Breaking News

Departments

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.

Timothy Burke: Culture, Politics, Academia and Other Shiny Objects

Source: Easily Distracted (Blog) (1-31-06)

Michael Berube’s most recent essay on academic freedom deserves wide exposure: it would make a good pamphlet to be sent and circulated not just among academics, but between academics and their various publics, including legislatures and pundits.

One part of it that caught my eye in particular was Berube’s observation that the defense of academic freedom should be one part of a wider commitment to procedural liberalism (not “liberalism” in the sense of “those Democrats are liberals”, liberalism in the wider sense that includes most American conservatives save for the religious or cultural right). It caught my eye partially because it reminded me of what frustrates me in some discussions of academic freedom: that more than a few scholars who rise in defense of academic freedom are either agnostic about procedural liberalism in the wider sense or actively antagonistic or dismissive of it.

This is what allows some academics to rise to defend academic freedom from David Horowitz and yet strongly endorse campus speech codes, for example. In other areas of argument, the same duality is what allows critical legal theorists to argue that “law” is largely a mechanism of power, that the claims procedural liberals would make about how law works are not in fact how law works, and yet at the same time, often to invoke legal or procedural standards to defend or protect what they politically value; for anti-foundationalists to suddenly plant their feet on the foundations they otherwise tear down when they find themselves threatened.

My frustration with this pattern, at least what I see as a pattern, conditions my initial approach to an intense discussion produced by a recent posting from Scott Eric Kaufman at The Valve. Kaufman’s entry is a relatively (and to my view, atypically) well-worn attack on symbolic politics on the left, as one respondent puts it, an “ew, hippies” post.

I’ve been accused of making similar comments at times in the past, with some justice, and I’m about to make such comments again. The problem with Kaufman’s entry is that it glosses the intellectual and political history of the New Left, but on the other hand, unpacking that history may actually sharpen the antagonism that his post invokes and that the comments exemplify.

As some of the Valve commenters note, a more nuanced history of the New Left actually recapitulates the division between Kaufman and some of his strongest critics, such as Turbulent Velvet. Kaufman is wrong in many ways to associate the kinds of symbolic politics that he disdains with the Students for a Democratic Society. In many ways, SDS was at least initially the fraction of the New Left that was more distinctly establishment, more oriented towards both procedural liberalism and older lineages of mass-movement radicalism; the SDS of 1962 was eclipsed both by a situationist left whose politics were largely symbolic and representational and by a would-be vanguardist fractional left that made the move into violent confrontations with the state that it took to be anything but symbolic. The “old” New Left was dragged along in the wake of that double move, dropped out of late 1960s political struggle, or made the formal transition into mainstream political and social institutions.

The discussion at the Valve that follows is pretty intense. In some cases, I think it’s simply a case of people talking past one another, or not noticing odd points of congruity. Turbulent Velvet argues that Kaufman is complicit in the kind of patterned media coverage that allows the cameras to show the “five guys dressed as Batman” at a protest of a million people otherwise dressed in suits and ties, that the “ew, hippie” trope is one that authorizes that sort of selectivity. To some extent, stepping outside of the debate for a minute, I’d say more commonsensically that if I was the guy editing the nightly news broadcast, I’d probably show the five Batmen as well: it’s just a better picture. But it is precisely that calculation that is part of the deeper problem: the best situationists understood the representational logic of public culture very well in the late 1960s.

T.V. is right to ask, “Why aren’t the million well-dressed people the main political fact that becomes news?” and maybe right even to say, “You’re legitimizing the fact that it’s not news by stigmatizing the five Batmen”. He’s not asking, “Why are there five Batmen there in the crowd of a million”, because he thinks that’s an irrelevant question. And he’s actually agreeing with Kaufman implicitly by suggesting that it’s the million people who are there to be counted for a statement made within normative politics who matter, not the five who are there to make some very different and anti-normative point.

This is what the situationists challenged from the outset: that the million matter more. They rejected that procedural liberalism is a value system which legitimately constrains and directs our actions rather than a straightjacket which coerces a performance of consent. There is a legitimate antagonism here between procedural liberals and anti-foundational radicals, and I get as wary and tetchy as Kaufman when I hear anyone trying to either argue that no such legitimate antagonism exists, or that I have misperceived the nature of the problem. I’d rather hear, forthrightly, the accusation that I’m siding with the establishment or with conservatives, because that is in many ways accurate, and because that accusation at least begins to chase out into the open some of the real issues, many of which lie within and are defined by the wreck of the history that Kaufman raises from the deep.

Based on that history, people with a commitment to liberalism are perfectly correct to be on guard against both situationist and vanguardist attempts to outflank them to their left. Right both in the sense that each of those responses seeks to substantively void or evacuate the core commitments of liberalism and seeks to somehow shackle liberals to a political strategy not of their own making. Situationism by making procedural responses seem impotent, humorless and complicit; vanguardism by laying its eggs parasitically inside the body of more establishment left or liberal institutions. I’m more concerned by the latter, because there’s a very real history of such political practice on the left in the United States.

On the opposite side, there is equally legitimate historical reason for various radicals to regard liberals as fundamental enemies. I’m always minded of Garry Wills’ brilliant indictment of liberals in Nixon Agonistes, of the clueless, patronizing response that many offered to undeniably substantive radical arguments. Of the disengaged and anti-intellectual disdain of some liberal intellectuals now for postmodernist and poststructuralist critiques, their unwillingness to engage arguments that by the standards of liberalism one is obligated to engage and take seriously. More tangibly, there’s no denying that some mainstream liberals in the 1960s and 1970s were all too willing to report radicals to the state, to participate in political suppression well outside the bounds of the public sphere and civil society–in fact, to violate their own commitments to proceduralism in order to score transient political points or puff up their credentials as anti-communists.

To get past “ew, hippie” (or “communist dupe”) on one hand and “establishment pawn” or “sell-out” on the other does not free us from the antagonism that history (and our present) have in ample measure. Because there is a real, possibly unbridgeable, political struggle involved, one that is made all the more intense by the fact that both groups imagine a common relationship to some unmobilized, relatively silent, general and possibly fictional constituency. Both imagine within the United States that they are speaking for and with some of the same social constellations, and competing for leadership of same. And here both groups are, in some measure, wrong.

It is a caricature to say that liberals want to “move to the center”: that is in some sense more coherent than the actual floundering tactical vision of the political that many liberals have on offer. It is a caricature to say that various flavors of radical, anti-foundationalist, or left consciousness just want to do street theater with puppets or smash windows in Seattle. They don’t even have that clear a collective sense of direction. Clarity for either (or more than either, because I think there are really more than two bodies in this room) really does lead them in completely opposite directions, but clarity for either probably doesn’t lead in any immediate sense to political victory inside or outside the electoral system.

In a way, the aimlessness of contemporary strategy has much to do with the fact that neither constellation of thinkers and activists is willing to face their own inauthenticity to the present moment. The radical constituency conjures visions of conspiracy and mass false consciousness; the procedural liberal putters around peddling his own technocratic excellence and managerial ability and wondering when the decent majority is going to buy some of that product. What neither grasps is that something subtle has changed in the underlying normative architecture of social alliance and social identity in America. We go looking for explanation and settle on cartoonish one-note sociologies: it’s the religious right! it’s the soccer moms! it’s fear of Osama! it’s Karl Rove’s diabolism! it’s Diebold and gerrymandering! it’s culture, stupid! it’s the economy, stupid! and so on. It’s all and none: there may be one geist, but the spirit is a composite, and the sum does not tell you the parts.

There is no single move to make to unlock the future. It doesn’t help to think about everything in a way divorced from any strategic conception of the political, which I think could be said fairly about both procedural liberals and various flavors of radicals and leftists. John Kerry trying to filibuster Samuel Alito isn’t about anything more than building his credentials for another run at the Presidency with people who are going to vote Democratic whether the Democrats nominate Hilary Clinton or Attila the Hun. Don’t bring that shit if you don’t have a hope of winning the game, of blocking the nomination, particularly not if you’re otherwise staking your reputation on the defense of normative institutional ways of doing politics. A filibuster is a rupture in normative deliberation, a power-play.

Don’t play power if you don’t have the tools to play. A protest is the same thing: a million Mormons or a million transvestite Batmen, I don’t care, it doesn’t add up to anything unless that’s a million committed votes that weren’t committed before, or the protest is a tipping point that moves a new constituency into a different political position, or if the protest threatens the continued functioning of something that a persuadable or vulnerable interest doesn’t dare allow to be threatened. If you can get a general strike going, that’s real power. If you can compel a response from the powerful that makes them look worse that the protestors, that’s symbolic power. If you can get people who voted one way last time to vote a different way next time, that’s electoral power. But if your protest breaks the thing you came to save, good luck fixing it. If it ends up accumulating symbolic power for your enemies, good luck getting it back. If it ends up losing more votes than it gains, what was the point?

Don’t play at the politics of symbols unless you know what symbols mean, how they circulate, and about how to transformatively alter their meaning and circulation. Most of the people, many of them radicals, who argue for a symbolic understanding about why people think and act they way they do have painfully empirically and conceptually thin understandings of processes and institutions of cultural production, of the mechanisms of cultural circulation, and of mass audiences and their capacities. Sure, perhaps the media pictures the five Batmen at a protest of a million, but what does that mean? Is that why some unnamed viewing public who is presumed to be potentially sympathetic to the million protesters is instead unmobilized and unmoved? There’s a lot of missing steps in between point A and point Z in that claim. Maybe much of the mass audience is just as smart in some respect as Turbulent Velvet and pay no more attention to the five Batmen than he does. Maybe that’s not why they aren’t pouring into the streets themselves to join the protestors.

In the end, because I’m essentially a classical liberal, possibly even of the more conservative kind in many respects, my view of the road ahead runs through liberalism. I would be the first to say that the cartographers presently trying to lay down that asphault mostly are rolling out circles, at least in the United States. If there’s an argument to be made for liberalism at its deepest and most authentic levels, it is going to have to connect to, and possibly be subsumed within, hybrid compositions of common sense and everyday interpersonal decency in American life. It is not going to find those formations evenly spread through American life, either. Politics is about mobilizing discrete constituencies, and liberals are mostly confined to a kind of urban, technocratic, expert-educated elite in the United States, a confinement that is comprehensive from values to culture to political philosophy.

Radicals of various forms and inclinations have a similar problem: for the most part, they’re located within a kind of lumpenbourgoisie that arises within and around the same social formations that sustain contemporary American liberals.

My personal inclination, much as it appears to be Kaufman’s, is to think that many diverse kinds of radicals are even further from having a clue than mainstream liberals about how to connect their convictions to any kind of political power, whether it’s through mass action or winning elections. Trying to collectively impede business as usual when the people conducting such business can just retreat behind even more protected redoubts (physical and otherwise) usually means you end up hassling people who are not (or were not, until you hassle them) in any sense your opposition; a lot of radical mass action ends up being the left-wing version of bombing the shit out of a bunch of innocent Sunnis in order to kill one terrorist that you suspect of being present. Here, yes, I cry, “Oh, noes! Here come the puppets!” half with a kind of nasty intent to mock, and half with the deliberate desire to make it clear that I’m not to be found in any part of the street theater–both because I judge such action ineffectual and because even were it effectual, symbolic politics of that kind, or even most mass action, centrally attacks my political values, my vestment in liberal institutions and liberal proceduralism. I might forgive that politics the latter if it at least could boast of the former, but even at that, I’d be making the devil’s bargain, in my view retrospectively foolish, that many establishment leftists made during the 1960s.

The core point is that the antagonism here is not superficial. It runs all the way to the foundational bottom. We’re not fighting about whose fault it is that the television cameras zoom in on Batman or on broken windows at Seattle Starbucks: we’re fighting about what politics and society have been, are, and ought to be. If American liberals and leftists have a hard time signing the dotted line on a popular-front agreement, however high the stakes, it may be partly because both sides know that in the history of the 20th Century, such a concord is usually reached with knives held behind the back and fingers crossed, and because both sides genuinely are interested in and potentially identify with social and political constituencies who are not at the table and who will be actively antagonized by the existence of such an alliance.

It’s not about buying respectability with a mythical middle for liberals, or street cred with the Multitude for the radicals, nothing that generic. For me, it’s that I want to communicate seriously with many conservatives (both within the establishment and outside of it) not just because I think that’s the road to political victory but because the seriousness of my values demand that I do so. That’s liberalism, warp and woof!

Indeed, because I think that many conservatives or libertarians are procedural liberals, one and the same thing. The seriousness of my values demand I try the same with radicals, because the critique many of them offer is absolutely substantive; even situationist or symbolic responses are.

The same is true for many radicals, postmodernists, anti-foundationalists, latter-day situationists, you name it: they may have their Others whom they can only oppose, but that’s not the liberal; liberals are just close enough to create an accursed intimacy, a need to furiously ask why the liberal hates the leftist. To accuse the liberal of self-loathing is to suggest that the liberal is really a radical and ask why the liberal keeps committing fratricide. To ask, as Turbulent Velvet asks, why the self-loathing liberal can’t just call down the energy of the men dressed as Batmen and the puppet-carryers, mobilize his own fringes.

In part the reason they can’t is because that is the substantive liberal critique of the procedurally-minded conservatives and libertarians: that they have failed to protect the institutions and practices which are the substance of democratic politics, the essence of contemporary freedom, that they’ve sold out to their own fringe in pursuit of power. The radical asks the liberal, “Why can’t you do the same? Why must you show contempt for all the various constituencies that are deeply alienated from contemporary American life, for all the varieties of political practice?” The liberal’s answer, at least mine, is that I’m trying to make the world safe for carrying puppets to rallies but that “making use of the energy” or the incorporation of various radicalized constituencies is destroying the village that I’m trying to save, just as I think the Republicans have done. I readily agree that’s the key to recent Republican electoral success, that they’ve embraced a political faction that hungers for the demolition of many of the structural underpinnings of liberal democracy, tried to catch that lightning in a bottle. They’ve already burned their enemies that way; I think they’re going to end up burning themselves, too. Cynically, quietly, my answer to the radical is also, “It wouldn’t work anyway”, that whatever it is that the radical yearns for as a praxis in the contemporary crisis isn’t just morally wrong, it’s beside the point, even more ineffectual and self-defeating than weak defenses of business-as-usual.

What this amounts to is this: don’t think I’ve made a mistake when I distance myself from what I perceive to be various forms of radical praxis or argument. Nor do I believe that really the radical is just a liberal who doesn’t know it yet.

I do think that he ought to be. I think the same about the cultural or religious right, that they scarcely dream of what they’re asking for, or the general consequences of what they’re trying to bring about. In neither case is that a claim of false consciousness in the classic sense of the term. It’s more, “I know best”, a preemptive version of “I told you so”, which I readily grant is a response that rarely (never) endears the person offering it to anybody.

Posted on Tuesday, January 31, 2006 at 10:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Martin E. Marty: Textbooks and Religion ... The Problem

Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (1-30-06)

Historians, to whose company I belong, are often taught to feel irrelevant. Survey after survey shows that most citizens know appallingly little about the past, including "their" past, the past on the basis of which they make decisions. Whether the fault is with us historians for doing our job badly or with publics for failing to pay attention is hard to discern. One point ought to be clear, however, in these days when our sub-cultures fight our sub-cultures and our "multi-" groups fight other "multi-" groups: Much of that fighting is about religion. In such encounters, historical accounts are often misrepresented, becoming inflaming sources of issues.

This week, a Wall Street Journal story by Daniel Golden showed just how tense debates are over how religious history is taught in public school textbooks (January 25). He described Hindu, Islamic, and Jewish groups complaining about and fighting over the way these texts treat their pasts. It is obvious that textbook writers, school boards, administrators, and teachers are "damned if they do and damned if they don't" touch religion, and are pretty much damned however they do do religion. (For good background on the complexity of all this, read Kent Greenawalt's Does God Belong in Public Schools? Greenawalt shows how hard it is to make judicial and judicious decisions on this subject).

A reminder: Those who criticize the United States Supreme Court for having been secular and a secularizer fail to note that the famed "school prayer decisions" of 1962-1963 -- which ruled against using classrooms and school instrumentalities for devotional exercises, prayer, and the like -- strongly urged that religion as such should be taught. Without knowledge of the religious past and religious peoples' ways of doing things, how can we understand the present? we were asked. There are agencies that try to supply texts, but their books have not been adopted as widely as one might expect. Here's one reason for this: In the end, most agitators for religion in the schools want their religion to be favored, privileged, and taught.

Golden points to interest groups in the various faiths, each of which has a point, and most of which overstate their cases. Hindus do not like reference to polytheism, the caste system, the inferior status of Indian women, and "sati" (the burning of widows on their husbands' pyres). Some of the self-appointed agitators play rough, attacking scholars of Hinduism who do not satisfy them. We do not have space here to detail what Jews and Muslims have not liked, but it takes little imagination. And while Golden does not concentrate on them, some Christians have tried hardest to dictate how Christians get covered. Golden also portrays fair-minded scholars who do their best to tell the truth, but are caught in crossfires.

All this is fateful, since the decisions of boards in giant California and Texas markets come under every kind of pressure. If California and/or Texas votes "no" on a book, it stands little chance. A "yes" assures a market -- but not a free ride, because someone will protest something in each book, and there'll soon be another expensive revision. We are learning from this that you can't satisfy everyone and that religion is not a "private affair" but always a hot topic in a republic where we cannot settle things, but have to live with messiness.

Occasional Reference Note:
We do regular sightings of religious events from Wall Street Journal news coverage. Readers who see quite accurately that paper's editorial page as being conservative sometimes confuse the distinction between news and editorial bias there. This week I learned that Tim Groseclose, a political scientist, and Jeffrey Milyo, an economist, along with twenty-one research assistants, combed through ten years of U.S. media coverage and found "a systematic liberal bias" (see http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/). But hold on: Using their scales and measurements, they announced that "one surprise is that the Wall Street Journal ... we find as the most liberal of all twenty news outlets," and cited a 2002 survey which found it the second most liberal. So we cannot gain points with conservatives when we quote the Journal, just as we should not lose points with liberals who are suspicious of it. So there ....

Posted on Monday, January 30, 2006 at 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Andrew E. Busch: The Goldwater Myth

Source: Claremont Review of Books (winter 2005-2006) (1-27-06)

"During the campaign of 1964, [he] was our incorruptible standard-bearer," recalled William F. Buckley, Jr., in his 1998 obituary of Barry Goldwater, the career senator from Arizona, 34 years after the watershed. Goldwater, of course, was defeated resoundingly on Election Day, winning only six states. "It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater's critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene," Buckley continued. "But then of course 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching."

Strange, then, that these days many commentators believe that Goldwater's conservatism was a different species from Reagan's and, especially, from George W. Bush's. Though admittedly an economic conservative, Goldwater has become an icon of opposition to social conservatism. When the 2004 Republican national convention showcased social liberals like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani, George F. Will proclaimed, "[Goldwater's] kind of conservatism made a comeback." By "Goldwater conservatism" Will meant "muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural questions."

Will was merely restating the consensus view. Darcy Olsen, president of the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, argued on the fifth anniversary of Goldwater's death that "Goldwater conservative" had "a different meaning than just saying, 'I am a Republican,' because when you say 'I am a Republican,' people assume that you're involved in the Moral Majority. It's its own brand…very libertarian." Senator John McCain said that Goldwater "disliked the religious right, because he felt they were intolerant, because Barry was not only conservative, but he was also to a degree libertarian."

What does the notion that Goldwater was a libertarian mean? First, it suggests that the cultural Right has abandoned true conservatism. It implies that presidents like Reagan and Bush, who have relied heavily on socially conservative voters, deviate from Goldwater's rugged and pure frontier conservatism. And then there is the implication, appearing frequently in the mainstream media, that Republicans must move back in Goldwater's direction if they are to reclaim their intellectual credibility.

But this interpretation happens to be wrong: it overlooks the role of social issues in the origins of the conservative movement. William F. Buckley, Jr.'s, God and Man at Yale (1951) complained not only about economic collectivism but also about rampant agnosticism and atheism among Yale's faculty. Ever since, the conservative movement has been as concerned with religious and moral issues as with economic and libertarian ones. Goldwater's 1964 campaign actually shaped the social conservatism of the modern Republican Party in at least three crucial respects: his view of human nature and the American republic; his concern over the moral deterioration of American society; and his stand on several key policy questions....

Posted on Friday, January 27, 2006 at 6:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Henry Siegman: Israel's History and Spielberg's Munich

Source: New York Review of Books (2-9-07)

... I saw nothing in the movie to justify the claim that it seeks to establish the moral equivalence of terrorist killings of civilians and Israeli retaliations. While the movie includes an emotional exchange between a Palestinian terrorist and the leader of the Israeli counterterrorism team about the moral claims of their respective national struggles, the focus of Munich is on members of the Israeli assassination team and their mounting doubts about their assignment and what it may be doing to their values and personal lives. These doubts are frequently the subject of their conversations, and finally cause the leader of the team so much anguish that he refuses to return to Israel. The Israelis therefore inevitably emerge as more real, personally appealing, and morally attractive than the Palestinian terrorists, whom the viewer never gets to know much about....

In his book Righteous Victims (1999), Benny Morris, the Israeli journalist and historian to whom The New Republic has turned for reviews of books on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, writes that "the upsurge of Arab terrorism in October 1937 triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict." While, in the past, Arabs "had sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers," now, "for the first time, massive bombs were placed [by the Irgun] in crowded Arab centers, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed." Morris notes that "this 'innovation' soon found Arab imitators."

During Israel's War of Independence, the Yishuv's defense forces acted not much differently from the way the Irgun or Palestinian terrorist groups behaved. As Morris explained in an interview in Haaretz, documentation recently declassified by the IDF's archives shows that "in the months of April–May 1948, units of the Haganah were given operational orders that stated explicitly that they were to uproot the villagers, expel them and destroy the villages themselves."[2]

"What the new material shows," Morris stated in the interview, is that during the course of this ethnic cleansing, especially in Operation Hiram, "there were far more Israeli acts of massacre than I had previously thought," including "unusually high concentration[s] of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion." These executions were ordered and overseen by the IDF. When asked about the number of occasions on which they were carried out, Morris replied,

Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others, the numbers were 70, 80, 100.... The worst cases were Sa-liha (70–80 killed), Deir Yassin (100–110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds), and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]; at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwassi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa.
Morris reports that orders for these executions and expulsions were issued in writing by senior Haganah commanders following meetings with David Ben-Gurion. And in The Guardian, Morris wrote that while a master plan for the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs did not exist before April 1948, "pre-1948 transfer thinking" by key Zionist leaders, including Ben-Gurion, "had readied hearts and minds in the Jewish community [in Israel] for the denouement of 1948."

In justification of the massacres committed by the Haganah, Morris stated in the Haaretz interview that "without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here." He added that the only fault he found with Ben-Gurion's actions is that the Haganah's ethnic cleansing was not carried out on a scale large enough to have prevented the "demographic problem" Israel faces today.

In other words, Morris seems to be arguing that when the establishment of a Jewish state hangs in the balance, there is no such category as innocent Palestinian civilians; their very existence constitutes a mortal threat to the state, and therefore to the Jewish people. That threat transforms innocent civilians into legitimate military targets.

Of course, Israel's resort to ethnic cleansing and the massacre of civilians in its War of Independence does not confer any legitimacy on the morally indefensible atrocities committed by terrorists in the Palestinians' ongoing struggle for their independence—atrocities that discredit and diminish the Palestinian national cause. But it exposes the double standard of commentators who have had little to say on the subject of Israeli atrocities, yet pounce on any hint of moral equivalence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Because Munich avoids such tendentiousness, the movie may help people to see the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in a more balanced perspective. The same cannot be said for criticism that assumes a moral superiority on the part of the Israelis that so far has been largely unearned. It must also be said that a particularly unfortunate aspect of the accusation of moral equivalence made by some of the movie's critics is that it has distracted attention from what is surely the most important moral issue by far, namely the decades-long occupation that has turned the lives of millions of Palestinians into a daily hell. Those in Israel who have come to view the shattering of an entire people as an acceptable condition of their own national normalcy will certainly not agonize over the "collateral damage" caused by Israel's retaliations.



Posted on Friday, January 27, 2006 at 6:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Kwan Weng Kin: Koizumi's Obstinacy Could Isolate Japan ... Yasukuni and Asia

Source: Japan Focus (1-22-06)

[This article appeared in the Straits Times on January 13, 2006. Kwan Weng Kin is the Japan correspondent for the Straits Times ( Singapore).]

... Critics say Mr Koizumi makes up for his lack of diplomatic finesse by his deftness at substituting real issues with those of his own creation.

He insists that his decision to visit Yasukuni is a 'matter of the heart' and that it is natural for a prime minister to express gratitude to his country's war dead.

But China and South Korea are not complaining about him praying for the souls of his countrymen who fell in battle, or pledging not to go to war again.

The problem is that Mr Koizumi insists on doing both at the infamous shrine.

Mr Koizumi, it seems, fails to understand this. Or perhaps he has never tried to do so.

As a young man and even after becoming a politician, he had not displayed the slightest interest in Yasukuni. It was only when he ran in the 2001 presidential elections of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that he pledged to make annual visits to the shrine in order to win the votes of members of the Association of War Bereaved Families, a powerful backer of the party.

Many Japanese believe that Mr Koizumi continues to visit the shrine because he makes a virtue of carrying through with his promises, no matter what negative implications they may hold.

Given the obstinate streak in Mr Koizumi's character, the protests from China and South Korea only make it more difficult for him to back down.

Reports also suggest that he had resolved to continue Yasukuni visits as a way to spite Beijing, after a tumultuous encounter with then Chinese leader Jiang Zemin in October 2002 on the fringes of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, during which Mr Jiang reportedly berated him over Yasukuni for most of their 45-minute meeting.

Weekly news magazines and commentators on cable television current affairs talk shows have recently taken to describing Mr Koizumi's stance on Yasukuni as 'childish'. By pursing his own personal interests, they believe, Mr Koizumi has hurt Japan.

The Yasukuni issue, for instance, gave Beijing a convenient excuse last year to oppose Japan's bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

The danger is that Mr Koizumi's theatrics - for example, when talking about Yasukuni at the New Year press conference, his eyes glazed over - may mislead the Japanese people.

His performance was doubtless aimed at his domestic audience, and calculated to drum up popular support.

For there are many Japanese, especially among the younger generation, who do not understand the fuss over Yasukuni but will readily agree that Mr Koizumi is right not to buckle under pressure from China and South Korea.

It appears that the stubborn Mr Koizumi will stick to his stance on Yasukuni until he steps down as Prime Minister in September, when his term as LDP leader runs out.

The problem is that the stand-off over Yasukuni may continue after he goes.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the current front runner in the succession stakes based on his overwhelming popularity with voters, regretfully shows much the same naivety as Mr Koizumi, who is his diplomatic model.

Asian nations are clearly perturbed that Mr Koizumi's exit may not end the spat with China and South Korea.

According to Jiji Press, Singapore's Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong told visiting Japanese politician Taku Yamasaki in Singapore on Tuesday that he hopes Japan 's next prime minister will refrain from visiting Yasukuni.

The United States has also expressed concern over Japan's inability to counter China's apparent use of war issues, including Yasukuni, to isolate Japan in East Asia.

In a recent interview with the Mainichi Shimbun, former White House security official Michael Green pointed to Japan's lack of a strategy against the Chinese.

'One solution is for PM Koizumi to stop going to Yasukuni. But that is for him to decide,' Mr Green told the Mainichi.

American scholar Kent Calder of Johns Hopkins University reportedly said at a closed-door meeting here recently that the US feared a worst-case scenario in which countries in the region decided to go ahead and form an East Asian Community without Japan.

Mr Koizumi, who claims he is 'always open' to dialogue, would have his people believe that the ball is now in the court of Beijing and Seoul.

Clearly, it is not.

Posted on Friday, January 27, 2006 at 5:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Joseph Rago: Rosenberg Reruns (The left can't face the truth that they were guilty)

Source: WSJ (1-27-06)

[Mr. Rago is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.]

You would think, by now, with a half-century of scholarship behind us and a great deal of damning evidence on display, we would not have to be arguing about the guilt or innocence of various iconic figures of the late 1940s and 1950s: Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White or, perhaps most notoriously, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. But the martyr status of such figures seems irresistible, even today, to a certain kind of sentimental leftist. They still remain symbols of some malevolent American quality--never mind the truth of what they actually did.

Such was the lesson of a forum last week in Manhattan convened to discuss the "artistic influence" of the Rosenbergs. The invitation to the event, sponsored by the Fordham Law School, referred to the Rosenbergs as "the accused." It was a tellingly exculpatory phrase. For the record, both Julius and Ethel were convicted as communist spies and executed for espionage in 1953.

The stars of the evening were the novelist E.L. Doctorow and the playwright Tony Kushner. Mr. Doctorow is the author of "The Book of Daniel" (1971), a novel that centers on a couple loosely patterned after the Rosenbergs; Mr. Kushner wrote the play "Angels in America" (1993), which imagines the specter of Ethel Rosenberg returning to haunt various protagonists. Both works are highly sympathetic to the Rosenbergs' dilemma, if that is the right word.
The forum was generally arcane and self-serious. Messrs. Doctorow and Kushner ventilated many concerns about the relation of culture to society, chief among them the obligation of the artist to accurately represent the past. The pair eventually settled on the definition of historical art as "an aesthetic system of opinions," as the good Doctorow put it.

Fair enough. But why would "the artist"--let alone anyone--still be hung up on the Rosenbergs? To plow through the evidence for the millionth time: While the trial of the Rosenbergs was flawed by technical improprieties, their crimes are not uncertain or unresolved. Julius Rosenberg, with Ethel as his accomplice, was the head of a sophisticated spy network that deeply penetrated the American atomic program and relayed top secrets to Stalin's Kremlin. In his memoirs Nikita Khrushchev noted that the Rosenbergs "vastly aided production of our A-bomb." Joyce Milton and Ronald Radosh wrote a damning account of their activities in "The Rosenberg File" (1983). And the Rosenbergs' guilt was corroborated by the 1995 declassification of the Venona documents, thousands of decrypted KGB cables intercepted by the National Security Agency in the 1940s.

The notion that anyone would today deny their fundamental complicity in Soviet subversion is extraordinary, almost comically so. But comedy was not quite the mentality at the Rosenberg event. "Ambiguity is the key word, I think," said Mr. Doctorow, regarding our understanding of the past, though in this instance ambiguous is precisely what it is not.

Mr. Kushner argued the Rosenbergs were "murdered, basically." Mr. Doctorow went further, explaining that he wanted to use their circumstances to tell "a story of the mind of the country." It was a mind, apparently, filled with loathing and paranoia--again, never mind the truth of the charges against the Rosenbergs or other spies of the time. "The principles of the Cold War had reached absurdity," he continued. "We knew that the Russians were no threat, but we wanted to persuade Americans to be afraid" and so impose "a Puritan, punitive civil religion." Pronounced Mr. Kushner: "Our failure to come to terms with a brutal past, our failure to open up the coffins and let the ghosts out, has led to our current, horrendous situation."...

Posted on Friday, January 27, 2006 at 4:31 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Susan Vigilante: Opus Dei 101 (Investigating a “history” class)

Source: National Review Online (1-26-06)

[Susan Vigilante blogs from Minneapolis at www.desperateirishhousewife.blogspot.com.]

So here I am facing another Minnesota winter, looking to expand my mind. Naturally I turn to "The Winter & Spring 2006 Community Education Catalog" of the Eden Prairie, Minnesota public schools, where I see the very first course offering is "Da Vinci Code Historical Seminar."

Did you find the historical events in the 2003 fictional best-seller interesting but too fantastic to believe? Actually, most of the background items cited in the book were tied to events purportedly recorded in history.


I struggled with "purportedly recorded" for a while, but decided to move on. As the rest of the description made clear, the point of this course is to explain how The DaVinci Code, the Dan Brown novel that claims Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a baby and that Opus Dei is a murderous conspiracy charged with protecting the Divine Descendents, is like, you know, historical and stuff.

What really made me pause however was this line: "The Priory of Sion actually existed since 1099, and Opus Dei frightfully exists right here in the U.S.A., today!"

The Priory of Sion — the even older alleged conspiracy to protect the alleged descendents of Jesus Christ — certainly did not exist since 1099 (or ever), being a 1960s fabrication of a convicted French swindler. Asserting in a public-school program — even one for adults — that it actually existed amounts to using the public schools to spread anti-Christian and specifically anti-Catholic propaganda. The line about Opus Dei's very existence in the U.S. being frightening suggests the same, and then some.


Meet the Historian
I'm not a fan of Catholics joining the whiners' club. A few sub-literate paragraphs in a course catalog aren't the end of the world. Ultimately, though, it was the incompetence that prompted me to look into what was going on. The way the course description read, somebody had probably just been asleep at the switch. They'd probably want to know.

I called the school district and asked to speak to the person in charge of community education. I was referred to Ann Coates, the executive director, but was told she was not in. So I tracked down Mr. George Tkach, the teacher of the "Da Vinci Code Historical Seminar" in Eden Prairie's "Adult Academy."

Mr. Tkach (pronounced t'kosh) is a retired Navy officer. Describing himself as a "major fan of art history" who is "deeply interested in the Gnostic Gospels and Coptic Christianity." He also told me he was trained as an engineer.

Mr. Tkach is a nice man, more in the great American autodidact — harmless-eccentric tradition than the not-so-great American white-sheet-wearing tradition. He chatted amiably about the lecture he's planning, though he did want to know if I was Catholic before going into details.

He asked me if I had read the novel. When I told him I had (as much as I could stand, anyway — its' a really lousy book) he seemed relieved.

"That's good," he said. "Some dioceses have outlawed the book, you know. Several bishops have forbidden people to read it."

(Later I called the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, just on the wild chance this might be true. After an astonished "What?" the spokesman there said, "I never heard of such a thing.")...



Posted on Friday, January 27, 2006 at 2:16 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Daniel Golden: New Battleground in Textbook Wars ... Religion

Source: WSJ (1-25-06)

The victors write the history books, the saying goes. But increasingly, religious advocates try to edit them.

Religious pressure on textbooks is growing well beyond Christian fundamentalists' attack on evolution. History books are the biggest battleground, as groups vie for changes in texts for elementary and secondary schools that cast their faiths in a better light.

Two Hindu groups and a Jewish group have been set up in the past three years as textbook watchdogs, adding to Islamic advocates who have monitored history textbooks since 1990. In addition, some Sikhs have started to complain about being short-changed in history textbooks.

All are seeking to extract concessions as California holds its periodic approval process for history textbooks. The process drives school-district purchases in the most populous state, and books adopted for California typically are the ones that schools in the rest of the country end up using for several years.

Hindu groups, in particular, have swamped California authorities with proposed revisions, which would delete or soften references to polytheism, the caste system and the inferior status of women in ancient India. For example, the Hindu Education Foundation, a group linked to a Hindu nationalist organization in India, proposed replacing a textbook's statement that "men had many more rights than women" in ancient India with: "Men had different duties ... as well as rights than women. Many women were among the sages to whom the Vedas [sacred texts] were revealed."

California's Curriculum Commission endorsed this and most other changes pushed by Hindu groups, moving the matter along to the state board of education, which usually follows its advice. But then a strong objection to such changes arrived from a group of U.S. scholars, led by a Harvard professor, Michael Witzel. The scholars' protest, in turn, led to a lawsuit threat, a call for Harvard to disband the professor's department, and finally an unusual state-sponsored head-to-head debate between two scholars of ancient India.

Underlying such free-for-alls is the question of whether lobbying by religious groups yields a more sensitive and accurate version of history or a sugar-coated one -- and also whether students are served better or less well. "It tends to be scholar pitted against believer," says Kenneth Noonan, a member of the state education board.

For textbook publishers, meanwhile, to ignore religious groups is to risk exclusion from markets. One of the nation's largest school districts, Fairfax County, Va., dropped a McGraw-Hill Cos. 10th-grade text from its recommended list last year after complaints from Hindu parents, keeping it out of classrooms there.

Religious protests nearly crippled Oxford University Press's effort to enter the U.S. world-history textbook market. The prestigious university press sought to impress California authorities with cutting-edge scholarship and narrative verve, but the Curriculum Commission initially recommended against adopting Oxford's sixth-grade book last fall after Jewish and Hindu groups objected to it.

The Institute for Curriculum Services, a Jewish group set up in 2004 to scrutinize textbooks, was upset by the book's statement that archaeology and ancient Egyptian records don't support the Biblical account of the Exodus of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. While conceding this was true, the group said the book didn't apply the same skepticism to Islamic or Christian events, such as when it said that "ancient writings" and the Gospel according to Matthew relate that "wise men (probably philosophers or astrologers) followed a brightly shining star" when Jesus was born. Similarly, the book said that "according to Muslim tradition," the prophet Muhammad flew into heaven from the site of the Dome of the Rock mosque....

Posted on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 6:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jon Wiener: UCLA's Dirty Thirty

Source: Nation (2-13-06)

A right-wing alumni group at UCLA recently came up with a tactic that even Joe McCarthy and HUAC never tried: paying students to rat on their professors. The Bruin Alumni Association offered students up to $100 for tapes of lectures that show how "radicals" on the faculty are "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom." The group has posted a list of thirty professors--the Dirty Thirty--on its website as its first targets.

Other groups have sought to monitor American campuses for evidence of professors' political bias, but they used "volunteers" rather than offering to pay students--most notably the David Project's campaign against Columbia's Middle East Studies program [see Scott Sherman, "The Mideast Comes to Columbia," April 4, 2005] and the Middle East Forum's so-called Campus Watch. David Horowitz and his Students for Academic Freedom have been running a national campaign to get state legislatures to pass laws to correct "liberal bias" among the faculty. In the name of advancing intellectual diversity, Horowitz and his allies seek to impose external political control over central educational functions like curriculums, hiring and firing, and teaching methods. It's hard to imagine a more profound threat to academic freedom and the independence of American universities. Horowitz & Co. had such a bill introduced in the California legislature last year, but it died in committee. Their big problem: They lack concrete evidence that professors are abusing their authority in classrooms and discriminating against conservative and Christian students. That's where the Bruin Alumni Association comes in.

But what is the Bruin Alumni Association? It appears to be a single person: Andrew Jones, a 2003 UCLA grad who headed the campus Bruin Republicans. He made news for running an affirmative action bake sale, in which he charged white male students more for cookies than minorities and women. Jones worked for Horowitz, but according to the New York Times, Horowitz says he fired him because Jones pressured students to "file false reports that they had been physically attacked by leftists." (Neither Jones nor Horowitz replied to e-mailed questions.)

Jones's website features lengthy reports on each of the thirty professors he's targeted, but they contain virtually nothing about misconduct in the classroom. The charges against the faculty include supporting affirmative action (Ellen DuBois), organizing a memorial meeting for Edward Said (Sondra Hale), opposing the confirmation of John Roberts as Chief Justice (Christine Littleton), supporting gay rights (Eric Avila) and arguing that Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida (Doug Kellner). As Russell Jacoby noted in these pages ["The New PC: Crybaby Conservatives," April 4, 2005], "Once an unreliable professor meant an anarchist or communist; now it includes Democrats."

A search of all thirty professor profiles turns up only one report claiming to document classroom misconduct: Avila, according to Jones, told a Chicano studies class in 2003 that an antiwar protest was being held on campus, and he "expected to see everyone there." But Avila told me, "That report is false. However, in 1998 or 1999 I had a course assignment for students to observe a demonstration and bring their observations back to the classroom for discussion. In that context I probably said I expected to see the students at the demonstration. But I haven't repeated that assignment since 1999."

Many faculty on the list are angry. Law professor Gary Blasi suggests with pointed sarcasm that he and the rest of the Dirty Thirty should ask the Bruin Alumni Association to provide "specific guidance as to things we are forbidden to say in classrooms, or things that are mandatory to discuss that we may have overlooked." There's no sign that any of the listed faculty members are backing down--on the contrary. Robert Brenner teaches a course on Karl Marx's Capital but was not listed. "It's humiliating," he told me. "I didn't even make the top thirty." Jacoby did make the Dirty Thirty but was disappointed to be second from last. "I've inquired discreetly," he says, "as to how one can move up on the list."

Andrew Jones has gotten his fifteen minutes of fame, with appearances on Fox News and MSNBC. But mostly he has taken a beating. At least four members of his advisory board have quit, all prominent conservatives. One, Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, a well-known opponent of affirmative action, said it was "vigilantism" to pay students to turn in information on professors. And the Los Angeles Times devoted an editorial to criticizing Jones for attacking academic freedom.

The initial UCLA response came from a university lawyer who warned that students who sold audiotapes of lectures could be violating professors' intellectual property rights. That forced Jones to withdraw his offer of payment. But that's not really the problem. UCLA chancellor Albert Carnesale did the right thing when he declared in an official statement about Jones that "the UCLA community...finds his methods reprehensible, even as we support every critic's right freely to express his or her views." The chancellor said, "We sympathize with and support our faculty colleagues who have been targeted in this way, and we share their anger and frustration."

Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.

Posted on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 6:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Seth Perry: Why Is It So Hard to Talk about Mormons?

Source: Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (1-26-06)

[Seth Perry is a Ph.D. student in the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.]

It seems nearly impossible for those in the public discourse to talk evenly about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Commentators are given to hyperbole (the growth of Mormonism is "one of the great events in the history of religion," says intrepid sociologist Rodney Stark in a new book); fawning (according to a Newsweek cover story written by a Mormon, the faith is "optimistic, vigorous, a source of continuing personal growth for all who accept its blessings -- [it] in many ways echoes the American Dream"); snide joviality (Larry McMurtry writes of Joseph Smith's "prattle about an angel" in the New York Review of Books); or outright ridicule (in a New York Times book review, Walter Kirn, himself a lapsed Mormon, uses an analogy to belief in Santa Claus to explain how the growth of Mormonism may have nothing to do with its content).

However one may describe the conditions of religious tolerance on the ground, our increasingly tolerant public discourse gives a wide berth to religions outside of the Jewish/Christian norm. The examples above, though, all fairly recent, suggest that there is something not quite as even-handed in the public discussion of Mormonism. Instead, there are articles celebrating Mormons -- as some scholars have opined -- as a "model minority" among religions: more industrious, healthier and cleaner than the rest of us. And then the opposite: the flickering smile, the whimsical tone -- McMurtry, for example, writing in a formal review in a major publication that Brigham Young "fathered fifty-seven children on twenty wives" when he means "with"; and another writer's throwaway line in the New Yorker classing Mormons with Wiccans and Scientologists (groups decidedly further from the mainstream than Mormons).

I think the problem has something to do with the fact that Mormonism is different from our culture's de facto Christian/Jewish point of reference -- but not that different. Mormonism is no Hinduism: Latter-day Saints share sacraments, the Bible, and indeed the Heavenly Savior with other Christians. But everyone knows, if they know anything about Mormonism, that its followers are not just any Christians: the sacraments sometimes take place in temples where only the approved may venture; the Bible is heavily supplemented with other revealed texts and contemporary prophetic authority; and the salvation offered by the Mormon Christ is combined with a chance for each believer to progress toward godhood.

The fact that these distinctive characteristics are expressed through elements and vocabulary familiar to Christians often leads popular pundits and even otherwise detached scholars of religion to talk about Mormons the way one might talk about that kid in class with mittens pinned to his jacket -- bless their hearts, they try, but they just don't quite get it. Among believing Christians, along with the condescension is often a note of defensiveness; people who would never dream of being anything but deferential to more remote religions often feel the need to police the boundaries of their own. Put a universal truth about peace and love in the Buddha's mouth and liberal Christians fall over each other to join in interfaith celebration. But tell a Christian that such a saying came from Jesus -- they've just never heard this one -- and everyone gets a little uncomfortable.

The answer to this discomfort, of course, is practice; increased discussion of Mormonism in more varied contexts will breed better habits. Recent coverage of the possibility that Mitt Romney -- a Mormon and governor of Massachusetts -- will run for president has represented a marked step forward, frankly treating his religion as a possible liability while refusing to make it the focal point of discussion. Time will tell, though, if American popular discourse can become fully comfortable with what is often called a "home-grown" American religion.

Posted on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 3:32 PM | Comments (1) | Top

How Cuba Presents Its Own History

Source: Chicago Tribune (1-25-06)

HAVANA - If you sign up for a tour of Cuba, chances are one of the first places you'll visit is the Museum of the Revolution.

Just a stone's throw from the gray waters of Havana Bay and beyond it the Florida Strait, the museum is housed in an old presidential palace whose baroque facade and towering cupola conjure the feel of a cathedral.

Visitors get Cuban Revolutionary History 101, a barrage of information about what happened before Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 and what has happened since - all from the perspective of the government.

Cubans know the script by heart, but the island's official view of history can jar visitors such as Krystal Beckham, a 22-year-old senior at the University of California, Davis, who toured the museum on her third day in Cuba as part of a university study program.

"It's uncomfortable to think that something that you've always believed in is not perceived that way by everybody and maybe what you believe is wrong,"
Beckham said, referring in particular to Cuba's presentation of Columbus as an invader in the Americas rather than an explorer.

Up the museum's white marble stairs is a veritable gold mine of revolutionary memorabilia, from the bloody uniforms of slain guerrilla fighters to 3-D models of rebel battles to revolutionary icon Ernesto "Che" Guevara's black beret.

Although some exhibits are closed for renovation, the museum remains packed with weapons of every sort - spears, swords, rifles, pistols, shotguns, tanks, even a surface-to-air missile - all of it giving the impression that Cuba is consumed by warfare.

Out back sits the twisted turbine of an American U-2 spy plane shot down during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Nearby, resting in a glass case, is the Granma, a 38-foot diesel-powered yacht that Castro and 81 rebels rode from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to begin their improbable war to topple the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

"Everything in the museum is important to me, but the Granma is a symbol (of the revolution)," said a wiry 36-year-old museum guide who insisted that his name not be published.

The guide speaks several languages and said his job is to teach foreigners the true history of Cuba.

"The Spanish did nothing good," the guide said as he stepped into a small room dedicated to nearly 400 years of Spanish rule.

Standing next to black leg irons and a 15th Century Spanish sword, the guide explained:
"They carried away the principal wealth to Spain. The Indians were eliminated in Cuba. They brought the black man to do the difficult work. It was terrible."...

Posted on Thursday, January 26, 2006 at 2:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Scott McLemee: On Stolen Words

Source: Inside Higher Ed (1-25-06)

... the topic of plagiarism itself keeps returning. One professor after another gets caught in the act. The journalists and popular writers are just as prolific with other people’s words. And as for the topic of student plagiarism, forget it — who has time to keep up?

It was not that surprising, last fall, to come across the call for papers for a new scholarly journal called Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. I made a mental note to check its Web site again — and see that it began publishing this month.

One study is already available at the site: an analysis of how the federal Office of Research Integrity handled 19 cases of plagiarism involving research supported by the U.S. Public Health Service. Another paper, scheduled for publication shortly, will review media coverage of the Google Library Project. Several other articles are now working their way through peer review, according to the journal’s founder, John P. Lesko, an assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, and will be published throughout the year in open-source form. There will also be an annual print edition of Plagiary. The entire project has the support of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan.

In a telephone interview, Lesko told me that research into plagiarism is central to his own scholarship. His dissertation, titled “The Dynamics of Derivative Writing,” was accepted by the University of Edinburgh in 2000 — extracts from which appear at his Web site Famous Plagiarists, which he says now gets between 5,000 and 6,000 visitors per month.

While the journal Plagiary has a link to Famous Plagiarists, and vice versa, Lesko insists that they are separate entities — the former scholarly and professional, the latter his personal project. And that distinction is a good thing, too. Famous Plagiarists tends to hit a note of stridency such that, when Lesko quotes Camille Paglia denouncing the poststructuralists as “cunning hypocrites whose tortured syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral culpability of their and their parents’ generations in Nazi France,” she seems almost calm and even-tempered by contrast.

“It seems that both Foucault and Barthes’ contempt for the Author was expressed in some rather plagiaristic utterances,” he writes, “a parroting of the Nietschean ‘God is dead’ assertion.” That might strike some people as confusing allusion with theft. But Lesko is vehement about how the theorists have served as enablers for the plagiarists, as well as the receivers of hot cargo.

“After all,” he writes, “a plagiarist — so often with the help of collaborators and sympathizers — steals the very livelihood of a text’s real author, thus relegating that author to obscurity for as long as the plagiarist’s name usurps a text, rather than the author being recognized as the text’s originator. Plagiarism of an author condemns that author to death as a text’s rightfully acknowledged creator...” (The claim that Barthes and Foucault were involved in diminishing the reputation of Nietzsche has not, I believe, ever been made before.)

To a degree, his frustration is understandable. In some quarters, it is common to recite – as though it were an established truth, rather than an extrapolation from one of Foucault’s essays – the idea that plagiarism is a “historically constructed” category of fairly recent vintage: something that came into being around the 18th century, when a capitalistically organized publishing industry found it necessary to foster the concept of literary property.

A very interesting argument to be sure — though not one that holds up under much scrutiny.

The term “plagiarism” in its current sense is about two thousand years old. It was coined by the Roman poet Martial, who complained that a rival was biting his dope rhymes. (I translate freely.) Until he applied the word in that context, plagiarius had meant someone who kidnapped slaves. Clearly some notion of literary property was already implicit in Martial’s figure of speech, which dates to the first century A.D....





Posted on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 5:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Greenberg: When will scholars get the chance to legitimately assess his legacy in Vietnam?

Source: Slate (1-25-06)

[Mr. Greenberg is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image (2003). He teaches history at Rutgers University.]

he other day, the John F. Kennedy Library and the National Archives announced that they would be holding a conference in March on the subject of the Vietnam War. Promotional literature trumpeted the appearance of well-known figures such as David Halberstam, Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Bob Herbert, and Henry Kissinger, serving on panels on topics from "Vietnam and Presidential Tapes" to "Inside the White House."

Although on the surface benign and even appealing, this announcement dismayed many scholars of the Vietnam era, myself included, because it concealed an unpleasant back story. Last year the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace abruptly scuttled a similar symposium—one with many more scholars participating—apparently for political reasons. By hosting this new event, the other libraries are, albeit unintentionally, legitimizing that transgression.

Some in academia dismiss high-profile conferences like this one as just so much public relations. But these events can shape popular perceptions of the issues at stake and may subtly affect agendas. The public awareness and media coverage that result can drive Congress or an administration to direct funding for research in one direction or another, and even can influence the academic world directly. This conference, moreover, comes at an auspicious moment: The Nixon Library just released the deed of its gift of many of its materials to the National Archives—a critical step before it's absorbed into the presidential library system later this year.

Some background: For 30 years after Nixon resigned, the Nixon Library—alone among the archives dedicated to our chief executives—remained outside the official presidential library system. Nixon's much-deplored efforts at the end of his presidency to destroy or make off with government records prodded Congress and even President Ford to realize that his papers required special care. In 1974 they enacted the Presidential Recordings and Materials Preservation Act, making Nixon's official papers and tapes public property. The law kept the Nixon materials in government custody in the Washington, D.C., area, while the privately run Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, Calif., was home to only his pre- and post-presidential papers.

But in 2004 Congress voted to let the Nixon Library join the grown-ups' table—and to move his presidential materials from the National Archives in Maryland to Yorba Linda. Although the National Archives will run the library and materials, and thus in theory should rid the Nixon Library of political influences, in practice the family foundations in many presidential libraries still exert influence, notably over areas such as public exhibitions and access to personal papers. The Nixon Library has a history of extreme politicization—the library has seldom hosted serious historians, who tend to be at least somewhat critical of Nixon, more typically showcasing assorted Nixon apologists and right-wing pundits—and so the imminent transfer remains worrisome.

To show good faith, the Nixon Library planned, with Whittier College (Nixon's alma mater), a conference on Nixon and Vietnam, to be held last April. The conference promised to feature leading scholarly critics of Nixon's handling of the war, including Larry Berman, Jeffrey Kimball, Stanley Kutler, and Melvin Small. (I was also going to participate.) But the Nixon Library suddenly cut off funding for the conference, terminating the event. The library said that not enough people had signed up to attend—even though scholarly conferences don't normally generate revenue, and, besides, most invitations still hadn't been sent. Some of us suspected that the library was up to its old tricks, trying to shut down an honest (i.e., not hagiographic) inquiry into Nixon's record. It was as though Nixon, obsessed with his reputation during his lifetime, were waging his image campaign from beyond the grave.

I joined 15 others in the intellectual's time-honored act of feckless protest: signing a letter. We wrote to Congress, asking it to suspend the transfer of the Nixon materials to Yorba Linda. The flap about the "Yorba Linda 16" garnered some news coverage and the library backpedaled slightly. Under pressure from the newly appointed national archivist, Allen Weinstein, John H. Taylor of the Nixon Library agreed to give the archives White House materials dealing with Nixon's political activities (as it's now doing). Taylor also pledged to make his institution's exhibit about Watergate more accurate, which, when I last saw it, accused Democrats in Congress of planning a coup against Nixon in order to make House Speaker Carl Albert president. Finally, participants in the aborted conference received assurances that there would be another Vietnam symposium in the future.

The Kennedy Library stepped into the breach by proposing a conference to be co-hosted by the National Archives of all the presidential libraries—an unprecedented and encouraging collaboration, Weinstein noted. The organizers stated it wasn't a "replacement." Nonetheless, it was made possible by the first conference's cancellation, it was hatched immediately afterward, and the Nixon Library joined in the planning. Even granting the different goals of the new event—this one aspired to a much broader public audience—the new conference was, in fact if not in intention, a substitute.

Unfortunately, no one systematically reached out to the participants of the canceled affair, although three distinguished historians from the Nixon Library conference program—George Herring of the University of Kentucky, Jeffrey Kimball of Miami University, and Robert Schulzinger of the University of Colorado—were invited, as was Marilyn Young of New York University. When the press release came out, attitudes among the Yorba Linda 16 ranged from outrage to mild disappointment tinged with measured hope.

What troubled many was that the organizers rounded out the new program not with more scholars but with lots of famous names. As the author of The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam, to be sure, has earned a place in any discussion of the Vietnam War. But the addition of Kissinger, Jack Valenti, and, most bizarrely, Brian Williams of NBC News suggests that one motive at work might be to solicit a lot of oohing and aahing—coos that would drown out last year's bad publicity.

As Cornell's Fredrik Logevall noted, the relative paucity of scholars, coupled with their relegation to the first panels, held on a Friday afternoon, leaves the impression that these academics are there for respectability—to be seen and not much heard. Deborah Leff of the Kennedy Library argued to me that putting the historians first was only logical. But compared to the original event, their role has undeniably been diminished. (In talking to me for this article, Weinstein said he still hopes more historians might be included in the upcoming conference.)

The problems are compounded, as Carolyn Eisenberg of Hofstra University put it, by the inclusion of policy-makers such as Kissinger and Al Haig, which raises questions about the dedication to pursuing historical truth. All policy-makers are inclined to offer self-serving remarks (as Al From, among others, showed at a recent Clinton conference); but for this war and this era, the credibility of government officials is a central, unavoidable issue. Spotlighting Kissinger takes it off the table; it presumes that he deserves the stature that should be debated.

A case can be made, of course, for including even officials with dubious reputations. But they ought to share the stage with panelists who can offer informed accounts that are based on documentary evidence—and who can question the officials directly. Kissinger and Haig are insulated on a panel with no journalists or historians.

To my mind, the worst result is that going forward in this way sweeps under the rug last year's Nixon conference fiasco. It implies that the cancellation of the conference carries no censure, that no amends need to be made. In fact, questions remain about whether the Nixon Library, as it enters the presidential library system, will live up to National Archives standards. As we hear news reports of Gerald Ford growing ill in his twilight years, it's hard not to think of him in this context. For, in a small way, Richard Nixon seems to be getting pardoned all over again.


This piece first ran in Slate and is reprinted with permission of the author. Click here to see a list of his other History Lesson columns in Slate.

Posted on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 12:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Adam Cohen: Democracy in America, Then and Now, a Struggle Against Majority Tyranny

Source: NYT (1-23-06)

During the War of 1812, an angry mob smashed the printing presses of a Baltimore newspaper that dared to come out against the war. When the mob surrounded the paper's editors, and the state militia refused to protect them, the journalists were taken to prison for their own protection. That night, the mob broke into the prison, killed one journalist and left the others for dead. When the mob leaders were brought before a jury, they were acquitted.

Alexis de Tocqueville tells this chilling story in "Democracy in America," and warns that the greatest threat the United States faces is the tyranny of the majority, a phrase he is credited with coining. His account of his travels through America in the 1830's, which is often called the greatest book ever written about America, is both an appreciation of American democracy, and a cautionary tale about its fragility.

Bernard-Henri Lévy, the well-known French intellectual, has just written "American Vertigo," about his own travels along Tocqueville's route. It is an entertaining trip, as much in the tradition of Jack Kerouac as Tocqueville. Mr. Lévy visited Rikers Island and a Dallas gun show, and interviewed Americans ranging from Richard Perle to Sharon Stone. His outsider's perspective sometimes lends insight, as with his reflections on the sad plight of Detroit and Buffalo. At other times, it just leads to odd advice. (He puts surprising faith in Warren Beatty as a political leader.)

Unfortunately, Mr. Lévy, who is most passionate about American foreign policy, pays little attention to the issue Tocqueville was most intent on: how closely even a thriving democracy like America borders on tyranny. It is a subject that is particularly relevant today, with the president claiming he can wiretap ordinary Americans without a warrant, insisting on his right to imprison without trial anyone he labels an "enemy combatant," and warning critics of the Iraq war against "emboldening" the enemy. Entertaining as Mr. Lévy's book is, "Democracy in America" - 170 years old, and notoriously difficult to distill - still provides far greater insight into contemporary American democracy....



Posted on Wednesday, January 25, 2006 at 12:52 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Ken Olsen: Discovering Lewis and Clark

Source: Tolerance Magazine (Spring 2006)

..."A dismaying amount of our history has been written without regard to the Indians," writer and historian Bernard DeVoto observed more than 50 years ago.

Such disregard is glaring in many mainstream stories of Lewis and Clark.

"They wouldn't have made it if we hadn't been here to show them how to hunt and what wood to chop," Hudson's granddaughter, Cassi Rench, says of the Mandan's critical role in Lewis and Clark surviving the 45-below days of the winter of 1804-05.

"It was two men -- two men who encountered at least 48 different tribes," adds educator Judy BlueHorse of Portland, Ore. "And yet it's always a story about these two men."

In Recovery from 'Discovery' Dazzled by the notion of Manifest Destiny, American history tends to eulogize what Lewis and Clark "found" on their 7,400-mile journey. For Native Americans, the story instead is about what was lost -- lives, land, languages and freedom.

"Within 100 years of Lewis and Clark passing through here, every Native nation they encountered was displaced from their traditional lands and put on reservations," says BlueHorse, who works in the Indian Education Program for Portland Public Schools. "The ancient forests were clear cut. The great buffalo herds that fed (the expedition) were reduced to fewer than 300 animals, and the last Oregon sea otter, whose highly prized pelts had helped fuel (President Thomas) Jefferson's mission, was gone."

Pacific salmon, which the Nez Perce Indians fed the starving expedition in northern Idaho, continue to struggle for survival against lethal changes wrought by the dam-and-reservoir landscape. These same reservoirs drowned the most important Native American fishing sites and many sacred sites.

"I think continuing to glorify exploitation as exploration is dangerous," says BlueHorse, who is Nez Perce, Chickasaw and Cherokee. "We're in recovery from 'discovery.'" ...

Posted on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 8:53 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Neve Gordon: Hamas ... Sharon's Legacy?

Source: In these Times (1-23-06)

[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights.]

Both the Israeli and Palestinian political arenas are in turmoil. In Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke has left the country and his newly established party, Kadima, in disarray. In the Palestinian territories, the ruling Fatah party is rapidly losing popular support, and the Islamist party Hamas is gaining ground. Paradoxically, Hamas' steady ascent is part of Sharon legacy, while its imminent victory in the upcoming elections will help Israel's new leader transform Sharon's political vision into reality.

Sharon, the father of Israel's unruly settlement enterprise and the person responsible for thousands of deaths in the Lebanon debacle, including the Sabra and Shatila massacre, altered his strategic thinking during the last couple of years. After leading Israel's efforts to expropriate Palestinian land for three decades, Sharon finally realized that as the messianic and militaristic visions of a greater Israel became reality and the border between Israel proper and the territories it occupied in 1967 was erased, the very idea of a Jewish state, where Jews are the majority, was being "threatened." While he considered the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza appealing from a geographic point of view, he joined the vast majority of Israeli Jews who feel endangered by the fact that today the majority of people living between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea are not Jewish.

For years this demographic "threat" was kept at bay by denying the occupied Palestinians Israeli citizenship and subjecting them to military rule. Israel, in other words, created an apartheid regime in the West Bank (and Gaza) in order to sustain the Jewish majority within its borders. It installed dual legal systems within a single territory, one for Jews, the other for Palestinians. This incongruence between Israel's geographic aspirations and demographic reality led to a political juncture whereby it had to choose one of two options: continue maintaining a system of apartheid or, conversely, give up the idea of a Jewish state.

Sharon decided to adopt a third way. He withdrew from the Gaza Strip and made plans to annex several parts of the West Bank so as to radically alter the region's demographic and geographic reality. He used the separation barrier--which is made up of electronic fences, barbed wire, patrol roads, trenches and massive concrete slates--as the means to unilaterally implement his political vision. Thus, even though the barrier is constantly presented as a "temporary" security apparatus, in reality its primary objective is to redraw the map between Israel and the Palestinian entity.

Demographically, the barrier will surround 56 Jewish settlements from the east, annexing the land that they now occupy so that 171,000 West Bank settlers will be incorporated into Israel's new borders. The wall being built in East Jerusalem is meant to reinforce the 1967 annexation of this part of the city, and to legitimize the 183,800 Jewish settlers living there. If the barrier does indeed become the new border it will solve the problem posed by about 87 percent of Israel's illegal settlers. The remaining 13 percent, or 52,500 settlers, will have to be forcibly evacuated, like the Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip.

Geographically, the barrier is meant to enlarge Israel's internationally recognized territory by annexing West Bank land, while creating self-governing enclaves for the Palestinians. The barrier's route cuts up the Palestinian territory into 16 small internal enclaves containing specific villages, towns or cities. In addition, it cuts the West Bank in at least two (north/south) and perhaps four larger enclaves (the north is divided into three parts, north of Ariel, south of Ariel and south of Jericho). Taking the Gaza Strip into account, it becomes clear that when the barrier is complete, the future Palestinian "state" will be made up of three to five main regions.

The regions will be closed off almost completely from each other, while Israel will continue to effectively control all of the borders so that it can implement a hermetic closure whenever it wishes. What is new about the barrier is not the attempt to create enclaves in the Occupied Territories, but the effort to transform these enclaves into quasi-independent entities that will ostensibly form a Palestinian state.

It is not surprising that Sharon's unilateral solution has in the past two years been sowing the seeds of hatred. One would expect the international community to condemn Israel's myopic unilateralism. Yet now more than before there is a good chance that once Sharon's successors try to secure international approval for his program they will receive widespread support, since in the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism, everything is permitted.

This is where Hamas enters the picture. Hamas, an abbreviation of Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, namely, Islamic Resistance Movement, was founded in 1987 by Sheik Ahmad Yasin at the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada. While Hamas tends to be identified with its military arm, Izzeddin al-Qassam, well known for its attacks on Israeli targets, it has always also been a vibrant political and social movement. It has kindergartens and schools that offer free meals for children, education centers for women, and youth and sports clubs. Its medical clinics offer subsidized treatment to the sick and it extends financial and technical assistance to those whose homes had been demolished and to refugees living in sub-standard conditions. Thus, ever since its establishment, Hamas has offered Palestinians extensive community services and has responded constantly to the changing political reality by making pragmatic decisions.

The changing power relations within Palestinian society, in which the ruling Fatah party has lost many of its supporters to Hamas, will no doubt help Israel advance its unilateral solution. As In These Times went to press, it seemed highly likely that Hamas would become the largest party in the Palestinian territories in the January 25 elections, if not winning them outright. This will benefit Sharon's heir, since it will help him convince not only the United States but also Europe to back Israel's intent to establish new borders, turning a blind eye to the ongoing violation of Palestinian rights that Israel's unilateral action entails. Ultimately, this will leave the Palestinians both rightless and stateless.

Sharon, a brilliant strategist, seems to have recognized this long ago, and over the years implemented policies that have strengthened Hamas. The International Crisis Group has shown, for example, that Hamas has been empowered by the economic calamity caused by Israeli assaults and closures. The resulting economic disaster created a gap that Hamas' charitable organizations could fill and the Palestinian Authority could not. Thanks to Sharon's military and economic policies in the Occupied Territories, practically all doors have been closed except, of course, the mosque doors.

Sharon's actions during his tenure as prime minister strengthened Hamas, while Hamas' ascendancy in the Palestinian street will ultimately enable Sharon's followers to pursue his plans unhindered.

Posted on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 8:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Daniel Goldhagen: Turkey should follow Germany's example ... and deal with its history

Source: NY Sun (1-23-06)

[Mr. Goldhagen, a member of Harvard's Center for European Studies, won Germany's triennial Democracy Prize in 1997 for his contributions to German democracy for having written "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust."]

... The Turkish government and people should use the Pamuk affair as a spur to rethinking the wisdom of their historical cover-up of the Armenian genocide. And to do that, they should look for guidance to the center of Europe itself, to Germany.

Since 1945, Germans, including German political leaders, have had to struggle with how to confront their country's and countrymen's crimes, chiefly the slaughter of 6 million Jews. This confrontation with historical truth, with their own country's and their own people's souls, with survivors, and with the need to perform repair, has been immensely complex and variable, with substantial successes and continuing failures.

To be sure, there was for decades no great willingness on the part of Germans and their leaders to come clean about what so many of them had willingly done, namely to slaughter Jews and non-Jews in the cause of creating a European Nazi imperium. But they could not deny these truths or completely ignore them: The victorious allies made some semblance of an honest acknowledgment of the past and some considerable reparations to the victims a condition for Germany's re-entry into the community of nations. So German historians and newspapers began writing about the Holocaust, the German government in 1952 signed a reparations agreement with Israel, and the German courts, albeit reluctantly, began to try and convict the murderers.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and even to some considerable extent to this day, these measures have been either extremely unpopular or have at least dissatisfied considerable minorities within Germany. It is not easy to confront the horrific part of one's past, to make good on material and moral debts, and to bend a knee in contrition - as German Chancellor Willy Brandt literally did in 1970, falling to his knees at the site of the destroyed Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.

Yet as many in Germany, particularly its political leaders, slowly and in the 1990s finally came to understand, being truthful about the past and acting to make amends with the victims as best one can - always principally done for pragmatic reasons - neither shames nor weakens Germany, but strengthens it and enhances its standing in the world.

I know this firsthand. In 1996, I published "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust," causing a furor and a sensation in Germany, causing the entire country to undergo - for many an unwanted, for virtually everyone an unpleasant - soul searching about the one central aspect of the Holocaust that had been buried by German scholars, namely that ordinary Germans were not coerced by the Nazi regime to kill Jews but they by and large willingly did so because of their own anti-Semitism. There was an unprecedented and as yet unequalled flood of attention for this. There were national debates. There was much agonizing. Germany's apologists did not want the truths to be discussed, so many attacked my book viciously. But more Germans insisted that the truths had to be known, and the issues had to be worked through. This was all closely watched and reported in the media around the world, sometimes with surprise at how well Germans were accepting the difficult truths, and always with admiration at this aspect of the reaction.

Discussing and being truthful about the past crimes of one's countrymen, and carrying out the duties of repair, while difficult, only brings credit to a people and their country. Can anyone honestly say that Germany, the leading country of Europe, a member of the European and international community in good standing, seen in many ways as a model for others, has suffered for its truthfulness? Has Germany's relations with other countries ever been harmed because of Germany's willingness to acknowledge the crimes of its past? Has the German economy been weakened? Has German culture ceased to flourish?...

Posted on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 8:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mark Naison: Live With It! Liberal and Leftist Professors are Here To Stay!

[Mark Naison is Professor of AFrican American Studies and History, Fordham University.]

The whole question of liberal and leftist bias on university faculties came to the fore recently when a Conservative Alumni group offered $100 to any student who would take notes on the lecture of 30 faculty members at UCLA who the group identified as "radical professors"

I hardly think this an issue worthy of such extreme measures Yes, Conservatives are right--- university faculties are filled with liberals and leftists, but why is this a problem if they do their jobs well? The ranks of college football coaches are filled with born again Christians and rock ribbed Republicans, but I don't hear about legislative committees monitoring their activities to assure political and religious diversity in the locker room. Can you imagine the Pennsylvania State legislature calling in Joe Paterno and asking whether his coaching staff contains any marxists and feminists? Or suggesting that coaches not begin games with a prayer because their might be atheists or non-believers on their teams?

Liberals and leftists have gravitated to university teaching careers, just as Christians and conservatives have gravitated to careers in coaching and the military, but people on the Right are not going to be able to do anything about this without undermining their own credibility. Why? Because most college teachers have high standards of professionalism and are deeply immersed in their discipline. By the time they have a tenure track position on a university faculty, they have gone through a rigorous training program in pursuit of their doctorate and have gone through exhausitve search procedures which included university administrators as well as senior members of their department. In those settings, spouting political propoganda just won't cut it; you have to show a mastery of your field honed by thousands of hours of disciplined study,and if there are biases in the subjects chosen, they are hardly ones shaped by current political controversies

Sure, some faculty members have "Impeach Bush" posters in their offices, but I defy anyone to show that college teachers are more aggressive in prostyletizing for their political or religious beliefs than college football coaches or offficers in the US military, who also for the most part, have their positions paid for by "taxpayer money".

Live with it! Leftist professors are a fact of life in American Universities, and unless conservatives want to upset the majoirty of students who actually like their professors and wreak havoc with established norms of academic freedom and university governance, they are here to stay.

As for David Horowitz, who has been leading the charge for "political balance" in university hiring, I have one coment. For the sake of consistency, why don't you do the same thing with college football staffs? Why don't you place a few radicals,or even Democrats, as assistant coaches at Clemson or Penn State or University of Alabama.

I volunteer to be a the first recruit for this campaign. Joe Paterno or Bobby Bowden would love me I may be a leftist, but I push my students hard and as anyone who knows me from Brooklyn sandlot sports can tell you, I play to win!

Posted on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 at 10:51 AM | Comments (4) | Top

David Horowitz: Bruin Alumni Association ... How Not to Wage a Campus Campaign

Source: Frontpagemag.com (1-23-06)

An organization calling itself the Bruin Alumni Association has been getting a lot of press lately, almost all of it bad. And deservedly so. Several of its conservative board members, James Rogan, Stephan Thernstrom, Manny Klauser and Jascha Kessler have already resigned. We applaud them for doing so, and hope they will be followed by others.

The Bruin Alumni Association is the brainchild of Andrew Jones, a UCLA graduate who briefly worked for the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and was fired for unethical behavior.

Unethical behavior continues to be a trademark of Jones' career. The bad publicity he has recently received is a consequence of the strategies he has chosen; Most centrally, his decision to pay students to target leftwing professors whom he pillories with crude epithets like "the dirty thirty." UCLA is also considering suing Jones for illegally lifting its logo and flying his organization under false colors. The Center is considering its own suit since Jones lifted our donor list to raise money for his organization while concealing the fact that the Center had dissociated itself from him.

Naturally, the Pavlovian left is in a dither, decrying the "McCarthyism" of Jones' tactics, which is their normal excuse for an argument. By simply googling the name of any prominent conservative one can find hundreds of thousands, even millions of instances of leftwing McCarthyism -- tarring conservatives with their alleged associations from the past to take one example. Like belonging to an innocuous Princeton club twenty-two years ago that can be deceptively linked to racism by unscrupulous alcoholics. If the balance of power in Washington were a tad different, moreover, such a youthful "mistake" could cost you a Supreme Court seat.

What's wrong the Bruin Alumni Association campaign is that it is designed to purge the university of leftist ideas. This is a bad educational idea. Any university worthy of the name will have professors with leftist ideas on its faculty, and should have. Just as it should have professors with conservative ideas on its faculty. You can't get a good education, if they're only telling you half the story. That is why the principle of intellectual diversity is the center of the campaign for an Academic Bil of Rights, which we at the Center are waging.

We do not care whether a professor is a liberal or a conservative. We care that a professor is professional; that he or she does not indoctrinate their students but educates them. This means exposing them "to the spectrum of significant scholarly opinion" as the Academic Bill of Rights phrases it. It also means that professors do not introduce irrelevant issues into classrooms where they don't belong -- like their passions over the war in Iraq in courses on English literature, or any subject that is not the war in Iraq. Even in such classes professors should not be passionate advocates of one side of a controversy unless they make clear to their students that these are opinions, not incontrovertible truths, and that students will suffer no consequences for disagreeing with their instructors.

An academic freedom campaign worthy of the name is about process, not the substantive viewpoints of professors. It's about what goes on in the classroom, not what professors do when they exercise their citizen rights.

Posted on Monday, January 23, 2006 at 4:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Paul Mitchinson: The New JFK Conspiracy Books

Source: Blog of paulmitchinson.com (1-23-06)

There’s been a recent deluge of new material on the Kennedy assassination. Formerly top-secret documents and hundreds of fresh interviews have seemingly led to one unshakable conclusion: John F. Kennedy’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy.

But there’s a wee problem. Just who instigated the conspiracy? According to “Rendezvous with Death,” a new documentary by German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann, it was Cuban intelligence. According to Lamar Waldron’s Ultimate Sacrifice, it was the Mob. According to Joan Mellen’s A Farewell to Justice, it was the CIA.

Now I’m not qualified to judge the relative merits of these scenarios. But Mellen’s book, a biography of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, interests me for a peripheral reason.

Some years ago I was doing research for a journal profile of Ralph Schoenman, a radical activist whose activities have spanned the globe for decades. (The article was never published, for reasons I won’t go into here.) Schoenman got his start in the early 1960s as personal secretary to philosopher Bertrand Russell in his final years. During this time, Schoenman inspired, organized and directed virtually every public enterprise associated with the great philosopher, including the Committee of 100, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, the International War Crimes Tribunal, and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation. Schoenman became a globetrotter for radical causes: documenting American atrocities in Vietnam, revolution in Iran, massacre at Sabra and Shatilla. During the 1967 trial of Régis Debray, who was accused by the Bolivian government of supporting the country’s guerrilla movement, it was suggested that Che Guevara himself had attempted to appeal to Schoenman for money and equipment for the guerrillas. (According to the military prosecutor, Schoenman was as an unnamed American mentioned by Che in his diary.)

What does Ralph Schoenman have to do with Joan Mellen’s book? Well, let’s put it this way, using language familiar to conspiracy theorists everywhere. Ralph Schoenman has “connections” with Joan Mellen. He is her ex-husband. He introduced her to Jim Garrison, whose
“investigation” he assisted. He helped research Mellen’s book, conducting interviews on Mellen’s behalf. His views on the assassination, which he first developed during his years with Russell, provide the skeleton — and much of the flesh and sinews — of Mellen’s book. “Had it not been for Ralph Schoenman,” Mellen writes in her acknowledgements, “this book would not have come into being; his friendship, devotion and understanding have been without parallel.”

Back in 1971, Schoenman urged Garrison to publish the results of his “investigation”:

Let’s get out a book, hard and fast, which nails the case against Shaw that we couldn’t get into the courts…. let’s put THEM on the defensive … with a muck-raking book that closes in on the company [i.e., the CIA] even closer.

Thirty-five years later, Ralph Schoenman has finally got his wish....

Posted on Monday, January 23, 2006 at 2:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Dana Stevens: The New World is another chin-scratching poem

Source: Slate (1-20-06)

For a certain core group of patient, passionate cinephiles, The New World (New Line), Terrence Malick's retelling of the story of the Jamestown settlement, was already a major movie event before it even hit screens last Christmas. (Since withdrawn for a recut by the director, the movie reopens nationwide today in slightly shortened form.) Malick began his career with two films of an almost Rimbaudian purity and perfection: Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978). These movies, both of them lyrical reflections on doomed love against the backdrop of a cruel (but lushly filmed) nature, made Malick's name as a poetic and visionary director, on par with Stanley Kubrick or Francis Ford Coppola.

But post-Days of Heaven, Malick dropped out of sight. He refuses to be photographed, hasn't given a real press interview in more than 30 years, and fields whatever questions do cross his path with a vague, "Uh, I guess I don't want to talk about that." The Thin Red Line (1998), Malick's return to filmmaking after 20 years, was generally received as a failure, but it was a fascinating one—a World War II epic that eschewed conventional plot and character in favor of endless nature shots and overlapping, dreamy voice-overs. "Why does nature contend with itself?" asked an off-screen Jim Caviezel in the opening frames, over an image of tree-suffocating vines. No doubt a less compelling question to most soldiers than, "Where's my body armor?" but that obliqueness was part of Malick's point—to step back from the immediacy of battle and ponder the strangeness of war itself.

The New World takes a shopworn American myth—the first encounter of settlers and Indians at Jamestown, and the romance between Pocahontas (Q'Orianka Kilcher) and Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell)—and runs it through the Malick-izer, making it feel rich, strange, and new. In so doing, the film takes wild liberties with historical accuracy. Most serious scholars now dispute the notion that the Indian girl and the English adventurer were sexually involved, though Smith's memoirs do relate how she begged her father, the tribal chief Powhatan, to spare his life after his capture. But the Smith/Pocahontas affair is like the erotic equivalent of the Thanksgiving story: It is true as a metaphor, a condensation of fantasies about colonization and first contact....

Posted on Sunday, January 22, 2006 at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Yossi Melman and Steven Hartov: Munich: fact and fantasy

Source: Guardian (UK) (1-17-06)

In 1984 the blood of the Israeli intelligence operatives and the Palestinian terrorists they hunted in "the war of the spooks" was still congealing in the back alleys of Europe when a young Israeli named Yuval Aviv teamed up with the Canadian George Jonas, a budding journalist. Aviv claimed to be a freshly defrocked Mossad assassin with a true tale to tell, and the game began.

Their resulting bestseller, Vengeance, was a detailed account of Israel's response to the Munich massacre. In September 1972, PLO terrorists introducing themselves as the hitherto unknown group Black September stormed the Israeli dormitories at the Olympic village and took hostage a dozen members of the Israeli team. They demanded the release of their comrades from Israeli prisons. After two days of negotiation, a failed rescue attempt by German police left 11 Israelis and five terrorists dead. Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir, summoned General Zvi Zamir, the head of Mossad, and instructed him to kill all the PLO operatives directly and indirectly involved.

Seen through the eyes of "Avner", Aviv's undercover persona, the story told by the book seemed to marry well with factual newspaper accounts of how Israel eliminated the Black September killers. It was made into a film - Sword of Gideon - and Jonas and Aviv reaped substantial rewards for their "scoop".

However, our investigations show that Aviv never served in Mossad, or any Israeli intelligence organisation. He had failed basic training as an Israeli Defence Force commando, and his nearest approximation to spy work was as a lowly gate guard for the airline El Al in New York in the early 70s. The tale he had woven was apparently nothing more than a Walter Mitty fabrication.

How, then, did Steven Spielberg and his producer, Kathleen Kennedy, choose Aviv's tale as the source for their film Munich? Last July, when we approached the film's producers, the Spielberg PR machine denied any connection to Aviv. But the film's opening scene states that it was inspired by real events, and at the end it gives a credit to Jonas's book.

During shooting, numerous offers to provide the production team with the facts of the case were rebuffed. More than 30 years had passed since those days of deadly cat and mouse (which now seem quaint compared with the daily horrors of the war on terror) and participants on both sides were ready to talk. Yet the men who held the secrets were never contacted. The phone never rang at Zamir's house, though he could have clarified the myths in an hour. Mike Harari, who supervised the hit teams as head of Mossad's operations, did not receive an inquiry from Spielberg's team. The women who represent the families of the murdered Israelis were disappointed not to be approached. Even Mohammed Daoud, the former Black September chief widely accepted as one of the Munich masterminds, was dismayed no one spoke to him....

Posted on Sunday, January 22, 2006 at 12:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Al Neuharth: Hillary has it wrong, Bush not the 'worst'

Source: USA Today (1-20-06)

The 2008 presidential election still is more than 33 months away, but the campaign to succeed President Bush started in earnest this week.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., seeking an almost certain re-election to that seat this year but with both eyes on her party's presidential nomination in two years, charged that the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country."

She's wrong. As a serious student of politics and history in high school and college and a close observer as a journalist for more than a half-century, these presidents were the five "worst" in my book:

*Andrew Jackson, (D) 1829-37

*James Buchanan, (D) 1857-61

*Ulysses S. Grant, (R) 1869-77

*Herbert Hoover, (R) 1929-33

*Richard Nixon, (R) 1969-74

It's very unlikely Bush can crack that list in his remaining three years in office.

His tragic "pre-emptive" war against Iraq may well go down as the biggest foreign policy blunder ever, especially if he "stays the course" and the unconscionable cost in lives and dollars goes on.

But domestically, except for the foul-up of the follow-up to Hurricane Katrina, Bush has done reasonably well. His leadership helped rally the country after 9/11. The economy is not great, but OK. In the areas of health care and education, he gets pretty good grades....

Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 4:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Simon Jenkins: A map supporting claims that the admiral Zheng He reached the New World in the early 15th century is plainly a hoax

Source: Guardian (UK) (1-20-06)

We all know that a lie goes halfway round the world while truth is putting on its boots. But what if the lie goes the whole way? What if it claims to circumnavigate the globe?

Last week came purported evidence that the Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed his great fleet of junks round the world a century before Columbus, Da Gama and Magellan. An 18th-century copy of a map dated 1418 has emerged from a Shanghai bookshop, depicting North and South America, Australia and Antarctica. The map was bought by a Chinese lawyer, Liu Gang, and was reportedly to go on display on Tuesday in London's Maritime Museum. (The museum denies all knowledge of it.) The map challenges the customary Euro-centric version of global discovery and can thus rely on a weight of political correctness in support. It appears to stake China's claim to have "discovered" America first.

This comes as a surprise to those of us who know for a fact that America was discovered by Prince Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd in 1170. He landed at Mobile, Alabama, on the orders of the family druid and asserted Wales's claim to King Arthur's North Atlantic empire. Making his way across country, he settled west of the Mississippi, where the Mandan tribe were encountered in the 18th century, fair-skinned and speaking a dialect of Welsh.

Unfortunately Madoc's arrival had been forestalled by St Brendan in the seventh century. He sailed to America in a leather-bound coracle, as Tim Severin proved in 1977. The survivors of this trip remain pickled in a downtown Boston saloon to this day. Brendan and Madoc were followed by a Scottish knight templar, Henry Sinclair, seeking refuge from the suppression of his order in 1398. He and his freemasons escaped with assorted treasures and holy grails to settle in Nova Scotia with the Micmac Indians (clearly a tribe of Hiberno-Scots ancestry). Sinclair's masonic star, or "la merika", duly gave its name to the continent and merits a Da Vinci saga all of its own. The only blot on this glory is that everyone knows America got its name from Glamorgan's Richard ap Meurig (Amerik), a wealthy sponsor of John Cabot's search for the north-west passage in the 1490s.

It is amazing that all these chaps never bumped into each other. Sailors tend to chat, and nothing obsesses them so much as maps. Zheng's giant ships - some 400ft long, five times the size of Columbus's - would surely have left a chopstick or two in Manhattan. They would have left more than a kung fu parlour in downtown LA. As for Zheng He's dubious British cheerleader, the author Gavin Menzies, how can he explain a detailed Chinese map of America appearing three years before his hero discovered the place, as he claims, in 1421?

The Chinese map is plainly a hoax. It not only shows North and South America as massive continents, which no sailor could possibly have known. It accurately depicts Alaska, the curve of central America and the Yucatan peninsula, not to mention the Mississippi and St Lawrence rivers. It shows Australia and the land mass of Antarctica beneath it, and New Zealand as two islands....

Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 4:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Gregory Haines: Can't we just teach serious history in the classroom?

Source: Australian (1-20-06)

[Sydney high school history teacher Gregory Haines, in Quadrant magazine, laments the state of his profession.]

ACADEMIC history has been under threat and perhaps in decline for some time. In part, this is due to an overall decline in arts faculties and a consequent search for relevance, funding and position in enterprise universities which are increasingly geared for vocational training rather than broad education.

But there are other factors at work. The rise of postmodernism and theory in arts faculties, later in Australia than elsewhere, where the decline has commenced, has discredited what little education there is on offer.

Australian history has become particularly problematic for the academics. After a flourishing period from the 1960s to the '80s, when academic historians such as Manning Clark gave a strong lead in publishing, now, frequently, it is the non-academic writer who captures the market.

Perhaps the best example of this is Robert Hughes's Fatal Shore, but also the work of Peter FitzSimons. (Most academic history books have a brief shelf life, and even in the US it is unusual for an academic monograph to sell more than a few thousand copies.)

The lack of confidence, and the disarray and decline, affect students: they seem fed up with many of the courses on offer, especially history from below, politically correct history and the current fad of historiography.

Students, it appears from a number of surveys, prefer history courses of substance dealing with the grand themes, courses which are educational as well as informative and which open them to diverse cultures and times.

But history has been too long the bride of fashion. From at least the '50s until after the '80s, the fashion in almost all fields of historical study and teaching was Left-liberal secularism with analysis usually favouring some form of Marxist class conflict. This politicisation of history probably reached its peak during the Vietnam war.

The real tragedy has been the academy has shown itself singularly unable to censure, for unprofessional conduct, those who on their own admission falsified and fabricated. Instead, with very few exceptions, academic historians whose field is Australian history have fallen in line to shoot or vilify the messenger ... An associated tragedy is the new history itself.

Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 4:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tony Kushner: Defending 'Munich's' disputed territory

Source: LAT (1-22-06)

[Tony-, Emmy- and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner's works include "Caroline, or Change" and "Angels in America." "Munich," written with Eric Roth, is his first screenplay.]

At a recent family gathering, my cousin-in-law, Janice, asked me to respond to complaints she'd read over and over again about "Munich," the Steven Spielberg film I co-wrote with Eric Roth, which she hadn't yet seen.

The movie is stirring up a lot of controversy, which I anticipated when I agreed to work on it. I even considered it a side benefit that my mishpocheh, my family, an occasionally argumentative bunch, would have fresh subject matter for the discussion part of our next few Seders. Matzo balls might be flung, but arguing is good for the digestion.

In the last month, the co-creators of "Munich" have been accused of being apologists for the Palestinians, apologists for Israel, defamers of Palestinians and of Israel, softheaded Hollywood liberals, dupes of the radical left, dupes of the radical right, even of being anti-Semitic or self-loathing, for showing Jews talking about receipts and handling money. We're morally confused, overly complicated, simplistic. We're cowards who refused to take sides. We took a side but, oops! the wrong side....

I think it's the refusal of the film to reduce the Mideast controversy, and the problematics of terrorism and counterterrorism, to sound bites and spin that has brought forth charges of "moral equivalence" from people whose politics are best served by simple morality tales. We live in the Shock and Awe Era, in which instant strike-back and blow-for-blow aggression often trump the laborious process of analysis, investigation and diplomacy. "Munich's" questioning spirit is an affront to armchair warrior columnists who understand power only as firepower. We're at war, and the job of artists in wartime, they seem to feel, is to provide the kind of characters and situations that are staples of propaganda: cleanly representative of Good or Evil, and obedient to the Message.

Contradiction in human affairs, such as the possibility that injustice can drive people to do horrible things, is routinely deplored and dismissed in these troubled times as just another example of the naivete of the morally weak (a.k.a. liberals and progressives). But there will always be pesky people who, when horrific crimes are committed, insist on asking, "Why did that happen?"

This is a great annoyance to the up-and-at-'em crowd, whose unshakable conviction is that the only sane and effective response to terrorism is savage violence commensurate with the original act. To justify this conviction they offer, as so many of the political critics of "Munich" have done, tautologies on the order of "evil deeds are done by evil people who do evil deeds because that's what evil people do." If that's helpful to you as a tool for understanding terrorism, you won't like "Munich."

In the film, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is presented not as a matter of religion versus religion, or sanity versus insanity, or good versus evil or civilization versus barbarism or Judeo-Christian culture versus Muslim culture, but rather as a struggle over territory, over geography, over home.

We've followed the lead of many Israeli historians, novelists, filmmakers, poets and politicians who have recognized and described the Israeli-Palestinian struggle this way — as something tragic and human, recognizable. We've incurred the wrath of people who reject, with what sounds like panic, an inescapable fact of human life: People do terrible things in the name of a cause they believe is just, even in the name of a cause that actually is just....

Posted on Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Clyde Haberman: When Pols Use History to Score Points

Source: NYT (1-20-06)

NEW YORK'S junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, joined quite a group of substance abusers the other day. In this bunch, no one is likely to even try kicking the habit.

The substance is history. The abuse is taking some of its most brutal and shameful chapters - slavery, the Holocaust, the massacre of American Indians - and exploiting them for whatever issue happens to land on the agenda.

Not that Mrs. Clinton invented the technique. She merely followed a well-worn path when she went to Harlem and likened the House of Representatives to a plantation, because, she said, its Republican leaders squelch dissident voices.

Did the senator serve history well (never mind the obvious question of whether not being able to speak up was truly the worst hardship endured by plantation slaves)?

"What she is doing is insulting anybody who suffered" during slavery, said William B. Helmreich, a sociologist at the City College of New York and the City University of New York's Graduate Center.

To John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, "these analogies display a lack of basic human compassion."

"People suffered deeply in order to make our lives possible," said Mr. McWhorter, who is black. "You do not toss these things around just to score points on television."

Mrs. Clinton did not speak in a vacuum. There is a long roster of public figures who seek to call attention to their cause by invoking historic cataclysms.

The Holocaust comes in for its share of abuse.

When the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, visited New York last spring to defend his imminent expulsion of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, Jewish protesters yelled "Nazi" and "Auschwitz."

A campaign by the city's Health Department to warn Jewish parents about the potential hazards of a circumcision ritual prompted some Hasidic leaders to threaten disruptions at the mayor's inauguration ceremony this month. They planned to wear yellow Stars of David, those despised symbols of Nazi persecution. In the end, they did not go that route. But that they even considered it shows how cavalierly some are willing to treat the Holocaust, said Professor Helmreich, who is Jewish. "If everything is a Holocaust, then nothing is a Holocaust because it no longer means anything," he said. Paradoxically, he added, those ready to don yellow stars were "protesting over something intended to save Jewish lives by invoking something that destroyed Jewish lives."

SLAVERY and Jim Crow metaphors abound. Observing the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said it "looks like the hull of a slave ship." In the eyes of Justice Clarence Thomas, opposition to his ascension to the Supreme Court amounted to a "high-tech lynching." Representative Charles B. Rangel unblinkingly labeled President Bush "our Bull Connor" in the wake of Katrina, the reference being to the police chief who once turned attack dogs loose on blacks demonstrating for equal rights in Birmingham, Ala.

American Indians get into the act, too. A few years ago, an Indian leader in California said that opponents of expanded casino gambling were trying to "complete the genocide" of his people.

The list could go on and on....



Posted on Friday, January 20, 2006 at 7:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert J. Samuelson: Our History by the Numbers

Source: Newsweek (1-23-06)

Let us now praise the newest edition of "Historical Statistics of the United States," whose five volumes and 1,781 tables are about to hit libraries and universities all over the country. We study history for many reasons: (1) it's interesting; (2) it helps explain who we are and how we got this way, and (3) with luck, we may learn from the past. But the discovery of history is always an exhausting project—part adventure, part ordeal—because the past is shrouded in its own secrets of time, place, belief, motivation and personality. The new edition of "Historical Statistics," the first since 1975 and 11 years in gestation, makes the search a bit easier.

You may regard numbers as drab, but they can fascinate by illuminating the past in two ways. One is to confirm, qualify or contradict things we think we "know." For example, we all "know" that the Civil War was hugely murderous. But do we grasp how murderous? In 1860 the United States had 31.5 million people. In the next five years 364,511 Union soldiers and sailors died; Confederate deaths (including those in prison camps) totaled at least 159,821. Now skip to World War II. By 1940 the population was 132.6 million; U.S. war deaths were 405,399. As a share of population, the Civil War was more than five times as deadly.

The other way that numbers inform the past is to raise questions about it. We stumble across an intriguing statistic and ask: why was that? Since World War II, no president has outdone Dwight Eisenhower in successfully vetoing congressional legislation. He vetoed 181 bills and was overridden only twice. By contrast, Ronald Reagan vetoed 78 and was overridden nine times; Bill Clinton's numbers were 36 and two. What explains Eisenhower's record? (The veto champion was Franklin Roosevelt, with 635 and nine overridden. The current president hasn't vetoed any bill; if he never does, he'd be the first president to do so since James Garfield in 1881.)

If you peruse "Historical Statistics," you'll encounter many revealing numbers:

***During the past century, religion has become more organized in the sense that more people have joined a formal church. In 1890 only about 34 percent of Americans belonged; by 1989 that share was 60 percent, down slightly from its peak of 64 percent in 1970. This decline may reflect the rise of small storefront congregations, which are missed by membership surveys....

Perhaps you doubt you'll peruse "Historical Statistics," especially at a drop-dead price of $825 from Cambridge University Press. Well, for numbers buffs, there's another choice. Unlike earlier editions, this "Historical Statistics" also comes in an online version that, presumably, will be purchased by most universities, colleges and many libraries. Many ordinary students and scavengers of facts—not just academics—should be able to tap this treasure of figures....

We always need to know more. History is an endless blending of fact and imagination. Since the last "Historical Statistics," the data on America's past (from obscure sources) have grown enormously. When the Census Bureau couldn't find the funds for a new edition, a group of academics—guided by the husband-wife team of Richard Sutch and Susan Carter from the University of California, Riverside—decided to fill the gap. The resulting compilation enlarges our rearview mirror and, perhaps, hints where we're headed.



Posted on Friday, January 20, 2006 at 6:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

WSJ Editorial: Reaganomics, 25 Years Later ... Still Morning in America

Source: WSJ (1-20-06)

Twenty-five years ago today, Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the 40th President of the United States promising less intrusive government, lower tax rates and victory over communism. On that same day, the American hostages in Iran were freed after 444 days of captivity. If the story of history is one long and arduous march toward freedom, this was a momentous day well worth commemorating.

All the more so because over this 25-year period prosperity has been the rule, not the exception, for America--in stark contrast to the stagflationary 1970s. Perhaps the greatest tribute to the success of Reaganomics is that, over the course of the past 276 months, the U.S. economy has been in recession for only 15. That is to say, 94% of the time the U.S. economy has been creating jobs (43 million in all) and wealth ($30 trillion). More wealth has been created in the U.S. in the last quarter-century than in the previous 200 years. The policy lessons of this supply-side prosperity need to be constantly relearned, lest we return to the errors that produced the 1970s.

The heart and soul of Reagan's economic agenda were sound money (making the dollar "as good as gold," as Reagan used to put it) and lower tax rates. On monetary policy, Reagan has won a resounding victory. Today, nearly all economists agree with Reagan's then-controversial belief that the sole purpose of monetary policy should be to keep prices stable. Double-digit inflation is a distant memory unlikely to recur anytime soon.

On tax policy, Reaganomics has also carried the day, if somewhat less completely. Tax rates in the U.S. are on average half as high now as they were in the 1970s, and almost every nation has followed the Reagan model of lower tax rates. Even Bill Clinton only dared to raise the top marginal income tax rate back to 39.5%, not 50% or 70%.

Nonetheless, tax cuts still stand in disrepute among most of the media, academics and Democrats in Congress, albeit for shifting reasons. When Reagan proposed his 30% across-the-board tax-rate cut, his critics howled that this would cause demand to rise and lead to hyper-inflation. In fact, supply rose faster than demand, and inflation fell to 4% from 13% and has fallen even lower since. When the economy went into a deep recession in 1981-82, Reagan's adversaries (and some of his own advisers) declared his tax cuts a failure. Reagan said stay the course, and the moment the final leg of the tax cut took effect, in January of 1983, the economy roared to life with an expansion that lasted more than seven years.

When the budget deficit rose in the mid-1980s, the liberals warned that if Reagan would not raise taxes interest rates would skyrocket. He didn't and rates didn't. After the 1987 stock market crash, liberal John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that "this debacle marks the last chapter of Reaganomics . . . and the irresponsible tax cuts." Again, Reagan refused to buckle, and two months later the stock market recovered and the expansion roared on--an expansion that didn't end until George H.W. Bush reversed course and raised taxes in 1990.

The Gipper's critics have written an economic history of the 1990s that they portray as a repudiation of Reaganomics. In this telling--known as Rubinomics--the Clinton tax hikes of 1993 ended the budget deficit, which caused interest rates to fall, which produced the boom of the mid- to late-1990s. In fact, the budget deficit hardly fell at all in the immediate aftermath of the tax hike, and while long-term interest rates fell in 1993, they shot back up again in 1994 almost precisely through Election Day (rising by some 230 basis points from October 1993 to November 1994).

On that day, voters repudiated the Clinton tax hikes and the specter of HillaryCare and gave Republicans control of Capitol Hill to govern on the Reaganite agenda of lowering taxes and shrinking runaway government. Both the stock and bond markets turned upward precisely on Election Day in 1994, beginning a whirlwind six-year rally. By 1998, growth and fiscal restraint delivered a budget surplus for the first time in nearly 30 years. In 1997 President Clinton signed a further reduction in the capital gains tax, which propelled investment and the stock market to even greater heights....

Posted on Friday, January 20, 2006 at 4:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Richard Wightman Fox: Lincoln's Religious Quest

Source: Slate (1-18-06)

[Richard Wightman Fox, professor of history at the University of Southern California, is the author of Jesus in America: Personal Savior, Cultural Hero, National Obsession.]

The recent avalanche of Abraham Lincoln books announces the ever-closer approach of Lincoln's 200th birthday. (Lay in some extra bunting: Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the same day, Feb. 12, 1809.) The year 2005 began with C.A. Tripp, in The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, freely speculating about Lincoln's alleged "homosexual side" and with Ronald C. White Jr., in The Eloquent President, reminding us that this self-educated son of a small-time farmer evolved against all odds into an accomplished prose stylist. The year ended with Joshua Wolf Shenk inviting us to ponder Lincoln's Melancholy, a broader state of soul-suffering than what we now call "depression," and with Doris Kearns Goodwin, in Team of Rivals, refocusing attention on Lincoln the politician and president. Nothing in his psychic life stopped him from defanging his Republican presidential competitors, slyly bringing them into his Cabinet, and exploiting their talents while keeping their higher aspirations in check and turning a couple of them into firm friends.

In Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power, Richard Carwardine, a history professor at Oxford, extends Goodwin's emphasis on Lincoln the politician, leaving Lincoln's personal life wholly aside. Carwardine is not trying to protect the president's image of greatness—he explicitly rejects the tradition of "biographical pietism" that often elevates Lincoln above mortal men. But he is wary of speculative scholarship about Lincoln's personal life that relies not on Lincoln's own written or publicly spoken words but on the post-assassination recollections of others (sometimes first published decades after Lincoln's death). This Lincoln, first published three years ago in a British series called "Profiles in Power" and now reissued by Knopf in an illustrated edition, nevertheless contributes something new to our grasp of Lincoln the person as well as the politician. The author of two previous books on religion and politics before 1865, Carwardine shows how deeply religion informed Lincoln's exercise of power and ultimately his sense of himself.

Here he joins forces with Allen Guelzo, whose ground-breaking Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (1999) challenged the reigning outlook among 20th-century historians. They had presumed that the non-church-member Lincoln maintained a secular perspective throughout his life, even as, during the war, he found psychic solace in the Scriptures and accommodated the religious cravings of his fellow citizens by framing some of his speeches in biblical language. David Donald's superb Lincoln (1995), while noting the president's apparent religious turn, saw even his deeply theological second inaugural address as a translation by Lincoln of his persistent secular fatalism into religious terms familiar to his audience....

Thanks to Carwardine and Guelzo we can see that Lincoln, by the end of his life, had inverted Thomas Jefferson on the subject of religion. The third president, the great exponent of Enlightenment, had tried to banish mystery from religion while preserving a privileged place for Jesus as the greatest ethical teacher of all time. For his part, the 16th president dropped Jesus by the wayside while rekindling awareness of the unfathomable mysteries of religion. Lincoln resembles the ostensibly secular Benjamin Franklin more than he does the Jesus-infatuated Jefferson. The skeptical Franklin kept a place for Providence in his thinking about the ultimate fate of humanity, while dismissing the pleas of his friend the Rev. George Whitefield that Franklin "close with Christ." Lincoln transformed Franklin's Providence into a vigorous historical actor but, like Franklin, he found little use for Jesus. ...

One reason why Lincoln has endured as Americans' prime civic icon (white Southerners having come on board in large numbers even by the late 19th century) is his straddling of the secular-religious boundary line. He can gather disciples on both sides. The 2009 commemorations will surely coincide with attempts to induct Lincoln into the ongoing American cultural tug-of-war by forcing him onto one side or the other. Pundits of faith are liable to pit a secular Darwin against a religious Lincoln. Perhaps Carwardine's book will help shield him from such treatment. The real Lincoln remains a straddler, too religious for most secularists but too fatalistic for most religionists.

Posted on Thursday, January 19, 2006 at 9:29 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Joel Engel: Bill Clinton, Historian?

Source: Weekly Standard (1-19-06)

[Joel Engel is an author and journalist in Southern California.]

A MEMORIAL SERVICE for former senator Eugene J. McCarthy was held last Saturday at the National Cathedral in Washington, and former president Bill Clinton was there to eulogize him. This was not surprising: President Clinton will probably be present to eulogize every other boomer icon, whenever photographers are permitted, for as long as his health permits. What was surprising, though, was that Clinton credited the senator, who died last month, for turning the country against the Vietnam War--the operative word being "credited."

"It all started when Gene McCarthy was willing to stand alone and turn the tide of history," said the forty-second president of the United States.

But "to stand alone and turn the tide of history" is the kind of language generally reserved for the likes of Churchill's warnings about Hitler at a time when no one wanted to hear them. Or for Lincoln, risking everything to keep the United States united. Indeed, those could've been the words Clinton used for Rosa Parks, substituting "sit" for "stand" in his eulogy at her funeral. They're used for people whose actions are considered unambiguously good.

As far as I know, there has never been a national referendum in which America as a nation decided that President Kennedy's decision to send military "advisers" to South Vietnam as a bulwark against falling-dominoes communism was an error of historic proportions; that those who fought, and died, did so in vain; that the consequences of our leaving Vietnam without winning--millions slaughtered--were, at worst, morally neutral. That the war, in short, was unredeemable from first to last....

Posted on Thursday, January 19, 2006 at 9:23 PM | Comments (0) | Top

R. J. Del Vecchio: Lessons of Viet Nam ... By Whose Judgment?

Source: Communication to HNN

[R. J. Del Vecchio is a veteran activist and long-time student of the conflict in SE Asia, starting prior to joining the Marines and serving in the 1st Marine Division in 1968. He has been making presentations on the war as a guest lecturer at colleges and high schools since 1996, is active in several veteran’s organizations, and was a speaker at the 2004 Boston Conference on the Myths of Viet Nam. He is a co-author of “Whitewash/Blackwash: Myths of the Viet Nam War”, a teacher’s aid booklet commissioned at the Boston Conference.]

In a recent HNN posting of a lecture given to the American Historical Association in Philadelphia (Was Anything Learned from Vietnam? 1/9/06, by Dr. Carolyn Eisenberg), a passionate presentation was made on the relationship between the war in Iraq and our experience in Viet Nam over three decades ago. One might expect such inputs to be based on reasonably sound grounds of historical fact, or at least arguable grounds, but this is not the case, and a response from a more objective point of view is required.

First, it should be noted that whether or not the US should have invaded Iraq, and how sound the initial policies implemented after the fall of Baghdad may have been, are indeed very arguable matters. The effectiveness of the later strategies employed by the US and the interim Iraqi government are also arguable. What is hardly arguable is that the sudden abandonment of Iraq to the forces of chaos, tribal and sectarian warfare, and the influence of foreign jihadists would be disastrous for both the Iraqis and the stability of the Middle East. But that is not the topic of this presentation.

Many statements of implied “fact” were made about Viet Nam in the lecture that are anywhere from highly debatable to demonstrably incorrect. In the second paragraph it was claimed that the war was a “cynical invocation of democracy and freedom [for the purpose of] American domination and support for dictatorship” and that “the vast American ‘war machine’ [rained] unimaginable suffering on foreign civilians whom it was claiming to save”.

Apparently neither the doctrine of Containment which was the US response to the communist expansionism that began shortly after WW2 nor John Kennedy’s pledge to fight every foe in the defense of liberty have been considered in regard to possible reasons for US involvement in Viet Nam; and at the same time, a compelling US drive to dominate a small country whose main export was Natural Rubber (for which Malaysia was and is a much greater source) and the assumption that Diem was nothing more than a dictator (like Saddam Hussein?) are assumed. The documented 58,000+ kidnappings and assassinations committed by the Viet Cong in South Viet Nam (Guenter Lewy, America in Viet Nam), and the deaths of many thousands of North Vietnamese during the “land reform” enforced by the communists in their half of the country (see Fall, The Two Viet Nams, and Huyen, Vision Accomplished?) are unnoticed, but an alleged rain of suffering deliberately inflicted on innocents by US forces is posited.

The pattern of very strong inherent bias in regard to Viet Nam is continued throughout the rest of the article. However, analysis of just a few statements made about Viet Nam from an historical point of view is preferable to a point-by-point dissection of the entire article.

“’Vietnamization’…. had been tried and failed” An interesting claim, but then how was it that in 1972 after all US main force units were gone, when the North Vietnamese Army invaded the South with several divisions totaling 200,000 men, complete with tanks, antiaircraft missiles, and better artillery than the US had left to the ARVN, that the South Vietnamese fought a horrific series of pitched battles over a period of months that resulted in only 60% of the NVA surviving to retreat back North, minus almost all their tanks and artillery? (Douglas Pike, Vietnam and the Soviet Union, and Thi, Autopsy- The Death of South Viet Nam)

“when the peace agreement was virtually signed, Nixon ordered the infamous Christmas bombings. Anguished military officials wondered why he was jeopardizing more US pilots and wasting the planes when everything was settled” There is simply no evidence to support these claims.

Indeed, the facts of the North Vietnamese delegation’s stalling and intransigence in regard to actually signing the agreement which had begun that Fall (preceded, of course, by their famous prolonged arguments over the shape of the negotiating table) were very well known at the time, and have long since been written about in detail. For example, while Dr. Kissinger had made an announcement in early October that agreement was near at hand, a series of obstacles then arose. By November 23rd Le Duc Tho had reneged on previous points of agreement, and in December 10-13, the North Vietnamese made a total of 33 demands for changes in the terms of the agreement. (See Kalb and Kalb, Kissinger, Hung and Schecter, The Palace File, and Diem and Chanoff, The Jaws of History)

The negotiations then broke down completely and the North Vietnamese left the table. President Nixon then sent Hanoi a message demanding negotiations start anew, in 72 hours, or Hanoi would have to face the consequences. The three days passed with no response from Hanoi. (Kissinger, also Davidson, Viet Nam at War) With no other options for motivating the communists to resume negotiations, Nixon called in Adm. Tom Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and instructed him to conduct whatever strategic bombing campaign was needed to impress Hanoi enough to get them back to Paris to conclude an agreement.

It would be difficult to impossible to find any of the alleged “anguished military officials”, but many of the high ranking officers (e.g. General “Buck” Shuler) are still alive to testify that they were only anguished about not having been able to bring effective strategic bombing into play much earlier in the war. The bombing campaign (Linebacker II) lasted eleven days, ending on December 30th, and by January 8th Le Duc Tho was back in Paris, negotiations resumed, and were concluded by the 27th of the month.

“In Richard Nixon’s first term of office, close to 20,000 Americans died, approximately 1-2 million Southeast Asians” A fascinating use of statistics. On the one hand, we are led to conclude that Nixon was somehow personally responsible for the deaths of some of the Americans involved in the war, the initiation of which did not involve him, and from which he frantically tried to extricate US troops; yet on the other hand, is he also to be held responsible for the nearly 2 million Cambodians murdered by the Khmer Rouge, whose leaders were trained and equipped by Hanoi? And the at least 60,000 South Vietnamese executed by the communists after the fall of Saigon as well, or the over 80,000 more who died in the “re-education” camps that sprang up across Viet Nam once the North had all power? (Todd, Cruel April)

A call to any Americans to take part in the national debate about Iraq is very well and good, and one might well make the case that historians have a special role to play in that debate. However, if such a claim is to be made, its legitimacy depends very much on those historians employing professional knowledge and objectivity rather than personal bias and psuedohistory.

Posted on Thursday, January 19, 2006 at 2:52 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michiko Kakutani: Runaway Relativism and the Fictional Memoir

Source: NYT (1-17-06)

...We live in a relativistic culture where television "reality shows" are staged or stage-managed, where spin sessions and spin doctors are an accepted part of politics, where academics argue that history depends on who is writing the history, where an aide to President Bush, dismissing reporters who live in the "reality-based community," can assert that "we're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." ...

Around the same time [as "our culture's enshrinement of subjectivity], biographies became increasingly infected with personal agendas. There was biography as pretentious exercise in deconstruction (Wayne Koestenbaum's "Jackie Under My Skin"), biography as spin job (Andrew Morton's "Diana: Her True Story"), biography as philosophical manifesto (Norman Mailer's "Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man") and biography as feminist polemic (Francine du Plessix Gray's "Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet"). While some of these authors were candid about what they were up to, Edmund Morris's ludicrous 1999 book "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" - which recounted Ronald Reagan's life through the prism of a fictional narrator, who liked to talk about himself - was sold as "the only biography ever authorized by a sitting president."

Equally egregious was "The Last Brother," Joe McGinniss's speculative portrait of Senator Edward M. Kennedy - a book in which the author acknowledged that he'd "written certain scenes and described certain events from what I have inferred to be his point of view," despite the fact that he did not even interview the senator for the book. "This is my view, and perhaps mine alone," Mr. McGinniss wrote, "of what life might have been like for Teddy."

While books like these were further blurring the lines between fact and fiction- a development that had begun years before with the rise of the new journalism, which appropriated the techniques of fiction without assuming its prerogative of invention - academics were questioning the very nature of reality.

By focusing on the "indeterminacy" of texts and the crucial role of the critic in imputing meaning, deconstructionists were purveying a fashionably nihilistic view of the world, suggesting that all meaning is relative, all truth elusive. And by focusing on the point of view of the historian (gender, class, race, ideology, etc.), radical feminists and multiculturalists were arguing that history is an adjunct of identity politics, that all statements about the past are expressions of power and that all truths are therefore political and contingent.

Variations on these arguments were used by Janet Malcolm, who disingenuously suggested in "The Silent Woman," her highly partisan 1994 portrait of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, that all biographers share her disdain for fairness and objectivity.

The dangers of such relativistic theories are profound. As Deborah Lipstadt, the author of "Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory," has argued, the suggestion that no event or fact has a fixed meaning leads to the premise that "any truth can be retold." And when people assert that there is no ultimate historical reality, an environment is created in which the testimony of a witness to the Holocaust - like Mr. Wiesel, the author of "Night" - can actually be questioned.

In her 1994 book "On Looking Into the Abyss," the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb argued that historians have always known "what postmodernism professes to have just discovered" - that any historical work "is necessarily imperfect, tentative and partial." Yet postmodernists do not merely acknowledge the obstacles that stand in the way of objectivity but also celebrate those obstacles, elevating relativism into a kind of end in itself. They strive to be imaginative, inventive or creative, instead of accurate and knowledgeable....

Posted on Wednesday, January 18, 2006 at 1:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Stacy Schiff: Poor Richard's Redemption

Source: NYT (1-17-06)

[Stacy Schiff is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America."]

AMERICAN history is short on 300th birthdays. Which is only one reason to salute Ben Franklin, who had the foresight to have been born three centuries ago today. It was one of many generous acts for his country. He makes us feel we have a history.

As a man of science, Franklin lamented that he had been born too soon. (A beautiful woman 40 years his junior generally elicited the same regret.) But he could not truly quibble with chronology. In America's seminal story, birth order was on his side. He was already a father - and a thriving publisher - when Adams and Washington were in swaddling clothes. He retired from the printing business when Jefferson was 4. He had flown his kite when Madison was an infant; by the time Hamilton was born he had turned to politics, and proposed a first plan for colonial union. He could have been either man's grandfather.

Franklin was, too, the founder who came the furthest. He alone spent six decades as a British subject before embracing the revolutionary cause, to which he applied the zeal of a convert. He neither hailed from an elite nor subscribed to one. The youngest son of a youngest son, he chafed as much against entitled elder siblings as against enthroned upper classes. Until Tom Sawyer displaced him, he ranked as our foremost juvenile delinquent. Franklin's autobiography begins with defying his family and running away from home. "Perhaps I was too saucy and provoking," he reflected afterward, with ample reason. He thought he was writing his own story but was of course writing America's as well.

Neither birth order nor longevity - he signed every document central to America's founding - would alone have established Franklin as the ur-American, however. He was a true egalitarian, which could not be said of Adams. For all his ingenuity he was less a manufacturer of ideas than a purveyor of them; he was no dreamy Jefferson. Alexander Hamilton may well have known everything, but Franklin questioned everything.

His curiosity was matched by the suppleness of his mind, one singularly free of hobgoblins. (His ability to argue either side of an issue with equal vigor drove Adams to distraction.) Nor was there anything orthodox or evangelical about Franklin, who took his Puritanism as he took his Enlightenment ideals: with a splash of water, hold the doctrine. His religion was tolerance, his sect pragmatism.

When did he become so plushly, so comfortably, so voluptuously American? As the features are not aquiline, so the morals are far from impeccable. With equal genius Franklin codified good behavior and defied it. He was an organization man who was not particularly organized, a committee man who worked most effectively through back channels. With equal gusto he preached temperance and wrote drinking songs. He practiced frugality only, he admitted, so long as it was absolutely necessary. Diligence was his middle name, but few have made dilatoriness sound so attractive. A great deal of his famed industry consisted of getting someone else to whitewash the fence.

That Franklin would one day be anointed "the first great American" was far from clear during his lifetime. He was proud of his social sprint, which he merrily advertised. To his mind it made the success all the sweeter. He who had been born to poverty and obscurity had dined with royalty! But social mobility was not something one bragged about in the l8th century. It was Franklin who gave work and bootstraps - among other things - a good name. One easily forgets that "democrat," too, was a dirty word in colonial America....

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 9:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Christopher Hitchens: Benjamin Franklin was the Socrates of his day

Source: WSJ (1-17-06)

It might seem a little extreme to compare the Philadelphia of the 18th century A.D. with the Athens of the fifth century B.C., but seldom can any one city have been the center of so much learning, inquiry and innovation. And not just a center -- for work in astronomy, medicine, law and other fields -- but also a magnet. When Joseph Priestley, the virtual discoverer of oxygen, had his laboratory smashed by the mob that shouted "Church and King," he quit Birmingham, England, and removed his scientific instruments and his heretical religious opinions to Philadelphia. So did Thomas Paine, the self-taught customs officer and designer of the first iron bridge. Paine, the moral author of the Declaration of Independence, was lucky in his timing but also lucky in his patronage. Across the Atlantic, he bore with him a letter of recommendation from Dr. Benjamin Franklin in London. And if Philadelphia was Athens at all, then Franklin was, as well as its senior citizen, its Socrates.

In how many dimensions can one observe this figure, on his tercentenary? Unlike most philosophers, he was also an eminently practical man, schooled at first in the most charming and useful of trades -- that of a printer -- but wise in the ways of business and some distance ahead of his time in matters of science. If he did not exactly discover electricity, he did establish beyond doubt that it was a principle at work in the natural universe. And for him, discovery of this kind was intuitively linked to the possibility of the useful: for the lightening of the human load and, more important, the enlightening of the human mind.

Unlike most revolutionaries, he was a conservative. He did not, for example, join Benjamin Rush and Thomas Paine in the Anti-Slavery Society until quite late in his life. I think it may have been John Maynard Keynes who observed that conservatives often make very effective revolutionaries, in that they have tried to make the existing system work and have come to understand very clearly why it must be changed. Benjamin Franklin offered to pay the damages of the Boston Tea Party. If the British authorities had not treated him in such an arrogant and underhanded manner, and had not had such a paltry idea of the man with whom they had to deal, he would very probably have negotiated a brilliant settlement of the outstanding disputes between the colonies and the motherland. This was certainly his wish. But as it was, his full talent as a diplomat was only disclosed when he became the first and best envoy of the American Revolution. (He never lived to see the full effect of the French one.)

One ought, also, to remember his physical courage and his readiness to take risks. He very nearly died on a hazardous expedition to French Canada during the fighting in 1776, and repeatedly stood the danger of first-hand experiments with lightning, which on at least one occasion could have cut his life extremely short. His insouciance about all this must bear some relationship to his dry and highly developed sense of humor. The Founding Fathers were not to be renowned for their joke-cracking capacities: One may page through Thomas Jefferson's elegant correspondence and yet become dispirited by the want of a jest. You can never be sure exactly when Franklin is joking: In the "Autobiography" he boasts with Abramoff-like glee that he both recommended an increase in paper money to the Pennsylvania Legislature and then eagerly received the contract to print it. But in any crisis of seriousness, Franklin was also the main man. He was drafted onto the committee that drew up the Declaration (and may well have been the one who imposed the ringing term "self-evident," as against the more pompous "sacred and undeniable" in its crucial opening stave.) When George Washington's horse bore him into Philadelphia for the grueling meeting that would eventually evolve the United States Constitution, it was at Franklin's front door that the president necessarily made his first stop....

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 9:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Taylor Branch: Globalizing Martin Luther King's Legacy

Source: International Herald Tribune (1-16-06)

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s name carries more resonance than impact - noble, universal, yet bounded by race and time.

The official celebration of his birthday draws tributes to the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite America's high-stakes national commitment to advance free government around the world, Americans consistently marginalize or ignore King's commitment to the core values of democracy.

His own words present a vast and urgent landscape for freedom. "No American is without responsibility," King declared only hours after the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" repulse of voting rights marchers in Selma, Alabama.

"All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life," he added. "The struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land."

His public appeal gathered an overnight host from many states behind a blockaded vigil. When white supremacists beat one volunteer to death with impunity, King responded with prophetic witness against the grain of violence. "Out of the wombs of a frail world," he assured mourners, "new systems of equality and justice are being born."

Selma released waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. Ordinary citizens ventured across cultural barriers, aroused a transnational conscience and engaged all three branches of government.

After the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, King claimed that the distinctive methods of sharecroppers and students had revived nothing less than the visionary heritage of the American Revolution.

"The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation," he told the Synagogue Council of America. "Rather it is a historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society."

This effusive axiom went unnoticed, but the blessings of freedom did ripple far beyond the black victims of caste. As King predicted, the civil rights movement liberated segregationists themselves.

The integrity of law enforcement rose with a stark decline in racial terror. The Atlanta Braves joined the first professional sports teams to spring up at integrated stadiums, and business radiated Sun Belt growth into a region of historic poverty.

In elections, new black voters generated the 20th century's first two-party competition to displace the ossified regimes of white supremacy. The stigma of segregation no longer curtailed a Southerner's chances for high national office, and fresh candidates rose swiftly to leadership in both national parties. Parallel tides opened doors for the first female students at some universities and most private colleges, then the military academies.

Overseas, as an amalgam of forces suddenly dissolved the Soviet empire atop its mountain of nuclear weapons, King's message echoed in the strains of "We Shall Overcome" heard along the Berlin Wall and the streets of Prague. Likewise, South African apartheid melted without the long-dreaded racial Armageddon, on miraculous healing words from a former prisoner, Nelson Mandela.

Students shocked the world from Tiananmen Square with nonviolent demonstrations modeled on American sit-ins, planting seeds of democracy within the authoritarian shell of Chinese Communism.

These and other sweeping trends from the civil rights era have transformed daily life in many countries, and now their benefit is scarcely contested. Yet the political discourse behind them is atrophied. Public service has fallen into sad disrepute. Spitballs pass for debate. Comedians write the best-selling books on civics. King's ideas are not so much rebutted as cordoned off or begrudged, and for two generations his voice of anguished hope has given way to a dominant slogan that government itself is bad.

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 7:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Levering Lewis: Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s final chapter

Source: New Yorker (1-23-06)

In one of his more bizarre Oval Office confidences, Lyndon Johnson said that he didn’t want to “follow Hitler” but that Hitler had the right idea: “Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, even if it wasn’t true, why, people accept it.” Johnson was speaking by telephone to Martin Luther King, Jr., in Selma, Alabama, about how to convince Southern whites that Southern blacks deserved the franchise. The curious political-science tutorial came on the afternoon of January 15, 1965, King’s thirty-sixth birthday. Whatever he may have thought of Johnson’s inaccurate analogy, King had already begun repeating, on television, in the press, and from church pulpits, the moral necessity of a guaranteed vote for every American, regardless of color. Two weeks earlier, King had publicly announced that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the alliance of Baptist preachers he led, would launch voter-registration protests in Selma, where fourteen thousand four hundred whites had, by legal ruse and naked force, limited fifteen thousand blacks to one per cent of the registration rolls.

Johnson, as recorded by the secret Oval Office taping system, both commended and cautioned King on his Selma strategy. He was, he said, committed to getting federal voting legislation enacted, but he implied that King’s timing and his tactics were dangerously precipitate. Johnson’s Great Society programs for Medicare, Medicaid, education, and poverty were pending, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had already depleted congressional good will.
King was by then expert at telling Johnson what Johnson wanted to hear, and managed to interrupt the Presidential monologue long enough to tell Johnson what he felt Johnson needed to know. He pointed out that, in the five Southern states that Johnson lost to Goldwater in 1964, fewer than forty per cent of eligible African-Americans were registered to vote. A voting-rights act would produce a coalition of blacks and white moderates, changing the electoral map of the South. Johnson liked that. It could be his greatest achievement, he said—“It will do things that even that ’64 Act couldn’t do.”

“At Canaan’s Edge” (Simon & Schuster; $35), the third and final volume of Taylor Branch’s monumental chronicle, “America in the King Years,” covers the period from 1965 to 1968, and charts civil-rights history as the parallel biographies of two tragic titans—Martin Luther King, Jr., the modern Moses, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the would-be Lincoln. The tape of Johnson’s phone call to King has inspired speculation about their collusion in the design and execution of the Selma-Montgomery campaign; one student of the period recently called it the Johnson-King voting-rights “pas de deux.”
Branch doesn’t go this far, but he briskly relates how Johnson moved from annoyed doubt about Selma to outright collaboration within a matter of weeks. He urged King to expose the worst of voting conditions in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana, but he could hardly have had in mind the brutal reaction of Selma’s sheriff, Jim Clark. For King’s purposes, however, Clark and his deputies were ideal—studio-cast thugs guaranteed to provoke national outrage and instigate federal intervention....


Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 6:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tony Paterson: Uwe Benkel's Team Has Recovered Thousands Of Bodies Of WWII Allied Airmen

Source: The Independent (London) (1-16-06)

A fist-sized block of glass sits on top of a stack of files in Uwe Benkel's sitting-room. It looks like an expensive crystal paper weight that might have been bought at Harrods. Yet the block has a more poignant history. A few weeks before Christmas it was retrieved from a 15ft pit hidden deep in a forest in Germany's Rhineland Palatinate district near the French border.

The block once formed part of the bulletproof windscreen of an American fighter bomber flown by 21-year-old Ronald Potter, whose P47 "Thunderbolt" plane was shot down 61 years ago during a Second World War dogfight with a German Messerschmitt.

Yesterday Uwe Benkel, a mild-mannered social security office manager in his forties, presented the chunk of windscreen and other bits of retrieved plane wreckage to Kerry Potter, the 62-year-old son of the pilot of the American plane. He travelled to Germany from Alaska for what was an emotional ceremony.

"Kerry Potter is deeply moved," Mr Benkel said. "He told me on the phone from Alaska that this will finally connect him with his father. He said he had given up hope of finding out much about him. Until now, nobody really knew how he died. He was simply listed as killed in action and his body was found in a mass grave."

The event will be another milestone in Uwe Benkel's remarkable part-time career. Since 1989, he and the 14 other voluntary and unpaid members of his Research Group for the Missing have recovered the remains of 80 British, American and German wartime aircraft shot down during the Second World War and recovered the bodies of 28 pilots listed as missing.

"It is more of a calling than a hobby," Mr Benkel said last week, "We just think its right to give these lads a decent burial and explain their fate to their relatives. We don't give a damn whose side they were on. Most of them were hardly out of their teens," he added.

The fate of US Air Force Lieu-tentant Ronald Potter is typical of the estimated 15,000 to 20,000 pilots shot down over Germany during the Second World War. Shortly after his plane crashed, his body was found by local German officials and simply dumped in a mass grave. After the Allied invasion of Germany, US officials found the body, identified it, and returned it to America for military burial. But Ronald Potter was just one of the thousands of US pilots killed in action.

However, Mr Benkel's team of crash-site excavators was able to discover the exact circumstances of his death. "We asked local people who remembered witnessing the dogfight. Then we actually found the pilot of the Messerschmitt who shot down Lt Potter's plane. He is still alive!" Mr Benkel said.
...
Relatives of Second World War pilots stil registered as missing in Germany can contact Martina and Uwe Benkel in English at Am Zimmerkopf 9,67716 Heltersberg, Germany.

Email: mu.benkel@t-online.de

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 2:14 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Stephen McGinty: It's time for BBC Scotland to make history in the Schama mould

Source: scotsman.com (1-17-06)

... I indulged my passion for America by working my way through Ken Burns's magisterial The Civil War and The West. This was capped last Christmas by Alistair Cooke's 13-part history of America, first broadcast in 1972, which remains informative and fascinating. Then came Michael Wood's tight-trousered jaunts through the ancient world, In Search of the Trojan War and In Search of Alexander the Great. I must have been infected by the Macedonians' desire to take on the world, for next I embarked on Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. This landmark 13-part BBC 2 series, made in 1973, is the Everest of documentaries.

CHRISTMAS Day brought Professor Simon Schama and his 15-part History of Britain into the living room, and this has now whetted my appetite for a similarly robust examination of our own past from BBC Scotland.

No doubt BBC Scotland would claim that this is territory already tilled. In 2001, it broadcast a ten-part series, In Search of Scotland, presented by Fiona Watson, which was three years in the making. Yet at a mere 30 minutes per episode, the makers were forced to condense 5,000 years of history into five hours, or slightly longer than the time given to tell of the story of the construction of the Scottish Parliament building.

If BBC Scotland can spend GBP 9 million on the creation of River City and almost GBP 1 million on The Gathering Place, why not invest GBP 2 or GBP 3 million on a comprehensive landmark series on the history of Scotland? At a time when education ministers are foolishly allowing the teaching of history to lapse from the school timetable, it would be a valuable resource tool, a public service and in the right hands, gripping television....

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 2:11 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Patrick Barkham: 850 Year Old Middlesex Village In Heathrow's Path

Source: The Guardian (London) (1-16-06)

Elm trees hugged the main street in Sipson when Jack Clark earned his weekly 3s 9d on Thomas Wild's farm. Fields, he recalls, were lined with hummocks of strawberries. Grapes and peaches grew in glasshouses. Plums dangled over the walls of orchards. There was a pump for spring water. A mile-and-a-half down the road was a small cluster of cottages called Heathrow. The only grey objects in the sky above the market gardens of Middlesex were Clark's pigeons.

Jack Clark is 94 and still keeps pigeons at the bottom of his cottage garden in Sipson. Around him, however, is a landscape utterly transformed. At night, he stands in his dressing gown and watches a line of eight aircraft, lights ablaze, hanging in the sky like Christmas lights as they make their descent into the world's busiest international airport. A field away, a satellite dish whirs round and round. The red lights of a control tower blink over the rooftops. Sipson, a village of 700 homes, is marooned between the M4, the M25 and Heathrow.

Where he would bird-nest as a boy, a boxy Holiday Inn now squats. Where he once played cricket on the street, people carriers stack up. And yet, against all logic, a small community survives in Sipson. You will see it if you look to your right seconds before touching down from your sunshine break in Barbados. Americans exclaim at it. There is a paddock of horses, the low beams of the King William IV pub, a primary school, a (converted) Baptist church, the post office and the butcher's, mock-Tudor houses, crescents of pale-bricked semis from the 70s. A village, a recognisable village.

This year, 855 years after the first surviving records of a settlement called Sibwineston, the people of Sipson expect to be wiped off the map. From Gordon Brown downwards, the government, supported by airlines and the aviation industry, says that Heathrow must have a third runway. At Stansted, plans for a second runway will swallow two small hamlets, but not since wartime has such a large village been threatened. Sipson's 700 homes, shops, pubs, small businesses and school will by buried under taxiways, terminals, concourses and car parks by 2020 if this year's government review of its 2003 aviation white paper approves R3, as the aviation industry calls it. And, as BAA, Heathrow's owners, acknowledge, it is not an either/or choice. A third runway at Heathrow will not halt the need to expand other airports. Our insatiable appetite for cheap foreign travel means that the struggle to save Sipson will mirror other battles across the country in years to come.

A sickly image recurs on the streets of Sipson. "I've lived here for more than 30 years and just rubbed along with the airport," says Christine Shilling, whose house is 200 yards from the proposed taxiway just outside Sipson. "Now I see it like a cancer, spreading across the landscape." Bryan Sobey stands in his front room next to three wistful oil paintings of trains. "Heathrow used to be what I called a 'friendly-advantage' place. It supplied work. It was a bit of a family, in a way. It is now a cancer just about to become malignant." He and his wife Ann bought their house in 1959. Coming from Devon, they had seen entire villages sacrificed for military camps during the second world war. "But this is so that someone can go to Malaga," says Sobey.

Heathrow was born in the war. A small aerodrome with a grass runway was built by Fairey Aviation to test aircraft in 1929. According to local historian Philip Sherwood - like every resident, drawn into the campaign to save Sipson - the air ministry knew that an airport so near west London would never be approved under normal planning laws. The second world war intervened, Fairey was evicted and Heathrow became a military airfield. "It was a ruse," says Sherwood. "They didn't start work on building the airport until May '44. Within a year, the war was over." The people of Sipson have a motto for Heathrow: "Deception since its inception."

This year, Sipson celebrates an inauspicious anniversary: 60 years of having been earmarked for destruction. Plans from 1946 show five runways and no Sipson, but money ran out. Heathrow remained a bucolic collection of marquees. "They had only just pulled down the tents when I arrived. The terminals were Nissan huts," says Sobey. In his early days as a customs officer intercepting smuggled diamonds, all the "bucket and spade" flights departed from other (now defunct) small airports nearby. He never imagined Heathrow's remorseless expansion. When Terminal 4 arrived in 1978, residents were assured there would never be a 5, 6 or 7. But by the early 1990s, with T5 on the statute book, a third runway was mooted to serve Terminals 6 and 7. Rejected in 1995, the plans for R3 were quietly resuscitated at the century's end.

Three developments make 2006 a potentially fatal year for Sipson. Buried in the chancellor's pre-budget report in November last year was an announcement of "extensive" research on pollution problems at Heathrow "aimed at identifying solutions that would allow construction of a third runway to take place within relevant air quality limits". Then there is the government's own review of Britain's transport infrastructure by Rod Eddington, the former British Airways chief executive. It is widely expected to streamline the planning process for major infrastructure, making it harder for Sipson to block the runway. Finally, at the end of the year, the government will review its 2003 white paper. It had said Heathrow's expansion would be delayed because of noise and pollution problems. Lobby groups are now pushing for a positive decision on R3; the chancellor's activity suggests they will get it.

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 2:11 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Vincent Carroll: Rocky Mountain News Editor Takes Historians To Task

Source: Rocky Mountain News (1-17-06)

The power of the individual

If young people today are turned off by the study of history - and by and large they are - it is partly the fault of the historians and educators who write the books that students read. History is most vivid and real when it highlights the extraordinary individuals, good and evil, who shaped it. But many scholars disdain such a focus, dwelling instead on culture, class and economics as the driving forces in our past.

Their impersonal approach is useful up to a point. Taken too far, however, it obscures the truth. No one has ever pointed this out more forcefully than the brilliant Milton Himmelfarb, who died this month at 87, in an essay titled No Hitler, No Holocaust.

"Hitler willed and ordered the Holocaust, and was obeyed," Himmelfarb wrote. "Traditions, tendencies, ideas, myths - none of these made Hitler murder the Jews. All that history, all those forces and influences, could have been the same and Hitler could as easily, more easily, not have murdered the Jews. . . .

"Anti-Semitism was a necessary condition for the Holocaust, it was not a sufficient condition. Hitler was needed. Hitler murdered the Jews because he wanted to murder them."

His entire essay, which was published in Commentary magazine in 1984 and can be found online, is still worth reading. It's a powerful argument against any version of history that demotes individuals to the role of puppets.

NOTES: Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 1:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Deodorants Have Been Used For Centuries

Source: The New Zealand Herald (1-17-06)

Body odour was once an inevitable part of life, but thanks to a mystery inventor, modern society smells a lot nicer.

In 1881, an unidentified man in Philadelphia made the first antiperspirant to be sold commercially, known as "Mum".

The product was originally sold through his nurse and made with zinc, but later deodorants changed to aluminium chloride after complaints of skin irritation. It was originally sold as a cream in a jar.

Helen Barnett, an employee, was inspired by the invention of the ballpoint pen to suggest a roll-on applicator, which was introduced in 1952. The use of aerosol to apply deodorant did not begin until the 1960s.

The original Mum brand has many competitors but is still going strong. Procter & Gamble spokesman Simon Prentice said the company sold about 850,000 units of Mum deodorant in New Zealand each year.

Historical records show attempts to create deodorants as far back as the ancient Sumerians.

Auckland University technology historian Dr Ruth Barton said deodorants had been used for centuries in different forms.

For instance, perfumes were commonly used to mask body odours.

"Deodorants and then antiperspirants to roll onto one's body are more recent. We [in the West] are more offended by body odours."

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 1:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ralph Vartabedian/Stephen Braun: New Orleans' Levees Suffered From Numerous Defects

Source: Los Angeles Times (1-17-06)

In the frantic days after Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers scrambled to plug a breach on the 17th Street levee, dropping massive sandbags from a fleet of helicopters.

But the engineers were baffled: The sandbags kept disappearing into the watery breach. The pit eventually swallowed 2,000 sandbags, each weighing between 3,000 and 20,000 pounds. It was an early sign that the hurricane had opened an extraordinarily deep hole in the foundation of the storm wall, pointing to a fundamental breakdown in the engineering of the city's levee system.

Investigators recently told The Times that the 17th Street levee failed because its engineers made a series of crucial mistakes, one of which was to base the levee design on the average strength of the soil rather than on the strength of its weakest layer. The errors may reflect a loss of expertise during the 1990s, when the corps sharply downsized its soil laboratories.

The faulty soil analysis is one of many defects or flaws in concept, design, construction and maintenance that left many of the levees in New Orleans especially vulnerable to Katrina. Environmental miscalculations, including the loss of natural protection from marshes, added to the problems.

The errors might have been offset had the corps required larger safety margins, and that raises questions about the corps' internal culture.

Although the levees' shortcomings became apparent shortly after the hurricane hit, experts are only now pinpointing the underlying causes of the collapses. What they find will determine who bears the political and legal responsibility for the flood and provide a technical basis for any future levee system to protect New Orleans from a monster storm.

The levee failures were among the most costly engineering errors in the United States, measured by lives lost, people displaced and property destroyed, said half a dozen historians and disaster experts.

Katrina flooded New Orleans with about 250 billion gallons of water and killed more than 1,000 people.

"I don't think there is anything comparable in recent American history," said retired engineering professor Edward Wenk Jr., a science advisor to three presidents and investigator of the Exxon Valdez accident.

[Editor's Note: This is a short excerpt from a much longer article. Please see the LA Times for more.]

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 1:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

John Kay: Global Trade Roots Planted In History, Geography

Source: Financial Times (London, England) (1-17-06)

The Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company was founded before legislation permitted the establishment of limited liability companies, and still operates today under the royal charter its self-made founders, Arthur Anderson and Brodie Willcox, obtained when they won the lucrative contract to ship the Royal Mail to Britain's eastern colonies.

The 20-year-old Queen Victoria could hardly have imagined that the business on which she bestowed these favours would one day be subject to rival bids from Dubai and Singapore, and that control of its activities might be transferred from Pall Mall - in the centre of London's club land - to the Peninsula and Orient itself. Another demonstration, it would seem, of the globalisation of world capital markets and the rise of Asia. Not quite. When P&O was founded, India and China enjoyed a much larger share of the world economy than they do today and the world capital market was in important respects more international than it is now.

If there are economic historians around a few hundred years from now, what they will find remarkable may not be the relative rise of China and India in the 21st century, but the relative decline of these countries in the 19th and 20th. Two hundred years ago, no one knew what gross domestic product was, far less how to measure it. But painstaking research by economic historians, notably Angus Maddison, gives us estimates. China and India then accounted for almost half of world production. That was why imperial power and foreign trade, and P&O itself, seemed so important.

Perhaps the most important single event in modern world history is that in the late 18th century economic growth took off in western Europe and not in south-east China, in spite of the apparent similarity of technological and economic development and natural resource availability in the two regions. But, over the next 200 years, that fact transformed not only world politics but determined its economic shape. China and India's share of world output would fall by half and their share of trade would be reduced even further. Western Europe and north America, with about 10 per cent of the world's population, now account for about 40 per cent of its production. Most world trade is no longer along the routes that P&O pioneered, but is the exchange of manufactured goods around the northern hemisphere.

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 1:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Heroic Scottish Explorer Died In Poverty Due To Shackleton

Source: The Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand) (1-17-06)

The family of Henry "Chippy" McNish, a Glasgow-born shipwright who made possible the epic open-boat voyage of explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, wants a posthumous award of the Polar Medal.

McNish -- who later settled in New Zealand -- helped save the lives of the expedition's 28 men, but Shackleton branded him a troublemaker and refused to recommend him for a Polar Medal, an accolade given to most members of the failed 1914-16 Imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition. Andrew Leachman, of the Antarctic Society of New Zealand, told London's Sunday Times newspaper: "The expedition is viewed as one of the greatest epics of survival. Shackleton even conceded they would not have lived but for McNish.

"By withholding the Polar Medal, Shackleton achieved the final shaming of McNish and displayed a vindictiveness that fell below his own mercurial standards of loyalty."

McNish died in New Zealand and was buried in a pauper's grave in Wellington. The plot at Karori cemetery remained unmarked till the Antarctic Society erected a headstone in 1959 -- spelling his name "McNeish". In 2004 the society spruced up the grave and raised $6000 for a statue of McNish's cat Mrs Chippy to go on it.

Shackleton ordered Mrs Chippy shot when the expedition had to abandon its ship, the Endurance, in pack ice.

Shortly before his death in 1930, McNish was visited in a Wellington old people's home by an Antarctic historian who later said: "He lay there repeating over and over again: `Shackleton killed my cat'."

Now the forgotten Scot of the Antarctic is the subject of a campaign by his Clydeside family to have the Polar Medal awarded.

* The petition website is http://www.petitiononline.com/Chippy14/petition.html .

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 1:36 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Nick Chordas: All About The Benjamin

Source: The Columbus Dispatch (1-17-06)

You have to hand it to Benjamin Franklin: How many 300-year-olds can say they helped found the United States and inspired a Diddy song?

B. Frank was an O.G. (Original Genius) long before his mug appeared on the $100 bill.

Every grade-school graduate knows that Franklin signed the Declaration of Independence, published Poor Richard's Almanack and flew a kite during a lightning storm.

But who knew that Franklin invented the armonica? Furthermore, what the heck is an armonica?

Here are some of the lesser-known aspects of Franklin's life:
...
Because you asked, the armonica is a glass musical instrument played with a wet finger -- the way one "plays" the rim of a wineglass.

Armonicas aren't around much anymore, because late-18th- and early-19th-century music fans thought Franklin's creation caused insanity and even death. Some blamed the armonica for the demise of Beethoven and Mozart, who both wrote compositions for it.

Illogically speaking, then, Franklin snuffed out two of the world's greatest musical talents. Nice going, genius.
...
Besides the armonica, many of Franklin's other creations are still around -- including bifocals, the lightning rod and political cartoons.

He is also credited with dreaming up the thing your grandma uses to grab out-of-reach stuff. During his days as a printer, Franklin fashioned a pole with pincers at the end so he could reach items on high shelves.

We assume that the artificial arm also allowed him to remain seated for long periods. It took four men to carry Franklin in his sedan chair into the Constitutional Convention.
...
Some zealous historians have speculated that Franklin sired upward of a dozen illegitimate Bens and Belindas. Others put the number even higher, but only son William has been confirmed.

All agree, however, that Franklin was a notorious flirt.

Thomas Jefferson said of his fellow Founding Father: "I have marked him particularly in the company of women where he loses all power over himself and becomes almost frenzied."

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 1:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jim Ritter: The First American: Benjamin Franklin

Source: Chicago Sun Times (1-17-06)

Today, America celebrates the 300th birthday of the Founding Father who called himself Benjamin Franklin, printer.

Ben Franklin was much more than that, of course. Take your choice: scientist, diplomat, inventor, civic booster, publishing magnate, politician, writer, celebrity, ladies' man and the most famous kite flier in history.

"He probably had more IQ points than most anyone else who has walked the American earth," said University of Pennsylvania historian Michael Zuckerman.

Philadelphia, his hometown, is planning a big party. There's a commemorative silver dollar, a commemorative beer (Poor Richard's Ale) and an endless stream of books.

A Ben Franklin traveling exhibit, "In Search of a Better World," will stop in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Houston, Denver, Atlanta and Paris. But other than a cake-and-coffee birthday party at Fox River Grove Memorial Library, not much is happening locally.

He was born in Boston on Jan. 17, 1706. His father was a candle- and soap-maker who married twice and had 17 children. Ben was the youngest of 10 sons. He learned to read at an early age but had just two years of schooling. Ben went to work at age 10, first for his dad, then for an older brother as an apprentice printer.

Franklin ran away to Philadelphia at age 17. He made a fortune as a printer and publisher, and he retired at age 42 to pursue his many other interests.
...
He was the American Renaissance man. "Leonardo da Vinci can't hold a candle to him in terms of the realms in which he operated," Zuckerman said.

Historians call Franklin the First American. He was a self-made man with middle-class values, an entrepreneurial spirit and a genius for founding quintessentially American organizations such as the volunteer fire department.

"He was us at our best," Zuckerman said.

[Editor's Note: For more, see the Chicago Sun Times.]

Posted on Tuesday, January 17, 2006 at 1:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Patricia Q. Wall: Writing a Children's Book About Slavery in New England

“I never knew there were slaves in New England.” That is the most common response among nearly 4000 teachers, parents and other readers to my book, Child Out of Place: A Story of New England.

Based on thorough research, CHILD… provides teachers and parents with a gentle story to help children understand, get discussions going about a painful era in U.S. history and its repercussions for today. In the story, readers are carried back to the early 19th century, into an old mansion in Portsmouth, NH, and into the troubled heart of ten-year-old Matty, servant and newly freed slave. It reveals the peculiar nature of slavery in this region and a black family’s struggle to endure and finally gain their freedom.

As the author, I am gratified that this small work of historical fiction is helping to open minds to a neglected chapter in the history of enslaved Africans in America. But I’m also most troubled. It’s discouraging to realize that for nearly half a century, scholars have been putting forth a wealth of excellent adult books revealing New England’s participation in that pernicious institution of slavery, yet it appears that most elementary school curricula, textbooks and story books continue to ignore it. Or, pass it off with the wrong headed idea that it was somehow benign and insignificant when compared to the South.

Since CHILD... made its debut at the Seacoast African American Cultural Center in Portsmouth, NH, I have visited with more than two thousand 4th – 6th graders in northern New England. Before discussing my book, I ask children to tell me what they already know about slavery in America. Always, they simply tell me about southern plantations and the Civil War and the “neat” stories they’ve read about the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman. Often, some youngster will assure me that his (or her) house must have been a part of that because “there’s this funny closet in our attic” (or cellar).

One fifth grade boy stood up and described his understanding of the topic by saying, “You see there were millions of slaves brought over from Africa to work on the cotton plantations down south. Then there was the Civil War and President Lincoln freed the slaves and then everything was fine after that.”

In the classroom, once I have read sections of the book to the children, their questions and comments take a different, more empathetic approach. They make personal connections to the characters and their suffering. They ask, “Why did white people do that”…”why didn’t the President stop that?”

A boy tells me, “I can feel what Matty feels.” Their eagerness to know more gives me hope. Of course I realize that one small work of historical fiction won’t make sweeping changes, but perhaps it will encourage children (and their teachers) to seek the real story.

This story came to me (a history enthusiast) by accident. As a long-term guide in the 1716 Warner House Museum in Portsmouth, NH, I planned to write about what I knew – the children of the white families who owned it. But, mid-way into the project, the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail by Valerie Cunningham and Mark Sammons was published and their exciting, ground-breaking work set me on an entirely new course – thank goodness.

And, the story of young Matty in the “Warren” house isn’t finished.

For me, it created an intense desire to know more about early African American history – a rich, complex history of human struggle that all our children deserve to know about. It seems, now that I’ve invented an early 19th century black family in one situation, they’ve decided I must tell more about their life beyond 1806. How I love the research, but oh, the writing can be painful.

Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Adrian Brune: Yale Project Laboring To Show Softer Side Of Jonathan Edwards

Source: Hartford Courant (1-10-06)

Those of us who think we know Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century fire and brimstone theologian, don't really know one of Connecticut's most famous sons. We really only know the side that brought his congregation to their knees with words like this: ``The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider ... abhors you, he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire.''

Yale Divinity School historian Kenneth P. Minkema wants people to see the warm, fuzzy side of Edwards, the side that wandered through fields and sat on the pristine banks of the Hudson; the side that pondered an ``appearance of divine glory, in almost everything.''

``I often used to sit and view the moon, for a long time; and so in the daytime, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky ... in the meantime, singing forth with a low voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer,'' he wrote in a letter to his son-in-law Aaron Burr, father to the famous 18th-century politician.

Minkema is betting that the modern world will like the other Edwards -- a lot. In fact, he's staking his career on it.

``People read `Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God' in high school and they never want to read anything by Edwards again,'' he says. ``But here was an incredibly luminous mind that needs to be discovered and re-discovered and re-discovered.''

To that end, Minkema and three more of Edwards' greatest admirers have already spent a good portion of their adult lives bringing the theologian/philosopher/``Renaissance man'' to the masses through print. Now, cloistered in a corner of the Yale Divinity School, using the power of the Internet, those same academics are laboring away to make Edwards -- and all 60,000 pages of his work -- available to the common man.

The Jonathan Edwards Project, though it is not without competition (a fan site jonathanedwards.com is a favorite among evangelical Christians), is the first of its kind -- a comprehensive, exhaustive effort to produce an online archive of all of Edwards' sermons, treatises, letters and musings to serve the needs of anyone who cares to know the man.

To date, no other university or institute has attempted to transcribe, computerize and then post online the complete works of any one historical figure -- not Benjamin Franklin, not George Washington, not even Abraham Lincoln.

Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 at 1:13 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Scott Burchill: Sharon's Eulogists Ignore The Blood On His Hands

Source: THE AUSTRALIAN (1-11-06)

Presentism -- overemphasising the significance of current events and denying historical perspectives -- reached epidemic proportions after September 11, 2001, as Western governments scrambled to deny that Islamists acted out of any sense of legitimate grievance.

According to Prime Minister John Howard, the West was targeted by extremists ''because of who we are, not because of what we have done''. There is no cause for self-examination because our enemies are driven by a ''detestation of Western values''.

Alternative explanations such as the CIA's ''blowback'' thesis, which argued that the US is reaping the unintended consequences of earlier interventions in the Middle East and Central Asia, were dismissed as condoning terrorism. There were no root causes of Islamist terror nor any need to consider the consequences of Washington's support for brutal and corrupt dictatorships in the Gulf, let alone its financial and military support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian land.

According to Howard: ''Convoluted argument[s] about the alleged dispossession or prolonged disputes in other parts of the world'' constituted ''obscene rationalisations that the apologists for terrorists have engaged in''. Thus, Palestinian terrorism could be condemned without mentioning its cause: the Israeli occupation.

If the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 can be reduced to a mere allegation by Australia's Prime Minister, it's no surprise that historical events are also being effaced from Ariel Sharon's political obituaries.

Current orthodoxy paints Sharon as a ''warrior statesman'' who courageously returned the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians and was preparing to make further ''painful and generous concessions'' on the West Bank before being cut down by a stroke. Dubbed ''a man of peace'' by President George W. Bush, it is said Sharon moved from the hard Right to the political centre, creating a new political party that, after winning elections scheduled for March, would oversee a peace settlement that delivered a Palestinian state.

None of this is even remotely true.

A cursory examination reveals Sharon to be more an unindicted war criminal than a peacemaker. His bloody record has been extensively documented by British journalist David Hirst, Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, and several others. However, rather than being placed in the dock at the International Criminal Court, Sharon is now receiving effusive praise from Western elites for his commitment to peace.

Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 at 12:44 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Andrew Busch: The Goldwater Myth ... He didn't become a libertarian until his twilight years

Source: WSJ (1-11-06)

[Mr. Busch is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author most recently of "Reagan's Victory: The Presidential Election of 1980 and the Rise of the Right" (University Press of Kansas). This article appears in the Winter issue of the Claremont Review of Books.]

"During the campaign of 1964, [he] was our incorruptible standard-bearer," recalled William F. Buckley Jr. in his 1998 obituary of Barry Goldwater, the career senator from Arizona, 34 years after the watershed. Goldwater, of course, was defeated resoundingly on Election Day, winning only six states. "It was the judgment of the establishment that Goldwater's critique of American liberalism had been given its final exposure on the national political scene," Buckley continued. "But then of course 16 years later the world was made to stand on its head when Ronald Reagan was swept into office on a platform indistinguishable from what Barry had been preaching."

Strange, then, that these days many commentators believe Goldwater's conservatism was a different species from Reagan's and, especially, from George W. Bush's. Though admittedly an economic conservative, Goldwater has become an icon of opposition to social conservatism. When the 2004 Republican national convention showcased social liberals like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rudy Giuliani, George F. Will proclaimed, "[Goldwater's] kind of conservatism made a comeback." By "Goldwater conservatism" Mr. Will meant "muscular foreign policy backing unapologetic nationalism; economic policies of low taxation and light regulation; a libertarian inclination regarding cultural questions."

Will was merely restating the consensus view. Darcy Olsen, president of the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute, argued on the fifth anniversary of Goldwater's death that "Goldwater conservative" had "a different meaning than just saying, 'I am a Republican,' because when you say 'I am a Republican,' people assume that you're involved in the Moral Majority. It's its own brand . . . very libertarian." Sen. John McCain said that Goldwater "disliked the religious right, because he felt they were intolerant, because Barry was not only conservative, but he was also to a degree libertarian."

What does the notion that Goldwater was a libertarian mean? First, it suggests that the cultural right has abandoned true conservatism. It implies that presidents like Reagan and Bush, who have relied heavily on socially conservative voters, deviate from Goldwater's rugged and pure frontier conservatism. And then there is the implication, appearing frequently in the mainstream media, that Republicans must move back in Goldwater's direction if they are to reclaim their intellectual credibility.

But this interpretation happens to be wrong: it overlooks the role of social issues in the origins of the conservative movement. Mr. Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" (1951) complained not only about economic collectivism but also about rampant agnosticism and atheism among Yale's faculty. Ever since, the conservative movement has been as concerned with religious and moral issues as with economic and libertarian ones. Goldwater's 1964 campaign actually shaped the social conservatism of the modern Republican Party in at least three crucial respects: his view of human nature and the American republic, his concern over the moral deterioration of American society, and his stand on several key policy questions....

Posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2006 at 10:59 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Max Boot: Ariel Sharon's unending legacy

Source: LAT (1-11-06)

WHEN ARIEL Sharon became Israel's prime minister in 2001, much of the world lamented that a fatal blow had been dealt to the Mideast peace process. He was widely denounced in European and Muslim states as a butcher and a war criminal whose goal was ethnic cleansing or possibly mass murder of the Palestinians.

Now that Sharon is incapacitated, many of the same voices are mourning him — irony of ironies — as a peacemaker whose loss would make a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict harder to achieve. The current angst over Sharon's exit from power is likely to prove as misbegotten as the earlier angst over his ascension.

Like other great leaders, "Arik" Sharon altered reality so that the unthinkable became the inevitable. His continuing influence may be likened to that of Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. Even after Roosevelt's death, World War II was won, a liberal postwar order was established and the New Deal remained intact. Even after Reagan's retirement, the era of big government was over, the economy stayed strong and the "evil empire" was headed for the ash heap of history.

The legacies of these presidents were ratified not only by their designated heirs (Harry Truman, George H.W. Bush) but, even more important, by presidents of the opposing party (Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton). So too, in all likelihood, will Sharon's successor — whether it is Kadima's Ehud Olmert, Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu or, less likely, Labor's Amir Peretz — carry on his work.

Sharon's primary achievement was to bulldoze the fantasies of left and right. The Israeli left for years had dreamed of reaching an accord to live in peace with the Palestinians. Yasser Arafat's cynical resort to violence in 2000 — even though he was offered sovereignty over almost the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip — showed that no meaningful negotiations were possible when so many Palestinians had not truly accepted the legitimacy of a Jewish state. The right, for its part, had dreamed of settling Jews in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to make those areas forever part of Greater Israel. But the Palestinians' higher birth rate meant that before long they would become the majority, forcing Israel to jettison either its Jewish identity or its democracy.

With both negotiations and settlements exposed as impossible strategies, Sharon found a successful third way: separation. This involved a spectacular about-face from policies he had advocated throughout his career. Having long championed settlers, he now determined to pull them out of the Gaza Strip. And having opposed building a barrier along the West Bank, he now determined to do just that.

These defensive measures were coupled with a vigorous offense that included armed incursions to clean out terrorist strongholds and targeted killings to eliminate terrorist leaders. Helped by President Bush's unwavering support, his policy paid off with a 90% decline in attacks within Israel.

Perhaps no one other than Sharon could have pulled off this feat — particularly the removal of the settlers — without causing massive upheaval. But Sharon's lifelong history of fighting for the Jewish state reassured most Israelis that he would not do anything to endanger their security. The taunts of the ultra-right that he was a sellout rang hollow.

Now his work is all but done. The last major step that remains is the removal of the outlying West Bank settlements. This will not happen as quickly or as easily without Sharon's leadership, but it will still happen. That's the logic of the West Bank separation barrier, which closely tracks the cease-fire line (the Green Line) established at the end of Israel's War of Independence in 1949. Less than 10% of the West Bank will remain on the Israeli side of the barrier. The rest will wind up as part of a Palestinian state, even if the next election is won by an opponent of unilateral concessions like Netanyahu. (Recall how Netanyahu opposed the Oslo process as opposition leader but did not abandon it as prime minister from 1996-1999.)

The real challenge for Sharon's successor will be dealing not with the Palestinians but with the Iranians. The European negotiations with Tehran are exposing the futility of pursuing yet another Mideast peace process. Iran is proceeding full speed ahead with plans to build an atomic bomb even as its president vows that "Israel must be wiped off the map." With Jews once again facing the threat of genocide, the next prime minister will have to decide how to stop Iran's nuclear program before it's too late.

Posted on Wednesday, January 11, 2006 at 9:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Harvey J. Kaye: Tom Paine's Common Sense ... An Anniversary Progressives Should Remember

Source: TomPaine.com (1-10-06)

[Harvey J. Kaye is professor of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (Hill and Wang, 2005).]

The 230th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense—the brilliant little pamphlet whose arguments literally turned the world upside down— invites reflection both on the state of the nation to which it gave birth and on the state of the left to which it gave rise and whose many generations carried on the fight to realize the democratic vision rendered in its pages.  Recalling Paine’s work should serve, as well, to remind us of not only what we stand in opposition to, but also what we stand in opposition for.  And ultimately we might ask, “What would Tom Paine do?”

Born in 1737, the son of an English Quaker artisan and an Anglican mother, Paine had a career before coming to Philadelphia in 1774 that included corsetmaking, privateering, tax collecting, preaching, teaching, labor campaigning and shopkeeping, punctuated by bouts of poverty, the loss of two wives, business bankruptcy and dismissal from government service (twice!).  And yet as much as he came to despise kingly rule, aristocratic privilege and religious establishments for their oppression, exploitation and corruption, Paine did not pick up his pen to assail Crown, Constitution and Empire out of anger alone.

It was his love for America that turned Paine into a radical writer. Struck by the country’s prospects and possibilities, and moved by the spirit and determination of its people to resist British authority, Paine devoted himself to the American cause.  And through Common Sense and his later Crisis Papers , he emboldened his new compatriots to turn their rebellion into a revolutionary war, defined the new nation in a democratically expansive and progressive fashion, and articulated an American identity charged with exceptional purpose and promise.

Sincerely believing that, “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth,” Paine translated American anxieties and aspirations into a powerful cry for independence.  But it was never simply a matter of separating from Britain.

Paine’s own experience—reinforced by what he witnessed in America— convinced him that working people, not just the highborn and propertied, had the capacity both to comprehend the world and to govern it.  And by addressing his arguments not merely to the governing elites, but all the more to those who traditionally were excluded from political debate and deliberation, he transformed the very idea of politics and the political nation.

Utterly rejecting the old political and social order and pressing for national unity, Paine called for an American constitution—empowered by the people— that would create a democratic government and guarantee freedom to all, and above all else freedom of conscience and worship (which, he clearly stated, required separating church and state).  And in that spirit he projected an Independence Day filled with splendid democratic ritual:

[L]et a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the Word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING.  But lest any ill should afterwards arise, let the crown at the conclusion of the ceremony be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is.

Moreover, appreciating America’s ethnic diversity, Paine foresaw the United States welcoming to its shores freedom-loving folk from all nations: 

 O! ye that love mankind!  Ye that dare oppose, not only tyranny, but the tyrant, stand forth!  Every spot of the world is overrun with oppression.  Freedom hath been hunted round the globe.  Asia and Africa have long expelled her.  Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart.  O! receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

Declaring that, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” Paine envisioned the United States serving not only as a refuge, but also as a model, and in time a champion, of freedom and republican democracy.  And possessed of tremendous confidence in his fellow citizens to be, he proclaimed that, “We have it in our power to begin the world again.”

To the chagrin of conservatives, and against their best efforts to suppress Paine’s memory, American progressives—men and women, native-born and immigrant— for two hundred years thereafter were to draw ideas, inspiration and encouragement from Paine’s life and labors as they themselves sought to extend and deepen freedom, equality and democracy.

Heartened and animated by Paine, we pressed for the rights of workers; insisted upon freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state; demanded the abolition of slavery; campaigned for the equality of women; confronted the power of property and wealth; opposed the tyrannies of fascism and communism; fought a second American Revolution for racial justice and equality; and challenged our own government’s authorities and policies, domestic and foreign.  Though we regularly suffered defeats and committed mistakes, we also achieved great victories and, more often than not, transformed the nation and the world for the better.

Evidently, struggles continue. Yet something has changed. Somewhere along the way, we lost the political courage and conviction that once motivated our efforts. Arguably, we lost touch with Paine.

Clearly our own “times that try men’s souls” differ profoundly from those Paine confronted.  Yet we, too, find ourselves subject to a regime that ignores the needs of working people, promotes aristocratic power and wealth, pursues imperial policies, makes religion a test for public office and places itself above the law. 

Far more than simply reciting Paine’s lines and acknowledging their author, the revitalization of progressive politics demands that we redeem Paine’s radical spirit.  We must reaffirm our faith in America’s great purpose and promise, recover our belief in the prospects and possibilities of democratic change and regain our confidence in our fellow citizens.  For only then, Paine would surely say, might we “have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Posted on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 at 9:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mustafa Akyol: Remembering Abdul Hamid II, a pro-American caliph

Source: Weekly Standard (12-26-06)

[Mustafa Akyol is a writer based in Istanbul.]

AL QAEDA'S STATED GOAL--to reestablish the caliphate, the political leadership of worldwide Islam embodied first in the successors of the Prophet Muhammad and most recently in the four-century rule of the Ottoman dynasty--is pure, ahistorical fantasy. One way to appreciate this is to revisit the 33-year reign of the most remarkable modern caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909). An ally neither of bigoted Islamists nor of the radical secularists who ultimately deposed him, Abdul Hamid was an Islamic modernizer--and, interestingly, a friend of the United States.

Abdul Hamid emphasized the role of Islam inside the Ottoman Empire, and he emerged as the protector of Muslims around the world, from India to sub-Saharan Africa. He pressed for a new railway to the holy places of Mecca and Medina and sent emissaries to distant countries preaching Islam. Because of these policies, once called "pan-Islamism," he is still revered by conservative Muslims.

His principal political opponents were the Young Turks, inspired by the fashionable European and especially French ideas of the time. They portrayed the caliph as a despot, and the description stuck. While it is true that Abdul Hamid suspended the constitution of 1876 for decades, he did so not out of any contempt for democracy, but out of justified fear of the Young Turks' autocratic ambitions. Although they espoused the rhetoric of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, they had strong authoritarian tendencies. As Princeton historian Sukru Hanioglu explains, their worldview was based on "biological materialism, positivism, Social Darwinism and Gustave Le Bon's elitism," all of which led them to regard egalitarianism as "unscientific."

Another Princeton scholar, the dean of Middle Eastern history, Bernard Lewis, writes that "Abdul Hamid was far from being the blind, uncompromising, complete reactionary of the historical legend; on the contrary, he was a willing and active modernizer." In areas such as education, commerce, finance, diplomacy, central government administration, journalism, translation, and even theater, he accomplished significant reforms. He founded the first archaeology museum, public library, faculty of medicine, academy of fine arts, and schools of finance and agriculture. He endowed the empire with the telegraph, railroads, and factories, and during his reign, Constantinople flourished as a world capital.

Unlike subsequent modernizers, however, Abdul Hamid developed an Islamicly legitimate way forward. Personally observant, he practiced Sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam. Yet he also had Western tastes; he loved playing the piano, and arranged piano lessons for his daughter. He enjoyed opera, too, and had the famous Belgian soprano Blanche Arral perform for him.

With some notable exceptions--such as the harsh repression of Armenian insurgents by irregular forces authorized by the sultan in 1895-6--Abdul Hamid was on good terms with his non-Muslim subjects, of whom a record number entered government service. Ahmet Midhat, who has been called a sort of Turkish Edmund Burke, was Abdul Hamid's favorite intellectual. Midhat argued that Islam respects Christianity and Judaism, emphasizing how the empire welcomed the Jews expelled from Catholic Spain in 1492. And he defended the emancipation and education of women.

Abdul Hamid's attempt to marry Islam and modernity was cut short by the Young Turks in 1909. Although secular in outlook, they proved willing to exploit Islamic concepts for political ends. Abdul Hamid never waged a jihad; the Young Turks, on the advice of their new allies, the Germans, launched a global jihad in 1915 against Britain and its allies. Alas, the dethroned and interned caliph had warned them that they should align the empire with Britain, which controlled the seas and so would inevitably triumph. Britain did triumph, and this brought the Ottoman Empire to an end.

Abdul Hamid's relationship with the United States further defies the Islamists' notions about the caliphate.

In contrast with the aggressively secularist Westernizers who believed that the only hope for progress was to get rid of religion entirely, Abdul Hamid saw that the West was not monolithic. In particular, as Kemal Karpat, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, explains, he studied the American separation of church and state, which he regarded as consistent with Islamic principles. (The Ottoman Empire was not a theocracy in the sense of being governed by clerics; indeed, it developed a de facto separation between the religious and temporal authorities.)

At the beginning of his reign, Abdul Hamid observed the centennial of American independence by sending a large number of Ottoman books to be exhibited at Philadelphia and subsequently donated to New York University. Later, he was the first foreign head of state to receive an invitation to the Columbian Exposition of 1893, held in Chicago, to honor the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. Although he did not personally attend, a total of one thousand people from Jerusalem alone visited the exposition. The World Parliament of Religions held its inaugural meeting in Chicago at the same time, and the sultan's representatives exhibited a large number of Ottoman wares and built a miniature mosque.

Because Abdul Hamid believed that American prosperity had resulted partly from a good accounting of the population and efficient management of national resources, he asked Samuel Sullivan Cox, the American ambassador in Constantinople and the organizer of the first modern U.S. census, to introduce the Turks to the study of statistics, one of the first of the exact sciences to be established in the Ottoman Empire.

Beyond such cultural exchanges, actual Ottoman-American cooperation in foreign policy took place in the face of the Muslim insurgency in the U.S.-occupied Philippines. The American ambassador to Turkey Oscar S. Straus (a Jewish diplomat, incidentally, who was welcomed by the Abdul Hamid regime at a time when his colleague, A.M. Keiley, was declared persona non grata by the Austro-Hungarian authorities simply for "being of Jewish parenthood") received a letter from Secretary of State John Hay in the spring of 1899. Secretary Hay wondered whether "the Sultan under the circumstances might be prevailed upon to instruct the Mohammedans of the Philippines, who had always resisted Spain, to come willingly under our control." Straus then paid a visit to the sultan and showed him Article 21 of a treaty between Tripoli and the United States, which read as follows:

As the government of the United States of America . . . has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmans; and as the said states never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the partners that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony between the two countries.

Pleased with the article, Abdul Hamid stated, in regard to the Philippines, that the "Mohammedans in question recognized him as Caliph of the Moslems and he felt sure they would follow his advice."

Two Sulu chiefs were in Mecca at the time, and they were informed that the caliph and the American ambassador had reached a definite understanding that the Muslims of the Philippines "would not be disturbed in the practice of their religion if they would promptly place themselves under the control of the American army." Later, Ambassador Straus wrote, the "Sulu Mohammedans . . . refused to join the insurrectionists and had placed themselves under the control of our army, thereby recognizing American sovereignty."

This account is supported by an article written by Lt. Col. John P. Finley (who had been the American governor of Zamboanga Province in the Philippines for ten years) and published in the April 1915 issue of the Journal of Race Development. Finley wrote:

At the beginning of the war with Spain the United States Government was not aware of the existence of any Mohammedans in the Philippines. When this fact was discovered and communicated to our ambassador in Turkey, Oscar S. Straus, of New York, he at once saw the possibilities which lay before us of a holy war. . . . [H]e sought and gained an audience with the Sultan, Abdul Hamid, and requested him as Caliph of the Moslem religion to act in behalf of the followers of Islam in the Philippines. . . . The Sultan as Caliph caused a message to be sent to the Mohammedans of the Philippine Islands forbidding them to enter into any hostilities against the Americans, inasmuch as no interference with their religion would be allowed under American rule.

Later, President McKinley sent a personal letter of gratitude to Ambassador Straus for his excellent work, declaring that it had saved the United States "at least twenty-thousand troops in the field." All thanks to the caliph, Abdul Hamid II.

Such acts of statesmanship make painfully obvious that if there are any religious leaders in the Muslim world today who walk in the footsteps of the great caliph, they are not the terrorist leaders of al Qaeda, but rather the peacemakers such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, who have been trying to defuse the violence in Iraq by cooperating with coalition forces and calming fellow Muslims. When terrorists like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his big brother Osama bin Laden portray themselves as warriors for the caliphate, they totally misrepresent the historical meaning and function of this Islamic institution. What they do is "hijack" the caliphate--to borrow a term from President Bush--as much as the faith it represents.

The caliphate was abolished in March 1924 by that supreme secularizer Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the Young Turk hero of World War I and the Turkish war of independence. Despite strong opposition in the Turkish National Parliament, Ataturk dethroned and expelled the last caliph, Abdulmecid Efendi, a cousin of Abdul Hamid, and outlawed all Islamic institutions including the Sufi orders. The 1,300-year-old leadership of Islam was destroyed overnight.

Today many Turks see this act as a great leap forward in Turkey's modernization. Yet it also had terrible side effects. The religious Kurds, who had been loyal to the Ottoman state for centuries, mainly out of Islamic brotherhood, were shaken. In 1925, a group of them revolted against secular Turkey with the aim of reestablishing the caliphate. They were crushed, and this trauma was the source of Turkey's never-ending Kurdish question.

Indeed, the excesses of the Kemalist revolution poisoned the very notion of modernization for many devout Muslims all over the world. Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran, inspired by Kemal, became an even more enthusiastic secularizer and tried to de-Islamicize his society by force--ordering police, for example, to rip the veils off women in the streets. The response, in the long run, would be Ayatollah Khomeini.

And in the Sunni Arab world, the end of the caliphate left a vacuum of authority that was filled by myriad radical, revolutionary, or fundamentalist movements. The worst was Wahhabism, the product of a revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the 18th century that the caliphs suppressed. In the post-caliphate disorder, Wahhabism found fertile ground for spreading its antimodern and inhumane distortion of Islam.

One antidote to that violent heresy is to recover the spirit of Islamic modernity personified by the piano-playing Sufi, Abdul Hamid II. There really is a third way between the spurning of all faith and militant Islamism, and that is what the Islamic world needs today.

Posted on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 at 7:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt: Did an author who claimed to unmask the Klan make-up much of his story?

Source: NYT (1-8-06)

[Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything." Some of the documentary evidence discussed in this column is at www.freakonomics.com.]

Our book "Freakonomics" includes a chapter titled "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" This chapter was our effort to bring to life the economic concept known as information asymmetry, a state wherein one party to a transaction has better information than another party. It is probably obvious that real-estate agents typically have better information than their clients. The Klan story was perhaps less obvious. We argued that the Klan's secrecy - its rituals, made-up language, passwords and so on - formed an information asymmetry that furthered its aim of terrorizing blacks and others.

But the Klan was not the hero of our story. The hero was a man named Stetson Kennedy, a white Floridian from an old-line family who from an early age sought to assail racial and social injustices. Out of all of his crusades - for unionism, voting rights and numberless other causes - Kennedy is best known for taking on the Klan in the 1940's. In his book "The Klan Unmasked" (originally published in 1954 as "I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan"), Kennedy describes how he adopted a false identity to infiltrate the Klan's main chapter in Atlanta, was chosen to serve as a "klavalier" (a Klan strong-arm man) and repeatedly found himself at the center of astonishing events, all the while courting great personal risk.

What did Kennedy do with all the secret Klan information he gathered? He disseminated it like mad: to state prosecutors, to human rights groups and even to broadcasters like Drew Pearson and the producers of the "Superman" radio show, who publicly aired the Klan's heretofore hidden workings. Kennedy took an information asymmetry and dumped it on its head. And in doing so, we wrote, he played a significant role in quashing the renaissance of the Klan in postwar America.

Kennedy has been duly celebrated for his activism: his friend Woody Guthrie once wrote a song about him, and a Stetson Kennedy Day was recently declared in St. John's County, Fla., where Kennedy, 89, still lives. That is where we interviewed him nearly two years ago; our account of his amazing true story was based on those interviews, "The Klan Unmasked" and a small mountain of history books and newspaper articles.

But is Kennedy's story as true as it is amazing?

That was the disturbing question that began to haunt another Florida author, Ben Green, who in 1992 began writing a book about Harry T. Moore, a black civil rights advocate who was murdered in 1951. For a time, Stetson Kennedy was a collaborator on the book. Although Green was only tangentially interested in Kennedy's Klan infiltration - it wasn't central to the Moore story - he eventually checked out Kennedy's voluminous archives, held in libraries in New York and Atlanta.

These papers charted the extraordinarily colorful life of a man who had been, among other things, a poet, a folklorist, a muckraking journalist and a union activist. But Green was dismayed to find that the story told in Kennedy's own papers seemed to be quite different from what Kennedy wrote in "The Klan Unmasked."...

Perhaps Kennedy's long life of fighting the good fight are all that matter. Perhaps, to borrow Peggy Bulger's phraseology, a goal of "cultural advocacy" calls for the use of "applied folklore" rather than the sort of forthrightness that should be more typical of history or journalism. One thing that does remain true is that Kennedy was certainly a master of information asymmetry. Until, that is, the data caught up with him.



Posted on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 at 6:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Richard Powers: Mozart's Skull ... Should We Care If We've Identified It?

Source: NYT (1-8-06)

[Richard Powers is the author, most recently, of the novel "The Time of Our Singing."]

MOZART'S skull may or may not have been rediscovered, and you probably didn't even know it was missing.

Today, live on Austrian state television, scientists from the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck will declare definitively whether the skull held by the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg in fact belonged to the man whom many consider the most sublime composer who ever lived. In what reads like a pilot for a new spinoff - "CSI: Tyrol" - forensic pathologists, employing the highest of high biotech, compared genetic material scraped from the mystery Schädel with DNA gathered from the thigh bones of Mozart's grandmother and niece.

The results, determined last year and "100 percent verified" by a United States Army laboratory, have been held secret for the broadcast of the documentary "Mozart: The Search for Evidence" on this first weekend in the 250th year of Mozart's birth. After a quarter of a millennium, the bones of a man pitched into a common grave are suddenly world news.

Doctors, chemists and forensic pathologists have been prodding at the skull since it was acquired by the Mozarteum more than a century ago, hoping to shed light on the composer's mysterious last illness and death. The skull has come to embody the flurry of myths that swirl around this most inexplicable of humans. In every decade, researchers have vied for the last word about the man's death: rheumatic fever, Henoch-Schönlein syndrome, manic depression, infectious disease aggravated by bad medical treatment, a hematoma caused by a fall or blow to the head or even (the perennial popular favorite) murder.

These investigators have probed the skull as if its evidence might render Mozart's mind-boggling musical ability more understandable and thus less disturbing. That the skull exists separately from the skeleton at all is testimony to the 19th-century cutting-edge science of phrenology, and the habit among budding phrenologists of going about collecting the heads of geniuses.

This story follows another of a month ago, when researchers at the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory announced "solid evidence" that Beethoven suffered from lead poisoning. Fragments of Beethoven's skull (confirmed, of course, by mitochondrial DNA comparison with Beethoven's hair) were scanned by X-rays from the lab's Advanced Photon Source, which, according to a press release, "provides the most brilliant X-rays in the Western Hemisphere." (A test of such importance is clearly not to be outsourced.)

The test revealed large samples of lead concentration in Beethoven's bone sample, relative to a control. The Argonne team hinted tantalizingly that the accumulation of lead might account for the change in Beethoven's personality and music from his early 20's onward. Jay Leno's take: "Hopefully, the Beethoven family now finally has some closure."

Diagnosing art's unsolved mysteries with state-of-the-art medical knowledge is irresistible....

[But w]hat can the bones know that the notes don't? Forget the forensics and face the music. The mysteries hidden in Mozart's skull are everywhere for the hearing.

Posted on Tuesday, January 10, 2006 at 6:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jonathan Glancey: Save Britian's Heritage Celebrates 30 Years Of Historic Building Preservation

Source: The Guardian (London) (1-9-06)

Forlorn Palladian country houses. Faded mechanics' institutes. Unitarian churches and Methodist chapels long abandoned by the non-conforming industrial faithful in the once sooty suburbs of northern towns . . . these are just the sort of abandoned buildings that Save Britain's Heritage was set up to rescue 30 years ago, during what had been designated European Architectural Heritage Year.

Britain's contribution to that event was, in the first three months of 1975 alone, 334 applications to demolish listed buildings. The rate at which these were disappearing was astonishing. It was as if the nation, for all its contemporary dismissal of modern architecture, was in a hurry to rid itself of at least two centuries of distinguished buildings as it ploughed with spectacular incompetence through the economic mire of the "decade that design forgot".

The heroes of the mid-1970s, in the world of architectural conservation, were Marcus Binney, then editor of Country Life, and first and future president of Save, and John Harris, curator of the Royal Institute of British Architects' Drawing Collection. The conservation group they founded with historians, authors, curators, journalists and architects sprang from an exhibition curated for Roy Strong by Binney and Harris at the V&A in 1974. This was The Destruction of the Country House, which drew an unexpectedly large and sympathetic audience. Well before Charles Sturridge's lavish TV series Brideshead Revisited, which brought country house style back into favour in the economically buoyant 1980s, the V&A exhibition made people take notice of the wilful architectural blitz raging the length of Britain.

Binney and Harris showed haunting pictures of 1,116 country houses demolished over the past century, a figure later revised to more than 1,600. This might have been cause for celebration to many of the last generation of working-class Labour politicians and old school trade unionists for whom country houses were anathema, yet what the founders of Save were showing at the V&A was only the tip of an iceberg of much-liked, potentially re-usable and even glorious British architecture. This included handsome Regency working-class housing and magnificent railway stations designed for everyone, such as Glasgow St Enoch's, demolished in that destructive European Architectural Heritage Year 30 years ago.

Thanks to Save's know-how, the press swung behind the conservation movement, as did public opinion. Today, with so many fine buildings saved and thriving with new uses, you might think Save would rest on its laurels. You would be wrong.

In the back of a lively new book, Save Britain's Heritage 1975-2005: Thirty Years of Campaigning, are pictures of impressive buildings under threat. These include: the Collier Street Baths, Salford, one of the earliest surviving municipal bathhouses in Britain; Gwrych Castle, north Wales, an immense and sadly roofless folly designed by the entertainingly named Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh for himself from 1819; and Kinmel Hall, Derbyshire, designed for the copper-rich Hughes family by WE Nesfield in the 1870s - an evangelical conference centre until it was abandoned after a fire, this country house is now empty.

Posted on Monday, January 9, 2006 at 9:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Brent Staples: When Democracy Died in Wilmington, N.C.

Source: NYT (1-8-06)

The United States abolished the practice of owning and selling human beings when the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865. But the commercial component of slavery was in some ways the easiest to dispense with. The systems of black powerlessness and white supremacy that supported the enterprise proved to be far more pernicious. They persisted for another 100 years in the Deep South, enforced by lynching, disenfranchisement and state-sanctioned racial terror.

By the rise of the civil rights movement, many black Southerners had been so thoroughly conditioned to be subservient that they dared not look white people in the eye, much less seek the right to vote. This posture was understandable in the Deep South, where racial violence had been a kind of blood sport. But it seemed out of place in states like North Carolina, which was not as closely associated with hard-core brutality as were states like Mississippi and Alabama.

This rosy version of Carolina history turns out to have its bloody side. A draft of a voluminous report commissioned by the North Carolina legislature has recently outlined a grotesquely violent and stridently racist version of state history that rivals anything ever seen in the most troubled parts of the Deep South. The report, by the Wilmington Race Riot Commission, has thrown a klieg light onto a coup and riot that were staged in Wilmington, N.C., in 1898 - and that still have an evident impact on the political landscape of the state.

The uprising was engineered by white supremacists who unseated a government that had been elected by an alliance that included black citizens and white progressives. Scores of black citizens were killed during the uprising - no one yet knows how many - and prominent blacks and whites were banished from the city under threat of death. White supremacists hijacked the state government, stripped black citizens of the right to vote and brought black political participation to a close. ...

The riot commission is circulating a draft version of its report (which has also been posted on the Web at www.ah.dcr.state.nc.us), and hopes to find descendants of blacks and whites who fled Wilmington for places like Washington and New York. The draft report has already begun to pull back the covers on a brutal but little-known episode in Southern history. If the commission's progress so far is any measure of things to come, the final report will make an even more impressive contribution to public understanding of this period.



Posted on Sunday, January 8, 2006 at 11:32 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Danny Schechter: Ariel Sharon: The Collision of Memory, Myth and Media

Source: Mediachannel.org (1-8-06)

[News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. His latest books are "The Death of Media" and "When News Lies." See newsdissector.org/store.htm for more information.]

Ariel Sharon has been a warrior all his life so his post-surgical fight for life is nothing new. Reports that he had died were quickly supplanted by news from the operating room that the tank-like former tank commander turned Israeli Prime Minister was hanging on like some modern day Sampson although still gravely ill with millions praying for his recovery.

Few contemporary figures inspire the kind of debate, hate and adoration that he attracts.
His life has been wrapped in media mythmaking on all sides.

This is a challenge to the news world that always has to navigate through the mine fields of misinformation, myth and memory. Say something negative, and you can be labeled insensitive to a dying man or, worse, a hater, even an anti-semite. Say something positive, and you can be accused of being blind to what many say are war crimes, some of which he admitted in moments of macho bravado and unexpected candor.

In the White House and among Sharon's many supporters, including today's TV cheerleaders-he is viewed as pro-peace moderate who outgrew his reputation as "the Butcher of Beirut" for his role in l982 in the slaughter of Palestinians in Beirut, crimes acknowledged by Israeli investigators on the Kahan Commission who held him "personally responsible."

SHARON AS SURVIVOR

He is a survivor but not in the Holocaust sense. He has come back from many crises and attacks for everything from persistent excessive brutality to corruption in his family and political campaigns. "As a soldier and a statesman, he was loved and hated, promoted and demoted," waxes Yoel Marcus nostalgically in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. "One day he was 'king of Israel' and the next he was 'a danger to the state.' The man who was deemed unfit to be defense minister went on to become the 'father of the nation.'"

But like the character Avner, the Israeli hit man pictured in Steven Spielberg's Munich, he was more complicated as is the situation in Israel which is so often pictured in our media only as a monolithic nation with a government that represents all of its people and acts on its behalf.

Many in other parts of the world see the United States that same way as if President Bush fully represents our deeply divided nation even as public opinion turns against the war and his policies.

There are many Americas just as there is more than one Israel but our media reduces conflicts there, Bush-like, into a black and white, good guys vs bad guys paradigm, as in 'you are either with the terrorists or us.' The TV networks usually only report on the personalities who hold political power paying little attention to who and what they really represent. In Sharon's case, he has been more consistent in his agenda over the years than not.

The media focus on the "Great Men" (and occasionally "Great Women") of politics leads to less reporting on institutions and interests: civil society and even corporate power gets ignored. In the Middle East, that means only rare attention paid to Israeli peace movements and joint Israeli-Palestinian peace projects. A truth that is rarely explained is that Israel, and for that matter Palestinian politics, are fragmented into competing factions and ideological postures. There are more than two sides on both sides.

WHAT IS HIS LEGACY?

So how should Sharon be regarded? As a warlord or a statesman? As a fanatic or visionary leader? Or should we just be silent about his life now that it is at risk?

To listen to Pat Robertson and many on the far right, Sharon sold out his own holy cause. In his view, God struck him down for giving back Gaza, a territory illegally occupied and often terrorized by the Israeli military for decades.

My former colleague, Jeannette Friedman, a fervent supporter of Israel who disliked Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza is more generous, writing: "His life and the history-and the land-of Israel are intertwined, each having a lasting effect on the other. No matter what side of the fence you are on-Labor or Likud, Peace Now or a member of a religious party, Ariel "Arik" Sharon's dedication and love for Israel is unquestioned."

That may be true from a nationalistic perspective, but that is certainly not the way the Arab world and many in Europe -- sees it - and not in small part because of the apartheid-like fence Sharon insisted on building to separate Israel and Palestinians. Why are there constant references by "experts" and pundits to a "peace process" that has, in truth, been stalled if not moving in reverse?

Critical perspectives on Sharon are mostly absent in mainstream media discourse except in the writings of veteran British journalist Robert Fisk who covered the Middle East for a quarter of a century.

He is not persuaded that Sharon ever changed his real colors or his attitude. In his massive new book, The Great War For Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East, Fisk writes:

"Š it is as a war criminal that Sharon will be known forever in the Arab world, through much of the Western world, in fact - save, of course, for the craven men in the White House and the State Department and the Blair Cabinet - as well as many leftist Israelis. Sabra and Chatila was a crime against humanity. Its dead counted more than half the fatalities of the World Trade Center attacks of 2001Š

"Ever since he was elected in 2001 - and especially since his withdrawal of settlements from the rubbish tip of Gaza last year, a step which would, according to his spokesman, turn any plans for a Palestinian state in the West Bank into "formaldehyde" - his supporters have tried to turn Sharon into a pragmatist, another Charles de Gaulle. His new party was supposed to be proof of this. But in reality, Sharon had more in common with the putchist generals of Algeria."

Is this view too harsh? Should old memories be forgotten as in the language of the New Year's 'let bygones be bygones?' Must we just erase the crimes of the past in our reporting as we rev up the tributes that are certainly being prepared in the event of Ariel Sharon's final departure?

SHOULD HIS LIFE BE CELEBRATED?

Not all Israelis will be joining the likely celebration. The Israeli writer David Grossman explains: "Ariel Sharon is a man of potent primal urges, of violence, of combat, cunning and brilliance. He is a sharp manipulator, brave and corrupt. He has swung like a mighty pendulum between construction and destruction. He has blatantly ignored limits, whether international boundaries or the boundaries of the law."

For many Palestinians, there is no "new" Sharon. "Everybody knows that Ariel Sharon had a dark past," writes former PLO rep Karma Nabuksi in the Guardian. " For us Palestinians, for me as a Palestinian, he is our dark present. The entire destruction of the fabric of our civic and political society over the past five years has had the looming presence of Sharon at its black heart." Hamas and the Islamic Jihad are far more hostile in their condemnations.

These views of Sharon are likely to disappear in much of the media when and if he dies, like the way criticisms of Ronald Reagan were sanitized in the media marathon of tributes following his passing. Even though truth never really dies, it can be hidden and avoided for years. History has always been rewritten and popularized by winners, or, as it is today, by disinformation specialists, spin-meisters and news executives.

Often when you try to debate Israeli policies, emotionalism overcomes insight on all sides because the response is often finger pointing and "Yes, but what aboutŠ. (You can fill in the blank.)" Ears close as partisans cling to their pain preferring diatribes to dialogue. All offer up their different maps and memories of atrocities or oppression to rationalize predictable positions.

WHAT ELSE IS DYING?

This conventional media discourse misses deeper dimensions of the problem. Is Israeli society only to be discussed by our media in terms of its military leaders and security concerns? What about its founding values and culture? As Sharon fights for life, something more profound may be dying in Israel, says one American who has lived there for many, many years-the compassion of the Jewish people.

Larry Derfner wrote about this in the Jerusalem Post on December 22 last year.

"When I came to this country 21 years ago, being a socialist - as distinct from being a communist - was a solidly Israeli thing to be. The prime minister at the time, Shimon Peres, made a point of describing himself as one. Israelis weren't saints, they weren't monks - they envied the wealth and comforts of Western Jewry. But fighting this envy was the pride they took in the lack of pretension and nonsense in their way of life, and the contempt they felt for the shallow, selfish lives of wealthy Jews abroad.

"Yeah, well, times have changed, haven't they? Today Diaspora Jews and Israelis are of like minds, all going for the gelt, all looking out for No. 1, all agreed that the poor will always be with us, so let's maybe throw them a bone (and put up a plaque). Most important, we are all agreed that the world is divided into the haves and have nots, and we - Jews of the Diaspora and Israel together - have become the natural allies of the haves, and the natural enemies of the mobilized have nots.

"And it's not just the Palestinian issue or radical Islam that divides world Jewry from the Third World. It's also the assimilation of American Jewry into the conservative economic and political establishment of their country, and Israeli Jewry's identification and connection with it. You can add the Russian Jewish oligarchs to the mix. You can also throw in the leadership of Jewish organizations across the Diaspora, which are basically plutocracies - societies ruled by the rich.

"Together, we are the voice of world Jewry. And as the saying goes, where you stand depends on where you sit."

Larry Derfner may not have heard about the pithy terror warnings posted in the subways of New York that say "If you see something, say something." Yet he is saying something about something no one is talking about but that is relevant as we hear all the speculation about the future of Israel and the news bulletins on what may be the mighty Sharon's last stand in the holy land.

Posted on Sunday, January 8, 2006 at 11:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Klaus Wiegrefe: New Film Offers Strong Theory but Weak Evidence About JFK Assassination

Source: Spiegel Online (1-5-06)

A German TV station will broadcast a documentary on Friday that wants to clear up the murder of US President John F. Kennedy. But does the film prove its own thesis? A critical analysis.

On the morning of Sept. 27, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald stepped out of a bus in Mexico City after a long ride from the American border. The lanky southerner stayed in the Mexican capital at least four days, and if you believe film director Wilfried Huismann (Rendezvous With Death, airing on ARD on Jan. 6 at 9:45 pm), this visit is the key to the most important political murder mystery of the 20th century: The assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy by Oswald in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The fruits of Huismann's investigation have captivated not only the German director himself, but also the heads of public broadcaster ARD: "This new information will revolutionize Kennedy research," claims regional public broadcaster WDR on its Web site (WRD helped fund the documentary). "Lee Harvey Oswald was the final pawn in a murderous feud between Fidel Castro and the Kennedy brothers." The director himself adds: "For me, the essence has been explained."

But does the movie really provide what its authors claim -- the solution to the most spectacular political murder of the 20th century? Legions of investigators, historians, and journalists have worked on this puzzle in vain since Kennedy's death. So now it's been pieced together?

Huismann argues that a 24-year-old Oswald -- an avid supporter of Fidel Castro and his revolution -- received orders in the Cuban embassy in Mexico City to assassinate Kennedy. Castro's motive: Kennedy had already tried to kill Cuba's Maximo Lider because he feared the bearded revolutionary would grant the Soviet Union a strategic opening in the Caribbean. Castro, in Huismann's theory, acted in self-defense.

The thesis isn't new. The faction of people who have long believed in Castro's involvement in the murder reaches from President Lyndon B. Johnson to former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO (and US Secretary of State) Alexander Haig.

Huismann believes he can supply missing pieces to this theory, and at first glance his collection of evidence looks overwhelming: segments of tapped phone conversations from the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City; documents from Russia's intelligence agency, the KGB; statements from several current and former Cuban intelligence agents. But under close scrutiny, the links in this chain of proof look weak.

None of Huismann's witnesses were involved in the supposed operation. It's not clear exactly how the Cubans may have helped Oswald. Many of the witnesses are recognizable figures in Kennedy-research circles -- although

Huismann gives the opposite impression -- and many of their statements have been rejected by investigative committees or historians. What Huismann has freshly cobbled together raises a lot of questions -- which will have to be answered before anyone rewrites history.

In the end it's just hearsay that Cuban security services contacted the young Oswald in 1962....


Posted on Sunday, January 8, 2006 at 6:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Kevin Smant: Is the Republican Party the Party of Watergate as Rick Perlstein Claims?

Source: Richard Jensen's C-Net List (1-4-06)

[Mr. Smant teahes history at Indiana University South Bend.]

Now that final exams and the hectic days of the holidays are behind us, I'd like to go back to something that appeared on C-Net a few weeks ago. It was the text of a talk given by Rick Perlstein at a recent Princeton University conference on the conservative movement, its past, present, etc. In it, Mr. Perlstein discusses what will be his next book, a history of American conservatism during the Nixon years, and he argues that conservatives then--as with conservatives now, according to Perlstein–lost their way. They became too much inclined to defend anything a sitting president did, defending (according to Perlstein) corruption, illegality, etc., be it that of Nixon or (now) of George W. Bush.

Perlstein argues that all of this compares unfavorably to the principled independence of America's first major conservative political leader, Barry Goldwater, about whom of course Mr. Perlstein has written a very important book. In his talk, Perlstein said: "...it has become my thesis that the Republicans are less the party of Goldwater, and more the party of Watergate---and this not despite the operational ascendancy of the conservative movement in its councils but in some cases because of it..."

Well. Having written myself on the history of American conservatism through my work on National Review, James Burnham, and more recently Frank Meyer, I thought I'd briefly respond to all this, and I thought others on this list would find this interesting too.

First of all, I'm glad Rick Perlstein is writing about conservatism and the Nixon years. It's an important topic and hasn't really been addressed much by historians. I've thought of writing about it myself some day.

It raises important and interesting questions. By the time Nixon came into office, conservatism had for some time been an opposition, an insurgency. But now someone who...well, if not "one of them", had at least fairly close ties to them, was in office. How would conservatives behave? They'd wanted access to power for so long. Now, maybe, they had it. But power and principles don't always coexist easily. And there were certainly instances where conservatives, during Nixon's time, didn't behave so well.

But I'd also urge Mr. Perlstein to be careful. I realize he was giving a presentation at a conference, and so time is limited; there's only so much one can say, you can't include all the evidence you have...mainly you want to be sure everyone gets your thesis, so you state it very baldly. [sic—not ‘’badly’’] Still, his thesis as stated makes it sound as if, during the Nixon years, he believes almost all conservatives marched in lockstep with Nixon, defending nearly everything he did until finally the final bombshells exploded in August 1974, Nixon resigned, and even Nixon's defenders had to give up the ghost.

To that I'd say: whoa!! There's actually a lot of evidence showing that at least some conservatives---many?---were hardly prisoners on the Nixon bandwagon. Take NATIONAL REVIEW conservatives, for example. In 1960, NR saw Nixon as so liberal on domestic policy that the magazine didn't even endorse him for president vs Kennedy. In 1968, two prominent members of the NR editorial board, publisher William Rusher and senior editor Frank Meyer, were all for Reagan, not Nixon, for the GOP nomination, all the way to the convention. NR stayed neutral during the primaries. They and the magazine did indeed support Nixon vs Humphrey and Wallace in the fall election (no surprise there). And once Nixon became president, NR generally supported his judicial nominations, his stance on busing, and his Vietnam policies (the incursion into Cambodia, for instance).

But on domestic policy, it was a different story. Both Rusher, and especially Meyer, were sharply critical of Nixon's budgetary and spending policies, the sharp increases in spending for many welfare programs, Nixon's statement that "we are all Keynesians now", and so forth. Meyer was relentlessly critical of Nixon all through 1971, in both his NR columns and his work with such organizations as the American Conservative Union.

And _all_ NR conservatives were absolutely horrified at Nixon's decision to begin to normalize U.S. relations with communist China, and his decision to allow the UN to boot out Taiwan. William F. Buckley went with Nixon on his trip to China, and was rather pointed, often, in his criticism of Nixon; and many in NR supported the brief and ill-fated run of conservative congressman John Ashbrook against Nixon in the early 1972 Republican presidential primaries.

I'd also urge Mr. Perlstein to take a good look at the move by a number of conservatives--again, led by many at NR---to announce a "suspension of support" for Nixon. This occurred in July 1971, and got some attention, including some from the Nixon administration. It may have even wrung a few concessions on policy from Nixon.

As for Watergate: yes, many on the Right defended Nixon. But again, not all. You should look at William Rusher's writings. He had always been one of Nixon's sharpest critics, and he never wavered from them. But when it came to Watergate, he himself admitted that he tended to defend Nixon--not out of blind loyalty to the man, but because he believed that the charges against Nixon, and the way they were being pushed by Nixon's (often) liberal critics, were often unfair, partisan, and hypocritical. How can he be blamed for that?

And once the facts of Watergate began to become known, NATIONAL REVIEW for example was hardly blindly supportive of Nixon. After the Saturday Night Massacre of October 1973, for example, NR in its lead editorial (written by James Burnham, who tended to take the lead in NR's editorial-writing re: Watergate) was sharply critical of Nixon and pointed out that it was obvious that up to then he'd been doing everything he could to obstruct the Watergate investigation. By the time Nixon resigned, Buckley was referring to the "weak and devious men" that had made up the Nixon administration.

As for the present, the current relationship between conservatives and George W. Bush also defies easy, simple characterization in my view. Yes, conservatives have certainly supported W. on things like tax cuts, his response to 9/11, and the war in Iraq. But again, is it really fair to imply that many on the Right are abandoning principle and marching in lockstep with President Bush? They certainly seem to support the war on terror, and the actions in Iraq, on principle. And they've been critical of Bush. For example, remember campaign finance reform a few years ago? When Bush signed the campaign finance reform bill into law, many, many on the right were critical, and said so. Many conservatives think, and have said, that Bush hasn't done enough on the immigration issue. And my goodness, have we forgotten the Harriet Miers flap so soon??? Conservative opposition to Bush on the Miers nomination hardly suggests to me a movement marching in lockstep.

Don't get me wrong. Rick Perlstein is writing an important book, and I can't wait to read it. But I fear that the issues he's addressing are very complicated and complex; and the conservative movement both was, and is, more complicated in its makeup, more nuanced in its positions, and maybe has stuck far more to its principles, than Mr. Perlstein is giving it credit for. My $0.02...

Posted on Friday, January 6, 2006 at 11:09 AM | Comments (2) | Top

Bradford William Short : Did physicians or family caregivers play a causal role in the deaths of Adams and Jefferson?

Source: National Review Online (1-5-06)

[Bradford William Short is the research editor at the Catholic Family & Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) in New York.]

Many bioethicists are striving to create a grim future for America, one in which such outrages as infanticide are tolerated. But disfiguring the future isn't enough for some of them. They're doing the same thing to the past.

Pro-assisted-suicide bioethicists have time and again made false and often preposterous claims about the history of suicide and assisted suicide in Western (and especially Anglo-American) thought. Further evidence of this fiction can be found in the just published Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die, written by the influential University of Utah bioethicist Margaret Pabst Battin. (She was one of the signatories to the bioethicists' March 2004 letter protesting President Bush's appointment of new members to the Kass Commission.) In this book, Battin advances arguments in favor of legalizing and legitimating assisted suicide. One of them is that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who uncannily both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826, may have both deliberately killed themselves.

Battin has a chapter in which she complains that while "practically every schoolchild" learns "the fact that Adams and Jefferson died the same day," "asking why" is not encouraged. The answer cannot be that it was a coincidence, as the schoolchildren are taught:

[T]he fact that the death dates for both Adams and Jefferson fell on a historic anniversary — the fiftieth anniversary, not the forty-ninth or fifty-first — may seem to stretch beyond the point of sheer plausibility the claim that this was mere coincidence. But when appeals to coincidence are insufficient, we must look for explanations in common circumstance or common cause, or for causation from one case to the other.

Actually, it is extremely plausible that among the hundreds of great Americans in our history, there would be at least one coincidence involving two of them that, looked at in isolation, appears highly improbable. But Battin still drives on, and looks for that "causation." She slanders the memory of the two physicians who attended to the two dying former presidents when she insincerely "asks" the following question: "Did physicians or family caregivers play a causal role in the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, deliberately allowing or helping them to die?" Pretty soon Battin has our fifth president, James Monroe — who also died on the Fourth, but of a different year — in on the suicidal fun, along with people to whom both Jefferson and Adams wrote letters in the early 1800s, and even Adams's horse:

Furthermore, the issue of synchrony — whatever the individual explanations for their deaths — also leaves us with the further question of coordination. Did Adams and Jefferson think alike but act independently? Could they have had some joint understanding, reached perhaps in 1813 — when each had been corresponding with a physician, Adams with Benjamin Rush about a horse's deliberate stumble and Jefferson with Samuel Brown about lethal drugs — that they then recalled later on? Did their physicians or families think alike but act independently, or perhaps in concert? Could their families and caregivers have lied about the precise dates of their deaths, seeking to lend their demises a greater grandeur? Or was there a more orchestrated plan here, known only to these two men, or to their physicians and families, that accounts for the extraordinary "coincidence" or "grand design" of their deaths? Could it have been the mode, so to speak, to die on the Fourth if at all possible, by whatever means? After all, not just Adams and Jefferson, but three of the first five presidents of the young United States died on the 4th of July. In 1831, just five years after the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, James Monroe, the fifth president, did so as well (emphasis in original).

You half-expect her to start talking about the numerological significance of the number five, ŕ la Farrakhan.

Posted on Friday, January 6, 2006 at 10:04 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Jonathan Alter: As the shadows fell, MLK looked north

Source: Newsweek (1-9-06)

Forty years ago this winter, I was an 8-year-old boy growing up on the North Side of Chicago. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had moved into a slum in the impoverished West Side neighborhood of North Lawndale to dramatize the conditions of what were then known as "Northern Negroes." King was scheduled to visit the home of a local politician to raise money for his cash-strapped movement from white "lakefront liberals." But the politician, caught between his personal sympathies for King and his allegiance to Mayor Richard J. Daley, who was no fan of the civil-rights leader, felt uncomfortable hosting the party. So he called up my parents and, to my delight, the event was moved to our house at the last minute. The fund-raising was "disappointing," according to my father's diary, and King spent most of the evening on our telephone. But I got the great man's autograph and we heard him deliver an eloquent talk while standing in front of several dozen guests in our living room. At such events that year, King would sometimes scrawl a reminder to himself: "Ad lib 'We Shall Overcome'."

This all came to mind while reading "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68," the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's magisterial account of the most important social movement of the 20th century, which lasted only 13 years—from the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to King's death at age 39 in 1968. It made me think anew about how much has changed for African-Americans living in places like Chicago, and how little. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the unfinished agenda of the 1960s is under discussion again, if not in Washington then at least among the legions of local leaders still trying to better their communities.

Branch's book, to be published this month, shows us King not as a plaster saint but an intuitive, conflicted and harried human being—running late to everything, refereeing among squabbling lieutenants, straying from his wife to the end, even slipping out to catch what one of his traveling aides said was his favorite movie, "The Sound of Music."

But we also see that even after he became world-famous, King had reason to call his movement a civil-rights struggle. Branch conveys in powerful detail the dramatic, chaotic, inspiring and incendiary era, from the triumphant Selma-to-Montgomery march to the passage in 1965 of the landmark Voting Rights Act and little-noticed end to discrimination against the Third World in immigration (which reshaped the face of America); from the pathos of Lyndon Johnson—caught between his breathtaking commitment to fighting injustice and the worsening Vietnam War—to the backlash against liberalism represented by Ronald Reagan's election as governor of California, and finally to King's eerie "I might not get there with you" premonition at the Mason Temple in Memphis on the night before his assassination....

Posted on Thursday, January 5, 2006 at 9:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

James C. Roberts: Front row at Nuremberg

Source: Washington Times (1-3-06)

Lt. John Dolibois sat in the courtroom at Nuremberg, Germany, 60 years ago watching Herman Goering testify in the war crimes trials. Much of the world was transfixed by the proceedings, but Lt. Dolibois, an Army intelligence officer, felt strangely indifferent.

"I just wanted to go home," he said. "I had had enough of the Nazis."

On trial were 22 high-ranking Nazis charged with crimes against humanity. Lt. Dolibois is the man who knew them the best -- their records, their strengths and weaknesses, their psychological profiles, their fears, obsessions, family situations, food preferences -- the result of close interaction with them over six months.

In May 1945, Lt. Dolibois' commanding officer informed him that he was being assigned to a facility called the Central Continental Prisoner of War Enclosure No. 32 in Mondorf, Luxembourg. The facility was nicknamed "Ashcan."

The Luxembourgian native had migrated to the United States in 1931 with his widowed father and two siblings. He was fluent in French and German, and it was his German skills that had earned him the assignment.

Arriving in Mondorf, Lt. Dolibois drove to the Palace Hotel, a well-known spa he had visited as a boy.

"I was shocked to see how altered it was," he said. "We stopped at a huge gate that was part of a barbed-wire fence 15 feet high. Two strands of the fence were electrified. The gate stretched around the main building and surrounding gardens and on each corner of the fence were guard towers occupied by sentries with machine guns. ... It was the most heavily fortified [prisoner of war] facility I had seen." ...

Posted on Wednesday, January 4, 2006 at 10:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Peter Ford: France Divided On How To Cast Colonial Past

Source: Christian Science Monitor (1-4-06)

Hardly had the fires died down in the Paris suburbs, as the November rioting by immigrant youths petered out, than the flames of another conflict fed by France's colonial past began to sweep through the political landscape here.

This time they are metaphorical. But the passionate debate under way over whether French history teachers should stress positive aspects of colonialism is generating almost as much heat. The argument reveals the same ambivalence among French politicians about their country's former empire and its peoples which also fuels much of the immigrants' alienation. It has also raised questions about whether a democracy can have an "official history."

The controversy "very much speaks to what is happening in France today," says Nancy Green, who teaches immigration history at the School for Higher Social Science Studies in Paris.

"Questions of memory keep popping up," setting competing groups' recollections against one another, she explains. "It's hard to tell when they'll be sufficiently digested" into a commonly accepted version of history.

The trouble started last February, when lawmakers from the conservative ruling party quietly slipped a clause into a bill requiring schools to "recognize in particular the positive character of the French overseas presence, notably in North Africa."

History teachers protested, and in November the opposition Socialists, whose leader Francois Hollande said had voted for it "inadvertently," tried and failed to overturn it in Parliament.

Diplomatic pandemonium ensued. Algeria suspended negotiations on a friendship treaty with France that was meant to seal the two countries' final reconciliation. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy cancelled a trip to France's Caribbean island possessions when local leaders said they would not meet him. And fierce arguments broke out at home both about the nature of French colonial rule and about whether politicians should tell schools how to teach history.

President Jacques Chirac insisted in a special address in December that the French state had no intention of promoting an official history. "Laws are not meant to write history," he said. "The writing of history is for historians." France "has known moments of light and darker moments. It is a legacy that we must fully assume ... respecting the memory of everyone."

Mr. Chirac also added that he would form a commission to decide what to do about the law and report back in three months. "It does not take much," he warned, for history, "the key to a nation's cohesion," to become "a ferment for division."

That, argues Catherine de Wenden, a specialist on immigration, is the problem with perceptions of the war in Algeria, which ended with Algeria's independence in 1962.

"There were the colonists, the Algerians who fought with the French, the Algerians who fought against the French, the French soldiers called up to fight - each of these groups has drawn different conclusions from the war," Ms. de Wenden explains. "It is not possible for them all to have one common vision."

Posted on Wednesday, January 4, 2006 at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Steven Plaut: DePaul U Confronts Amerikan "Empire"

Source: frontpagemag.com (1-3-06)

Q: How do you know when America has crossed the line into an oppressive, occupational empire?

A: When DePaul University begins studying it.

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at DePaul and its Dean, one Chuck Suchar (a sociologist), have officially announced a “College Theme Series” entitled “Confronting Empire” for the 2005-6 academic year. This is a DePaul faculty initiative involving the participation of various departments and programs throughout the college. The organizers call themselves the “Empire Committee,” sounding like something out of Star Wars. Naturally, the evil empire under examination is the United States.

The “Empire Committee” has invited a Who’s Who of radical anti-Americanism to campus for the series. The roster includes pro-terror communist Tariq Ali, who thinks that 9/11 was caused by American fundamentalism; Bill Goodman from the so-called “Center for Constitutional Rights,” which devotes most of its time to defending the terrorists in Gitmo; and Seungsook Moon from the Department of Sociology at Vassar, who will speak on “Politics of Gender and Sexuality in the Global U.S. Military Empire.” The DePaul “Anti-Empirists” are also featuring an evening of “anti-nationalist” poetry and readings, and an evening of “theater” featuring the play “Guantanamo,” based upon the writings of Gitmo terrorist detainees.

 

According to the Dean, DePaul hopes through the “Theme Series” to achieve the following objectives:

 

  1. to engage in a College wide (and broader) conversation about the current state of and developing trends in the global order, not only for the purpose of advancing a theme of great interest to faculty and students but also to significantly enhance the community of intellect and engagement in the University;
  2. to promote a wide range of views and participants in this conversation about empire and opposition in its contemporary and historical dimensions utilizing the increasingly global interests of our faculty and students;
  3. to question the nature of the American role and the role of other nations and interests in the emerging order and consider the forms of appropriate action, engagement and scholarship in light of that assessment.

In other words, it is to be a one-sided campaign of on-campus brainwashing designed to turn DePaul students into Manchurian candidates of radical political correctness. According to one dissident DePaul professor with whom we spoke:

 

It still amazes me that someone can call a series “Confronting Empire” and believe that it has any pretense of objectivity…The special horror of DePaul is that it is so completely unashamed of its substitution of advocacy for education. I have spent a good deal of time in the last ten years trying to convince my colleagues that they needed to remember that we are a school and not a Marxist sect, a pacifist group, the latest identity fad or what have you. But this is what happens when you have people who are mediocre intellects who think their “correct” political views more than makes up for their intellectual deficiencies. It’s very depressing.

 

DePaul's pseudo-academic loopiness is of course not restricted to its jihad against the Amerikkkan “Empire.” DePaul has been at the forefront of the movement to ban military recruiters from campus. DePaul sponsors a group called Cuba Coalition/Junta de Accion Latina, a front for the Communist Party. On August 5, 2004, DePaul sponsored a “Conference on Globalization,” organized by assorted extremist organizations. The “International Studies Program” at DePaul regularly sponsors conferences devoted to Marxism and America-bashing. You would have to look very hard through its departmental webpage to find any course not filled with political indoctrination.

 

Among those at DePaul building a career on rants against the American “empire” is one Deena Weinstein, Professor of Sociology at DePaul University. Her “specialization” is the sociology of heavy metal rock music. She also is a promoter of Pulp Marxism. She ranted:

 

The call to empire has come up only because world capitalism has met with opposition from Islamic revolution on the right and the counter-globalization movement on the left. America is at best a would-be empire that is being contested on all sides and could have its pretensions rudely dashed by a deep recession, failures in post-war “nation building,” a pandemic and/or new coalitions of rising military powers. American empire is a very problematic work in progress.

 

Her course in the sociology department is “SOC 282- ROCK JOURNALISM.” According to the DePaul website, “This course explores the wide variety of rock writings, from album and concert reviews to interviews with musicians. The functions served by the rock press will also be considered as part of the hype machine of the rock industry, as critical information for an audience whose knowledge of rock does not come from formal education.”

 

Aminah Beverly McCloud, the Director of the Islamic World Studies Program (IWSP) at DePaul, is an apologist for and follower of Louis Farrakhan. Her courses feature anti-American propaganda texts. She was a signatory to a document denouncing the Patriot Act and imploring U.S. authorities to grant Tariq Ramadan permission to enter the country.

 

Another professor who teaches in the Islamic World Studies Program is Khaled Keshk, who resorts to using biased texts that blithely portray Palestinian terrorism as a justified reaction to Israeli atrocities. Readings in his course on Israel are taken from the late notorious anti-Semite Israel Shahak (who claimed “The Jews worship Satan”).

 

The DePaul Religious Studies department is full of PC indoctrination courses in “liberation theology,” feminism, and “post-modernism.” Political Science offers “Contemporary Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Politics.” Extremism permeates the entire campus. The DePaul campus library features a large special collection, purchased with campus funds, called the “Venceremos Brigade Research Collection.” It is a mass of pro-Castro propaganda, including many of Fidel Castro's mind-numbing speeches. The list of materials in this collection alone stretches more than 29 pages.

 

Another large collection at the library consists of masses of political propaganda produced by Daniel Berrigan, who was once (with his brother) on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. (Berrigan was a close comrade of Howard Zinn. J. Edgar Hoover went so far as to publicly call Berrigan a “traitor.”) DePaul was one of the campuses mentioned by name at a conference sponsored by the American Congress for Truth as guilty of classroom indoctrination in hate.

 

A few months ago, a speaker of honor hosted at DePaul was none other than Ward Churchill, speaking with open endorsement and support from the DePaul administration. In fact, the administration prohibited the holding of a protest against the Churchill visit by DePaul students. Jonathan Cohen, a math professor at DePaul, described the event in an article for “American Thinker.” Among other notable moments at that event:

 

The talk turned to his (Churchill's) favorite bottom line for evil, Adolph Eichmann. He pointed out that even in Israel they were never able to convict him of personally killing anyone...He was a desk murderer. For Churchill the people who were bond traders in the Twin Towers were not innocent because they participated in the corporate system that is responsible for the vast majority of slaughter in the world. Presumably they were desk killers too....

 

Then the Vice President for Student Affairs, Jim Doyle, got up and made a few comments...Looking over the audience he recounted observing the body language of the audience and noted that it was obvious that some people approved of what Churchill was saying while others did not. Turning his attention to those of us who had not stood or applauded the talk, he admonished us in a scolding manner that we needed to consider seriously the things that Churchill was saying, especially about human rights. Somehow, equating anything Churchill said as advancing the cause of human rights seemed ridiculous, since Churchill had effectively justified the killings at the World Trade Center.

 

While such wackiness has come to symbolize DePaul's politicized campus and low academic standards, nothing attests so clearly to the fact that DePaul should not be regarded as a bona fide academic institution than the employment of Norman Finkelstein as an assistant professor of political science. Finkelstein is a pseudo-scholar with an empty academic publication record. His entire career has been devoted to turning out propaganda screeds in the form of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel books and web rants. His books have been dismissed as collections of fraudulent pseudo-research and thinly-disguised Jew-baiting propaganda by nearly every serious historian who has reviewed them. In addition, Alan Dershowitz from Harvard has devoted considerable energies in exposing Finkelstein as a fraud.

 

DePaul likes to justify Finkelstein's presence on its faculty as proof of its devotion to academic freedom, protected even for extremist crackpots just as long as they are doing serious academic work. (Never mind that the firing of Thomas Klocek makes a mockery out of such a claim.) But the truth of the matter is that Finkelstein was NOT hired and retained by DePaul because of any “academic research” that he does. Finkelstein does not do any academic research at all. There can be no doubt that Finkelstein was hired precisely because he is an extremist and anti-Semite with no serious academic credentials, one tied to neo-Nazi and far-leftist anti-American hate groups. In short, Finkelstein’s retention at DePaul shows that DePaul has junked all attempts at pretending to maintain academic standards, in its quest to battle the American “empire” and its Israeli ally.

 

DePaul University hired  Finkelstein a few years back to teach courses on the Middle East. A course he teaches in Political Science consists almost entirely of anti-Israel political propaganda written by Bash-Israel radicals and Marxists. (In another course, writings by Noam Chomsky form much of the required readings.) Finkelstein was recruited by DePaul after he had been fired from several colleges in New York, following controversy over his support of holocaust denier David Irving and his abusive attacks against individual Holocaust survivors. While it is possible to find a few other people as openly anti-Semitic as Finkelstein in North American academia, in most cases they have bona fide academic records or were hired before the campus chiefs became aware of their extremist hate activities. Neither was the case with DePaul and Finkelstein.

 

By the way, when Finkelstein was fired from those New York colleges, it was not because of his political views. He was fired because he has an empty academic publications record. Although a graduate of Princeton (much to the embarrassment of all other graduates of Princeton), Finkelstein has never published any academic research and never engaged in any scholarly inquiry. Not a single paper of Finkelstein's has been published in a refereed academic journal. Instead, he devotes himself full time to his anti-Semitic propaganda. His curriculum vitae may be viewed here.

 

The closest Finkelstein ever got to a journal publication was with a couple of propaganda pieces in New Politics, a “socialist” non-academic magazine of far-leftist agitprop, sponsored by – among others – Noam Chomsky. This “journal” states that it “stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action.” Neutral, scholarly, and objective?

 

Finkelstein also turns out articles for Palestinian propaganda “journals,” which are less objective yet.

 

Alan Dershowitz has issued a series of devastating denunciations of Finkelstein, the most recent in response to Finkelstein's newest anti-Jewish book, Beyond Chutzpah : On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History. The title is a backhanded slap at Alan Dershowitz’s Chutzpah. Finkelstein’s basic theme there and in his other writings is that just because someone hates Jews and wants to see Jews killed by terrorists and other murderers is no reason to accuse that person of being an anti-Semite. Finkelstein's screeds appear on every Holocaust Denial and neo-Nazi web site on earth. Neo-Nazis adore him, proclaiming him the heroic Jew who proves that there was never a Holocaust. He also appears regularly on anti-Israel and anti-Jewish websites from the Left, like Counterpunch.

 

Dershowitz wrote the following about Finkelstein:

 

Finkelstein has said that he “can’t imagine why Israel’s apologists would be offended by a comparison with the Gestapo”[1] and asserted that Israel’s human rights record is “interchangeable with Iraq’s” when it was ruled by Saddam Hussein. He has said that most alleged Holocaust survivors - including Elie Wiesel - have fabricated their past, are “bogus,” and that those seeking reparations (from Germany) are “cheats” and “greedy.” Because of my support of Israel, he has compared me to “Adolf Eichman [sic],” and accused me of expressing “Nazi moral judgments.” When challenged to defend his frequent comparison between Jews and Nazis, he has responded, “Nazis never like to hear they’re being Nazis.” He is a popular speaker among German neo-Nazis; one, Ingrid Rimland, whose husband, the notorious Ernst Zundel, wrote The Hitler We Loved And Why, even referred to him admiringly as the “Jewish David Irving” (“Jüdischer David Irving”) - a reference to the British Holocaust denier and Hitler admirer. The comparison is apt because Finkelstein has reportedly praised the Holocaust-denying Irving as “a good historian!” and as having “made an indispensable” contribution to our knowledge of World War II.

 

Commentary Magazine’s editor Gabriel Schoenfeld has labeled Finkelstein’s views as “crackpot ideas, some of them mirrored almost verbatim in the propaganda put out by neo-Nazis around the world.” Finkelstein has been endorsed by anti-Semites of all stripes.

 

The Anti-Defamation League considers Finkelstein to be a Holocaust Denier and a neo-Nazi. The Washington Post described him as “a writer celebrated by neo-Nazi groups for his Holocaust revisionism and comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany.” Leon Wieseltier from the New Republic wrote, “He's poison, a disgusting self-hating Jew, something you find under a rock.” Omer Bartov, a noted historian at Brown University, compared Finkelstein's book to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The eminent historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen has dismissed Finkelstein as an anti-Semitic crackpot, as a pseudo-scholar, and as an apologist for the Hamas terrorists. While Finkelstein likes to defend his own anti-Semitic ravings by claiming his parents are themselves Holocaust survivors, Dershowitz recently revealed that Finkelstein’s mother was in fact a collaborator with German Nazis during the war.

 

Finkelstein has been dismissed as a fraud and an anti-Semite by nearly every serious historian on the planet, even by some far-leftists inside Israel like Professor Benny Morris. Finkelstein's sources, according to Morris, are “dubious,” and Finkelstein “fails to marshal sources or materials from elsewhere.” The NY Times’ reviewer described Finkelstein as “juvenile,” “arrogant,” and “stupid” (Aug. 6, 2000).

 

While born to Jewish parents, Finkelstein routinely compares Israelis with Nazis. He is an open cheerleader for the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists. He appeared on the official Hezbollah television station al-Manar, because, he said, “If I’m willing to appear on CNN – the main propaganda organ for America’s terrorist wars – why shouldn’t I appear on al-Manar?” Earlier this year DePaul students heard a speech by Finkelstein, in which he stated unequivocally that the 1948 Arab/Israeli war was an “ethnic cleansing” of the “Palestinians” by the newly created Jewish state. The fact that the destruction of Israel and the eviction of the Jews was the publicly proclaimed goal of the surrounding Arab armies and states that attacked Israel was never mentioned. Jewish community leaders have been increasingly forthright in speaking out against the situation in DePaul, especially regarding Finkelstein.

 

Finkelstein is coming up for tenure at DePaul within the next few months. The fact that DePaul would even dream of considering him for a permanent academic position there raises serious questions concerning academic standards at DePaul.

 

DePaul has some bizarre notions about free speech. Its President, Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, publicly defends the employment of Finkelstein as a professor, and defends the operation on campus of a Bash-Israel propaganda show dressed up as an art exhibit. Holtschneider has also publicly celebrated the performance on this Catholic university campus of the “Vagina Monologues.” While pretending that it hired Finkelstein because of his “academic credentials,” which turn out to be non-existent, DePaul administrators revealed their real agenda of on-campus political indoctrination and extremism in the now-famous Thomas Klocek Affair.

 

Thomas Klocek was an instructor at DePaul who was fired when he was found guilty of expressing support for Israel in a chat outside the classroom. (The proliferation of in-classroom indoctrination by the Left at DePaul has already been noted.) Klocek's courses have ranged from Critical Thinking, to College Writing, to Languages and Cultures of the World. By all accounts, he was a popular teacher and his classes were always full. After 14 years of continuous employment at the Chicago-based college, Klocek was suspended without due process last September, and then stayed suspended - without pay - after that. Klocek was guilty of nothing more than expressing pro-Israel views in the face of extremist Palestinian propagandists on DePaul's campus, including students and non-students proliferating the usual lies and canards about Israel and Rachel Corrie.

 

Despite having an unblemished record during that span, DePaul summarily dismissed Klocek from his duties after the school claimed that he had “insulted” and “demeaned” several Muslim students at a campus fair for extracurricular groups. Klocek had publicly expressed his belief that “strictly speaking, right now there is no such place as Palestine on the map. The Palestinian people were simply Arabs who lived in the West Bank and Gaza.” For our part, we seem to recall that Galileo was also persecuted by Church institutions for daring to tell the truth. (Klocek, by the way, is Roman Catholic).

 

The university contends that Klocek's case “is not a case of academic freedom, but a situation of inappropriate behavior outside the classroom by a university employee,” according to Denise Mattson, the university spokesperson. Sure, while another DePaul professor has made a career out of insulting Holocaust survivors, promoting and cheering Holocaust deniers, and serving as the darling of neo-Nazi web sites. The “behavior” of Norman Finkelstein, the most openly anti-Semitic Jew on the planet, does not disturb these same DePaul Inquisitors.

 

DePaul has a large Muslim student population, as noted by the American Thinker. Klocek’s crime was to answer back to outrageous statements being made on campus by a radical Moslem. Klocek responded that there was a “qualitative difference between the Israel Army targeting known terrorists who have killed their own people...and suicide bombers targeting beaches, cafes, and even Seder dinners, killing indiscriminately Israelis, both Jew and Arab alike.” The suspended professor himself gives an excellent summary of the “Klocek Incident” here.

 

Since that time, Klocek’s firing has become the foremost symbol of the attempt by DePaul to limit free speech on campus and restrict it only to anti-American and anti-Semitic radicals. Klocek's plight has become a cause celebre for those seeking to defend free speech and pluralism on American college campuses. The  Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has repeatedly denounced DePaul's behavior in the Klocek Affair. FIRE has given DePaul University a speech code rating of “Red,” the worst rating possible. (You can read more about this institution's speech code ratings on this page.) Even some leftists have come out to protest the Klocek firing.

 

Meanwhile, DePaul University is getting sued by Thomas Klocek. Probably the best weblog that follows and documents the political shenanigans at DePaul is Marathon Pundit at http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/. (Check for updates on the suit.)

 

DePaul is an excellent illustration of everything that is wrong in American institutions of higher education in general, and in some church-affiliated schools in particular. In pursuing its crusade to instill campus indoctrination and leftist Newthink, DePaul has abandoned any pretense of protecting academic freedom, while at the same time abandoning any pretense of maintaining standards of academic excellence and scholarship.

 

If you would like to tell DePaul’s President Holtschneider what YOU think of all this, his email address is president@DePaul.edu . The names and emails of the other officials are here.


ENDNOTES

 

[1] Jerusalem Post, Aug 28, 2000

Posted on Tuesday, January 3, 2006 at 12:36 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Nigel Bunyan: Fulford Battlefield Society Commissions Embroiderers For Bayeux-like Piece

Source: The Daily Telegraph (LONDON) (1-3-06)

It may be almost 1,000 years late but campaigners are pinning their hopes on a preface to the Bayeux Tapestry to win the second Battle of Fulford - the "forgotten'' clash of 1066.

The battle is considerably less well known than the clash between King Harold and William the Conqueror, and it even lags behind the Saxon encounter with Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge just before Hastings.

However, historians believe that Fulford played a key role in the struggle for the English throne, since Saxon forces were tired and depleted at a time when they needed to be at their strongest to deal with William.

The precise location of the field of battle is in some doubt, but members of the Fulford Battlefield Society believe it must lie beside the Ouse to the south of York.

Almost 1,000 years after the Saxons were routed, the enthusiasts find themselves ranged against developers wanting to build an estate of 700 houses.

Chas Jones, the society's chairman, describes the development as "cultural vandalism''. He is demanding that the site be preserved as an educational and tourist attraction.

The developer, Persimmon, insists that despite spending pounds 350,000 on independent surveys it has not found a shred of evidence of a battle in the 11th century.

Objectors have until Friday to make submissions to the inquiry that will decide the issue. In their very modern battle, the society's campaigners have commissioned a preface to tell the story of Fulford in the same style as the Bayeux Tapestry.

It is hoped the embroidery will be completed in time for the 940th anniversary of the battle in September.

"We hope it will help raise awareness,'' said Mr Jones. "As in William's time, we are using local women who have skills in sewing and embroidery."

Posted on Tuesday, January 3, 2006 at 7:17 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Ian Moore: Australia's National Archives Irresponsible With Whitlam Papers

Source: THE AUSTRALIAN (1-3-06)

[Ian Moore is a former editor of The Sunday Telegraph and the founding editor of the Sunday Herald Sun.]

History must be an impartial -- and accurate -- account of events; a record of man's achievements, failings and follies. To this end, documents such as cabinet papers are invaluable to historians, who have had to wait 30 years for the political tumult (or embarrassment) to abate before they can assess their contents.

The cabinet papers released on January 1 were the more eagerly anticipated because they cover the last months of prime minister Edward Gough Whitlam; a set of documents that would detail the death throes of a government that -- fuelled by incompetence -- self-immolated so brilliantly that there are still many blinded by the light.

So what happened, come December 31, 2005? Whitlam was presented by the National Archives -- along with the documents -- to put his spin on history. It was like asking Nero to critique the fiddle-playing as Rome burned.

There should have been an outcry. It is the third year in a row the Archives have paraded Whitlam upon the release of the cabinet documents, allowing him to pass judgment on issues raised in them. It does nothing to assert the objectivity of the presentation or provide an independent view of contemporary political history.

Whitlam, however, managed to put us straight on one thing. If he was delusional in 1975, the condition remains untreated. Try this comment on for size.

''The dramatic destruction of my government has given rise to many myths and misconceptions,'' he said. (True, however these are usually spread by so-called true believers in the ALP who also are deluded in thinking Whitlam was a great prime minister.) Whitlam continued: ''Chief among these misconceptions is the notion that the political and quasi-constitutional crisis of '75 led to a paralysis of government. These cabinet documents provide ample proof to the contrary. The conduct of the business of the nation proceeded energetically and efficiently.''

No paralysis of government? Efficient? Leaving out the fact Whitlam thought he could raise money by essentially issuing government IOUs to banks and paying public servants with no legal spending authority, the government was bankrupt. It was staring down a deficit of $5 billion, a phenomenal amount in 1975.
...
However, with Whitlam, someone must point out that the emperor has no clothes. Not only was he not the messiah, he was a false prophet and an economic infidel. It is time he got off the stage and allowed history to be the judge of his tumultuous three years in government, with no prompting from the National Archives.

Posted on Tuesday, January 3, 2006 at 7:09 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Home Newsletter Submissions Advertising Donations Archives Internships About Us FAQs Contact Us All Articles

 

 

News

Roundup

HNN Blogs

Etc.

Recent Comments

Archives

February 2010
January 2010
December 2009
November 2009
October 2009
September 2009
August 2009
July 2009
June 2009
May 2009
April 2009
March 2009
February 2009
January 2009
December 2008
November 2008
October 2008
September 2008
August 2008
July 2008
June 2008
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
January 2008
December 2007
November 2007
October 2007
September 2007
August 2007
July 2007
June 2007
May 2007
April 2007
March 2007
February 2007
January 2007
December 2006
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004

RSS Feed (Summaries)
RSS Feed (Full Posts)

CHNM ad

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

 

HNN Donations--click here.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Just How Stupid Are We? By Rick Shenkman

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.

Subscribe to HNN's newsletter.