday.

Avvenire, which is owned by the Italian Conference of Roman Catholic bishops, said new details of the plot had emerged in documents presented to the Vatican in favour of putting the controversial wartime pontiff on the road to sainthood.

Avvenire said the German dictator feared the pope would be an obstacle to his plans for global domination and because the dictator wanted to eventually abolish Christianity.

It said that in 1944, shortly before the Germans retreated from Rome, SS General Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff had been directly ordered by Hitler to kidnap the pope. The newspaper said Wolff returned to Rome from his meeting with Hitler in Germany and arranged for a secret meeting with the pope.

The newspaper said Wolff had assured the pope he had no intention of carrying out Hitler's orders, but warned the pontiff to be careful "because the situation (in Rome) was confused and full of risks".

Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had already fallen and a German-backed puppet regime was set up in northern Italy.

Avvenire said the details of the plot were in testimony Wolff gave before he died in Germany to church officials accumulating evidence to back efforts to have Pius eventually made a saint.

Other historians and authors have depicted Pius as being pro-German and have accused him of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust.

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 12:18 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Painted Cave In France Could Force Rewriting Of Human History

Dietlind Lerner, The Irish Times, 1/15/05

Deep within the limestone hills of the Auvergne in south eastern France lies the secret entrance to Chauvet, the 34,000-year-old grotto known as "the Sistine Chapel of Prehistoric art". For the lucky few who have been allowed inside Chauvet since a trio of amateur speleologists first discovered it in late 1994, almost everything is off limits. Nothing may be touched - not the 447 animal paintings on the walls, nor the 83 bear skulls littering the floor; not even the 4,000-plus footprints embedded in the ground.

In fact, conditions in the 1,500-foot cave are so ecologically fragile that there are even limits on breathing. In order to maintain the delicate equilibrium of carbon dioxide on which the cave has become dependant, no more than 10 people are allowed in, for a maximum of eight hours at a time.

One Chauvet researcher, Philippe Fosse, remembers initially asking himself: "How are we going to work if we can't touch anything, or move anything?" Yet Chauvet's fame and importance make the draconian precautions necessary.

The last time humans visited Chauvet was during the Ice Age. Dinosaurs were long gone, but man was still working with flint tools when, in around 22,000 BC, something caused the rocks above the cave to tumble down over its entrance, closing what at one point had been a large opening in the hill. Insects visited the cave during the subsequent thousands of years, but until 1994 that was about it. And so Chauvet became a historian's dream: a place where time stood still.

Hampered by a series of complicated lawsuits over who owned the artistic rights to Chauvet - not to mention the land itself - it was a couple of years before the French government came to an agreement with the plaintiffs and appointed a 30-person research team to study the cave. Even then, because of the preservation concerns, the Chauvet research group is allotted only two two-week visits a year.

A typical study day begins shortly before sunrise over the hills of Chauvet. It's a half-hour hike from the no-frills leisure centre where the research group lives to the jutting mass of rock that hides the cave's opening high in the rocks.

The researchers remain in the cave for about three hours and when they push back the big steel door at the end of the long, narrow tunnel leading into the cave, they are exhausted - a result of the dark, the cold, the lack of oxygen and the physical demands of their work.

Valerie Feruglio, a 39-year-old art historian, recalls her first visit: "We'd all seen pictures of Chauvet but when I finally got inside, well it was even more impressive than I had expected. The art work was so emotional, it was like seeing a Leonardo drawing - and feeling him doing it. At Chauvet you feel that close to the artist."

No humans are represented in the paintings, but there are 14 different types of beasts - including lions, rhinoceros, mammoths, horses, panthers, owls and bears - often portrayed in groups, usually in motion. The animals are more than mere symbols - they live and breathe and display emotions. As Feruglio puts it, "The panels are alive, each animal has a life of its own and there is motion, a real story. What is sure is that this artist had a great sensitivity." And a surprisingly advanced technique.

Until recently it was believed there was a gradual evolution in prehistoric art. It was assumed that skills like composition, perspective, shading and understanding of anatomy evolved slowly over the centuries.

When Chauvet was discovered, France's minister of culture announced that it most likely dated from 20,000 BC to 17,000 BC. When carbon dating later placed the Chauvet paintings at two intervals some time between 32,000 and 23,000 BC, the art world gasped at the news. These works were so sophisticated that they had been misdated by several thousand years.

The experts hope to figure out how the Chauvet drawings were executed: how many artists there were, how much time the work took and to what degree the compositions were mapped out. They are convinced that the more they can figure out about the artistic process behind the drawings, the closer they'll be to forming an idea of what life was like some 34,000 years ago.

It is an arduous process. Crouching on a steel and aluminium walkway (built over the path of the footprints established by the cave's first modern visitors), Feruglio beams the light from her helmet through the pitch darkness to take high-resolution digital photographs of the works to be transferred to computers back at the laboratory.

On her next visit, she brings a printout of the digital image, covered with a sheet of clear plastic upon which she adds details of the composition missed by the camera. The artists knew how to use the cave's uneven surfaces to their advantage by incorporating the bumps and hollows into the composition - today these three-dimensional variations tend to confuse the computerised eye of the camera. The goal is to have a perfect record of the artwork.

Their labour has already yielded some fascinating results. To begin with, they have found many marks indicating that the artists wiped the surface of the wall clean with their hands before beginning work. This indicates that tens of centuries ago, humans were already interested in the quality of their work, which would not have been the case had they only been interested in creating a simple representation. Although there are occasional smudges where the artist sought to make a correction, for the most part the works were done with few changes, indicating the artists knew what they were going to do before starting.

Pre-historian Bernard Gilly, a man of few words but many ideas, spends a lot of time wondering about the artistic choices made at Chauvet. For example, he points out that the mammoth was the meal of choice for people of this era, and also that it was an enormous animal, "yet at Chauvet the mammoth is always depicted in white, never in the more dominant colours of red or black, and it is always depicted smaller than the other animals, which were in reality smaller than it." He has spent much time thinking about this, but so far has no answers.

The bones scattered throughout the cave puzzle him also. "There are bear bones here, but no mammoth bones. They ate a lot of mammoth, so where are the bones? And what is the explanation for all of the bear bones? And why are there so many paintings in some parts of the cave, and nothing in others - what was the significance of the works, what was the motivation? It's never over - the more we learn, the more new questions we have," he says, before donning his hard hat and disappearing behind the steel door and into the cave.

Archeologist Philippe Fosse is called "the bear guy" because of his specialised field of interest. He is amazed by the extraordinary bounty at Chauvet: "In other caves you have to dig and hunt to find things, here it is like an open book - everything is just sitting on the walls and the ground."

At Chauvet, Fosse and his colleagues have discovered bones from 14 different species, including rodents, birds and reptiles, but mostly there are bear bones: 3,700 of them. (They have yet to find human bones.) The bones are scattered all around the cave and there is a theory among some of the Chauvet experts that humans might have used the bones to mark territory or, much like Hansel and Gretel many centuries later, to find their way back to a specific location.

And then there is the matter of the "bear altar". At the centre of the so-called "Cavern of the Skull", in a low-ceilinged part of the cave studded with stalactites, a bear skull has been placed on a large rock that has fallen from the ceiling. It certainly looks like someone put it there for a reason, but of course this can only be speculation.

One of the most sensational discoveries to come out of Chauvet has nothing to do with the artists or the bears, butwith human need and emotion. Michel Garcia, who studies the foot and paw prints of Chauvet's damp clay floor, believes he has found tracks of what might have been a prehistoric dog. Until Chauvet, the earliest dog prints came from Germany and dated back to approximately 12,000 BC. Garcia believes his prints are around 26,000 years old.

Garcia has also found about 80 human footprints whose length and width lead him to believe they were made by a boy of about 10 years old, walking barefoot - possibly at the same time as the dog - and the dog's tracks appear to intertwine with those of the boy.

So far, Garcia has found traces only of the dog's print on top of the boy's. If he finds the opposite he'll have proof to back his hunch that the boy and the dog visited the cave together, placing the history of man and his best friend back to the beginning of human record.

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

France Agonizes Over How To Remember World War I Veterans

Jo Johnson, Financial Times (London, England), 1/15/05

They are known as the ders des ders, the last of the last, and they will soon be gone. Aged between 105 and 110 and with a life expectancy measured in months not years, 14 soldiers are all that remain of the vast French armies of the first world war. In the hills above Verdun, the fortress town near the German border, a sense of impending loss is palpable as the last guardians of living memory of the fighting that scarred this area disappear one by one.

Just how they will be remembered is a question troubling Jean-Louis Dumont, who represents the Verdun area in parliament. The Socialist deputy has provoked debate by proposing a law to turn the funeral of the last poilu (French infantryman of the 1914-18 war) into a "solemn national homage" to all who fought in that conflict. This memorial service for an entire generation could, he suggests, be held at Verdun or at Douaumont, where Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl held hands in 1984 and said "Never again."

"Paris may prefer Invalides and of course we can't ignore the claim of the Somme, but Verdun has a special resonance. It is the universal battlefield," says Mr Dumont as he drives past white posts that mark where houses once stood in Fleury-devant-Douaumont, one of the nine villages in the area that he says "gave up their lives for France".

"Next year, the 90th anniversary of our victory, would be ideal for Verdun, but may be too soon of course. Many, thankfully, are in good health."

The doyen of poilus is Maurice Floquet, a Somme veteran who still keeps fit on an exercise bicycle at his home in the Var. He turned 110 on Christmas Day and was this month promoted by President Jacques Chirac to the rank of officer in the legion d'honneur. Most, though, are in wheelchairs and live either in nursing homes or with 24-hour care. Last year, for the first time, none made it to the Remembrance Day service in Paris.

Some countries have already bid farewell to this generation. When Alec Campbell, the last Anzac and a survivor of Gallipoli, died in 2002 at the age of 103, Australian flags around the world flew at half-mast. The prime minister cut short a visit to China to attend a state funeral. In the UK there are 19 veterans left, aged 105 to 108, eight fewer than the start of 2004.

The politics of wartime memory are ever sensitive in France, and Mr Dumont's proposal has yet to win government approval. Pierre Mayaudon, cabinet director at the Ministry for Veterans' Affairs in Paris, says it is difficult to know whether the last poilu will be emblematic of the first world war spirit of soldiers charging out of mud-filled trenches into merciless machine-gun fire. Some of the veterans who were awarded the legion d'honneur en masse in the mid-1990s refused to accept it, he recalls.

"For the last poilu, France must organise something exceptional," Mr Mayaudon says. "But it's not simple because it could be that the last man is someone who cannot be used to illustrate a generation. Perhaps among those that remain there are one or two who refused the legion d'honneur, whether because they opposed the war or felt that if they hadn't been given it earlier they didn't deserve it. And there might be others who only had a small role behind the lines for just a few weeks at the end of the conflict."

For Dennis Goodwin, who runs the UK's First World War Veterans Association, the French debate is unnecessarily morbid. "There's still a lot to play for and the game's not over yet. I can't believe the French are saying, 'What shall we do when they're all dead?' They should do something for them when they're all alive to give them the will to live. I hope I can continue to take our lads places and keep alive the compassion and debt that we owe this unique generation."

Historians say they will miss the living link. Nigel Steel, head of research at London's Imperial War Museum, which has an archive of around 16,000 personal papers and recorded oral histories from the Great War, says that archaeology and the study of archives will become more important: "You can't ring people up and see them. People can't turn around and say, 'No, it wasn't like that.' It's always important for historians to be reminded that they're dealing with real people."

Yet the technological breakthroughs allowing oral history to develop in the 1960s mean historians have a representative cross-section of experience from the first world war.

"From an evidentiary standpoint, there's enough to supply historians for some time to come and, in terms of our understanding, the loss of what is left of this generation is not going to be great," says Mr Steel. "But even if you don't learn much, meeting them is so powerful it's a great shame it will no longer be possible."

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 11:46 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Memories Of Auschwitz

Jonathan Webber, The Guardian (London), 1/13/05

Auschwitz is far and away the largest single site of the mass murders committed during the second world war. It is the largest cemetery in the world, containing the last remains of well over a million human beings - men, women and children, murdered in the name of a state ideology. The corpses were pushed into giant incinerators and their ashes dumped into nearby rivers and ponds, or simply strewn over neighbouring fields. The sheer scale of the atrocities, the horrific industrialisation of mass murder by poison gas, the systematic robbery of personal property - all this, and very much more besides, rightly confirms the name of Auschwitz as an indelible stain on the moral history of humanity and on the social and political history of Europe.

So it is not difficult to understand why the liberation of Auschwitz, on January 27 1945, is an event of singular importance deserving serious and thoughtful commemoration. But how adequate is Auschwitz as a symbol of the totality of the Holocaust, which claimed six million Jewish lives, and as a symbol also of the deaths of many millions more of other European populations during the war (notably Poles, Gypsies and Russians)? What about the five other death camps specially constructed by the Germans in occupied Poland - Treblinka, Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Chelmno? Many people have never heard of them. How is this possible?

The short answer is that what most people know about the Holocaust derives to a great extent from survivors. It is absolutely right that we listen to their voices, out of respect for the dead and out of concern for the suffering of those who managed to live through it all. Auschwitz had 40 sub-camps, constituting one vast prisoner universe of slave labourers; the largest of these, at Birkenau, was alongside the gas chambers. It meant that if, on arrival, a deportee was sent to an Auschwitz labour camp, rather than to the gas chambers, there was a possibility that he or she could end up surviving the war. At Belzec, in contrast, there was no labour camp. About half a million Jews were murdered there, on a piece of land not much larger than three or four football pitches; fewer than 10 people are known to have survived. More than double that number were murdered in Auschwitz, but many tens of thousands managed to survive through being assigned to one of the labour camps. Auschwitz survivors were thus numerous enough to ensure their story was told to the world. Many Auschwitz survivors are still alive today (about 150 of them in Britain alone) - whereas from Belzec we have just two testimonies, and those two survivors are long since dead. No wonder so few people have heard of Belzec.

Well over 100 buildings survived intact in Auschwitz, in addition to the ruins of the gas chambers themselves, and visitors have a good deal to gaze at there. Nothing at all remains of Belzec or Treblinka, except for memorials. Auschwitz was carefully preserved as a museum by the Polish government, and today it has a staff of 200 people, including research historians who have together published more than 400 titles in many different languages; Treblinka, where 800,000 people were murdered, has no museum.

Auschwitz was also more international than other camps: people were deported there from all over Europe, from as far away as northern Norway and even from the Greek island of Rhodes. All over Europe the memory of this camp located near a small Polish town thus lives on, as a horrifying reminder of the evil perpetrated by the German occupying forces.

During the war, Auschwitz was already a household name in Poland: this was the camp to which Polish intellectuals, priests, members of the resistance movement, and indeed ordinary Poles arrested in street round-ups would be sent. As many as 75,000 ethnic Poles were murdered in Auschwitz: their families knew where they were since they could send them postcards, even food parcels. Auschwitz (or Oswiecim in Polish) became synonymous with the horrors of the occupation; little wonder that the communist government after the war preserved the place as a reminder of the evils of fascism, and a visit there was an obligatory part of the school curriculum.

These are some of the reasons why Auschwitz is so well known. But the fury and the brutality of the Holocaust extends much further than Auschwitz, where not more than a quarter of the six million Jewish victims met their deaths. Probably as many Jews were murdered by firing squads and their corpses dumped in mass graves - across eastern Europe this happened at so many hundreds of sites that their names will never be well known. Nor will the names of the ghettos into which the Jews were forced, usually in appalling conditions, before being taken out and murdered. We will never know the exact number of the victims in each of these stages and settings of the genocide, mainly because the historical records are incomplete. We owe it both to the historians and to the survivors, each in their different ways, for our detailed knowledge. But when the generation of survivors slowly comes to an end, we will still have our film-makers and other artists, among many others, to fill out our understanding.

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Poland's Communist Sympathizers

Richard Bernstein, The New York Times, 1/14/05

During the heady days a decade and a half ago when democracy first came to Poland, few faces were more visible, or more emblematic of the democracy movement than the movie star-like spokeswoman for Solidarity, Malgorzata Niezabitowska. Certainly, she would be the last person anybody would suspect of having collaborated with the Communist government.

But in the past few weeks, Ms. Niezabitowska -- like numerous other Solidarity veterans -- has been snared by allegations that under the code name Nowak she was a regular informer for the Communist security services. The allegation, supported by newly available documents from the Communist-era secret police, has both transfixed Poland and made a turmoil of Ms. Niezabitowska's life.

Among the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe, Poland is a relative latecomer to what has become know as lustration, so called because the bringing to light of secret Communist files may serve as a purifying sacrifice, a process that roiled countries like Germany, the Czech Republic and Hungary in the 1990's.

Several years ago, none other than Lech Walesa, a founder of Solidarity and Poland's first democratically elected president, was charged with having collaborated in the early 1970's. While he was cleared by the Polish Parliament, the taint on his reputation has remained.

But there has been a sharp increase here lately in lustration cases because, after years of delay, Poland only this month completed the process of opening its former Communist secret police archives to anybody who can claim to have been a target.

Just last week, Jozef Oleksy, a former prime minister, was forced to resign as speaker of the Polish Parliament after a court found he had lied about his past associations with Polish military intelligence. Mr. Oleksy denied that allegation and is appealing the court's ruling.

Mr. Oleksy is a former member of the Communist Party, but, in a strange paradox, many of the people whose past records are coming up for scrutiny are former leaders in the Solidarity movement. Among them are Marian Jurzczyk, the Solidarity leader of Szczecin and now the mayor of that city, and Zbigniew Nakder, a former head of the Polish language service of Radio Free Europe, and numerous Roman Catholic priests.

This has led some people here to wonder if the process is not harming the wrong people -- former democracy activists rather than the many current government officials who were members of the very Communist Party that persecuted them.

''Lots of people signed something,'' said Helena Luczywo, the deputy editor of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza and a former democracy activist. ''Lots of people said something to the police, because they were weak, or because they were blackmailed.''

''It's all very complicated,'' Ms. Luczywo said, ''but if you're young and didn't have this experience, it's difficult to understand.''

While there have been a number of highly publicized disclosures lately, the accusation against Ms. Niezabitowska, which she denies, is the one that has riveted the country. She has admitted to speaking once to the Communist-era secret police, but said she refused to collaborate with them and, in any case, told them nothing they did not already know. She said that any documents in the files relating to anything other than that one meeting were fakes made by a secret police that routinely engaged in fabrications.

''Their attitude is that if the secret police wrote something, it must be true,'' Ms. Niezabitowska, 56, said of her accusers during a conversation at her home outside Warsaw. ''But this is a fundamental misunderstanding. In the Communist time the core of the system was a lie and the system's executors were professionals. They knew very well how to make lies look like truth by mixing both in words and in documents.

''There was a special service inside the secret police called Office T that specialized in making false documents,'' she continued. ''Sometimes they invented fake agents altogether, or they fabricated letters with compromising information.''

But officials at the government bureau that keeps the documents and studies them argue that, while Ms. Niezabitowska's claim of forgery could theoretically be true -- the issue is now before a special court -- it is unlikely in this case, and that Ms. Niezabitowska does indeed have a past that she has, until now, refused to acknowledge publicly.

''To me the file of Malgorzata Niezabitowska is a standard file,'' said Pawel Machcewicz, a historian at the Institute for National Remembrance, which is the custodian of the vast records of Poland's Communist past. ''I didn't see anything in it that makes it different from other files.''

Similarly, a well-known historian, Antoni Dudek, wrote recently in Gazeta Wyborcza, one of Poland's leading newspapers, ''To accuse the special services of forging documents is absurd, because they would just have been cheating themselves.''

Ms. Niezabitowska's case came up when another former member of Solidarity Weekly, Krzysztof Wyszkowski, examined his own files and learned that he had been informed on by a secret collaborator identified as Nowak. Researchers at the Institute of National Remembrance determined that Nowak was Ms. Niezabitowska, and Mr. Wyszkowski gave that information to the Polish press.

In the meantime, having learned that her file had turned up, Ms. Niezabitowska made a statement of her own to the press, in which she recounted her secret police experience.

She had one and only one meeting with the secret police, on Dec. 15, 1981, she said, shortly after martial law was declared, when she was picked up at her home, taken away and interrogated for six hours. She says that she gave some opinions about some of her fellow members of Solidarity Weekly, including Mr. Wyszkowski, whom she did not like.

To talk as much as she did, Ms. Niezabitowska has admitted, was an error. But, she says, she did not disclose information harmful to anybody, and she refused further cooperation. After that first involuntary meeting, she said, she never met with the secret police again.

She argues that what she was really doing in those days belies the accusation of collaboration. She and her husband, Tomasz Tomaszewski, a photographer, clandestinely documented scenes of martial law, taking pictures, for example, of tanks on the streets, and surreptitiously passing them to a Western diplomat who sent them abroad. There they were published, helping to counter the portrait being painted by the official propaganda, which was that Poland, free of the unrest caused by Solidarity's strikes and demonstrations, had once again become a happy, peaceful place. If Ms. Niezabitowska or Mr. Tomaszewski had been caught, she said, their crime would have been espionage, and they would have faced prison terms of at least 10 years, or possibly even the death penalty.

''So can you imagine how I feel about this now -- that I was not a fighter for democracy, but was a petty collaborator with the secret police,'' Ms. Niezabitowska said. ''I'm heartbroken, not just for me, but for Poland. I fear that the history of the Polish opposition and our struggle for freedom will now be the story as told by the secret police, by people who were our worst enemies and did everything to destroy us. It would be a real victory of the totalitarian system from its grave.''

Mr. Machcewicz said that, having studied Ms. Niezabitowska's dossier, he believed the documents in it to be authentic. Her file, he said, consisted of 11 reports from her controller in the secret police. In one of them, for example, she appeared to provide information about a clandestine meeting of members of the underground Solidarity Weekly that took place in April 1982.

Ms. Niezabitowska's signature does not figure on the 11 reports of her handler, but it does appear on three separate documents, twice with her own name, once as Nowak. One signature appeared on a typed document, dated the day after she said she had her sole meeting with the secret police, in which she agreed to collaborate, for the sake of ''avoiding bloodshed,'' in the words of the person who wrote the letter.

Mr. Machcewicz said that the police seemed to have some information about Ms. Niezabitowska, the exact nature of which he declined to disclose. ''It's a complicated case,'' Mr. Machcewicz said of Ms. Niezabitowska, ''of a person who was under strong pressure, who tried not to collaborate, but who nonetheless provided some valuable information.''

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Spain To Honour British Sea Wolf

Isambard Wilkinson, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON), 1/14/05

Spain is to honour one of Britain's greatest maritime heroes, Lord Cochrane, almost two centuries after he helped to defeat Napoleon's armies in the Peninsular War.

The town of Roses in Catalonia is to dedicate a plaque to the celebrated sea captain who was the inspiration for both Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey and CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower, to commemorate his audacious defence of the town in 1808.

The tribute to Lord Cochrane, nicknamed Le Loup de Mer or Sea Wolf by Napoleon, has taken almost 200 years to come to fruition because of lingering Spanish animosity towards Britain.

"This is a superb idea to honour such a fine sea captain," said Pablo de la Fuente, a military maritime historian who lives in Roses. "It has taken so long because of Gibraltar. But it is time to acknowledge that we sometimes forget the huge collaboration of the Royal Navy and gallantry of British sailors."

Thomas Cochrane (1775-1860), 10th Earl of Dundonald, was a household name in Britain two centuries ago and his exploits have been immortalised more recently in the swashbuckling action film Master and Commander.

During his naval career, he also found time to be elected to Parliament but ended up in prison after being framed in a Stock Exchange scandal. He escaped and later commanded the Chilean, Brazilian and Greek navies before returning home when his name was cleared.

His link with the picturesque bay of Roses dates back to his defence of the local fort, pounded by the French and, as he wrote later, scarred by a hole "as large as the Great West Window at Westminster Abbey".

At one point Cochrane strolled out under fire to pick up a dislodged Spanish flag and raise it again. His bravado won him a broken nose and a splinter that pierced the roof of his mouth.

As the French swarmed through the town below, he evacuated the fort with the loss of only three of his men. The French lost more than 100 of theirs. As the French breached the fort's fortifications, Cochrane demolished the walls with a booby trap he had left behind.

Until last year the fort had not been restored. The mayor of Roses lacked funds to carry out a full reconstruction of the walls and so replaced the old stone with concrete.

Hard feelings over Gibraltar aside, Josep Barris, the town archivist, believes that the delay in acknowledging Lord Cochrane's heroism may have been due to the state in which he left the fort.

"After all, it was he who blew up the fort," he said. "We have to understand it was in a time of war."

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 10:55 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Search For Closure In a Mississippi Town

Patrick Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), 1/14/05

With Edgar Ray Killen back on trial after four decades, a state struggles - again - with vestiges of its segregationist past.
Surrounded by tabby cats, under a canopy of oaks on his porch overlooking muddy cow country, Edgar Ray Killen grew old. His contemporaries remember gangs with sling blades and men in pointy white hats with holes for eyes. But most people in this town of 8,000 had forgotten the ordained Baptist minister who eked out a living on his backyard sawmill.

Forty-one years ago, state prosecutors say, Mr. Killen helped kidnap and kill three civil rights workers. Last week, a stooped Killen returned to court and barked a hoarse "not guilty" at the judge. So began the latest, and perhaps the biggest, in a series of recent reckonings of civil rights era crimes - a turn of events that some see as a hopeful sign of righting old wrongs, some decry as a pointless dredging of the past, and some liken to the hunt for Nazi war criminals.

The case may be another sign of transition in a town - and a state - that has struggled for years to leave behind its segregationist past.

"I'm sure there are people in Philadelphia who wish it would all just go away, but there are some people, at least, who think it's long overdue, and that the town can't begin to heal itself without exposure of what happened, who did it, and finally see justice," says Harry Watson, the director of the Center for the Study of the American South in Chapel Hill, N.C.

Trials revisiting, and sometimes revising, Southern segregation have come in quick succession in the past decade, from the 1994 conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in Mississippi; to the 1998 conviction of former Klan wizard Sam Bowers in a 1966 firebombing, also in Mississippi; to the recent conviction of two men involved in the 1963 bombing that killed four black girls at Alabama's 16th Street Baptist Church.

On the streets of Philadelphia, Miss., the trial comes at a time when physical intimidation of blacks is largely gone. But longtime residents still remember the sheriff's 10 p.m. curfews in black neighborhoods when, if lights stayed on, whites might toss sticks of dynamite through living-room windows.

"The New South is just the Old South with a smile," says William Morgan, an African-American who was 12 when Killen and 18 others allegedly kidnapped two white Northern civil rights workers and a black man working with them, killed them, buried their bodies in a railroad embankment west of town, and set their station wagon on fire. Mr. Morgan's parents were housing civil rights workers at the time.

Mississippi, like other Southern states, has made undeniable progress in race relations. Diminished prejudice, a low cost of living, and rising demographic trends have lured many, including actor Morgan Freeman, to the Magnolia State. But the long shadows of the Civil War still fall here, and movies such as "Mississippi Burning," which was based on the Killen case, as well as scandals tying powerful state politicians to segregationist groups, continue to define Mississippi.

"What has really marked Mississippi as a sort of the 'South of the South' has been the society," says Watson. "Companies don't want to go there, professionals don't want to go there. On the other hand, there are a lot of black people moving back, and obviously folks are looking for something they can't find anywhere else in the country. As Mississippi addresses these ghosts of the past, then more people will be willing to do that."

While the kidnapping plot was hatched in House and finalized in Meridian, it was carried out in Philadelphia, and it's here that the memory is strongest. Some say Killen is simply a scapegoat - "the surrogate for sins of the whole people," says J. Wayne Flynt, a civil rights historian at Auburn University in Alabama. Authorities should leave him alone, one argument goes, and let the aging icon live out his days in a society he couldn't, in the end, control. Certainly, there's a weary ambivalence here. Philadelphia wants to move on - and many are finally confident it will.

"Right is right and wrong is wrong," says Harold Smith, owner of a hardware store in Union, where the past hangs in the rafters along with farm implements and the dust of decades. "In the end, everyone has their day of reckoning."

Posted on Friday, January 21, 2005 at 10:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Louis A. Pérez Jr.: Castro ... Political Rorschach Test

Louis A. Pérez Jr.in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (1-19-05):

[Louis A. Pérez Jr. is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The most recent of his many books about Cuba is On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). His next book, To Die in Cuba: Suicide and Society, will be published by the University of North Carolina Press this spring.]

No foreign head of state has defied U.S. efforts at regime change longer than Fidel Castro. Since 1959 he has survived an armed invasion, repeated assassination attempts, years of political isolation, and decades of economic sanctions. Forty-six years later, Castro is alive, if not so well, 90 miles away, still in power, still defying the United States.

Survival under such circumstances is tantamount to at least one kind of success, and success draws a crowd. Americans have displayed a curious ambivalence toward Castro, not necessarily disagreeing with their government's stance toward Cuba but nonetheless fascinated by the man who has so confounded 10 American presidents.

That fascination has transformed Castro into a veritable cottage industry. Castro biographies -- by academics, journalists, and at least one psychiatrist -- have become almost an American literary genre. Then there is Fidel in fiction: an "unauthorized autobiography," a play, and such fantasy titles as Fidel Castro Assassinated and A Bullet for Fidel. In the marketplace, that most remorseless measure of public interest, Castro sells.

He has also achieved something of an iconic status in myriad news interviews, documentaries, and docudramas, among them Saul Landau's Fidel (1969) and, with Dan Rather for CBS, Castro, Cuba, and the U.S. (1974). Rather interviewed Castro again in 1996 for CBS's The Last Revolutionary. The cigared one has been featured in Marita Lorenz's film Dear Fidel, Estela Bravo's Fidel, a CNN interview with Ted Turner, a docudrama for Showtime, a 10-part series on Univisión featuring Castro's home movies, an Oliver Stone documentary for HBO, and on and on. Never mind his portrayal by Jack Palance, Joe Mantegna, Anthony LaPaglia, and others in overheated comic or melodramatic turns.

In 1993 The Miami Herald ranked Castro as the second "most influential" person in South Florida history, preceded only by the Florida tourism developer Henry Flagler. It is fitting, then, that PBS should include Castro within the scope of the American Experience series, although I hope it's not too radical to suggest that he's more integral to the Cuban experience.

Castro is a political Rorschach test. All Castro documentaries presume to inform, but they mostly inform on their own sympathetic or hostile political views. It could hardly be otherwise. He is not a man about whom one is likely to be neutral.

PBS's Fidel Castro is true to type. It pulls no punches, setting the tone in the first 15 minutes as it describes Castro's youth and university years.

He is "the hick" (el guajiro), an outsider, illegitimate, unruly, and disruptive at the school from which he is said to have been expelled; a boy whose "reckless behavior" earned him the name of "the crazy one" (el loco); a "ferocious son" alleged to have threatened to burn his parents' house down; a combination of "genius and juvenile delinquent" who showed "signs of brilliance and then behaved like a hoodlum," influenced by fascist priests, and incapable of empathy for the normal needs of ordinary people. He is implicated in two murders during his university years and characterized by his ex-brother-in-law as a paranoid psychopath who might just as soon throw his wife out of a 10-story window as buy her a mink coat.

That perspective, reinforced by interviews with exiles and defectors, shapes the narrative arc of the documentary, which was written, produced, and directed by Cuban-born Adriana Bosch. She draws on the memories of Castro's boyhood friends and estranged family members, allies turned adversaries, former government officials and political prisoners. These are not disinterested voices, of course, but together they serve the film well, bearing witness to disappointment and disaffection....

Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 at 10:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Barone: Why Bush Will Sound Like Wilson

Michael Barone, in the WSJ (1-19-05):

Tomorrow George W. Bush will deliver his Second Inaugural speech, the 16th Second Inaugural delivered by an American president over the last 212 years. It will be the first time that one president has delivered a second inaugural just eight years after another since William McKinley in 1901. It can safely be predicted that Mr. Bush will not deliver the shortest Second Inaugural -- George Washington's was only 135 words -- nor the longest -- James Monroe in 1821 went on for what must have been an hour. And we can be certain that he will not deliver the most sublime. Abraham Lincoln did that in 1865 in his Second Inaugural, surely the greatest speech ever delivered by an American president.

A second inaugural comes at the hinge point of what each of these presidents expected to be an eight-year administration. It is an opportunity to look back at the last four years and to look ahead to the next.

Our early 19th century presidents tended to look backward, to give an accounting of their service. Invariably it was favorable. Thomas Jefferson in 1805: "On taking this station on a former occasion I declared the principles on which I believed it my duty to administer the affairs of our Commonwealth. My conscience tells me I have on every occasion acted up to that declaration according to its obvious import and to the understanding of every candid mind." Andrew Jackson in 1833: "The foreign policy adopted by our government soon after the formation of our present Constitution, and very generally pursued by successive administrations, has been crowned with almost complete success." Mr. Bush is not likely to confess to a syllabus of errors as his liberal critics would like. But he surely will not sound this smug.

Second Inaugurals also can try to place where Americans stand in history. The Founders lived in a world where republics were scarce and knew they had embarked on an experiment. Monroe gave a discourse on ancient republics. Jackson, a general turned president, warned of "military leaders at the head of their victorious legions becoming our lawgivers and judges."

Ulysses Grant took a more optimistic view. "The civilized world is tending toward republicanism," he said in 1873, three years after France ousted its last monarch and established its Third Republic. "I do believe that our Great Maker is preparing the world, in His own good time, to become one nation, speaking one language, and when armies and navies will no longer be required."

The vision Mr. Bush is likely to present seems more in line with Woodrow Wilson's. Speaking in March 1917, as World War I raged, and one month before the United States entered the conflict, Wilson said, "The tragic events of the 30 months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back." He set forth his goals -- a world in which all nations were "equally interested in the peace of the world and the stability of free peoples, and equally responsible for their maintenance" -- a clear preview of his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations. There is something in common here with Mr. Bush's vision of an America spreading freedom and democracy to new corners of the world.

Similarly, Dwight Eisenhower after a decade of Cold War insisted, "Our world is where our destiny lies -- with men, of all people, and all nations, who are or would be free." Richard Nixon, after ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam, sounded a note of retreat. "The time has passed when America will make every other nation's conflict our own. . . . Let us build a structure of peace in the world in which the weak are as safe as the strong -- in which each respects the right of the other to live by a different system."

Twelve years later Ronald Reagan echoed Eisenhower's denunciation of Communism and sounded a more optimistic note. "Human freedom is on the march." The Cold War over, Bill Clinton in 1997 promised safety against remaining threats. "We will maintain . . . a strong defense against terror and destruction. Our children will sleep free from the threat of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons." Expect to hear more on this from Mr. Bush....

What not to expect? Querulous complaints about the people or the press. Grover Cleveland, who loved to veto appropriations, decried "certain conditions and tendencies among our people which seem to menace the integrity and usefulness of their Government. . . . The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned." Thomas Jefferson noted, "During this course of administration, and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been leveled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare." He went on in this vein for three paragraphs. Ulysses Grant ended his Second Inaugural thus, "I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history, which today I feel that I can afford to disregard in view of your verdict, which I gratefully accept as my vindication." Mr. Bush had his fun with the New York Times in his acceptance speech in Madison Square Garden and probably won't raise the issue again.

George W. Bush has been criticized for his religious references. But he has only been following tradition. Every Second Inaugural since Washington's brief statement has included some reference to God, from Jefferson's "that Being," Madison's "Heaven" and Monroe's "Supreme Author of All Good" to Reagan's "God bless you" and Clinton's "May God strengthen our hands for the good work ahead -- and always, always bless our America." Four years ago Mr. Bush referred, in Founder's language, to the "author" of "our nation's grand story." Expect something similar from him tomorrow.


Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Adam Hochschild: How the British Inspired Dr. King's Dream

Adam Hochschild, in the NYT (1-17-05):

ACROSS the country today, parades, rallies and church services will mark the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Participants usually think of this national holiday - created against considerable opposition two decades ago - as this country's first widely celebrated commemoration of the long struggle for racial justice. Not so. For many decades, beginning well over 150 years ago, both black and white Americans celebrated another such day: Aug. 1.

The former slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass called Aug. 1 "illustrious among all the days of the year." At the Concord, Mass., courthouse on Aug. 1, 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a major speech against slavery that the writer Margaret Fuller, in the audience, described as "great, heroic, calm, sweet, fair ... tears came to my eyes." On that day in 1847, 10,000 people assembled in Canandaigua, N.Y., to hear Douglass and others speak. Seven thousand people - free blacks and sympathetic whites - attended an Aug. 1 rally in New Bedford, Mass., in 1855. A few black communities in the United States continued to celebrate Aug. 1 until well into the 1920's. Today, in many Caribbean nations, the Monday after Aug. 1 is a national holiday.

Why the First of August?

Long before Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, another major nation had been the first to end slavery in the territory it controlled: Britain. And unlike American slavery, essentially brought to an end through the Civil War, slavery in the British Empire ended as the result of a huge popular movement - whose early start, size and persistence dwarfed its counterpart in America. It's a story most in this country have long forgotten, although several generations of American slaves and their descendants knew it well.

The British antislavery movement burst into being in 1787. Up to that point, few people in England had spoken out on the subject. But within months after a firebrand organizer named Thomas Clarkson convened a 12-man abolition committee at a Quaker bookstore in London, agitation swept the country. Within a few years, more than 300,000 Britons were boycotting sugar, the major product of the British West Indian slave plantations. Nearly 400,000 signed petitions to Parliament demanding an end to the slave trade. Olaudah Equiano, a brilliant former slave, wrote a best-selling autobiography and embarked on a five-year speaking tour of the British Isles. Thomas Clarkson rode 35,000 miles on horseback, gathering witnesses for parliamentary hearings and setting up local antislavery committees. In 1792, the House of Commons became the first national legislative body in the world to vote to end the slave trade.

That ban, however, did not become law, because the House of Lords balked. Then Britain and France began two decades of war, and wars are always bad for progressive movements. Still, the abolitionists did not abandon hope. In the early 1800's Clarkson toured the country again, and in 1807 both houses of Parliament banned the slave trade.

With the death rate on plantations in the British West Indies very high, the abolitionists hoped that cutting off the supply of new slaves would quickly end British slavery itself. When this did not happen, Clarkson - now in his 60's - spent 13 months crisscrossing the country again, this time by stagecoach, in 1823 and 1824.

The next 10 years saw several new rounds of organizing: large petitions, great meetings, skillfully coordinated lobbying, a rare street demonstration and, to widespread male shock, the emergence of outspoken women abolitionists. In addition, there was the added pressure of a large, barely contained slave revolt in Jamaica. Finally, after months of acrimonious debate, in 1833 Parliament voted to phase out slavery throughout the empire. When freedom for all came, just after midnight on Aug. 1, 1838, a group of former slaves who were gathered in a Baptist church in Falmouth, Jamaica, placed a whip, chains and an iron punishment collar in a coffin, and buried it in the churchyard. Emancipation Day has been celebrated ever since.

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Posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2005 at 2:23 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jon Meacham: What Presidential Leadership Means

Jon Meacham, in Newsweek (1- 20-05):

The inauguration was a quiet affair. Sixty years ago this week, on Jan. 20, 1945—a cold Saturday in Washington—Europe had been at war for nearly six years, America for just over three. Three months away from death (he privately remarked that he felt like "boiled owl" much of the time), Franklin Roosevelt decided the fewer the festivities, the better.

There was no parade (the military was overseas), and so little chicken in the salad at lunch that most guests could be forgiven for thinking they were eating a celery dish. After taking the oath on the South Portico of the White House—one of the last times he ever stood, his steel braces locked in place—FDR delivered what has become an unjustly obscure fourth Inaugural Address, one long overshadowed by the majestic 1933 speech in which he told America that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

To understand the 21st century, however, Roosevelt's 1945 Inaugural is essential reading, an encapsulation of his conviction that politics and leadership are not clinical but human enterprises, America an unfinished experiment, the world a neighborhood with friends and foes close at hand.

"Our Constitution of 1787 was not a perfect instrument; it is not perfect yet," he said that day. "But it provided a firm base upon which all manner of men, of all races and colors and creeds, could build our solid structure of democracy." Engagement, not isolation or hesitancy, was the right road ahead. "We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent upon the well-being of other nations, far away ... We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that 'the only way to have a friend is to be one'."

As George W. Bush begins his second term this week, he finds himself pursuing causes Roosevelt defined as quintessentially American: the spread, by force if necessary, of democracy abroad and the management of a complex federal government at home. A history major at Yale and a reader of serious popular biographies (from James MacGregor Burns to Michael Beschloss to William Manchester), Bush enjoys emblems and themes from the past. There are busts of Churchill and Eisenhower and portraits of Washington and Lincoln in his Oval Office; Bush particularly likes to refer to the bronze Churchill, evoking the prime minister as the archetypal soldier of steel. "He knew what he believed," Bush has said of Churchill, "and he really kind of went after it in a way that seemed liked a Texan to me."

He went after it. With his swaggering syntax, Bush is talking about leadership, about the way in which great men define the direction of the age and then mobilize others to follow until the race is done. The president likes boldness; the question for history, naturally, will be whether his bold course leaves us better off than we would have been if we had taken a different path.

Leadership is one of those words that make some people feel the way Justice Potter Stewart did when he weighed the term "pornography": he knew it when he saw it. It is true that masterstrokes are often not seen as such until long afterward, and that winning strategies—no matter how thin the margin of victory—are hailed as works of genius even if they very nearly fail. After reading a profile in which an aide of his was described as "coruscatingly brilliant," John Kennedy remarked, "Those guys should never forget, 50,000 votes the other way and we'd all be coruscatingly stupid."...

Posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2005 at 1:49 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Thurston Clarke: Why JFK's Inaugural Succeeded

Thurston Clarke, in the NYT (1-15-05):

[Thurston Clarke is the author, most recently, of "Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America."]

AMERICANS watching John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration on television saw a scene worthy of Currier & Ives. The marble facade of the Capitol gleamed in the sun, dignitaries wore top hats and dark overcoats and the cold air turned Kennedy's breath into white clouds. When he said, "Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation," his words actually appeared to be going forth into the exhilarating air.

No one knew that Kennedy was wearing long underwear so he could remove his topcoat and appear youthful and energetic, or that he had received months of tutoring from a speech coach, or that there was so much animosity among the platform's dignitaries that if grudges had weight, the entire contraption would have collapsed. No one suspected that Cardinal Richard Cushing had slowed his invocation because he believed that smoke wafting from beneath the podium came from a smoldering bomb meant for Kennedy, and he wanted to absorb the blast himself. (It was actually a short circuit.) No one knew that as Cushing droned on, Kennedy was probably improving his address in his mind. (He would make 32 alterations to the reading copy of his inaugural address as he spoke.)

Praise for his inaugural address came from across the political spectrum - Barry Goldwater said, "God, I'd like to be able to do what that boy did there" - and was so extravagant it seems hard to believe the nation was even more divided than it is today. Kennedy had won the 1960 election with only 49.7 percent of the popular vote, yet a Gallup poll taken soon after his inauguration showed him with an approval rating of 72 percent. His own pollster, Lou Harris, put it at an astounding 92 percent. Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, perhaps hoping for similar ratings, have paraphrased lines from Kennedy's speech in their own inaugural addresses.

The most recent offender was George W. Bush, who in 2001 translated "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country" into "What you do is as important as anything government does. I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort; to defend needed reforms against easy attacks; to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor."

Kennedy's imitators have failed to appreciate that the words in his address were only part of its magic. There was also the brilliant weather, Jackie Kennedy's wardrobe, Robert Frost's poem and a president-elect who had devoted almost as much attention to his appearance as his words - darkening his tan in Palm Beach, and fussing over the cut of his suit and the arrangement of dignitaries on the platform.

They have failed to appreciate something else, something that is nearly impossible to replicate. It was Kennedy's life - and his close calls with death - that gave the speech its power and urgency. Those who study the speech would do well to pay less attention to the words and more attention to how he wrote the speech and to the relationship between its words and Kennedy's character and experience....

Posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2005 at 1:28 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Eric Hobsbawm: The Great Need Now for Marxist Interpretations of History

Eric Hobsbawm, in the Guardian (1-15-05):

"The philosophers so far have only interpreted the world: the point is to change it." Marxist history has developed along parallel lines, corresponding to the two halves of Marx's famous thesis. Most intellectuals who became Marxists from the 1880s on, including historians, did so because they wanted to change the world in association with the labour and socialist movements. This motivation remained strong until the 1970s, before a massive political and ideological reaction against Marxism began. Its main effect has been to destroy the belief that the success of a particular way of organising human societies can be predicted and assisted by historical analysis.

Meanwhile what of "interpreting the world"? Here the story is about a double movement. This challenged the positivist belief that the objective structure of reality was self-explanatory - all that was needed was to apply the methodology of science to it. At the same time, it was a movement to bring history closer to the social sciences, and turn it into part of a generalising discipline capable of explaining the transformations of human society. History was to be about "asking the big 'why' questions".

Marxism contributed to both these movements - though it has been mistakenly attacked for an alleged blind objectivism. But the most familiar impact of Marxist ideas, the stress on economic and social factors, was not specifically Marxist; it was part of a general historiographical movement which was to reach its peak in the 1950s and 1960s.

The historical interests of most Marxist historians were not so much in the base - the economic infrastructure - as in the relations of base and superstructure. This socio-economic current was wider than Marxism. These historical modernisers asked the same questions and saw themselves as engaged in the same intellectual battles, whether inspired by human geography, Weberian sociology or the Marxism of the communist historians who became carriers of historical modernisation in Britain.

They all saw each other as allies against historiographical conservatism, even when they represented mutually hostile positions. This front of progress advanced from the second world war to the 1970s. There followed a transition from quantitative to qualitative studies, from macro- to micro-history, from structural analysis to narrative, from the social to the cultural.

Since that time the modernising coalition has been on the defensive. And yet the need to insist on what Marxism can bring to historiography is greater than for a long time. History needs to be defended against those who deny its capacity to help us understand the world, and because new developments in the sciences have transformed the historiographical agenda.

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Posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2005 at 12:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

The Human Condition after Hiroshima:

Roger Pulvers, in Japan Focus (January 2005):

[Roger Pulvers is an American-born Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He translated all the Japanese writings quoted in the five-part Japan Times series "Revealing the Japanese Sensibility," that included the present article. A collection of his fiction and nonfiction writings, "Half and More," will be published by Shinchosha in 2005.]

What could be said for the human being after Nanking, Dresden, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Whatever the motivation, this is what we did to each other, and continue to do to this very hour. How can a writer write about goodness when people of all nations, autocratic or democratic, take up murder and torture with the same eager sense of merriment that they do an innocuous hobby?

For the postwar writer the dilemma was plain. How can you create a positive character who is motivated by both a clear knowledge of innate human cruelty and an unfaltering loving kindness? Given the real world, the only hero appears to be an anti-hero; the only emperor is the emperor of the oven.

Postwar Japanese literature produced a stunning variety of novelists, from Mishima Yukio to Murakami Haruki, from Ooka Shohei to Nakagami Kenji, and many more of brilliance. Their work is distinguished by a truth to human nature, with our offensive blemishes on display for all the world to see. They are influenced, to a greater or lesser degree, by the catastrophic defeat of Japan in its war of aggression, and strive to come to terms with it in a good part of their literature.

But one author stands out as being in a class by himself: Inoue Hisashi. He, too, has been deeply affected by the war's aftermath, but his method of overcoming the grief has been somewhat different from his contemporaries.

My interest in his work began when, more than 30 years ago, I saw his 1971 play "Dogen no Boken (The Adventures of Dogen)," a witty and satirical portrayal of the Kamakura Period (1192-1333) Zen monk, Dogen. I was attracted, like all of his fans, to his ingenious use of language, his cutting humor and perhaps more than anything -- to use a word that now seems most out of fashion -- his humanism.

Inoue was known then primarily as a popular writer of humorous fiction and as the most clever player on words in contemporary literature and theater. His fantasy novel of 1970, "Bun to Fun (Boon & Phoon)," about the ups and downs in the career of a no-hope writer whose characters come to life, has sold more than two million copies to date. He is also one of the few Japanese novelists who has created a full-blown, warts-and-all portrait of a non-Japanese, in his hilarious and sympathetic 1972 portrait of a French priest, "Mokkinpotto no Atoshimatsu (The Fortunes of Father Mockinpott)."

But what makes Inoue's literature stand out is not his humor or his clearly cosmopolitan sensibility. It is the essential humanity, an endearing humanity, that his characters possess. Even the evildoers in his prose and drama -- be they thief, imposter or vengeful solider -- display the kind of redeeming features that virtually all other authors, East or West, are loath to give them. The result is that the essential humanity (read that as goodness) of these characters rubs off on us all.

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Posted on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 at 11:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Best and the Worst of Inaugural Addresses

Bob Dart, for the Cox News Service (1-16-05):

The best have spawned the phrases that defined an American president for the ages.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all ..."

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself ..."

"Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country."

When President Bush delivers his second inaugural address on Thursday, his words may abide in textbooks for centuries to come. Or, as with such speeches by most presidents, his sentences may sink in history's cesspool of cliche and boilerplate.

Rarely have inaugural addresses ascended to greatness, historians agree.

"Inaugurations are heralded events but rhetorically disappointing," said Richard Vatz, a professor of political rhetoric at Towsend University in Maryland. "The historian Arthur Schlesinger called inaugural addresses 'an inferior art form with a high platitude quotient.' That is obviously true."

"There are only three or four that would merit book length treatment" by future historians, said Stephen Browne, a Penn State professor who wrote one of those books himself, "Thomas Jefferson's Call to Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address."

"Certainly Jefferson's, Lincoln's, JFK's are amongst the top three or four," said Browne. But while few have been memorable, he said, and only a merciful handful have been "resoundingly bad."

In this era of TV sound bites, communications consultants and speechwriting by committee, a safe formula has evolved that that most presidents follow in their inaugural addresses.

"Now you could switch George W's with Clinton's and there wouldn't be a lot of difference," said Browne.

Modern inaugural speeches are invariably upbeat and generalized while touching on the issues of the day. Presidents of both parties call for post-election healing and promise bipartisan cooperation. Humor is rarely attempted. "Renewal" is an oft-used theme. Ever since John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" and Lyndon Baines Johnson's "Great Society," presidents have sought similar catch phrases of their own.

"Jimmy Carter tried to coin the 'New Spirit' and it never went anywhere," recalled Vatz. "Nixon tried a 'Driving Dream.' George Bush senior had the 'New Breeze.' Clinton's was the 'New Covenant.' None of those seemed to last. But everybody likes 'renewal.' "

For good or bad, at least parts of several inaugural addresses have survived the decades.

George Washington's second inaugural address is historic in its brevity -- four sentences. One was this encompassing promise: "This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony."

Jefferson's first inaugural address came at the conclusion of a bitter political campaign. That presidential race "was notable for anger and mudslinging, personal attacks, skullduggery" and modern campaigns are wimps in comparison, said Browne. Many thought the incoming president would continue the partisanship in his inaugural speech. Instead, Browne said, Jefferson "set the benchmark for all future presidents."

Since 1801, the speeches all "make sure the inaugural unites rather than divides," said Browne. "We can thank Jefferson for that."

"Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle,"

Jefferson noted at his first inaugural. "We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists."

Historic speeches sometimes spring from historic times. Bracketing the Civil War, both of Lincoln's inaugural addresses are rated by historians as among the best....

Posted on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 at 9:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Are There too Many Historians?

From the newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education (1-14-05):

A glance at the current issue of "Historically Speaking": The professionalization of history

The field of history suffers from "mass professionalization," Bruce Kuklick, a professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in the lead essay in "The American Historical Profession in the 21st Century: an Exchange," a section based on papers presented at the Historical Society's 2004 conference.

Too many people have doctorates in history, and there are not enough jobs in higher education to accommodate them, Mr. Kuklick says. The result is "a growing helot class of non-standing faculty, exploited and underpaid."

Publication has traditionally been the way for scholars to distinguish themselves from the pack, he writes, but the staggering number of journals and books being published now makes it "more difficult for scholars to publish their way 'out' or 'up.'" There is too much material for most scholars to keep track of what is out there, he says, much less evaluate what is especially good.

"In the old days," he argues, "standards may have been narrow and determined by a group of old white males who successfully passed on their rigidities. But at least one knew who to read, and the number of historians was limited enough so that supply did not so entirely exceed one's ability to consume."

In a response to Mr. Kuklick's essay, Marc Trachtenberg, a professor of political science at the University of California at Los Angeles, is less troubled by the volume of publications available. "The more basic problem," he says, "is that I would not want to read much of it, no matter how much time I had."

And in another response, Leo P. Ribuffo, a professor of history at George Washington University, says: "Ain't it awful? You bet. It always is."

The essays are online at http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/septemberoctober04.html#profession

Posted on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 at 7:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Steven Ozment: Courses in Western Civ Are an Antidote to Contemporary Narcissism

From the newsletter of the Chronicle of Higher Education (1-17-05):

A glance at the winter issue of "The Public Interest": Defending Western Civ

It may smack of the old school, but the Western Civ survey course still fills a serious void in undergraduate history education, says Steven Ozment, a professor of ancient and modern history at Harvard University.

Western Civ, Mr. Ozment says, is a time-tested antidote to what he perceives as a reigning, narcissistic absorption with all things contemporary.

"For the reading public," he writes, "the study of the past often seems a search for forerunners and blockers of modernity, a parade of people, ideas, and crises either lauded for having prepared the way to truths we hold to be self-evident, or excoriated for having opposed them -- history as self-confirmation."

"The great strength of the Western Civ survey within the history curriculum," he continues, "is that it reads history chronologically forward, not backwards from a commanding latter-day event or popular modern theory, a strength that may excuse its sometimes plodding narrative."

That Western Civ traces a timeline that begins and ends with Europe is not so much an assertion of cultural superiority, Mr. Ozment says, as it is a concession to the practical limits of constructing a coherent historical narrative. By contrast, the latter-day alternatives to Western Civ, which Mr. Ozment identifies as "World Civ" and "Global Civ," often stretch narratives past their breaking point.

"If Western Civ is Eurocentric, World Civ and Global Civ seem to have no defining center at all," he writes. "And if World Civ and Global Civ are more inclusive, they are also far more elusive."

The article, "Why We Study Western Civ," is not online. Information about the journal is available at http://www.thepublicinterest.com

Posted on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 at 6:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ancient Astronomical Atlas Unveiled

Dan Vergano, USA TODAY, 1/12/05

An ancient star atlas lost for centuries and a cutting-edge atlas of the modern universe were unveiled Tuesday by scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting.

Hidden in plain sight for centuries, the star atlas was found on a statue in Italy's National Museum of Archaeology in Naples. Called the Farnese Atlas, the 7-foot-tall marble statue depicts one of the titans of Greek mythology, Atlas, holding a 2-foot-wide globe on his shoulders. The sphere is covered with 41 star constellations, from Aries the Ram to Andromeda.

"Here we have a real case where lost, ancient wisdom has been found," says astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Inscribed on the Farnese Atlas, he reports, is the lost star catalogue of Hipparchus, one of the great Greek astronomers who lived around 140 B.C. on the island of Rhodes. No copies of the atlas, a standard reference for ancient astronomers, exist today.

But the star positions on the statue date to 150 B.C., give or take 55 years, and match those mentioned in a surviving book of commentary by Hipparchus, Schaefer says.

The link between the statue and Hipparchus was suspected by art historians. But Schaefer was the first to precisely plot the constellations on the stone globe. "It's amazing what (Schaefer) has done," Harvard science historian Owen Gingerich says.

On the modern front, two sky survey teams reveal they have seen the imprint of sound waves left over from the Big Bang in the arrangement of galaxies in today's universe. The findings match patterns reported in 2003 by other scientists studying the so-called cosmic microwave radiation, heat left over from 350,000 years after the universe's birth 13.7 billion years ago:

* In a survey of 46,000 galaxies spread across 10% of the sky, Sloan Digital Sky Survey scientists report that many galaxies are 500 million light-years apart, as predicted by the 2003 findings.

* In a separate map of 220,000 galaxies, a team of British and Australian scientists reports that only 18% of the matter in galaxies is normal matter, the stuff of stars, planets and people. The rest, as predicted, appears to be "dark matter," a more exotic accumulation of physics particles found in haloes around galaxies.

The results paint a picture of the universe coalescing out of the Big Bang, cooling and spreading into galaxies whose structure was determined by sound waves reverberating in the cosmic fireball.

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 2:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Assessment Of Britain's New FOIA And Academic/Historical Research

John Crace, The Guardian (London), 1/11/05

On the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, while half the country was asleep and the other half might just as well have been, Britain could finally claim to be a fully paid-up member of the world's democracies. After years of campaigning by pressure groups - not to mention governmental procrastination - the UK joined more than 100 other countries in allowing public access to some official records as its new Freedom of Information Act came into effect.

The Campaign for Freedom of Information had been working towards this moment for more than 20 years, and its director, Maurice Frankel, was understandably upbeat about the act. "The new rights will help people ensure they are being treated fairly, learn whether they are being exposed to hazards, check that public authorities are doing their job and give people a better chance of influencing decisions," he said. "They should also lead to more honesty in government. Giving the public the right to see the documents will make it harder for authorities to conceal substandard performance or get away with spin or misleading accounts of what they are doing."

There were some caveats, though. In the run-up to January 1 there were fears that government departments were indulging in some ruthless housekeeping by shredding awkward documents, which only exacerbated existing concerns that ministers were going to extend the right to non-disclosure from the legitimate aims of protecting national security, law enforcement and international relations to include protecting reputations and hiding cock-ups. "The legislation's most contentious feature is a ministerial veto, allowing cabinet ministers to override the Information Commissioner if he orders a government department to release information on public interest grounds," Frankel continued. "No one is putting any bets on ministers being able to resist its use where politically damaging information is at stake."

Discovering the really interesting information will largely depend on knowing what questions to ask. The general public might struggle here, but if anyone should know where the bodies are buried it's an academic. Peter Hennessy's postgraduate students have formed a Freedom of Information hit-squad to target documents from the late 70's - on the grounds that the government is likely to care less about their discolosure than about papers from more recent times - but it's fair to say there hasn't exactly been a stampede of researchers rushing to the post office to send off their requests to Whitehall. With more than four years to prepare for the implementation of the act, even the doziest researcher can hardly complain he or she was caught on the hop, so could it just be there may be not as much hidden treasure as one might imagine?

Anyone anticipating a similar deluge of information to that uncovered in the former Soviet bloc countries in the early 1990s is likely to be disappointed. For one thing, many records only ever existed in the minds of conspiracy theorists, and for another, the Major government had already released some 80,000 restricted cold war files in 1992 under the Waldegrave "open government" initiative. And the picture that emerged was not necessarily the one expected.

"The documents revealed a great deal about espionage in the cold war era, together with information on how and why the H-bomb was built," says Peter Hennessy, Attlee professor of contemporary history at Queen Mary College, University of London, who spent five years wading through the archive for his book, The Secret State. "But perhaps the most interesting aspect has been Britain's retaliation procedures in the event of nuclear war.

"The British went out of their way to avoid confrontation. The guardians of the secret state are often portrayed as gung-ho rightwingers, but that view is quite wrong. Here they are revealed as thoroughly British good chaps, practising self-restraint. They didn't want to follow the American McCarthyist route: rather they tried to preserve due process and civil liberties."

This is not something that could be said of the Blair government, with its indefinite imprisonment without trial for terrorist suspects and the planned introduction of ID cards. Campaigners for freedom of information - including this newspaper - have applied for the attorney general's opinion on the legality of the second Gulf war to be made public, but no one seriously expects the government to acquiesce on this or other sensitive issues.

Despite the trail of emails that have plagued the government - Jo Moore, the Butler inquiry and the Blunkett affair - many academics believe that governments are becoming increasingly wary of committing any evidence to paper or hard drive. "Most of the key discussions take place in informal meetings in Tony Blair's den before cabinet," says Anthony Seldon, headteacher of Brighton College and author of a bestselling biography of the prime minister. "All the important decisions on the Iraq war were taken in this way; cabinet merely rubber-stamped them. So even if the papers were released, they wouldn't tell us very much because they would be so bland as to be virtually worthless."

This may be less of an interference to scholarship than might be imagined. "Newspapers always make a big deal about information released under the 30-year rule," Seldon continues, "but the reality is that we rarely learn anything we didn't know already. All the important papers on Suez, the International Monetary Fund and the Falklands have just confirmed what we really knew already. This is useful for dotting the is and crossing the ts and for providing precise quotations, but it doesn't lead to a fundamental reassessment of our recent history."

Seldon maintains that interview technique is now more important for the modern historian than familiarity with the byways of the archives. "We live in a more confessional age," he says. "Politicians and civil servants may not want to be held to account by a written document, but they are still happy to confide in someone they trust. Not everyone is always happy with the way decisions are reached and so the truth has a way of leaking out. People are far more indiscreet these days, so government secrets tend to become public knowledge within days or weeks rather than months or years."

Greg Philo, director of the Glasgow Media Group at Glasgow University, confirms this trend. "People have realised how email has made it difficult to control the flow of information," he says, "so all the important evidence is now to be gained from conversations with the people involved. What we really need to know is not what decision was reached, as that is usually obvious, but who was paying for what and whose interests were being appeased, and this kind of information will never appear in the official records.

"We got an excellent insight into this when researching food scares prior to the BSE inquiry. Many scientists were bound by confidentiality clauses but said they had decided to no longer eat beef. This was before the sale of beef was banned, so we had a clear picture that something was wrong long before the government decided to act.

"Hard as they might try, governments can no longer totally control what information is made public. Everyone is much more cynical and disenchanted with the political process than they were 30 years ago, and the culture of deference and confidentiality has all but disappeared. When we first published our book Bad News, in 1976, everyone thought it was outrageous that we should be so critical of the BBC. Now everyone takes such comments for granted and the BBC has even asked us to help out with their own staff training."

Not that there aren't pieces of information that academics would dearly love to get their hands on. "For some years now, I've been trying to find out the government's plans for handling food insecurity during times of war," says Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University. "Each time I've been gently rebuffed. I'm happy to have another go under the new act, but I'm not expecting a different outcome."

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 2:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturn V Rocket On Display

Guy Gugliotta, The Washington Post, 1/10/05

The tests are the stuff of legend: Towns complaining to NASA because of the noise. Seismographs quivering hundreds of miles away. China cabinets disgorging their contents when all five first-stage engines fired at once.

You remember Saturn V. Maybe. If you're old enough. It was the Babe Ruth of rockets, bigger than life and way cool, a teeth-rattling, jaw-dropping, 363-foot, fire-breathing behemoth that could shoot three guys -- always guys -- at the moon and hit the target every time.

More than 31 years have passed since Saturn V last flew, but the legend lives on -- in decals, shoulder patches, stickers, photographs, videos, Web sites, scale models and stories that people tell their grandchildren. Even today, Saturn V symbolizes the pinnacle of U.S. space exploration.

But until relatively recently, retirement has not been kind. Saturn V's are enormous, awkward and not built for life on Earth, and while NASA installations quickly claimed the leftover rockets, they didn't care for them. The carcasses -- sun-bleached, moldy, rained-on and spattered with bird-droppings -- lay neglected for decades.

Times, however, are changing. The Kennedy Space Center has its own Saturn V museum, and plans are underway to move the two other remaining Saturn V's indoors and restore them. Creative thinking, a Clinton-era preservation fund and old-fashioned guilt are finally giving America's greatest rocket its due.

"Saturn V is a key artifact of the space race. If you wanted to pick one object to describe the era, that would be it," says Allan A. Needell, manned spaceflight curator at the Smithsonian Institution's Air and Space Museum. "I don't think you can overestimate its importance. There will never be anything like it again."

That's for sure. Giants always leave a mark, and Saturn V's footprints linger everywhere in its former habitat.

The visitors' complex outside the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., uses a life-size steel replica of Saturn V as a roadside teaser, and Marshall engineers talk rocket science around the beat-up conference table where Wernher von Braun and his colleagues met to design Saturn V.

At Florida's Kennedy Space Center, NASA still uses Saturn V's gargantuan Vehicle Assembly Building to "stack" rockets before a launch, even though the space shuttle barely fills half the assembly bay. And anybody at Kennedy who wants to watch a launch still has to stay three miles away -- the "fragmentation radius" in case a Saturn V blew up on the pad. It never happened.

And finally at Houston's Johnson Space Center, where NASA plans shuttle flights and trains astronauts, it is the Saturn V that holds the position of honor just inside the gate on the way to Mission Control. Saturn Lane is the main entry to the center.

The Johnson center, under Needell's oversight, has begun building a shelter around its Saturn V to get it inside for the first time in a quarter-century, the prelude to a museum-quality restoration. Needell expects the shelter to be finished and the rocket's structural damage to be repaired by the end of June.

This project is supposed to be the last word in Saturn V's, but the other centers are doing their best to match it. In fact, each has legitimate claims either to the uniqueness of its rocket or the distinctiveness of its exhibit. Where neglect once defined the treatment of the Saturn V, NASA now has dueling displays.

Marshall's Saturn V lies in the visitors' center backyard behind the glossy dummy, but the center will break ground on a new exhibition hall this spring. This Saturn V is the only one that has been together since birth, "the last actual vehicle," says Al Whitaker, spokesman for the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. "The others are made of components that had to be reassembled."

But Needell, a Johnson advocate, points out that Marshall's Saturn V was a test pad rocket, while Johnson's is composed "completely of stages that were intended to go to the moon" -- including unused service and command modules.

The Kennedy Center rocket is a mixture -- a test vehicle first stage and a mock-up service-command combo (the parts that orbited the moon and returned to Earth), Needell notes. And besides, he adds, the restoration in Florida is only "cosmetic," and parts of it will probably have to be redone.

Fair enough, but there are a couple of things to know about Kennedy's Saturn V. Although it spent 20 years lying derelict outside the Vehicle Assembly Building while lesser rockets were wheeled past it, it's inside now, and unlike the others, the exhibit is a done deal.

And the rocket looks terrific -- painted, carefully tooled and turned out in a building constructed especially for it next to a slice of wetland hard by Florida's Atlantic coast. (There's a real command-service module on the museum floor.) Johnson and Marshall may have better hardware, but only Kennedy -- so far -- has actually built the temple.

"I always try to bring people in this way, so they can see the engines," says Matt Slipkowski, of Delaware North Parks Services, the company that runs the Kennedy visitors' center. "It's really impressive." This, from someone who was born after Saturn V made its last flight.

The rocket lies on its side, with five tailpipe nozzles protruding from the bottom of the first stage's 33-foot diameter. The rest of the rocket, divided in pieces, disappears into the depths of a cavernous enclosure festooned with banners commemorating Apollo flights, and flanked by exhibit rooms and even a cafeteria.

Visitors get a taste of what the Saturn V was like in an auditorium where they can watch a movie of Apollo 8 taking off on Dec. 21, 1968. Lights flash on the mock mission control consoles and the windows shake as the rocket lifts off the pad.

It's pretty good, and astronaut James Lovell is charming doing the narration, but seeing the launch in a film retrospective doesn't quite illustrate it.

"The amount of energy at launch was not unlike the shuttle, but the Saturn was much taller and more visible," says Hal Row, a consultant to the Kennedy visitor complex. "It made the Earth rumble." The real thing, fully fueled and ready on the launch pad, stood as tall as a 36-story building and weighed 6.1 million pounds. The five first-stage engines generated 7.5 million pounds of thrust. Today's space shuttle, including solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank, weighs 4.5 million pounds. Nothing else has even come close.

And the Saturn V "was a great ride," adds astronaut John W. Young, the first person to fly in space six times, including two Apollo moon missions on Saturn V's. "It's putting out a lot of thrust, but it's so heavy you don't pull that many G's. The second stage is smooth as glass."

Saturn V came about directly as a result of President John F. Kennedy's 1961 call to catch and surpass the Soviet Union in space exploits and land a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

[Editor's Note: The original piece is much longer; please see the Washington Post for more.]

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Exceedingly Rare U.S. Coin Back On Display At Federal Reserve In NYC

Glenn Collins, The New York Times, 1/10/05

Until last week, the world's most expensive coin was hidden in the world's most valuable gold vault.

That is to say, in the brilliantly lighted blue-and-white stronghold of E Level, the deepest sanctuary of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the city's bank of banks.

The coin was locked in a compartment at bedrock, 80 feet below Liberty Street in Lower Manhattan, surrounded by $90 billion worth of gold bars -- some 550,000 of them -- from 60 foreign institutions. That is more gold than at Fort Knox, and indeed, more than in any other repository.

This exceedingly rare United States $20 gold piece, the $7.59 million 1933 double eagle, will be placed on public display today in the ground-floor exhibition space of the Fed's massive iron-barred neo-Florentine fortress of a building at 33 Liberty Street.

For more than a year the double eagle had been on view there in a free exhibition, ''Drachmas, Doubloons and Dollars: The History of Money.'' But in August the coin was spirited to the subbasement after a sudden Orange Alert from the Department of Homeland Security, which warned of ''casing and surveillance activities'' against major United States financial institutions.

For the double eagle's return from the underworld, The New York Times was granted rare permission to enter the vault on a recent morning as the coin was transferred, after agreeing not to describe the bank's security arrangements or print the names of its subterranean guardians.

Among those present were: three federal officers with automatic weapons. The archivist of the bank. A senior vice president of the bank. The head of the American Numismatic Society. The coin owner's representative. The coin's historian. A vault keeper. An auditor. A custodian. And yes, the two carpenters who actually did the work.

This, then, was the retinue monitoring the transport of the double eagle, a 34-millimeter-wide, 0.96-ounce stamped disk that is 90 percent gold and 10 percent copper. The length of the journey was but five floors: from the vault to the street-level exhibition space.

The coin-storage compartment -- itself guarded by multiple locks -- was adorned with a fragile paper seal, ''just as I left it on Aug. 2,'' said Rosemary Lazenby, the bank's archivist. ''Afterward, we kept it down here for the Republican convention, and then there was the election.''

The doors swung open. The coin winked smartly in the light, along with 11 other rare specimens from the exhibition that had been mounted on a plexiglass display panel. Immediately there were inspections by Ms. Lazenby, the auditors and David Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's, the auction house where the coin was sold for a record price on July 30, 2002. He represents the coin's still-anonymous owner whenever it is moved.

Also scrutinizing the treasures was Ute Wartenberg Kagan, executive director of the American Numismatic Society, which is the co-sponsor of the exhibition, along with the Federal Reserve.

Two carpenters, Cosimo Marolla and Joseph Palus, lifted the coin into a shiny rubber-wheeled steel cart and began trundling it along the dented vault floor. (The dents are from gold bars that were inadvertently dropped by vault wranglers in the decades since the building was completed in 1924. These days, handlers wear steel-toed shoes plus $500 magnesium shoe covers to protect feet from accidentally plummeting 27-pound ingots.)

Soon, then, members of the coin posse began watching the double eagle (and each other) as it was transported in the vault elevator up to the bank's exhibition level.

There, Mr. Marolla and Mr. Palus buffed the inch-thick mounting panel with Precision Glass Cleaner, and hoisted the coins into the hyper-secure centerpiece vitrine in the exhibition room. The total value of the 12 rare coins within -- estimated from $15 million to $25 million -- makes it, said Dr. Wartenberg Kagan, ''without doubt the most valuable coin case in the world.''

An hour and a half after the vault seal was broken, the coin was reinstalled, to be displayed indefinitely. ''It's good to see it returned to its home,'' Ms. Lazenby said of the double eagle, which is on long-term loan to the Fed. The $7.59 million price of the double eagle, which included a 15 percent commission to the auctioneers, ''is the record for a United States coin,'' said Beth Deisher, editor of Coin World, the largest weekly coin publication, in a telephone interview from her office in Ohio.

But the double eagle is on display not only because of its record price -- twice the previous record for any coin -- but also for its Maltese Falconesque history.

The coin's story only recently came to light thanks to documents unearthed during a five-year legal battle over its ownership. At the suggestion of President Theodore Roosevelt, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens designed the coin, called a double eagle because its face value was twice that of a $10 gold piece bearing the depiction of an eagle. It was first minted in 1907.

When the United States came off the gold standard in 1933, all the double eagles manufactured that year were ordered destroyed, save for two reserved for the Smithsonian Institution. None were declared legal currency.

But presumably after being stolen by a mint employee, one of the 1933 coins was believed to have been conveyed to the legendary coin collection of King Farouk of Egypt -- legally, thanks to a United States Treasury export license that had been mistakenly granted. Ultimately a 1933 double eagle came into the possession of a London dealer, who was arrested by Secret Service agents in a sting operation while trying to sell the coin in Manhattan in 1996.

A bitter court battle -- over whether the coin could be legally owned, thanks to the Treasury's export-license blunder -- was at last resolved in a compromise when the mint declared the coin to be the only 1933 double eagle ever to be legally issued by the United States. The proceeds from its auction were then split between the dealer and the government.

There may be other 1933 double eagles that have never come to light, said David Tripp, a rare-coin consultant who wrote the original Sotheby's exhibition catalogue as well as the definitive history of the coin, ''Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle'' (Free Press, 2004). But the one on display at the Federal Reserve ''is the only one that is legal to own,'' said Mr. Tripp, who was present at the bank during the unsealing.

Coin-collecting gossips have ceaselessly speculated about the identity of the double eagle owner, nicknamed Mr. Big by auction buffs.

''We know of no one in the coin world that the owner has talked with,'' said Ms. Deisher. ''We have put out teasers to the owner that we'd love to interview him or her, but we haven't been contacted.''

By permitting the coin to be publicly displayed, Ms. Deisher said, ''clearly the owner is generous and thoughtful, and has a sense of history and wants to share it with the public.'' But it is also smart of the owner to entrust the coin's security to the full might of the federal government, she said. The closest anyone has come to making off with gold from the New York Fed were the fictional villains in the 1995 action film ''Die Hard With a Vengeance.'' They were, naturally, foiled by Bruce Willis.

''If the double eagle is the Mona Lisa of coins,'' Ms. Deisher added, ''then the analogy is public display in the Louvre. That keeps the painting before the public eye, and helps give it the value that it has.''

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Burndy Library/Dibner Institute Of MIT May Move To Pittsburgh

Bill Schackner, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania), 1/9/05

Pittsburgh is a leading candidate to land a library and institute now located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that would bring to this city one of the nation's pre-eminent collections on the history of science and technology.

The 50,000 rare books, 30,000 secondary titles and assorted other materials include one of the world's three greatest assemblages of works by and about Sir Isaac Newton. They are contained in the Burndy Library, which is weighing a move to another city now that an agreement that has kept it on MIT's Cambridge, Mass., campus since 1992 will end in August 2007.

The Burndy and an affiliated research institute need two years to plan their relocation.

Pittsburgh has emerged as a possible new home, partly because of academic and library programs available at the University of Pittsburgh and neighboring Carnegie Mellon University. Other sites being considered are Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Indiana University in Bloomington, Ind., and a consortium of universities in Philadelphia.

Affiliated with the Burndy is the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, an international center for advanced scientific research. It sponsors graduate fellowships and hosts symposiums and other gatherings open to scholars worldwide.

The two Pittsburgh campuses, led by Pitt, are preparing a joint proposal, spurred not only by the collection but also by the Dibner Institute's potential as a magnet for scholars working in fields for which Pittsburgh has become known.

"We are already the No. 1 place in the world for the philosophy of science," said Pitt Provost James Maher. "We are one of the very leading places in the world on the history of science and technology.

"This would bring history of technology in Pittsburgh up to a prominence that we already occupy in philosophy of science. That would be quite a prestigious thing for both universities," he said.

Maher said discussions were very preliminary, adding, "I can't say a lot."

Campuses competing to host the library and institute will be evaluated on various factors such as quality and vibrancy of programs, commitment to supporting and finding adequate space for the institutions, and the manner in which they will be integrated into campus offerings

The Burndy Library was established in 1941 to accommodate holdings of the late Bern Dibner, a wealthy Ukrainian-born engineer, author and philanthropist whose fascination with Leonardo da Vinci spurred him to become an avid collector. The various items Dibner amassed, including manuscripts and artifacts like early microscopes, are rivaled by only a couple of other collections in the United States, said Ronald Brashear head of special collections at the Smithsonian Libraries, part of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

To mark America's bicentennial, Dibner donated a quarter of the Burndy's holdings in 1974 to the Smithsonian, which maintains a library in his name, Brashear said. The rest of the Burndy, then located in Norwalk, Conn., later moved to MIT.

"There aren't that many collections, not that size and scale that cover the wide breadth and also have a research component," said Brashear, who also is curator of the Smithsonian's Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology.

[Editor's Note: The original piece is much longer; please see the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for more.]

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Pope Pius XII And The Saving Of Jewish Children

Elaine Sciolino and Jason Horowitz, The New York Times, 1/9/05

In October 1946, just a year after the defeat of the Nazis, the Vatican weighed in on one of the most painful episodes of the postwar era: the refusal to allow Jewish children who had been sheltered by Catholics during the war to return to their own families and communities.

A newly disclosed directive on the this subject provides written confirmation of well-known church policy and practices at the time, particularly toward Jewish children who had been baptized, often to save them from perishing at the hands of the Nazis. Its tone is cold and impersonal, and it makes no mention of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Its disclosure has reopened a raw debate on the World War II role of the Catholic Church and of Pope Pius XII, a candidate for sainthood who has been excoriated by his critics as a heartless anti-Semite who maintained a public silence on the Nazi death camps and praised by his supporters as a savior of Jewish lives.

The one-page, typewritten directive, dated Oct. 23, 1946, was discovered in a French church archive outside Paris and made available to The New York Times on the condition that the source would not be disclosed. It is a list of instructions for French authorities on how to deal with demands from Jewish officials who want to reclaim Jewish children.

''Children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions that would not be in a position to guarantee their Christian upbringing,'' the directive says.

It also contains an order not to allow Jewish children who had been baptized Catholic to go home to their own parents. ''If the children have been turned over by their parents, and if the parents reclaim them now, providing that the children have not received baptism, they can be given back,'' it says.

Even Jewish orphans who had not been baptized Catholic were not to be turned over automatically to Jewish authorities. ''For children who no longer have their parents, given the fact that the church has responsibility for them, it is not acceptable for them to be abandoned by the church or entrusted to any persons who have no rights over them, at least until they are in a position to choose themselves,'' the document says. ''This, obviously, is for children who would not have been baptized.''

The document, written in French and first disclosed last week by the Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera, is unsigned but says, ''It should be noted that this decision taken by the Holy Congregation of the Holy Office has been approved by the Holy Father.''

The publication of the document is likely to embolden those who do not think Pius XII is worthy of becoming a saint. Some prominent Jews and historians have attacked the document for its insensitivity to the Holocaust.

The Rev. Peter Gumpel, a Rome-based Jesuit priest and a leading proponent for the beatification of Pius XII, the first step toward sainthood, said he was convinced that the document did not come from the Vatican. He pointed out that it is not on official Vatican stationery, that it is not signed and that it is written in French, not Italian. ''There is something fishy here,'' he said.

But Etienne Fouilloux, a French historian who is compiling Pope John XXIII's diaries during his years in France, said that the document had been discovered recently in church archives outside of Paris by a serious researcher and that it is genuine. John has been beatified, the last formal step toward sainthood.

At the time, Pope John XXIII was Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, Pope Pius XII'S representative to France. During the war, Monsignor Roncalli was credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews from Nazi persecution by using diplomatic couriers, papal representatives and nuns to issue and deliver baptismal certificates, immigration certificates and visas, many of them forged, to Jews. He also helped gain asylum for Jews in neutral countries.

''This document is indicative of a mind-set at the Vatican that dealt with problems in a legal framework without worrying that there were human beings involved,'' Mr. Fouilloux said. ''It shows that the massacre of Jews was not seen by the Holy See as something of importance.''

He said he would include the document in the next volume of the diaries.

The document underscores the sanctity with which the Vatican treated the sacrament of baptism at the time -- no matter how or why it was administered.

The church's stance that a baptized child is irrevocably Christian was established nearly a century before the Holocaust, when, in 1858, papal guards took Edgardo Mortara, 6, from his family in Bologna when word spread that he had been clandestinely baptized by a Catholic maid. It was relaxed only in the 1960's.

More important, the directive captures the church's failure to grasp the enormous implications of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. ''It shows the very bureaucratic and very icy attitude of the Catholic Church in these types of things.'' said Alberto Melloni, an Italian historian with the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, who is working with Mr. Fouilloux to publish the diaries of Pope John XXIII. He called the tone of the directive ''horrifyingly normal.''

A second document that was also discovered by the French researcher is a letter in July 1946 to Monsignor Roncalli that noted his pledge to intervene to return Jewish-born children to their community and asked for his help to return 30 Jewish-born children living in a Catholic charity.

''Almost two years after the liberation of France, some Israelite children are still in non-Jewish institutions that refuse to give them back to Jewish charities,'' said the letter, which was signed by the Grand Rabbi of France and the head of the Jewish Central Consistory. It added, ''We are in advance, grateful for your help.''

It is not known whether there was a reply.

No reliable figures exist on how many French Jewish children were saved by the church from the Nazis, or affected by its decision to prevent them from rejoining their families and communities after the war. The French Jewish population had limited success in recovering Jewish children who had been adopted by non-Jews.

In the most well-documented case in France, two Jewish boys, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were sent in 1944 by their parents to a Catholic nursery in Grenoble. The parents perished at Auschwitz. Family members tried to get the boys back in 1945, but in part because they had been baptized, it took an additional eight years and a long legal battle to prevail over the church.

''Look, I know that for the church, baptism means the child belongs to the church, you can't undo it,'' said Amos Luzzatto, the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities. ''But given the circumstances they could have made a human decision.''

Mr. Luzzatto described himself as ''speechless'' that the Vatican directive on the children does not mention the Holocaust and questioned the worthiness of Pius XII to be made a saint.

''If they beatify him, don't ask us to applaud,'' he said.

Some corners of the Catholic Church are suspicious that the document, and the ensuing debate that has played out in Italian newspapers, was produced to create obstacles in Pius XII's march toward sainthood.

But Pope John Paul II strongly supports the campaign to make Pius XII a saint, and in February 2003, the Vatican announced the opening of some secret archives to help clear Pius XII's name, although the papers do not deal with his activities as pope.

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:42 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The United Nations: A 60th Birthday Retrospective

Olivia Ward, The Toronto Star, 1/8/05

[Editor's Note: Warning, a longer than normal article.]

Plagued by sluggishness, shortcomings and scandal, the United Nations limps toward its 60th birthday next week with many observers - including key supporters - questioning its effectiveness, and even its survival as a credible insititution.

Most significantly, it is under attack from the country that once was its greatest booster.

"As the U.N. approaches 60, it is getting creaky in its bones," admits former foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, now Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special envoy on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border dispute. "Many of its key institutions were formed in the post-World War II reality of the victors. It's stalemated in terms of decision-making reforms, and hindered in adapting to the new global networks and constellations that exist today."

The U.N.'s current crisis began when the trauma of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks led to increasingly independent military action by Washington.

"In striking contrast to the pragmatic internationalism of F.D.R., Harry Truman, George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower and the leaders that followed them, the ideology of the Bush administration is basically unilateralist, exceptionalist and anti-internationalist," says Sir Brian Urquhart, one of the earliest and most senior members of the world body, and a U.N. historian.

Annan was known as an unusually skilled and pro-Western U.N. leader. But relations with Washington soured when he opposed Bush's decision to invade Iraq without U.N. backing.

Kathy Bushkin, executive vice-president of the United Nations Foundation in Washington, says the months of bitter exchanges between Annan, Bush and United Nations weapons inspectors, dealt a blow to the Secretary-General and the U.N.'s image.

"It created an overhang. There have always been a coterie of U.N.-bashers in the U.S., but it's unfortunate that they have now attacked the most pro-Western and pro-U.S. leader the U.N. has ever had."

Anger against Annan blew up in an explosion of allegations involving the "oil-for-food" program that allowed Saddam Hussein to sell limited amounts of oil in exchange for humanitarian goods during the 1990s international sanctions. Investigating the loss of $20 billion (U.S.) earmarked for impoverished Iraqis, a U.S. senator called for Annan's resignation.

The program was overseen by the U.S. and Britain, which were responsible for vetting its contracts. But the attack on Annan became personal, with allegations that his son, Kojo, was receiving unearned payments from a Swiss former employer that inspected goods eligible to enter Iraq under the program.

The Iraq scandal was damaging, but only the latest of the U.N.'s woes.

It was also hit with allegations that peacekeepers in Congo raped women and young girls, as well as profiting from prostitution rings. Accusations of sexual misconduct had surfaced earlier, in East Timor, Cambodia and the Balkans after wars.

Meanwhile, Annan was forced to reverse a decision to drop a sexual harassment case against a senior refugee official, after protest from U.N. workers.

It was a signal of the discontent that is rife within the U.N.organization. Its staff unions have held non-confidence votes in senior management, and the 2003 bombing of the U.N. compound in Iraq - which resulted in the death of 22 people - led to widespread anger by frontline staff.

Resentment against the U.N. has even spilled over to its host city, New York, which gains $2.5 billion a year from its presence on the East River, and New York's state senate, which blocked a plan to refurbish and expand the aging U.N. complex.

"Criticisms have been absolutely legitimate," says Kathryn White, executive director of the United Nations Association in Canada. "But considering the U.N. is operating with structures left over from 1945, it's amazing it's stayed intact as long as it has. In spite of all the criticisms, it's a table at which nations agree it's important to sit, however imperfect or battered it may be."

Only part of the U.N. is a political organization, experts point out. Its largest role is humanitarian and technical, carried out by its many agencies, from health to development, women's and children's rights, global economic aid, emergency food delivery, refugee aid, environmental protection, trade and international transit. Its Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is the focal point for international response to emergencies such as the Asian tsunami.

"When the horrible calamity of the tsunami strikes, you find that the U.N. is in Jakarta organizing the humanitarian effort," says U.N. Development Program spokesperson Bill Orme.

"It has the ability to bring together the affected countries, individual donors, and the World Bank, which is part of the U.N. system. The world recognizes that the U.N.'s agencies are playing a critical role."

The dimming of faith in an institution that had such bright beginnings has caused some observers to look back at another international body that came into being 85 years ago and was unable to maintain the support that was its lifeblood.

On Jan. 10, 1920, the League of Nations held its first meeting, pledging to reduce arms shipments, oppose wars and settle disputes through negotiation, diplomacy and a better standard of living for the world's poor.

Supported by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson as the best means of preventing future conflicts, it was never endorsed by the American Senate. In spite of some successes, it steadily lost ground with the major powers until it crumbled in the cataclysm of World War II.

But hope for peace dies hard. And 60 years ago, the United Nations rose from its ashes with unprecedented backing from Europe and the U.S. Where the League of Nations sank under the weight of American congressional opposition, the U.N. and its founding charter sailed to success at head-spinning speed.

"We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace," said president Franklin Roosevelt, who with his wife Eleanor, laid the foundations of the U.N. "Our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of nations far away. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community."

Margaret MacMillan, author of Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, agrees. The demise of the League of Nations, she says, is a cautionary tale for critics of the world body.

"The league is remembered as a failure because of World War II. But it settled disputes, had trusteeships, and at least introduced the idea that the Third World should have some financial benefits. In its time, it enjoyed tremendous support. But it was weakened because, like the U.N., it was only as good as its members. If powerful states don't support international institutions, they will be handicapped," says MacMillan, provost of Trinity College, University of Toronto.

But, says Axworthy, it would be a mistake to compare the league with the U.N., in spite of its difficulties.

"The U.N.'s problems, and the hostility of (President George W.) Bush should not suggest that the organization is finished. It is not the League of Nations. It has institutions that are imperfect, but are the best alternative the world has today. And it is a multinational organization where people like me go off to resolve disputes in countries where nobody else is doing it."

Even before the recent crisis of confidence in the U.N., its shortcomings were clear to friends as well as foes.

On its 50th anniversary, it was labelled a "miasma of corruption" by former U.S. State Department official Stefan Halper, now a political science professor in the U.K. "At the heart of the organization's mounting problems is almost total lack of accountability," he charged in a policy paper for the Washington-based conservative think-tank, the Cato Institute.

The budgetary process was flawed, he pointed out, and allowed for "bloated salaries, costly perks," and a wildly overgenerous pension scheme for bureaucrats who are often "time servers whose sloth is reputed to be of mythic proportions."

When Annan took office in 1997, he launched a "quiet revolution" to trim the organizational fat, making badly needed reforms. But he has not been able to make the U.N. bureaucracy fully accountable, and many of its workings are murky.

The political system of the U.N. has also been under the gun. The Security Council, with five veto-bearing permanent members, and a rotating membership chosen from regional groups that hold no vetos, has been criticized as an outdated legacy of the Cold War.

The 191-country General Assembly is regularly attacked as a "talking shop" that takes little responsibility for its actions. And the Geneva-based Human Rights Commission sparked outrage when countries that are some of the world's worst rights violators were elected to serve terms as its head.

With so many deeply rooted problems, the U.N. was rapidly moving toward a crisis of confidence when Sept. 11, 2001 accelerated the need for reappraisal.

In November, 2003, Annan called on a 16-member panel of experts to study ways of reforming the international system and meeting new global security threats that have sparked a bitter debate on when military action is justified, and what role the U.N. should play in "preventive war."

The results were tabled last month, in a report titled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility. Its writers include former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, Egyptian diplomat Amre Moussa, head of the League of Arab States; and former French justice minister Robert Badinter.

Early reviews were encouraging: "The panel looks at the broader issues of 2005," says one senior diplomat. "It's not one versus the other. They are inviting nations to redefine what collective security means, including poverty, hunger, disease and environmental degradation. They're recommending changes that would reinvigorate the U.N.'s purpose and mandate."

The 101 recommendations will be reviewed and voted on by the General Assembly at a summit in September. They include backing for a Canadian-inspired measure to protect civilians from genocide, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities even if is against their government's will.

"State sovereignty has always been seen as a shield, and that was true when the U.N. was first formed," says Canada's U.N. Ambassador Allan Rock. "But now we've begun to look at the fundamental principles of humanity and ask the question: 'Are we going to stand by and watch genocide, or will we intervene when humanity demands we do so?'"

The most powerful countries are likely to oppose the recommendation, Rock admits. But, he says, if countries are unwilling to safeguard their citizens, "we believe there should be a shift from the right to intervene to the responsibility to protect. That's been adopted by the panel, so we've crossed that threshold. It doesn't necessarily mean automatic intervention, but it makes advocacy much easier."

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

The Tainted Science Of Nazi Atrocities

Edward Rothstein, The New York Times, 1/8/05

[Editor's Note: Warning, longer than normal article.]

The welcoming image could not be more inspiring. Or more creepy. It is a ''glass man'' standing in an alcove, his red veins lining his transparent shell, his multicolored organs neatly stacked in his abdomen, his arms raised aloft like his gaze, reaching toward the heavens, glorying in the display of his inner self.

He was constructed in 1935 by the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden for an exhibition about genetic health that traveled to the United States. One of his clones was given to the Buffalo Museum of Science. But about 50 years later, with some belated embarrassment, the museum sent back the glass man, queasy over the company he once kept and the ideals he once represented. He even appears in a 1935 photo in Dresden, gazed at by admiring Nazi officials.

Guilt by association, perhaps? Not unfair, given that this powerful exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, called ''Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,'' shows how the Nazis took a widely respected idea and step by step stripped off its admired flesh, showing in one horror after another, the awful possibilities latent within it. That idea was eugenics, which once heralded better living through genetic intervention. It is an idea that lost all respectability from its Nazi associations, though not all its relevance, as contemporary debates about abortion, euthanasia and the genome project make clear.

That is one reason that this exhibition, which will be on display through Oct. 16, should be a part of every citizen's experience.

Its curator, Susan Bachrach, shaped an imposing collection of objects and images into a narrative of imposing power: the copy of ''On the Origin of Species'' given by Charles Darwin to his cousin Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term ''eugenics'' in 1883; a scarred wooden door from an isolation cell used at the Eichberg Psychiatric Clinic in Eltville, Germany; calipers and hair color samples used by Dr. Ernst Rudin to specify physical and racial traits in his genetic research; posters urging Germans to screen their lovers' families for genetic flaws.

There are instruments of sterilization like those forcibly used on 400,000 men and women in the Nazi era -- perhaps 1 percent of the German population of child-bearing age deemed mentally or physically unfit (''It is better to sterilize too many rather than too few,'' was the official doctrine); and a photograph of blind German children being taught to recognize different races by running their hands over plaster busts.

And more horribly: samples of the sedatives Luminal and Veronal like those dispensed by pediatricians to infants at ''pediatric wards,'' in order to execute 5,000 undesirable children. Then, when it seems as if nothing more could shock, one walks into a reproduction of the ''shower stalls'' used at six facilities in Germany and Austria where the Nazi program for what Hitler called ''mercy deaths'' expanded its ambitions.

Using carbon monoxide gas, more than 70,000 adults were poisoned, including schizophrenic artists, whose drawings and paintings are mounted here on the walls, under the shower heads. By 1945, 200,000 adults had been killed in various Nazi ''euthanasia'' programs.

Ultimately, of course, the techniques perfected on the feebleminded and deformed were turned against the country's primary ''typhus,'' as one poster puts it. ''Sterilize the Jew,'' reads a stamp that was pasted on envelopes, advertising one idea; but that procedure was too time-consuming. So the medical teams who had helped refine Germany's gene pool were dispatched to death camps like Sobibor and Treblinka in Poland to execute the Final Solution.

For all its gargantuan horror, this exhibit makes those millions of deaths seem an outgrowth of what came before, a more radical extension of genetics into the netherworld.

Much of this has been little known and little acknowledged, even in Germany, where in the 1990's, psychiatric institutions were still finding traces of this unsavory past in files and in jars of preserved specimens, and where many Nazi eugenicists enjoyed prosperous later careers.

But at the exhibition everything emerges with a kind of tragic restraint, weighted with carefully outlined detail. There is no resort to cliche or posturing. The opening sections even cause a certain uneasiness, because they make it clear that before the 1930's, eugenic ideas were commonplace. Galton had written: ''If the twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle what a galaxy of genius might we not create!''

Such enthusiasm was infectious. The ideas, as the historian Daniel J. Kevles points out in the exhibition catalogue, ''could and did strike root almost everywhere.'' ''Only healthy seed must be sown,'' reads a British eugenics poster from 1930. Swedes worried about the genetic effects of Finnish blood. British worried about the Irish. In the United States, such fears helped inspire the restrictive 1924 immigration laws. And in 1927, in the case Buck v. Bell, eight Supreme Court justices agreed that a feeble-minded woman should be sterilized; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. concluded after considering her genetic history: ''Three imbecile generations are enough.'' By the late 1920's, eugenic sterilization was practiced in two dozen states, with California accounting for more than half of the 16,000 operations between 1907 and 1933.

So some ideas and procedures were widely accepted. Moreover, the racial inquiries undertaken by the Germans were also part of physical anthropology as it was then practiced. The study of difference and the tracing of genetic lineage was a legitimate subject of inquiry.

Is the Nazi case different because of degree rather than kind? Was German medicine and science so dehumanizing that they caused everything to go awry? Was the element of anti-Semitism decisive, perhaps, leading the anthropologist Josef Wastl to purchase skulls and death masks of Polish Jews and steal 220 Jewish skeletons from a Viennese cemetery for further study?

No, it seems that something else took place in Germany in the years after Hitler consulted Fritz Lenz's 1921 treatise, ''Foundations of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene'' and invoked its ideas in ''Mein Kampf.'' Eugenics was not incidental to the construction of the Nazi state; it was at its heart. As one slogan said: ''National Socialism is the political expression of our biological knowledge.''

The Nazi state rested on what Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, called ''applied biology.'' One exhibited brochure creates an analogy between societies and organisms; Hitler is the brain guiding the state's biological ''regeneration.'' Its laws were often biological laws (like the ''Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring''), its solutions biological solutions. By 1942, 10 million registry cards had been collected documenting the genetic trees of German families. Josef Goebbels, Hitler's minister of propaganda, boasted in 1938: ''Our starting point is not the individual''; the goal is a ''healthy people.''

There was, of course, some acknowledgment that other things mattered. There was an urge to justify and an urge to conceal. In one chilling document, ''euthanasia'' gassings are rationalized by meticulously calculating how much food will be saved by the state over the course of a decade, including 13,492,440 kilograms of meat and sausage.

And however open Nazi doctrines were about their ruthless prosecution of their biological goals, the ''euthanasia'' program, given the code name Operation T-4, was considered so extreme in its killings of non-Jewish Germans, that it was conducted in secrecy. Gradually, though, there were slip-ups: two urns of ashes sent to puzzled relatives rather than one; a woman's brooch found in a man's effects; and the peculiar case of 2,000 people dying of natural causes in 40 days at an asylum that had only 100 beds. The gassings eventually stopped because of public pressure, whereupon energies were fully turned to more fundamental ambitions of biological elimination.

In these utilitarian justifications and secret machinations, though, there may have also been some sense that these acts were violating other kinds of principles, suggesting that humanity does not live by genes alone. But such hints are slight. And what, after all, could such ethical principles be? The exhibition properly resists the temptations that now seem to haunt all such exhibitions, to create morals, to turn the museum into a therapeutic agency, to generalize from the particular so pain is turned into platitude. We are simply given the facts, shown the objects.

As for the ethical principles governing eugenics, in contemporary culture they still remain curiously unsettled. There may be no other realm in which the absolute of Nazi evil has come to seem so bendable. The philosopher Peter Singer, for example, has attained academic respectability while advocating euthanasia and arguing that the killing of an infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. And if eugenics is unambiguously evil, then why do we accept genetic screening of human fetuses for possible abortion? If racial breeding is so offensive, why is the prospect of designer genes considered so appealing? If euthanasia shocks because it was forced, what about if it is welcomed? The ethical issues are rarely presented as starkly as they were in Nazi Germany. This exhibition doesn't make the answers any simpler, but that is one of its virtues.

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Science Aims To Solve Mystery Of King Tut

Ben Hoyle, The Times (London), 1/7/05

Tutankhamun's mummified body has been removed from its tomb and subjected to a CT scan that may finally solve the 3,300-year-old mystery of how he died.

A team of doctors and archaeologists conducted the 15-minute test in a specially equipped van parked in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor.

They hope to establish whether the boy king, made famous by the discovery of his dazzling sarcophagus in 1922, was in fact murdered while still a teenager.

An X-ray photograph by anatomists from Liverpool University in 1968 first suggested that Tutankhamun may have been killed by a blow to the back of his head when it revealed bone fragments inside the king's skull.

Historians have subsequently identified several possible murder suspects with plausible motives in the turbulent Egyptian court of 1350BC.

Tutankhamun succeeded Akhenaten, who may have been his father, at about the age of 8. Akhenaten had suppressed the worship of Egypt's ancient gods in favour of a single sun god, Aten. The boy king tried to cement his position by marrying Akhenaten's daughter, but he remained a puppet ruler. The real power resided with the elderly vizier Ay, who ascended the throne with unseemly speed on Tutankhamun's suspiciously early death.

"There are so many stories about his death and his age," Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist, said. "Today we will determine what really happened." Dr Hawass said that the results would be announced this month in Cairo.

CT imaging, essentially a three-dimensional X-ray scan used in many medical procedures, has helped scientists to learn more about several Egyptian mummies, including Ramses I. The technique was used on the 5,200-year-old remains of a Copper Age man found in a glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991. It picked up what simpler X-rays photographs had missed, identifying an arrowhead in the man's body that may have killed him.

Tutankhamun's scan began with the removal of the wooden box that holds his mummy from beneath a stone sarcophagus in the underground tomb. The box was then carried out of the vault. The blackened mummy, still resting in the box to protect it, was then inserted into the CT machine, which was sent from Germany by Siemens, the technology company. An eerie outline of Tutankhamun's face was visible, as were his toes and fingers.

The mummy, which had not been removed from its final resting place for 82 years, was returned to the tomb immediately after the scan.

National Geographic will fund the project for the next five years, Terry Garcia, the organisation's executive vice-president, said. Other Egyptian mummies will be scanned.

Tutankhamun's scan has captured more than 1,700 images of his remains, which the team believes will enable them to clarify previously uncertain details including his royal lineage, his age (now estimated at 17) and the cause of his death.

But the most important aspect of the work is conservation. Dr Hawass said that the body had been badly damaged when it was first discovered.

Howard Carter, the British explorer, may have sparked a worldwide craze for Egyptology when he stumbled on Tutankhamun's tomb, but his men smashed the body to pieces when they prized off its gold and jewel-encrusted face mask.

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

An Historical Look At Asian Natural Disasters

David Hale, The New York Times, 1/7/05

''Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice,'' wrote the historian Will Durant. The tsunami that struck Asia last month, caused by an earthquake off the coast of Indonesia, is a reminder of the validity of Durant's thesis; so far it has left some 140,000 people dead.

Throughout human history, earthquakes have set in motion great economic changes and political revolutions. Last month's tsunami was devastating in its toll on human life, but its economic and political effects may be more modest.

The San Francisco earthquake in 1906 was an important catalyst for the financial shocks that led to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Because British insurance companies underwrote the majority of the city's insurance policies, millions of pounds of insurance claims were soon presented in London. The insurance claims generated a huge outflow of gold from London, which forced the Bank of England to nearly double British interest rates and to lobby British banks to stop buying American debt. Higher interest rates played a role in creating a financial panic in America, and Congress was so alarmed that it established a commission to investigate whether the government should play a greater role managing the money supply. The result of the commission's work was the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.

Most of the businesses and people affected by last month's tsunami are relatively poor, and few had insurance. As a result, estimates of the insurance cost of the disaster are about $10 billion. The losses to the various national economies may also not exceed $10 billion.

Aceh, the Indonesian province where up to 100,000 people may have been killed, accounts for only about 2 percent of the country's gross domestic product. Thailand's southern provinces, which were overrun by the tsunami, contribute only about 2 percent of the country's G.D.P.

Sri Lanka, however, suffered extensive damage to its tourism, fishing and agricultural sectors. Tourism is a major industry there, directly or indirectly accounting for nearly 11 percent of gross domestic product, and the devastation in southern Sri Lanka could reduce G.D.P. by 2 percent to 3 percent this year. The regional impact will be modest, though, because Sri Lanka's economy is only about $74 billion compared with $478 billion for Thailand and $759 billion for Indonesia.

Thailand and Indonesia could suffer greater economic losses if their tourism industries decline; tourism is 12 percent of Thailand's economy and 10 percent of Indonesia's. But as the terrorist attack in Bali in 2002 and the SARS epidemic in 2003 demonstrated, shock events do not usually affect tourism for longer than a few months if people perceive that danger has passed. In fact, Thai hotel stocks declined on the day after the tsunami but have since recovered.

Earthquakes have also generated great political shocks. An earthquake in November 1755 destroyed Lisbon and killed at least 60,000 people. It also encouraged Portugal's foreign minister, Sebastiao de Carvalho, to usurp power from the king and launch a campaign against the Roman Catholic Church. Carvalho effectively reigned over Portugal until 1777.

In 1972, an earthquake in Nicaragua helped to nurture an incipient revolution against the ruling Somoza family. Outraged at the government's response to the catastrophe, many Nicaraguans in Managua turned to the Sandinistas, who ousted the Somozas in 1979.

Last month's earthquake could have important political implications because it struck regions in Indonesia and Sri Lanka that are home to domestic insurgent groups. Separatists in Aceh and Tamils in Sri Lanka have been challenging their governments for more than 20 years. The Indonesian government was initially slow to deploy aid, and many soldiers ran from the scene of the disaster, which could affect the standing of the new president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who had been promising to improve government efficiency. The Sri Lankan government, meanwhile, has allowed international aid agencies to coordinate relief with the Tamil separatists.

There is precedent for an earthquake encouraging political reconciliation. In 1999, earthquakes struck Turkey and Greece just a month apart and fostered cooperation between the two nations. The Turkish quake devastated an industrial city and killed more than 15,000 people; the Greeks sent relief and received positive news media coverage in Turkey. When a milder earthquake struck Greece a month later, Turkey reciprocated by sending aid.

The great risk in Aceh today is mismanagement of the reconstruction process. The Indonesian military has ruled the province since the fall of President Suharto in 1998 and has excluded foreign journalists. Since the earthquake, however, the province has been overrun with the global press and inundated with international relief agencies. When more foreign aid arrives, the Indonesian military could try to steal it. The presence of the United Nations could also encourage the Aceh separatists to demand more democracy in the province and even a referendum on independence. It would be a shame if the tsunami destabilized the administration of President Yudhoyono only a few months after he assumed office as a result of the country's first democratic presidential election.

The American press has been full of stories about how American aid for the earthquake and tsunami victims could help to improve American relations with the region. Public and private donations to the region from the United States could exceed $600 million. There is little doubt that the United States is playing a leadership role along with Japan, which has pledged $500 million, and the European Union, which has pledged $580 million. The new rising power in the region, China, is offering only $63 million.

What is unclear is whether Asians will regard the American aid as a truly transforming event or as a temporary burst of generosity from an aggressive superpower. Much may depend upon the follow-through. There is talk in Washington of capitalizing on the disaster by intensifying efforts to obtain a free trade agreement with Thailand and revive moribund talks about such an agreement with Sri Lanka. These developments could have a more lasting impact than the aid itself.

IN the 19th century, Indonesia was the site of two great volcanic eruptions whose impact was felt worldwide. The eruption at Tambora in 1815 killed at least 50,000 and spewed so much ash into the atmosphere that it produced a global cooling that caused frosts in New England in the summer of 1816. The eruption at Krakatoa in 1883 wiped out more than 160 villages and killed at least 36,000 people. The explosion was so loud it was heard in Perth, Australia, thousands of miles away.

The most enduring legacy of last month's tsunami may be the role of technology in providing relief. Because of the Internet, thousands of people were able to wire money to charities and aid agencies immediately. Ten years ago, it would have taken several days or weeks for checks to come in the mail. The prompt response shows that globalization can be a force for good. The challenge will be to ensure that the world remains focused on the recovery after the tragedy fades from the headlines.

Note: David Hale, an economist and financial adviser, is chairman of China Online, a business news site.

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

British Museum's "Crystal Skull" A Fake

Steve Connor, The Independent (London), 1/7/05

Some say it has mystical powers derived from its ancient origins as an Aztec symbol of death. Others believe it is one of 13 crystal skulls that will foretell the destiny of humankind when brought together in the same place.

Whatever legends are attached to the crystal skull of the British Museum in London, one fact stands out. No other object in the museum's extensive collection has acquired such a cult following from New Age devotees.

Now, however, science can finally set the record straight and, in doing so, shatter one of the most enduring myths of an object steeped in historical fantasy. The crystal skull is a fake.

A detailed analysis of the skull's surface has revealed that it was cut and polished with the sort of rotating wheel common in the jewellery houses of 19th-century Europe but absent in pre-Columbian America.

Historians and scientists believe that the skull was cut from a piece of Brazilian rock crystal by a lapidary in Europe, possibly Germany, and then sold to collectors as a relic from the ancient Aztec civilisation of Mexico.

Doubts about the authenticity of the crystal skull - a near life-sized sculpture - first surfaced more than a decade ago. Tests have now confirmed that it is almost certainly not a genuine Aztec object, said Professor Ian Freestone of the University of Wales at Cardiff and a former head of scientific research at the British Museum in London.

"We are not at all sure that there is a rock source in Mexico that would produce a rock crystal of this size. There is strong circumstantial evidence that it comes from Brazil," Professor Freestone said. "When you look at known, genuine Aztec rock crystals, they have a much gentler polish. This has the harsh, polished look you get with modern equipment," he said.

These two findings alone do not prove a fraud, but when scientists began to investigate the surface of the skull under a powerful electron microscope the doubts about the skull's origins began to be confirmed.

The scientists took impressions of the skull with the same flexible resin used by dentists to take precise impressions of teeth. This revealed minute rotary scratch marks around the eye sockets, teeth and cranium and was clear evidence that the sculpture had been cut and polished with a wheeled instrument - and the Aztecs never used the wheel.

"The evidence coming together suggests that it was late. To me the case is overwhelmingly against it being of earlier, Aztec origin," Professor Freestone said.

Further work by an archivist, Jane Walsh of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, points the finger of suspicion at Eugene Boban, a 19th- century collector of pre-Columbian artefacts who appears to have been instrumental in selling at least two crystal skulls purporting to be ancient.

Not much is known about Boban except that he was a French citizen who spent more than two decades of his life in Mexico, Dr Walsh said.

Documents unearthed by Dr Walsh reveal that it was Boban who had acquired the skull that was eventually sold in 1897 by Tiffany's, the New York jeweller, to the British Museum. She also found that it was Boban who some years earlier had tried to sell the same skull to the Smithsonian. And it was Boban who sold a similar crystal skull to a collector who later donated it to the Musee de l'Homme in Paris, where it still is today.

For Boban to come into possession of two crystal skulls purporting to be of pre-Columbian origin may be a coincidence too far, especially in the light of the new scientific evidence suggesting a fake.

Colin McEwan of the British Museum said that the skull, which is going on display this Christmas in the museum's Wellcome Trust Gallery, has been the subject of some peculiar rituals over the years when it was in the Museum of Mankind. "We had people going into seances and talking in tongues," Dr McEwan said.

One native American legend tells of the existence of 13 such skulls which are supposed to contain information about the origins and destiny of humankind. At a time of great need all the skulls would be rediscovered so that they can be brought together in one place to reveal their secrets, so the legend goes.

Interestingly, there are now about a dozen large crystal skulls known to exist in the world, and all but three of them are in private hands.

Some of those who believe in these legends have accused the museum of trying to hide the skull from public view, or of "trapping" the cosmic energy contained in it, Dr McEwan said. "We've had extensive petitions claiming that damage has been done to the object because it has feelings, it's imprisoned, it's not allowed to fulfil its destiny, and so forth."

Joshua Shapiro, an author who believes the skull has mystical properties, said it was difficult for him to comment on the findings. "It sounds like they wish to discredit the significance of their crystal skull and the possibility that it could have been carved or fashioned by the Meso- American people in Mexico where it was purportedly discovered," he said. "These questions might not even be as important as what this crystal skull represents within this field of study ... Even if its origins or who made it are unknown, it helped to give people in the world an awareness that such objects do exist, and that they are revered by the indigenous people in the world."

Professor Freestone accepts that the latest findings are unlikely to convince those who believe that the crystal skull is anything but a fake. "As soon as we say that one part of it has been polished in a certain way, someone else says it's because it's been touched up later on. It's hard to make a cast-iron case, to be honest," he admitted. "You've only got to look at the shroud of Turin to see that some people will be hard to convince even in the face of overwhelming evidence."

Nevertheless, even if it is a fake, the skull in London still commands a lot of interest from the public. As Professor Freestone says: "Whatever you think of it, it's a fantastic object. Even if it was made in Germany at the end of the 19th century."

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:10 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Art, Christianity, And The Holocaust

Lucie Lehmann-Barclay, Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA), 1/7/05

[Editor's Note: Warning - This is a longer than normal piece.]

Two works of Christian art predating the Holocaust raise questions about whether they intentionally contributed to anti-Semitism.
At first glance, a 20th-century mural and a 12th-century altar cross have little in common. But the controversy each has provoked reaches back into old Christian dogma itself, casting light on the role such art may have played in fomenting anti-Jewish feeling.

The issues mirror those being debated over the Ten Commandments - whether the US Constitution's First Amendment permits or prohibits the commandments from being displayed in public places such as courthouses - that will be taken up by the US Supreme Court in March.

The Boston Public Library, site of the mural "Triumph of Religion," and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which acquired the cross as part of its medieval art collection, have approached their stewardship of these objects very differently. The decisions made offer a case study in dealing with controversial religious art.

At issue is whether a public institution should display work so closely identified with a religion - Christianity in this case - which maligns or offends people of another faith.

This question gathers intensity in light of the Holocaust. People today are far more conscious of the creeping effects of intolerance. Societies are also far more pluralistic than they were when John Singer Sargent began his mural or an unknown craftsman carved the ivory cross.

Two works, one doctrine

Begun in 1890 and left unfinished in 1919, Sargent's mural series in the library's Special Collections Hall incorporates a tradition that depicts Christianity as ascendant over Judaism. Though a casual visitor is likely to miss the significance of these images, one panel shows a vanquished Judaism - personified by the female figure of "Synagogue," a blindfolded old woman with a broken staff and her crown falling off - a common image in European Christian art.

The panel caused a storm of protest from the Jewish community when it was unveiled in 1919; a vandal even threw ink on it. Three years later, the Massachusetts State Legislature passed a law to remove it, but the state's attorney general eventually declared the act unconstitutional.

Sargent, dismayed, never completed the final panel of the Sermon on the Mount, which art historian Sally Promey says would have shown the "Triumph of Religion" as culminating in the ethical content of the sermon, thereby rendering the old Church/Synagogue imagery obsolete. As for the charges of anti-Semitism, Sargent told a Jewish publication, "My intent was not to harm anyone."

At Sargent's death, the state Supreme Court granted the unpaid commission to the library rather than to Sargent's estate. The money was to have paid for maintenance of the murals, but over the intervening decades they deteriorated and were largely lost to public memory.

Until two years ago, that is, when the Boston Public Library (BPL) decided to restore the Sargent murals as part of an extensive building renovation. The Special Collections Hall was reopened to the public in October.

BPL president Bernie Margolis, who is Jewish, views the restoration as a means of confronting the anti-Semitism issue publicly. He was supported in this by a board of trustees that includes author and historian James Carroll, whose book "Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews, a History" may be the definitive study of relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jews.

Mr. Carroll has challenged the church to remove from its teaching the doctrine of "supersessionism" that perceives Judaism as having been rendered obsolete by Christianity.

This doctrine has been symbolized in almost two millenniums of Christian art - such as the Sargent panel - by the female figures of "Ecclesia" (Church) and "Synagoga" (Synagogue), with Church portrayed as triumphant and Synagogue depicted as progressively turned away from the figure of Christ - as bent, blindfolded, decrepit, or with the Torah scrolls upside down.

"We believe that the library should be a place for discussion - even for wrong ideas," Mr. Margolis says.

The library also produced educational materials and last fall conducted a series of public discussions on the Sargent murals.

During one forum, panelist Philip Cunningham, executive director of Boston College's Center for Christian-Jewish Learning, spoke of supersessionism as "replacement theology."

Pointing to the consequences of such teaching, panelist Adam Strom, of the educational program Facing History and Ourselves, said that the public today is in a better position since the Holocaust to judge the harm engendered by anti-Semitism than was the public in Sargent's day.

Inscriptions in ivory

The cross became a lightning rod of controversy for two reasons. First, the curator who acquired it in 1963 hid the fact that it was inscribed with derogatory references to Judaism and may have contributed to a pogrom against Jews at England's St. Edmundsbury cathedral in 1190. These facts would have been of great interest to the many Jewish supporters of the Met, not to mention its trustees. Second, the museum has chosen to play down the cross's anti-Semitic inscriptions in its display at the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum's medieval branch in Fort Tryon Park.

Of 100 inscriptions carved on the cross (quite a feat since it is only about two-feet tall) relating to Old Testament prophecy of the Messiah and its New Testament fulfillment, only two refer specifically to Judaism. One translates: "The Jews laughed at the pain of God dying," and the other: "Synagogue has collapsed with great foolish effort."

The cross's notoriety surfaced in the book "King of the Confessors," a page-turner on the intrigues at the Met by Thomas Hoving. Mr. Hoving, later director of the Met until 1977, was at the time of the purchase a curatorial assistant pushing for acquisition of the cross on its artistic merits.

"If one were to choose a single work of art," he wrote, "that would most perfectly typify the art, the history, and the theology of the late Romanesque period in England, one could do little better than to select the Cloister's Cross."

A revised edition of "King of the Confessors" was published in 2001 as an e-book. At this time, Hoving granted forbes.com an online interview. The Forbes interview, which is headed "The Cross of Shame," refers to "fiery anti-Semitic invective" and quotes Hoving as saying the inscriptions are "almost entirely anti-Jewish" and contains a reference to Jews sacrificing Christian children - propaganda that was widely disseminated in medieval times. In an e-mail to this reporter, Hoving says that he was misquoted and that there is no such inscription on the cross. He also chooses to use the term "anti-Jewish," to avoid confusion with 20th-century anti-Semitism.

Hoving's book provoked a furor at the Met whose effects are still being felt: No one contacted at the Cloisters would agree to be interviewed about either Hoving or "King of the Confessors."

'Never instigated a social reaction'

The Met's official word is found in "The Cloister's Cross," by Charles Little, the current director of the Met's medieval department, and Elizabeth Parker, a professor of art at Fordham University in New York.

The book, in photographs and detailed descriptions, places the cross within both the Christian liturgical traditions in England at that time, as well as Continental artistic traditions.

The Met's book portrays the cross as intended to clarify Christian tradition or to convert the Jew to Christianity. Absent is any suggestion that the cross might have provoked anti-Jewish acts in antiquity, as Hoving asserts. Similarly, the Met's audio guide refers to the anti-Semitism of the times without making it an issue.

Asked whether the Met has "underplayed" anti-Semitism connected to the cross, Mr. Little says, "We simply didn't feel it was an issue. No work of medieval art - that we know of - has ever instigated a social reaction against any group."

Although the cross's history is something of a mystery, that uncertainty did not prevent the Cathedral of St. Edmundsbury from commissioning a copy for the church's own use in the present day.

"The majority of English art historians do not attribute the cross to the [cathedral]," Little says, but they have "adopted" it as "something to be held and ... for teaching."

The Very Rev. James Atwell, dean of the cathedral, in his presentation speech said, "The cross is not anti-Jewish; it is however, an expression of both the theological strengths and weaknesses of its own age." But his recognition of the issue of supersessionism was apparent as he continued, "There is room for contrition as well as pride as we contemplate our Christian history. We, too, have to develop our own theological understanding of the Jewish faith not only in the Bible, as a context for Christianity, but as a faith community in its own right and for today."

This attitude is a far cry from the exclusionary rhetoric that emanated from pulpits in medieval St. Edmundsbury or late 19th-century Boston. But Christians in the United States and other Western countries, who have long been in the majority, may not be aware of the symbols of intolerance in the art they view.

"It's a matter of projecting 'the other' onto other peoples," says Nancy Scott, an associate professor of fine arts at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. "The most potent example of anti-Semitic artistic expression is the 'horned' Moses which first surfaces in the medieval period, but is most famous in Michelangelo's Moses. This is a type based on a mistranslation of the word keren in Hebrew, which should be read as 'ray of light,' but was misconstrued as 'horns'... The step to the devil is not far away."

Christelle Baskins, an associate professor of art at Tufts University in Medford, Mass., points out that these symbols become "naturalized - no one notices them."

But she also cautions against making a "laundry list [of anti-Semitic images]. Each must be considered in context," she says.

'We must name it'

While the St. Edmundsbury cross and the Sargent panel depict the same theme - the triumph of Christianity over Judaism - each was commissioned for a different purpose. One was to inspire private worship, the other to illuminate the path of Christianity. Both have, nonetheless, become public objects in public venues.

To the extent that such institutions can use controversial objects as teaching tools, they will invigorate a debate that is certain to gather steam as the Supreme Court hears arguments in the Ten Commandments case. Events in US history have shown that Americans can be deeply divided over church-state issues.

Author James Carroll says museums have an opportunity and an obligation.

"Anti-Semitism is not just religious," he says. "It goes to the absolute bone of our culture. Art reflects this long tradition. Wherever we find it, we must name it."

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 1:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Inaugurations Used to Be Simpler Affairs

Jim Malone, in the VOA News (1-12-05):

Preparations are nearly complete for President George Bush's second inauguration on January 20. Inauguration activities have grown considerably since the early days of the republic when a presidential inauguration consisted of a simple swearing-in ceremony.

Presidential inaugurations are mandated by the U.S. Constitution. It requires that the president repeat a 35-word oath in which the chief executive promises to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The president must take the oath of office by noon on January 20th. Prior to 1937, Inauguration Day was March 4.

The first presidential inauguration took place in 1789 when the nation's first chief executive, George Washington, took the oath of office in New York City.

President Washington initiated a number of inaugural traditions that include taking the oath of office while placing his hand on a Christian Bible.

Marvin Kranz is a historian at the Library of Congress.

"And George Washington set certain precedents. For example, he was about to be inaugurated and he said, 'My goodness, how do I take the oath of office?' And he said, 'Gee, I need a Bible.' And so they had to run out and see where they could find a Bible, which they found in the local Masonic lodge. And that Bible has been used by some other presidents since that time," says Mr. Kranz.

Traditionally, the oath of office is administered by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Chief Justice William Rehnquist says he will carry out that duty this year despite his ongoing battle with thyroid cancer.

The inaugural ceremony will be held outside on the West front of the U.S. Capitol building before a large crowd. Ronald Reagan began that tradition in 1981. Prior to that, the inaugural ceremony was held on the East Front of the Capitol facing the Supreme Court.

Historian Marvin Kranz says inaugural traditions rarely change once they are established.

"It has been tradition for well over 100 years to hold it at the Capitol,” he notes. “The only exception was Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. He was kind of ill and they held it in the White House where he was sworn in."

After the oath-taking ceremony, the president delivers the inaugural address, which usually lasts 15 to 20 minutes.

The shortest inaugural address on record was that of George Washington at his second inaugural in 1793. It lasted about two minutes.

The longest address was given by William Henry Harrison in 1841. He spoke for nearly two hours.

Historian Marvin Kranz says Harrison's determination to finish his speech in bad weather proved to be his undoing.

"Of course, it was the longest address and the shortest presidency,” he points out. “He died a month later. He probably contracted a cold out there. He was a real 'he-man', he stood outside in a biting wind without an overcoat and delivered his inaugural address and a month later he was dead."...

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 4:47 AM | Comments (0) | Top

NY Post's Review of C.A. Tripp's Gay Lincoln Biography

Eric Fettmann, in the NY Post (12-27-05):

IN the pantheon of presidents, was Abraham Lincoln a queer eye among a bevy of straight guys?

Yes, claims a new book, "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln," which has received the imprimatur of a major publisher (Free Press) and a distinctly supportive article in The New York Times.

The book's author, the late C.A. Tripp, was a longtime gay writer and former sex-researcher for Alfred C. Kinsey. And he insists that the case is beyond dispute: Lincoln was gay, he writes, naming several alleged lovers.

But the evidence is not just slim, it's nonexistent. Indeed, the case for a gay Lincoln rests on giving every possibly ambiguous statement or incident a sexual meaning - an extreme case of one of the worst sins of historical research: projecting 21st-century mores on earlier eras.

Which is why serious Lincoln historians - like two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Herbert Donald, who's spent a lifetime studying the 16th president - reject these claims.

Yes, Lincoln shared a bed for several years with Joshua Speed, his first law partner. But there was nothing uncommon about that back then, notes Harold Holzer, author of 23 books on Lincoln and/or the Civil War and co-chairman of the national Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.

In fact, Lincoln's two White House secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, also shared a single bed for years - and no one has suggested they were gay.

From the perspective of our sex-saturated time, when gossip columns are filled with items about "canoodling" and "tonsil hockey," it may look like proof positive. But 19th century America didn't share today's mores - or sexual obsessions.

In fact, says Holzer - who was asked to write the introduction to Tripp's book but refused - the whole discussion "is an embarrassment to serious historical discussion."

Actually, there's much more to this than debatable historical research. As Larry Kramer, the provocative gay activist, told the Times: "It's a revolutionary book, because the most important president in the history of the United States was gay. Now maybe they'll leave us alone, all those people in the party he founded." In short, this is an attempt to co-opt Lincoln for contemporary political purposes - something Kramer has been trying to do for years.

Back in 1999, he attracted considerable media attention when he claimed he'd uncovered a previously unknown Joshua Speed diary that explicitly confirmed the "love affair." Kramer even gave a public reading of some lurid quotes from the diary that sounded like they could have been written by Danielle Steele.

Since then, the diary has never surfaced. Says Holzer, Kramer "said he invented the story as a means of reminding Americans that gays can become great." Indeed, Kramer has been quoted as saying that he was trying to provide "the first gay president" - even if that means having "to invent our own" history....

Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 at 2:14 AM | Comments (1) | Top

Interview with Abraham Rabinovich: The Yom Kippur War as a Turning Point

From Frontpagemag.com, an interview with Abraham Rabinovitch. He was interviewed by Jamie Glazov, the managing editor.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Abraham Rabinovich, a reporter for the Jerusalem Post and a United States Army veteran. He is the author of the new book The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East.

FP: Mr. Rabinovich, welcome to Frontpage Interview. It is a pleasure to have you here.

Rabinovich: Thank you for inviting me.

FP: What inspired you to write on this war?

Rabinovich: I covered the Yom Kippur War as a reporter for The Jerusalem Post. It lasted less than three weeks but was such an intense, monumental, event that I could not fully grasp what I had witnessed and heard. In the years that followed, I read everything available about it, both in English and Hebrew, and learned a lot of details but the story remained a tangled collection of episodes.

I finally decided to try to understand the war by writing about it myself -- aiming to connect its major aspects in a way that would make their inter-relationship clear. Events on the battlefields would be linked to each other and to the decisions of the high commands in Tel Aviv, Cairo and Damascus. These decisions, in turn, would relate to the manoeuvrings of the superpowers who regarded the warring armies as proxies. I aimed at producing a narrative that would be comprehensive and detailed but clear. It would keep an eye firmly on the Big Picture but let us also understand the war as it was experienced by tank crewmen in the heat of battle and generals struggling with existential dilemmas. I interviewed more than 130 persons and waded through reams of hitherto classified information, mostly in Israel. I thought I could do the job in three years. It took five.

FP: Give our readers a little glimpse into why this was one of the most fascinating wars of modern times.

Rabinovich: The war involved two stunning reversals of fortune. First, the Arabs, humiliated in the Six Day War and dismissed by Israel as third-rate opponents, managed to muster the national will and self-discipline to stagger Israel with a massive, two-front surprise attack only six years later. The success of the surprise ranks with those of Pearl Harbor and Barbarossa. Despite numerous warning signs, Israel’s smug military intelligence chiefs were convinced that the Arabs would not dare attack. When Egypt and Syria struck on Yom Kippur afternoon in 1973, only one-third of Israel’s army was in uniform. The remainder, Israel’s reserves, had only begun to mobilize a few hours before thanks to a last-minute war warning from a Mossad informant. At zero hour, 100,000 Egyptian troops began crossing the Suez Canal under covering fire from 2,000 artillery pieces. Opposite them, in the so-called Bar-Lev Line, were only 450 Israeli soldiers supported by 50 artillery pieces. On the Golan, the Syrians attacked with an 8-1 superiority in tanks and even greater superiority in infantry and artillery.

Apart from their massive advantage in numbers, the Egyptians employed tactical innovations and a new Soviet anti-tank missile that enabled their infantry to destroy in the first 12 hours of fighting two-thirds of the only armored division Israel had in Sinai at the war’s outbreak. For the first time since the tank was introduced in the First World War, infantry was able to stop large armored formations cold. In addition, the Soviet anti-aircraft missiles in Egyptian and Syrian hands succeeded in neutralizing the vaunted Israeli air force over the battlefield. Perhaps the greatest surprise for the Israelis was the grit displayed by the Arab soldiers who had the psychological wind at their backs and did not flinch when hit. So grave was the situation that Defense Minister Moshe Dayan spoke openly to colleagues of the possible fall of Israel. Prime Minister Golda Meir would reveal in her memoirs that she contemplated suicide.

The second reversal of fortune was Israel’s success, despite all of the above, in turning the Arab armies back. Within two weeks of its disastrous setback, the Israeli army was pounding on the gates of Damascus and threatening Cairo. I asked major historians like John Keegan and Donald Kagan whether they could think of any parallel in history, modern or ancient, in which an army, so badly mauled, had recovered and regained the initiative so quickly against such formidable odds. None of them could.

FP: What accounted for this remarkable turnabout?

Rabinovich: The fighting ability of the Israeli soldier, deriving from training and motivation. Fortunately for Israel, its soldiers on the front had no time to think about their appalling situation. They focussed on dealing with the enemy to their immediate front. It was the leadership of field commanders – particularly battalion commanders – and the courage, effectiveness and improvisational ability of the troops that succeeded in slowing down the Arab armies and stabilizing the situation. Israeli tank crews fired faster, straighter and at longer range than Arab tank crews. As for the Arabs, while they had executed their initial attack plan with determination and courage, they proved unable to match the Israelis in improvisation once that attack plan ran out of steam.

FP: Tell us a bit about Golda Meir’s and Sharon’s behaviour during the war. How do you grade them?

Rabinovich: Early on Yom Kippur day, in the hours between the Mossad’s war alert and the actual outbreak of fighting, Golda Meir, who admitted that she did not know what a division was, had to make two critical military decisions. Her major military advisors, Defense Minister Dayan, Israel's most prominent war hero, and Chief of Staff Gen. David Elazar, disagreed with each other over whether Israel should launch a pre-emptive air attack against the Arab forces and whether it should order a general mobilization of all its reserves. Elazar proposed both these moves. Dayan, who was still not convinced the Arabs would attack, rejected them. The two battle-scarred generals left it the 75-year-old grandmother to decide between them. Falling back on common sense and political instincts, she backed Elazar on full mobilization and backed Dayan in ruling out a pre-emptive strike. The Americans, she noted, opposed pre-emptive strikes and Israel might be needing American materiel and political support, she said. Retrospectively, both her decisions proved correct. Although visibly pained by the high casualties, she bore up well during the war. She let her generals manage the fighting but whenever her intervention was needed her judgement proved sound.

Gen. Ariel (Arik) Sharon had been commander of the Egyptian front until three months before the war when he retired from the army to enter politics. With the war’s outbreak, he was recalled as a general commanding one of the reserve armored divisions dispatched to Sinai. He was adulated by his troops but was a thorn in the side of his superiors who found it difficult to control him. Despite orders to conserve his forces until the army had gathered sufficient strength for a decisive counter-attack, he kept edging his tanks forward -- and losing many. From the beginning, he pressed for a crossing of the Suez Canal. He did not hesitate to criticize his superiors to visiting reporters or to telephone political leaders, and Dayan himself, from the front line in order to press his demands for more aggressive action.

In the end, Sharon’s division led the Israeli crossing of the Suez Canal that turned the war around. He has been given too much credit for that action, as if he was the one who had conceived it. The critical timing of the crossing was not his, but the high command’s, and the idea of a crossing was likewise a long-standing Israeli war plan. However, he did execute the crossing successfully in extremely arduous circumstances. His officers would laud his leadership, his coolness in action and his ability to read a battle. Unlike other senior officers, who were stunned by the surprise attack, Sharon had kept his head in the opening days and was able to correctly predict Egyptian moves. He personally wielded a machine gun on his command half track and was slightly wounded on his forehead. Comparisons to Gen. Patton are not far-fetched.

FP: Tell us something about that Mossad alert.

Rabinovich: The Mossad chief, Zvi Zamir, was wakened early Friday morning, the day before Yom Kippur, by a call from his station chief in London saying that he had just been contacted by an informant in Cairo who wanted to come to London to speak to Zamir urgently. Late Friday night, Zamir met the informant who told him that war would break out the next day. Zamir’s encoded message reached Tel Aviv before dawn on Yom Kippur, enabling the mobilization process to get underway about 10 a.m., four hours before the Arab attack. Those few hours probably saved the Golan Heights from falling.

FP: Did any other Arab countries join the fighting?

Rabinovich: Indeed. Iraq sent two armored divisions which stopped the Israelis from reaching Damascus after the Syrian army had almost been broken. A Jordanian tank brigade also joined in the fighting on the Syrian front as did a Moroccan brigade. The Egyptians had ground and air contingents from several Arab countries as well as a Palestinian brigade. The Egyptians even had a North Korean fighter squadron flying cover over air bases.

FP: What lessons does the Yom Kippur War teach for the future of Israel?

Rabinovich: The principal lesson of the war for Israel was never to underestimate your enemy. I believe we saw this lesson applied when the Palestinian intifada broke out four years ago. The ferocity of the uprising surprised many but the Israeli army, and other security arms, have waged one of the most successful counter-insurgency campaigns ever seen thanks to tactics and technologies developed before the uprising. As for the Arabs, the inability in 1973 of their armies to overcome Israel despite surprising it in a two-front attack with its army unmobilized -- circumstances unlikely ever to be repeated – in the end made Israel seem to the Arab world more than ever an irremovable entity rather than a passing phenomenon. This has been the basis for Israeli peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and for lesser diplomatic and economic ties with other Arab states. These ties have in large part been frozen because of the intifada but we can expect them to be renewed, and expanded, when there is some kind of settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The war itself was brutal – Israel lost three times as many men per capita in less than three weeks than America did in Vietnam in a decade. But the war also had a perfect ending, engineered by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, in which Israel returned all of Sinai in return for a peace treaty with Egypt – the first between Israel and an Arab country.

FP: Mr. Rabinovich, it was a pleasure to speak with you. We hope to see you again soon.

Rabinovich: Thank you.

Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2005 at 10:12 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Richard Brookhiser's NYT Book Review of C.A. Tripp's Gay Lincoln Biography

Richard Brookhiser, in the NYT Book Review (1-9-05):

This book is already getting noticed. In ''The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln,'' C. A. Tripp contends that Lincoln had erotic attractions and attachments to men throughout his life, from his youth to his presidency. He further argues that Lincoln's relationships with women were either invented by biographers (his love of Ann Rutledge) or were desolate botches (his courtship of Mary Owens and his marriage to Mary Todd). Tripp is not the first to argue that Lincoln was homosexual -- earlier writers have parsed his friendship with Joshua Speed, the young store owner he lived with after moving to Springfield, Ill. -- but he assembles a mass of evidence and tries to make sense of it.

Tripp died in May 2003, after finishing the manuscript of this book, which means he never had a chance to fix its flaws. The prose is both jumpy and lifeless, like a body receiving electric shocks. Tripp alternates shrewd guesses and modest judgments with bluster and fantasy. He drags in references to Alfred Kinsey (with whom he once worked) to give his arguments a (spurious) scientific sheen. And he has an ax to grind. He is, most famously, the author of ''The Homosexual Matrix.'' Published in 1975, it was a document of gay liberation. Since the other president sometimes thought to have been gay is the wretched James Buchanan, what gay activist wouldn't want to trade up to Lincoln? Still, obsession can discover things that have been overlooked by less fevered minds.

Tripp surveys seven of Lincoln's relationships, four with men and three with women, as well as two episodes from his early life. The discussion of Lincoln's youth is worthless. Relying on Lincoln's law partner and earliest biographer, William Herndon, Tripp decides that Lincoln reached puberty when he was 9 years old. Since Kinsey concluded that early maturing boys tended to become witty masturbators with lots of homosexual experience, Tripp concludes the same of Lincoln. He claims even more for Lincoln's adolescence, including a source for his religious heterodoxy. ''Since Lincoln had already arrived on his own at the powerful pleasures of orgasm . . . one can be sure that like most precocious youngsters he was in no mood to give it all up for bookish or Bible reasons.'' One can be sure, if one is as credulous as Tripp.

Lincoln's story becomes interesting when Tripp discusses real people. In 1831, when he was 22, Lincoln moved to New Salem, an Illinois frontier town, where he met Billy Greene. Greene coached Lincoln in grammar and shared a narrow bed with him. ''When one turned over the other had to do likewise,'' Greene told Herndon. Bed-sharing was common enough in raw settlements, but Greene also had vivid memories of Lincoln's physique: ''His thighs were as perfect as a human being could be.'' Everyone saw that Lincoln was tall and strong, but this seems rather gushing.

Six years later, Lincoln moved to Springfield, where he met Joshua Speed, who became a close friend; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, two early biographers, called him ''the only -- as he was certainly the last -- intimate friend that Lincoln ever had.'' Lincoln and Speed shared a double bed in Speed's store for four years (for two of those years, two other young men shared the room, though not the bed). More important than the sleeping arrangements was the tone of their friendship. Lincoln's letters to Speed before and after Speed's wedding in 1842 are as fretful as those of a general before a dubious engagement. Several of them are signed ''Yours forever.''

By contrast, Lincoln's relations with women are either problematic or distant. Ann Rutledge was the daughter of a New Salem tavernkeeper with whom Lincoln boarded in 1832. Three years later she died of malaria and typhoid. Lincoln biographers have been feuding for decades over whether Lincoln loved her. Tripp, naturally, sides with the skeptics. He concedes that Lincoln was devastated by her death, but argues that it was death itself that distressed him.

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Posted on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 at 1:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Inaugurations: New Exhibit at the Library of Congress

From the Washington Post (1-7-05):

Top hat in hand, a beaming Woodrow Wilson is standing next to a smiling William Howard Taft. Captured for posterity by a photographer, the usually dour-looking Wilson seems to be enjoying this moment on March 4, 1913, the day of his first inauguration.

Inaugurations are pleasant days for presidents and their supporters, and most of the time the hostilities of the campaign and the disappointment of the opponents are muted or, in contemporary times, fenced behind the barricades. Generally, the protocol is to let the winner have his day.

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., has mounted a special exhibition titled "I Do Solemnly Swear" on several inaugurations that opened to the public Thursday. It shows how the day has been marked by lofty speeches and much pomp, and it underscores that presidential inaugurations are an American invention.

"There is no model for this," says Marvin Kranz, a manuscript historian and inaugural specialist at the library. "George Washington set the precedent and it's been working ever since."

Every four years the inauguration gives the capital's archival institutions a chance to dust off some favorite pieces. This time the selections range from rare pieces of history to artifacts that are important only because of their connection to the first family.

Washington early on recognized the significance of this new ritual. The library has a letter he wrote to Henry Knox, later his secretary of war, ordering a suit of "plain brown cloth" with buttons.

Both the library and the National Archives have copies of Washington's first inaugural address. The library keeps what is believed to be the paper Washington read from in a special vault and is not displaying it this year. The Archives has another copy that Washington made. Because of its fragility, the Archives is exhibiting only the first and last pages of the eight-page document that bears his distinctive signature.

"He took the trouble of copying it and was aware of the momentous nature of the day," says Stacey Bredhoff, a senior exhibit curator at the Archives....

Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 at 8:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Andrew Sullivan: How Gay Was Lincoln?

Andrew Sullivan, in the New Republic (1-11-05):

How gay was Abraham Lincoln? By asking the question that way, it's perhaps possible to avoid the historically futile, binary question of "gay" versus "straight." Futile, because we are talking about a man who lived well over a century ago, at a time when the very concepts of gay and straight did not exist. And C.A. Tripp, author of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln was, despite the crude assertions of some reviewers, a Kinseyite who believed in a continuum between gay and straight. If completely heterosexual is a Kinsey zero and completely homosexual is a Kinsey six, Tripp puts Lincoln at five. Reading his engrossing, if uneven, book, I'd say you could make a case that Lincoln was, in fact, a four. It's going to be a subjective judgment, and I'm no Lincoln scholar. In any particular piece of evidence that Tripp discovers, I'd say it's easy to dismiss his theory. But when you review all the many pieces of the Lincoln emotional-sexual puzzle, the homosexual dimension gets harder and harder to ignore. As conservative writer Richard Brookhiser has noted, all we can say with complete confidence is that "on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, at least some of whom loved him back." That's a pretty good definition of the core truth of homosexuality.

That Tripp (who died shortly after completing the book) had an ax to grind, as some have alleged, is to my mind unfair. Yes, he sought to understand the homosexual experience better. But he was a Kinseyite social scientist, not a New Left propagandist. His database of Lincoln material is regarded as superb and invaluable to Lincoln scholars everywhere, and he had a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Yes, he was gay. But being gay can also be an advantage in this respect. The contours of a closeted gay life--the subtle effects of concealed homosexuality on behavior, public and private--are most easily recognized by other gay men, for the simple reason that many have experienced the same things. And the very nature of a closeted life is that it is hard to discern from the surface. I don't doubt that my own view that Lincoln was obviously homosexual is affected by my personal recognition of some aspects of the story, especially in his early years. The danger, of course, is over-identification and projection. But the danger of under-identification is also there--and it may well have impeded real research into what made Lincoln tick. Certainly if you're looking for clear evidence of sexual relationships between men in Lincoln's time in the official historical record, you'll come to the conclusion that no one was gay in the nineteenth century. But of course, many were.

But was Lincoln? Here's what I'd say are the most persuasive facts. Lincoln never developed deep emotional relations with any women, including his wife. Even the few snippets we have of early romances or his deeply strained courtship of Mary Todd suggest a painful attempt to live up to social norms, not a regular heterosexual life. His marriage was a disaster, by all accounts. Why? Well, ask Brookhiser, who tries to exonerate Todd from charges of being cruel and psychopathic as well as corrupt: "Explosive, imperious, profligate, she may well have been mad. But in fairness to her, Lincoln was maddening--remote and unavailable, when he was not physically absent." Hmmm. Remote, emotionally unavailable, running away to hang with men whenever he could. Ring a bell? Not in Brookhiser's mind....

Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 at 7:17 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Hottentots and the Birth of Racism in Europe

From the Chronicle of Higher Education (1-11-05):

In 1497, when Europeans first encountered the Khoikhoi people, popularly known as "Hottentots," of present-day South Africa, an important chapter in the cultural history of racism began, says Nicholas Hudson, a professor of English at the University of British Columbia.

European explorers initially were repulsed by the Hottentots, who had very different ideas about how to dress, cook, and conduct courtships than were current in Europe. The Hottentots, early reports indicated, smeared their light skin with dirt and oil to appear darker, preferred barely cooked tripe to animal muscle, and looped greasy cow intestines about their beloveds' shoulders to celebrate engagements.

By the 18th century, "Hottentot" was a common insult in Europe for an ill-mannered, filthy, or otherwise uncivilized person. The Hottentots also became a popular subject for parodies of European customs. They "provided a classic example that beauty was in the eye of the beholder and that all fashions could seem preposterous from a different cultural perspective," Mr. Hudson writes.

But thinking of customs and values as relative made many Europeans uncomfortable, and a "racial science" developed to combat that world-view. "From this ideological root," he says, "grew the distinctive language of modern racism."

By attributing differences between themselves and other peoples to intrinsic characteristics rather than to cultural variations, he says, Europeans were able to retain their sense of superiority and to justify colonizing people they saw as inferiors in need of control and indoctrination.

The article, "'Hottentots' and the Evolution of European Racism," is online for a limited time at http://jes.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/34/4/308

Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 at 5:01 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Larry Elder: Bush, Like Reagan, Will Be Remembered as a Transformative President

Larry Elder, in his column published by townhall (12-30-05):

... Bush assuredly takes comfort that the critics of another visionary -- President Ronald Reagan -- also called him a simple-minded warmonger. While Democratic contender John Kerry gave a phony salute to Reagan during one of the presidential debates, in 1988, Sen. Kerry condemned the "moral darkness of the Reagan-Bush administration." When Reagan gave his "Evil Empire" speech, Columbia University historian Henry Steele Commager wrote (and was widely quoted in many media outlets) that this was "the worst presidential speech in American history, and I've read them all." Anthony Lewis of The New York Times denounced the speech as "primitive." "What is the world to think," wrote Lewis, "when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology . . . ?"

Halfway through his first term, a January 1983 New York Times editorial pronounced Reagan's administration a catastrophe: "The stench of failure hangs over Ronald Reagan's White House. The people know it, judging by the opinion polls. Corporate titans know it and whisper disenchantment with a fellow conservative."

Critics derided Reagan's economic policies as "trickle-down." They dismissed his strategic defense initiative by calling it "Star Wars." A 1986 New York Times editorial about Soviet missile strength said, "On a . . . vital matter on which he had had to be briefed to the teeth, then, Mr. Reagan confirmed that he still does not have a firm grip." Later that year, another Times editorial continued the Reagan-as-dummy theme, "Previous U.S. administrations have prompted [Moscow] either to explain or desist from questionable activities through the diplomatic channel for resolving arms disputes. Mr. Reagan's solution is radically different: tear up the rule book. In doing so he removes the grounds for complaint -- and for correction. How does that leave America better off?"

We know history proved Reagan's critics wrong. The Soviet Union -- and the threat they posed -- did, indeed, end up on the ash bin of history. Reagan's tax cuts produced increasing government revenues, and Reagan policies ushered in an era of long-term prosperity. The Reagan years saw explosive job creation and income growth. The economy created 20 million new jobs. Individual and corporate charitable contributions increased.

And now, in a few short months, with minimal casualties, despotic terrorist-supporting regimes no longer exist in Afghanistan and Iraq. Taking the hint, Libya's Moammar Kadafi promptly renounced his WMD program.

Some day -- it may take decades -- historians will look back at this period of American history, and they will salute Bush's courage, steadfastness and vision. It just may take a . . . healing period.

Posted on Thursday, January 6, 2005 at 5:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

AP: Q & A on the History of Presidential Inaugurations

Donna Cassata, for the Associated Press (1-2-05):

At noon on Jan. 20, in the shadow of the Capitol, George W. Bush will raise his right hand, place the other on the Bible and swear to faithfully execute the office of president and preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.

It will be the 55th quadrennial presidential inauguration, an event steeped in history and marked by all the pomp and pageantry with which Americans have come to associate the oath-taking ceremony. Heightened security, a constant in this age of terrorism, also will be part of the first inaugural since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Here, in question and answer form, is a look at the inauguration:

Q: Why is the inauguration on Jan. 20 at noon?

A: The Constitution's 20th Amendment, passed by Congress March 2, 1932, and ratified by the necessary states on Jan. 23, 1933, set the date and time.

The president had been sworn in on March 4, typically the final day of the congressional session. For practical reasons, the nation's forefathers had chosen that date because it took weeks to collect and count the votes, and then weeks by coach or horse for the president-elect to get to the capital.

The change also reflected the desire to limit the lame-duck congressional session, which the outgoing president and members of Congress found to be an "unproductive period of time," according to Betty Koed, the assistant U.S. Senate historian.

In the 1930s, Sen. George Norris, R-Neb., suggested the 20th Amendment, and lawmakers agreed. Koed said there were several reasons for the date. It was about two weeks after Congress counted the electoral votes. Also, calendars indicated that at least for the next few years, the inauguration would not fall on a Sunday -- a day of religious services for many -- and weather patterns showed favorable conditions.

High noon seemed appropriate for a change in command.

Q: Does the chief justice of the United States always administer the oath of office?

A: Traditionally, at the official Washington ceremony, the chief justice administers the oath. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has accepted Bush's invitation to administer the oath despite begin treated for thyroid cancer.

In special circumstances, others have sworn in a president. On Nov. 22, 1963, after President Kennedy was assassinated, U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes administered the oath to Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas. Hughes was the first woman to administer the oath.

On April 30, 1789, when George Washington was sworn in on the balcony at Federal Hall in New York City, not a single justice had been appointed to the Supreme Court. Robert R. Livingston, chancellor of New York state, administered the oath. ...

Posted on Thursday, January 6, 2005 at 5:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Commentary On Britain's New Freedom Of Information Act

Magnus Linklater, The Times (London), 1/05/05

I want some red-hot government secrets, and I want them now. Using the new Freedom of Information Act I intend to wrench open filing cabinets that have been locked for decades, expose the briefing notes we were never meant to see, nail the rumours that will make or break the reputations of the highest in the land. If the law means what it says, then this is a new dawn for journalists. For the first time, we have the legal right to acquire any records that are held by public authorities on any topic, including documents, e-mails, computers, cassettes, microfiche, maps, and even handwritten notes. Never before has the "right to know" been given such tangible form.

That is the theory. The reality, I suspect, will be more mundane. The headlines this week, as the Act came into force, did little to set the adrenalin coursing through the veins. The battle to allow civil servants to use soft toilet paper in the 1970s; the mysterious fate of the Home Office cat in 1929; the refusal to allow Porridge to be filmed inside one of Her Majesty's prisons; the less than shattering revelation that Harold Wilson was worried about conspiracy theories, and that Jim Callaghan disliked No 10. None of these are likely to trouble historians bent on mapping the seismic events of the 20th century.

There are a few more promising examples -we have learnt more about the treatment of IRA hunger strikers, we now know there was a (discarded) plan to blow up the Channel Tunnel with a nuclear bomb in the event of invasion, and we have a list of the celebrities who have been invited by Tony Blair to dine at Chequers. But it will take more than this to shake the pillars of the Establishment. Any suggestion that, with the advent of FoI, Whitehall intends to shrug off its long record of entrenched secrecy, can be briskly laid to rest.

Just one, salutary, example: the mild revelation about Mr Blair's dinner guests, took a Liberal Democrat MP 19 months to chisel out. Just think what it is going to take to prise open a genuine, cast-iron secret. There are 23 exemptions to the Act, which cover everything from national security, defence and foreign relations, to foggy concepts such as "formulation of government policy" and "information provided in confidence." Don't think, for instance, that you can find out anything about the honours system -that is specifically excluded.

The Act is likely to be more effective at local government level, where the fusty autocracy of town hall officialdom is finally to be challenged. I suspect that more good will come of this than anything in Whitehall. I have, however, three test cases to apply to the Act, and they do not include the Attorney-General's legal advice on the legitimacy of war in Iraq -I doubt if that will see the light for 30 years or more. The first is historical. How many Nazi war criminals did the British secret services knowingly employ for counter-intelligence work after the war? We know about the Americans and what they did, because they have a genuine Freedom of Information Act which has yielded up about 500 documents on the subject. Hitherto, the British have supplied precisely six -mostly blanked out.

Yet Britain was at least as complicit in this murky affair as the US.

The second is more recent: who dreamt up the infamous three-kilometre pre emptive cull during the 2001 foot-and-mouth outbreak, which condemned millions of healthy animals to death on the basis of no scientific evidence? Who proposed it, who approved it, and what advice did the Chief Scientist give to ministers to persuade them that it was the right thing to do? The minutes of ministerial meetings held in the fraught, early weeks of the epidemic would tell us much about scientific evidence and how it is used for political ends.

Finally, how many lobbyists for the drinks and gambling industries had access to ministers during the run-up to the easing of restrictions in both of these areas, and what advice was given by chief constables over the same period? We deserve to be told far more about the evidence on which these far-reaching social experiments are based, and, to judge by the many U-turns and confusing explanations given by government spokesmen, it should turn out to be rich territory for investigation.

None of this will come easy. The more sensitive the disclosure, the more it will have to be worked at. The evidence of the "voluntary" period leading up the Act suggests that anyone applying for information must be prepared for long waits, uncompromising bureaucracy, setbacks and frustration along the way.

A plethora of reasons will be offered for withholding documents, either on the grounds of cost or conflict with the various exemptions mentioned above. Those who persevere may have to appeal to the Information Commissioner if they are turned down, and then go through another long process. Finally, the papers that are released are likely to be mind-numbing in length and arcane detail. Reading, understanding and distilling them will require time and patience. "This is the hour of the long-term clever nerd," comments Professor Peter Hennessy, veteran observer of the Whitehall scene.

None of this, however, should deter us. We have been given the key to a chamber of secrets that has stayed locked for too long. Now, it is up to us to use it. That may mean that journalists will have to fall back on a skill that many have lost or forgotten: the art of long and patient investigation. It may not be glamorous, it will certainly be tedious. But in the end it may yield the greatest prize of all: the means of understanding how we are governed, and whether it is well or badly done.

Posted on Thursday, January 6, 2005 at 4:06 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Vatican Reels From New Revelation About Pope John XXIII

John Hooper, The Guardian (London), 1/06/05

In 1940, after Nazi troops marched into France, the future Pope John XXIII, darling of liberal Roman Catholics, took up his pen to comment. Did he, as one might expect, warn of the dark shadow of the jackboot spreading over Europe? Did he fret over the fate of the Jews who had just fallen into Hitler's grasp? No. What he wrote was that German society was made up of "alert, strong" men, who fully deserved their victory over a "worn-out French democracy".

Skeletons have been rattling in the Roman Catholic church's wartime cupboard for years. In particular, the Vatican's inaction over the Holocaust, its failure to condemn openly and specifically the Nazis' attempted genocide, has cast a long shadow over the reputation of the austere wartime pontiff, Pius XII.

Now, however, a new row is threatening to engulf a man of a very different sort - his benign successor, John XXIII. The man Italians call "il papa buono" ("the good Pope") was as much a symbol of the mould-breaking 60s as John Kennedy, Che Guevara or the Beatles: a cuddly, grandpa figure who was also an audacious moderniser.

Time magazine, which made him its 1962 Man of the Year, called him "the most popular Pope of modern times". Whereas his predecessor had moved almost exclusively among prelates and diplomats within the Vatican's walls, John XXIII escaped them to visit orphanages and hospitals and, on one celebrated occasion, Rome's main prison. This was the Pope who fathered ecumenism, who launched the Second Vatican Council and who seemed to be pointing the world's biggest Christian church down a path very different from the narrow one it has since followed under Pope John Paul II.

As the Vatican's envoy, or nuncio, in Turkey, Monsignor Angelo Roncalli, as he then was, had rescued Jews escaping from Nazi Germany. As Pope, he made a profound impression on a group of Jewish visitors - and, through them, on the entire Jewish world - when he approached them with the simple Biblical greeting: "I am Joseph, your brother."

But last month, the Italian daily Corriere della Sera published a letter apparently sent by the Vatican to the papal nuncio in France in 1946. It concerned the thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of Jewish children in Europe who had been handed over by their parents to Roman Catholic couples or institutions during the war to save them from the Nazis' death camps. The Vatican's letter said that children who had been baptised in the meantime ought not to be handed back. It ended with the words: "Please note that this decision has been approved by the Holy Father." The recipient of the letter was Roncalli, who had recently been posted to France from Turkey.

Amid the controversy prompted by the letter, two questions have been asked. The first, posed by Father Peter Gumpel, the Jesuit who built up the case for Pius XII's beatification, is why the Vatican's instructions should have been written in French. The working language of all Vatican departments is Italian and the recipient, too, was an Italian. Father Gumpel believes the letter may have been a so-called "communicazione abbreviata" - a summary of the instructions in French, carried out by Roncalli so that he could pass them on to the French bishops.

Whatever the exact status of the letter, though, it does not detract from the force of the second question: why, if Pope John XXIII was such a friend of the Jews, did he apparently obey the letter's blood-chilling instructions without question? Matteo Luigi Napolitano, an expert on church-state relations, has noted that in Roncalli's diaries there was no trace of concern about the Holocaust, let alone the Jewish children who survived it in Catholic families and orphanages.

The explanation provided by some fellow historians is that there was always a vast gap between the man and his image. He may have been born the son of a sharecropper, but he soon became a sophisticated and adroit diplomat. Cesare Cavalleri, the editor of Studi Cattolici, argued in yesterday's Corriere della Sera that "all John XXIII's speeches and doctrinal documents bear witness to his narrow and rigorous orthodoxy". He originally entrusted the preparation of the Second Vatican Council to an arch-conservative cardinal but was swept into more liberal territory by the demands it drew to the surface.

No one is arguing that the "good Pope" was an anti-semite. But, according to Pier Giorgio Zunino, a lecturer in contemporary history at the university of Turin, the Angelo Roncalli of the 1940s was "fully at home with the majority Catholic culture: aligned with fascism, opposed to Soviet communism, but also suspicious of western democracy".

Some of the evidence for his views was published in 2003 in a book about the Italian republic that went unnoticed outside academic circles. It includes a letter written in 1943 that raises further disturbing questions. By 1943, many of the horrors perpetrated by the Axis would have been known to an international diplomat such as Roncalli. Yet his advice to his relatives back in Italy was to keep "unchanged faith" in the fascist regime. Their best course, he said, was "to work, pray, suffer, obey and keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet".

Posted on Thursday, January 6, 2005 at 3:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Revisionist History Of Cleopatra's Death

Richard Girling, Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), 1/06/05

The death of Cleopatra from an asp bite is one of history's greatest romantic tragedies. But, asks Richard Girling, can the verdict of suicide, accepted for 2000 years, stand up to a modern-day investigation by a forensic expert?

For 2000 years, the death of Queen Cleopatra VII has worked like a mind-altering drug in the bloodstreams of painters, poets, playwrights and historians. Tragedy and romance have never been so irresistibly entwined: the beautiful young queen, maddened by grief, hastening to join her dead lover, Mark Antony, through the kiss of an asp.

We believe it because we want to. What we don't do is pass the story through a filter of modern, proof-seeking inquiry in which questions have to be matched with answers. Is it likely -- is it even possible -- that the testimony of Plutarch, written more than 100 years after the event, could be true? Yet thanks to him, this is the version handed down through history:

Cleopatra, from her chamber (possibly in her mausoleum, possibly in her palace, where she is under house arrest) sends her conqueror, Octavian -- the future Emperor Augustus -- a sealed tablet, which he opens immediately. He reads her plea, begging to be buried with Antony, correctly interprets this as a suicide note and sends his guards sprinting the short distance to the chamber. What they find there will be etched into the collective memory as indelibly as the crucifixion of Christ. The great queen, seductress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, lies in her royal robes, dead on a golden couch. One of her two maidservants, Eiras, lies dying at her feet. The other, Charmion, fighting unconsciousness, struggles to straighten the diadem on the royal head before herself falling lifeless. All three women have applied to themselves the poisonous fangs of an asp, which has been smuggled to them in a basket of figs.

Whose word do we have for this? Possibly that of Cleopatra's physician, Olympos, and almost certainly that of Octavian/Augustus himself, whose memoirs -- unseen by any modern historian -- were a likely source for the historical account written by Plutarch, on whose word we are compelled to rely. But Plutarch was not born until 75 years after Cleopatra's death. In any modern court of justice his evidence would be inadmissible. Even if allowed, it would be ripped apart by lawyers. Inconsistency is piled upon inaccuracy; unlikelihood upon frank impossibility.

Wherever you look, there are problems -- problems with the behaviour of the women, problems with the snake, problems with the guards, problems with Octavian. No single aspect of the story is impossible, but the degree of improbability mounts as each new factor is tossed on to the pile, until the resulting accumulator carries the kind of odds that would attach to a donkey in a steeplechase. For a 21st-century criminal investigator, the signals are as plain as bullet holes. This was no suicide pact. This was a plain case of murder.

Even the great queen's beauty is a myth -- her attraction to Caesar and Antony lay more in the political union of Rome and Egypt than in the sweaty coupling of soldier and sex kitten. Certainly Octavian, who had no political need of her after victory at Actium, seems to have found it easy enough to repel her advances (though apparently he had the greatest difficulty in keeping his toga on elsewhere). Ideas of beauty, of course, evolve over time. It may be that a 1.5m-tall, dumpy woman with rolls of neck fat, a huge beaky nose and brown, eroded teeth somehow embodied a pre-Christian physical ideal, and that crocodile-dung contraception was every hero's pre-Viagra turn-on. Or it may not. You could argue that what Cleopatra looked like was the least important thing about her; yet it plants the first red flag, a crucial early warning of the dislocation between reality and myth.

Other red flags follow thick and fast, many of them planted in the body of the "asp". By common consent, Cleopatra's ticket to oblivion would have been the Egyptian cobra, Naja haje. This was the species represented in the Egyptian symbol of royalty, the uraeus, and is the one still employed by snake charmers throughout North Africa. It is a big animal, thick in the body and typically 2 1/2 metres long. Cleopatra would have had to feign an unusual appetite for figs in order to justify to Octavian's guards a basket big enough to conceal it.

Let us assume, however, that this habitual manipulator of emperors, with all her cunning, could have found a way covertly to take delivery of a 2.4m snake. What then? She writes and sends her suicide note to Octavian, then straight away seizes the cobra and encourages it to bite her. Before she falls, she passes the snake to Eiras, who quickly receives a bite of her own before passing it on to Charmion, who does the same. By the time the guards run in, minutes later, they are all either dead or on the brink of death. The snake, meanwhile, has vanished without trace.

Plutarch's yarn begins to crumble. The first snag is the timing. There are reported cases of death occurring within 15 or 20 minutes of a cobra's bite, but it usually takes much longer. Snakebite expert David Warrell, Professor of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the University of Oxford says in his experience, the quickest death took fully two hours. In the case of Cleopatra, when Octavian's guards came on the scene in a matter of minutes, we are asked to believe not only that the queen died in record time but that her two maidservants did likewise. You couldn't say it was impossible, but the likelihood is remote. It becomes remoter still when you consider the delivery of the venom. It's not that a single cobra would not have had enough.

"There's a misconception," Professor Warrell says, "that snakes can exhaust the supply of venom with one strike. All the evidence now suggests that repeated strikes, even up to 10 in a row, can deliver lethal doses." The problem again is a matter of odds, for not every bite injects poison. "If you're bitten by a venomous snake and the fangs puncture your skin, there's probably only an average 50 per cent chance that venom will be injected." Again, three in a row may not be impossible, but the statistical hurdle is climbing relentlessly skywards.

You have to consider, too, not only the cobra but the likely behaviour of its victims. Terror of snakes is hard-wired into the human psyche. To reach out and touch even a harmless one is a supreme test of the human will; to confront, grasp and invite the strike of an Egyptian cobra requires the kind of courage that is normal only in saints.

Naja haje is variable in colour. It may be brown, cream, yellowish, greyish, copperish. Very often it is banded. Always it has a long tail, a powerful cylindrical body and a broad head with large, stare-you-down eyes. When aroused, it rears and spreads its hood. Given her identification with it, and her wearing of the uraeus as royal insignia, it is possible to imagine Cleopatra taking it into her last embrace. Cynically, you might argue even that it was a union of approximate moral equivalence, for it would have taken a very active snake to kill more people than the queen herself.

Whatever human life may have meant to her, it was never an obstacle to self-advancement. As was the custom in the Ptolemaic dynasty, Cleopatra was the child of an incestuous marriage between brother and sister. As was the custom, too, she had adopted murder as an everyday instrument of protocol.

Her first husband, who she married when she was 17, was her own 10-year-old brother, Ptolemy XIII, against who she later made war and who ended up face down in the Nile. Her second was another brother, 11-year-old Ptolemy XIV, whose death by poisoning four years later was timed conveniently to coincide with the readiness of Caesarion, Cleopatra's bastard son by Julius Caesar, to join her on the throne. She also procured the murder of her sister Arsino, and shortly before her own death ordered the execution of King Artavasdes of Armenia, whose head she then sent to another monarch, whose co-operation she wanted.

The foxy temptress and swooning beauty of popular imagination was a violent pragmatist for whom death held no chill. Although, as we shall see, there are reasons to believe she would have done no such thing, it is quite possible to imagine such a woman consorting with a snake. Her servants, however, were a different matter.

They raised two more prominent red flags in the mind of investigative criminal profiler Pat Brown. Based in Minneapolis, she specialises in unsolved, "cold" murder cases and sells her analytical skills to prosecutors, defence attorneys and police forces throughout the US.

"I thought about how the handmaidens, after they saw Cleopatra scream after she was bitten by the snake and perhaps dropped it -- because it's hard to hold on to something that has just bitten you -- would then have to run after the snake. If you're reconstructing this crime in your mind, can you imagine two women seeing this and then the next woman has to run after the slithering snake and try to pick up this thing and then apply it to herself and give it to a third woman?"

Higher and higher rises the hurdle of disbelief, and higher yet again; for when Octavian's men arrive, the frenzied snake in its orgy of biting has totally disappeared. Sometimes even hotshot criminal investigators are driven to state the obvious.

"When a suicide is committed," Brown says, "you usually have two things: a body and the implement of death. Because, once you're dead, you cannot yourself remove that implement of death. The only person who could do that would be somebody visiting the crime scene afterwards. In this case, we have Cleopatra's body, we have her two handmaidens' bodies, but Octavian's men say they saw nothing else."

There was no asp, and no other evidence of suicide beyond the presence of three dead or dying women -- no cup of hemlock, no dagger, no poisoned comb.

While none of this proves murder, the lengthening list of anomalies and unlikelihoods leaves Plutarch's account bristling with more red flags than a CIA intelligence dossier. In whose custody was Cleopatra when she died? Who stood to benefit from her death? On whose account did Plutarch have to rely for his verdict of suicide by asp? The answer to all three questions is the same: Octavian. If that is not enough to arouse your suspicion, then consider what the future Emperor Augustus did next (and about this there is no dispute). He killed Cleopatra's son, Caesarion.

ONE of the biggest obstacles that any revisionist faces is the sheer, romantic attraction of Plutarch's version, spun by Shakespeare into one of the greatest of all human tragedies: "Dost thou not see my baby at my breast, That sucks the nurse asleep?" Who could fail to be affected? The exact sequence of events from historical accounts is unclear, but the double suicide of the doomed lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, is as much a "fact" as Nelson's death at Trafalgar or Hitler's in his bunker.

[Editor's Note: This is only approximately one-half of the original piece.]

Posted on Thursday, January 6, 2005 at 3:49 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Daniel Pipes; What Label Should We Use to Refer to Radical Islamists?

Daniel Pipes, at his blog (12-26-04):

Coming to Terms: Militant Islam or Radical Islam? My title here plays off of Martin Kramer's spring 2003 article in the Middle East Quarterly, "Coming to Terms: Fundamentalists or Islamists?" In it, he reviews the "heated debate" of the past two decades on how to label in English the phenomenon variously known as Muslim fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, political Islam, militant Islam, radical Islam, and Islamism. He concludes the survey by noting that "It is impossible to predict which terms will prevail in the West's own struggle to come to terms with change in contemporary Islam."

True enough, and I have my own colorful history of terms for this topic. In my first-ever article on it, "This World is Political!! The Islamic Revival of the Seventies," Orbis, 24 (1980-81): 9-41, I used neo-orthodox Islam. I then moved successively over to fundamentalist Islam and Islamism. Islamism remains my preferred term (because it is used by Islamists themselves; and because of its parallel with the other ideological "isms"), but it is heavy to say, so after 9/11, I adopted militant Islam and used it in the title of a book and in many articles and television appearances.

Then, in the year and a half since Kramer wrote his article, militant has become the main euphemism for terrorist, to the point that now even militant Islam offends my ear. So, with some reluctance, I take up a new term, that being radical Islam. I hope this term lasts longer than the others - and longer than the phenomenon itself. (December 26, 2004)

Posted on Monday, January 3, 2005 at 8:34 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Jared Diamond: How Civilizations End (How We Can Escape the Fate of those that Died)

Jared Diamond, in th NYT (1-1-05)

[Jared Diamond, who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies," is the author of the forthcoming "Collapse: How Societies Choose or Fail to Succeed."]

NEW Year's weekend traditionally is a time for us to reflect, and to make resolutions based on our reflections. In this fresh year, with the United States seemingly at the height of its power and at the start of a new presidential term, Americans are increasingly concerned and divided about where we are going. How long can America remain ascendant? Where will we stand 10 years from now, or even next year?

Such questions seem especially appropriate this year. History warns us that when once-powerful societies collapse, they tend to do so quickly and unexpectedly. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise: peak power usually means peak population, peak needs, and hence peak vulnerability. What can be learned from history that could help us avoid joining the ranks of those who declined swiftly? We must expect the answers to be complex, because historical reality is complex: while some societies did indeed collapse spectacularly, others have managed to thrive for thousands of years without major reversal.

When it comes to historical collapses, five groups of interacting factors have been especially important: the damage that people have inflicted on their environment; climate change; enemies; changes in friendly trading partners; and the society's political, economic and social responses to these shifts. That's not to say that all five causes play a role in every case. Instead, think of this as a useful checklist of factors that should be examined, but whose relative importance varies from case to case.

For instance, in the collapse of the Polynesian society on Easter Island three centuries ago, environmental problems were dominant, and climate change, enemies and trade were insignificant; however, the latter three factors played big roles in the disappearance of the medieval Norse colonies on Greenland. Let's consider two examples of declines stemming from different mixes of causes: the falls of classic Maya civilization and of Polynesian settlements on the Pitcairn Islands.

Maya Native Americans of the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent parts of Central America developed the New World's most advanced civilization before Columbus. They were innovators in writing, astronomy, architecture and art. From local origins around 2,500 years ago, Maya societies rose especially after the year A.D. 250, reaching peaks of population and sophistication in the late 8th century.

Thereafter, societies in the most densely populated areas of the southern Yucatan underwent a steep political and cultural collapse: between 760 and 910, kings were overthrown, large areas were abandoned, and at least 90 percent of the population disappeared, leaving cities to become overgrown by jungle. The last known date recorded on a Maya monument by their so-called Long Count calendar corresponds to the year 909. What happened?

A major factor was environmental degradation by people: deforestation, soil erosion and water management problems, all of which resulted in less food. Those problems were exacerbated by droughts, which may have been partly caused by humans themselves through deforestation. Chronic warfare made matters worse, as more and more people fought over less and less land and resources.

Why weren't these problems obvious to the Maya kings, who could surely see their forests vanishing and their hills becoming eroded? Part of the reason was that the kings were able to insulate themselves from problems afflicting the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was slowly starving.

What's more, the kings were preoccupied with their own power struggles. They had to concentrate on fighting one another and keeping up their images through ostentatious displays of wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run from the problems of society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege of being among the last to starve....

Click here to read the rest of this article.

Posted on Saturday, January 1, 2005 at 11:15 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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