Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 at 1:13 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, September 23, 2006

Historians Against the War: Iraq War Teach-Ins Planned

Source: Press Release -- Historians Against the War (9-1-06)

As the violence in Iraq and across the Middle East intensifies, with the accompanying attack on civil liberties here at home, the need for an informed public debate is vitally important. As historians, concerned scholars, students, and activists, we are acutely aware that the transformations now occurring have far-reaching implications for our current lives and for future generations.

With mid-term elections scheduled for November, we have the opportunity to focus campus attention on the vital issues of war and peace. Why is the United States still occupying Iraq? How and when can we withdraw? How does the Iraqi occupation relate to the current crisis in Israel, Palestine and Lebanon? And what are the prospects for a new war in Iran or Syria? How is the Bush Administration expanding the powers of the Executive Branch? And what are the domestic effects of its commitment to a prolonged “war on terrorism?”

Historians Against the War is urging our colleagues – professors and students - across the country to organize or participate in National Teach-In Days, October 17-19.

If you can help arrange an event at your school on any one of these three days, please email us at teachin@historiansagainstwar.org so that we can begin compiling a listing and assisting with resources. If your organization can endorse this call, please contact us. We will post this call and additional information on our Teach-In page on our HAW website: http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/teachin/

While the exact format and themes will reflect the particular needs of your institution, Historians Against the War will be lining up speakers, preparing a web-page with helpful ideas, and establishing connections with national organizations (such as Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Parents, Iraq Veterans Against the War!).

The tragedies now unfolding in Iraq and across the Middle East underscore our responsibility as educators and citizens to enhance public knowledge, to stimulate thoughtful inquiry, and to end the American occupation of Iraq. We hope that you can join this urgent effort!

Organizations Endorsing the October 17–19 Iraq War Teach-Ins
(as of September 21)

Code Pink
(http://www.codepink4peace.org/)

Global Exchange
(http://www.globalexchange.org/)

Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)
(http://www.ips-dc.org/)

National Youth and Student Peace Coalition/Randy Wilson (http://www.nyspc.org/)

Peace Action/Peace Action Education Fund
(http://www.peace-action.org/)

Radical Teacher
(http://www.radicalteacher.org/)

Rouge Forum (http://www.pipeline.com/)

Student Peace Action Network
(http://www.studentpeaceaction.org/)

United for Peace and Justice
(http://www.unitedforpeace.org/)

U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation (Josh Ruebner)
(http://endtheoccupation.org/)

Wheels of Justice
(http://justicewheels.org/)

Posted on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 7:30 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Saul Cornell: The Constitution's gun-control pledge

Source: Editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (9-23-06)

First, a calming caveat: Saul Cornell doesn't want to take away your guns. He's neither antigun nor progun. He really isn't a gun guy at all. His thing is history.

Cornell, a professor at Ohio State University, passed through town the other day with much to say about regulating guns. Yet his aim isn't to take sides in the modern gun-control debate -- a squabble he thinks has strayed rather off-topic. It's far more interesting, he thinks, to look back to learn what this country's founders actually thought about gun regulation.

They couldn't imagine life without it, says Cornell. That's the point of his new book, "A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America." In it, Cornell excavates the foundations of the ! Second Amendment and offers some startling conclusions.

"As long as we've had guns in America," says Cornell, "we've had gun regulation." In fact, the Second Amendment's chief purpose is to assure such regulation. Without it, the founders feared, anarchy might take hold.

The amendment was born of the founders' desire for "a well-regulated militia." Having opted against a standing army, the Constitution's cobblers determined that every able-bodied man would serve as a member of a local militia -- prepared to respond in unison against invasion.

"It would have been impossible to muster the militia without a scheme of regulation," says Cornell -- and the early Americans had one. "Muster rolls" kept track of militia members and their firearms. And every hamlet in the land had its own de facto gun registrar: the local gunsmith, who knew every gun and gun-owner in town.

There's one right the Second Amendment wasn't written to confer: an entit! lement to take up arms against the government. "The founding f! athers d rew a distinction between a well-regulated militia, which operates under the authority of the state, and an armed mob," says Cornell. History couldn't be clearer about this point: "Once you have constitutional government," Cornell points out, "you have no right of revolution anymore."

Indeed, "All these things that the gun-rights community has championed in the name of the founding fathers -- opposition to registration, promotion of concealed-carry and stand-your-ground laws, the notion that individuals have a right to take up arms against their government -- are antithetical to the original understanding of the Second Amendment."

They also contradict today's legal understanding of the amendment. "The reason the high court hasn't heard a case regarding the meaning of the Second Amendment in so long," says Cornell, "is that it's considered one of the most settled issues in American law." In other words, laws meant to curb gun violence are usually ruled con! stitutional. ...

Posted on Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 11:05 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, September 22, 2006

Historians strike out in MacArthur awards

Source: Bruce Craig in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History (9-20-06)

Each year we look forward to reporting on the historians and humanists who have been honored with one of the coveted MacArthur Awards ­ a $500,000 prize that each fellow receives courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. This year, however, we are sorry to report that of the twenty-five named fellows (of which twelve are academics), not one is an historian.

Each year, the MacArthur Foundation awards an unrestricted fellowship to talented individuals who have shown “extraordinary originality and dedication to their creative pursuits and marked capacity for self-direction.” The cash prize is given in the hope that recipients will pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations.

This year’s winners include 25 individuals of which 15 are scientists, doctors, and astronomers. Of the remaining ten winners, there are two musicians; five writers, playwrights and journalists, and three artists/sculptors. When the history coalition contacted MacArthur Foundation to ask “where are the historians?” a spokespersons stated that “that there has not been a shift” in fellowship priorities or emphasis. According to the spokesperson, “over the 26-year trajectory, there have been many historians and there undoubtedly will be others in the future.”

The names of those people who nominate candidates for the fellowship remains a secret. According to the foundation website, each year over a hundred nominators are approached by the foundation to nominate the most creative people they know within their field and beyond. The nominations are then evaluated by a Selection Committee (the deepest kept secret list) composed of about a dozen leaders in the arts, sciences, humanities professions, and for-profit and nonprofit communities. Recommendations are then made to the President and Board of Directors of the foundation. Typically, 20 to 30 fellows are named; to date over 700 individuals have received the award, including over 70 historians.

Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006 at 7:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thomas Fleming: Writes children's history book

Source: HNN Staff (9-22-06)

Thomas Fleming, the author of more than 40 books, has written a children's book: Everybody's Revolution, published by Scholastic.

Fleming takes a multicultural perspective on the Revolution, emphasizing the contributions of a wide variety of groups. According to the book's description:

The dimensions of the patriot cause during the American Revolution were far more multicultural and multiethnic than we have for so long believed. Women, African Americans, Jews, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, European immigrants, and young adults played leading roles in the struggle for independence from Great Britain. Today it seems students and teachers want to know more about the past than what a few famous white men did. They want to understand how women and men of different cultures and backgrounds contributed to our early history, and to making America what it is today.

Disclosure: Mr. Fleming is a member of the board of directors of HNN.

Posted on Friday, September 22, 2006 at 1:49 PM | Comments (2) | Top

Thursday, September 21, 2006

Morris Slavin: In memory of him

Source: Christopher Phelps in solidarity-us.org (9-21-06)

MORRIS SLAVIN, A historian of the French Revolution and one of the last remaining veterans of the American Trotskyist movement of the early 1930s, died on February 6 in Denver, Colorado, at the age of 92. The vast majority of Slavin's years were spent in Youngstown, Ohio, but his childhood took place in Russia.

Slavin was born in Kiev in 1913 on the eve of the First World War. His parents were Lazar Slavin, owner of a lumber yard and forests, and Vera Slavin, a graduate of the University of Odessa and dentist trained at the Polytechnic Institute of Berlin. Both were ardent members of the Bund, the Jewish socialist and labor organization, for which his mother smuggled arms during the 1905 Russian revolutionary upsurge.

As a boy, Slavin was fluent in Russian. He read Pushkin and Tolstoy in the original. His father's devotion to Yiddish led to his enrollment in Hebrew school, which he hated and from which he was expelled, but he subsequently learned Yiddish in a school run by Der Arbayter Ring (the Workmen's Circle). Later in life, he mastered English, French and German, as well, making him competent in five languages.

After surviving the German occupation of the Ukraine during the First World War, the Slavin family was swept into the Russian revolutionary upheavals of 1917. His father considered the Bolsheviks fanatics and favored Alexander Kerensky, the moderate socialist leader.

The family business was confiscated, first by the counterrevolutionary Whites, because Lazar Slavin was a Jew, and subsequently by the Bolsheviks, who designated him a bourgeois. The Slavins survived the famine during the Civil War on rations by working as dentists for the Red Army.

In 1923, when Slavin was nine years of age, the entire family, including a younger brother and sister, emigrated to the United States. They settled in Ohio, to which his mother's two sisters had immigrated before the war. His father's Hebrew traditionalism led him to forbid his mother from entering dentistry school, denying her proper American credentials for her craft. Consequently, the family was severely impoverished after 1929, when the Great Depression hit.

Impressed by Socialist Party standard-bearer Norman Thomas, Morris Slavin joined the Young People's Socialist League as a teenager. When he met some Trotskyists, however, he found them "at entirely a different level, intellectually and politically, from the people I'd met in the SP."

As a result, he read Trotsky's My Life (1930), and in 1934 joined the Communist League of America, the Trotskyist organization in the United States. "I was 21 years old," he quipped in a 2002 interview. "I knew everything."

Slavin attended the December 1934 convention of the CLA at which the organization merged with the American Workers Party led by A. J. Muste to form the Workers Party of the United States. He participated in the subsequent revolutionary socialist phases of that decade, including entry into the Socialist Party in 1936 and the formation of the Socialist Workers Party in 1938.

Between 1932 and 1935, in the nadir of the depression, Slavin worked irregularly for Youngstown's street department repairing roads, cleaning sewers, and sweeping streets. After a year at Youngstown College, he attended the Ohio State University, from which he graduated in 1938 with a degree in history and English.

On campus in Columbus, he was involved in the student antiwar movement and contested with the Young Communist League. "The Stalinists hated our guts," he said. "They wouldn't talk to us."

The Trotskyist leader who most impressed Slavin was Max Shachtman, whom he first met in 1934 and considered "the most brilliant polemicist I ever heard." He witnessed Shachtman speak "with passion for four hours" at the 1934 convention, after which Shachtman's knuckles were bloody from pounding the podium.

At a Youngstown speaking event which Slavin helped organize, Shachtman spoke against the Stalin dictatorship's cynical frameup of many leaders of the Bolshevik Revolution on fraudulent charges. "The Stalinists threatened to bust up our meeting," Slavin recalled. "So we got hold of a few truck drivers. We had friends among them; in fact, the business agent was a friend of ours. So when they tried to get in, we just physically wouldn't allow it, unless they paid, like everyone else." The Trotskyists then permitted local Communists to speak, but Shachtman refuted their every objection: "When the Stalinists tried to ask him questions, he just mowed them down."

When Shachtman broke with Trotsky in 1940, Slavin followed suit. He still considered Trotsky illustrious but was unable to concur with his characterization of the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state" on the basis of its nationalization of property alone.

Slavin joined Shachtman in the newly formed Workers Party and its successor organization, the Independent Socialist League, remaining a member until its dissolution in 1958. The WP and ISL, known on the left as the "Shachtmanites," advocated a socialist politics independent from both Washington and Moscow, the two Cold War camps.

After graduating from Ohio State in 1938, Slavin went to work in a steel mill in Niles, Ohio. He then worked at another steel mill in Youngstown, from which he was quickly fired for union advocacy. He then became a substitute teacher, a job that led to regular employment as a schoolteacher for a year and a half. In 1942, he was drafted into the Army and served in the field artillery during the Second World War for a year and a half before being discharged in 1943 because of illness.

From 1943 on, Slavin taught high school in Youngstown. Beginning in 1946, he started to moonlight, teaching evening classes at Youngstown College (later Youngstown University, then Youngstown State). Meanwhile, he took graduate courses part-time and received an M.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961 from Western Reserve (now Case Western) in Cleveland.

Though he later wrote several review-essays on the question of Bolshevism's responsibility for Stalinism, it was impossible in the 1950s for Slavin to study the Russian history that had shaped his life and politics, because to travel to the Soviet Union in the Stalin era would have been dangerous for someone with his political background. Therefore, he chose to focus on the French Revolution, writing a dissertation entitled "Left of the Mountain: The Enragés and the French Revolution."

Slavin finally obtained regular university employment in 1961 at Youngstown State, where he taught for twenty years. He found it difficult, however, to carry out research given the demands of teaching, and in a striking inversion of most academic careers today, he enjoyed his publishing heyday after his teaching duties ended.

Slavin's three books, all issued after his supposed retirement, made a significant contribution to the understanding of the French Revolution in the "from below" school established by Albert Soboul. They were The French Revolution in Miniature: Section Droits-de-L'Homme, 1789-1795 (Princeton, 1984), The Making of an Insurrection: Parisian Sections and the Gironde (Harvard, 1986), and The Hébertistes to the Guillotine: Anatomy of a "Conspiracy" in Revolutionary France (Louisiana State, 1994).

These were followed by a collection of essays entitled The Left and the French Revolution (Humanities, 1995). The international regard for Slavin's scholarship was manifested in a festschrift, Rebels Against the Old Order: Essays in Honor of Morris Slavin (Youngstown State, 1994), edited by Boris Blick and Louis Pastouras.

Tall and thin, kindly and unassuming, Slavin remained a Marxist and a partisan of the left throughout his life. In his later years, he belonged to the Democratic Socialists of America and maintained cordial relations with radicals of many persuasions. He read New Politics, Against the Current, Jewish Currents, and Cahiers Léon Trotsky, contributing to them all.

"The thing that makes me sometimes depressed, although on the whole I'm still optimistic," he remarked in 2002, "is the fact that I thought in the 1930s that by ten, twenty years, we would certainly have a labor party, or at least a social-democratic party, some kind of left-wing party. But we are further than ever, much further than ever."

Slavin married Sophie Lockshin in 1940, to whom he remained devoted until her death sixty years later. He is survived by their daughter Jeanne Kaplan and her husband Stephen, both of Colorado, and by their children, Leslie and Michael.

Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 2:10 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Juan Cole: Are we fighting fascists?

Source: Sandbox, the blog of Martin Kramer (9-20-06)

Over at Sandstorm, I have a column on the intellectual history of the Islamism-fascism comparison in the social sciences. The comparison wasn't born in the White House, but has a long academic pedigree. There I quote Michigan professor Juan Cole's denunciation of "the lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism." But there was nothing lazy in the "conflations" made by Manfred Halpern, Maxime Rodinson, and Said Amir Arjomand, who spent a lot more time vetting their ideas than blog-hurried Cole spends vetting his.

The full Cole quote provides but one more example:

The lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism cannot account for their increasing willingness to participate in elections and serve in parliamentary government. Hizbullah, for example, ran in the 2005 elections and had 12 members elected to parliament. Altogether, the Shiite parties of Hizbullah and Amal, who have a parliamentary alliance, have 29 members in the Lebanese parliament of 128 seats. Hizbullah and Amal both joined the national unity government, receiving cabinet posts. This is not the behavior of a fascist movement tout court.

Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Gordon Wood: The historian as public intellectual

Source: Mark Oppenheimer in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (9-20-06)

... Much has been written about the divide between academe and "the real world," and about academic writing versus popular writing. But far less has been said about the split within the academy between those who care about the popularization of academic learning — either they want to be popularizers, or they enjoy reading popularizers, or they at least feel a professional obligation to know who the popularizers are — and those who do not. Residing in the same department can be a professor with influence far beyond the guild of scholars — often known as a public intellectual — and a student, or younger professor, with no idea how her colleague accrued the power and now wields it.

One important public intellectual in the field of American history, for example, is Gordon S. Wood, a history professor at Brown University. Only a couple of the American-history graduate students I knew were aware of the tremendous influence he has on how millions of Americans learn history. He is the primary reviewer of books about Revolutionary-era America for The New York Review, and so his opinions about new and important works of history are read by a couple of hundred thousand college professors, law-school professors, journalists, National Public Radio hosts and producers, and assorted other curious parties who, as a class, shape the narratives that get fed to the rest of us on talk shows and in textbooks and newspaper op-eds. Wood, who was even mentioned by Matt Damon's character in the movie Good Will Hunting, also reviews books for The New Republic, which similarly gives a few other professors, like Sean Wilentz, frequent opportunities to pass judgment on new works in American history.

It's not that Wood, Wilentz, Garry Wills, Christine Stansell, Edmund S. Morgan, and George M. Frederickson control how Americans think about history — they have less influence than best-selling authors like David McCullough — but they have the influence that comes with writing for journals at the intersection of academe and the culture at large. They interpret scholarship for people who prefer to read journalism, and their opinions reverberate and multiply, if in ways that we cannot measure.

Most graduate students I knew had no idea that this was going on. They knew Gordon Wood as the author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution, but they weren't aware that far more Americans knew him for his book reviews. They knew him, in other words, as just another professor, rather than as a professor with special powers with which to project his take on American history. Students were aware of debates in The Journal of American History, but not of how those debates got simplified and clarified in the pages of The New York Review, The New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, or The New Republic. The situation might be different in other disciplines. Anthropology students might, for example, hunt down Clifford Geertz's words wherever they can be found, even in nonacademic journals, and young political scientists might read articles and opinion essays by Michael Walzer and Jean Bethke Elshtain in popular publications. But in the humanities — history, literature, and philosophy — most graduate students whom I knew, and even many professors, did not regularly read the publications that explained those scholars' ideas to laypeople....

Posted on Wednesday, September 20, 2006 at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Howard Zinn: Part 2 of his interview with a conservative talk show host

Source: Dennis Prager at frontpagemag.com (9-19-06)

[Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently "Happiness is a Serious Problem" (HarperCollins). His website is www.dennisprager.com. ]

This is the second part of my radio dialogue with an icon of the Left, Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of Boston University, author of A People's History of the United States. (Read Part One here.) The intention of this ongoing series of what major leftists think is to enable people to see clearly what they believe. Then people can much better make up their minds about which side of the culture war they wish to identify with.

After Professor Zinn argued in Part I that America has not been a force for good in the world, I proceeded with the following questions:

DP: I believe that we [Americans] fought in Korea in order to enable at least half of that benighted peninsula to live in relative freedom and prosperity; the half that we did not liberate is living in the nightmare, almost Nazi-like, condition of the North Korean government. Why don't you see that as a great good that Americans did?

HZ: I think that your description of the North Korean government is accurate. It's sort of a monstrous government. But when we went to war in Korea the result of that war was the deaths of several million people. And I question whether the deaths . . . were worth the result. . . .

DP: If America had never intervened, do we both agree that Kim Il-sung, the psychopathic dictator of North Korea, would have ruled over the entire Korean peninsula?

HZ: I think that's probably true.

DP: Do you believe that that would be a net moral or immoral result for the Korean people and the world?

HZ: That would have been an immoral result, but the result of the war itself was also immoral -- I'm talking about the killing of several million people. And what I'm suggesting is that the answer to . . . tyrannies like that is not war, which in our time always involves the massive killing of innocent people. . . . I think we have to find ways other than war to get rid of dictatorships and tyrannies.

DP: I would love that. But this is where we often consider people on the Left, at best, to be naive. . . . Let's talk about that naivete. You believe that there would have been another way to get rid of the Korean communists -- whom we both agree are monstrous -- as opposed to the Korean War. . . . This is the naivete of the Left, that ugly things can be gotten rid of in sweet ways.

HZ: Not sweet ways. I wouldn't say that. And I wouldn't say either in totally peaceful ways . . . by struggle and resistance but not by war. We have historical examples of what I'm talking about. The Soviet Union, Stalinism, was not overthrown by war. . . . Stalinism was really replaced, in time, by the Russian people themselves. . . . What I'm suggesting is that there are a number of places in the world where we have had tyrannies that have been overthrown without war. . . .

DP: Yes, there are. No one would deny that. And there are historical examples of where war is the only way to achieve a moral end.

HZ: Well, I'm not sure that's the only way.

DP: Was there another way to have gotten rid of Hitler?

HZ: In the case of WWII, I don't know what it would have taken to get rid of Hitler. We certainly had to resist him, we certainly had to get rid of him. . . . What bothers me most today is that people use WWII as an example for what we should do today. It's a very different situation.

DP: No, we use it as an example of where war is the moral choice. Are you prepared to say that war is ever the best moral choice?

HZ: No.

DP: Never. Not even against Hitler?

HZ: Well, I'm not sure about WWII.

DP: Wow . . .

HZ: War has reached the point where when you wage war . . . there's always a war against innocent people. . . . Let's be very specific about today. Take the situation in Iraq. War is not a way to bring democracy to Iraq. We are not succeeding at it . . . we're killing large numbers of people.

DP: Why are we not succeeding?

HZ: Because there is so much resistance in Iraq to the presence of a foreign invader.

DP: No, there's so much resistance in Iraq to the presence of democracy. That's where you and I have a different read on the resistance. . . . You feel that they are resisting the United States, and I feel that they are resisting democracy by blowing up their fellow citizens and hoping for moral chaos and civil war.

HZ: Well there certainly is civil war in Iraq. And we have brought it to Iraq.

We have brought it by the occupation of our troops. . . . Iraq is in chaos. Iraq is in violence. And the United States military presence has done nothing to stop that. It's only aggravated it and provoked it. And the best thing we can do for Iraq right now is to get out of the place, and save the lives of our young people.

DP: What would happen if we did get out? Do you think that there would be fewer people dead or more?

HZ: I would hope that there would be fewer people dead.

DP: I believe if we left, the bloodbath would make what is happening now look like a very sad episode but not a bloodbath.

HZ: . . . The point is that war is the worst possible solution.

DP: That's where we differ. It isn't the worst possible. There are worse things than war. More people have died in North Korea . . . than died in the war that you thought we shouldn't have waged. . . . So it isn't the worst possible. It wasn't the worst possible versus the Japanese. It wasn't the worst possible versus the Nazis. Is it the worst possible in Afghanistan? Are we wrong there too?

HZ: It is the worst. In Afghanistan it was not a good idea to wage war on Afghanistan. Because the fact is that Bush did not know where Osama bin Laden was except that he was in the country. So what does he do? He bombs the country, kills 3,000 at least ordinary Afghans. That's as many as died in the Twin Towers. And today after these years of bombing Afghanistan, driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. What have we accomplished in Afghanistan? The Taliban is back.

DP: No, it's not back.

HZ: The Taliban now controls much of the country.

DP: But it doesn't control Kabul. It doesn't control the major cities. And women are now free to step out of their homes. Doesn't that matter to you? HZ: It matters a lot to me. But I don't think that liberation of women matters a lot to the Bush administration. . . .

DP: Whatever your view [about the war in Iraq] . . . would you say that by and large the people that we are fighting, the so-called insurgents, the people who blow up marketplaces and try to create civil war, are bad or evil people? Or would you not make a moral judgment?

HZ: I would certainly make a moral judgment about people who blow up things, who kill innocent people. And I would make a moral judgment on ourselves because we are killing innocent people in Iraq.

DP: So do you feel that, by and large, the Zarqawi-world and the Bush-world are moral equivalents?

HZ: I do. I would put Bush on trial along with Saddam Hussein, because I think both of them are responsible for the deaths of many, many people in Iraq, and so, yes, I think that. Killing innocent people is immoral when Iraqis do it, and when we do it, it is the same thing.

DP: Although we don't target them, but I won't get into that debate. I am just fleshing out your views.

HZ: Actually we should get into that. You know, as a former Air Force volunteer I can tell you, it is not necessary to target civilians. You just inevitably kill them. And the result is the same as if you targeted them.

DP: But we have a different punishment for premeditated murder and for accidental murder.

HZ: Yeah, but when you accidentally kill 100 times as many people as the other side kills in a premeditated way . . .

DP: But we haven't done that . . .

HZ: But we have.

DP: Not in Iraq we certainly haven't.

HZ: No, in Vietnam . . .

DP: Don't go to Vietnam every time I ask an Iraq question.

HZ: OK.

DP: Next, Israel and its enemies. Would you say that Israel and Hezbollah are also moral equivalents?

HZ: Well, first of all, I certainly oppose Hezbollah's firing rockets into Israel, and I think Israel reacted with absolutely unjustified immoral indiscriminate force. I mean, you look at the casualties on both sides, and the casualties among civilians in Lebanon is 10 times the casualties . . .

DP: Well, the casualties in Germany were 10 times those of the casualties in Britain. So are Britain and Hitler morally equivalent? You are making the assessment of morality on the basis of numbers killed.

HZ: No. I think regardless of the numbers, when you kill innocent people there is immorality. So there is immorality on both sides, but I think there is a case in the case of Israel where you have to get back to fundamental causes.

The fundamental cause of the violence on both sides is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and so long as that occupation continues . . .

DP: But they got out of Gaza. And according to President Clinton, the Palestinians were offered a Palestinian state with 97 percent of their land and 3 percent more from Israel.

HZ: Well that's according to President Clinton. But not according to a lot of people who have been studying the Middle East . . .

DP: A lot of people on the Left, but not a lot of people studying it.

DP: Professor Zinn, I thank you so much for your time.

HZ: Thanks.

Posted on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 10:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Allan Lichtman: Thanks his supporters after losing primary race for US Senate in Maryland

Source: Campaign Website (9-19-06)

Thank You!
Dear Supporters,

I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your consistent support of my United States Senate campaign. Your faith in our message helped all of us at the Lichtman campaign bring positive, fundamental change across the state of Maryland.

Although we did not prevail in this campaign, I can assure you that I, my wife Karyn Strickler, my staff, and our volunteers worked as hard as humanly possible to reach the voters of Maryland. Our campaign attracted nationwide attention for our many innovations, including our youth outreach program, novel advertising, and our lead on crucial issues. Long before the polls turned against the war, we were the first Democratic Senate campaign to propose a phased withdrawal from Iraq. Before the issue became trendy, we developed a plan to reduce our fossil fuel dependence by 50 percent over 20 years. We were the first campaign to support a specific single-payer health care plan to cover all Americans. And we were the only campaign to develop detailed proposals for protecting our civil rights and liberties.

I firmly believe that we changed the course of the debate in Maryland and nationwide. We gained more endorsements than any other campaign from national figures - George McGovern, John Anderson, Ray Mabus, Cleo Fields, and Daniel Ellsberg, among many others.

From the start, a year ago, I described this campaign as a boulder, which if it got moving would roll over the state of Maryland and begin a new era in state and national politics. Ultimately, the boulder did not move, but it was not for lack of effort, ideas, or support from wonderful people like you. I promise that I will continue to be of service as an educator, author, political analyst, and civil rights expert.

I will never forget you.

Sincerely,

Allan Lichtman

Posted on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 9:57 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Rob Kroes: A Moment in a Scholar's Understanding of America

Source: Journal of American History (9-1-06)

There are generally two momentous occasions in a European academic's career: when the professor accepts an appointment at a university and when she or he retires from that appointment. On those occasions the professor's colleagues, students, administrators, relatives, and friends, from home and abroad, gather to celebrate a professional life. The honoree gives a formal lecture. On the first occasion the honoree reflects on the state of the field and projects what the professor hopes to contribute; on the second the professor reflects on the state of the field as she or he leaves it. The essay that follows is Rob Kroes's formal retirement lecture from his thirty-year career as director of the pioneering American Studies Program at the University of Amsterdam. On a bright sunlit late Friday afternoon, September 9, 2005, in the Doopsgezinde Kerk along the Singel Canal in central Amsterdam, Kroes gave his lecture to hundreds of colleagues and friends who had gathered from all over the world. The lecture was the central focus for three days of festivities that included a symposium in which people reflected on his contributions to the field, the presentation to him of a festschrift of original essays, and a lavish retirement party held on the Dutch estate of the last German kaiser (where that emperor had also, well, retired from an earlier career).1 Following his speech inside the church, Kroes's dean, colleagues, successor, and students paid tribute to him. The ceremony ended with an event that brought smiles to all who knew his love for herring. Dressed in a cutaway coat, his herringmonger strode to the front of the hall, presented him with a herring on a silver platter, and Kroes, holding it by the tail, gulped down the fish. A Dutch moment. A Kroes moment.

Even before Kroes began to speak, many knew the lecture would be an important statement. From Boston to Berlin, Bozeman to Bologna, scholars came to hear how this director of a leading European center for the study of American culture, this former president of the European Association for American Studies, would now frame the challenge that he had placed at the center of his career: How could Europeans contribute a distinctive perspective to the study of the United States? Some knew what to expect, for he had been trying out parts of his theme over the past year in talks in Europe and North America. Naoki Fukuhara, who covered Europe for a leading Japanese newspaper chain, had come from his base in Brussels, Belgium, to report on a speech his editors thought would offer an emerging European perspective on the United States.

In that speech, Kroes gave a new twist to his longstanding project. Europeans could make a distinctive contribution to American studies, as he had illustrated in some forty books he had written or edited, by exploring how, in exchanges of people, images, and ideas, Europeans used the United States to advance and retard their own political debates and cultural projects. For Europeans, the United States over the past two centuries had been "the site of the modern," as Rob frequently put it, the place where European ideas could be explored and developed more fully than in their more tradition-bound birthplace. Whether as immigrants to Montana, inhabitants of Europe who consumed American television programs, music, and clothes, or individuals trying to frame horizons of possibility and constraint in a globalizing world, Europeans used the United States to think about European needs and agendas. As the way of the future, American mass culture—a favorite theme of Kroes's work—represented the greatest hope for some Europeans and the worst nightmare for others, simultaneously the promise of and the threat to European civilization, but, above all, a source that Europeans could embrace, reject, and adapt to fit their own needs....

Posted on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 9:05 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Ilan Pappe: Interviewed about the Middle East

Source: Zaman.com (8-6-06)

Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-born professor at Haifa University, who is well-known as a revisionist or "post-Zionist" Israeli historian. He has a BA from Hebrew University and a PhD from Oxford. He is a senior lecturer in the department of Political Science at Haifa University and the Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. He is also the Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. Ilan Pappe is the author of many books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With the publication of each of his ground-breaking books, he has been both acclaimed and smeared. Ilan Pappe’s most recent books include The Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2005), and A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge University Press, 2004), in which he documents the expulsion of Palestinians as an orchestrated crime of ethnic cleansing that tore apart peaceful Arab-Jewish coexistence . His previous books include The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951 (New York, 1992) and The Israel/Palestine Question (London, 1999). He is sometimes accused of being anti-Semitic for his views on the myths which he believes inform main stream Israeli Jewish society. We talked to Dr. Ilan Pappe about the recent crisis in the Middle East.

Read More...

Posted on Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at 5:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, September 18, 2006

Leonard Levy: 83, Expert on Constitutional History, Is Dead

Source: NYT (9-1-06)

Leonard W. Levy, an exacting, dogged, prolific and combative constitutional historian whose work was frequently cited by the United States Supreme Court and won him a Pulitzer Prize, died on Aug. 24 in Ashland, Ore. He was 83. His death followed years of poor health and a recent stroke, said his wife, Elyse. Professor Levy’s Pulitzer, the 1969 prize for history, was awarded for his “Origins of the Fifth Amendment.” He published almost 40 other books, on topics including religious liberty, Thomas Jefferson and constitutional interpretation. But it was his work on the scope of the First Amendment’s protection of free expression that gained the most attention. His “Legacy of Suppression: Freedom of Speech and Press in Early American History,” published in 1960, argued that the framers of the Constitution had had a crabbed view of press freedom, limited largely to prohibiting prior censorship and perfectly comfortable with subsequent punishment for speech they thought harmful, including attacks on the government. “I have been reluctantly forced to conclude,” Professor Levy wrote, “that the generation which adopted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not believe in a broad scope for freedom of expression, particularly in the realm of politics.” That assessment, at odds with the conventional wisdom, gave rise to withering attacks on his work. Justice Hugo L. Black of the Supreme Court, a First Amendment absolutist, wrote in a letter to a friend that the book was “probably one of the most devastating blows that has been delivered against civil liberty in America for a long time.” But Professor Levy was capable of changing his mind. “He was scrupulously honest and fair in his assessments of his own writings and other people’s writings,” said Kenneth L. Karst, who collaborated with him in editing the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution. Indeed, Professor Levy revised “Legacy of Suppression” in 1985 and gave it a telling new title: “Emergence of a Free Press.”...

Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 5:41 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Annette Gordon-Reed: Rutgers-Newark Appoints Nationally Renowned Presidential Scholar to Faculty

Source: Press Release--Rutgers (Newark) (8-28-06)

Newly appointed Rutgers-Newark Professor of History Annette Gordon-Reed has attracted attention from fellow scholars and mainstream media due to her work on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and one of his female slaves, Sally Hemings. In many ways, this work reflects a central theme of her research and teaching.

“The issue of race has been at the heart of the American dilemma from the very beginning,” Gordon-Reed notes. “How do you develop a multicultural society when you have the paradox of slavery and freedom existing together in the United States? We’re still trying to get out from under the fallout from all that.”

Gordon-Reed will begin teaching undergraduate and graduate-level courses in American History and American Studies at Rutgers-Newark in the spring 2007 semester. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth in 1981 and her law degree from Harvard in 1984. She has been a professor at New York Law School since 1992 and will continue in that role after she assumes her position at Rutgers-Newark. Gordon-Reed spent the early part of her career as an associate at Cahill, Gordon and Reindel and as counsel to the New York City Board of Corrections. She speaks or moderates at numerous conferences across the country on history and law-related topics. Gordon-Reed is currently finishing her book, “The Hemings Family of Monticello: A Story of American Slavery,” which will be published by W.W. Norton next year.

Her first book, the critically acclaimed, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” sparked a great amount of interest from fellow scholars. Nearly one year after her book was published; DNA analysis corroborated the link between Jefferson and Hemings.

“Annette Gordon-Reed is a superb historian and a great addition to a very strong department at Rutgers-Newark,” notes Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Professor of History at the University of Virginia. “Her path-breaking book on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings has forced historians to take a fresh look at the Sage of Monticello and his times. Annette Gordon-Reed is now emerging as one of our leading historians on the history of race and slavery in the new nation; she has already established a formidable reputation as a premier Jeffersonian scholar.”

Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 5:37 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Martin Gilbert: Churchill's biographer joins Western Ontario U.

Source: Press Release--University of West Ontario (8-31-06)

An internationally recognized historian and authority on Jewish history starts a five year term this fall as an adjunct research professor in the History Department at the University of Western Ontario.

Sir Martin Gilbert is a leading authority on Jewish history and the official biographer of Winston Churchill. He previously lived in London, England.

"It's very exciting," says Gilbert. "I've been coming to London on and off for a number of years. I like the atmosphere very much indeed.

"Its going to be a wonderful opportunity to have contact with students. I taught students at Oxford from 1960 to 1970 and since then I've almost been a hermit. I'm emerging from the ivory tower."

Ben Forster, chair of Western's History Department, praised Gilbert saying, "We're absolutely delighted to have Sir Martin Gilbert, one of the leading historians of the 20th century affiliated with our department. It's going to be terrific to have him deliver a variety of talks on the subjects that he knows exceedingly well and for which he's highly respected - Sir Winston Churchill, the Second World War, the Holocaust and the world of the Jewish peoples in the twentieth century. I know he's going to be a significant figure here at Western."

Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 5:35 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Adam Goodheart: The C.V. Starr Center Welcomes New Director, Prize Winner

Source: The Elm, Wash College Student Newspaper (9-8-06)

The C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience has recently undergone a facelift in its leadership by promoting Adam Goodheart, professor of American Studies, to director.

Goodheart said he is "helping to turn Washington College into a kind of 'magnet school' for students interested in American history, politics, and culture, archaeology, historic preservation and similar fields."

The Center, constantly striving to connect American history to the Eastern Shore community and to support various academic opportunities that will garner the college national prominence, will quickly become an epicenter of new and explorative ideas for students of varying interests.

Goodheart is a Philadelphia native and 1992 graduate of Harvard who has received accolades ranging from the Henry Lawson Award for Travel Writing in 2005 to having works published in the prestigious Norton Reader. Working with publications such as the Washington Post, the New York Times and GQ, among others, Goodheart has been a travel essayist, a critic and a historian.

Dovetailing all of these passions, he found himself at the C.V. Starr Center as a visiting fellow. He was hired as a professor and was able to help "launch the Starr Center as a place with a growing national reputation for its innovative approaches to the past," said Goodheart.

His students find Goodheart to be an obvious choice to head the Center. Erin Koster, a senior who had Goodheart in the spring 2005 semester for "Chestertown's America" said, "He really cares for the college and the Center and has some great ideas."

Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 5:33 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Eric Hobsbawm: His career and books assessed by Michael Kazin

Source: Chris Lehmann interview with Michael Kazin for NPR (9-1-06)

Q: Do you find -- as I did -- Hobsbawm's account of the public past disturbingly selective when it came to the abuses of the Soviet Union? He mentions the Gulags in a handful of brief passages, and says even less about the Stalin-era purges and show trials.

Certainly, Hobsbawm is too sympathetic to what used to be called "the Soviet experiment" -- the decidedly unscientific order that had a mostly deleterious impact on the history of the 20th century, particularly the history of those nations ruled by a party which modeled itself on the Leninist model. The tone as well as the brevity of his description of the millions of people whom the Soviet government exterminated suggests his psychological distance from their suffering: "the number of direct and indirect victims must be measured in eight rather than seven digits."

Yet at the same time, he does a masterful job of explaining why the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917. This was, after all, a time when no other political faction was able or even willing to take power and seek a solution to the chaos left by the collapse of the Czarist regime amid the slaughter on the Eastern Front. And Hobsbawm also evokes and explains what about Soviet Communism appealed so strongly to so many people for so long. Towards the end of the book, he provides a sober analysis of why the whole edifice of the USSR and its satellites crumbled so rapidly and thoroughly. These are vital questions for an historian to answer, and Hobsbawm's long but usually critical affiliation with the British Communist Party allows him to answer them quite brilliantly.

I do wish he had written a more censorious history of "existing socialism." But his reticence to describe its human costs is not due to his partisanship. Rarely does he dwell on the bloody details of this bloodiest of all centuries. For example, he devotes only one passing phrase to the Holocaust, which is remarkable for a Jewish historian of any political persuasion. So, for me, the insights yielded by his acute analytical sangfroid outweigh the absence of a truly empathetic temperament.

Q: On a related note, it seems that Hobsbawm is much too glib in dismissing the political theologies of the Muslim world as a dalliance with a "simpler and stable and more comprehensible age of an imagined past." Hasn't it been evident for some time, even before the Sept. 11 attacks, that Islamic fundamentalism, like its Christian counterpart, is an anti-modern movement entirely at ease in its use of modern technologies and recruitment techniques?

In his defense, Hobsbawm drafted this book before the rise of militant Islam became as apparent as it has over the past decade. But understanding religion has never been his strongest suit. He does make the Marxist -- and, for that matter, secular liberal -- error of reducing religious enthusiasm to its socio-economic components. Ironically, he often compares his allegiance and that of his contemporaries to Marxism and Communism to a religious faith -- and attributes the relatively bloodless fall of the USSR to a patent loss of this faith, even among the high priests of the Politburo.

Q: How much of Hobsbawm's revolutionary Marxism persists in this account? Does he have anything in mind to replace it?

Hobsbawm long ago replaced his revolutionary politics with a version of social-democracy. One can see this in his high regard for the Italian Communist Party, the first major CP in the West to jettison its Bolshevik heritage, as well as its successor which waves the banner of "democratic socialism" and takes positions similar to those of any center-left party in Europe or, for that matter, in North America. In Britain, Hobsbawm was a notable defender of Tony Blair's successful attempt to wean Labour away from its identity as a party rooted mostly among the unionized working class in declining industries and to become, instead, a mass "party of the people." Hobsbawm has also written in praise of the American reform tradition. In Interesting Times, the only politician about whom he writes unambivalently and unironically is that "traitor to his class," Franklin D. Roosevelt.

So Hobsbawm probably has scant, if any, hope for a millennial revival. In fact, he may have lost that hope as early as the late 1940s when the great expectation of a global lurch leftward, described in Age of Extremes, essentially came to naught. His sensibility is nearly always cool and distanced. Perhaps, as Tony Judt commented in a review of the book, it reflects the loss of faith in the potential for human emancipation that flowered during the long 19th century (from 1789 to 1914) and were compromised, at best, by the end of the short 20th.

Q: How has Hobsbawm's work influenced your own thinking -- and writing -- about the past?

On one hand, my own work is much narrower in scope and quite distinct in sensibility from Hobsbawm's. I write mostly about the politics and ideology of my own nation and view empathy with both historical subjects and contemporary readers as vital. I have neither the abililty nor the ambition to craft the kind of multi-topic, heavily structural, global narratives that are Hobsbawm's greatest achievement (although he has also written brilliantly about such narrower topics as the meaning of the workman's cloth cap and the history of jazz). Among the school of British historians who were once comrades in the British CP, I've always felt closer in spirit to the late E.P. Thompson, whose masterpiece was The Making of the English Working Class. I admired Thompson's decision to put aside his scholarly writing during the 1980s to become a leader in the international campaign against nuclear weapons, criticizing the United States and the USSR with equal passion.

Yet we need to understand the larger history of our planet and to do so with a certain coolness that views the barricades -- cultural, intellectual, as well as political -- from some distance apart and above. No historian writing in English does this with the lucidity and wit and eye for the telling detail and summarizing judgment that Hobsbawm has brought to the task since writing the first volume of this tetralogy almost five decades ago.

One example will suffice. In his chapter on the quarter-century after the end of World War II -- "the golden age" -- he writes not just about the diffusion of such technological marvels as TV, refrigerators, and automobiles to nearly every corner of the globe or the astounding rise in incomes that brought a cosmopolitan flavor to such poor nations as Jamaica and Algeria as well as to rich ones like Japan and Finland. He makes clear that behind this change of life lay a "sudden and seismic" shift in consciousness: "For 80 percent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or, better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s."

Some scholars would object that "the Middle Ages" is not a meaningful concept to apply to the history of any country outside West and Central Europe. But that would miss the beauty of Hobsbawm's formulation. In fewer than 25 words, Hobsbawm manages to illuminate the revolutionary character of the unparalleled growth of industry and a global consumer economy -- with politicians and social movements of different stripes trying to understand and exploit this development, of course. And his habit of amending himself, within the same sentence, demonstrates the balance between material reality and consciousness that is perhaps the most beneficial aspect of the Marxist approach to history.

I expect that historians and, I hope, ordinary readers of history will continue to learn from Hobsbawm at the end of the 21st century as they do at its beginning. He is not my model, but he is my teacher.

Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 5:27 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Heather Warren: Using music to bring religious history alive

Source: Cavalier Daily (9-7-06)

f you've ever taken "Religion in America Since 1865," you probably recall religious studies Prof. Heather Warren periodically strumming away at her guitar during class. The reason for Warren's display of guitar skills is not to give her rendition of a John Mayer ballad but to engage her students as she illustrates her main points.

"One of the things I do find within many faiths, particularly in American religious life, [is that] people sing what they believe," Warren said. "I think music is very powerful in that way."

Having spent most of her youth in Nashville, Tenn. as the daughter of a pastor and college professor, religion has always been a prominent part of Warren's life. Growing up, she never thought she would go into the ministry.

Warren graduated from Cornell University in 1981 with a bachelor's degree in literary and religious studies. She went on to The Candler School of Theology at Emory University, a seminary school in preparation for the ministry. After only one year there, Warren received a Rhodes Scholarship, which led to a two-year leave of absence to earn a bachelor's in theology at Oxford University.

Warren returned to Emory and received her Master's of Divinity and then served as a pastor in southern Maryland for two years. While pursuing her doctorate in history at Johns Hopkins University, she ultimately developed a desire to pursue teaching.

Teaching "was actually a lot easier than preaching," Warren said. "You have a much more captive audience."

Coming to the University in 1992, Warren said she was excited to be joining the highly reputable department of religious studies. Here, Warren has crafted her own 400-level seminar course entitled "American Religious Autobiography," in which her students write their own religious autobiography.

In Warren's courses, she said the focus is on ways to make connections, understand where something fits and acknowledge that there is a bit of mystery in life.

"But that doesn't mean that you don't seek to probe the mystery," said Warren....

Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 5:21 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Stephen Kercher: History professor writes analysis on 60s comedians

Source: Advance-Titan (9-11-06)

Within the dark hallways of the Clow faculty building is the office of Dr. Stephen Kercher. Amid the various history books and other assorted papers piled up on Kercher’s desk, you might find a copy of Kercher’s new book, “Revel With A Cause: Liberal Satire in Post-War America.” The book is Kercher’s analysis of the period from 1945-1965, when political satirists were at their most venerated.

“I’ve always been compelled by how artists use humor and comedy to criticize social patterns and issues of the day such as the bomb, race and the military,” he said.

Kercher, who received a doctorate from the University of Indiana, is an associate professor in the history department at UW-Oshkosh. He teaches a variety of 20th century history courses dealing with World War II and the 1960s.

Kercher believed that a book needed to be written on the satire of the post war period because he felt comics like Lenny Bruce, and others of the era, have not been taken seriously as writers and weren’t taken as seriously as the news media at the time.

“People like Lenny Bruce then, or Jon Stewart today, take the news stories of the day and put a humorous twist on them, but there’s still a serious moral purpose behind it,” Kercher said.

The book took shape in 1995, when Kercher was a grad student at the University of Indiana. The book began as Kercher’s dissertation, and he continued to edit it until two years ago, when he began looking for a publisher.

“I was blissfully naïve to think that I could pitch the book idea to publishers and someone would publish it. I know now that it usually doesn’t happen that way. Luckily, I got immediate interest from a few publishers, and I decided on University of Chicago Press,” Kercher said.

While working on the book, Kercher got the opportunity to interview famous comedy writers and satirists. He interviewed Gloria Steinem who, prior to becoming a feminist writer, worked with comedic material; Buck Henry, a famous satirist; Calvin Trillin of the New Yorker; and Del Close, the guru of American improv, who coached at Second City in Chicago. ...

Posted on Monday, September 18, 2006 at 5:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Bernard Lewis: Interviewed by Bruce Cole

Source: NEH (9-15-06)

National Endowment Chairman Bruce Cole talked recently with Bernard Lewis, the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University.

A scholar on the history of Islam, Lewis has written more than twenty books, among them What Went Wrong: The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror.

Bruce Cole: Members of one culture are sometimes reluctant to understand enough about another culture, or even learn the other's language. What causes this?

Bernard Lewis: There have been many civilizations in the world, and the normal practice of civilizations has been to dismiss with contempt those outside. The world is divided into civilized people--that means us--and barbarians.

Cole: Us and them.

Lewis: Them. "Them" usually are regarded as barbarians. The Greeks and the Romans ruled the Middle East but did not bother to learn any of the languages.

Cole: I understood that the word "citizen" doesn't exist in Arabic. Is that correct?

Lewis: Yes, I'm afraid it is. The word which we use in English, "citizen," which has its equivalence in the other languages of Christendom, citoyen and so forth, has a connotation going back to the ancient Greeks. A citizen is a member of the city-state. He takes part in the governance of the city. This is a notion which is absent from most other civilizations.

The word that is used in modern Arabic for citizen is the word muwatin. But muwatin has the literal meaning of compatriot. The very notion of the city is not there.

Cole: The fact that there isn't a word for citizenship and presumably not a concept for it, does that pose obstacles to the kind of changes that we are hoping for in that part of the world?

Lewis: We talk about democracy. It's a word which is used in many different senses. Remember that when Germany was divided, it was the Communist dictatorship that was called "The People's Democracy." The term democracy was used by General Franco in Spain to describe his regime. It was used by the Greek colonels and all sorts of other people. So let's be careful when we talk about democracy. We should avoid going to the opposite extreme and assuming that democracy means our type of government; that anything that differs from our type of government is not democracy and that all things that are not democracy are equally bad and evil. These are self-flattering delusions.

Democracy comes in many different forms. I think we should also shed the illusion that democracy is the natural, normal human condition and that any deviation from it is either a disease to be cured or a crime to be punished. It isn't. For most of human history, most of the world could get along without democracy. Even where democracy does come, it doesn't have to be our kind.

Cole: In writing about the present-day Arab world, you characterize Turkey as a successful democracy. What's the makeup of a successful democracy as you see it? How do you define it?

Lewis: Well, I like Sam Huntington's definition of that. He said, "You can call a country a democracy where it has changed its government twice by elections." Once isn't enough. There are a number of cases where a government, either on principle or through inadvertence, has allowed itself to be voted out of power, and where then the new lot that came in made damn sure they would not leave by the same route they came.

Cole: So you've got to have it two times?

Lewis: Yes. When you have a country where the government has been changed twice--well, in Turkey the government has been changed many times by elections, three times also by other methods. But Turkey is the only Muslim country which has really developed a functioning democracy, and that democracy is now in danger from the present government of Turkey....

Posted on Sunday, September 17, 2006 at 9:16 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Annual Report Card: Human rights and history around the world

Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH) #45a (Annual Report 2006) (9-17-06)

The Network of Concerned Historians (NCH) forwards to its
participants news about the domain where history and human rights
intersect, as reported by:

**the American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS,
Washington];
**Amnesty International [AI, London];
**Article 19 [A19, London];
**Human Rights Watch [HRW, Washington/New York];
**Index on Censorship [IOC, London];
**the Network of Education and Academic Rights [NEAR, London];
**International PEN Writers in Prison Committee [PEN, London];
**Scholars at Risk [SAR, New York];
**and other sources.

The fact that NCH presents this news does not imply that it shares
the views and beliefs of the historians and others mentioned in it.

Please send NCH a message if:

**you have more information on the cases below.
**you have a new e-mail address.
**you wish to receive previous NCH reports.
**you wish colleagues to receive NCH reports.
**you do not wish to receive NCH circulars anymore.

INTRODUCTION

**This is the twelfth Annual Report of the Network of Concerned
Historians (NCH). It covers 79 countries and is sent to more than 600
historians and others interested in the past all over the world.

**Previous reports cover the years 1995 to 2005. All can be consulted
on NCH's website.

**Please visit and bookmark the NCH website:
http://www.let.rug.nl/nch/ or its mirror: http://dit.is/nch.

**For the current status of cases on whose behalf NCH campaigned, see
the NCH website section "Results".

**NCH is a founding member of the Network of Education and Academic
Rights (NEAR), a global watchdog for academic freedom. Please visit
and bookmark the NEAR website (http://www.nearinternational.org), and
support NEAR's work.

AFGHANISTAN

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**In January 2005, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights
Commission published the results of its consultation with the Afghan
people about human rights violations during armed conflicts since
1979-80. In December 2005, the government passed the Transitional
Justice Action Plan, which calls for the commemoration of victims,
vetting of state employees to exclude human rights violators, the
creation of a truth-seeking mechanism, the promotion of national
reconciliation and the establishment of mechanisms to bring
perpetrators of past crimes to justice. Some regional officials and
commanders -- often called warlords -- continued to maintain links
with armed groups that were active in the conflicts.
[Sources: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 51; HRW, World Report 2006 (2006),
225-26.]

ALBANIA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #5 (1996).

**In April 2005, the Cold War International History Project reported
continued problems with access to files from the communist era,
including access to Communist Party records.
[Source: D. Banisar, Freedom of Information Around the World 2006: A
Global Survey of Access to Government Records Laws (2006) 5.]

**See also Serbia and Montenegro.

ALGERIA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**In March 2005, the authorities ordered a ban on import sales of
Afrique Magazine after they discovered that the March issue carried a
report on political disappearances in Algeria in the 1990s. In the
internal conflict (1992-2000), thousands of persons disappeared.
[Source: IOC 2/05: 86.]

**At the end of March 2005, the mandate of an official commission on
disappearances, set up with a narrow mandate in 2004, expired. The
head of the commission publicly excluded criminal prosecution of
those responsible for the disappearances and proposed compensation
payments to the families. He declared that the commission had
concluded that 6,146 individuals had disappeared at the hands of
security officers between 1992 and 1998. However, media reports later
quoted him contradicting this by saying that half of these were
"terrorists", rather than victims of state abuses. The commission's
confidential report to the President had not been made public by the
end of 2005. In September 2005, the government held a national
referendum to win support for its Charter for Peace and National
Reconciliation which would extend an amnesty to perpetrators of human
rights violations (security forces, state-armed militias and armed
groups) committed during the internal conflict (1992-2000). President
Abdelaziz Bouteflika officially stated that some 200,000 people were
believed to have been killed since 1992, but there was no commitment
to establishing the truth about these killings and other gross human
rights abuses. Regarding the amnesty, although perpetrators of
certain serious abuses were not to be exempt from prosecution, no
details were provided concerning the process of determining who would
be eligible. Similar measures introduced in 1999 were applied
arbitrarily and resulted de facto in wide-ranging impunity for abuses
committed by armed groups.
[Source: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 44, 54-56.]

**See also France.

ANGOLA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #32 (2003).

ARGENTINA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**On 14 June 2005, the Supreme Court of Justice declared the Full
Stop (1986) and Due Obedience (1987) laws unconstitutional, by a 7-1
majority, with one abstention, upholding an earlier decision by
Congress from August 2003. The laws attempted to institutionalize
impunity in cases of human rights violations committed during the
military governments (1976-83). The ruling allowed the reopening of
dozens of trial proceedings in Argentina.
[Sources: AI, "Argentina: Historical Ruling Opens the Way for Justice
in the Country" (Press Release; 15 June 2005); AI, Report 2006
(2006), 32, 59; HRW, World Report 2006 (2006), 162, 164-66.]

**On 18 November 2005, Mariano Saravia, journalist of the Córdoba
daily newspaper La Voz del Interior and author of a book on police
brutality during the military dictatorship (1976-83), complained of
death threats. He also said to be a victim of "judicial persecution"
because he was sued by former members of the military.
[Source: IOC 1/06: 104.]

**See also Chile, Cuba, Uruguay.

ARMENIA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**In January 2002, Turkish born Armenian journalist Murad Bojolyan
(1950-) was arrested and charged with espionage. A historian and
oriental specialist graduated at the Department of Oriental Studies
of Yerevan State University (1972) and author of a book about the
Ottoman Empire (published in Russian), he worked at the Institute of
Oriental Studies of the National Academy of Sciences (1972-91) and
for the public radio as an announcer and translator into Turkish
(1980-91). In 1991-98, he worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
the National Assembly and in the administration of President Levon
Ter-Petrossian as chief translator for the President (1991-98). He
was dismissed due to a staff reduction shortly after Robert Kocharyan
became President in 1998. Since 1998, he had been working as a
journalist, reporting for a number of Armenian and Turkish mass
media. He was charged with spying for the Turkish National
Intelligence Organization MIT and communicating to them information
in exchange for payment concerning Armenia's and Nagorno Karabakh's
military, economic and political affairs, particularly about the
Russian troops based in Armenia. Retracting an earlier confession,
Bojolyan said that any information he had, were public press reports.
In December 2002, a court in Yerevan found Bojolyan guilty of treason
and sentenced him to ten years' imprisonment with confiscation of all
property. His various appeals were dismissed. In October 2005, the
European Court of Human Rights rejected most of Bojolyan's complaints
but wanted to look into the charge that his freedom of expression had
been violated.
[Source: European Court of Human Rights, Partial Decision as to the
Admissibility of Application no. 23693/03 by Murad Bojolyan against
Armenia (Strasbourg, 6 October 2005).]

**On 17 June 2005, Yektan Turkyilmaz (?1972-), a Turkish citizen of
Kurdish origin, a doctoral student of cultural anthropology and a
fellow at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke
University, Durham (North Carolina, United States), was arrested at
Yerevan airport and imprisoned for attempting to smuggle culturally
valuable antique books out of Armenia. On his fourth research trip to
Armenia, Turkyilmaz had conducted research on the history of Eastern
Anatolia during the interwar period. He had acquired around 88 books
dating from the 17th to the 20th century from Armenian second-hand
bookstores, an open-air market, and as gifts, in order to build up a
research collection and a library of Armenian books that would
otherwise be lost. However, he was apparently unaware that he was
required to declare seven of the 88 books, which were over fifty
years old, at customs. Turkyilmaz was questioned on his archival work
and political beliefs, and digital copies of his archival research
were confiscated. His official request to be released on bail until
his trial date (9 August 2005) was rejected. He faced up to eight
years' imprisonment. On 16 August 2005, Turkyilmaz, was released but
given a suspended sentence of two years' imprisonment. The judge
upheld the confiscation of all 88 books, though ordered the return of
his electronic research materials. The court had convicted Turkyilmaz
on charges of smuggling, but commuted the sentence, as he was
cooperative during investigations and partially admitted his guilt.
Turkyilmaz was the first Turkish scholar to ask for and receive
access to the Armenian National Archives, where he did research in
May and June 2005. He was one of the few Turkish scholars who had
critically examined the events of 1915 and Armenian claims of
genocide, and other instances of political violence in Anatolia and
the South Caucasus. He received several foreign scholarships. His
dissertation "Imagining 'Turkey', Creating a Nation: the Politics of
Geography and State Formation in Eastern Anatolia, 1908-1938" won him
several awards. Turkyilmaz also studied in the Masters Program at the
Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Bogazici University,
Istanbul. (See NCH #39.)
[Sources: AAAS Case, ar0510-tur (5 & 18 August 2005); HRW, World
Report (2006) 327; PEN, Rapid Action Network 31/05 (4 & 5 & 22 August
2005); Social Science Research Council, "Yektan Turkyilmaz" (2005).]

AUSTRALIA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #32 (2003).

**See also Japan.

AUSTRIA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**On 21 February 2006, British writer David Irving (1938-) was
sentenced to three years' imprisonment after pleading guilty to
charges of Holocaust denial. The charges stemmed from two lectures he
delivered in Austria in 1989. In Austria Holocaust denial is
punishable by up to ten years' imprisonment. While in custody, Irving
reportedly found a copy of his Hitler's War (1977), banned for
defending the thesis that Hitler had no knowledge of the Holocaust,
in the prison of Graz.
[Sources: IOC 1/06: 104; IOC 2/06: 178.]

AZERBAIJAN

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #10 (1998).

BAHRAIN

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #37 (2004).

BANGLADESH

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**In August 2005, the High Court declared the Fifth Amendment to the
Constitution unlawful. The amendment had legitimized the imposition
of martial law in 1975-79. Following an appeal by the government, the
Supreme Court suspended the High Court ruling.
[Source: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 65.]

BELARUS

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**In April 2005, special forces of the police beat and detained
peaceful demonstrators who had gathered on the 19th anniversary of
the Chernobyl nuclear accident.
[Source: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 67.]

BELGIUM

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #37 (2004).

**Although the law on universal jurisdiction was amended in 2003 so
that victims could lodge complaints directly with an investigating
magistrate only if the case had a direct connection with Belgium, a
limited number of cases were pursued. One of these was the case of
former President of Chad, Hissène Habré (see under Chad).
[Source: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 69.]

**See also Chad.

BOLIVIA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #27 (2002).

**See United States.

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**Under a "completion strategy" laid down by the United Nations (UN)
Security Council, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) was expected to conclude all cases, including
appeals, by 2010. Between February and April 2005, the last
indictments before the closing down of ICTY were confirmed and
unsealed. Impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity during
the 1992-95 war was widespread. Thousands of disappearances were
still unresolved. According to estimates of the International
Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP), between 15,000 and 20,000
people who went missing during the war were still unaccounted for. In
August, the Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina became the
co-founder, with the ICMP, of a federal Missing Persons Institute.
Lack of full cooperation with ICTY, particularly by the Republika
Srpska (RS), remained an obstacle to justice. Efforts to tackle
impunity in proceedings before domestic courts remained largely
insufficient, although some war crime trials were conducted. The
first convictions for war crimes committed by Bosnian Serbs were
passed by RS courts.
[Sources: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 14, 71-73; HRW, World Report 2006
(2006), 342.]

**In July 2005, the tenth anniversary of the massacre of around 8,000
Bosnian Muslims after the UN "safe area" of Srebrenica fell to the
Bosnian Serb Army in 1995 took place. While crimes committed in
Srebrenica have been recognized as amounting to genocide by the ICTY,
the women of Srebrenica whose husbands and sons were killed were
still waiting for most of the perpetrators to be brought to justice.
During an anniversary ceremony, the remains of 610 victims were
buried at the Potocari Memorial. At the end of 2005 the remains of
approximately 5,000 victims had been recovered and over 2,800 victims
had been identified. In January 2005, implementing a decision by the
High Representative, the RS had appointed a working group to study
documentation produced by the Srebrenica Commission (established by
the RS authorities to investigate the massacre), with a view to
identifying those implicated. In its first report in March 2005, the
working group had presented a list of 892 suspects reportedly still
employed in RS and national institutions. The High Representative,
however, expressed concern at the failure to provide specific data on
individuals deployed in Srebrenica in July 1995, and urged the
ministries involved to provide all information necessary to complete
the list so that it could be forwarded to ICTY and the Prosecutor of
Bosnia and Herzegovina. A further report and list were presented by
the working group in September 2005, by which, according to the High
Representative, the obligations of the RS were met.
[Source: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 14, 72-73.]

**See also Greece, Serbia and Montenegro.

BRAZIL

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**The federal government made efforts to open files from the military
archives and opened a reference center on political repression during
Brazil's military government (1964-85), which would contain
documents, films, and victims' statements from the period. Human
rights groups protested against the fact that only selected archives
relating to disappearances and killings of political prisoners would
be opened.
[Sources: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 76; HRW, World Report 2006 (2006),
171.]

BULGARIA

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #27 (2002).

**In 2005, an Italian parliamentary investigation into communist
Bulgaria's role in a 1981 attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II
claimed that the Bulgarian authorities had censored 75 percent of the
information on the case held in the former secret police's files.
Declassified East German files suggested that the Bulgarian secret
police indeed recruited the assassin, the Turkish right-wing gunman
Mehmet Ali Agca.
[Source: IOC 3/05: 99-100.]

**In January 2005, the government proposed to amend the Law for the
Protection of Classified Information to make it easier to destroy
documents including the files of the former secret police without
declassifying or releasing them. The provisions were withdrawn
following public criticism that the amendment would allow the mass
destruction of important files about Bulgarian history.
[Source: D. Banisar, Freedom of Information Around the World 2006: A
Global Survey of Access to Government Records Laws (2006) 24-25.]

**In five different rulings (October 2001, October 2005, January
[twice] and February 2006), the European Court of Human Rights ruled
that the ban on the commemorative meetings of the Obedinena
Makedonska Organizatsiya "Ilinden" (United Macedonian Organization
Ilinden) was not necessary in a democratic society and, hence, that
the authorities had violated Ilinden's right of peaceful assembly and
association. (See also NCH #5, #27.)
[Sources: European Court of Human Rights, Case of Stankov and the
United Macedonian Organisation Ilinden versus Bulgaria: Judgment
(Strasbourg, 2 October 2001); Case of the United Macedonian
Organisation Ilinden and Ivanov versus Bulgaria: Judgment
(Strasbourg, 20 October 2005); Case of the United Macedonian
Organisation Ilinden and Others versus Bulgaria: Judgment
(Strasbourg, 19 January 2006); Case of the United Macedonian
Organisation Ilinden-Pirin and Others versus Bulgaria: Judgment
(Strasbourg, 20 January 2006); Case of Ivanov and Others versus
Bulgaria: Judgment (Strasbourg, 24 February 2006).]

BURKINA FASO

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

BURUNDI

**Last Annual Report entry: see NCH #38 (2005).

**Legislation establishing a National Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (NTRC), passed in December 2004, mandated the NTRC to
establish the truth about acts of violence committed in the course of
the conflict since 1962 (including those which occurred in 1972 and
1988 and in the violence following the 1993 assassination of former
President Melchior Ndadaye), specify which crimes had been committed,
other than genocide, and identify both perpetrators and victims of
such crimes. In a report published in March 2005, the United Nations
(UN) Secretary-General raised doubts about the credibility and
impartiality of the NTRC and addressed the feasibility of
establishing an international judicial commission of inquiry. It
recommended amending the composition of the NTRC by including an
international component (originally it was to comprise 25 members,
all Burundians) and setting up a special chamber within the court
system of Burundi. This chamber would be competent to prosecute those
bearing the greatest responsibility for genocide, crimes against
humanity, and war crimes, and would be composed of national and
international judges. In November 2005, the new government designated
a delegation of eight members to establish an NTRC in collaboration
with the UN.
[Sources: AI, Report 2006 (2006), 80; HRW, World Report 2006 (2006),
83.]

Posted on Sunday, September 17, 2006 at 7:56 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, September 15, 2006

Eric Alterman: Defends reputation of I.F. Stone from communist spy charge

Source: Eric Alterman in the Nation (9-18-06)

It's a truism that once an accusation is leveled, it's impossible to erase entirely from the public memory. This is doubly true when it comes to the deceased, and doubly dangerous in our political world, in which debate is driven by cable news networks that show little interest in quaint questions involving what's actually true. The only apparent standard is what's actionable--or what's going to piss off the network brass. Given the fact that most casual news consumers cannot be expected to sift through competing claims of evidence and the like, the media's disregard for traditional standards of verification is one of the right wing's most potent weapons.

Take as a case in point the accusations that have floated around for more than a decade against the late left-wing journalist (and Washington editor of this magazine) I.F. "Izzy" Stone. In her new biography, All Governments Lie!, journalist Myra MacPherson compares two sets of KGB memos by a Russian secret agent code-named "Sergei," written in the summer and autumn of 1944, as the American and Russian armies were racing each other toward Berlin. One set described a series of conversations with a journalist code-named "I." It contained all manner of detailed discussion about US strategy and speculations about how it would affect the USSR. Tempted as one might be to imagine that "I" stood for "I.F.," alas, it stood for "Imperialism," and the FBI concluded that it was none other than that well-known commie spy Walter Lippmann. Next, MacPherson examines a second set of memos by Sergei--a k a TASS reporter Vladimir Pravdin--in which he tries and eventually succeeds in lunching with a journalist code-named "Blin/Pancake." The FBI decided in 1952 that the latter "appears" to be Stone.

The brouhaha around Stone's alleged activities as a Soviet spy arose in 1992 and was based almost entirely on a misstatement by a former Soviet agent named Oleg Kalugin, terming Stone "an agent," which was then reported in an extremely confused fashion by the London Independent. My colleague Don Guttenplan and I spoke, separately, to Kalugin afterward and clarified the fact that Stone was not "an agent" but rather a journalist who, like Lippmann--and any number of journalists--met with the local TASS reporter and swapped opinions. No classified information was ever broached. No money was ever passed. Izzy would not even let the guy pay for lunch. As MacPherson writes, "First, Stone never had access to classified secrets to barter. Second, journalists naturally sought information about Russia from a TASS correspondent, Pravdin's official role. And as files reveal, Lippmann told far more than Stone ever did in meetings with Pravdin." Despite continuous FBI surveillance of Stone's daily activities and a dogged desire by J. Edgar Hoover to nail him for something, not a single shred of evidence ever emerged to support any spy allegations against him.

Stone died in 1989 at age 81, but the smear never has. The leaders of this campaign have been the professionally paranoid red-hunter Herbert Romerstein, the comically misnamed "Accuracy in Media," wind-up shrieking doll Ann Coulter and, most tellingly, Robert Novak. The last is, of course, both a respected member of the Washington journalistic establishment and, as everyone who has followed the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame case is well aware, a man who will give away national security secrets to America's enemies when it suits his own ideological purposes.

Novak has been peddling the phony Stone story for more than a decade now. When I appeared on CNN's Crossfire with him fourteen years ago, he raised it in order to smear my work and my reputation (Stone was my friend and journalistic mentor during his last decade). Following the show, I wrote a letter to then-CNN president Tom Johnson asking for the record to be corrected but received no response. I've tried a few more times to force the issue with Novak, but he has run away from every appearance. And the slander continues. When John Edwards spoke of Stone's Trial of Socrates during the 2004 presidential campaign, Novak fulminated on CNN that this was an outrage, as "Stone received secret payments from the Kremlin." Again, CNN did not bother with a rebuttal, much less a correction.

Since we now know that Novak is willing to blow the cover of a CIA agent and potentially endanger the lives and operations of those she was involved with, the smear campaign against Stone is thick with irony. This is, after all, exactly the crime of which Communist spies--both real and alleged--were accused. But not even Novak's undeniable guilt in the matter has affected his status as an insider in good standing.

A few voices--mostly on the liberal margins--called on CNN and the Washington Post to fire or at least rebuke Novak. Both refused, with CNN allowing him to decamp to Fox only after he lost his cool, saying "Bullshit" on the air and storming off. Speaking of bullshit, this is the same Robert Novak CNN star anchor Wolf Blitzer praised as "one of the best reporters in the business" after Novak's Wilson/Plame role was revealed.

One could say much the same about Ann Coulter, who has been exposed as a fabulist and fabricator so many times she deserves to have a wing named after her in the Liars and Lunatics' Hall of Fame (as soon as one is built). She somehow claims that Stone's career as "a paid Soviet agent" is not only "overwhelmingly documented" but also "confirmed" in "declassified Soviet cables." For such pathetic performances, she is praised by MSNBC's Chris Matthews as "brilliant" and invited to lie without challenge as frequently as she likes on his show. Remember, this is not Fox--it's CNN and MSNBC.

It may be true, as Stone said, that "all governments lie," but democracy cannot function if journalists do too. This is why the success of liars like Novak and Coulter at the center of our political culture is a greater danger to America than a truck full of terrorists bent on doing us harm.

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

Posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 7:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Prominent historians sign Euston Manifesto

Source: Euston Manifesto (9-12-06)

[Prominent historians have signed the Euston Manifesto, an endorsement of liberal values in foreign affairs. According to Wikipedia: "The Euston Manifesto (pron. "yoosten", IPA /?ju?st?n/) is a declaration of principles by a group on the democratic left in support of universal human rights and other fundamental principles. It began as a conversation between friends, a gathering of (mainly British) academics, journalists, and activists. At their first meeting in London, they decided to write a 'minimal manifesto', a short document summarising their core values. The original intention of its proposer was that the manifesto would provide a rallying point for a number of left-leaning blogs, to be collected by an aggregator, and the basis for a book collecting some of the best writing about related political questions. The group met more formally after the document's first drafting, at O'Neill's, a pub on London's Euston Road — just across the road from the British Library — where the manifesto was named, and its content voted on. It was first published in the New Statesman on April 7, 2006."--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euston_Manifesto]



Marion Deshmukh, History, George Mason University

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Harvard University

Alonzo Hamby, History, Ohio University, Athens

K.C. Johnson, History, Brooklyn College

Walter Laqueur, Historian, Author and Co-founder of The Journal of Contemporary History

Keith Olson, History, University of Maryland, College Park

Stanley Payne, History, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Ronald Radosh, History, Emeritus, CUNY Graduate Center

Gerhard Weinberg, History, Emeritus, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

et al.

Posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 6:49 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Phillip Zelikow: Just why was he chosen as executive director of the 9-11 commission?

Source: Max Holland, writing in the American Spectator (9-15-06)

... historians will one day ponder why Philip Zelikow was selected as the commission's executive director. A friend of Condoleezza Rice's since their days together on the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush, Zelikow was a key member of Rice's transition team in 2000 and 2001 and was instrumental in the pivotal decision to demote counter-terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke. After 9/11, Zelikow remained an outside adviser to Rice, helping to draft the administration's 2002 national security blueprint for unilateral, pre-emptive military action—the framework for the invasion of Iraq. Without Precedent is the title of Kean's recently co-authored memoir about the commission's work, an apt choice considering that the panel featured a staff director who had to oversee the investigation, testify, and recuse himself simultaneously.

Since February 2005, Zelikow has been counselor to now Secretary of State Rice. It's a textbook case of what Ralph Nader calls Washington's "deferred bribe syndrome." (Disclosure: From 1999 to 2003, this author worked at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs while Zelikow was its director.)

Posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 4:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Allan Lichtman: Fails to win Democratic nomination for Senate in Maryland

The Baltimore Sun reported on September 13, 2006 that "American University history professor Allan J. Lichtman was arrested while protesting his exclusion from a debate at Maryland Public Television studios in Baltimore."

Lichtman was one of 18 candidates for the Democratic nomination for Senator in Maryland. According to election results posted at Wikipedia, he came in sixth with just over 6,000 votes. Congressman Benjamin Cardin won the nomination with 235,000 votes, beating out Kweisi Mfume, who received 215,000 votes.

On his campaign website Mr. Lichtman called on Maryland Public Television to drop charges against him:

U.S. Senate candidate Allan Lichtman asks Maryland Public Television (MPT) to drop all charges after his arrest from protesting the only statewide televised debate.

Facing charges of “trespassing on public property after hours,” Lichtman says he “exhausted every avenue to persuade the league and MPT to follow past practice and include all serious democratic candidates in the statewide debate. I called the President of MPT and filed petitions with the Maryland League of Women Voters, the National League of Women Voters, and the FCC. I held two press conferences with candidates Josh Rales and Dennis Rasmussen. It was only after exhausting all of these avenues of redress that I peacefully protested our exclusion from the debate in the foyer of MPT outside the lobby.”

Although Lichtman has encountered some scrutiny from the press, he has also garnered support across Maryland from voters of all parties, who believe it’s time someone stood up for their rights. One voter wrote: “I’m outraged at the way the paths to political office are restricted to the two big party’s chosen candidates. I appreciate your dedication, mission, and courage.”

Lichtman said, “Even if MPT does not drop the charges against me, they should surely drop the charges against my wife and our volunteer-a 40 year-old homemaker who was merely holding a sign that read: ‘Give Democracy a Chance.’”

Posted on Friday, September 15, 2006 at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 76, Dies; French Opponent of Torture

Source: NYT (9-14-06)

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, an eminent French historian of the ancient world who became widely known for exposing wartime atrocities of the modern one, died on July 29 in Nice. He was 76.

The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, his publisher, Éditions la Découverte, told the French newspaper Le Monde on July 30. Mr. Vidal-Naquet’s death has not been widely reported outside of Europe.

A leading scholar of Greek antiquity, Mr. Vidal-Naquet became known to a broad general readership as an outspoken opponent of Holocaust deniers. He was also one of the first people to document the systematic use of torture by the French during the Algerian war for independence in the 1950’s and early 60’s.

Reviewing Mr. Vidal-Naquet’s book “Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust” in The New York Times Book Review, Walter Reich wrote:

“Mr. Vidal-Naquet — a Jew whose parents were deported from France during the German occupation and whose mother died in Auschwitz — is a subtle writer whose passion about the subject is expressed by means of a gracefully piercing irony. His reader, though dragged through the mire of intellectual dishonesty that characterizes the writings of Holocaust deniers, is nevertheless elevated by the energy and nobility of Mr. Vidal-Naquet’s intellectual and moral power and achieves, in the end, a deep appreciation of the absolute centrality of truth to the twin tasks of writing history and preserving memory.”

Pierre Emmanuel Vidal-Naquet was born in Paris on July 23, 1930. His father, a lawyer, was an early member of the French Resistance in World War II; after Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, the family fled to Marseille.

Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 at 9:01 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Bernard Lewis: U.S. May Lose War on Terror

Source: New York Sun (9-14-06)

The victor of the war on terror is far from clear, the historian Bernard Lewis told a Hudson Institute conference.

The British-born professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton said Monday that he was "more optimistic about the future of our struggle" in the early 1940s — when the French had capitulated to the Germans, when Stalin was Hitler's ally, and when America was still neutral — than he is today.

Read More...

Posted on Thursday, September 14, 2006 at 1:44 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Rebecca J. Scott: University of Michigan Professor Wins $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize

Source: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (9-13-06)

NEW YORK, NY (SEPTEMBER 13, 2006) – Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan has been selected as the winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded for the best book on slavery or abolition. Scott won for her book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Harvard University Press). The book examines the path to freedom taken by two slave societies and their construction of post-emancipation communities. The prize is awarded by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

In addition to Scott, the other two finalists for the prize were Steven Deyle for Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (Oxford University Press); Richard Follett for The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860 (Louisiana State University Press).

The $25,000 annual award is the most generous history prize in the field. The prize will be presented to Scott at a dinner in New York City in February 2007.

This year’s three finalists were selected from a field of nearly 80 entries by a jury of scholars that included Mia Bay (Rutgers University), Larry E. Hudson, Jr. (University of Rochester), and Jane Landers (Vanderbilt University). The winner was selected by a review committee of representatives from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Yale University.

“Rebecca Scott’s Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery is a worthy recipient of the Frederick Douglass Prize,” said Hudson, Associate Professor of History at the University of Rochester. “Its examination of the political obstacles to black freedom in post-emancipation Cuba and Louisiana provides an innovative and exciting approach to comparative history that will influence the study of the black experience for decades to come.”

The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition by honoring outstanding books. Previous winners were Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004; and Laurent Dubois, 2005.

The award is named for Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), the slave who escaped bondage to emerge as one of the great American abolitionists, reformers, writers, and orators of the 19th century.

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, a part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, was launched at Yale in November 1998 through a generous donation by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Its mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, in particular the chattel slave system, including African and African-American resistance to enslavement, abolitionist movements and the ways in which chattel slavery finally became outlawed.

In addition to encouraging the highest standards of new scholarship, the GLC is dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge through publications, conferences, educational outreach and other activities. For further information on events and programming, contact the center by phone (203) 432-3339, fax (203) 432-6943, or e-mail gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu.

Posted on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 9:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Eric Alterman: Mainstream Blog Pioneer Alterman Axed by MSNBC

Source: Editor & Publisher (9-11-06)

NEW YORK Eric Alterman, perhaps the first writer to get a blog on a mainstream national news site, has been dismissed after 10 years by MSNBC.com.

"P.S., I’m Fired," he heads an email to others in the media.

His blog, Altercation, however, will be picked up by the liberal site Media Matters. He will also become a senior fellow there. Alterman has also been a longtime columnist at The Nation magazine. He teaches at City University of New York.

"I was hired before the 1996 launch by both the website and the cable station, and while the latter association ended in 1998, I have been here at MSNBC.com for ten straight years, writing a column until 2002 and Altercation every day, ever since," he writes. "Permit me to point out that with the help of my contributors and co-Altercators, I’ve probably contributed more words to this site than any other person, including full-time staff. Well, ten years is a good run at anything."

Alterman noted that when he started, others, such as Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan, already had popular blogs but they had not yet been adopted by larger news organizations.

"As for MSNBC.com, I want to say that my experience working with my editors, past and present, has been an unbroken and unblemished blessing," he concludes. "It may sound amazing in the context of the online world but until I learned of my dismissal a few weeks ago, I had no idea whatever how many hits this site received. Nobody ever asked me to deal with a topic on Altercation, much less to stay away from one. And of course, all mistakes were my own....

Related Links

Posted on Wednesday, September 13, 2006 at 12:34 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Thomas S. Kidd: Explaining the links between Protestants and Muslims

Source: Martin Marty in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School. (9-11-06)

"Dumb me!" one says or thinks -- at least this one does -- when awakened to knowledge of what one's sleepy eyes and consciousness had long overlooked. For a half-century, I, like the colleagues of my generation among American religious historians, could babble for thousands of hours and write thousands of pages and yet show little awareness and make slight mention of Muslim-Protestant relations in this nation. Change for me began in 1988, when we started the "Fundamentalism Project," a great self-educational experience. Still, as we studied Islam more than before, few of us sighted Muslim-Protestant contacts.

Thomas S. Kidd, an expert on evangelical history at Baylor University, gave a Gordon College audience a rare glimpse of this subject (which can be found, condensed and under the title "Islam in American Protestant Thought," in the September/October issue of Books and Culture). His footnotes merit follow-up, since they point to mainly wild and extravagant visions. His own voice is authoritative, judicious, and, in the end, mournful in tone. He gets right to the point about the "uses" Protestants made of Muslims. First, they used Islam to define themselves and acquire bragging rights about Protestant theological and political superiority. Next, they observed Muslims, with the dream of converting many. Third, they fit Muslims into "end of the world" and, later, "left behind" scenarios in which God sends Jesus to clean up the world and devastate the Muslim opposition.

Plaintively, at the end, Kidd asks Christians -- he's focusing on evangelicals -- to take Muslims seriously, "refusing to traffic in sound bites, stereotypes, and 'gotcha' stories about Islam and the Prophet." The next one is harder, perhaps, for all believers and all non-Muslim citizens: "Be exceedingly careful not to conflate [your] faith with contemporary political agendas, parties, and wars .... There are courteous and understanding ways to witness for the truth of one's faith." Then comes the mournful line after a condensed but sophisticated review of the trends in the project: "The history of American Protestant thought about Islam, sadly, has revealed precious little courtesy or understanding."

Reading Kidd and the people he quotes helps make one thing clear: The American Christians who most nearly replicate the Islamic extremists' call for jihad are those who most vehemently rally the troops against all forms of Islam and start aping their enemy. Most of the noticing of Muslims was done by those whose ideologies, prophecies, tactics, and dreams are most like those of jihadists on the Muslim right in form and tone, not in substance. Like finds like, and like nurtures like. Hold it: I am not speaking of "equivalency" among those who have a problem with this scene, but of just plain "courtesy and understanding" as Kidd describes them. There we look at each other in each other's mirrors, and then engage in self-criticism of our own comments on "the other's" ministry.

Kidd does not call for an end to proselytism, missions, or evangelism, but he shows how, on religious and political grounds, it is wise, fair, and -- yes -- Christian to be honest about the self and the other: courteous and understanding.
The stereotyping shouters and rousers of rabble would then stand less chance than they do now, in present circumstances. Kidd is not totally pessimistic, but he does find little about which to brag or on which to build -- so far.

Posted on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 10:03 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Howard Zinn: Interviewed by conservative radio host

Source: Howard Zinn interviewed by Dennis Prager at frontpagemag.com (9-12-06)

[Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently "Happiness is a Serious Problem" (HarperCollins). His website is www.dennisprager.com. To find out more about Dennis Prager, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.]

Every so often, one hears the argument that "Left and Right" are outdated terms, or that there really aren't enormous differences in the ways the Left and Right view America, the world, men and women, and just about every other important aspect of life. I wish this were true. But the gaps between the Left and Right on almost every issue that matters -- including and especially issues of good and evil -- are in fact unbridgeable.

That is why, for many years, I have invited leading representatives of the intellectual Left onto my radio show. Not in order to debate them (though I would be happy to do so at any college), but in order to clarify for listeners exactly what the Left believes.

I recently dialogued with an icon of the Left, Howard Zinn, professor emeritus of political science at Boston University, author of A People's History of the United States, lauded by The New York Times as "required reading" for all American students. And, as Wikipedia notes, it "has been adopted as required reading in high schools and colleges throughout the United States."

Dennis Prager: I think a good part of your view is summarized when you say, "If people knew history, they would scoff at that, they would laugh at that" -- the idea that the United States is a force for the betterment of humanity. I believe that we are the country that has done more good for humanity than any other in history. What would you say...we have done more bad than good, we're in the middle, or what?

Howard Zinn: Probably more bad than good. We've done some good, of course; there's no doubt about that. But we have done too many bad things in the world. You know, if you look at the way we have used our armed forces throughout our history: first destroying the Indian communities of this continent and annihilating Indian tribes, then going into the Caribbean in the Spanish-American War, going to the Philippines, taking over other countries, not establishing democracy but in many cases establishing dictatorship, holding up dictatorships in Latin America and giving them arms, and you know, Vietnam, killing several million people for no good reason at all, certainly not for democracy or liberty, and continuing down to the present day with the war in Iraq....

DP: There is evil in the way we treated the Indians, there is no question about it. But there's also no question that the great majority died of disease and not deliberately inflicted disease.

HZ: That's true that the great majority of Indians died of disease in the 17th century when the Europeans first came here. But after that -- after the American Revolution -- when the colonists expanded from the thin band of colonies along the Atlantic and expanded westward, at that point we began to annihilate the Indian tribes. We committed massacres all over the country....

DP: What percentage of the Indians do you believe we massacred, as opposed to diseases ravaged?
HZ: Oh, well it might have been 10 percent.

DP: But 10 percent is very different from the generalization of "we annihilated the Indians."

HZ: Oh, well 10 percent is a huge number of Indians, that is. So it's pointless I think to argue about whether disease ...or deliberate attacks killed more Indians....

DP: No, but 10 percent is very different from what the general statement of "annihilate" tends to indicate. That's all I am saying.

HZ: Okay.

DP: If, let's say, Europeans never came to North America and it was left in the hands of the American indigenous Indians, do you think the world would be a better place?

HZ: I'd have no way of knowing.


HZ: Absolutely. We have no way of knowing what would have happened.

DP: Well, we do have a way of knowing. If the Indians had never been intervened with, they would have continued in the life and the values of the societies that the American Indians made.

HZ: Well, I suppose we could presume that. And many of their societies were very peaceful and benign, and some of their societies were ferocious and warlike. But the point is that we very often sort of justify
barging into other peoples' territories by the fact that we are sort of bringing civilization. But in the course of it, if in the course of bringing civilization we kill large numbers of people -- which we did in that case and which we have done in other cases -- then you're led to question whether what we did deserves to be praised or condemned.

DP: Well, you can do both. You can condemn the massacres and you can praise the civilization that we made here.

In Part II, Professor Zinn and I discuss the morality of fighting World War II, the moral differences between George W. Bush and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and more.

Posted on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 9:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Jaclyn LaPlaca: Missing Credentials

Source: Ella Powers at Inside Higher Ed (9-12-06)

She was popular in the classroom. She had taken students on a service learning trip to Guatemala over last winter break, and had brought some to the University of Oxford to meet with professors. She was working on an oral history project with World War II veterans. But there was a problem with her credentials.

Jaclyn LaPlaca taught history at Marywood University, in Pennsylvania, for the last academic year, and Rod Carveth — a colleague who began last fall at the same time as LaPlaca — said she had already distinguished herself.

“Looking at new faculty who made a mark, it was her,” said Carveth, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Communication Arts. “She was a very nice person. She always struck me as someone who played things close to her vest, and now I understand why.”

LaPlaca’s problems began during the 2002-3 academic year, while she was doing work for an Oxford graduate degree. Oxford revoked LaPlaca’s master’s degree and booted her from a doctoral program for plagiarism, according to Ronald Daniel, an Oxford official. (LaPlaca could not be reached for comment, but she has said previously that she earned her Oxford degrees.)

A short period later, she began work as a faculty member at Kent State University’s Stark campus. LaPlaca provided Kent State officials with a certificate from Oxford stating that she was on her way to receiving a Ph.D., said Gayle Ormiston, associate provost for faculty affairs and curriculum at Kent State. Daniel, of Oxford, said that the university had asked LaPlaca to return the certificate after expelling her.

According to the Daily Kent Stater, the Kent State student newspaper that broke the story this summer, LaPlaca told the college that she had defended her dissertation and was waiting for faculty approval.

According to Carveth, after she left Kent State abruptly for Marywood, someone at Kent State called Oxford to inquire about LaPlaca’s credentials. Oxford then explained the situation to Kent State. By this time, LaPlaca was no longer employed there. Ormiston said the college considered the matter closed and, on the advice of its legal counsel, did not share the information with outside parties, including Marywood. But the student paper eventually found out.

This summer, officials at Marywood learned of the story through the newspaper article, Carveth said. Barbara R. Sadowski, interim vice president for academic affairs at Marywood, said only that LaPlaca resigned in July for personal reasons. Carveth said that none of LaPlaca’s associates had expected her to leave....

Posted on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 9:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Roy Rosenzweig: His scholarly article on Wikipedia is drawing readers to the online encyclopedia

Source: Sage Ross at Wikipedia (8-31-06)

Roy Rosenzweig's recent article in the Journal of American History, Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, seems to be having a powerful effect in turning the tide of academic opinion. Several posters suggested the article to naysayers. Said one, "Rosenzweig convinced me of the importance of this entity, which I had been trying unsuccessfully to ignore."

Posted on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 2:43 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Joachim Fest: Hitler biographer dies

Source: Deutsche Welle (9-12-06)

German historian and publisher Joachim Fest has died. The Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, which he co-published for two decades ending in 1993, said he died at his home near Frankfurt at the age of 79. Fest was seen as one of Germany's leading authorities on Nazism. He may be best remembered for his 1973 biography of Adolf Hitler, which was a best-seller.

Read More...

Posted on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 1:47 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Robert Paquette: Named to head Hamilton College think tank

Source: Stephen Balch in the National Review Online (9-7-06)

In recent years, Hamilton College has done little that would have pleased its namesake. It's hard to imagine that any of the founding generation's leaders—perhaps excepting Paine—
could find much to their liking in the college's fawning treatment of radical icons or its fervent multiculturalism. It was Hamilton that sought to bring former weather underground member and convicted terrorist, Susan Rosenberg, to campus as an instructor and "artist-in-residence", as it was Hamilton that launched Ward Churchill into world class notoriety by inviting him to speak.

But it's good to discover that Hamilton is capable of learning something from its repeated embarrassments. Like those of a growing number of universities and colleges, its administration has decided that a move in the direction of intellectual diversity might prove helpful.

Yesterday, the college announced the inauguration of its new Alexander Hamilton Center under the leadership of Professor Robert Paquette, a distinguished American historian of conservative outlook. According to the college's press release, the Center's purpose will be "to promote excellence in scholarship through the study of freedom, democracy and capitalism as these ideas were developed and institutionalized in the United States and within the larger tradition of Western culture." Toward this most-welcome end, it will sponsor lectures, organize conferences, promote scholarship on Hamilton, and, most important for the long run, "design programming for the education of Hamilton College undergraduates."

The success of the Center will, of course, depend on its ability to mobilize financial backing from Hamilton alumni who would like something better for today's students.

Since many vociferously communicated their displeasure following the Rosenberg and Churchill fiascoes, with some even joining in a strong but unsuccessful effort to place
insurgents on the Hamilton board, support for the Center is likely to be substantial.

The Hamilton Center now joins an as-yet-small but expanding number of new academic programs that are bringing "diverse perspectives" to colleges and universities around our land. Somewhere out there Publius must be smiling.

Posted on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 12:01 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Andrew Bacevich & Thomas Henriksen: Raise questions about President Bush's historical analogies

Source: Howard LaFranchi in the Christian Science Monitor (9-6-06)

As the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, President Bush is reemphasizing his focus on the war on terror as the defining struggle of the age. With historical analogies his constant tool, the president compares Osama bin Laden to the ideological foes the United States faced in the 20th century - Lenin and Hitler, for example - and likens the struggle against Islamic radicalism to the cold war.

Such comparisons can help Americans understand the foe the US is up against, analysts agree, and can help put the challenge ahead into perspective. For example, the cold war was an ideological battle spanning more than four decades, and the fight against terrorism is not likely to reach a decisive denouement anytime soon, experts say.

But such analogies go only so far and can actually hinder understanding if they obscure the differences in the current situation or act to cover up missteps in current policy.

"The cold war is a good template to begin to think about how to deal with the challenge of radical Islam," says Andrew Bacevich, a former Army colonel and now professor of international relations at Boston University. "The problem is that whatever the president is saying now, his administration's policies have not mirrored the policies of the cold war - starting with the fact that US strategy in the cold war was not primarily oriented towards an aggressive use of force."

Mr. Bush himself has said that the war on terror is not just a military battle, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are nevertheless seen as the signature acts of the president's war on terror.

At the same time, Bush continues to draw comparisons between this war and 20th-century conflicts. "Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them," he said in Washington Tuesday in a speech to the Military Officers Association of America.

Such references are both useful and problematic, some experts say. "It's helpful to have things to point to that people can understand. But it's also true that historical analogies are rarely 100 percent accurate, and that can lead to misunderstandings," says Thomas Henriksen, a historian focusing on US foreign policy at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, Calif. "It's true that this will be a long conflict, and when the president says this is more than a military conflict, that's also true."...

Posted on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 11:57 AM | Comments (0) | Top

John Lewis Gaddis: What a Cold War realist can teach us about winning a "long war"

Source: Patrick Garrity in the WSJ (9-6-06)

[Patrick Garrity is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. This article first appeared in the Claremont Review of Books.]

In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, a Yale University student asked one of her instructors, "Would it be OK now for us to be patriotic?" The professor, John Lewis Gaddis, widely regarded as the dean of American Cold War historians, replied: "Yes, I think it would."

Even allowing for the emotions of the moment, such a response from a prestigious Ivy League academic might seem a bit surprising in these politically correct times. Yale University was once home to Samuel Flagg Bemis, the pre-eminent U.S. diplomatic historian before World War II. Bemis is now widely ridiculed in the academy as "U.S. Flagg Bemis" for treating America as something other than a rapacious, racist, retrograde regime. Gaddis runs the same risk of professional ostracism. He told the story of his student in a controversial 2004 book, "Surprise, Security, and the American Experience," in which he concluded that the Bush administration's policy of strategic pre-emption, whatever its merits in the particular circumstances, did not depart radically from the American foreign policy tradition. Gaddis's latest work, "The Cold War: A New History," intended for popular audiences, offers a conclusion that is equally guaranteed to set his colleagues' teeth on edge. "The world, I am quite sure, is a better place for that conflict being fought in the way that it was and won by the side that won it. . . . For all its dangers, atrocities, costs, distractions, and moral compromises, the Cold War--like the American Civil War--was a necessary contest that settled fundamental issues once and for all."

Gaddis, to be sure, is no political conservative, much less a cheerleader for the Bush administration. He gained his professional reputation as the leading expositor of an interpretation of the Cold War known as post-revisionism, which emerged during the 1970s and 1980s. The traditional or orthodox school--always more of a popular or political viewpoint than an academically respectable one--had held that the Cold War was the result of unprovoked Soviet aggression, which left the Free World no choice but to organize in defense of civilization. The contrary view, revisionism, emerged during the Vietnam era as a variant of New Left history. The revisionists placed the blame squarely on the United States, which pressed relentlessly to take advantage of Soviet weakness after World War II in order to stave off what was perceived as the imminent collapse of capitalism.

Gaddis offered a nuanced alternative to both orthodoxy and revisionism, beginning with "The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947," published in 1972. He drew heavily, if not explicitly, on the modern international relations theory of structural realism. From this perspective, neither Washington nor Moscow was immediately responsible for the emergence of a security competition in the aftermath of World War II. The two new superpowers were driven naturally into opposition by the forces of international politics. Both sought security and the prevention of a new war, not ideological or economic dominance. Their views of security differed greatly, however, based on their distinct geographical situations and historical experiences, and as a result they found themselves caught up in a classic "security dilemma." Steps that one side took to increase its security, such as the formation of a defensive military alliance, were interpreted by the other side as threatening. The second side responded with its own defensively-intended measures, which in turn were interpreted as threatening by the first side; and so on. The security dilemma was intensified by the atomic bomb. Each side feared that the other would find a way to use that revolutionary weapon to gain a decisive strategic advantage....

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

Monday, September 11, 2006

Historians join the protest against the ABC 9-11 docudrama

Source: Press Release (9-8-06)

CHICAGO, IL -- SEPTEMBER 8, 2006 – A group of leading American historians today sent the following letter to Mr. Robert Iger of ABC. Signatories include Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Schlesinger and Sean Wilentz, Princeton University, this year's winner of the Bancroft Prize, the American history profession's highest honor. Stressing the significance of the “traumatic” events of 9/11, the signers of this letter are calling on Mr., Iger to stand up for responsible media treatments of such important historical moments and withdraw the program from circulation.

The text of the letter follows:

Dear Robert Iger: We write as professional historians, who are deeply concerned by the continuing reports about ABC’s scheduled broadcast of “The Path to 9/11.” These reports document that this drama contains numerous flagrant falsehoods about critical events in recent American history. The key participants and eyewitnesses to these events state that the script distorts and even fabricates evidence into order to mislead viewers about the responsibility of numerous American officials for allegedly ignoring the terrorist threat before 2000. The claim by the show’s producers, broadcaster, and defenders, that these falsehoods are permissible because the show is merely a dramatization, is disingenuous and dangerous given their assertions that the show is also based on authoritative historical evidence. Whatever ABC’s motivations might be, broadcasting these falsehoods, connected to the most traumatic historical event of our times, would be a gross disservice to the public. A responsible broadcast network should have nothing to do with the falsification of history, except to expose it. We strongly urge you to halt the show’s broadcast and prevent misinforming Americans about their history.

Sincerely,

Arthur Schlesinger

Sean Wilentz, Princeton University

Michael Kazin, Georgetown University

Lizbeth Cohen, Harvard University,

Nicholas Salvatore, Cornell University;

Ted Widmer, Washington College;

Rick Perlstein, Independent Scholar;

David Blight, Yale University;

Eric Alterman, City University of New York.

(List in formation)

The scheduling of the docudrama has raised a firestorm of criticism from educators, congressional leaders and former President Bill Clinton. For additional information on the controversy and the opposition from leading Americans, please check: http://openlettertoabc.blogspot.com/ , and http://thinkprogress.org/?tag=Path+to+911 , and http://www.firedoglake.com.

Posted on Monday, September 11, 2006 at 4:58 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Saturday, September 9, 2006

Don Heinrich Tolzmann: Cincinnati Historian found guilty of plagiarism

Source: Ralph Luker (blog) (8-23-06)

An internal investigating committee at the University of Cincinnati has found Don Heinrich Tolzmann guilty of plagiarism in his book, The German-American Experience. After reviewing charges first made three years ago on H-Ethnic, the committee has recommended that Tolzmann be dismissed as a faculty member in the University's German Studies Department and as director of its German-American Studies Program. Tolzmann promises to meet with University officials in mid-September about the matter and to fight the charges vigorously.

Related Links

Posted on Saturday, September 9, 2006 at 3:48 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Friday, September 8, 2006

Juan Cole: Duke as well as Yale decided not to hire him

Source: David White in Campus-Watch.org (9-7-06)

Juan Cole's supporters have taken to portraying the antiwar University of Michigan history professor as a victim of a neoconservative cabal that deep-sixed his job application at Yale. There's only one problem with that conspiracy theory: It's not true.

At the same time when Cole's pursuit of a job at New Haven was gaining so much attention, it turns out he was also applying for a job at Duke and getting passed over there, too. Since no one outside the halls of Duke knew about Cole's interest ? this is the first time it has been reported ? there was no "concerted press campaign by neoconservatives" such as had plagued his application at Yale; he was evidently passed up for the job on the merits.

In November 2005, Duke announced the creation of an Islamic Studies Center complete with a chaired professorship in Islamic studies, with religious-studies professor Bruce Lawrence as the Center's inaugural director. Shortly afterward, Duke began its search for a professor of modern Islamic studies, and Cole was selected as one of the four finalists. The search stretched across disciplines, and the four finalists consisted of two historians and two political scientists. Members of both departments at the university were encouraged to attend the job presentations of the finalists.

As the first finalist to visit, according to school officials, Cole's presentation was well attended. Most professors had high hopes for the lecture, which focused on Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani and the Shiite democratic tradition. After all, as Malachi Hacohen, an associate professor of history, religion, and political science at Duke who attended Cole's lecture, explained, "Cole's earlier work was solid."

But according to several professors familiar with the proceedings, Cole's presentation was unimpressive. According to Hacohen, "It was one of the worst job talks I have heard in my life," "[it was] logically faulty," and "the talk seemed as if it were directed more to CNN viewers than to an academic audience." Michael Munger, chair of Duke's department of political science, explained that Cole's lecture "was just not at a level we were expecting?it was more like an undergraduate lecture."

Whereas several observers of the Yale incident cite faculty division as the principal reason for Cole's rejection (in Yale's history department, only 13 of 23 professors agreed to Cole's appointment), he eventually sank at Duke because his limited interest in academic life was so blatant. As Munger explained, "We wanted someone who had a clear commitment to internal institution building. We wanted someone who was going to build the Islamic Studies Center. And?he was honest that he wasn't that interested in that."

According to others, even Cole's supporters were eventually put off by this ambition. He was forthright about wanting to come to Duke because it's closer to Washington than is Ann Arbor, an attitude that led many of Cole's proponents to believe they were being used. As a former Duke professor of public policy explained, "The question was whether or not his commitment to being a public intellectual overrode his commitment to scholarship." At its best, after all, Duke is in the business of cultivating scholars, not television stars.

When news of Yale's rejection broke, anti-Israeli blogs erupted. Frequent Daily Kos blogger Grand Moff Texan blamed "a bunch of Israel-first, rightwing flacks [who] went and scared Yale's Jewish donors, and they in turn scared administrators at Yale. That's three groups of people right there who need to reconsider what country they live in." At TPMCafe, Richard Silverstein blamed Cole's troubles on a "concerted campaign against him from Yale Jewish donors and other Jewish neocons." And in the pages of The Nation, Philip Weiss blamed Yale's rejection on a "neocon uprising." But since "Jewish neocons" were unaware of Cole's trips to Durham, they couldn't have possibly influenced Duke's proceedings.

Making matters worse for Cole's defenders, Duke's search was chaired by Bruce Lawrence, who, like many on Duke's faculty, is known for his progressive politics. Notwithstanding the political sympathies he certainly elicited, it appears Cole's academic credentials simply did not withstand the test. And so Cole remains in Ann Arbor, and his critics await their apology.

? David White is a writer in Washington. This article was written with support from Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

Posted on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 4:01 PM | Comments (0) | Top

David Greenberg et al: Join New Republic blog

Source: David Greenberg at the New Republic blog, Open University (8-31-06)

Whether you're a surfer in the blogosphere, a TNR junkie, or a fan of one of the many intellectuals who make up our illustrious contributor list--welcome! We hope you'll bookmark us and come back to visit as we get up and running.

To the best of our knowledge, this blog is unlike any other out there. It's dedicated to thinking about not just the news of the day but also the news from the academy: Controversies in campus politics that warrant thoughtful discussion. Scholarship from our various disciplines that we think deserves a broader hearing. Ideas we had in doing our research that seem eerily relevant to something we read in The New York Times today. Our bloggers range widely over the political spectrum. They include both novices and old hands (as well as chastened dabblers like me).

Please let us know what you like, what you don't, and what you think we should do differently. And by all means, sit down and write back (in keeping with prevailing rules of courtesy and civility, of course).

[Contributors include: Eric Rauchway, Ted Widmer, Darrin M. McMahon, Michael Kazin, Abigail Thernstrom.]

Posted on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 3:53 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Allen Weinstein: Reports on declassification initiative

Source: Bruce Craig, writing in the newsletter of the Coalition for History (9-8-06)

n a meeting with representatives of the research community on 6 September 2006, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein reported on the progress being made in the effort to implement the "National Declassification Initiative (NDI)," a new set of policies, declassification practices, procedures, and organizational structures believed necessary to create a more reliable executive branch-wide declassification program for federal records. The Archivist said, "When we last met in April, I promised that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) would act swiftly and responsibly to begin to address the very serious challenges that we face in coordinating with other Federal agencies in the realm of declassification." The meeting demonstrated that Weinstein's promise is being kept.

The new NARA initiative is in response to an April 2006 audit report by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) entitled "Withdrawal of Records from Public Access at the National Archives and Records Administration for Classification Purposes." During the hour-long meeting that brought together representatives of the National Coalition for History, the American Historical Association, the National Security Archive, the Federation of American Scientists, and several other groups, Weinstein explained the objectives, milestones, and progress to date for the initiative that he hopes will serve as the catalyst for declassification reform among federal agencies. The Archivist stated that all federal agencies are being encouraged to participate in and support both of these declassification initiatives.

Weinstein reported that the steering group met on 28 August at which time representatives of the 12 executive branch agencies with major declassification responsibilities discussed various strategies required to ensure the NDI's success. The Archivist stated that in subsequent meetings, the executive steering group will develop and implement detailed work plans designed to ensure that agency equities are referred and resolved to allow the maximum feasible declassification. In addition, the steering group will focus on ensuring that common referral standards are developed, redundancies are reduced, and that records are adequately reviewed for declassification so that only information that must be retained for national security purposes is withheld.

According to Weinstein, the program will establish a better means for managing referrals of classified equities between executive branch agencies. As envisioned, the new NDI program will reduce redundancies in declassification review, will promote accurate and consistent declassification decisions, will improve equity recognition across the declassification community, will develop centralized priorities and management controls around the priorities, and will make the declassification process more transparent to the public. In order to realize these goals, an interagency executive steering group has been established.

The Archivist also gave a status report on specific audit items. Weinstein stressed that since the ISOO audit report was issued, notwithstanding the ongoing Department of Energy document review pursuant to the Kyl-Lott Amendment [in which materials relating to atomic energy and weaponry are being "re-reviewed" consistent with a Congressional mandate], the practice of withdrawing documents from open shelves "has been stopped in its tracks." Weinstein stated that "today,withdrawals are extremely rare" and in order for an agency to do so it "must demonstrate a compelling case." He stated that only seven new documents had been withdrawn in the last four months and that "all of these withdrawals have been carefully noted in the opened files so that their removal is transparent to researchers and all have been handled in accordance with the audit protocol." One of the documents (from the Truman Library) has been declassified and is now back on the open shelf and agency decisions are still pending on the other items which originated from the Carter presidential library.

As a result of the findings of the ISOO audit, the Archivist stated that he requested that agencies do another re-review of the documents withdrawn during the first re-review. This effort is ongoing and the National Archives expects the vast majority of records withdrawn to be restored to public access over the next several months. For example, at the end of their work, the Air Force expects that 95 percent of their records under re-review will be released in full or redacted. By way of another example, CIA is re-reviewing 55 boxes of State Department records and expects to release in full 85 percent of their records; release in redacted form 10 percent; and withhold 5 perpcent. Additional collections will likewise be reviewed for return to the open shelves. "We regard this as encouraging news and plan to continue to hold our feet to the fire to ensure that there is no backsliding," added the Archivist. "

Posted on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 3:20 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Thursday, September 7, 2006

Jaclyn A. LaPlaca: Claimed she had a degree she didn't

Source: Daily Kent Stater (9-7-06)

Last year the university hired about 260 full- and part-time faculty. Every department, school and college handles these hirings based on their individual policies within the university's guidelines.

This year already welcomes a new president and dean. Additional faculty positions have been approved in fast-growing fields such as journalism and fashion design. Those don't even touch on the routine replacements and part-time faculty the university hires every year.

In 2003, the university hired an assistant professor to teach history at its Stark campus. They thought she had the master's and doctorate degrees she claimed to have from University of Oxford in England.

She didn't.

Kent State officials said the case of Jaclyn A. LaPlaca shouldn't have fallen between the cracks and don't know how it did.

LaPlaca worked at Stark for two years, quit and took a job at a university in Pennsylvania in 2005, where she is currently employed.

How can the university ensure that this doesn't happen again?


What happens next

Gayle Ormiston, associate provost for faculty affairs and curriculum, said Kent State will not take any action against LaPlaca or make any policy changes when it comes to hiring faculty. The university does not know of any harm to students, he said, and any courses she taught still count.

"We (the Stark campus) employed her," Ormiston said. "We assigned her to teach. We assigned her to teach under the assumption that whatever she told us was the truth. We're not going to go back and tell the students it doesn't count."

This doesn't happen often, he said....

Someone at the Stark campus had anonymously contacted Oxford questioning LaPlaca's degree completion, Ormiston said. Frances Lannon, a principal at Oxford, contacted Ormiston in August 2005 to inform him that LaPlaca did not have a valid degree from her university. A principal is like a provost, Ormiston said. Several phone conversations and a letter were exchanged.

At this time, LaPlaca had already left Kent State and was employed at Marywood University in Pennsylvania.

LaPlaca was never granted a doctoral-level degree and her master's-level degree was revoked when she was found guilty of plagiarism, according to a letter from Lannon to Ormiston. Oxford in turn expelled LaPlaca.

The Daily Kent Stater obtained copies of this letter and all other documents in LaPlaca's personnel file through a freedom of information request....

Posted on Thursday, September 7, 2006 at 8:46 PM | Comments (0) | Top

William H. Harbaugh: Vietnam/Iraq Time Warp ... His Cambodia Crisis Speech

Source: Edward J. Renehan Jr. at his blog (9-5-06)

The biographer and historian William H. Harbaugh, professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia who died in the spring of '05, was a great friend and mentor to me. His Power & Responsibility: The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (FS&G, 1961) remains the very best single-volume biography of TR ever published. Meanwhile, his biography of John W. Davis - Lawyer's Lawyer (Oxford University Press, 1973) - was a finalist for the National Book Award and a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. Bill was a dear, generous and brilliant man - one who will always be much missed. He was also a highly decorated veteran of the Second World War.

What makes me think of him is that I've just been rereading a speech he gave in the Rotunda of the University of Virginia on May 6, 1970, during an action protesting both the invasion of Cambodia and the state-sanctioned murder of students, just two days before, at Kent State University. Bill's words from 1970, regarding Vietnam and Cambodia, trigger no small amount of deja vu given our contemporary situation in Iraq. I quote only portions. The entirety of Bill's remarks can be found here.

Members of the Committee, students, tourists, faculty, Billy and Rickey [his sons] and guests from the Charlottesville chapter of the FBI:

We meet in a time of despair. We have witnessed worse tragedies than the one at Kent State University Monday. We see them on TV every night - the wanton destruction by our troops and by our allies of the moment, the South Vietnamese, of the innocent peasant men, women and children of Vietnam and now Cambodia. But not until we saw on TV Monday the slaying of four of our kind did many among us finally perceive the real nature of the violence to which this nation has been committed in South East Asia for a decade and against which some among us have been protesting ever since the first teach-ins five years ago ...

... We meet at what may well be the most critical juncture in the history of the United State, and, indeed, of mankind. The crisis which prompted the designer of this architectural complex - this testament to that which is sensitive, beautiful, and creative in man and which makes the struggle to live worth sustaining - the crisis, I repeat, which prompted him to write the Declaration of Independence was nothing as compared to the one that now confronts us. Nor was the Civil War, nor World Wars I or II of comparable magnitude to the one that confronts us now. For not until our times has man possessed bacteriological and nuclear weaponry in sufficient capacity to destroy mankind.

One would think that harsh truth would have long ago inspired a reordering of the assumptions on which our foreign policy is based. But it has not. For ten years now policy scientists in the Rand Corporation and the highest councils of government have grounded their tragic advice to John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon on assumptions that are rooted in the misuse, rather the understanding, of history.

They have transformed the Munich analogy, the domino thesis, and the idea - not of national interest - but of national prestige into a kind of Holy Trinity of foreign policy making. They have not told us that for every Munich there were nine rational compromises which averted war. They have not told us that it was the failure to compromise that precipitated World War I. They have not told us that the chip-on-the-shoulder diplomacy of Cordell Hull destroyed the viability of the peace party in Japan prior to Pearl Harbor.  (Nor, parenthetically, have they told us - presumably because they have not bothered to reflect on the matter - that the Asia we went to war to protect in 1941 was not even an Asia ruled by Asians. It was an Asia owned or dominated by Europeans - by Britons, Frenchmen, and Dutchmen - and run by them in the interests of their fellow Europeans. It was, moreover, an Asia which was not then, and is not now, within either the vital or the legitimate sphere of influence of the United States.) ...

Posted on Thursday, September 7, 2006 at 7:51 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Louis Fisher: Writes new book about state secrets

Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists (9-5-06)

A landmark 1953 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which affirmed the government's use of the "state secrets" privilege to withhold information is the focus of a new book called "In the Name of National Security" by constitutional scholar Louis Fisher.

The 1953 case, United States v. Reynolds, revolved around a request by three widows for access to an accident report about a military plane crash in which their husbands died in 1948. The government refused to release the requested report.

Confronted by this dispute, Fisher writes, the Supreme Court had at least two valid options. It could have ruled in favor of the widows, granting their claims for damages in full, as lower courts had done. Or it could have subjected the disputed document to in camera review to determine whether withholding was justified on security grounds.

But the Court did neither. Instead, it upheld the government's denial of the document without bothering to review it, establishing an unfortunate precedent that would resound throughout the coming decades up to the present day.

Fisher traces the fateful Reynolds case from its inception throughout the litigation process to its final resolution. And he considers the ramifications of this frequently cited case for current national security policy.

Richly detailed, the new book combines legal scholarship, critical analysis, and even some "Law and Order"-style suspense. See "In the Name of National Security: Unchecked Presidential Power and the Reynolds Case" by Louis Fisher, University Press of Kansas, September 2006:

http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/fisint.html

I will introduce Louis Fisher at a September 11 event at the Library of Congress, where he will discuss the book and sign copies. Come on by:

http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2006/06-157.html

Posted on Thursday, September 7, 2006 at 7:34 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Tricia Billes: WA State teacher named History Teacher of the Year by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History

Source: Sequim Gazette (9-6-06)

Inside her classroom, piles of books and journals are stuffed into plastic containers and crowd tabletops and bookshelf tops. Groups of desks congeal and set into the middle of the room, topped by upended chairs, like stalagmites in this cave of learning.

One might be able to learn here, if they don’t put an eye out first.

In a sense, it is organized chaos, says Tricia Billes, Sequim Middle School seventh-grade teacher. A messy calm before the storm.

When her students enter the classroom this week, they may not know they have the state History Teacher of the Year Award winner in their midst (as named by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History). Chances are, all that’s on their minds is what chapters they may have to memorize to pass history.

But Billes didn’t get the prestigious award for nothing. She’s ready to make history come alive and to throw out the old way of interminable text memorization.

Instead of passing history, she wants students to stop and take a look around.

“I don’t want history to be reduced to dates and names,” she says. “I want them to dig deeper, get into specifics. I teach them how to write and defend a thesis … (and) look at primary sources.”

Instead of studying a dozen explorers, her students study two or three in depth and learn the impact those figures have had on the world.

It’s that kind of fervor that prompted someone — Billes doesn’t know who — to nominate her for the award last school year.

Almost reluctantly, Billes compiled a video of her teaching themes, unit plans and philosophies and sent it off to Gilder Lehrman.

“I had low expectations,” she says. “It’s incredibly nice to be recognized. Teaching is a profession where your rewards are hugs from kids. (The award) is very gratifying. I’m honored and proud.”

A lover of history, Billes wasn’t always knee-deep into history texts. A UCLA graduate, she taught computer and music classes in Los Angeles before taking a Sequim English position in 1996....

Posted on Thursday, September 7, 2006 at 5:55 PM | Comments (1) | Top

55 Scholars Protest Book's Claims About FDR & Holocaust

Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies (9-3-06)

Fifty-five leading Holocaust scholars have denounced a new book which asserts that criticism of President Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust is "anti-American" and "America-bashing." The book also contains false allegations against reputable historians, severely misrepresents key historical facts, and contains at least twenty-one passages that use language from other books without appropriate attribution.

The book, Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust, by South Carolina divorce attorney Robert N. Rosen, was published by Thunder's Mouth Press earlier this year. Rosen has been invited to address the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, NY, and the Carter Presidential Library, in Atlanta, as well as other institutions.

The scholars' petition, organized by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, criticizes Rosen for "impugning the patriotism of scholars, including Prof. David S. Wyman, who have taken issue with the Roosevelt administration's response to the Holocaust ...As scholars who have written about the Holocaust, we protest Mr. Rosen's attempt to demean the motives of reputable historians who have documented important facts about how America responded to the Nazi genocide. Does your publishing house really mean to suggest that questioning the policies of a particular administration is grounds for branding a scholar 'anti-American'? Such name-calling and invective are deplorable, false, and have no place in serious discussion of the Roosevelt administration's response to one of the greatest moral crises of the Twentieth Century."

The signatories include Rabbi Dr. Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, former chairman of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council; Prof. Hubert G. Locke, Dean Emeritus at the University of Washington; Dr. Gregory H. Stanton, president of Genocide Watch; Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Professor & Director at the University of Judaism's Ziering Institute on the Holocaust; Prof. Blanche Cook of the City University of New York, author of the acclaimed multi-volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt; Prof. Israel W. Charny, editor of the Encyclopedia of Genocide; Prof. Susannah Heschel of Dartmouth College; and Thane Rosenbaum, novelist and professor of human rights law at Fordham University.

For the full text of the petition and the list of signatories, call the Wyman Institute at 202-434-8994 or visit www.WymanInstitute.org

At the same time, the Wyman Institue has issued a 33-page report analyzing Saving the Jews. The report, titled Whitewashing FDR's Holocaust Record, was co-authored by Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff; Dr. Racelle Weiman, director of the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion; and Dr. Bat-Ami Zucker of Bar Ilan University, author of In Search of Refuge: Jews and U.S. Consulates in Nazi Germany 1933-1941.

For the full text of the report, call the Wyman Institute at 202-434-8994 or visit www.WymanInstitute.org

Highlights of the Wyman Institute's report:


* Rosen Makes False Allegations against Reputable Historians:

Rosen makes false allegations against prominent Holocaust scholars such as Deborah Lipstadt, Henry Feingold, David Wyman, and Laurel Leff. For example, Rosen falsely accuses Prof. Feingold of calling President Roosevelt "a coward," and calling the U.S.and British governments "unspeakable antisemites." He also alleges that Feingold essentially manufactured evidence to make a State Department official appear antisemitic. Rosen falsely alleges that Prof. Leff described Jewish activist Peter Bergson as the leader of the Palestine Jewish community.


* Rosen Severely Misrepresents Key Historical Facts:

--Rosen misquotes historians Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut to make it seem as if they praised FDR's response to Kristallnacht, when in fact they were critical of FDR's response. (p.78)

--Rosen manipulates immigration statistics to claim the U.S. accepted twice as many refugees from Hitler as the rest of the world combined (p.442), when in fact the rest of the world took in nearly twice as many the United States.

--Rosen falsely claims that FDR was so "incensed" by the 1939 British White Paper (which closed off Palestine to almost all Jewish immigrants), that he began pushing for the removal of Arabs from Palestine to make room for the Jews. (p.485) In fact, FDR's discussions about Arab emigration took place more than six months before the White Paper, and his response to the White Paper was very weak.

--Rosen defends FDR's failure to speak out about the persecution of Europe Jews, on the baseless grounds that verbal protests would have led to increased persecution. (pp.455-456) Rosen also defends the British White Paper, claiming that Jewish immigration to Palestine would have caused Arabs to become pro-Nazi and possibly kill Jews in the Middle East. (pp.274, 116-117)

--Rosen falsely claims that not a single prominent U.S. Jewish leader asked the Roosevelt administration to bomb the Auschwitz death camp. (pp. 404, 475) In fact, Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and U.S. representative of the Jewish Agency, did ask the administration to do so, and his request is mentioned even in a document from 1944 that Rosen himself lists in one of his footnotes. Other Jewish leaders, organizations, and publications also called for bombing the death camps.


* Rosen Falsely Portrays Jewish Activists as Draft-Dodgers:
Rosen portrays the 1940s Jewish activists known as the Bergson Group as draft-dodgers. He claims that their leaders "sat out the war in America, preferring to agitate for the overthrow of the British in Palestine rather than enlist and fight Nazis themselves." (p. 303) In fact, two of the group's five leaders, Yitshaq Ben-Ami and Dr. Alexander Rafaeli, enlisted and fought in the U.S. Army (in the Battle of the Bulge and the Normandy invasion, respectively), and the other three were classified 4-F.


* Rosen Uses Other Authors' Language without Appropriate Attribution:

Saving the Jews contains at least twenty-one passages that have language identical to, or virtually identical to, language used in books by other authors. In these twenty-one passages, Rosen does not use quotation marks to indicate that the words were composed by a different author. The American Historical Association's official Standards on Professional Conduct and Statement on Plagiarism define plagiarism as "the use of another's language without quotation marks and citation." The Statement also notes: "Plagiarism includes more subtle and perhaps pernicioius abuses than simply expropriating the exact wording of another author without attribution ... a historian ... should never simply borrow and rephrase the findings of other scholars."

The Wyman Institute has alerted the American Historical Association's Professional Division concerning Rosen's book and the twenty-one passages in question.

Posted on Thursday, September 7, 2006 at 12:04 AM | Comments (0) | Top

Tuesday, September 5, 2006

Austria's highest court rejects appeal in David Irving trial

Source: International Herald Tribune (9-4-06)

Austria's Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by right-wing British historian David Irving and upheld the conviction in his Holocaust denial case, the Austria Press Agency reported Monday.

Read More...

Posted on Tuesday, September 5, 2006 at 12:08 PM | Comments (0) | Top

Monday, September 4, 2006

Niall Fergusson: Controversial historian in McCain's Orbit

Source: ABC (9-4-06)

A recent New York Times article about John McCain's growing "kitchen cabinet," contained a piece of information that might have been meaningless to many American readers, but resonated strongly with most British ones.

According to a McCain aide, the article said, one of the senator's unofficial advisors as he ponders a possible run for the White House is the British-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson.

Read More...

Posted on Monday, September 4, 2006 at 12:38 PM | Comments (0) | Top