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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Montgomery Watt: Historian of Islam, 1909-2006

Source: Manan Ahmed at HNN blog, Cliopatria (10-30-06)

William Montgomery Watt, Professor (Emeritus) of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh - unarguably one of the key historians of Islam in the West - died on October 24, 2006 at the age of 97. He was educated at the Universities of Edinburgh, Jena, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He held the post of Assistant Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh from 1934 to 1938, Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy 1946-1947, and successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in Arabic 1947-1964. In 1964 he accepted the Chair from which he retired in 1979.

He was the author, most notably, of Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman, 1961, Muhammad at Mecca, 1953, and Muhammad at Medina, 1956.

Watt brought a deep sense of spirtuality to his work and, for that reason, many Muslim scholars find his approach more sympathetic to the biography of the Prophet than, say, Rodinson's. I do recommend reading this interview conducted in 2000 as it elaborates the connections between his own faith and his life's work on Islam.

Those of us who study and teach Islamic history will recognize the immense loss to our field.

Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at 8:24 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Whatever happened to the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair at the University of Wisconsin?

Source: Email from historian Mark Grimsley to John J. Miller of National Review. Posted at Cliopatria, the HNN blog (10-31-06)

I've finally gotten the more or less definitive word on the background and status of the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair at Wisconsin. According to the university's development office, quite a few parties have been involved in this fundraising drive since Stephen Ambrose kicked it off in 1997. He was, of course, the main donor to the Chair.

The files contain no formal document outlining an agreement between the other donors and the University of Wisconsin Foundation. But it seems fair to say that, in 1997, there would have been a natural assumption on the part of donors that if the fundraising goal of $1 million was met, the position would be filled. The fund only recently reached that $1 million benchmark, and in the meantime the fiscal situation at Wisconsin has become intractable. The university has absorbed a $190 million budget cut from the state legislature in the past four years. This has led to significant cuts to most colleges in the university. The College of Letters and Science (which contains the Department of History) has had to absorb major budget cuts in the last two budget cycles. An unfortunate consequence is that history and other departments have not been given permission to replace or hire new faculty at the same rate as in the late 1990's.

Meantime, the costs associated with an endowed chair have spiraled. Wisconsin computes the interest on its endowments at four percent and computes benefits at, I think, 36 percent of salary. Assuming a salary of $100,000, which is a probably realistic figure required to land a distinguished military historian, it would therefore require at least $136,000/year to sustain the position without augmenting it with internal funds. To produce that much interest income, the A-H chair endowment would have to be $3.4 million.

From everything I've heard, although there are indeed a few faculty within the Wisconsin history department who are lukewarm about hiring a military historian, the department is committed to seeing an important scholar of military history hired for the A-H Chair, and for that hiring to occur in as timely a manner as possible. The delay is coming almost exclusively from the university administration, and is based on fiscal rather than political objections.

That said, I think it is short-sighted on the part of Wisconsin not to run a search for an endowed chair once the agreed upon funds have been raised, and it seems almost certain that in the case of the A-H Chair, $1 million was indeed the target amount. At Ohio State we have a policy of honoring bequest agreements, even though it regularly obliges us to "top off" endowment revenues to meet the salary/benefits requirements of actually filling a given chair. If I understand correctly, the history department chair at Wisconsin has passed along "Sounding Taps" to his dean in order to underscore the bad publicity that has resulted from the failure to run a search for the A-H Chair now that the endowment has reached $1 million. It seems to me that in addition to bad publicity, the university runs the risk of losing benefactors who might otherwise be inclined to make significant bequests.

None of this supports the thrust of "Sounding Taps" concerning the demise of military history as an academic field, and it confirms the picture as portrayed by Prof. John Cooper and the university's desire to raise "even more money." But I think it is moonshine to suppose that Wisconsin can expect to raise an additional $2.4 million if it won't honor a commitment that appears already to have been made. I doubt it could raise even an additional $500,000.

You can treat this as being on the record, though I doubt any of this is worth pursuing out there in wingnut-land — it doesn't make a meaty wingnut point. But I did think you'd be interested in what I managed to unearth.

[The blog includes Mr. Miller's response.]

Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at 8:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tony Judt: Israel, and Free Speech (roundup of comments on the controversy)

Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (10-31-06)

Hours before the New York University historian Tony Judt was scheduled to give a talk at the Polish Consulate in New York on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," the event was called off. In an e-mail message to friends, colleagues, and the news media, Judt charged that "the talk was canceled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League." For its part, the ADL, which has been critical of Judt's previous writings on Israel, acknowledged contacting the consulate but insisted that it had not sought to intimidate officials. Whatever the case, the controversy — coming on the heels of continuing debate over an article critical of U.S. support for Israel by the international-relations scholars Stephen Walt, of Harvard University, and John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago — has touched off an uproar. At least two petitions citing free-speech concerns, with signatures by noted intellectuals and scholars, have been circulating, and newspapers, commentators, and bloggers around the world have been weighing in.

Petition circulated by Mark Lilla, the University of Chicago, and Richard Sennett, NYU and the London School of Economics and Political Science: Though we, the undersigned, have many disagreements about political matters, foreign and domestic, we are united in believing that a climate of intimidation is inconsistent with fundamental principles of debate in a democracy. The Polish Consulate is not obliged to promote free speech. But the rules of the game in America oblige citizens to encourage rather than stifle public debate. We who have signed this letter are dismayed that the ADL did not choose to play a more constructive role in promoting liberty. (The New York Review of Books)

Petition circulated by Norman Birnbaum, Georgetown University Law Center: We express our solidarity with Professor Judt and Professors Mearsheimer and Walt. We consider that this nation's public sphere will be strengthened by a full discussion of both the American alliance with Israel and Israel's policies. In a historical moment when the "War on Terror" serves as an excuse for an American version of authoritarianism, we invite our fellow citizens to renew their own attachment to the Constitutional traditions of American freedom of speech and thought. (Archipelago.org)

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor: I wonder whether the shahid of Washington Square and his champions have spoken or signed anything against the boycotts of Israeli academics; but I will leave the double-standards research to others. The more significant point is that what Judt was prevented from delivering at the Polish Consulate was a conspiracy theory about the pernicious role of the Jews in the world. That is what the idea of "the Lobby" is. It is Mel Gibson's analysis of the Iraq war. (The New Republic)...

Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at 7:36 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Donald M. Goldstein: WWII gift worth 'a billion in knowledge'

Source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (10-28-06)

A $1 million gift by a University of Pittsburgh professor, including his private collection on World War II, helped the school raise $1 billion and establish it as a leading source of information on the Good War.
The collection of military historian Donald M. Goldstein was appraised in February at $890,000, and he kicked in $110,000 to raise his gift to $1 million. But he told Pitt's board of trustees Friday, "It may be a billion dollars in terms of knowledge."

His archives contain about 4,400 books, 13,000 original photographs of such people as Adolf Hitler and Amelia Earhart, 300 films and videotapes, and transcripts of 200 interviews with Japanese and American participants in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

One of the most important items is the map of Pearl Harbor used to brief Japanese Emperor Hirohito, proving he knew in advance of the attack.

Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at 7:04 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Douglas Brinkley: Now writing a book based on Reagan diaries

Source: CBS Evening News (10-30-06)

... "When Ronald Reagan was elected governor, he blew everybody's expectations of him losing out of the water," says historian Douglas Brinkley, a CBS News consultant.

Brinkley is writing a book based on Reagan's presidential diaries.

"That this Hollywood actor could ... win the biggest state in the country and use that as the springboard for the conservative movement has become the stuff of political lore," Brinkley says.

The lore and legacy are on view at the Reagan Presidential Library, from a replica of the Oval Office to the behemoth of the exhibit — the actual Air Force One, the plane that flew seven presidents, including Reagan, through history.

"When they were flying to Berlin to talk about the 'Tear Down The Wall' speech, it was aboard this aircraft," says R. Duke Blackwood, executive director of the Reagan Presidential Library and Foundation.

Reagan's legacy is more than bricks and mortar and gleaming artifacts. It is his California dream writ large on the American political landscape 40 years later. It's a vision that still resonates.

"As a nation, we are still living in the long shadow of Ronald Reagan. We're all dealing with the agenda Reagan had, which means that politicians can’t mention tax increases or they get slammed," Brinkley says.

Reagan did cut taxes, and government spending — except on defense. There, he spent the Soviet Union and communism into oblivion. Love him or hate him, Reagan possessed a rare talent that still eludes most politicians: the power of persuasion.

"When you heard Ronald Reagan speak, you would be moved towards a kind of patriotic disposition. He made you proud to be an American. That is very hard for politicians to accomplish," Brinkley says. ...

Posted on Tuesday, October 31, 2006 at 12:12 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, October 30, 2006

Author of a new history of America decries the "myth that the Southern Confederacy was wrong"

Source: FrontpageMag.com (10-30-06)

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is H. W. (Harry) Crocker III, who has worked as a journalist, a speechwriter for the governor California (Pete Wilson, in his first term and reelection campaign), and as Vice President and Executive Editor of Regnery Publishing. He is the author of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History, and Robert E. Lee on Leadership: Executive Lessons in Character, Courage, and Vision, as well as the prize-winning comic novel The Old Limey. He is also the author of the new book Don't Tread on Me: A 400-Year History of America at War, from Indian-Fighting to Terrorist-Hunting.

FP: Harry Crocker, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Crocker: Thanks, I'm happy to be here.

FP: What motivated you to write this book?

Crocker: Well, I wanted to bust a lot of myths about American history: including the myth of the Indian as a noble savage; the myth that America has always been a non-imperial power; the myth that the Southern Confederacy was wrong; the myth that the American military relies on big battalions rather than on the extraordinary individual courage and skill of the American fighting man; the myth that we “lost” the Vietnam War (we won and the Democratic Congress shamefully gave it away); and the myth that the Iraq War is a disaster, among others. If I have one wish for the book, I’d like it to be put into the hands of every serving soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine so that he can know that his sacrifice today is part of the great sweep of American military history. I titled the book Don’t Tread on Me because that seems to me America’s unofficial motto, the phrase that best sums up the American spirit, especially the spirit of the American fighting man, and that explains our history.

FP: The "myth" that the Southern Confederacy was wrong? Kindly clarify this point as many readers may think that you are implying that defending the evil institution of slavery was a legitimate thing to do. Yes, the Civil War was not initiated to free the slaves, but it was about slavery and freeing the slaves was its end result and its humane and positive result. So the Southern Confederacy was wrong in the sense that it inhabited an evil institution that had to be liquidated in a democratic nation and the North was right in that it represented freedom and equality for all. It was right in that it freed the slaves. Kindly clarify the context and meaning of your position.

Crocker: Well, Jamie, as every politically incorrect schoolboy used to know, Lord Acton, the great historian of liberty, wrote a letter to Robert E. Lee in November 1866 saying, "I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo." And he was talking about liberty, not slavery. He thought secession was a necessary check on what he called "the absolutism of the sovereign will."

But it's also wrong to deal -- especially from the painless distance we have now -- with slavery as an abstraction, as an obvious moral evil to which the sacrificing of 600,000 dead (not to mention the infliction of military rule and the bitterness engendered by Reconstruction over the South) is a but a trifle, an historical necessity. The idea that an "evil institution" should be "liquidated" -- those are the words of a Soviet commissar, not a conservative. Robert E. Lee in his reply to Acton's letter said that no one in Virginia bemoaned the loss of slavery; Virginians like himself had long wanted to do away with it; but that they did not think that the costliest war in American history was, to appropriate your words, the "humane and positive" way to do it.

And of course, if slavery is the historical trump card, then the War for American Independence was wrong, because many of the founders held slaves and upheld slavery against the British who were willing to abolish it, as a war a measure. You remember Samuel Johnson’s great taunt in Taxation No Tyranny: “how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” The founders of the Southern Confederacy thought of themselves as following directly in the founders’ footsteps, which is why George Washington is on the great seal of the Confederacy -- and also why the politically correct are just as eager to prohibit naming schools after George Washington as they are after Confederate heroes.

But for me, as a natural Tory (and 1776 Loyalist) and adoptive Virginian, the real issue was best put by Robert E. Lee, a soldier who had served the United States his entire adult life, and who opposed secession and slavery (which he thought, and I quote, "a moral and political evil"), but who turned down command of the Union armies and said: “a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets … has no charm for me….”

I think he took the position of every humane man when he said: “With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty as an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home.”

I often ask anti-Confederates to put the question that was faced in 1861 into the prism of their own lives. If the South seceded today, how many of us would think the appropriate response would be to send armored divisions over the 14th Street Bridge here in Washington, to carpet bomb Southern cities, and to blockade Southern ports?

Lee believed that Americans should resolve political disputes through gentle persuasion and free assent. He did not believe in waging war against fellow Americans—and neither do I....

Posted on Monday, October 30, 2006 at 9:13 PM | Comments (3) | Top

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Philip Zelikow: Featured in front-page NYT profile

Source: NYT (10-28-06)

For the last 18 months, Philip D. Zelikow has churned out confidential memorandums and proposals for his boss and close friend, Condoleezza Rice, that often depart sharply from the Bush administration’s current line.

One described the potential for Iraq to become a “catastrophic failure.” Another, among several that have come to light in recent weeks, was an early call for changes in a detention policy that many in the State Department believed was doing tremendous harm to the United States.

Others have proposed new diplomatic initiatives toward North Korea and the Middle East, and one went as far as to call for a reconsideration of the phrase “war on terror” because it alienated many Muslims — an idea that quickly fizzled after opposition from the White House.

Such ideas would have found a more natural home under President George H. W. Bush, for whom Mr. Zelikow and Ms. Rice worked on the staff of the National Security Council. They reflect a sense that American influence is perishable, and can be damaged by overreaching, as allies and other partners react against decisions made in Washington. They form a kind of foreign policy realism that was eclipsed in Mr. Bush’s first term, in favor of a more ideological, unilateral ethos, but that has made something of a comeback in his second term.

Whether Mr. Zelikow, 52, is giving voice to Ms. Rice’s private views, or simply serving as an in-house contrarian, remains unclear. Some of his ideas have become policy: he had called for the closure of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency a year before the Supreme Court decision that prodded the Bush administration to empty them.

The United States offered North Korea a chance to negotiate a permanent peace treaty, per Mr. Zelikow’s advice, and he, along with Ms. Rice, was one of the backers of the Iran initiative, in which President Bush offered to reverse three decades of American policy against direct talks with Tehran if Iran suspended its uranium enrichment.

Neither North Korea nor Iran has bitten on the initiatives, but America’s allies have applauded them. Mr. Zelikow’s assessments of the Iraq war, first disclosed in Bob Woodward’s book “State of Denial,” were presented to Ms. Rice in 2005.

Ms. Rice keeps Mr. Zelikow close at hand, and the fact that his memorandums have surfaced in recent books and news articles suggests, at a minimum, that he and his allies are aggressively lobbying for his ideas. Mr. Zelikow (pronounced ZELL-i-ko) is being talked about inside the State Department as an outside shot for the vacant job of deputy secretary of state, but some believe that his management style is too combative for the job....

Posted on Saturday, October 28, 2006 at 2:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, October 27, 2006

Herbert Aptheker and African American History

Source: Mark Solomon at the website of Portside (10-22-06)

[Mark Solomon is Emeritus Professor of History at Simmons College.]

HNN Editor's Note: After Mr. Solomon posted the statement reprinted below at Portside's website, Jesse Lemisch submitted the following note to Portside on 10/22 (where it has not been posted):

In his comment on Portside 10/22/06, Mark Solomon selectively omits words surrounding those that he quotes from my "About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations," History News Network, 10/4/06, and thus precisely reverses what I said. Solomon writes: Lemisch urges the search for a connection between molestation and Aptheker's writings in African American history and other areas: "I continue to wish for discussion on how the attitudes expressed in Herbert's awful acts might have been reflected in books like the centrally important American Negro Slave Revolts and or the truly terrible The Truth About Hungary." In a note to Phelps, Lemisch returns to that point: "I am interested in seeing what connections people might be able to sketch in. There might be some."
What I said, quoted below, is the reverse of what Solomon has me saying: "I continue to wish for discussion as to how the attititudes expressed in Herbert's awful acts might have been reflected in books like the centrally important American Negro Slave Revolts and/or the truly terrible The Truth about Hungary. I CAN'T SEE IT, but discussion may bring out some continuity. I think Chris[topher Phelps] implies but DOES NOT SHOW A CONNECTION ... Without positing a major disconnect between the personal and the public, I CAN'T SEE HOW THESE REVELATIONS of despicable sexual behavior make American Negro Slave Revolts or the horrifying Truth about Hungary any more true or false. But I am interested in what connections people might be able to sketch in. There might be some." (EMPHASIS ADDED)
In other words, Solomon has turned my expression of disagreement with the idea of a connection upside down, and made it into concurrence with the idea. Quite a feat! Nonetheless, it's too bad that the discussion I invited doesn't seem to be taking place.

If one discusses Herbert Aptheker's work in African American history in the midst of controversy over Bettina Aptheker's assertion that her prominent father molested her as a child, one is left open to the charge of unjustly changing the subject from the deadly serious issues of repressive patriarchy and sexual predation.

However, Aptheker's writing in Black history was first raised by Bettina in her book, "Intimate Politics," in Christopher Phelps' review of the book in the Chronicle of Higher Education and in Jesse Lemisch's comment on Phelps' review on the History News Network website. Phelps wrote:

"Aptheker ... adamantly denied the possibility of 'objective' history. 'It is intense partisanship on the side of the exploited and therefore on the side of justice,' he once wrote, 'that makes possible the grasping of truth.'

"Perhaps only a daughter who internalized that norm could so piercingly identify its author's faults -- and I do not primarily mean his abuse of her.

"The psychological scars left by her father's violations lent Bettina Aptheker an acute understanding of the traumatic consequences of oppression, allowing her to intuit that the history of black Americans was far more complex than Herbert allowed for in his interpretations.

"She writes that her father tended in his public talks to portray the history of blacks one of 'undaunted heroism.' She reflects on 'how foolish and condescending' that was 'without meaning to be' when viewed from the 'interior' reality of black experience, where weakness and betrayal are just as common."

Lemisch urges the search for a connection between molestation and Aptheker's writings in African American history and other areas: "I continue to wish for discussion on how the attitudes expressed in Herbert's awful acts might have been reflected in books like the centrally important American Negro Slave Revolts and or the truly terrible The Truth About Hungary." In a note to Phelps, Lemisch returns to that point: "I am interested in seeing what connections people might be able to sketch in. There might be some." (In a panel discussion with Eric Foner and Manning Marable on October 30, 1996, Lemisch praised Aptheker and his influence on Lemisch's own work, singling out American Negro Slave Revolts for its exploration of an "alternate moral code" in the individual acts of slave resistors.)

Bettina Aptheker's thoughts about her father's historical writing constitute only two paragraphs in a 545-page memoir. Focusing on those brief comments, Phelps however did not quote Bettina's important qualification: "He [Herbert Aptheker] accurately reported betrayals in his writings, for example, in slave revolts, but in lectures he represented the history as one of undaunted heroism."

Some years ago, in a conversation with Herbert Aptheker, he voiced an awareness of pathologies and scars in African American life. His historical labors accounted for the savage nature of white supremacy and the inevitable physical and psychic damage it inflicts on the oppressed. He noted that both scholarly work and popular culture were rife with characterizations (themselves manifesting racism) of social pathologies but sorely lacking was the record of black resistance, social survival and the building of a powerful institutional life in the face of remorseless racism. His scholarly work was dedicated to baring that history. Given the essentially educative character of lectures compared to exhaustively documented writings, it is not surprising that Aptheker sought to stir his live audiences to the richness of African American resistance.

In the mid-1930s Aptheker began his exploration of African American history. Acknowledging his debt to the Black scholars who preceded him, Aptheker, working without academic appointments, research assistants, computerized data, or fulsome grants, nevertheless produced a massive body of work in that history. John Hope Franklin, the dean of African American historians, said Aptheker's studies "made it more and more difficult to neglect the history of the Negro in America."

It's important to note the scholarly environment when Aptheker began his work. Dominating the field of history were open apologetics for slavery wherein slaves were considered innately inferior, invisible or marginal or endowed with childlike dependence -- characterizations often extended to Blacks in general. (Even into the early 1950s, Morison's and Commager's widely used standard US history textbook, The Growth of the American Republic, characterized slaves as happy and indolent.)

In those early years, Aptheker challenged openly racist schools of history as well as sentimental, liberal interpretations of African American life and race relations such as Gunnar Myrdal's contention that "The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American." That view ascribed no important role to Blacks in struggling for their own liberation. For Aptheker, the oppression of African Americans was rooted in concrete relationships based upon economic and political power; it had to be fought not in the subjective and inert realm of sentiment, but in the economic and political arena.

That arena constituted the framework for Aptheker's M.A. thesis (completed in 1937) on Nat Turner's Rebellion. Basing his analysis of the Turner uprising upon study of economic and social conditions in rural Virginia in the early 1830s and on close reading of the testimony of white Southerners, Aptheker concluded that Turner, in the midst of deteriorating economic circumstances, was motivated by nothing less than a willingness to die for the liberation of his people. He and his followers were not "deluded wretches and monsters...but rather ... further examples of the...endless roll of human beings willing to resort to open struggle to get something precious to them -- peace, prosperity, liberty, or in a word, a greater amount of happiness."

American Negro Slave Revolts was published in 1943 while Aptheker was on the battlefields of Europe. In that pioneering study of slave plots and rebellions there was neither the need nor the compulsion to exaggerate or mythologize. Rumors (false or real), unrest, plots (thwarted or consummated) and actual uprisings were accurately defined, labeled and differentiated; distinctions between conspiracies hatched in the minds of planters and actual rebellions were sharply drawn. John Hope Franklin, in a Harvard University address in 1965, vigorously rebutted an assertion from the audience that Aptheker overstated claims of rebellion, noting that Slave Revolts carefully drew distinctions between rumors, plots and uprisings.

At the same time, Aptheker noted that Southern legal, social, theological, political and cultural life was molded to undermine the "restlessness, discontent, and rebelliousness" of slaves. In addition to psychological debasement, the legal and political structure forbade slaves to read and write, to possess weapons, to testify against whites in courts, to resist the commands of white masters. Traitors and spies were cultivated; overseers, militiamen, guards, bounty hunters, posses and federal troops were all mustered to staunch plots and rebellions, real and imagined, that underlay Southern life.

The book's recapitulation of the consequences of slave transgression, real or imagined -- bleeding backs, cropped ears and the lyncher's rope -- raised a broader concern with the threat to the democratic rights of all should the physical reach and political influence of chattel slavery grow. American Negro Slave Revolts fashioned a portrait of slave plots and rebellions on a broad canvas -- linking the struggle to end slavery with realization of the nation's democratic promise.

Aptheker's historical research was largely devoted to rediscovering the exterior lives of African Americans in engagement and struggle with the nation's racist structures. (It has been alleged that Aptheker was deficient in understanding the interior lives of Blacks. But that provokes a question: how many white persons in this society, rent by pervasive social and cultural apartheid, can claim an understanding of those lives?) The capstone of Aptheker's efforts to render the voices and contributions of African Americans is his monumental multi-volume Documentary History of the Negro People. His aim was to rediscover those voices that bore witness to the falsehoods of those who would denigrate or ignore their roles in the historical panorama. Those who had been reviled or silenced reappeared: Black soldiers who bled and died in shocking numbers on Civil War battlefields, scores of petitioners who sought to end their enslavement, conductors on the Underground Railroad and many more represented in a collection of thousands of letters, speeches, articles and reports.

Professor John Bracey, at a historians' meeting, recalled the excitement among students at Howard University in the turbulent sixties when they first encountered the Documentary History. They found in the first volume the intellectual and emotional bloodlines that quickened their self-awareness and helped forge a bond with past generations. When they went into battle against Jim Crow in Washington, DC, they carried what they called "The Documents" to confirm and fortify the vast change in consciousness taking place within them and within society.

A final point: the urgent battle against sexual abuse is sullied and damaged when it is used, intentionally or not, to open a back door to discredited characterizations of the African American experience, to settle old political scores, to resurrect red- baiting, to present distorted and one sided characterizations of the record of the left (especially the Communist-led left) on gender and women's liberation -- all of which have appeared in various venues where Bettina Aptheker's memoir has been discussed. Patriarchy and sexual molestation are among the most important and lethal issues facing this society. They must be confronted clearly and without distraction, with courage, honesty and a determination to eliminate them. These efforts are inseparable aspects of the fight to free all human beings from every form of oppression.

Posted on Friday, October 27, 2006 at 6:31 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Lawrence Levine, esteemed history scholar, dies at age 73

Source: Press Release -- Berkeley (10-26-06)

Lawrence W. Levine, a highly influential history professor for more than three decades at the University of California, Berkeley, died on Monday (Oct. 23) of cancer at his home in Berkeley. He was 73.

Through his writings and teaching, colleagues said, Levine helped transform cultural history in the United States into a vibrant and accessible field of study. A champion of multiculturalism, Levine won a MacArthur "genius" fellowship in 1983 for his intellectual curiosity and scholarship.

In "Black Culture and Black Consciousness" (1977), Levine's best known work, he made use of the oral expressive tradition of African Americans to examine how they perceived themselves, their position in American society, and their relations with whites.

According to UC Berkeley history professors Leon Litwack and Waldo Martin, the book was a pathbreaking study of folk thought and culture that exerted an extraordinary influence on several generations of scholars - not only historians, but anthropologists, folklorists, musicologists, sociologists, and students of American and African American culture.

Historian Shane White, a professor in Australia at the University of Sydney, where Levine once taught as a visiting professor, added that Levine was "one of the best historians writing in the second half of the 20th century. His pioneering explorations of the American past made possible the current explosion in the popularity of cultural history."

Levine's 1988 book "Highbrow/Lowbrow" and the 1993 book "The Unpredictable Past" demonstrated not only the varieties of historical consciousness and documentation, but the interplay of American thought and behavior in folk and popular culture. And "The Opening of the American Mind," a 1996 book, was a spirited defense of multiculturalism and a powerful critique of conservative critics of modern American culture.

In a 1996 interview with The New York Times, Levine said that in "The Opening of the American Mind," he tried to show "that the genius of America has been its ability to renew its essential spirit by admitting a constant infusion of different people who demand that the ideals and principles embodied in the Constitution be put into practice. The result has been to open America to great diversity..."

UC Berkeley's Martin said Levine "was a great historian who revolutionized American cultural history. He also was a great friend."

Said Lily Wong Fillmore, a professor emerita in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, "He educated all of us about American cultural history, and he taught me the meaning of the expression 'mensch' - he was truly a person of integrity, good humor and honor."

Fillmore and Levine were on a committee in the 1980s that developed a campus requirement that all new undergraduates take a class on America's complex racial and ethnic past and present.

Levine was born on Feb. 27, 1933, and raised in New York City He received his bachelor's degree in 1955 in history from the City University of New York and his master's and doctorate degrees in history from Columbia University in 1957 and 1962, respectively.

He told The New York Times that before going on to graduate school, his history teachings had been limited. He said he knew "very little about the majority of the people in the world. We studied Northern and Western Europe. Nothing in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Even Canada was a great blank. My own father was an immigrant from Lithuania, and my grandparents were from Odessa, but we talked only about Northern and Western Europe. There's something wrong with that."

Levine joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1962, retiring in 1994 as the Margaret Byrne Professor of History. Also in 1994, he was appointed professor of history and cultural studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va.

While on the UC Berkeley faculty in the 1960s, Levine immersed himself in the political life of the campus, participating in sit-in demonstrations by the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the nation's oldest civil rights groups, to force stores to hire black people. He also joined other historians who marched in Alabama from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.

During the Free Speech upheaval at UC Berkeley, he came to the defense of students protesting a ban on political activity on campus, activity in support of the civil rights movement.

In the late 1980s, Levine was a member of the campus Academic Senate's Special Committee on Education and Ethnicity, which developed UC Berkeley's American Cultures Breadth Requirement, first launched in 1991.

The innovative move, which made national headlines, resulted from complaints at the time by students who felt their history wasn't being taught on a campus that was rapidly changing in its ethnic and racial composition. The curricular change became a successful part of the UC Berkeley experience and attracted the attention of educators elsewhere.

Fillmore, who also is UC Berkeley's Jerome A. Hutto Professor of Education emerita, said Levine's contribution to the committee was "crucial: He was a moderating force, reminding the committee about the necessity to be inclusive and interdisciplinary, if the proposal had any chance of winning the support of the Senate faculty. The committee had faculty and student members, and Larry Levine made sure that students' voices were heard and included in the design of the proposal."

Litwack, a close friend of Levine's, said "few individuals I have known in this profession or out of it have been as important to me: as committed, as insightful, as creative, as imaginative, as challenging, as intellectually engaged, as stimulating, as provocative, as tough-minded, as open to new ideas and experiences. He will always be with me in my work and thoughts."

During his 32 years on the faculty, Levine received many honors. Following the MacArthur award, he was elected in 1985 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. And in 1994, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow.

From 1992-93, he served as president of the Organization of American Historians, and he received the 2005 American Historian Association's Award for Scholarly Distinction.

Levine is survived by his wife, Cornelia; stepson, Alexander Pimentel of Richmond; sons, Joshua and Isaac of Berkeley; sister, Linda Brown of New York City; and three grandchildren, Stephanie and Benjamin Pimentel, and Jonah Levine.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to the American Cancer Society. A memorial service is pending.

Related Links

NYT Obituary

Posted on Friday, October 27, 2006 at 3:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Middle East Studies profs criticized at Madison for failing to block appearance by 9/11 conspiracy "fruitcake"

Source: David White in Campus Watch (10-27-06)

[David White is a writer in Washington, D.C.]

Earlier this month, the folklore department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison sponsored an event billed as "9/11: Folklore and Fact."

Held in the university's social sciences building, two leaders in what is known as the "9/11 Truth"—Kevin Barrett and James Fetzer—came to discuss their notion that 9/11 resulted not from the actions of al Qaeda, but from a Bush Administration conspiracy. As Barrett has claimed on many occasions, he doesn't "believe, but knows that 9/11 was an inside job."

Considering this event was sponsored and hosted by an institution that is funded by taxpayer dollars, the residents of Wisconsin have plenty to be angry about. But the story gets worse, for Barrett teaches a class on introductory Islam at the university. His continued presence at Madison illustrates the tendency of contemporary academe to protect its own, standards be damned.

For despite his crack-pot views, Barrett enjoys the full backing of the university's top administrators and his department colleagues. Indeed, it's likely he enjoys more support than if he held mainstream views. Earlier this year, after questions were raised, a panel consisting of the university's provost, the dean of the College of Letters and Science, and the chair of the department of languages and cultures of Asia pronounced Barrett fit for the classroom. As Provost Patrick Farrell explained to Madison's NBC affiliate, "He's welcome to his political opinions."

Calling Barrett's conspiracism a "political opinion" allows Farrell and Barrett's other supporters to depict the controversy as a matter of free speech, as if to demarcate his personal opinions from his professional knowledge. University administrators can thereby simultaneously disdain Barrett's views and defend his employment.

Although few professors agree with Barrett's "inside job" conspiracy theory, nearly all considered it extremely important to stand by his appointment while being interviewed for this piece. Their reasoning breaks down roughly into three camps:
The first rejects any judgment of professorial speech. Harold Scheub, Barrett's dissertation adviser in African languages and literature, argued that, "A university is a place for ideas, and when the question of speech and academic freedom becomes relevant, it's not with the normal, generally-accepted ideas, because these are seldom called into question. It's when you go to boundary issues and have ideas about them. That's when—as you can see—people start getting very nervous and upset. And if you start putting barriers and building boundaries around ideas, I don't know where that stops."

Islamic studies professor Muhammad Memon—whose sabbatical precipitated Barrett's hiring—asserted that, "we're wasting our time, resources, money, energy on issues which really are not that important, and least important in a country which prides itself on freedom of thought and freedom of expression."

A second group sees the issue in terms of autonomy for the university—something all the more pertinent given that the University of Wisconsin is based in the state's capital of Madison: "We all look at this case and we wonder what's happened to the University of Wisconsin," explained a humanities professor, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But on the other hand, we're really concerned about pressure from the state legislature. Once they get their foot in that door, how we're going to extract it I have no idea. I don't know if I'd say we stand by the guy, but we stand by the process."

A third group combines both these arguments. Surprisingly, it includes Donald Downs, president of UW-Madison's Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights—an organization that exists to confront political correctness on campus:

"I totally reject what Barrett stands for, and I haven't met any faculty here that agree with him in any way, but that is his belief," said Downs in a phone interview. "And sure, it's awful. It's immoral. And the outrage is certainly understandable. But Barrett has already gotten the contract to be a lecturer, so the question is whether or not he'll be able to teach the class in a responsible way. And the evidence suggests that that is the case."

"And the other issue," Downs added, "is the political pressure: the legislature dictating to us that you've got to fire this guy or proceed 'at your own peril.' That raises a host of other kinds of questions. It doesn't mean that you don't fire the guy simply because you resist the legislature, but you should be very careful."

Because of these sentiments, eight other members of the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights joined Downs in publicly supporting the university in mid-July.

But there were dissenters, led by Marshall Onellion, another member of the committee who's currently finishing a book on ideology.

"In almost any other discipline," Onellion explained in an interview. "They'd regard the guy as a fruitcake. So when Donald asked the group for our thoughts, I said 'No way.' The reason for me is that I simply don't believe that he could possibly be able to teach a course on Islam in an objective fashion," Onellion continued. "It has nothing to do with his intellect; it's his passion. Any person who sincerely believes that the U.S. government plotted September 11 is entitled to his beliefs, but he's not entitled to pretend to possess an objectivity that he clearly doesn't have. Just as I wouldn't hire a Holocaust denier to teach a course on twentieth century European history, I wouldn't hire Barrett to teach a course on Islam. They'd be incapable of objectively going through the events. The analogy is precise."

Expanding Onellion's analogy, can one imagine any university hiring a professor of modern European history who denied the Holocaust or who taught that the French Revolution resulted from schemes hatched by Freemasons? One would hope that certain ways of thinking are too extreme even in today's rudderless university.

But that is not the case. Barrett benefits from the strength of the modern professoriate. Administrators don't so much lead faculties as appease them, the better to maintain their friendships and lucrative jobs (ask Larry Summers). Such faculty strength can lead to particularly noxious results in the field of Middle East studies, which is among the most radicalized in academe. In this context, what a fool believes is less important than where he believes it.

Posted on Friday, October 27, 2006 at 3:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Alfred Chandler, Jr.: The new capitalism

Source: Robert J. Samuelson in Newsweek (10-30-06)

When he died in 1848, John Jacob Astor was America's richest man, leaving a fortune of $20 million that had been earned mainly from real estate and fur trading. Despite his riches, Astor's business was mainly a one-man show. He employed only a handful of workers, most of them clerks. This was typical of his time, when the farmer, the craftsman, the small partnership and the independent merchant ruled the economy. Only fifty years later, almost everything had changed. Giant industrial enterprises—making steel, producing oil, refining sugar and much more—had come to dominate.

The rise of big business is one of the seminal events in American history, and if you want to think about it intelligently, you consult historian Alfred D. Chandler Jr., its pre-eminent chronicler. At 88, Chandler has retired from the Harvard Business School but is still churning out books and articles. It is an apt moment to revisit his ideas because the present upheavals in business are second only to those of a century ago.

Until Chandler, the emergence of big business was all about titans. The Rockefellers, Carnegies and Fords were either "robber barons" whose greed and ruthlessness allowed them to smother competitors and establish monopolistic empires. Or they were "captains of industry" whose genius and ambition laid the industrial foundations for modern prosperity. But when Chandler meticulously examined business records, he uncovered a more subtle story. New technologies (the railroad, telegraph and steam power) favored the creation of massive businesses that needed—and, in turn, gave rise to—superstructures of professional managers: engineers, accountants and supervisors....

The rise of big business involved more than tycoons. Its central feature was actually the creation of professional managers. Like many great truths, this one seems obvious after someone has pointed it out.

The trouble now is that the defining characteristics of Chandler's successful firms have changed. For example, many were "vertically integrated"—they controlled raw materials, manufactured products and sold to the public. AT&T made electronic components, produced telecommunications equipment and sold phone services. But in many new industries, vertical integration has virtually vanished, as economists Naomi Lamoreaux of UCLA, Peter Temin of MIT and Daniel Raff of the University of Pennsylvania argue in a recent study. The computer industry is hugely splintered. Some firms sell components (Intel, AMD); some, software (Microsoft, SAP); some, services (IBM, EDS); some, hardware (Dell, Apple). There's overlap, but not much....

Just as John Jacob Astor defined a distinct stage of capitalism, we may now be at the end of what Chandler perceptively called "managerial capitalism." Managers, of course, won't disappear. But the new opportunities and pressures on them and their companies may have altered the way the system operates. Chandler admits as much. Asked about how the corporation might evolve, he confesses ignorance: "All I know is that the commercializing of the Internet is transforming the world." To fill that void, someone must do for capitalism's next stage what Chandler did for the last.

Posted on Friday, October 27, 2006 at 2:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, October 26, 2006

McGuire Gibson et al.: Letter demanding Iraqi authorities protect history

Source: Iraqi Crisis (letter sent Sept. 23, 2006) (10-26-06)

H. E. Jalal Talabani, President of Iraq
H. E. Nouri Kamel al-Maliki, Prime Minister of Iraq
H. E. Hoshyar Zebari, Minister of Foreign Affairs
H. E. Dr. Asaad Al-Hashimi, Minister of Culture
Mufid Mohammad Jawad al-Jazairi, Chair of Cultural Committee, Iraqi Parliament
Maysoon al-Damluji, Member of the Iraqi Parliament

Your Excellencies:

We, the undersigned, would like to express our concern for the present and future state of antiquities and cultural heritage in Iraq. As individuals who have done research for years in Iraq, who have taught its great history and culture, and who have made great efforts to call attention to the potential and real damage to Iraq's cultural heritage due to war and its aftermath, we ask you to ensure the safety of the museums, archaeological sites, and standing monuments in the entire country.

Most immediately we ask that the holdings of the Iraq National Museum be kept safeguarded and intact as one collection rather than subdivided. We also ask that the Antiquities Guards, who have been recruited and trained to protect the ancient sites in the countryside, be kept as a force, meaning that they continue to be paid and equipped and their numbers increased. This force is the key to halting the illegal digging of sites and damaging of monuments that has been occurring since April 2003. We furthermore ask that Iraq’s cultural heritage be treated as part of the rich culture of the Iraqi people, to be preserved for present and future generations. Therefore we ask that cultural heritage either be independent or that it be administered by the Ministry of Culture, which in the past has made preservation and interpretation its highest priorities, implemented by a professional, unified State Board of Antiquities and Heritage. Antiquities and heritage are so important to Iraq that it would be justifiable to make the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage into a new ministry or to connect that Board directly to the cabinet general secretariat, as has been done with the Iraqi Academy of Sciences.

Iraq's cultural heritage is an unparalleled one, and as the tradition from which many other civilizations are derived, it is of great concern to all peoples in the world. It is too important a heritage to be sub-divided and should remain under a national administration. The State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, as part of the Ministry of Culture, has had a record of good administration, and it has been in the past the best Antiquities organization in the Middle East. For years, with its strong Antiquities Law, that made all antiquities and antiquities sites the property of the state, Iraq protected its antiquities sites better than most countries in the world, and it should rise to that level once again.

All persons who work in Antiquities should be above politics and allegiance to any party, and definitely should have no connection to the antiquities trade. Too much of the ancient treasures of Iraq have already been lost through looting and smuggling, and the damage done especially to the great cities of Sumer and Babylonia has been very extensive. Only a strong, national, non- political State Board of Antiquities and Heritage, backed fully by the force of the state, can preserve the heritage that is left.

You are in positions to save the Cultural Heritage of Iraq for everyone, and we hope that you will act to do so.

Sincerely yours,

Prof. McGuire Gibson, President, The American Academic Research Institute in Iraq
Prof. Robert McC. Adams, Secretary Emeritus, Smithsonian Institution
Dr. Lamia Algailani, Hon. Research Fellow, University College London
Prof. Kenneth Ames, President, Society for American Archaeology
Prof. Harriet Crawford, Chair, British School of Archaeology in Iraq
Prof. Leon DeMeyer, Rector Emeritus, University of Ghent, Belgium
Prof. Patty Gerstenblith, President, Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage
Preservation
Dr. Cindy Ho, President, SAFE/Saving Antiquities for Everyone
Prof. Antonio Invernizzi, Scientific Director, Centro Recirche archeologiche é Scavi di
Torino per il Medio Oriente é l’Asia.
Dr. Michael Müller-Karpe, Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Mainz, Germany
Dr. Hans J. Nissen, Professor emeritus of Near Eastern Archaeology, The Free
University of Berlin, Germany
Dr. Roberto Parapetti, Director of the Iraqi-Italian Centre for the Restoration of Monuments
Prof. Ingolf Thuesen, Director, Carsten Niebuhr Institute, University of Copenhagen
Prof. Jane Waldbaum, President, Archaeological Institute of America

cc Samir Sumaidaie, Ambassador to the United States, Embassy of the Republic of Iraq
cc. Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq
cc Kofi Annan, Secretary General, United Nations
cc Koïchiro Matsuura, Director General, UNESCO
cc Mounir Bouchenaki, Director General, ICCROM
cc Michael Petzet, President, ICOMOS
cc C. David Welch, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, Department of State.
cc R. Nicholas Burns, Under Secretary, Political Affairs, Department of State
cc. Alberto M. Fernandez, Director, Press and Public Diplomacy, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs,
Dept. of State

Posted on Thursday, October 26, 2006 at 4:02 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Keith David Watenpaugh: The Middle East's overlooked middle class

Source: Keli Senkevich in the California Aggie (10-26-06)

... In his latest book, Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Class, religious studies professor Keith David Watenpaugh explores the rise and formation of this Arab middle class and its relationship to modernity during the period from 1908 to 1946.

The role of the middle class in the Middle East is a new and relatively untouched field of study, and academics recognize Watenpaugh's research as an innovative contribution to the study of the region.

Watenpaugh said historians have traditionally attributed the rise of the Arab middle class to a transformation led from the top down. However, as he illustrates in his book, this was not the case.

"The middle class was deeply influenced by a desire to change its own society and making its society modern," he said.

Being Modern in the Middle East emerged from Watenpaugh's doctoral dissertation at UCLA, and he said it took its current shape back in 2000.

Watenpaugh traveled to Turkey, Syria, London and France, where he consulted a number of sources, gathering research from various archives and cultural artifacts like newspapers and pamphlets, items he said were not "intended to be permanent."

In one section of his book discussing the history of the Baden-Powell Scout movement in the Middle East, an international organization similar to the Boy Scouts of America, Watenpaugh had the rare opportunity to construct an oral history of this movement with several of its former living participants, which he notes is not something historians get to do very often.

Overall, Watenpaugh said his book is a "point of departure where neither the middle class nor modernity is generally recognized by the West in the Middle East."

Such discussions of the middle class have been absent from historical writings, he said, because there is something more exotic about focusing on the differences between the West and the Middle East, rather than on their similarities.

"We're mostly middle class, and we don't find ourselves particularly interesting," Watenpaugh said. "We focus on the exotic rather than the commonplace."

For Watenpaugh, the Middle East became a region of interest after spending his junior year of college abroad in Cairo, Egypt. Following his stay there, he lived and conducted research in Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq.

Watenpaugh is one of few scholars to have visited Iraq in 2003 after the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of the country, and though he said he was still able to safely roam about in public then, he describes the current situation as bleak.

"As bad as things are, I have no doubt they're going to get worse," he said. Watenpaugh taught a class this summer on the historical, cultural and ethical components of the ongoing Iraqi civil unrest and violence.

He plans to write a social and cultural history of Iraq, which he said he aims to complete somewhere between 2010 and 2015.
...

Posted on Thursday, October 26, 2006 at 3:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Dutch historians come up with 50 icons to represent 3,000 years of history

Source: Dutch News (10-17-06)

Historians have come up with a checklist of 50 icons or windows to illustrate 3,000 years of Dutch history. Ranging from the megalithic tombs in Drenthe (hunebeds) to the euro, the aim of the Canon van Nederland is to outline what important elements in the development of the Netherlands could be taught at both a primary and secondary level.

The list takes the form of a flow chart through time and includes the first example of written Dutch, the Beemster polder and the Groningen natural gas fields, as well as events which shaped world history, such as the invention of printing and the two World Wars. At a time when the Dutch are trying to get to grips with their own identity, an understanding of Dutch history can help newcomers integrate into society, the commission which drew up the list said. But the list was in no way to be used to choose or create a national identity. That would be a ‘threatening, yes dangerous’ thought. ‘It is meant to help exchange ideas. It is for all the Dutch,’ said professor Frits van Oostrum who led the commission.

Megalithic tombs circa 3000 BC
Early farmers

The Roman Limes 47 A.D.-circa 400 A.D.
On the frontiers of the Roman world

Willibrord 658 A.D.-739 A.D.
The spread of Christianity

Charlemagne 742 A.D. – 814 A.D.
Emperor of the Land of the Setting Sun

Hebban olla vogala circa 1100
The Dutch language in writing

Floris V 1254-1296
A Dutch count and disgruntled nobles

The Hanseatic League 1356-circa 1450
Trading towns in the Low Countries

The printing press circa 1450
A revolution in reproduction

Erasmus 1466?-1536
An international humanist

Charles V 1500-1558
The Low Countries as an administrative unity

The “Beeldenstorm” (iconoclastic outbreak) 1566
Religious conflict

William of Orange 1533-1584
From rebel nobleman to “father of the country”

The Republic 1588-1795
A unique political phenomenon

The Dutch East India Company (VOC) 1602-1799
Overseas expansion

The Beemster Polder 1612
The Netherlands and water

The canal ring 1613-1662
Urban development in the seventeenth century

Hugo Grotius 1583-1645
Pioneer of modern international law

The Statenbijbel (authorised version of the Bible) 1637
The Book of Books

Rembrandt 1606?-1669
The great painters

Blaeu’s Atlas Major 1662
Mapping the world

Michiel de Ruyter 1607-1676
Heroes of the sea and the wide reach of the Republic

Spinoza 1632-1677
In search of truth

Slavery circa 1637-1863
Human trafficking and forced labour in the New World

Country mansions 17th and 18th centuries
Prosperous living

Eise Eisinga 1744-1828
The Enlightenment in the Netherlands

The patriots 1780-1795
Political conflict about modernising the Republic

Napoleon Bonaparte 1769-1821
The French period

King William I 1772-1843
The kingdom of the Netherlands and Belgium

The first railway 1839
Acceleration

The Constitution 1848
Fundamental rules and principles of government

Max Havelaar 1860
Scandal in the East Indies

Opposition to child labour 19th century
Out of the workplace and back to school

Vincent van Gogh 1853-1890
The modern artist

Aletta Jacobs 1854-1929
The emancipation of women

The First World War 1914-1918
War and neutrality

De Stijl 1917-1931
Revolution in design

The crisis years 1929-1940
Society in the depression

World War II 1940-1945
Occupation and liberation

Anne Frank 1929-1945
The persecution of the Jews

Indonesia 1945-1949
A colony fights for freedom

Willem Drees 1886-1988
The welfare state

The great flood 1 February 1953
The danger of water

Television since 1948
The rise of mass media

The port of Rotterdam since circa 1880
Gateway to the world

Annie M.G. Schmidt 1911-1995
Going against the grain of a bourgeois country

Surinam and the Netherlands Antilles since 1945
Decolonisation in the West

Srebrenica 1995
The dilemmas of peacekeeping

Diversity in the Netherlands since 1945
The multicultural society

The natural gas deposit 1959-2030?
A finite treasure

Europe since 1945
The Dutch and Europeans

For further information see www.entoen.nu

Posted on Thursday, October 26, 2006 at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Historians sign letter protesting exclusion of Tony Judt

Source: NY Review of Books (11-16-06)

A letter protesting the cancellation of a talk by Tony Judt to the Polish Consulate has been signed by more than a hundred people including:

Peter Beinart, Thomas Bender, Ian Buruma, Lizbeth Cohen, Franklin Foer, Timothy Garton Ash, Todd Gitlin, Michael Kazin, Richard Sennett, Jim Sleeper, Fritz Stern, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Tomasky, Leon Wieseltier, Alan Wolfe, and Marilyn Young.

Posted on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 at 10:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Carlos Eire: Yale professor/Cuban exile to kick off Salt Lake book festival

Source: Deseret News (10-22-06)

Carlos Eire is really two people — one is an erudite professor of history and religion at Yale University, who teaches classes and writes scholarly books, and the other is a Cuban exile of 47 years ago.

This second Eire is a man with strong emotions, and he is responsible for writing "Waiting for Snow in Havana" three years ago, the story of Eire's childhood in Cuba and his escape to the United States at the age of 11.

Eire, who said he loves both personae, wanted to title the memoir "Kiss the Lizard, Jesus," but his publisher rejected the title, calling it "off-putting and disgusting."

"But the lizards stand for many things," Eire said by phone from his Yale office in New Haven, Conn. "I still have a fear of reptiles. I found a snake in my basement two weeks ago and I thought I was going to die! I just have an irrational loathing of these creatures.

"Actually, they're good creatures who eat bugs and vermin. I did cruel things to them as a child. Life is filled with things like that (lizards) that we think are bad. Death is a lizard, but we learn to live with it."

Eire's lecture in Salt Lake City will deal with death in 16th-century Spain, the subject of his scholarly research. "As a small child, I had a preoccupation with death, so it was inevitable that as a professional historian I would study the subject."

His research in Spain demonstrated that "a belief in the afterlife was very real. ... Death is the ultimate inconvenience, something no one escapes. Yet we're hard-wired as human beings not to be able to look at it for very long. We know it's there. Some, like morticians and doctors, have a switch they use to turn it off when they go home."

But Eire asserted that "Death is the main reason humans believe in religion. The ultimate paradox of religion is that we can't prove there is an afterlife. It's very hard for most of us to imagine not existing. There's also a genetic component, as demonstrated in the book 'The God Gene: How Faith is Hard-Wired in our Genes' by Gene Hamer."

Posted on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 at 10:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Linda Borish: Historian's research on female Jewish athletes turned into documentary

Source: WMU News (Western Michigan U.) (10-17-06)

KALAMAZOO--A documentary film with Western Michigan University history professor Dr. Linda Borish serving as executive producer and historian had its premiere in early October.

Borish, professor of history and gender/women's studies, shares her expertise and research on American women's sport history in this first-ever film about Jewish women in American sport from the 1880s through the 20th century.

"Jewish Women in American Sport: Settlement Houses to the Olympics" is being presented by Maccabi USA/Sports for Israel and was screened Oct. 3 at the Cherry Hill, N.J., Jewish Community Center and Oct. 5 at the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and Museum in Commack, N.Y. Borish is on the hall of fame's advisory committee and a research associate of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Brandeis University.

The film has been in the works since spring 2003 when Borish teamed up with well-known Israeli and Chicago-based filmmaker Shuli Eshe, the film's director and producer, to develop and produce the documentary on the history of American Jewish women in sport based on Borish's original research.

Borish and Eshel used archival research, news footage, still images and interviews with athletes and historians to trace the early years of prominent American Jewish female athletes and sports administrators, culminating with the induction of the first class of women into the 2003 Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

The film examines such important Jewish sportswomen as Charlotte Epstein, recognized as the mother of women's competitive swimming, Senda Berenson, who studied the teachings of Dr. John Naismith in the 1890s to develop the first rules for women's basketball, and 1932 Olympic track and field champion Lillian Copeland. Current athletes also are highlighted, including LPGA professional Amy Alcott, Olympic gold medal skating champion Sarah Hughes, and ESPN sportscaster Linda Cohen....

Posted on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 at 10:19 PM | Comments (0) | Top

SIMON Schama: Wants to change the way art history is done on TV

Source: Susan Mansfield in scotsman.com (10-20-06)

SIMON Schama breaks off a conversation about his new TV series to talk about kippers. "Scotland has almost all my favourite foods in the world. I'm so glad I don't live here because I would be incredibly fat. I'd eat four kippers for breakfast, and I'd eat shortbread every day all day long. And I'd drink vast amounts of whisky."

Then, I suggest, he begins to see why we Scots are dropping like flies from diet-related illnesses? "Yeah, but I hope you die happy!" he chuckles, his mouth full of shortbread crumbs.

And I begin to see why people like Schama. It's not so much the mercurial intellect, or even his passion to communicate it, it's the fact that the BBC's face of history wears red suede shoes and wants four kippers for breakfast. He laughs a lot, often at himself, loves recalling his TV slip-ups. "Someone has actually done a montage of Schama's worst moments on TV, you should see it, it's very funny."

He talks quickly, flamboyantly, breaking off and interjecting as new thoughts come crowding in. Nothing is merely "good" if it can be "really good" or even "extraordinary". He's easily bored and fidgets constantly, a coiled spring of energy. So much to do, his body language says as he re-crosses his legs for the 20th time, so little time.

Schama is 61, but became a household name just six years ago when his History of Britain was launched. "Life is short and getting ever shorter for me, and I'm in television to try to do something different each time. After I'd finished the History of Britain, everyone wanted me to do the history of something else - Belgium or Botswana or whatever. I wasn't going to do that.

" I wanted to do something different, both in terms of the storytelling, and in terms of the craft of television itself."

Which brings us to his new series, The Power of Art, which begins tonight on BBC2, an eight-part series that was two years in the making. Each programme features a great artist: Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko, captured at a moment of personal or professional crisis, a make-or-break period which in turn led to a great masterpiece.

Schama is typically ambitious. He wants to change the way art history is done on TV. "Too often it feels like being walked by the acoustic-guide along a wall of paintings. It feels very demure, and that's not what the greatest art is at all.

"If only you could free yourself from this approach, you could construct it as if you were writing a programme about a murder or a love affair, a war or a revolution."...

Posted on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

John V. Murra: 90, Professor Who Recast Image of Incas, Dies

Source: NYT (10-24-06)

John V. Murra, a professor of anthropology who culled voluminous Spanish colonial archives for research that reshaped the image of the Incas and their vast South American empire, died on Oct. 16 at his home in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by Blaine Friedlander, a spokesman for Cornell University, where Professor Murra taught from 1968 until his retirement in 1982.

“Before he came along, the image of the Incas was one of barbaric splendor,” said Frank Salomon, the John V. Murra professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But Professor Murra’s work “forged a radically new image” of that empire, Professor Salomon said — one based on an intricate and often ceremonial exchange of produce as gifts among tribal kinfolk. They hiked from the edges of the rain forest to meet those living at the heights of the Andes, ensuring each other’s survival by trading key lowland crops like maize and potatoes for scarce mountain goods like llama and alpaca wool. That economic system was named “the vertical archipelago” by Professor Murra.

“His ‘vertical archipelago’ model has been verified through research that archaeologists have since done in the Andean zone,” said Heather Lechtman, a professor of archaeology and ancient technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While some experts debate aspects of the theory, Professor Lechtman said, “This is certainly the accepted model for the central Andes.”

The Inca empire existed from about 1400 to 1535 in an area that now includes Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and parts of Colombia, Argentina and Chile. What largely held it together, until the Spanish invasion in 1532, was its unusual economic system. The social system was documented by Professor Murra with his search through colonial archives and court documents in which the words of Incas were recorded.

Posted on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 at 6:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

William Clark: The history of academic charisma

Source: Anthony Grafton in the New Yorker (10-23-06)

... what does the academic agenda of the modern research-based university have to do with the other side of college life as we know it—with fraternity pledges, the choruses of “Gaudeamus igitur,” the stone façades of Victorian Gothic buildings? The mixed inheritance of the modern university is the subject of a new book with the somewhat oxymoronic title “Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University,” by William Clark, a historian who has spent his academic career at both American and European universities. Clark thinks that the modern university, with its passion for research, prominent professors, and, yes, black crêpe, took shape in Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And he makes his case with analytic shrewdness, an exuberant love of archival anecdote, and a wry sense of humor. It’s hard to resist a writer who begins by noting, “Befitting the subject, this is an odd book.”

Clark’s story starts in the Middle Ages. Th organizations that became the first Wester universities, schools that sprang up in Paris an Bologna, were in part an outgrowth of ecclesiastica institutions, and their teachers asserted their authorit by sitting, like bishops, in thrones—which is why w still refer to professorships as chairs—and speaking i a prescribed way, about approved texts. “The lecture like the sermon, had a liturgical cast and aura,” Clar writes. “One must be authorized to perform the rite and must do it in an authorized manner. Only the does the chair convey genuine charisma to th lecturer.” Clark assumes his notion of charisma loosely but clearly, from the work of Max Weber, wh developed the idea that authority assumes three forms Traditional authority, the stable possession of king and priests, rested on custom, “piety for what actually allegedly or presumably has always existed. Charismatic authority, wild and disruptive, derive from “the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplar character of an individual person.” Rational authority the last of the three forms to emerge, represented th rise of bureaucratic procedure, dividing responsibilitie and following precise rules
As Weber pointed out, in real organizations these different forms of authority interact and collide. In the medieval classroom, for all its emphasis on tradition-bound hierarchy and order, a contrary force came into play, one that unleashed the charisma of talented individuals: the disputation, in which a respondent affirmed the thesis under discussion and an opponent attempted to refute it. (Unlike the lecture, the disputation hasn’t survived as an institution, but its modern legacy includes the oral defenses that Ph.D. candidates make of their theses, and the format of our legal trials.) Clark calls the disputation a “theater of warfare, combat, trial and joust,” and, indeed, early proponents likened it to the contests of athletic champions in ancient Rome.

One early academic champion was the Parisian master Abelard, who cunningly used the format of the disputation to point up the apparent inconsistencies in orthodox Christian doctrine. He lined up the discordant opinions of the Fathers of the Church under the deliberately provocative title “Sic et Non” (“Yes and No”) and invited all comers to debate how the conflicts might be resolved. His triumphs in these “combats” made him, arguably, the first glamorous Parisian intellectual. A female disciple, Héloïse, wrote to him, “Every wife, every young girl desired you in absence and was on fire in your presence.” Their story has become a legend because of what followed: Héloïse, unwed, had a child by Abelard, her kin castrated him in revenge, and they both lived out their lives, for the most part, in cloisters. But even after Abelard’s writings were condemned and burned, pupils came from across Europe hoping to study with him. He had the enduring magnetism of the hotshot who can outargue anyone in the room.

Traditionalist plodders and charismatic firebrands shared the university from the beginning. The heart of Clark’s story, however, takes place not during the Middle Ages but from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, and not in France but in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire. This complex assembly of tiny territorial states and half-timbered towns had no capital to rival Paris, but the little clockwork polities transformed the university through the simple mechanism of competition. German officials understood that a university could make a profit by attaining international stature. Every well-off native who stayed home to study and every foreign noble who came from abroad with his tutor—as Shakespeare’s Hamlet left Denmark to study in Saxon Wittenberg—meant more income. And the way to attract customers was to modernize and rationalize what professors and students did....

Posted on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 at 3:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Andrew Roberts: Bush is reading his history of the English-speaking peoples

Source: Transcript from This Week (ABC News) with George Stephanopoulos (10-22-06)

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)

(Off-camera) What was the last book you read?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (UNITED STATES)

I'm reading history of the English speaking peoples from 1990 on - 1900 on. It's a great book. [Editor: The book, History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900, by Andrew Roberts, will be published by HarperCollins in Feb. 2007.]

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)

(Off-camera) What are you taking from it?

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (UNITED STATES)

I'm taking that - I'm taking that sometimes history gets distorted.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (ABC NEWS)

(Off-camera) And you have to take the long view.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH (UNITED STATES)

Yes you do.

Posted on Tuesday, October 24, 2006 at 2:26 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, October 23, 2006

Charles Gati: Says Soviets may have allowed limited freedom for Hungary in '56

Source: David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (10-23-06)

Fifty years ago today, thousands of students and workers took to the streets of Budapest to demand democratic reform. Among them was Charles Gati, who was then a young newspaper reporter.

Twelve days later, Soviet tanks rolled across Hungary, crushing what had become a broad popular revolt. Before the end of November, Mr. Gati, like tens of thousands of others, had fled the country.

Today Mr. Gati is a senior adjunct professor of European studies at the Johns Hopkins University. In a new book, Failed Illusions: Moscow, Washington, Budapest, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolt (Stanford University Press), he argues that the Soviet military action was not inevitable. If the White House and Hungary's volatile, reform-minded prime minister, Imre Nagy, had played their cards differently, Mr. Gati says, the Soviets might have tolerated a semi-independent Hungary.

Mr. Gati recently spoke with The Chronicle about his journeys through the archives of Washington and Moscow.

Q. What are your memories of October 23?

A. I went with the students to the statue of General Bem, a Polish general who had helped the Hungarians in 1848 and who is regarded as a good guy. The march was partly in response to events in Poland, the so-called Polish October. ... Change was in the air in Poland, especially with the rise of a more nationalist communist leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka.

I have to tell you that I was not particularly politically astute back then, as you may have gathered from the book. I just got caught up in the mood when I heard that the demonstration was taking place, and I joined it with a friend. I didn't plan the march; I didn't help prepare it; I did not play any kind of important role at all. I was just there.

Q. Then, on November 3, you were in the Parliament building to cover what turned out to be the last press conference of Imre Nagy's reform government.

A. I was there not to report the big event, for which I was totally unqualified, but rather to record some colorful tidbits that I might have picked up. Which I did. I was ready to do that for the next afternoon's paper. But at dawn on November 4, the Soviets crushed the revolution, and my paper never appeared again.

Q. After it witnessed the Berlin uprising of 1953, what sort of plans should the United States have had in place for the next time something similar happened?

A. Let me go a bit further than I go in the book. I would now go so far as to say that the dominant view in the White House, held particularly by [Vice President Richard] Nixon, was that gradual change in Hungary, à la Titoism, would not help American interests. So they used very strong language on Radio Free Europe, and the thought was that either Communism collapses, and that's good for us, or else Soviet tanks would keep the regime in power, which is good propaganda for us. ... We believed, like Stalin, the worse, the better. And that, I must say, was unfortunate, and wrong.

Q. What do we know now from the Kremlin's archives about the range of outcomes that the Soviets might have been willing to tolerate?

A. First, I should emphasize that whatever options they may have considered, that does not change the brutality of their ultimate decision to crush the revolution. So while I am critical of American policy, and while I am critical of the Hungarian leadership's incompetence, the key issue remains as it has been, which is that a small country wanted to be independent, and the Soviets did not allow that to happen. The basic story has not changed.

Having said that, we do now know that from the very beginning, ... they were considering a range of options. As late as October 30, they reached a decision not to act militarily, and they were hoping, expecting, that Imre Nagy would save their cause. So it might have been a slightly different country ... with some kind of limited pluralism and perhaps some mom-and-pop stores representing free enterprise. And if things went too far from the Soviet point of view, they could hope to roll back the gains over time....

Posted on Monday, October 23, 2006 at 8:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Norman Stone: There is No Armenian Genocide

Source: Norman Stone in the Journal of Turkish Weekly (10-21-06)

[Norman Stone (1941-) is a British historian of modern Europe, especially Central and Eastern Europe. He is the author of ''Europe Transformed, 1878-1919.'' Stone was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Between 1984-1997, he served as professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Since 1997 Stone has worked at Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey. After 2005, he transferred to Koc University,Istanbul,Turkey and still continues to teach there.]

“The Armenian ‘genocide’ is an imperialist plot.” So said Dogu Perincek, in Marxist mode, and he chose to say it in Switzerland. Switzerland passed a law threatening prison for anyone ‘denying’ that there had been a genocide of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915, and Mr. Perincek was interrogated by the police.

There have been similar events in other countries and now we have the French parliament passing a law that is harsher than the Swiss one – a year’s prison and a heavy fine. This is a ridiculous and contemptible business – bad history and worse politics. It is also financially very grubby indeed. We all know how the American legal system can work: lawyers will agree to work for nothing, in return for a share of the profits at the end of a court case. Court cases are very expensive and it can simply be easier for banks or firms or hospitals to agree to make a payment without any confession of liability, just because fighting the case would be absurdly expensive, and the outcome – given how the American jury system works – unpredictable. A burglar, crawling over a householder’s glass roof, fell through it, was badly wounded, and took the householder to court: result, a million dollars in damages. Class actions by Armenian Diaspora descendants in California shook down the Deutsche Bank over claims dating back to 1915 and collected 17,000,000 dollars; then they attempted the same with a French insurance company. We can be entirely certain that if Turkey ever ‘recognizes the genocide’ then the financial claims will follow.

But if Turkey refuses to admit it, she is in fact on perfectly good ground. The very first thing to be said is that the business of ‘genocide’ has never been proved. The evidence for it is at best indirect and when the British were in occupation of Istanbul they never found any direct evidence or proof at all. They kept some hundred or so prominent Turks in captivity on Malta, hoping to find some sort of evidence against them, and failed. They asked the Americans if they knew anything and were told, no. The result is that the alleged ‘genocide’ has never been subjected to a properly-constituted court of law. The British released their Turks (meanly refusing to pay for their journeys back home from Malta). There is a counter-claim to the effect that this happened because the Nationalist Turks were holding British officers hostage but the fact is that the Law Officers simply said that they did not have the evidence to try their captives.

Diaspora Armenians claim that ‘historians’ accept the genocide case. There is some preposterous organization called ‘association of genocide scholars’ which does indeed endorse the Diaspora line, but who are they and what qualifications do they have? Knowing about Rwanda or Bosnia or even Auschwitz does not qualify them to discuss Anatolia in 1915, and the Ottoman specialists are by no means convinced of the ‘genocide’. There is in fact an ‘A’ team of distinguished historians who do not accept the Diaspora line at all. In France, Gilles Veinstein, historian of Salonica and a formidable scholar, reviewed the evidence in a famous article of 1993 in L’Histoire. Back then the Armenian Diaspora were also jumping up and down about something or other, and Veinstein summed up the arguments for and against, in an admirably fair-minded way. The fact is that there is no proof of ‘genocide’, in the sense that no document ever appeared, indicating that the Armenians were to be exterminated. There is forged evidence. In 1920 some documents were handed to the British by a journalist called Andonian. She claimed that he had been given them by an Ottoman official called Naim. The documents have been published as a book (in English and French) and if you take them at face value they are devastating: here is Talaat Pasha as minister of the Interior telling the governors to exterminate the Armenians, not to forget to exterminate the children in orphanages, but to keep it all secret. But the documents are very obviously a forgery – elementary mistakes as regards dates and signatures. At the time, in 1920, the new Armenian Republic was collapsing. Kazim Karabekir was advancing on Kars (which fell almost without resistance) and the Turkish Nationalists were co-operating with Moscow (in effect there was a bargain: Turkey would abandon Azerbaijan and Russia would abandon Anatolian Armenia). The Armenians were desperate to get the British to intervene and save them, by landing troops at Trabzon. However, the British (and still more the French) had had enough of the problems of Asia Minor and were in the main content to settle with the new Turkey. Andonian’s documents belong in that context. The chief Armenian ‘genocidist,’ V.Dadrian, still passionately defends the authenticity of these documents but the attempt does not do much credit to his scholarship: for instance, to the claim that the paper on which these documents were written came from the French school in Aleppo, he answers that there was a paper shortage (leading the Ottoman governor to ask a French headmaster if he could use some of his school-paper? Not very likely). The Naim-Andonian documents have incidentally never been tested in a court. The British refused to use them and a German court subsequently waved them aside. They have since disappeared – not what you would have expected had they been at all that is the sum total of the evidence as to ‘genocide’. Otherwise you are left with what English courts call ‘circumstantial evidence’ – i.e. a witness testifying that another witness said something to someone. Such evidence does not count. In the past three years Armenian historians have apparently been going round archives ?n two dozen countries to find out what they contain – the Danish archives for instance. What they contain is what we knew already – that an awful lot of Armenians were killed or died in the course of a wartime deportation from many parts of Anatolia. Did the Ottoman government intend to exterminate the race, or was it just a deportation that went horribly wrong? ...

Posted on Monday, October 23, 2006 at 8:31 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Sunday, October 22, 2006

Bettina Aptheker: False Memory Syndrome?

Source: Jenny Brown at lbo-talk, a forum for the discussion of economics, politics, and culture from a broad left perspective, sponsored by Left Business Observer (10-21-06)

... In order to say that Bettina is having 'false memory syndrome' you'd also have to claim that she's lying that as an adult she spoke to her father about the abuse, and he apologized--was sick with shame, actually, is the feeling you get from her account. So it's not just false memory syndrome she'd be being accused of, it's also a wholesale fabrication of her adult interaction with her father about it. (She also said she got therapy after she remembered, not before, so these stories about therapists bringing things up are only relevant if we think Bettina is lying about these details and saw a therapist _before_ she recalled the abuse.)

I read Bettina to be telling a very difficult thing that she would much prefer not to be telling. I find it harder to imagine a motive for Bettina for lying (and lying so elaborately) than it is to imagine that the abuse occurred. I suspect my reaction differs from some because I've heard so much testimony, from kids and adult women about sexual abuse from fathers, grandfathers, stepfathers, uncles--not 'recovered memory,' most of it has nothing to do with that--that I no longer have the reflexive "it can't be!" shock reaction that comes from not really having much sense of the scope or range of the problem, and from thinking that the men that do it are--surely, must be, monsters, heinous criminals--and rare. They're not. Women talk about not only continuing abuse of the kind Bettina alleges but also a continuum that ranges from one-time sexual wierdness with fathers (such as him beating her up for breaking the rules and during the beating the girl becomes aware that he has an erection; fathers making one-time passes at their 15-year olds; fathers who grope) to continuing abuse. At least half the women I know well enough to have talked about it have had some experience of this kind, and several experienced sustained sexual abuse as children.

Progressive men need to get a little more honest about this. One excellent ally in some child sexual abuse cases I worked on in Mississippi is a radical preacher from New Orleans--he not only took men to task and said, let's call it what it is, rape, but he also told on himself about sexual feelings he had around his daughter. So this needs to be called out for what it is--not in a shocked anti-sex hysterical save-the-innocents caterwaul--but selfish male supremacist bullshit that must stop.

Bettina said her father asked, "Did I ever hurt you when you were a child?" and her answer was "yes." So he didn't know, or claimed not to know, that this would or did hurt her. When told yes, he was anguished. I think this is very real if not typical--men justify this bad behavior by saying it isn't hurting anyone, carefully constructing their denial. (I suppose in some cases they're simply so selfish that they don't need to bother with denial.)

It's only through women and girls really calling men on it and telling them they will not get away with it--and that they may be exposed--that it will stop. The reaction to Bettina's book is one sign of how much shit you will get if you speak out, so this is something that takes considerable courage.

As for 'forgetting' something for decades, I think 'forgetting' is not really the right word. I have had this happen with one traumatic experience, and it's more like putting something in a drawer you don't open. When you open it, the memory is still there, it wasn't ever gone, really, but you just didn't have time or space or a way to think about it, so you didn't. If, while the drawer is closed, you are asked, 'did x happen?' your answer is genuinely 'no' but later it might dawn on you that well, actually, 'yes.'

I'm not on a jury, and it's true there would be a higher burden of proof there. This will never, thank god, go to a jury, since the criminal justice system is not the answer to this (a strong women's liberation movement is). But one reason Bettina has for talking about this is that public exposure--and the fear of it--really is the most powerful leverage to get men to stop.

Posted on Sunday, October 22, 2006 at 3:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, October 20, 2006

Robert L. Beisner: His biography of Acheson reviewed on the front page of the NYT Book Review by Kissinger

Source: Henry Kissinger in the NYT Book Review (10-15-06)

Dean Acheson was perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history. Robert L. Beisner, in “Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War,” his sweeping and thoughtful account of Acheson’s tenure, cites a scholar who, with meticulous pedantry, discovered that during the four years — 1949-53 — that Acheson served as secretary of state, Republicans made 1,268 antagonistic statements about him on the Senate floor and only seven favorable ones (one wonders for what).

History has treated Acheson more kindly. Accolades for him have become bipartisan. Secretaries of state appointed by the party of his erstwhile tormentors have described him as a role model; Condoleezza Rice is the most recent example. Thirty-five years after his death, Acheson has achieved iconic status. This is all the more remarkable in view of his out-of-scale personality, so at odds with the present period, in which eminence seems to be tolerable only in the garb of the commonplace....

For someone like myself, who knew Acheson, Beisner’s portrait does not always capture the vividness of his personality, which emerges too much as a list of eccentricities. Acheson’s relationship with the Nixon White House, and to President Nixon himself, is too cavalierly dismissed as the result of ego and an old man’s vanity. As a participant in all these meetings, I considered that relationship an example of Acheson’s generosity of spirit. Nixon had made essentially unforgivable attacks on Acheson during his 1952 campaign for vice president. But when he reached out to Acheson, it was received with the consideration Acheson felt he owed to the office, as a form of duty to the country. Acheson dealt with the issues Nixon put before him thoughtfully, precisely, without any attempt at flattery, in pursuit of his conception of national service and, unlike some other outside advisers, without offering advice that had not been solicited.

Acheson emerges from the Beisner book as the greatest secretary of state of the postwar period in the sweep of his design, his ability to implement it, the extraordinary associates with whom he surrounded himself and the nobility of his personal conduct. He was impatient with relativists who sought surcease from the complexity of decisions by postulating the moral equivalence of the United States and the Soviet Union. His values were absolute, but he knew also that statesmen are judged by history beyond contemporary debates, and this requires a willingness to achieve great goals in stages, each of which is probably imperfect by absolute standards.

This was the theme of an Acheson speech at the War College in August 1951: “There was not ‘one more river to cross’ but ‘countless problems stretching into the future.’ ... Americans must reconcile themselves to ‘limited objectives’ and work in congress with others, for an essential part of American power was the ‘ability to evoke support from others — an ability quite as important as the capacity to compel.’ ”

The importance of that perception has not changed with the passage of time.

Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 at 7:09 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Honey: Historian produces a 16-minute film about a soldier's duty to say no to illegal war

Source: Press Release (10-20-06)

[Michael Honey is a professor of labor and ethnic studies and American history at the University of Washington, Tacoma. For information on Watada's case, see www.thankyoult.org.]

The Bush Administration and Congress this week took the destruction of American civil liberties to a new low, in the name of a war against terror. The Magna Carta of 1215 established habeas corpus, the right to come before a court of law to confront one's accusers and to be safe from arbitrary arrest, indefinite imprisonment without charges, and capricious treatment. American colonists revolted against King George in 1776 in part for his refusal to ensure such legal rights.

Now George Bush and Congress have authorized the suspension of habeas corpus for non-citizens and legal permanent residents within the U.S. The President may detain anyone -- U.S. citizens included -- by designating them as enemy combatants, without the normal standards of habeas corpus. The President may also unilaterally determine what is and is not torture. The new law provides retroactive immunity to he and others who have instituted torture in the past.

On many counts, the Military Commissions Act violates the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and long-held precepts of fair treatment and democracy.

Within the American military, commanding officer named Lt. Ehren Watada has stood up against the President, charging him with lying about the reasons for war in Iraq, ignoring the United Nations prohibition on the use of force unless our country has been attacked, and carrying out the war in ways that have led to untold civilian deaths and human rights abuses, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, U.S. Army regulations, and the Nuremberg Principles. For these reasons, Watada says the war itself is illegal.

Watada is the first officer to refuse to go to Iraq, and the first to challenge the legality of the war. The U.S. Army at Ft. Lewis, Washington, plans to court martial him in the winter, and may send Watada to prison for up to eight years. In Tacoma, a Citizen's Hearing will be held on December 11-12, to inquire into these issues.

It is the American Way: question authority. For more information on Lt. Watada's challenge to President Bush's invasion and war in Iraq, see Michael Honey's new 16-minute film, A Soldier's Duty?

For additional documentation on the Watada case, see:

Dahr Jamail: Ehren Watada

In perilous times, it is up to the citizens to exercise their democratic rights to think and question their government. Now more than ever, we must exercise those rights.

Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 at 5:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

'Israel Academia Monitor' website acts as ‘Big Brother’, warns students of anti-Israel professors and courses at Israeli universities

Source: Anat Bereshkovsky at ynetnews.com (10-19-06)

Many history and sociology professors and researchers with the common goal of showing “the other” less popular side of Zionism, earned the handle “post-Zionists” for their participation in Palestinian propaganda against government policies and efforts against Israel’s definition as a Jewish state.

These “post-Zionist” professors don’t hesitate to weave comments about Israel’s injustices against the Palestinians, the lack of equality for Israel’s Arab citizens, and democracy’s limitations in a Jewish state, into their lectures.

Israel’s senior professors do not approve of this growing trend of younger professors politicizing academia by inserting anti-Israel agendas into Israeli institutions. Consequently, the “Israeli Academia Monitor” website was launched in order to warn student of such professors.

Posted on the “Israeli Academia Monitor” homepage was a message saying, “Israeli Universities are crawling with extremist staff members, many of whom hate their country, encourage their country’s enemies, and collaborate with international anti-Israel organizations, sometimes even with declared anti-Semites.”

Dana Brent, who runs the website along with Professor Steven Plaut, said that their goal was to expose what was going at universities with the publics funding.

“We noticed a lot of Israeli academics, who receive their salary from the state, use it for their own private ideology,” Brent explained, “They spread lies about Israel and there are many people in the world who would be happy to hear about it.”

Brent claims that beneath the plethora of courses on civil rights, human rights, feminism, and social justice supposedly working to expose students to “other ways of looking at the Israeli reality” actually lays anti-Israeli propaganda.

One of the many professors listed on the “Monitor” is Dr. Ilan Pappe, a social sciences professor at Haifa University. Pappe is one of Israel’s leading spokesmen against the definition of Israel as a Jewish State, and promoter of the “country for all its citizens” stance.

Pappe dismissed calls for professors to remain objective saying, “I am one of the few professors that openly voices my opinions. I don’t like academic members who say they are objective.”

He views the courses he gives as no less than a mission. He said, “Where, if not in academia, would I promote my political agenda?”

According to the “Monitor” website, there is a long line of Israeli professors that share Pappe’s views. A study conducted by Dr. Udi Label, a political psychology professor at the Ben Gurion Institute, showed that the trend was picking up speed.

The study revealed that syllabi of the social sciences departments in Israel’s universities included increasing numbers of courses supporting the ‘post Zionist’ ideas.

Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 at 1:54 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Juan Cole: Writes letter as President of MESA protesting Poland's cancellation of Tony Judt appearance

Source: Juan Cole at Informed Comment (Blog) (10-19-06)

This letter went out from the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association over my signature as president of the Middle East Studies Association. Many thanks to all the colleagues who worked so hard on it:

October 19, 2006
His Excellency Christopher Kastryzk
Consul-General
Republic of Poland
233 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Fax: 646 237 2105

Your Excellency,

I am writing to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA). We wish to convey to you our distress regarding your decision on the afternoon of October 3 to cancel abruptly a talk that Professor Tony Judt was scheduled to give a few hours later that evening. This action on your part constitutes a serious affront to the principles of free expression and the free exchange of ideas. We urge you to invite Dr. Judt to speak at the Consulate at a mutually convenient time in the near future and on a subject of his choosing. It is important to rectify the chilling effect that your cancellation on October 3 has had on the free exchange of ideas.

The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has more than 2600 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

Dr. Judt’s October 3 talk had been arranged by Network 20/20, an independent New York City-based membership organization that sponsors lectures and discussion panels on issues relating to United States foreign policy. According to Network 20/20, many of its events are held at the Polish Consulate, and the Consulate had been generous and supportive of their efforts over the years. Dr. Judt’s cancelled talk was to be on U.S. foreign policy and the role of the pro-Israel lobby. Approximately 100 persons had been expected to attend. The president of Network 20/20, Patricia Huntington, told our committee that the Consulate had never before cancelled any of its programs there.

According to Ms. Huntington, a member of your staff telephoned her at 4:15 p.m. on the day of the event to tell her that it was cancelled. When she asked to speak with you, your staff member said that this was not possible because you were on the telephone with Abraham Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and that you had been on this call “a long time.” After notifying Dr. Judt of your sudden cancellation, she and other Network staff member s, who had planned to arrive at the Consulate at 5 p.m. as usual to set up refreshments and deal with other logistics of the event, instead tried to notify meeting participants of the cancellation. In a subsequent press release, Network 20/20 said, “the consulate informed us that they were canceling the event because it was ‘too controversial.’ We regret that the Polish Consulate felt compelled to cancel Tony Judt’s talk.”

You have told the press that “maybe four” groups had called you on October 3 to express concern about Dr. Judt’s talk, but you declined to identify them. It now appears that the ADL person you were then speaking with was someone calling on Mr. Foxman’s behalf. Mr. Foxman has publicly denied allegations that the ADL put any pressure on you to cancel the event, but also said, “I think they made the right decision.”

David Harris, executive vice president of the American Jewish Com mittee, has said that he was one of the callers. “We didn’t want [the Consul General] to get blind-sided by any criticism that may emerge,” he said, according to an account in the Jewish Week of October 13. “It was natural to pick up the phone and say, ‘We want to be sure you know Tony Judt is a controversial figure in the Jewish community, and we want to understand whether you’re aware of it, because otherwise there could be misunderstandings.’” Harris said he “didn’t go to the extent of menacing or threatening, or any such thing,” and “I certainly didn’t ask the consul general to take any particular action.” According to press accounts, Mr. Harris has also commended the Consulate for doing “the right thing.”

From a perspective of protecting academic freedom and the core democratic principles of free speech and the free exchange of ideas, it is our view that you did the wr ong thing.
In an interview with the Jewish Week, you said, “It’s not true that they threatened or made any pressure. They simply expressed concern.” Elsewhere you said, “The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure. That’s obvious – we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that.”

You have also said, “I don’t have to subscribe to the first Amendment,” and that you took your decision “for my state’s interests.” Of course, as Consul General you and your government have every right to determine what takes place at the consulate. In this case, however, Network 20/20 has used your premises regularly for several years, at your invitation. Your decision to cancel Dr. Judt’s talk at literally the last minute, following these telephone calls, reflects a disturbing disregard for freedom of expression, a principle that the governm ents of Poland and the United States have pledged to respect. It is difficult to avoid concluding that pressure was indeed exerted on you by various pro-Israel organizations, however elegantly it may have been conveyed. We regret that you chose to succumb to that pressure, thereby conveying a message that you do not consider the free exchange of ideas to be worthy of your support when those ideas are “controversial.”

We strongly urge you to reconsider your decision of October 3, and in the process affirm your support for free expression and the free exchange of ideas, by inviting Professor Judt to give a talk at the Consulate at a mutually convenient time and on a subject of his choosing.

We look forward to your response.

Sincerely,
Juan Cole
President

cc: Abraham Foxman, National Director, Anti-Defamation League
Fax: 212-895-7700
David Harris, Executive Vice President, American Jewish Committee
Fax: 212-891-1492
Patr icia Huntington, President, Network 20/20
Fax: 212-586-3291

Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 at 1:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Efraim Karsh: Book on Islam Surprises Trustees

Source: Inside Higher Ed (10-19-06)

Trustees all over the country have been receiving a book critical of Islam, with no cover note, leading some to worry about why they were receiving the packages.

The address on the packages referred to their trustee status.

The book is Islamic Imperialism: A History, published by Yale University Press. The author is Efraim Karsh, a professor at the University of London who is highly regarded in neoconservative circles, but who has been harshly criticized by many in Middle Eastern studies. According to the Yale press, the book argues that the attacks on 9/11 reflect Islamic imperialism, and “Islam’s war for world mastery.”

The Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities sent an alert to members Wednesday disavowing any connection to the mailing, and saying that it would not have given out trustees’ names so that someone could mail them the books. The AGB alert said that law enforcement officials were looking into the mailings.

The books were sent by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank that says it was founded “to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.”

M. Edward Whelan III, president of the center, confirmed Wednesday that his group had sent the books, and said that he did not know how many trustees were receiving them. The AGB alert said that 50,000 books had been shipped. Whelan said that trustees were not the only recipients and that some of the books had been sent to journalists and lawmakers, among others....

Posted on Thursday, October 19, 2006 at 10:28 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Allen Weinstein: NARA's Budget Blues ... Can Anything Be Done to Help the Agency?

Source: Bruce Craig in AHA Perspectives (10-1-06)

Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein has faced a number of challenges since taking the helm of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). None are so daunting, and I'm sure, as frustrating to him as is the proposed fiscal 2007 budget for his agency. According to Hill insiders, unless Congress acts when it reconciles the budget proposals of the House and Senate in conference—and unless the committees throw tradition to the wind and provide an infusion of new money for the agency that neither the House nor Senate to date have independently approved—next fiscal year NARA will be some $8–11 million below what it really needs as a minimum operational base.

Anticipating a drastic reduction in its budget in fiscal 2007 NARA has already begun taking steps in response to the anticipated shortfall. For example, a hiring freeze went into effect on July 3; just days later, NARA requested and obtained approval from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for early retirement authority and permission to advance to employees voluntary separation initiatives; the goal was to cut expenses by moving some in NARA's aging workforce out of the agency or into early retirement. Finally, the archivist proposed new rules regarding reduced hours of operation—no more weekend hours, no more evening hours—that could dramatically affect researchers who seek access to NARA facilities in Washington, D.C., and throughout the country.

So who is responsible for the NARA budget blues? The president for his unrealistic budget proposal? Congress for failing to inject funds for the agency's real needs? The archivist for not having sufficient political clout with the White House or Congress? The history and archives community for not adequately making the case for NARA funding needs to their elected lawmakers? Or, are other factors responsible? ...

Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 1:00 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Do Poorer Schools Mean Poorer History Teaching?

Source: Robert Townsend in AHA Perspectives (10-1-06)

A new study from the Department of Education suggests that students at the poorest schools were less likely to have a fully qualified history teacher at the head of their class.

This study analyzes how many history teachers held one of two qualifications—a degree in the field (or at least a minor in history) and a certification to teach social studies. The report draws on a large survey of more than 51,000 school teachers in the 1999–2000 academic year, using the proportion of students receiving subsidized meals as a marker of relative poverty at the school.

According to the study, just 44.9 percent of students in America's high schools were taught by a teacher who had either majored or minored in history as undergraduate (only 37.4 percent by teachers who had majored in history). For students at schools where less than 10 percent of the student population received some subsidy for their lunches, more than 52 percent were taught history by a teacher with a major or minor in the field. In comparison, almost 46 percent of the students at schools where more than half of the students received subsidized meals learned their history from a teacher with that kind of sustained study in the discipline. ...

Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 12:56 AM | Comments (0) | Top

History Gains Ground in Majors and Undergraduate Degrees, Graduate Studies Continue to Decline

Source: Robert Townsend in AHA Perspectives (10-1-06)

After lagging behind other disciplines for almost a decade, history departments finally seem to be gaining ground in the number of undergraduate students earning degrees, even as the number of students earning graduate degrees in the field continues to decline.

The Department of Education reports 29,808 baccalaureate degrees conferred in history during the 2003–04 academic year—a 7.5 percent increase over the year before. This was almost double the growth reported for bachelor’s degrees conferred in all fields, which rose by a modest 3.8 percent.1

As a result, history degrees comprised 2.13 percent of the 911 degrees conferred. This marks a modest improvement from the recent low of just 2.01 percent of all degrees conferred, two years earlier ....

Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 12:53 AM | Comments (0) | Top

William H. Chafe: Concerned about the future of the AHA despite years of balanced budgets

Source: AHA Perspectives (10-1-06)

If you care about the American Historical Association, and indeed, if you care about the state of the historical profession, we need your help in assessing the health and future direction of the AHA.
On the surface the Association seems quite healthy, with a large membership, superb publications, and almost a decade of balanced budgets. Beneath that surface, however, there is real cause for concern. Over the past decade, membership remained essentially flat and subscriptions to the American Historical Review fell, even as the number of professional historians (in a wide variety of work contexts) grew significantly. At the same time, the Association finds itself buffeted by new challenges facing the profession, from a changing employment picture to the selling and reclassification of historical materials. This is occurring as a new generation rises to prominence in the profession (almost 60 percent of the AHA's membership earned their degrees since 1990) and changes in the technologies of communication reshape the way the AHA interacts with its members.

The Association needs to confront these challenges in a serious and thoughtful way, so in the coming months I will be chairing a "working group" of AHA members to address these issues. This working group will consist of Jim Grossman (Newberry Library), Lynn Hunt (UCLA), Earl Lewis (Emory Univ.), Danielle McGuire (Rutgers Univ.), Paula A. Michaels (Univ. of Iowa), Stefan Tanaka (Univ. of California at San Diego), and executive director Arnita Jones. The working group is small, because we want to prepare a final report and recommendations with sufficient quality and authority to command assent—a characteristic rare in documents written by large committees. To truly function, however, we will need your advice and input....

Posted on Wednesday, October 18, 2006 at 12:50 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Simon Schama: Has choice words for President Bush

Source: Independent (UK) (10-15-06)

Thanks to a press officer's slip of the pen, The Independent on Sunday is sent to interview Simon Schama not at his literary agent's offices in London's Russell Street but to a rather grander building in Russell Square. It is a side entrance to the British Museum. When, 20 embarrassing minutes later, I relate this to Schama, he roars with laughter. "That's the introduction to your piece," he giggles: "We know Simon's pretentious - but regarding himself as an antiquity!"

At 61, he is hardly an antiquity. But since his landmark BBC Television series A History of Britain, which ran between 2000 and 2002, Schama, professor of art history and history at Columbia, has become something of a national treasure, in the traditions of the corporation's cultural arbiters. When he was subsequently asked to join the commentary team for the Queen Mother's funeral, Schama's elevation to the great and the good was confirmed, with a CBE and affectionate impersonation by Dead Ringers to complete the process.

This week, however, as his new series, Simon Schama's Power of Art arrives, he is in more radical mood. The series looks at eight artists who shocked the establishment of their day - Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Bernini, David, Turner, Picasso and Rothko. In their art at least, all were radicals, some distinctly flamboyant. Does Schama feel a personal affinity for them? "Probably, probably, yeah," he says. "Are there any that I don't feel any connection to? No, you're probably right."

In conversation, Schama is equally iconoclastic - describing President George Bush as "an absolute fucking catastrophe", criticising Tony Blair over the invasion of Iraq, and censuring politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for their lack of historical awareness. He is critical of the idea of a "war on terror", and is hoping that the US will elect the African-American Senator Barack Obama as its next president.

Born in London at the end of the war, Schama studied history at Cambridge as part of a gilded generation of young scholars - including Quentin Skinner, John Brewer, Roy Porter and Lisa Jardine - who have since become standard-bearers for new styles and interests in cultural and intellectual history. Professor Jardine, now of Queen Mary, University of London, and a close friend of Schama's, says: "Many of that generation were passed over by the history establishment, and either had to work abroad or to develop new fields to find success."...

Posted on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Richard Landes: How a medievalist became a witness in a lawsuit involving a controversial documentary about Palestinians

Source: New Republic (10-17-06)

[Richard Landes , medieval history professor at Boston University, established www.seconddraft.org and blogs at www.theaugeanstables.com. He is the author of Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (forthcoming). ]

On September 30, 2000, images of 12-year-old Mohammed Al Durah and his father--cowering behind a barrel at Netzarim Junction, in the Gaza Strip--circulated globally, along with a claim that they had been the targeted victims of Israeli fire. If Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount two days earlier had sparked riots, these images triggered all-out war. The ensuing horror and outrage swept away any questions about its reliability. Indignant observers dismissed any Israeli attempt to deny responsibility as "blaming the victim."

But, by 2002, two documentaries--one German, one French--raised troubling questions. The raw footage from that day reveals pervasive staging; no evidence (certainly not the most widely circulated tape offers evidence of Israeli fire directed at the barrel, much less of Israelis targeting the pair; given the angles, the Israelis could scarcely have hit the pair at all, much less 12 times (indeed the only two bullets that hit the wall above them came from the Palestinian side, inexplicably 90 degrees off target); there was no sign of blood on the ground where the father and son reportedly bled for 20 minutes; there was no footage of an ambulance evacuation or arrival at the hospital; there was no autopsy; and none of the dozen cameraman present filmed anything that could substantiate the claim that the father and son had been hit, much less that the Israelis had targeted them. These documentaries had limited exposure, in part thanks to France2's refusal to run the one by a sister station in Germany. But they did spark a demonstration in Paris outside the France2 offices by citizens outraged to discover that so horrendous an image may well have been a fake.

The demonstrations apparently ruffled feathers. Some writers lambasted France2's coverage--most prominently Philippe Karsenty, who called for Al Durah beat chief Charles Enderlin and France2 chief Arlette Chabot to resign, and, in response, Enderlin and France2 itself--using the same law invoked against Emile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair--have accused three critics (including Karsenty) of "striking at their honor and respectability."

Now, four years later, the lawsuits are finally coming to trial in Room 17 of the Palais de Justice in Paris. The three suits (one for each defendant) come in rapid succession--September 14, October 26, and November 30--with judgments four weeks following each hearing. And, in at least two of the trials, I, a medieval historian, have been asked to testify.

I have become involved for two reasons. First of all, I noted almost immediately that Palestinians and anti-Zionists, insisting that Israel killed the boy on purpose, used Al Durah in a way familiar to medievalists--as a blood libel. This was the first blood libel of the twenty-first century, rendered global by cable and the Internet. Indeed, within a week, crowds the world over shouted "We want Jewish blood!" and "Death to the Jews!". For Europeans in particular, the libelous image came as balm to a troubled soul: "This death erases, annuls that of the little boy in the Warsaw Gherro," intoned Europe1 editorialist Catherine Nay. The Israelis were the new Nazis.

And second, when I saw the raw footage in the summer of 2003--especially when I saw the scene Enderlin had cut, wherein the boy(allegedly shot in the stomach, but holding his hand over his eyes) picks up his elbow and looks around--I realized that this was not a film of a boy dying, but a clumsily staged scene....

Posted on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 8:48 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Robert K. Brigham: Is Iraq Another Vietnam? Historian Robert Brigham Speaks Out

Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN (10-17-06)

He's co-authored a book with Robert McNamara and was the first Western scholar to be given access to the archives in Hanoi, so it isn't surprising to learn that Vassar historian Robert K. Brigham sees parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. But he fairly shocked a small audience in Seattle today when he claimed that Condoleezza Rice is following in the footsteps of Henry Kissinger in Iraq, reversing the course of Bush administration foreign policy 180 degrees. Neo-con ideology is out, Metternich is in.

Brigham, who shared his perspective with scholars at the Army War College last Friday, says that Secretary of State Rice has adopted a Kissingerian 19th century balance-of-power approach to Iraq starkly at odds with the administration's democratic rhetoric in the first term. It's 1815 again, he says, referring to the Congress of Vienna, with Condoleezza Rice playing the part of Austrian Foreign Minister Metternich. Brigham's thesis is that Rice apparently has decided that the only way out of Iraq is for the United States to work covertly in league with Iran and Syria in the hope that they can control the chief groups of insurgents. In exchange for their help, he says, Rice is likely promising Iran and Syria through back channels the chance to become regional major players with American help.

This approach makes a certain amount of sense, he says, noting that both countries might hope to follow the example of China, whose economy began skyrocketing after detente with the United States in the 1970s. Nodding his head in wonderment he observed several times that China's per capita income has quadrupled since the 1970s. If Iran and Syria could achieve similar results their regimes could hope to remain in power forever.

But he also expressed reservations about Rice's old-fashioned approach, noting that it may not be possible for Iran and Syria to control the non-state actors in Iraq. It's not clear he said that we know nearly enough about the insurgents as we should to follow this course. While a deal could be struck with them if their end game is to run a government, no deal may be possible if they have some other goal in mind. And the sad fact is American intelligence is so weak in Iraq that the United States government doesn't really know what the insurgents want.

In all events a democratic Iraq is now an unlikely possibility. The best the United States may be able to hope for is a "decent interval" between the time we draw down our forces in Iraq and Syria and Iran become dominant there. He asked point blank if this is Secretary of State Rice's limited goal now. If so, it's Vietnam all over again. As Brigham recounted, Henry Kissinger in the 1970s concluded that because American popular support for the Vietnam War was declining the United States could not win. The solution therefore was to ask Moscow and Beijing for help in restraining North Vietnam while the United States slowly began the withdrawal of American forces. Kissinger always denied asking the Soviets and the Chinese for help in arranging a "decent interval." But documents released in the last year confirm that he did, says Brigham. Chinese leader Chou En-lai asked Kissinger how long a period this decent interval needed to last. Eighteen months, said Kissinger. And that is precisely how long the North Vietnamese waited before beginning their final push to conquer South Vietnam, Brigham noted.

Bob Woodward recently reported in State of Denial that Kissinger has become one of President Bush's chief advisors. Woodward has concluded this means the president plans to follow Kissinger's oft-stated Vietnam line that we should fight until victory. Brigham says Woodward needs to go back and read some history books. He'd discover that while Kissinger was telling the American public that victory in Vietnam was essential, he was secretly arranging to allow North Vietnam to retain 100,000 troops in the South after the United States withdrew, a provision that turned up in the Paris peace accords. That, says Brigham, doesn't sound like victory.

Brigham, who is friends with Bob McNamara and the author of the recently published book, Is Iraq Another Vietnam?, admits there are thousands of ways Iraq and Vietnam are different. But he says he's struck by several parallels. The strategy of clearing and holding ground is the same as in Vietnam. The rhetoric is the same; we will stand down as Iraqis stand up is classic Vietnam talk. And likely as not this war will end in failure as Vietnam did, with similar resulting recriminations in America for a generation.

The economic consequences could also be equally devastating. Remember the bad economy of the 1970s? It's coming, he predicted. Once again we have acted as if we could have both guns and butter. But by another economic measure the wars are dissimilar. Vietnam in inflation-adjusted dollars cost roughly half a trillion dollars over a period of twenty years. Iraq has cost more than that in less than four.

Posted on Tuesday, October 17, 2006 at 8:20 PM | Comments (15) | Top

Jesse Lemisch: Charges that Portside Is Like Soviet Journalism

Source: Jesse Lemisch post on Historians of American Communism list (10-16-06)

After extended delay and embarrassing criticisms by many, Portside has finally decided to take notice of former Communist Bettina Aptheker's new book, Intimate Politics (see below). But the way they have backed into this notice is reminiscent of the worst of Soviet journalism. (Portside is the "discussion and debate service" of the Committees of Correspondence, a descendant of the US Communist Party.) They have presented a short piece by Aptheker with a rigged rebuttal - only one side of the debate that has taken place in the period of Portside's shameful silence. In the process they have airbrushed out my role in precipitating and participating this debate because they don't like the position I have taken. What a fate for a Red Diaper Baby!

By way of rebuttal to Aptheker's criticisms of the Communist Party and account of her sexual molestation by her late father (CP theoretician Herbert Aptheker), Portside selects from a debate that took place on the Historians of American Communism list. I kicked off the debate there with what later became my History News Network posting, "Shhh! Don't Talk about Herbert Aptheker," October 8, 2006: www.hnn.us/articles/30522.html (this followed up my October 4 HNN piece, "About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations" : www.hnn.us/articles/30519.html.) After my posting on HOAC, I was the central participant in the ensuing debate, fielding numerous, bunts, hits and foul balls that were sent my way by adversaries. But as far as Portside is concerned, my piece and role in the debate don't exist. Every one of the people they post from HOAC was writing in response to me and (except for Stephen Schwartz), each was writing to attack my position; further, in all these cases I replied: Portside takes no notice of any of this. In other words, I have been erased from a debate in which I was the central participant. Portside sends curious readers around Robin Hood's barn - literally, to an archive -- to get to "other contributions to the HOAC discussion" -- in other words, me. The net effect and clear intent of Portside's incredibly tendentious selection is to provide a rebuttal to Bettina Aptheker. Schwartz's passing mention of me by name has to be mysterious to Portside readers, since they have no idea from Portside of my participation in the debate. Portside must have worked hard to come up with such a corrupt sampling. (Portside just doesn't want people to read any parts of the debate that don't fit their line. It should also be noted that for Chris Phelps's October 6 Chronicle of Higher Education review, which started the discussion of Aptheker's book, Portside sends readers to a kind of a memory hole, the Chronicle's subscribers-only site, when it is available to all on HNN, where it is linked to my "About the Herbert Aptheker Sexual Revelations."

Portside's erasure of me might also have something to do with my direct criticism of the group in my October 8 HNN piece: "The reeling first reactions to the revelations seem almost a mini-version of the first reactions to Khruschev's 1956 Secret Speech on the crimes of Stalin... " It should be reported that somebody (not I) sent a copy of Chris Phelps's article on Bettina's memoir to Portside around Sunday or Monday October 3-4. Portside, which manages in any case to do a good job of finding things on its own, is the normally fairly catholic and inclusive "discussion and debate" list of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, the sane wing of the former CP. As of this writing, nothing about this matter has been posted there, although Portside has posted various items about what we might call merely bourgeois molestation scandals. Famous Red Diaper types have been strangely silent about the important issues raised by Bettina, presumably dismissing it as a merely private matter. It sounds like a case of keeping dirty linen out of the laundromat. A friend who is an ex-CPer sees Portside's silence as tending "to confirm my sense that the habits of hypocrisy, and the refusal to deal with women's experience, have survived intact from the CP itself."

It may shed some additional light on Portside's action - or non-action - to note that Bettina's parents and others urged her to join the Committees of Correspondence - which Herbert had named, in imitation of the Committees of Correspondence of the American Revolution -- but that, as she writes, "I had no inclination to do so... I was through with Communist politics..." (p. 495). (One friend, formerly in the Party, speculates that Bettina may have little sympathy among former CPers because she left the Party, as they see it, "too soon" - although it was 1981; p. 406ff.)"

I have no ego wrapped up in my erasure by Portside. Indeed it is a badge of honor. But it's like reading Pravda in America.

Jesse Lemisch

BELOW IS PORTSIDE'S OCTOBER 16 POSTING

From: moderator@PORTSIDE.ORG
To: PORTSIDE@LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG
Cc:
Subject: My Father the Icon; My Father the Molester
Date: Mon, October 16, 2006, 22:16:00

My Father the Icon; My Father the Molester

Daughter of Communist leader Herbert Aptheker recalls the pain and reconciliation that led to writing about her childhood abuse.

By Bettina Aptheker October 15, 2006 <http://www.latimes.com

[The oped below by Bettina Aptheker is based on her recent memoir, Intimate Politics. A discussion/review of this book by Chris Phelps appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the edition dated October 6. The Chronicle objects to the reprinting of material that appears in CHE, but the article is available to subscribers of CHE at http://chronicle.com/.

We also print below material from the discussion of the Phelps article on the listserve of the Historians of American Communism (HOAC) <http://www.h-net.org/~hoac/>. Other contributions to the HOAC discussion can be found by typing in the keyword "aptheker" in the list archives. -- moderator]

Comments from: Bettina Aptheker, Clare Spark, Melvyn Dubofsky, Mark Rosenzweig, Stephen Schwartz

===

My Father the Icon; My Father the Molester

Daughter of Communist leader Herbert Aptheker recalls the pain and reconciliation that led to writing about her childhood abuse.

By Bettina Aptheker October 15, 2006 <http://www.latimes.com/

It is a little disconcerting and somewhat chilling to read reviews of my recently published memoir and see my own words quoted back to me. It is not because I don't like what I wrote, or feel shame about it. It is because I was the holder of so many family secrets, and the injunction to silence was so strong. In writing my story, I broke all of the family rules.

Growing up, I held tight to the illusion that everything would by OK if I too could project the image of the perfect family, even though my inner life was so fraught with tension. In seeing recent reviews of my book, although favorable, sometimes the child part of my mind shrinks in horror: "What have you done?" And then the calm, adult part of my mind says: "You have told the truth to the best of your ability." Any of us who has experienced childhood sexual abuse or other forms of abuse, even as adults, knows something of these conflicted feelings.

[The remainder of this article had been deleted by the H-Net editor -- the full article is available online, as was posted on H-HOAC recently.]

===

From: Clare Spark
Subject: Phelps on Herbert and Bettina Aptheker
Date: Thursday, October 05

I have been thinking, with some agitation, about Bettina Aptheker's astonishing revelation of incest, as reported by Chris Phelps' review in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ ever since it was posted yesterday. I find it even more astonishing that the review accepts this and her other claims against her father (low pay for black help, criticism of Jewish passivity in the Holocaust) at face value. Moreover, as some other commentators have noted, it is passing strange that she waited until her parents' death to tell the world. But what I find most shocking is the review's credulity. Nor did the review see the revelation as vindictive, or possibly antisemitic. (The anti-Semitic stereotype includes Jews as excessively carnal, cheap, and cowardly.) Where is scholarly skepticism? Where is common sense?

The putative child abuse was not the only trial the heroic Bettina Aptheker has endured. Here is how Professor of Women's Studies Aptheker described her educational background for Out In The Redwoods (easily located through Google):

"[Aptheker:] I arrived in Santa Cruz in the fall of 1979 to begin my graduate studies in the History of Consciousness Program. I had two young children, and I was finalizing a divorce from my husband of thirteen years. I was also struggling to claim my lesbian identity. Brutalized by the police and FBI because of my Communist affiliation and radical activism in the 1960s and 1970s, 'coming out' for me was at once traumatic and exhilarating."

Recall that the review describes her sudden recollection, previously repressed, as having come to her while writing her memoir. Does this seem plausible to anyone here? Let us assume that father committed incest with young Bettina for years, yet she had no memory of what had to be traumatic. The cynic in me wonders if she is not beefing up her history to demonstrate that she has overcome yet another assault by authority, undeserved and extreme, of course. Why would she do that? Nothing like a famous and controversial father to expose as a way of getting attention from reviewers for her book, published by Seal Press, described on the internet as a small feminist press. The historian in me recalls that the feminist theory informing women's studies requires that patriarchy be viewed as the primary social contradiction, and indeed there was a job posting for teaching Women's Studies at UC San Diego while I was in graduate school, stating that adherence to feminist theory was a prerequisite for hiring. What could be more dramatic proof that the male desire to control women trumps class and other forms of illegitimate domination?

Clare Spark, Independent Scholar

===

From: Melvyn Dubofsky
Subject: Phelps on Herbert and Bettina Aptheker
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006

In my youthful days as an historian at Northern Illinois U. back in the early 1960s, when that department was an outlier of sorts in the national historical guild, we invited such lefties and reds as Gurley Flynn and Aptheker to campus. Even in her old age and in his no longer youthful years, no two people could have been more dissimilar as personalities and social types. Flynn was gregarious, a smoker and a drinker, for whom no topic, including, sex, was beyond he bounds; Aptheker by way of contrast was stolid, uptight, the proper and prudish communist. No tobacco entered his lungs, nor did alcohol pass his lips; dressed in a conservative business suit, with a starched dress shirt, and tightly tied tie, he spoke only about matters political and ideological, flirted with none of the young women at his post-talk social, and, indeed, conversed almost solely with the men. Unlike Flynn who led and wrote about her unconventional sexual life and experiences, Aptheker seemed almost an asexual individual, more like a communist monk. Perhaps Bettina Aptheker's recovered memories expose the real Aptheker, a man so repressed sexually that he had to satisfy his urges through a form of masturbation with his daughter as the object and stimulant. Yet, as historians, we all are familiar with the tricks that mind and memory play. Without corroboration, Bettina's recovered memories are less than convincing evidence and certainly would not suffice in a court of law. And with her father unable to offer rebuttal and her mother or other close relatives corroboration, we are left simply with a "she said" allegation. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the Herbert Aptheker whom I met 40 odd years ago was a pedophile, let alone an incestuous one. Instead of discussing the unknowable and unprovable, people on this list should focus on Aptheker's role and meaning for communism in the US, and also why a man who should have know better and who visited the Soviet Union numerous times insisted well after Stalin's death and K's exposure of the former's crimes that women enjoyed equality in the USSR and that Jews as well enjoyed complete equality and freedom.

Mel Dubofsky

===

From: Mark Rosenzweig
Subject: RE: Herbert and Bettina Aptheker
Date: Sun, 8 Oct 2006

For once I find myself somewhat in agreement with Mr. Schwartz. The search for a secret connection between the claims of abuse by the daughter and H. Aptheker's work on Hungary (about the character of which Schwartz and I would disagree) are, unlike matters of the Hungarian uprising itself, inadjudicable and unnecessary. They are also outside the purview of historians and people in related disciplines , and likely to be fueled, given his controversial character as a Communist/Stalinist outsider in academia, by his detractors' desire to seize an opportunity to attempt to portray Aptheker as what we call today "a sexual predator", a moral monster and sociopath, as already evidenced by the unseemly attempt to conflate being an accused incestuous parent with being a pedophile or a rapist, in order to attack not just his work or his beliefs but his person as a means of nullifying his human credibility altogether in all spheres.

Further, I believe that if Bettina Aptheker raises such egregious, conspicuously posthumous claims against her father, it is in full knowledge and disregard of the fact that the matter cannot be properly adjudicated but nonetheless will be taken, by those many with all kinds of reasons (of which she is well aware) to do so, as firm basis for a fundamental assault on the integrity of everything her father did and was associated with.

While the implications of these belated revelations for her father's reputation are-- as she well knows -- politically and academically damaging in the extreme, the motives for unleashing this hitherto unspoken personal history (which we are led to believe she repressed entirely from consciousness for more than 50 years only to retrieve it conveniently after her father's death and in the process of writing her memoirs. whole and undistorted, without confabulations or phantastic elaborations of the sort we know are common in the recollection of long past emotionally- charged events, whether or not they happened in actuality or only in fantasy, never mind allegedly fully repressed ones) , intact, with apparent full memory of all kinds of detail, seems to be a claim which has motives which are more the subject for psychoanalytic study and treatment than for the historical disciplines

Those who seize with alacrity upon this non-evidentiary, highly dubious personal material, suggesting it is somehow (they don't know exactly how or why) the "key" to not just the mind of Herbert Aptheker and therefore to the mind of a political intellectual who supported the repression of the Hungarian revolt, but to the proverbial "Communist mind" itself are, in doing this, not only unlikely to produce any connections but in the meantime are really reveling in the misfortune of a person, Ms. Aptheker, who felt, as is typical in her cohort, that she had, of necessity, to not only "recover" this kind of material , which always seems to be there for recovery-- one way or the other --but make it available to the public, in print, in what I can only call a sad ritual of our times, of compulsory public self-revelation, emotional exhibitionism and conspicuous displays of the "healing" of the wounds of life.

The credibility of the claims she makes about her memories of, not a "traumatic event" -- of the sort which sometimes is fully or partially repressed but which can also and more often become, a quite conscious, repeatedly re-lived, fixation with serious unconscious ramifications -- but of an entire "life situation", of events, by her own account, spanning whole phases of her early life, across several stages of biological, emotional, intellectual, cognitive and moral development -- fully ten years from the age of 3 to 13 - seem to me, to be prima facie problematic rather than something we should feel obliged, if we wish to approach it at all (which I believe to be worthless) to lend the benefit of the doubt. As for confirmation/disconfirmation, they are impossible and therefore a red herring to raise.

By all means let's discuss "The Truth About Hungary": the truth about Herbert and Bettina is inaccessible to us.

Mark Rosenzweig Zhenjiang, Jiangsu Province, PRC

===

From: Stephen Schwartz
Subject: Herbert and Bettina Aptheker
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2006

Regarding the continued discussion over the recollections of Bettina Aptheker and the allegation that her father habitually molested her:

I first would repeat my earlier statement that regardless whether Bettina (whom I have a right to call by her first name since I knew her) has made a truthful statement, it is absurd to debate why she did not do so while her parents were alive. Lemisch's point about Jewish CPers and Israel is well taken -- but more important is the very solid legal fact that no publisher would put such a statement in print while the person accused was alive, for risk of a libel suit. I made this point before.

To extend this point, there are those who enjoy attacking their parents and those who do not. Some of us had parents that were extremely intolerant, hateful, hurtful, and damaging Stalinists, but they were still our parents, and we hesitate to denounce them publically. To stray into religion, the prophet Muhammad said that those who come into Islam from the other religions should not attack their parents for holding to the earlier religion, because to become Muslim is good but your mother is your mother.

Believe it or not, I don't insist on personalizing these issues. I have tried to make this point about Aptheker and Hungary. To have supported the purges, Hitler pact, persecution of Trotskyists, postwar purges, trials of the Jewish writers, and suppression of the Budapest uprising would seem to me quite damaging as a basis for criticism of Herbert Aptheker or anyone else. It is shocking and sad to now learn that he allegedly broke the rules of normal society to the degree that he would reportedly molest his daughter. I am not sure what it says about the history of Stalinism, or the adulation of Aptheker in American academia. I can say that it appears Aptheker's early work on slave revolts and so forth remains quite valid. I can think of many CP intellectuals whose work I have criticized because it was poor in quality, and because I believe the CP inflated them into something they were not, i.e. major creative figures, only because of their political affiliation. I don't think Aptheker's work on slave revolts was inflated. I think he filled a very real void in American historiography. That does not excuse the rest of his life or behavior.

I also observe in the discussion here -- following on what seems to me a wilful confusion of paedophilia with incest -- a similar, apparently-deliberate confusion about recovered memory. Recovered memories as a corpus of psychiatric evidence have been discredited in many cases where it could be shown that the "memories" in CHILDREN, NOT ADULTS, were elicited through suggestion. The same is true in adults where "recovered memory" about UFOs involves both suggestion and an absence of physical evidence.

No reputable psychiatrist ever suggested that the recovery of memory in adults was or is generally suspect. If recovery of memory in adults was not a very real phenomenon, psychiatry would not exist as it does today. Recovered memory in adults has been a feature of psychiatric study and therapy since the late 19th century. Analysis of false memory or distorted memory is something every historian and literary critic does when they write or review a biography.

One should not have to point out, at this late date, that the mind is mysterious and plays tricks. People remember things that didn't happen. People don't remember things that did happen. The unconscious sometimes interferes with the process of memory. These issues -- remembering meetings and so forth -- get discussed in national political debates every day but it is seldom that the national media discussion ranges into freelance psychiatry.

I would like to also restate something I have argued before on this list: the great majority of historians make poor amateur lawyers or psychiatrists, although many seem tempted into it. I myself may be said to have deviated on this issue here, having offered opinions on recovered memory. I should therefore state, I suppose, that for several years I followed a course of intensive, orthodox Freudian therapy having specifically to do with false and recovered memories, so I am not simply improvising here. I realize that excessive dependence on personal experience is frowned on at H-HUAC, but am attempting to make a point.

Again, if there is something to be gained from this discussion it seems to me more philosophical than historical, but I am uncertain as to what it is. American Communists have been glorified and exalted in scholarship. A revelation like that about the Aptheker family undermines the status of a famous American Communist. It shows that American Communists may have been grossly imperfect human beings. There are many more such examples. The California Pilipino Communist Carlos Bulosan was found to have committed plagiarism. The Hollywood 10 produced movies like OBJECTIVE BURMA! and BLOOD ON THE SUN that were based on historical falsehoods. To cite a fictional but, I think, relevant example, the protagonist of Henry Roth's CALL IT SLEEP has an incestuous relationship with a female relative, and it is now widely believed that Roth himself was consumed with guilt for having engaged in such behavior. Do we now expel Roth from the canon?

Let us not make the mistake of thinking that because Communists had bad politics, and were often bad people, but are viewed by many as great people, that anti- Communists were or are, by opposition, perfect paragons of morality, especially those who are anti-Communist today when there are few real risks involved in taking such a position. Shia Muslims believe that bad actions can produce good results. Other believers do not. One thing is sure: human beings are flawed in every regard. Great intellects were horrible in politics. Great political figures had stupid and even evil opinions in other areas. Great creative personalities were and are often completely incompetent and even harmful in their personal relationships.

I don't see any particular point in questioning Bettina Aptheker's motivations in publicizing her memories of her father. Is it self-serving? What piece of published writing is not? After all, as Milton said, "fame is the spur," and few people write and publish out of purely charitable reasons. Do we demand from Bettina Aptheker vast powers of self-examination, reflection, or the capacity to make some great contribution to the understanding of human existence? I don't.

I was and remain hesitant to encourage anybody in the historical field to engage with the Aptheker incest issue. This is certainly not because I am a male or am anxious to protect the CP! It is only because human tragedy is what it is, and I believe the proper and worthy approach to it is to treat it with a certain distance. It seems to me that the concept of privacy no longer exists. Everyone is subject to criticism on anything, and completely unconnected issues are used to make political points. I don't consider this very hralthy.

Finally, a Communist intellectual all of us know and some of us love once commented that politics, psychology, physics, and art all operate by different rules and that a Marxist category cannot be forced on all of them. There is no Marxist or anti-Marxist context in which to place the tormented feelings of Bettina Aptheker, except to say, as in the case of any person in pain, that alleviation of suffering is better than aggravating it. It is a deeply human characteristic to recognize and empathize with pain even when it is experienced by those who have inflicted pain upon us. It is often difficult to accept such feelings. To cite one example, German Jewish exiles in the U.S. would not assist in the targeting of Hamburg for allied bombing because of their sympathy with their former neighbors. One need not be a saint to feel horror at the infliction of pain on someone that one despises. Rather, it is somewhat inhuman and alienated to refuse such empathy and to insist that further pain be inflicted. That is why all religions recognize repentance and counsel compassion. That is also why Sadism is considered a form of psychiatric illness. I do not suggest we dwell on the Aptheker revelations; nor do I suggest that we use them as a pretext to further torment Bettina Aptheker. The experience of publishing what she has published must have been and be enough of a punishment.

Stephen Schwartz

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

Monday, October 16, 2006

Bettina Aptheker: My Father the Icon, My Father the Molester

Source: LAT (10-15-06)

[BETTINA APTHEKER is a professor of feminist studies and history at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author, most recently, of Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, Emeryville California, 2006).]

IT IS A LITTLE disconcerting and somewhat chilling to read reviews of my recently published memoir and see my own words quoted back to me. It is not because I don't like what I wrote, or feel shame about it. It is because I was the holder of so many family secrets, and the injunction to silence was so strong. In writing my story, I broke all of the family rules.

Growing up, I held tight to the illusion that everything would by OK if I too could project the image of the perfect family, even though my inner life was so fraught with tension. In seeing recent reviews of my book, although favorable, sometimes the child part of my mind shrinks in horror: "What have you done?" And then the calm, adult part of my mind says: "You have told the truth to the best of your ability." Any of us who has experienced childhood sexual abuse or other forms of abuse, even as adults, knows something of these conflicted feelings.

My parents, Fay and Herbert Aptheker, were members of the U.S. Communist Party. My mother was a union organizer, and my father was often described in the New York Times as the party's "leading theoretician," as if it were an appendage to his name. He was also a radical historian and the literary executor of the papers of W.E.B. DuBois. He published extensively and was an exceedingly controversial figure in the historical profession, and his Communist affiliation assured that he was blacklisted from any university work, beginning in the 1930s.

I grew up in the 1950s striving to be the "perfect daughter" as my embattled parents bravely stood up to the McCarthy hearings, anti-Communist purges and trials and the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In childhood, I assumed that I would inherit my father's dream and further his ambition. This was my parents' expectation. As I matured, I gave up those particular dreams and ambitions, but I did not give up my mother and my father, even after the memories of sexual abuse arose. As I wrote in the memoir, "I sought a middle ground between the grief of an irreconcilable break and the long shadow of denial."

It was when I began writing the memoir in the mid-1990s, and especially its childhood section, that I had my first memories of sexual abuse by my father, which I had entirely suppressed until then. I was mucking around in my childhood because my daughter and my partner, reading early drafts, kept saying that the narrative was emotionally flat. "Where are you?" they wanted to know. "What were you feeling?" I was the narrator, but the story read as though I was floating around on the ceiling of my childhood, watching it unfold.

The psychological term for this is dissociation. I was about 3 years old when the sexual abuse began, and it was when my father and I were playing a game called choo-choo train on the rug on the living room floor of our apartment in Brooklyn. My father stopped molesting me when I was 13. By then, of course, it was no longer a game. It was clear in my memory that my father took great care never to hurt me physically; he was, in fact, very gentle with me. But he also made clear I was never, ever to tell anyone about our games.

Once the memories erupted — and they did erupt with astonishing, volcanic force — I stopped writing. I needed counseling, and I was fortunate to have an experienced and loving psychotherapist. My partner was bedrock, and my children were devoted to me. That I already had something of a Buddhist meditation practice was of great benefit. Although I was too agitated to sit still in meditation, I could walk, doing mantra, reminding myself that all emotion and thought are essentially ephemeral.

That provided the foundation for the compassion with which I ultimately faced my father. And it allowed me to return to the memoir project, writing without rancor. I also came to understand that, of course, I had dissociated. As a child, I attempted to protect my parents from the political onslaught of the McCarthy era in the only way that I could: by my silence, and the erasure of the untenable, protecting myself from what a child could not bear.

A little over two weeks after my mother's death in June 1999, my father and I talked about the sexual abuse. He initiated the conversation, asking as we were driving home from a Vietnamese restaurant. "Did I ever hurt you when you were a child?" was how he started. I had been furious with him for about five years, carrying around the memories like a truncheon and yet unable to confront him. But I said yes, and once we talked, his anguish was so great, his apology so heartfelt, that all the anger left me in a great whoosh of an out breath, and then I felt nothing but great waves of compassion for him.

There are many who knew my parents, and many more who have read my father's work or heard him speak or taken classes with him. Since the publication of my book, many people have written to me and offered their support, while others have expressed shock. One wrote to me in great anguish, saying that he no longer knew how to think about my father or his work. Others have simply expressed their disbelief that the Herbert Aptheker they knew could ever have done such a thing. And more than one person has invoked the idea of "false memory syndrome."

"Is there anything besides Bettina's words to support the charge against Herbert?" reads a recent post on the Internet.

Of course, there's little I can say in response to such allegations other than to observe that if you think it was shocking for you, imagine how I must have felt. For those who knew my father, I think there is a solution by finding that middle ground I sought for myself, between lionizing my father on the one hand or demonizing him on the other.

Why write of this sexual abuse? Why proceed with the memoir? More than just wanting to provide readers with firsthand accounts of the historical movements in which I participated, I wished to contribute to the ongoing collective reconstruction of women's history in which the intimate oppression of women and children is revealed because it is part of the historical record.

I wanted people to know that reconciliation is possible, healing is possible. Breaking silence, I bear witness, and the child is at peace.

Posted on Monday, October 16, 2006 at 3:35 PM | Comments (11) | Top

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Peter Hennessy: ‘I plan to die in the National Archives’

Source: Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times (UK) (10-13-06)

Professor Peter Hennessy leads me past the stacks of books in the library at his home in Walthamstow, east London, to show me something special: a tea towel. It’s no ordinary tea towel, however. If Britain had been blown up by a nuclear bomb in the 1950s, this cream-and-green waffled cotton sheet would have dried Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s dishes.

Emblazoned on the tea towel are the letters TETW. “It’s an elaborate joke,” Hennessy cries. “They stand for The End of The World!” Or Tea Towel, he later confesses. Hennessy retrieved it from Stockwell, a bunker in the Cotswolds chosen as the post-apocalypse refuge for the British government and military of the 1950s and 1960s.

It’s the prosaic bits-and- bobs as well as high political drama that catch Hennessy’s eye. Fish fingers sit alongside Churchill’s cabinet in his new book, Having it So Good: Britain in the Fifties. It describes a society emerging from second world war austerity into shaky prosperity while also eavesdropping on the cabinet meetings of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan – three very different premierships that each had to come to terms with Britain’s relative decline in the world.

Tastes, smells and sounds infuse the account and Hennessy, who was a child of the 1950s, is “a conscious figure” in the book. He recalls the moment when he heard that the Manchester United team had died in the 1958 Munich air disaster – he was playing with a toy car in his Finchley home. A glimpse of a Babycham bottle can still transport him back to that era.

Despite the weight of footnotes, the book is not arid and academic but packed with stories, a reflection of Hennessy’s 20 years in journalism, including spells at the Financial Times and The Times. It was later in life that he decided to make an honest subject out of oxymoronic contemporary history, eventually becoming the Attlee professor of contemporary British history at Queen Mary, University of London, in 1991.

His regular media appearances led one history purist to condemn him as an intrusive egotist who “does not really grasp what is at stake in the writing of history”. But Hennessy is not afraid of taking potshots at the establishment. He once said, of erstwhile friends on the left, now peers of the realm: “They’ve gone from Trotsky to tosserdom in one generation.”...

Posted on Sunday, October 15, 2006 at 10:07 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Eric Foner et al: Historians file briefs in Supreme Court case

Eric Foner, James McPherson, Nell Painter and more than a score of other historians have filed briefs in a Supreme Court case involving the racial balance of public schools. The historians argue that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution are not "color-blind," as the plaintiffs in two districts claim.

Ralph Luker explains the issues at stake in an article published on HNN's homepage:

http://hnn.us/articles/30733.html

Posted on Sunday, October 15, 2006 at 9:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, October 13, 2006

An AHA Blog? Yep.

Source: AHA Blog (9-28-06)

Welcome to AHA Today, a blog focused on the latest happenings in the broad discipline of history and the professional practice of the craft that draws on the staff, research, and activities of the AHA.

The staff and officers of the Association work constantly to support and represent history in meetings, conferences, and a host of other activities. Too often, however, these activities are so immediate or time sensitive that they never make it into Perspectives. We hope this blog will bridge that gap, by reporting more regularly on these activities while they are still fresh and newsworthy. We want you to know what we are doing on your behalf (whether you happen to be a member or not), and hope to encourage you to feel a part of the work and advocacy efforts of the Association. We also want to hear your voice while it can play a real part in this work, and provide you with timely and critical information that you can act on as well.

We hope this blog will serve as a clearinghouse for interesting, and perhaps useful information about the profession. This could be a pointer to an interesting newspaper article on changing practices in the history classroom, a fresh piece of data about the qualifications of history teachers in the schools, a significant new book on best practices in the preparation of historical documents, or a significant new internet collection that will be of general interest to students of history. And occasionally this will be news about a forthcoming project or activity that could interest or affect a sizeable portion of the membership.

To that end, the authors will be the professional staff of the AHA and occasional invited guests who can offer a fresh perspective on one of these issues. As anyone who reads blog postings regularly knows well, this medium tends to blur the line between the professional and the personal that seems much more secure in traditional print publication and their web page analogues. This blog will try to maintain that line, while still bringing the same high quality of writing that you have come to expect from the articles that appear in Perspectives and more recently online in our News Briefs column (which has been incorporated into this blog).

Like the media that makes this blog possible, we see this as dynamic, a work-in-progress. So we encourage you to write to us with your suggestions for topics we need to address and new areas or events we need to cover. The AHA is here to serve the interests of all professional historians, and we hope you will expect no less from this blog.

Posted on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 7:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Caroline Elkins: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya

Source: Boston Globe (7-3-06)

Wiry and energetic, the Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies at Harvard University coils in her chair and speaks with rapid force about her book that recently won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.

"I was strongly urged by colleagues not to undertake this project, for two reasons," Caroline Elkins said in an interview at her home, not far from the campus. "One, they felt it was too politically sensitive. Two, they said there wouldn't be enough information. So, me being me, I decided those were good enough reasons to undertake the project."

At 37, Elkins has spent more than 10 years exhuming and writing about the long-hidden story at the heart of "Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya." It's a vivid narrative -- not without its critics -- of oppression, torture, and cover up during the Mau Mau rebellion of the 1950s, which shows how even a democratic government with humane values can hide the truth of its abominable behavior.

Mau Mau was an uprising among the Kikuyu tribe of British Kenya, essentially a response to economic privation due to losses of land at the hands of British settlers. Beginning in 1951 and ending in 1959, the rebellion included an oath of loyalty among adherents, attacks on settlers, and a poorly armed movement based in Kenyan forests. Thirty-two Europeans were killed in rebel attacks. But in the British campaign that followed, thousands of Kikuyu, many of them innocent, were abused, tortured, or killed in a system of camps known as the Pipeline. By Elkins's calculations, as many as 320,000 men and women were held in the camps, and as many as 50,000 were killed.

Elkins uncovered hundreds of stories of tortures committed in the worst of these camps, some in grisly detail: castrations, clamping of women's breasts with pliers, fatal beatings. Equally compelling is her account of the British denial of the truth, which extended from local colonial officials right up through Winston Churchill and his successors, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.

Though British officials lied baldly in Parliament and later burned virtually all the records of the camp system, Elkins reconstructed the story -- including the names and locations of the camps -- using eyewitness accounts, contemporary letters and private documents, and records of the opposition Labor Party's futile resistance to the repression. Most of the chief architects of the camp system, including governor Evelyn Baring, retired from the colonial service with honor and were never held accountable for the abuses. Several senior participants were interviewed by Elkins, and they are unrepentant.

After the end of the empire, Elkins writes, people in Britain wanted to put the conflict in the past. After independence in 1963, Kenyan leaders, too, found it convenient to forget about the guerrilla war in the interest of unity, since many abuses were committed by Africans on the British side. Since the longtime ban on the Mau Mau movement was revoked in 2002, renewed discussion of the rebellion has blossomed in Kenya. A group of Kenyan lawyers recently announced a plan to file suit against the British government in coming months.

The barbed-wire camps of the Pipeline seem a long way from the leafy environs of Cambridge, where Elkins lives with her husband and two sons. Indeed, she could have stayed comfortably in academia and avoided the gory details of war.

Born in New Jersey, she majored in history at Princeton. She had had the usual European and American history courses when she took a course with Robert Tignor, professor of African studies. Fascinated by the continent, she graduated in African history, with highest honors. But she was far from finished.

"What really stood out was her energy and her desire to pursue a difficult career in the face of many challenges," Tignor said by phone. "We were overwhelmed by her stick-to-itiveness, her ability to tackle archival and personal research. All that comes out clearly in 'Imperial Reckoning.' "...

Posted on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Juan Cole: Complains that rightwingers keep distorting Wiki entries about him

Source: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment (10-12-06)

An encyclopedia article should be an objective accounting of a person's life and work. The wikipedia entry on me is constantly being distorted by a small group of far rightwing activists who put the comments of my ideological critics up into the body in an attempt to discredit me.

I never replied to the smear of me gotten up by Marty Peretz of the New Republic and carried out by a far rightwing Israeli historian named Ephraim Karsh, some time ago. It was beneath contempt.

Karsh used scurrilous propaganda techniques, attempting to insinuate that my criticisms of the Neconservative clique in the Bush administration are somehow like believing in the forged "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Of course, he put the insinuation in the negative, so as to protect himself from criticism. No serious person who knows me or my work would credit his outrageous insinuations for a moment.

Karsh charged that I am innocent of the 20th and 21st century history of the Middle East because much of my writing had been on earlier periods.

But in fact I have formally published in refereed academic venues on the Taliban, on September 11, the Ayatollahs of Iraq and democracy, on the historiography of the Muslim Brotherhood, on the Salafi leader Rashid Rida and many other twentieth century and twenty-first century subjects. My book, Sacred Space and Holy War contains chapters on the twentieth-century history of the Arab Shiites and on the modernity of the Islamic Republic of Iran and I have also published a chapter at McGill University Press on the treatment of religious minorities by the Islamic Republic, especially in the 1990s and early zeroes.

In addition to my writing on academic 20th century and contemporary topics, which has been extensive, I have published a raft of op-eds on contemporary affairs in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, the Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Petersburg Times, etc., etc. I am a sought-after commentator in the media on contemporary Middle Eastern affairs, which I follow on a daily basis, having made appearances on the Lehrer News Hour, Nightline, ABC Evening News, the Today Show, Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, CNN Headline News, etc., etc. The news professionals are in no doubt of my expertise on the up to the minute happenings in the region.

I am a person of wide personal experience with the late twentieth century and contemporary Middle East. I worked as a newspaperman in Beirut in the late 1970s. I lived for several years in Cairo. I lived in Amman, Jordan. I lived and traveled widely in Pakistan and India. I have continued to visit the region frequently in the past 15 years, keeping in touch with the pulse of opinion and changing local views. I don't need to do that through interpreters. I speak fluent colloquial Arabic, Urdu and Persian, and can get around in Turkish.

I have written a lot about the earlier history of the Middle East and will go on doing so. But Karsh's attempt to paint me as a dusty antiquarian is simply implausible.

You will note, moreover, that a medievalist like Bernard Lewis, who for the most part wrote about the early Muslim period or the Ottoman Empire, is lionized by people like Karsh when he writes about current affairs. Lewis's experience on the ground in the Arab world is minimal compared to my own.

Posted on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 5:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tony Judt: Paying a price for going too far in criticizing Israel?

Source: Eric Alterman in the Guardian (10-12-06)

The British historian Tony Judt, transplanted to New York told a reporter this week:

"I'm struck when I observe the Jewish community in the United States, especially in New York ...that it's a community which is the most successful, the wealthiest, the most well-integrated, the most influential, the most safe Jewish community in the history of Judaism, period - anywhere, anytime - since the Roman empire. And yet it's driven by an enormous self-induced insecurity."

Judt ought to know. Just this past week, he became the victim of its insecurity - or power, depending on how you look at it.

The problem was not Judt's London Review of Books (LRB) essay on "Bush's Useful Idiots", in which he carelessly failed to distinguish between those American liberals who supported Bush's massive misadventure in Iraq and those of us who had the good sense to oppose it. No, that annoyed people, particularly antiwar liberals, but as American liberals, we find ourselves frequently annoyed. Rather the essay causing problems for Judt was a New York Review of Books essay from way back in 2003, entitled, "Israel: The Alternative", in which he called for a one-state solution, and hence, the end of the Jewish state. Calling for the end of Israel is a much more serious offence in America than merely slandering liberals.

It's so serious in fact, that it led a group of professional Jewish leaders to try to prevent Judt from being heard any further. On October 3, Judt was supposed to give a talk about the Israel lobby to something called Network 20/20, an organization for mid-career professionals, at the Polish consulate. That talk never happened, and the group's president Patricia Huntington, who cancelled the talk that day, blamed the cancellation on "serial phone-calls from B'Nai Brith Anti-Defamation League (ADL) President Abe Foxman warned [the Polish consulate] off hosting anything involving Tony Judt."

According to a report in the New York Sun, a newspaper that is especially friendly to the Israel lobby, the Polish consulate insisted on the cancellation. But Huntington blamed the ADL, saying Foxman had threatened to poison Polish Jewish relations if Judt were allowed to speak. David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, joined in with kudos for the Poles.

Foxman, however, denied the reports. Though he admitted to be pleased that Judt had been denied a forum, he explained: "One of our staff people called; they said they were just making the facilities available. We said, 'O.K., thank you.' As far as we were concerned, the issue was closed."

But of course it wasn't. Judt launched an email campaign, in which he explained that Foxman had warned the Poles that unless they cancelled, "he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli antisemites (= me) all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote)." Ironically, it was many of the same liberals whom Judt slandered in his LRB essay who came to his defence. Mark Lilla of the University of Chicago and Richard Sennett of the London School of Economics e-circulated a petition to be sent to Mr. Foxman and the New York Review condemning the cancellation and this liberal, like many others signed it.

The thing is, nobody really knows what happened. Foxman and Harrington refuse reporters' entreaties to speak any further, except that the ADL insists that "in no way did the League urge or demand that the Polish consulate cancel the October 3 event."

All we know is that once again, we see the price that one pays in the United States for going too far in one's criticism of Israel...

Posted on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 5:40 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Edwin Bearss: Pivotal Battles of the Civil War

Source: Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard (10-16-06)

I don't think anyone knows who the first person was to earn a living as a guide to Civil War battlefields, but no member of that charmed profession has achieved the fame or longevity of Edwin C. Bearss (pronounced Barsssss), who captained his first lucky group of tourists around Vicksburg in 1955 and can still be found, from one weekend to the next, at one battlefield or another, leading a fanny-packed and be-visored platoon of customers into the pleasures of vicarious combat.

Over the last 50 years, like most enduring enterprises, Ed has diversified. This year alone he's taken several hundred people on tours of Anzio and Messina in Italy, the Oregon Trail in Idaho and Nez Perce encampments in Montana, scenes from the Mississippi floods of 1927 and from Abraham Lincoln's service in the Black Hawk War in the 1830s--on top of a schedule already filled with your basic Antietams, your Gettysburgs, your Shilohs and Chickamaugas and Spotsylvanias. He also found time to celebrate his 83rd birthday.

But Ed's first and last love is for the Civil War, and this, along with his standing in the trade, gives an air of inevitability to the publication of Fields of Honor. Somebody was going to have to put out this book sooner or later. For the last several years members of the self-named Bearss Brigades--a particularly tenacious species of the genus Civil War Buff--have armed themselves with tape recorders and gone chasing after Ed as he charges over the battlefields, hoping to preserve for the ages his incomparable observations and narrative spiel. Dozens of volunteers have transcribed the hundreds of hours of tape into thousands of pages of prose, and from these, culled and whittled, have come the 13 chapters of the book, offering definitive commentary on engagements from Fort Sumter to Appomattox. The literature of the Civil War is vast, of course, and nearly limitless in its variety of literary forms; but even so, I don't think there's another book quite like Fields of Honor.

And the reason is--forgive me if I sound like a Bearss Brigadier for a moment--there's never been a Civil War authority quite like Ed. Growing up on a ranch in Montana, he christened his favorite cows Antietam and Sharpsburg. His father was a Marine, and so was a cousin--"Hiking Hiram" Bearss, as the newspapers called him--who earned the Medal of Honor during the Philippines Insurrection and became, up to that time, the most decorated Marine in the history of the corps. Hearing their experiences led the boy to read every book he could get hold of about war. And when a real war made itself available, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ed enlisted and became a Marine Raider. He was sent to the Pacific theater, moving from the Russell Islands to the Solomon Islands to the assault on New Britain. His fellow Marines remember him for his almost empty backpack, containing only a few grenades, extra ammunition, and a copy of the World Book of Knowledge....

Posted on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 4:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Ignatieff: Candidate Called Israeli Attack on Lebanese Town a 'War Crime'

Source: Wa Po (10-13-06)

Michael Ignatieff, a former Harvard professor running for the leadership of Canada's Liberal Party, is facing a political uproar over remarks in which he labeled as a "war crime" Israel's deadly bombing of the southern Lebanon town of Qana.

Ignatieff, a noted human rights scholar and the front-runner in the race to lead the party, said in a French-language radio interview Sunday that the July 30 Qana bombing, which killed 28 civilians, "was a war crime, and I should have said that."

The co-chairman of Ignatieff's Toronto campaign, Parliament member Susan Kadis, abruptly quit the campaign Wednesday, and Canadian Jewish groups sharply criticized the candidate. Israel's ambassador to Canada, Alan Baker, said Thursday that Ignatieff's statement was "upsetting and disappointing."

Kadis said Ignatieff should "have a better handle on the Middle East."

The Lebanese civilians were killed when an Israeli warplane bombed a residential building in Qana. Israel said that it did not know civilians were in the apartment building and that Hezbollah fighters had fired rockets from nearby sites. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan rejected Israel's explanation. He noted after the bombing that an Israeli bombardment had killed more than 100 Lebanese civilians at Qana 10 years earlier and said Israel was "causing death and suffering on a wholly unacceptable scale."

The controversy is a blow to Ignatieff, who holds a narrow lead in the party race ahead of its convention at the end of next month. The party leader would become prime minister if the Liberal Party regains control of the government, which it lost to the Conservative Party in January. Ignatieff, who was born in Toronto, left his Harvard post last year to win a seat in Parliament.

To try to quell the uproar, he issued a statement Wednesday in which he said he has been "a lifelong friend of Israel." He described the Qana incident as "a terrible human tragedy where innocent civilians died in a conflict that saw unjustified tragedies on all sides." He later told reporters, "War crimes were visited on Israeli civilians; they were visited on Lebanese civilians."

Ignatieff's recent comments were made in an attempt to apologize for his remarks on Qana in August. Then, he said the bombing was made during a "dirty war" and noted he was "not losing sleep" over it.

"I showed a lack of compassion. It was a mistake," he said Sunday on the Quebec talk show.

Posted on Friday, October 13, 2006 at 1:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, October 12, 2006

National Book Award Finalists Chosen

Source: NYT (10-12-06)

The National Book Award finalists, announced yesterday, include “American Born Chinese” by Gene Luen Yang in the young people’s literature category, the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award. The winners will be announced in a ceremony on Nov. 15. In fiction, the finalists are Mark Z. Danielewski for “Only Revolutions”; Ken Kalfus for “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country”; Richard Powers for “The Echo Maker”; Dana Spiotta for “Eat the Document”; and Jess Walter for “The Zero.” The nonfiction finalists are Taylor Branch for “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68”; Rajiv Chandrasekaran for “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone”; Timothy Egan for “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl”; Peter Hessler for “Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present”; and Lawrence Wright for “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.”

Posted on Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 1:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tony Judt: More are outraged by cancellation of his talk

Source: Todd Gitlin at the American Prospect blog (10-10-06)

The NYU historian Tony Judt was invited to speak October 3 on the subject of “The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy” to a discussion group entitled Network 20/20, which always holds its meetings at Manhattan’s Polish Consulate. But Judt received a call from Patricia Harrington, the president of the group, canceling his talk. She told Judt (as he recounted in a widely distributed e-mail) that the Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League, who “warned them off hosting anything involving Tony Judt.”

Judt said that ADL’s Abraham Foxman warned the Poles that unless they cancelled, to quote Judt’s e-mail, “he would smear the charge of Polish collaboration with anti-Israeli antisemites (= me) all over the front page of every daily paper in the city (an indirect quote).” Poland is particularly sensitive about the charge these days, what with the recent publication of Jan Gross’s book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz.

Harrington and Foxman did not reply to my attempts to ask them directly about this. But Harrington did tell the New York Sun that the ADL “forced, threatened, and exerted ‘pressure’ on the Polish consulate to cancel the talk.” ADL’s October 5 press release says that “in no way did the League urge or demand that the Polish consulate cancel the October 3 event.” I e-mailed Foxman to ask what he did say to the Poles, but have not heard back from him.

In 2003, Judt wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books advocating a binational state in place of present-day Israel. For myself, I disagree. Given the difficulties in establishing a modicum of justice in two states so soaked in hatred, a decent binational state strikes me as hallucinatory. I admire Judt’s historical writing but think he sometimes goes overboard when foraying into some contemporary events. (A liberal manifesto by Bruce Ackerman and myself, to be published in the next issue of the Prospect, with many other signatures, addresses one of these excesses.)

But that’s neither here nor there. Public debate on AIPAC is long overdue and Judt is to be commended for broaching the subject. Too many people of the My-Israel-Right-or-Wrong persuasion are indulging in an unseemly hysteria about broaching the subject in polite company. Do they really think they can sustain this taboo forever by waving the bloody flag? The same day Judt was unplugged, the Forward featured a scare headline about Farrar Straus Giroux (“publisher of Singer and Malamud”) planning to publish a book by the political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, whose paper on AIPAC last year provoked a huge kerfuffle. ...

Posted on Thursday, October 12, 2006 at 1:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Edward Said: The Last Interview (Documentary)

Source: NYT (10-11-06)

Born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, Edward Said, the writer and literary critic who died of leukemia in 2003, was perhaps fated to feel forever the outsider. In “Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said,” the director Sato Makoto examines the roots of his subject’s chronic alienation and sympathy for the Palestinian cause, visiting his childhood homes in Jerusalem, Cairo and Beirut, and encouraging the recollections of a wide variety of friends and family members.

Yet the man they describe as “contrarian” and “indomitable” gradually fades from view as the filmmaker, reaching for a larger theme, abandons the home movies and photographs to linger with Palestinian refugees in Syria and a family of Mizrahim (Arab Jews) in Israel. Though loosely framed by readings from Mr. Said’s 1999 memoir of the same name, “Out of Place” is less a biography than a somewhat rambling meditation on exile, identity and the psychological scars of dispossession. The result is a melancholy, searching film whose inspiration, modestly buried in a Quaker cemetery in Lebanon, remains as distant as the world that shaped him.

Far more satisfying is the complex portrait provided by “Edward Said: The Last Interview,” a riveting record of Mr. Said’s 2002 conversation with the journalist Charles Glass. Though visibly depleted by illness, Mr. Said speaks eloquently about his privileged upbringing (including his early love of the Tarzan movies, in which he admits to identifying with the colonialists), his teaching at Columbia University and his twin passions for music and language.

The movie really begins to crackle, however, when the conversation shifts to Arab-Israeli politics and his involvement with what Mr. Said terms the “creative chaos” of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Vividly detailing his eventual disenchantment with Yasir Arafat and disgust with the peace process, Mr. Said is rueful about his lifelong attraction to difficult subjects. “I have learned to prefer being not quite right and out of place,” he says, returning again and again to his feelings of homelessness. Engrossing and wide-ranging, “Edward Said: The Last Interview” proves that a couch, a camera and a great mind can be all the inspiration a filmmaker needs.

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

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Sheldon Meyer: Oxford University Press editor mourned

Source: Press Release -- Oxford University Press (Niko Pfund) (10-10-06)

Oxford University Press is deeply saddened by the news that Sheldon Meyer, Oxford’s legendary editor, passed away on October 9 after a long illness. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. It goes without saying that Sheldon Meyer’s career inspires many of us here at Oxford; Sheldon was the Maxwell Perkins of American history publishing, an editor who published many of Oxford’s most distinguished titles over the last forty years and won many a Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize. He made equally important and innovative contributions in the fields of jazz, sports, popular culture, and African American studies, but he always maintained that he published authors, not books. Those authors’ respect for their editor was evident in American Places: Encounters with History (2002), a book that celebrated Sheldon’s career with essays on historical places by more than two dozen of the authors with whom he worked. In Sheldon’s memory, the OUP blog, http://blog.oup.com/oupblog/2006/10/mourning_sheldo.html, excerpts the preface to the book by William Leuchtenberg.

There will be a service to commemorate Sheldon's life and achievements at St. Michael's Church, 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, New York, at 2:00 pm on Friday, October 13.

Posted on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 4:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Walid Phares: Tells Iraqi academics ... You need to address your American colleagues on democracy and US efforts

Source: Phareswire.com (10-10-06)

In an interview with Radio Free Iraq, Middle East expert and Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Dr Walid Phares appealed to Iraqi academics and intellectuals to address their colleagues in the United States and express their real aspirations on democracy and freedom. Phares, who taught political science and Midle East studies at several Florida Universities since 1992, and who also taught in Beirut in the 1980s said he is speaking in the name of many American academics from Middle Eastern or Arab descent who wish to see their colleagues in Iraq, from all communities and universities, breaking the silence and reaching out to the American public directly. "It is not enough, said Phares, that your President and politicians make official speeches in Iraq or the US on fighting Terrorism; you need to speak out and come to America and speak directly to the intellectuals and the public."

Phares told his radio audience in Iraq that "the debate about the future of the liberated country is taking place today in America, and the voice of the Iraqi people and intellectuals is unheard yet. Americans do not hear enough from you. The US has spent billions of dollars and about 3,000 soldiers were killed in the war to remove Saddam and fight the terrorists. Yet your voice is not loud enough in the American debate. People need to know from you that had Saddam stayed in power, the massacres against Shiite, Kurds and moderate Sunnis, in addition to other communities, would have resumed. It is not just important for you, as thinkers and teachers, to educate the American People on your positions but it is your duty to do so. A real dialogue must be opened between you and your counter parts in America."

Posted on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 12:43 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tariq Ramadan: The State Dept. Was Right to Deny Him a Visa Says the Weekly Standard

Source: Olivier Guitta in the Weekly Standard (10-16-06)

[Olivier Guitta is a foreign affairs and counterterrorism consultant in Washington.]

ON SEPTEMBER 20, the State Department denied a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan on the grounds that he had contributed around 600 euros to a French charity classified as a terrorist organization since 2003 because of its relationship with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. This latest exclusion follows on the revocation of Ramadan's visa to live and work in the United States while teaching at Notre Dame in 2004, a step taken at the express request of the Department of Homeland Security. While the American Civil Liberties Union and the leftist literary group PEN, among others, present Ramadan as a moderate and accuse U.S. authorities of intolerance, the background and views of Tariq Ramadan suggest the government's move was entirely justified.

For starters, Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the highly influential Islamist organization born in Egypt in 1928. It was the Brotherhood that invented the now-familiar Islamist modus operandi of covert organization, assassination, and extremist theology. Its goal was to overthrow the Egyptian regime, install a fundamentalist Muslim government, and impose sharia (Islamic law) as the new constitution. Tariq's father, Said Ramadan, was a major figure in this organization, expelled from Egypt by Gamal Abdul Nasser for Islamist activity.

Said Ramadan took refuge first in Saudi Arabia, where he was a founder of the World Islamic League, one of the largest Saudi charities and global missionary groups. He then moved to Geneva, where in 1961 he created the Islamic Center, a combination mosque, think tank, and community center. The philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood influenced a generation of wealthy Muslim kids, including Osama bin Laden. Interestingly, Said Ramadan also had U.S. connections: He had a close relationship with Malcolm X and was personal mentor to Dawud Salahuddin, a black convert to Islam who murdered an Iranian dissident, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1980. After fleeing the United States, Salahuddin spent a few days in Geneva visiting Said Ramadan before taking refuge in Iran. Profiled in the New Yorker in 2002, Salahuddin confirmed that Ramadan remained his adviser and spiritual guide until Ramadan's death in 1995.

Said Ramadan was one of the most important Islamist thinkers of the 20th century. He is probably the author of "The Project," a 14-page document dated 1982 found by the Swiss secret service in 2001. "The Project" is a roadmap for installing Islamic regimes in the West by propaganda, preaching, and if necessary war. (It can be read here.)

Tariq Ramadan was born in 1962 in Switzerland. After toying with a career as a professional soccer player, he settled into the family business as an Islamic scholar. He became a teacher of philosophy and theology in Swiss universities. Most European secret service agencies are convinced that, at the end of the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood chose Tariq Rama dan to be their European representative. In 1991, he went to Cairo to study with Islamist professors. Upon his return to Switzerland, he founded the Movement of Swiss Muslims. His objective was to reach Muslim youth by Islamizing modernity rather than modernizing Islam.

Charming and smooth, Ramadan holds out Islam as the solution to all the problems of Muslim youth--in keeping with the slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood, "Islam is the solution." The first indication of his fundamentalism came in 1993, when he lobbied to outlaw a play called Mahomet, being produced in Geneva, which represented the prophet in a light that did not fit with Ramadan's views. In 1995, Alaa el-Din Nazmi, an Egyptian Secret Service agent assigned to watch the Ramadan family, was murdered in Geneva. No one has been arrested for the crime....

... Ramadan often speaks equivocally. Commenting on the September 11 attacks ten days after they occurred, he explained that one couldn't say for sure that bin Laden was behind them. He then asked, "Who profits from the crime?" noting that no Arab or Muslim cause was the better for it. This is an argument used by Islamist conspiratorialists who accuse Israel of perpetrating 9/11. In an interview with the French newsmagazine Le Point, Ramadan used the neutral term "interventions" when speaking of the major terrorist attacks in New York, Bali, and Madrid. And when asked recently by an Italian magazine whether car bombings against U.S. forces in Iraq were justified, he was quoted as saying: "Iraq was colonized by the Americans. Resistance against the army is just."

Ramadan's views about Israel are unsurprising: He strongly favors the elimination of the Jewish state. As one French DST (equivalent to the FBI) agent told the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Ramadan's long-term goal is to bring about the legal extinction of the state of Israel through a major Muslim lobbying campaign, first in Europe, then in the United States.

For her 2004 book Brother Tariq, Caroline Fourest, a French expert on Islamic fundamentalism, studied Ramadan's 15 books, 1,500 pages of interviews, and--most important--his 100 or so tapes, which sell tens of thousands of copies each year. Her conclusion: "Ramadan is a war leader." When an interviewer from the weekly L'Express asked Fourest how she could be so sure that Ramadan was indeed the "political heir of his grandfather," Hassan al-Banna, here's how she replied:

"Because I've studied his statements and his writing. I was struck by the extent to which the discourse of Tariq Ramadan is often just a repetition of the discourse that Banna had at the beginning of the 20th century in Egypt. He never criticizes his grandfather. On the contrary, he presents him as a model to be followed, a person beyond reproach, nonviolent and unjustly criticized because of the 'Zionist lobby'! This sends chills down one's spine when one knows the extent to which Banna was a fanatic, that he gave birth to a movement out of which the worst Jihadis (like Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number 2 man of al Qaeda) have emerged, and that he wanted to establish a theocracy in every country having a single Muslim. Tariq Ramadan claims that he is not a Muslim Brother. Like all the Muslim Brothers . . . since it's a fraternity which is three-quarters secret. . . . A Muslim Brother is above all someone who adopts the methods and the thought of Banna. Ramadan is the man who has done the most to disseminate this method and this thought.

In response to her book, Ramadan calls Fourest an agent of Israel but doesn't refute her findings. Predictably, as soon as her book was published, an Islamist website threatened Fourest and posted her address and the pass code to get into her building....

Posted on Wednesday, October 11, 2006 at 12:20 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Rashid Khalidi: Assessing the role of Palestinians in their own undoing

Source: Steven Erlanger in the NYT (10-7-06)

... Rashid Khalidi, American-born, comes from one of Jerusalem’s most distinguished families, which has also provided another distinguished historian, Walid Khalidi. Together they have done much to provide a Palestinian narrative rooted in their personal histories but disciplined by the standards of Western scholarship.

Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, “The Iron Cage,” is at heart a historical essay, an effort to decide why the Palestinians, unlike so many other peoples and tribes, have failed to achieve an independent state. To Mr. Khalidi’s credit, the answers are not very comforting to Palestinians, whose leaders have often made the wrong choices and have not yet built the institutional structures for statehood.

He often contrasts the weakness of Palestinian decision-making, especially before 1948, with the more organized behavior of the Jewish population of British Palestine, known as the yishuv.

At the heart of the book is his anguished question about what the Palestinians call al nakba, the catastrophe — “why Palestinian society crumbled so rapidly in 1948, why there was not more concerted resistance to the process of dispossession, and why 750,000 people fled their homes in a few months.”

Mr. Khalidi has his own set of external culprits: British colonial masters like Lord Balfour, who refused to recognize the national rights of non-Jews; lavish financial support for Jewish immigration; the romanticism and cynicism of Arab leaders, themselves newly hatched from the colonial incubator.

Like Britain before it, he argues, the United States “consistently privileged the interests of the country’s Jewish population over those of its Arab residents,” helping Israel to push “Palestinians into an impossible corner, into an iron cage” from which, he suggests, a viable Palestinian state may not, in the end, emerge.

But he has plenty of blame for the Palestinians, too — for the rivalries among rich Palestinian families who competed to serve their colonial masters, for leaders who failed to see the impact of Hitler on Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine, for those who mismanaged the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt against the British and especially for Yasir Arafat, who, along with his colleagues in Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, has a special place in Mr. Khalidi’s pantheon of Palestinian failure....

Posted on Tuesday, October 10, 2006 at 7:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert KC Johnson: His blogging on the Duke Lacrosse Scandal Admired

Source: Ralph Luker at HNN's Cliopatria (blog) (10-10-06)

I've long been proud of the fact that KC Johnson is one of the founding members of Cliopatria. He is featured in Kurt Anderson's "Rape, Justice, and the ‘Times'," New York Magazine, 16 October, an article that rips into the Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse case. My favorite paragraphs:

In the movie, Tom Hanks would play K. C. Johnson. He's the most impressive of the "bloggers who have closely followed the case," in the Times' tacitly pejorative construction. But Johnson is the Platonic ideal of the species—passionate but committed to rigor and facts and fairness, a tenured professor of U.S. history (at Brooklyn College), a 38-year-old vegetarian who lives alone in a one-bedroom Bay Ridge apartment and does pretty much nothing but study, teach, run, and write.
Johnson has no connection to Duke. (His B.A. and Ph.D. are from the Harvard of the Northeast.) His attention was grabbed in April by the "deeply disturbing" public comments of Duke faculty that righteously indulged in invidious stereotypes and assumed the lacrosse players' guilt. "One area that the academy, especially since McCarthyism, is supposed to stand up is cases where due process is denied," he says.
He usually posts at least once a day—not standard autoblog rim shots, but carefully argued, deeply researched essays running 1,000 words or more. "I need to ensure that it meets what I consider to be an acceptable level of academic quality." He has traveled to Durham several times. When he wanted to find out if Nifong's unfair photo lineups were standard provincial practice—they're not—he spent days talking to fifteen North Carolina police departments and prosecutors.
People assume he's a right-winger. "I'm a registered Democrat who has never voted for a Republican in my life." Not that he doesn't wildly speculate—he is a blogger. I wondered why, after Nifong won his primary, the D.A. didn't start tacking away from the case, setting himself up to drop the charges. Because, Johnson argues, if it doesn't go forward, he would be vulnerable to civil suits from the indicted players, and disbarment. "This is someone whose career is on the line. He has no choice."
The Times has not addressed any of this. For the past few years, I've tended to roll my eyes when people default to rants about the blindered oafishness or various biases of "the mainstream media" in general and the Times in particular. At the same time, I've nodded when people gush about the blogosphere as a valuable check on and supplement to the MSM—but I've never entirely bought it. Having waded deep into this Duke mess the last weeks, baffled by the Times' pose of objectivity and indispensably guided by Johnson's blog, I'm becoming a believer.

You can find KC's postings on the Duke lacrosse case at Durham-in-Wonderland. They are marked by his characteristically thoughtful and relentless energy. I'll be a happy man when the Duke lacrosse case is resolved and KC will be posting regularly with us again.

Posted on Tuesday, October 10, 2006 at 11:48 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Richard Hofstadter: Cited by Columnist Paul Krugman

Source: NYT (10-9-06)

... Mr. Hastert [who believes that George Soros and the Democrats are behind the Foley scandal] is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.”

Hofstadter’s essay introducing the term was inspired by his observations of the radical right-wingers who seized control of the Republican Party in 1964. Today, the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater controls both Congress and the White House.

As a result, political paranoia — the “sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” Hofstadter described — has gone mainstream. To read Hofstadter’s essay today is to be struck by the extent to which he seems to be describing the state of mind not of a lunatic fringe, but of key figures in our political and media establishment.

The “paranoid spokesman,” wrote Hofstadter, sees things “in apocalyptic terms. ... He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” Sure enough, Dick Cheney says that “the war on terror is a battle for the future of civilization.”

According to Hofstadter, for the paranoids, “what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” and because “the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated.” Three days after 9/11, President Bush promised to “rid the world of evil.”

The paranoid “demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals” — instead of focusing on Al Qaeda, we’ll try to remake the Middle East and eliminate a vast “axis of evil” — “and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration.” Iraq, anyone?

The current right-wing explanation for what went wrong in Iraq closely echoes Joseph McCarthy’s explanation for the Communist victory in China, which he said was “the product of a great conspiracy” at home. According to the right, things didn’t go wrong because the invasion was a mistake, or because Donald Rumsfeld didn’t send enough troops, or because the occupation was riddled with cronyism and corruption. No, it’s all because the good guys were stabbed in the back. Democrats, who undermined morale with their negative talk, and the liberal media, which refused to report the good news from Iraq, are responsible for the quagmire....

Posted on Tuesday, October 10, 2006 at 1:06 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, October 9, 2006

Hamid Dabashi: A prominent professor's attack on a best-selling memoir sparks debate among Iranian scholars in the U.S.

Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (10-9-06)

Like many Americans of Iranian descent, Hamid Dabashi read an article in the April 17 issue of The New Yorker with anxious dismay.

In that article, Seymour Hersh reported that President Bush's administration was preparing an airstrike against Iran, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.

The president himself dismissed the report as "wild speculation." But Mr. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University who has been active in the antiwar movement since the attacks of September 11, 2001, heard a call to action.

The article prompted him to dust off an essay that he had written a few years before and publish it in the June 1 edition of the Egyptian English-language newspaper Al-Ahram. His target? Not President Bush or the Pentagon, but Azar Nafisi, author of the best-selling memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran and a visiting fellow at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington.

Ms. Nafisi's memoir, published by Random House in 2003, blended a harrowing portrayal of the life of women in post-revolutionary Iran with a powerful personal testimony about the power of literary classics. The book found a wide audience, and its success made Ms. Nafisi a celebrity.

Gazing at the book through the lens of literary theory and politics, Mr. Dabashi had a much less favorable reaction to it. His blistering essay cast Ms. Nafisi as a collaborator in the Bush administration's plans for regime change in Iran. He drew heavily on the late scholar Edward Said's ideas about the relationship between Western literature and empire and the fetishization of the "Orient" to attack Reading Lolita in Tehran as a prop for American imperialism. He also pilloried Ms. Nafisi personally for what he described as her cozy relationship with prominent American neoconservatives.

"By seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire," wrote Mr. Dabashi, "Reading Lolita in Tehran is reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India, when, for example, in 1835 a colonial officer like Thomas Macaulay decreed: 'We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, words and intellect.' Azar Nafisi is the personification of that native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the very same project."

In an interview published on the Web site of the left-wing publication Z Magazine on August 4, Mr. Dabashi went even further, comparing Ms. Nafisi to a U.S. Army reservist convicted of abusing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. "To me there is no difference between Lynndie England and Azar Nafisi," he told the magazine.

"The reason that I decided to publish [the essay] was fear," says Mr. Dabashi over a cup of tea in his office at Columbia University. "Fear of another war."...

Posted on Monday, October 9, 2006 at 8:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tony Judt: Polish Consulate Says Jewish Groups Called To Oppose Historian

Source: Wa Po (10-9-06)

Two major American Jewish organizations helped block a prominent New York University historian from speaking at the Polish consulate here last week, saying the academic was too critical of Israel and American Jewry.

The historian, Tony Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University's Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of Europe. Judt was scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the consulate. Judt's subject was the Israel lobby in the United States, and he planned to argue that this lobby has often stifled honest debate.

An hour before Judt was to arrive, the Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk canceled the talk. He said the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee had called and he quickly concluded Judt was too controversial.

"The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure," Kasprzyk said. "That's obvious -- we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that."

Judt, who was born and raised in England and lost much of his family in the Holocaust, took strong exception to the cancellation of his speech. He noted that he was forced to cancel another speech later this month at Manhattan College in the Bronx after a different Jewish group had complained. Other prominent academics have described encountering such problems, in some cases more severe, stretching over the past three decades.

The pattern, Judt says, is unmistakable and chilling.

"This is serious and frightening, and only in America -- not in Israel -- is this a problem," he said. "These are Jewish organizations that believe they should keep people who disagree with them on the Middle East away from anyone who might listen."

The leaders of the Jewish organizations denied asking the consulate to block Judt's speech and accused the professor of retailing "wild conspiracy theories" about their roles. But they applauded the consulate for rescinding Judt's invitation.

"I think they made the right decision," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "He's taken the position that Israel shouldn't exist. That puts him on our radar."

Judt has crossed rhetorical swords with the Jewish organizations on two key issues. Over the past few years he has written essays in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz arguing that power in Israel has shifted to religious fundamentalists and territorial zealots, that woven into Zionism is a view of the Arab as the irreconcilable enemy, and that Israel might not survive as a communal Jewish state.

The solution, he argues, lies in a slow and tortuous walk toward a binational and secular state.

He has, of late, defended an academic paper -- co-authored by professor Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and John J. Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago -- which argues the American Israel lobby has pushed policies that are not in the United States' best interests and in fact often encourage Israel to engage in self-destructive behavior....

Posted on Monday, October 9, 2006 at 8:16 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Sunday, October 8, 2006

Fritz Stern: Can It Happen Here?

Source: Tom Reiss in the NYT Book Review (10-8-06)

[Tom Reiss is the author of “The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.”]

In November 2005, Fritz Stern received an award for his life’s work on Germans, Jews and the roots of National Socialism, presented to him by Joschka Fischer, then the German foreign minister. With a frankness that startled some in the audience, Stern, an emeritus professor of European history at Columbia University, peppered his acceptance speech with the similarities he saw between the path taken by Germany in the years leading up to Hitler and the path being taken by the United States today. He talked about a group of 1920’s intellectuals known as the “conservative revolutionaries,” who “denounced liberalism as the greatest, most invidious threat, and attacked it for its tolerance, rationality and cosmopolitan culture,” and about how Hitler had used religion to appeal to the German public. In Hitler’s first radio address after becoming chancellor, Stern noted, he declared that the Nazis regarded “Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

Stern was of course not suggesting an equivalence between President Bush and Hitler but rather making a more subtle critique, extending his idea that contemporary American politics exhibited “something like the strident militancy and political ineptitude of the Kaiser’s pre-1914 imperial Germany.” At 80, Stern has just published a sprawling memoir, “Five Germanys I Have Known,” and as with that speech, he does not file away his experiences of Nazism in a geographical or temporal box....

... When Stern needs to pick a college major, he tags along with his mother, who is interviewing Albert Einstein at Princeton, and he asks Einstein whether he should pursue medicine or history. The discoverer of relativity does not hesitate: become a doctor.

Ignoring Einstein’s advice, Stern studies European history and literature under Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, and he begins to sense his mission as a historian. Outraged by the facile interpretations of Nazism floating around in the 1950’s — “all the tomes and slogans about Germany’s inevitable path ‘from Luther to Hitler’ ” — he charts his own, more subtle interpretation of what caused the Third Reich. Over the years Stern protests the ways radicals abuse the memory of Nazism to support their present-day political agendas, whether the 1960’s students who called authority figures fascists and Nazis, or those today who compare foreign leaders they dislike to Hitler and cry “Munich” at every diplomatic gesture.

Yet the value of Stern’s work is precisely that it has refused to keep Nazism safely on the other side of a historical and geographic chasm. His first book, “The Politics of Cultural Despair” (1961), is one of the durable masterpieces of 20th-century history because it seems to locate the roots of a peculiarly modern malaise. As he explained in a later edition of the work, “I attempted to show the importance of this new type of cultural malcontent, and to show how he facilitated the intrusion into politics of essentially unpolitical grievances.”

Rather than looking for obvious parallels among contemporary dictators who ape the style of the Nazis, Stern looks for the nihilistic undercurrents in our own educated, commercial societies. Hunger and poverty have little to do with the politics of cultural despair. It thrives especially well at moments of plenty and prosperity, when people have enough social advantages to dwell on their inner alienations and resentments.

By probing history for answers to how Germany progressed from radical illiberalism to Nazism, Stern has created a cumulative canon of warning signs for the degeneration of any great nation’s politics. The more personal history in this book adds power to an argument that has been a lifetime in the making.

Posted on Sunday, October 8, 2006 at 9:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Norman Finkelstein: Will he get tenure?

Source: Steven Plaut in The American Thinker (10-5-06)

The new academic school year is well underway. But there is one school in which this year will determine once and for all whether it will henceforth be considered to be a bona fide “university”, or merely a make-pretend parody of one.

That institution is DePaul University.

This year will witness the most important decision in DePaul’s entire history, ever since it was first founded by the Catholic “Vincentians”. Over the next few months, DePaul will be deciding whether or not to grant Norman Finkelstein tenure on the basis of his “record”. The same university that fired Prof. Thomas Klocek for daring to defend Israel in a campus conversation outside the classroom is now seriously considering granting tenure to Finkelstein on the basis of his hate-filled pseudo-scholarly screeds. At DePaul, Finkelstein serves as assistant professor of political science at DePaul, but scholarship is the last thing that occupies his time.

Before coming to DePaul he had been fired from several adjunct jobs at academic institutions in the New York area for his lack of serious academic credentials and scholarship. Virtually Finkelstein’s entire publication record consists of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel books and non-professional articles. He has no publications whatsoever in any refereed academic journals, although he has hundreds in anti-Semitic, Holocaust Denial, and neo-nazi web magazines. The closest Finkelstein ever got to 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” openly states that it “stands in opposition to all forms of imperialism, and is uncompromising in its defense of feminism and affirmative action.” Finkelstein also writes in assorted pro-terror Palestinian “journals”.

Finkelstein’s “books” have been dismissed as scholarly frauds and hate-filled propaganda by just about every serious historian or other scholar who has reviewed them. In the New York Times, Prof. Omer Bartov (Brown University historian) described Finkelstein’s book on the Holocaust as a “novel variation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the fraudulent essay concocted in the late nineteenth century by the Czarist secret police. He also described Finkelstein as “juvenile,” “arrogant,” and “stupid” (Aug. 6, 2000). Professor Marc Saperstein described Finkelstein’s Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history as a “prolonged diatribe,” replete with “outrageous ad hominem attacks” and written in the “rhetorical style of the arrogant academic pit bull.”

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. The historian Israel Guttman dismissed Finkelstein’s book as an anti-Semitic buffoon. Professor Hans Momsen from Germany described it as “a most trivial book, one that appeals to easily aroused anti-Semitic prejudices.” University of Chicago Professor and author Peter Novick dismisses Finkelstein’s writing as “trash”. Novick has written,
“Such an examination reveals that many of those assertions are pure invention… No facts alleged by Finkelstein should be assumed to be really facts, no quotation in his book should be assumed to be accurate.” [1]
He adds,
“I had not thought that (apart from the disreputable fringe) there were Germans who would take seriously this twenty-first century updating of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ I was mistaken.” (Offene Fenster und Tueren,’Sueddeutsche Zeitung, February 7, 2001)
The Anti-Defamation League has repeatedly characterized Finkelstein as an open Holocaust Denier. So has the Simon Wiesenthal Center. The French group “Avocats Sans Frontieres“ (Lawyers without Borders) filed a suit in a French court against Finkelstein and his publisher two years back for libel and Holocaust Denial. Finkelstein readily adopts the language of neo-nazis; his web site a few days ago described a meeting of pro-Israel Jews in Europe as an assembly of the “Elders of Zion”. His personal web site recently carried a banner heading asserting that the Jews themselves fabricated photos of the murdered at Auschwitz..

“The field of Holocaust studies is replete with nonsense, if not sheer fraud,”

writes Finkelstein. Among his most famous pronouncements is,

“If everyone who claims to be a survivor actually is one,” my mother used to exclaim, “who did Hitler kill?” (Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry, Verso, London 2000). ....

Posted on Sunday, October 8, 2006 at 9:35 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Friday, October 6, 2006

Herbert Aptheker: Doubts expressed about his daughter's story of incest

Source: Clare Spark, in an email sent to H-HOAC: A Forum for scholars, serious students, and all who want to participate in a scholarly discussion of the History of American Communism (HOAC) (10-5-06)

[Aptheker:] I arrived in Santa Cruz in the fall of 1979 to begin my graduate studies in the History of Consciousness Program. I had two young children, and I was finalizing a divorce from my husband of thirteen years. I was also struggling to claim my lesbian identity. Brutalized by the police and FBI because of my Communist affiliation and radical activism in the 1960s and 1970s, ?coming out? for me was at once traumatic and exhilarating.

Posted on Friday, October 6, 2006 at 9:46 PM | Comments (1) | Top

No Historians win Ig Nobles This Year

Source: Ig Noble website (10-5-06)

The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded on Thursday night, October 5, at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.

[Ig Noble Prizes are a spoof of the Noble Prize. They are awarded annually to those with quirky achievements. In 2005 people doing history won several prizes: " James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, 'The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers.' " The American Nudist Research Library of Kissimmee, Florida, USA, for preserving nudist history so that everyone can see it.]

Posted on Friday, October 6, 2006 at 7:25 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Historians plan to introduce resolution against speech codes at AHA meeting in Atlanta

Source: Email from David Beito to members of Richard Jensen's CNET list (10-4-06)

At the upcoming Atlanta conference of the American Historical Association, a group of historians will propose a strongly worded resolution (shown below) opposing the use of speech codes to restrict academic freedom. The vote will take place at the business meeting for the general membership on Saturday, January 6, 2007 in the Fulton/Cobb Room at the Atlanta Hilton. To get the resolution on the agenda, however, twenty-five paid-up members have to sign it before October 13.

Those AHA members who are willing to do so should write as soon as possible to David T. Beito at dbeito@bama.ua.edu Please respond today. There is no margin for error. RESOLUTION ON SPEECH CODES AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM Whereas, The American Historical Association has already gone on record against the threat to academic freedom posed by the Academic Bill of Rights; and v Whereas, Free and open discourse is essential to the success of research and learning on campus; and

Whereas, Administrators and others have used campus speech codes and associated non-academic criteria to improperly restrict faculty choices on curriculum, course content, and personnel decisions; and

Whereas, Administrators and others have also used speech codes to restrict free and open discourse for students and faculty alike through such methods as "free speech zones" and censorship of campus publications; therefore be it

Resolved, The American Historical Association opposes the use of speech codes to restrict academic freedom.

Posted on Friday, October 6, 2006 at 7:22 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, October 4, 2006

Tariq Ramadan: Committee on Academic Freedom on the Middle East and North Africa (CAFMENA) Protests His Visa Denial

Source: MESA (10-3-06)

Dear Secretary Rice:

We, the Middle East Studies Association of North America’s Committee on Academic Freedom, are writing to express our grave concern and dismay over the Department of State’s denial of a visa for a second time to a world-renowned scholar of Islam, Professor Tareq Ramadan. It is apparent that this decision was made on purely political grounds, in clear violation of the principles of academic freedom and free speech, both of which are critical to the functioning of a healthy democracy. We urge you in the strongest terms to review and reverse this decision without delay.

The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on the Middle East and North Africa. The preeminent organization in the field, the Association publishes the International Journal of Middle East Studies and has more than 2600 members worldwide. MESA is committed to ensuring academic freedom and freedom of expression, both within the region and in connection with the study of the region in North America and elsewhere.

On August 30, 2004, we wrote asking for clarification regarding the Department of State’s then-recent decision to revoke the visa Dr. Ramadan had already been granted so that he could take the prestigious Luce Chair at the University o Notre Dame. As specialists in the region familiar with Ramadan's record, we stated that there was absolutely no evidence for the allegations then circulating in some media outlets claiming that Dr. Ramadan had advocated violence or had been associated with groups that perpetrate violence. On the contrary, numerous reputable scholars from prestigious universities had testified to his academic credentials and his character as a researcher and teacher.

In response, in a letter dated 3 September and addressed to MESA’s Executive Director, Dr. Amy Newhall, the State Department stated that the visa had been revoked “prudentially based on information that became available after the visa was issued” and that “Due to the confidentiality of visa records, as provided for in the Immigration and Nationality Act, [the Department of State] was not able to provide any details concerning this matter.”

Following the June 2006 ruling by a federal court which ordered the State Department either to grant the visa to Dr. Ramadan or provide an explanation for not doing so, Department spokeswoman Janelle Hironimus stated that Dr. Ramadan was denied a visa “for providing material support to a terrorist organization.” This charge is apparently based on the fact that he made donations between 2000 and 2004 in the amount of 600 euros to French and Swiss organizations that provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinians – donations which Dr. Ramadan himself disclosed in his visa application. Thus, in denying him a visa, the US government is apparently using Section 411(a)(1)(A)(iii) of the Patriot Act, related to excluding individuals believed to have provided “material support” for terrorism.

That contributions to European organizations seeking to provide humanitarian aid to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation is viewed by the US government as constituting support for terrorism, already speaks volumes about the administration’s lack of understanding of the region and the quality of its stated concern to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East. It is also unreasonable to expect that Dr. Ramadan should have had advance knowledge that the United States would at a future date put the organization to which he was contributing on its list of groups supporting Hamas; it figured on no such list at the time he made his donations.

Dr. Ramadan is a leading scholar and public intellectual whose writings and statements make clear his opposition to violence and terrorism. Indeed, the basic concern that motivates much of his work is one of reconciliation and interfaith coexistence. It seems clear that Dr. Ramadan’s charitable contributions in fact have nothing at all to do with the visa denial: its origins lie elsewhere. By his own account of the visa interviews conducted at the US embassy in Switzerland, the focus of the questioning was his positions on Palestine and Iraq. On these questions, like many others, Muslims and non-Muslims, Americans and non-Americans, scholars, intellectuals, and average citizens, Tareq Ramadan has been a critic of US policy in Palestine/Israel and Iraq. It appears that this visa denial has nothing whatsoever to do with his donations, but instead is punishment for his political views.

As we stated in our letter of 2004, “denying qualified scholars entry to the United States because of their political beliefs strikes at the core of academic freedom. On that basis alone, the decision to deny Dr. Ramadan access to our country is unacceptable.” We also find the decision profoundly counter-productive to the stated aims of US policy, which is to develop a better understanding of Muslims and the Muslim world. It is clearly in US interests to encourage dialogue and exchange with Muslims, particularly prominent and highly regarded members of Muslim communities who do not espouse violence, regardless of what their positions on US foreign policy may be. How does it serve the interests of the United States, which is currently seeking to improve its ties with and image in the Arab/Islamic world, to exclude from entry one of that world’s most highly regarded thinkers and scholars?

We are deeply troubled by this second denial of a visa to Dr. Ramadan. It is a clear violation of academic freedom and of the principle of free speech. We respectfully request that you review and reverse this decision without delay.

Sincerely,
Juan R.I. Cole
MESA President

Posted on Wednesday, October 4, 2006 at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Tariq Ramadan: Why I am banned in the US

Source: Tariq Ramadan in an op ed in the Wa Po (10-1-06)

For more than two years now, the U.S. government has barred me from entering the United States to pursue an academic career. The reasons have changed over time, and have evolved from defamatory to absurd, but the effect has remained the same: I've been kept out.

First, I was told that I could not enter the country because I had endorsed terrorism and violated the USA Patriot Act. It took a lawsuit for the government eventually to abandon this baseless accusation. Later, I reapplied for a visa, twice, only to hear nothing for more than a year. Finally, just 10 days ago, after a federal judge forced the State Department to reconsider my application, U.S. authorities offered a new rationale for turning me away: Between 1998 and 2002, I had contributed small sums of money to a French charity supporting humanitarian work in the Palestinian territories.

I am increasingly convinced that the Bush administration has barred me for a much simpler reason: It doesn't care for my political views. In recent years, I have publicly criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East, the war in Iraq, the use of torture, secret CIA prisons and other government actions that undermine fundamental civil liberties. And for many years, through my research and writing and speeches, I have called upon Muslims to better understand the principles of their own faith, and have sought to show that one can be Muslim and Western at the same time.

My experience reveals how U.S. authorities seek to suppress dissenting voices and -- by excluding people such as me from their country -- manipulate political debate in America. Unfortunately, the U.S. government's paranoia has evolved far beyond a fear of particular individuals and taken on a much more insidious form: the fear of ideas.

In January 2004, I was offered a job at the University of Notre Dame, as a professor of Islamic studies and as Luce professor of religion, conflict and peace-building. I accepted the tenured position enthusiastically and looked forward to joining the academic community in the United States. After the government granted me a work visa, I rented a home in South Bend, Ind., enrolled my children in school there and shipped all of my household belongings. Then, in July, the government notified me that my visa had been revoked. It did not offer a specific explanation, but pointed to a provision of the Patriot Act that applies to people who have "endorsed or espoused" terrorist activity.

The revocation shocked me. I had consistently opposed terrorism in all of its forms, and still do. And, before 2004, I had visited the United States frequently to lecture, attend conferences and meet with other scholars. I had been an invited speaker at conferences or lectures sponsored by Harvard University, Stanford, Princeton and the William Jefferson Clinton Presidential Foundation. None of these institutions seemed to consider me a threat to national security....

[The US now says that Ramadan's application for a visa was denied because of two donations he had made to charitable organizations serving Palestinians.]

In its letter, the U.S. Embassy claims that I "reasonably should have known" that the charities in question provided money to Hamas. But my donations were made between December 1998 and July 2002, and the United States did not blacklist the charities until 2003. How should I reasonably have known of their activities before the U.S. government itself knew? I donated to these organizations for the same reason that countless Europeans -- and Americans, for that matter -- donate to Palestinian causes: not to help fund terrorism, but because I wanted to provide humanitarian aid to people who desperately need it. Yet after two years of investigation, this was the only explanation offered for the denial of my visa. I still find it hard to believe.

Posted on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 8:39 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Clement A. Price: Featured in new documentary about Newark

Source: Rutgers News (9-18-06)

Cherry blossoms blooming in springtime. Stately houses of worship and historic structures rising above a city skyline. Baseball, art and foods from around the world. Sounds like Washington? Think again –this is Newark, a city that many people know of – but few people actually know.

A new film about Newark, to be broadcast in October, will change that. “The Once and Future Newark,” a documentary hosted by famed historian Clement A. Price, will premiere on NJN Public Television in New Jersey on Oct. 4, at 6:30 p.m., and will be rebroadcast on Oct. 5 at 9 p.m. The film, which was produced by Rutgers University, Newark in association with Blackbird Media Group, also will be previewed at Rutgers- Newark on Sat. Oct. 1, and on Wed., Oct. 4, featuring a Q & A with Dr. Price (See biography on page 3).

The program follows Price as the Newark resident tours the city with colleagues, visiting 18 historical, cultural, and in some cases, uniquely Newark sites. These include Branch Brook Park, the Ironbound, Weequahic High School,
the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Essex County Courthouse, and the Newark campus of Rutgers, where Price is Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor specializing in urban history, African-American history and New Jersey and Newark history. The film also incorporates a treasure trove of historical images.

Price has led tours of Newark for decades, inspiring students, educators and many others to be fascinated by Newark’s past and the promises of its future. Many who tour the city with Price have gone on to develop a personal connection and active interest in Newark.
"The growing interest in the new Newark that is taking shape has truly heartened my role as a New Jersey and public historian, “ Professor Price noted. “The film enables me to reach thousands of people who live, work and study in Newark, those who left the city years ago and, to be sure, those who deserve an opportunity to better understand New Jersey's largest and most important regional center."...

Posted on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 4:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Michael Fry: Scotland's most prolific historian now favors independence from UK

Source: The Australian (10-2-06)

SCOTLAND'S most pro-British historian has performed a remarkable about-face and declared his support for Scottish independence.

Michael Fry, a former Scottish candidate for the Conservative and Unionist Party, says the break-up of Britain is essential if Scotland is to thrive.

His conversion is a symptom of the growing support north of the border for a separate Scotland, with more people now saying they would back independence rather than the status quo in a referendum.

Fry's epiphany came as he was writing a book on the union between Scotland and England, with the 300th anniversary falling on May 1 next year.

The tercentenary comes two days before Scottish parliament elections due on May 3, in which the Scottish National Party is expected to make its strongest challenge for power so far.

As a Conservative candidate in the 1980s and 1990s, Fry was a staunch defender of the union with Britain - but now he is a nationalist. "I have changed my mind," he says. "I believe in an independent Scotland. I will do what I can to bring it about."

His change of heart was brought about by the failure of the devolution of power from London to Edinburgh, he said. "Devolution has proved to be completely hopeless, if anything making Scotland a worse country rather than better. You can do more, and do better, under independence than you can by basically rattling the begging bowl at the British Government, saying, 'Can we have some more money'."...

Posted on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 4:00 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Mark Moyar: Q & A with the author of a revisionist history of the Vietnam War

Source: Cambridge University Press email to HNN (10-2-06)

The following are a series of questions and answers with Mark Moyar that will provide further understanding of his revolutionary argument in Triumph Forsaken:

Q: You argue in Triumph Forsaken that much of what is traditionally believed about the Vietnam War is not true. Let’s start with your views on South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. The traditional thinking is that he was unpopular among the South Vietnamese people and that, after his crackdown on the Buddhist monks, the United States administration was happy to see him go and gave Diem’s generals their blessing for the coup against him in 1963. You believe that this school of thought is misguided. What do you think is the more accurate assessment of Diem and why?

A: Diem enjoyed the respect of many Vietnamese because of his asceticism, personality, and dedication to the welfare of his country. He governed in an authoritarian way because he considered Western-style democracy inappropriate for a country that was fractious and dominated by an authoritarian culture. The accuracy of this belief would be borne out by the events that followed his assassination, events that heretofore have not been covered adequately. Diem was not as heavy-handed as the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, and Diem’s traditional, but not reactionary, ideology had more appeal among the Vietnamese people than Ho Chi Minh’s radical ideology. Diem did not kill tens of thousands in the process of redistributing land or stifle religion as Ho Chi Minh did. For most of Diem’s tenure, the South Vietnamese government outfought the Vietnamese Communists. In the late 1950s, Diem succeeded in eliminating most of the Communist agents who had remained in the South after the partition of Vietnam in July 1954. During 1960 and 1961, however, the Viet Cong made considerable headway in launching a large-scale insurgency. The war took another dramatic turn in 1962, with the Diem government regaining the upper hand. Relying on young leaders whom Diem had begun cultivating in the 1950s, the South Vietnamese government fortified its local militia forces and its mobile units during 1962 and 1963. It inflicted numerous defeats on the Viet Cong’s armed forces and re-established control over most of the territory where the Viet Cong had made inroads in 1960 and 1961.

Diem’s critics believed that the Buddhist protest movement of 1963 stemmed from popular dissatisfaction with a government guilty of religious intolerance. The Buddhist protesters were, in reality, a small, politically-minded group that made false charges in an effort to unseat the government. The leaders had close ties to the Communists or were themselves Communists, and Communist secret agents participated extensively in their protest activities. In Vietnam, where a government lost face if it condoned strident public protest, Diem ultimately had to suppress the Buddhist movement in order to preserve his government. He suppressed it very effectively on August 21, 1963, by arresting its leaders and clearing the pagodas where it was headquartered. This maneuver was actually proposed and executed by Diem’s generals, a critical fact lost on those Americans who sought to remove Diem for suppressing the protesters. Most remarkably, the anti-Diem Americans decided that Diem should be replaced with these very generals. While Diem’s generals thought that he remained the best man for the Presidency, the ensuing renunciations of Diem by the U.S government and press ultimately caused some of them to remove him from power. President Kennedy did not personally consent to the coup that ousted Ngo Dinh Diem; U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge instigated the coup without notifying Kennedy and in direct violation of Presidential orders. A few days before the coup was to commence, according to previously untapped documents and presidential audio recordings, Kennedy learned that Lodge was encouraging the conspirators behind his back and he sent messages of protestation to Lodge but did not take decisive action to reign him in, primarily because Lodge was a leading candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in the 1964 election. Lodge’s incitement of the coup that overthrew Diem in November 1963 was by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War. As the title of the book indicates, the coup negated the great military and political gains that the Diem government had made in 1962 and 1963. Contrary to later assertions by the coup’s advocates, the South Vietnamese war effort had not entered into a period of decline during the last months of Diem’s rule, as is proven by previously unexamined North Vietnamese sources. The deterioration did not begin until the period immediately following Diem’s overthrow, when the new leaders failed to lead, feuded with each other, and arrested untold numbers of former Diem supporters.

Q: You come down harshly on President Lyndon Johnson and his administration for not taking a stronger stance against the North Vietnamese more quickly. Can you discuss this a bit more?

A: Previously unexamined North Vietnamese sources reveal that Lyndon Johnson’s lack of forcefulness in Vietnam in late 1964 and early 1965 squandered America’s deterrent power. Johnson’s generals favored striking North Vietnam quickly and powerfully, but he chose to follow the advice of his civilian advisers, who advocated an academic approach employing small doses of force to convey America’s resolve without provoking the enemy. Johnson made only a token attack on North Vietnam following the Tonkin Gulf incidents of 1964 and undertook no military action thereafter. Instead of inducing the North Vietnamese to reciprocate with self-limitations as advocates of the academic approach had predicted, however, the limited character of the American response convinced Hanoi that the Americans would not mount a major defense of Vietnam in the near future. This perception, in concert with the disintegration of the South Vietnamese government following Diem’s demise, led the North Vietnamese to invade South Vietnam with North Vietnamese Army units for the purpose of winning the war swiftly.

Q: One of the justifications for the US involvement in Vietnam was the so-called “domino theory,” the idea that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, then the rest of Asia would succumb as well, dangerously shifting the balance of power in the Cold War. While many claim that history has proven the domino theory to be false, you assert that it was indeed a legitimate theory. How so?

A: The U.S. government’s fear of falling dominoes in Asia was based on a sound understanding of the countries in Southeast Asia and the surrounding areas, not on simple-mindedness or paranoia as is usually alleged. For most of the region’s countries, the evidence available both then and since overwhelmingly indicated that South Vietnam’s defeat would have led to either a Communist takeover or the switching of allegiance to China. Some of these countries were strategically vital for the United States, most notably Indonesia and Japan. In 1965, China and North Vietnam were aggressively trying to topple many of the dominoes, and the dominoes were very vulnerable to toppling. Asia’s leaders believed that if the United States pulled out of Vietnam, then most of Asia would lose all confidence in the United States and would have to bow before China or face destruction. Every country in Southeast Asia and neighboring territory, aside from the few that were already allied with the North Vietnamese and Chinese Communists, advocated U.S. intervention in Vietnam, and most of them offered to assist the South Vietnamese war effort. American intervention in Vietnam would contribute to changes that would prevent the dominoes from falling when South Vietnam fell in 1975, including the widening of the China-Soviet split, the onset of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the civil war in Cambodia. Unbeknownst to previous historians, America’s willingness to hold firm in Vietnam played a critical role in convincing Indonesian generals to take power from the pro-Communist Sukarno and destroy the Indonesian Communist Party in late 1965 and early 1966, one of the most momentous events of the Cold War.

Q: You are critical of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for not recognizing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos as vital for the maintenance of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong supply lines into South Vietnam. Many historians let Kennedy and Johnson off the hook but you assert that disrupting the Ho Chi Minh Trail early in the war was essential. Can you discuss this further?

A: The Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly recommended putting U.S. ground forces into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but both presidents rejected the recommendations. While some historians have endorsed the view that the Ho Chi Minh Trail was not essential to the Communist war effort, new evidence on the trail and on specific battles disprove this contention. The Viet Cong insurgency always depended heavily on North Vietnamese infiltration of men and equipment, and it could not have brought the Saigon government close to collapse in 1965, or defeated it in 1975, without heavy infiltration of both. Other historians have argued that an American ground troop presence in Laos would not have stopped most of the infiltration, but much new evidence contradicts this assertion as well. American, North Vietnamese, and Soviet experts all have said that a few American divisions could have shut down the infiltration routes. In 1960, when the North Vietnamese infiltration had involved no motorized traffic, a South Vietnamese force
roughly the size of one division had severed the first Ho Chi Minh Trail—which lay within Vietnamese territory—by controlling the South Vietnamese section of Route 9, a stretch that comprised one-fourth of the entire route. In 1964, with the infiltration effort heavily reliant on trucks, the United States could have detected and stopped most infiltration of materiel much more easily because trucks could cross the Laotian segment of Route 9 at only a few intersections.

Q: Could the United States have won the war by invading North Vietnam?

A: After the overthrow of Diem, as the South Vietnamese war effort deteriorated, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other U.S. military leaders repeatedly advocated an invasion of North Vietnam. Johnson and his civilian advisers, however, rejected this advice, in the belief that such an invasion could spark a war between the United States and China. Historians have generally concurred in the assessment that Chinese intervention was likely. The evidence, however, shows that until at least March 1965, the deployment of U.S. ground forces into North Vietnam would not have caused the Chinese to intercede. Having suffered huge losses in the Korean War, the Chinese had no more desire than the Americans for a war between their country and the United States. The North Vietnamese and Chinese agreed that in the event of an American invasion, North Vietnamese forces would retreat into the mountains rather than stand and fight, for they knew that superior U.S. firepower would annihilate North Vietnamese forces defending fixed positions. The United States would not have won the war quickly had it invaded the North, but it would have faced a far better strategic scenario than the one it ultimately accepted by not invading.

Q: You believe that many journalists at the time, including David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, were inaccurate in their assessment of the Diem regime in South Vietnam and that their reporting in major media outlets in the US did tremendous damage. Can you expand on this a bit more?

A: Halberstam and Sheehan repeatedly filed erroneous reports on military events, regularly overemphasizing the South Vietnamese government’s shortcomings. John Paul Vann, the central figure in Sheehan’s book A Bright Shining Lie and a leading critic of the Diem government, was more dishonest in dealing with the press than Sheehan ever acknowledged. Halberstam and Sheehan presented grossly inaccurate information on the Buddhist protest movement and on South Vietnamese politics, much of which they unwittingly received from Communist secret agents. Ignorant of cultural differences between the United States and Vietnam, they criticized the Diem government for refusing to act like an American government when, in fact, Diem’s political methods were far more effective than American methods in treating South Vietnam’s problems. The reporting of Halberstam and Sheehan did much to turn Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and other influential Americans against Diem. South Vietnam’s elites regularly read Vietnamese translations of American press articles and they viewed the New York Times and other U.S. newspapers as mouthpieces for the U.S. administration, so negative articles on the Diem government also undermined South Vietnamese confidence in Diem and encouraged rebellion. Although the American journalists hoped that their reporting would bring about the installation of a better South Vietnamese government, it actually led to the installation of a series of ineffective governments, inflicting enormous damage on South Vietnam and on American interests. Once the coup that they had promoted led to political and military disaster, exposing them to blame for the crippling of South Vietnam, Halberstam and Sheehan and Stanley Karnow falsely disparaged Diem so as to claim that South Vietnam was already weak beyond hope before the coup. Their writings popularized the negative images of Diem.

Q: Do you believe that the war could have ended without a major deployment of US military personnel if the United States had fully supported the Diem regime?

A: Yes. Because of Diem’s accomplishments in 1962 and 1963, the Viet Cong lacked the ability to defeat the government at the time of Diem’s death, and for a considerable period thereafter. Had Diem remained in power, the Viet Cong could have kept the war going as long as they continued to receive new manpower from North Vietnam and maintained sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos, but it is highly doubtful that the war would have reached the point where the United States needed to introduce several hundred thousand of its own troops to avert defeat, as it did under Diem’s successors. South Vietnam might well have survived under Diem without the help of any U.S. ground forces. The men who led South Vietnam from November 1963 to the time of the American intervention prosecuted the war much less effectively than Diem had, and this weak performance helped overcome Hanoi’s great reluctance to send the North Vietnamese Army into South Vietnam. If the North Vietnamese Army had invaded the South at some later date with Diem still in power, South Vietnam might have withstood the onslaught with the help of U.S. air power but without U.S. ground troops, as it would in 1972.

Q: What does your book tell us that is relevant to the current conflict in Iraq?

A: I did not mention Iraq in the book because my objective was not to make points about Iraq but to render the history of the Vietnam War accurately. That being said, there are some important similarities, as well as some important differences, between what is described in the book and what is taking place today in Iraq. In 1954, the armed forces of South Vietnam faced some of the same challenges that the Iraqi security forces face now. South Vietnamese President Diem removed numerous officers from the South Vietnamese Army, though the armed forces were not dismantled completely as was the case with the Iraqi army after the defeat of Saddam Hussein. American advisers arrived early in the development of the South Vietnamese
Army and they did much to improve its proficiency. The most important factor in the effectiveness of a South Vietnamese Army unit, however, was always the quality of its leadership. In a culture with authoritarian traditions, such as Vietnam or Iraq, effective leadership is especially important. Advisers could impart knowledge and they could embolden through the display of courage, but they could not teach charisma, intelligence, and other key leadership attributes. Oftentimes the most important contribution of an American adviser was his assessment of South Vietnamese leaders, for it could help convince the South Vietnamese national leadership to replace ineffectual personnel. Because Diem inherited a weak corps of officers who had been trained by the French, he set out to develop his own leadership corps. He succeeded in creating a new generation of dedicated nationalist leaders, but it would take seven years before these individuals came into key positions and had a major impact. The South Vietnamese experience, therefore, suggests that strong Iraqi leadership can only be developed over a prolonged period of time. It is also not clear at this time that Iraq has a person or group that can effectively orchestrate the cultivation of new leaders as Diem did; Diem had greater freedom of action than Iraq’s leaders do today, for he was not confronted with democratic or legal constraints, or with rampant assassination of prospective leadership candidates.

Forming a government that can develop a leadership corps and adopt the necessary security measures will also require that Iraqis overcome intense internecine strife, something that South Vietnam faced on several occasions. In an effort to surmount such strife, the United States pressed for political liberalization in South Vietnam as it has in Iraq, though it was much less aggressive in pushing for complete democratization than in Iraq. In both the South Vietnamese and Iraqi cases, many Americans were too hasty to assume that liberal government could easily be transplanted into places with no liberal democratic traditions. Americans tended to project their own worldview onto others, and they paid too much heed to local elites who advocated liberalization but were out of touch with the masses in their own country. Enacting liberalization in South Vietnam would have prevented the Diem government from undertaking the stern measures needed to suppress subversives and gain the respect of the masses. When Diem first assumed power in 1954, he faced several large groups that possessed their own armed forces and did not want to submit to the authority of the central government. The U.S. embassy urged Diem to reach a compromise, not understanding that by trying to compromise and by tolerating open defiance from these groups, Diem would lose face with the masses. Ignoring American advice, Diem used force to compel these groups to submit to his authority. Rather than leading to alienation or civil war, as the Americans had predicted, he strengthened his power and won the respect of the masses. He then proceeded to build strong national armed forces. This particular episode suggests that the central government should control all armed forces during a period of civil strife, in order to ensure their loyalty to the central government and increase the government’s prestige. Such centralization, however, may no longer be possible in Iraq, or at least in
northern Iraq, where the Kurds enjoy autonomy and possess very formidable armed forces of their own.

In the period after Diem’s assassination, an array of South Vietnamese factions struggled with each other for influence. American prodding induced the South Vietnamese government to permit freedom of speech and freedom of protest, which facilitated subversion by the South Vietnamese government’s mortal enemies, and the same problem is now recurring, to some degree, in Iraq. The United States pressured South Vietnam’s rulers to make their government more “inclusive” by bringing in individuals from all groups in society. When the South Vietnamese did so, however, the results were discouraging, for the new individuals often were unqualified for their jobs and were more concerned with serving their own group’s interests than with operating an effective national government. Nor did inclusiveness or the promise of elections do much to reduce the hostility among the different groups. In terms of governmental effectiveness, a dedicated minority may be best suited to national leadership, in Iraq as well as in South Vietnam; Saddam Hussein’s government, like Diem’s government, was more effective in maintaining internal security and administering the country than its successors. Of course, the United States has already done a great deal to eliminate the power of the Sunnis and others who held power under Saddam Hussein and it is not clear that another dedicated elite is prepared to step in. Although the United States is inherently reluctant to support something short of democracy in a country for which it bears responsibility, many Americans at this point would be content with non-democratic rule in Iraq if it meant that the Iraqi government would be strong enough to enable the United States to withdraw its troops. By the middle of 1965, the United States had become so frustrated with governmental instability and ineffectiveness in Vietnam that it consented to a military dictatorship, which restored political stability and led to gradual rehabilitation of the government’s capabilities. In South Vietnam, and in many other countries with no democratic traditions, authoritarian rule was more effective than liberal rule in quelling internal subversion. The difficult process of liberalization generally succeeds only once the subversives have been suppressed, and it usually requires a gradual transition, not an abrupt change.

The differences of opinion between the U.S. civilian and military leadership over Vietnam resemble those of the past few years over Iraq. President Lyndon Johnson, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and other leading civilians disregarded advice from top military officers to strike North Vietnam harder and insert U.S. troops into Laos to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail, either of which would have given the United States enormous strategic advantages. The civilians believed that their smarts and their youthful vigor trumped the experience and accumulated knowledge of the military officers. Under the administration of George W. Bush, leading civilians have shown similar disregard for the military’s views on Iraq, especially during the planning and initial execution of the occupation of Iraq, with similarly unfortunate results. While the judgments of military officers are not infallible, they deserve greater attention from civilian leaders, particularly those with visions of dramatic departures from past military practices.

Posted on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 3:46 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Richard Lyman Bushman: A Mormon historian reflects on his biography of Joseph Smith

Source: Common-Place.org (10-1-06)

Most reviews of my recent biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, mention that I am a practicing Mormon. The Sunday New York Times titled its review, "Latter-Day Saint: A practicing Mormon delivers a balanced biography of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith." Perhaps a little oversensitive, I wondered why this was news. Was a Mormon telling the story of the church’s founding prophet with a degree of objectivity something like man bites dog? Did the editor mean that a mind capable of embracing Mormonism would surely be incapable of a balanced portrayal? Or that Mormonism evokes loyalties so deep that a dispassionate approach to Joseph Smith would be impossible for a church member? One reviewer spoke of my walking a high wire between the demands of church conformity and the necessary openness of scholarly investigation. Another, surprised by the balance of the book but unwilling to trust me entirely, said it achieved a "veneer of credibility."

The nearly universal notice of my religion got me thinking about passion, commitment, and balance. What is the place of personal values and beliefs in scholarship? Our personal commitments are certain to bias our work, and yet is that necessarily bad? Historians write with passion about slavery, race, women, war and peace, freedom, and injustice. Is their work marred by their belief? Beyond question, their values shape the work. After the civil rights movement, we write differently about women and race than we did a half century ago. Are the biases that play about our scholarship prejudices to be purged, or are they powerful and useful motivations?

An impassioned graduate student once announced in a seminar that she could find traces of gender on a blank wall. Her commitment had sharpened her eye for evidence that less engaged researchers missed. I can remember the time when historians sighed that since so little evidence about slaves survived slavery, slave lives, regrettably, could never be recovered. Nowadays one would pause before saying that about any subject. As the Gospels say, those who search, find. Passion may introduce bias but it also produces persistence—and data.

Okay, that may be true, we say, for gender studies or investigations of race, but does it work for Joseph Smith with his angelic visitors, gold plates, and a Urim and Thummim? Isn’t that a different kind of commitment that borders on the crazy? How can belief in such oddities be allowed any place in scholarship?

I would be the first to admit that my account of Joseph Smith shows greater tolerance for Smith’s remarkable stories than most historians would allow. I write about the visits of angels as if they might have happened. I do not assume, a priori, that Joseph Smith’s stories are fraudulent, any more than I would automatically write about Mohammad’s visions or the biblical miracles as obvious deceptions. But I hope that my readers see that my writing as a believer is not just a personal indulgence. I would like them to understand the benefit for historical inquiry as a whole in writing out of my convictions. The bizarre nature of Joseph Smith’s stories makes historical work by a believing historian all the more useful.

One reason is that skepticism about the gold plates and the visions can easily slip over into cynicism. The assumption that Smith concocted the stories of angels and plates casts a long shadow over his entire life. Everything he did is thrown into doubt. His exhortations to godly service, his self-sacrifice, his pious letters to his wife, his apparent love for his fellow workers all appear as manipulations to perpetuate a grand scheme. Cynicism has its advantages in smoking out hypocrisy, but it does not foster sympathetic understanding. Every act is prejudged from the beginning....

Posted on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 2:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Herbert Aptheker: His daughter, a historian, says in a new book that he molested her

Source: Christopher Phelps in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (10-3-06)

[Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University at Mansfield, is the author of Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist, published last year in a new paperback edition by the University of Michigan Press.]

... Now we have knowledge of a far more painful contradiction in the life of Herbert Aptheker than his simultaneous defense of black freedom and Soviet authoritarianism, one long buried in silence. Intimate Politics (Seal Press), the stunning new memoir by Bettina Aptheker, a professor of feminist studies and history at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will prompt a re-examination of her father, whom American historians now tend to honor as a pioneer in recognizing the centrality of the black past to American history.

Aptheker enjoys at least a fraction of her father's notoriety. She is listed in David Horowitz's book The Professors, for example, which purports to identify the "101 most dangerous academics in America." (The entry, regrettably, is replete with errors, such as the claim that she was expelled from the Communist Party in 1991, when in fact she had resigned from it a full decade earlier.)

Born in the year following publication of American Negro Slave Revolts, Bettina Aptheker was a sole child whose father was at the center of the family's Brooklyn household and of her own perception of the world's possibilities. Her mother, Fay, was her father's first cousin (their fathers were brothers), and she kept his social calendar between the tours she chaperoned to the Soviet Union.

"When I was a little girl I wanted to be just like my father," writes Bettina Aptheker. "Whatever he did, I did, or tried to do."

This powerful evocation of a child's boundless love makes the book's central revelation, conveyed in an indelible paragraph, all the more devastating:

"My father and I played other games too, besides baseball. I was three or four years old when we began playing choo choo train. We were in the living room in the apartment on Washington Avenue, crawling around on the Persian rug my mother treasured. Many years afterward, this memory came to me: My father was behind me, and then the train arrived 'at the station,' and we had to wait for the 'passengers' to get off and on. Our train rocked back and forth, back and forth, and my father had his right arm tightly around me. He was the 'locomotive' even though he was behind me. Our train shuddered just before it was supposed to leave 'the station,' except it didn't leave. I was wet and sticky and I remember my father was crying and I was sitting on the floor next to him and he had put a towel down so we wouldn't dirty the rug. I remember stroking his hair and saying 'It's okay, Daddy. It's okay.' And then he stood me up and we went into the bathroom and he washed me off, very gently. It didn't hurt. He never hurt me. And I knew not to tell. As I grew bigger we played different games, but they always had the shudder. Older still, I knew it was not a game. I still knew not to tell because he told me 'terrible things will happen.' My father stopped molesting me when I was thirteen and we had moved to a new house."

Incest is only the most painful of a series of hard truths about Herbert Aptheker that we confront in Intimate Politics. We discover that he underpaid the family's black housecleaners. We learn that his celebrations of black resistance were attempts "to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust." We are told that to cope with Stalin, the war, the party, and his family, he "lived much of the time in a fantasy world of his own making."

What makes Intimate Politics remarkable, however, is that none of its damning truths are told with rancor. Bettina Aptheker is a powerful witness to her father's contradictions precisely because of her emotional honesty. Her baring of her own shortcomings makes the book far more shattering than any shot ever fired by Eugene Genovese. Intimate Politics could not have been published, one senses, when Herbert and Fay Aptheker were still alive, but it is not governed by a spirit of vindictiveness....

Posted on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 2:35 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Ilan Pappe: New book argues that Israel displaced a million Palestinians at founding

Source: Znet (10-1-06)

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Publication date: October 19th 2006 Hardcover, £16.99, 336pp, 1-85168-467-0

The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.

-- David Ben-Gurion writing to his son, 1937

There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.

-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 1969

As Israel stands accused by Amnesty International of committing war crimes in Lebanon following its almost 5-week bombardment of that country, which left over a thousand civilians dead and almost a million displaced, a prominent Israeli historian at Haifa University revisits the formative period of the State of Israel to investigate the treatment of the indigenous Palestinians.

In this controversial new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe uses recently declassified archival sources to investigate the fate suffered by the indigenous population of 1940s Palestine at the hands of the Zionist political and military leadership, whose actions led to the mass deportation of over a million Palestinians from their cities and villages, over 400 villages wiped from the map, and hundreds of civilians dead.

Exploring both the planning and the execution of the Jewish operations during the British Mandate period and the run-up to independence, Pappe focuses in particular on the activities of the Hagana, the Irgun, and the Palmach. Drawing on such meticulously-researched documents as the minutes from meetings of Ben-Gurion’s unofficial "war cabinet" as well as the personal diaries and memoirs of a large number of key officials in all sectors of the Jewish leadership of the day, Pappe pieces together and re-examines the attitudes and motivations that influenced the conduct of the Jewish community towards the indigenous population. He goes on to offer a detailed account of the events of 1947-8 that eventually led to one of the biggest refugee migrations in modern history. This is no moral rant against the past, but a passionate plea to acknowledge the Nakba, as Palestinians call the catastrophe that befell them in 1948, as the root cause of the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict.

Many political commentators and historians trace the roots of the recent stages of the conflict back only so far as Israel’s occupation of the West Bank following the 1967 war, rightly regarding the occupation, the settlements and the Security Barrier as a violation of international law.

The first and second Intifadas may be seen as protests against the continuing occupation and a reflection of the deep despair of the Palestinians, who feel they have been severely let down by their own leaders, by Israel, by Arab states, by the United Nations, and by western powers.

Pappe argues persuasively, however, that the continued denial of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the consequent dispossession of a million native Palestinians from their homeland represents a gross injustice that requires redress. The refusal to acknowledge this event, and allow those dispossessed the right of return to their ancestral lands and homes, are not only an abuse of their human rights, but a rejection from the peace process of the essential foundation for a lasting peace in the Middle East and beyond.

An incisive, important and timely book, on an issue of continuing global concern.

Advance praise for The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Ilan Pappe is a senior lecturer of Political Science at Haifa University. He is also Academic Director of the Research Institute for peace at Givat Haviva, and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies, Haifa. His previous works include the bestselling A History of Modern Palestine, The Modern Middle East and The Israel/Palestine Question.

Ilan Pappe is Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.

-- John Pilger

The first book to so clearly document the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in

1948 of which the massacre at Deir Yassin was emblematic. Political Zionism has always been premised on the elimination of non-Jews who even today account for more than half of the population living within the borders controlled by Israel. Will the West continue to ignore this textbook example of ethnic cleansing, a crime against humanity?

-- Daniel McGowan, Executive Director, Deir Yassin Remembered, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Ilan Pappe has written an extraordinary book of profound relevance to the past, present, and future of Israel/Palestine relations.

-- Richard Falk, Professor of International Law and Practice, Princeton University

This is an extraordinary book - a dazzling feat of scholarly synthesis and Biblical moral clarity and humaneness.

-- Walid Khalidi, Former Senior Research Fellow, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

An instant classic. Finally we have the authoritative account of an historic event which continues to shape our world today, and drives the conflict in the Middle East. Pappe is the only historian who could have told it, and he has done so with supreme command of the facts, elegance, and compassion. The publication of this book is a landmark event.

-- Karma Nabulsi, a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University

If there is to be real peace in Palestine/Israel, the moral vigour and intellectual clarity of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine will have been a major contributor to it.

-- Ahdaf Soueif, author of The Map of Love

Fresh insights into a world historic tragedy, related by a historian of genius.

-- George Galloway MP

Groundbreaking research into a well-kept Israeli secret. A classic of historical scholarship on a taboo subject by one of Israel's foremost New Historians.

-- Ghada Karmi, author of In Search of Fatima

Ilan Pappe is out to fight against Zionism, whose power of deletion has driven a whole nation not only out of its homeland but out of historic memory as well. A detailed, documented record of the true history of that crime, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine puts an end to the Palestinian "Nakbah" and the Israeli "War of Independence" by so compellingly shifting both paradigms.

-- Anton Shammas, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern Literature, University of Michigan

Posted on Tuesday, October 3, 2006 at 11:37 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, October 1, 2006

Historians protest advertisement by Sewanee museum celebrating life of slave-holding bishop

Source: Episcopal Life (9-30-06)

A number of people attending the 2006 General Convention brought to the attention of the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church a full-page advertisement for “The Leonidas Polk Bi-Centennial Memorial Series” placed by the Sewanee On-Line History Museum in Episcopal Life’s General Convention Guide.

We find the advertisement’s celebration of Leonidas Polk – a slaveholding bishop who died in battle fighting to preserve a racist social order – and its proud association of Polk with the University of the South at Sewanee, an Episcopal institution of higher education, to be offensive and a cause for grave concern.

At a moment in time when the Episcopal Church, with every other province of the global Anglican Communion, is committed in principle and practice to the eradication of racism and the full inclusion and equality of all Christians, there is no place for such an advertisement. Its appearance at a General Convention when the church was trying to come to terms with its historic entanglements with slavery was particularly embarrassing.

Diverse in age, gender and race, we as members of the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church reject the assertion that Leonidas Polk is a “martyred bishop.” We reject the assertion that Leonidas Polk, through his role in founding the University of the South, was an advocate for the “religious training of the sons of the South,” knowing that he intended the school to be an institution for white males only and, indeed, only for a select portion of this group.

We reject the assertion that this advertisement redounds to the glory of the University of the South, which now encourages able students of both genders and all ethnicities and races to seek admission and, if accepted, to grow intellectually and spiritually on that campus. In fact, we think this advertisement is both deceitful and an insult to the University of the South in its present incarnation.

Although we respect the obligation of publications to be a forum for divergent voices, they have an ethical duty to ensure that material appearing in their pages meet basic standards of honesty and not be deliberately misleading. In this case, the advertisement misrepresents itself in ways that would lead readers to believe that the Episcopal Church had included Bishop Polk among those officially commemorated by the church and had endorsed the views expressed in the advertisement.

Fredrica Harris Thompsett, Ph.D.
President, The Historical Society of the Episcopal Church

Alfred Moss, Ph.D.
Chair, African American Episcopal Historical Collection Committee

RESPONSE

The staff of Episcopal Life apologizes to those who were offended by the advertisement and will bring concerns expressed in this letter to the attention of Episcopal Life’s Board of Governors.

Posted on Sunday, October 1, 2006 at 8:10 PM | Comments (1) | Top

Philip Zelikow: Detainee Memo Created Divide in White House

Source: NYT (10-1-06)

n June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.

In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its detention policies.

They called for a return to the minimum standards of treatment in the Geneva Conventions and for eventually closing the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The time had come, they said, for suspects in the 9/11 plot to be taken out of their secret prison cells and tried before military tribunals.

The recommendations of the paper, which has not previously been disclosed, included several of the major policy shifts that President Bush laid out in a White House address on Sept. 6, five officials who read the document said. But the memorandum’s fate underscores the deep, long-running conflicts over detention policy that continued to divide the administration even as it pushed new legislation through Congress last week on the handling of terrorism suspects....

Mr. Zelikow, who served as staff director for the national commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, joined the State Department in early 2005 with strong views on the detention issue, other officials said. Early on, he began to push the idea that high-level C.I.A. captives held in connection with the 9/11 attacks should be brought to justice, these officials said....

In a passage that underscored the views of Mr. Zelikow, one official said, the paper argued that efforts to bring to justice the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks must produce more than the chaotic trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-born militant who remains the only person to have been charged in an American court with involvement in the attacks.

The paper specifically called for taking Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others held by the C.I.A. before military commissions, officials said, arguing that much of the information that would be disclosed by their trials was already widely known.

Officials said the memorandum was well received by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who forwarded it to senior officials at the National Security Council. But the hope that it would lead to a broader discussion of options within the administration was quashed by Mr. Rumsfeld, they said....

Posted on Sunday, October 1, 2006 at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

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