Quote/Unquote 2005 jan.
Jan. 30, 2005
I'm just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a"political earthquake" and"a historical first step" for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn't been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.
Jan. 29, 2005
Headline in the New York Times:
"Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam"
Jan. 28, 2005
Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor who became a French health minister:
"I still cry each time I think of all the children ... I will never be able to forget the children."
Jan. 27, 2005
Karl Rove, as quoted in Newsweek, Jan. 24, 2005:
I've seen it time and time again. We all get the briefing papers the night before, we've all read them, and he'll [Bush] inevitably have thought about three steps ahead of anyone in the room.
President Bush, at his Jan. 26, 2005 news conference:
Q Mr. President, Dr. Rice again -- quoting your future Secretary of State, wrote in"Foreign Affairs Magazine" in 2000, outlining what a potential Bush administration foreign policy would be, talked about things like security interests, free trade pacts, confronting rogue nations, dealing with great powers like China and Russia -- but promotion of democracy and liberty around the world was not a signature element of that prescription. I'm wondering what's changed since 2000 that has made this such an important element of your foreign policy.THE PRESIDENT: I'm the President; I set the course of this administration. I believe freedom is necessary in order to promote peace, Peter. I haven't seen the article you're referring to.
Jan. 26, 2005
From the Singapore Straits Times:
Mr Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations calls for a prompt decision one way or the other. Either introduce 'a much larger force, on the order of doubling it, if possible, to get the situation under control', or, conversely, 'say that beating the insurgency is beyond the military willingness of the US'. Instead, take on 'a training and advisory role for the Iraqi troops, which suggests a force of less than 20,000, as opposed to the 150,000 we have today'.
Jan. 26, 2005
From the Montreal Gazette:
Liberation from the death camps? What liberation? For Holocaust survivors like Philip Katz, there was none. He and others like him are bitter that the Allied powers watched and did nothing during the Second World War while Jews suffered and died. And they want no part in this week's 60th anniversary of what is being widely called the"liberation" of the Nazi death camps."We were not liberated from the camps, we were freed, and there's a big difference," said Katz, 81, a Hungarian Jew who now lives in Montreal."Liberation would imply a deliberate attempt by some power to free us, and the fact is, that never happened," he said yesterday."We were freed as a consequence of the Allied victory. We were freed collaterally, accidentally. No one meant to do it."
Jan. 26, 2005
From an obituary for Winston L. Sarafian, a teacher of Russian history:
Sarafian is credited with establishing and cataloging, over a three-year period starting in 1981, a collection of more than 12,500 Armenian books and periodicals for the then-newly founded American Armenian International College at the University of La Verne. Most of the books were acquired from Armenia."He taught himself to read Armenian so he could catalog those books," [cousin George] Keeler said."He was a walking textbook." He liked working on cars, was interested in parapsychology and he had the ability to analyze a current event and predict its effect years into the future, Keeler said."Winston was the fun one in the family," Keeler said."He was somewhat eccentric, somewhat quirky. He loved to live in the past but also the present at the same time."
Jan. 26, 2005
Charles Peters, in the Washington Monthly:
Few people realize that, because the armed services are so much smaller today, the chance of a soldier or marine being killed or wounded in Iraq isn't much less than it was during the bloodbath in Vietnam. Indeed, according to an op-ed by Brian Gifford in The Washington Post, the chances of being a casualty in Vietnam were only one-fourth greater than they now are in Iraq.
Jan. 26, 2005
Howard Zinn:
Our presence in Iraq is a disaster for the American people and an even bigger disaster for the Iraqi people. Two years into the U.S. escalation in Vietnam, in the spring of 1967, a book of mine was published called 'Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal.' It was the first book on the war to urge an immediate departure from Southeast Asia, and at that time I heard the same arguments against withdrawal that we are hearing now. The United States did not pull out its troops for six more years. In those years at least a million more Vietnamese were killed, and perhaps 30,000 U.S. military. We must stay in Iraq, it is said again and again, so that we can bring stability and democracy to that country. Isn't it clear that after almost two years of war and occupation we have brought only chaos, violence, and death to that country? Can democracy be nurtured by destroying cities, by bombing, by driving people from their homes?
Jan. 25, 2005
HNN blogger Mark LeVine:
I am afraid; very afraid. No, it's not because terrorists might soon take over the codes to all 104 American nuclear reactors and melt them down simultaneously (although that's a nice plot twist on"24," which seemed to have exhausted plot twists after nuclear explosions and biological terror that last two years). Instead, it's our fearless leader's inauguration that has got me frightened. As President Bush described it:"By our efforts, we have lit ... a fire in the minds of men. It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." Thus did President Bush cement his position as either the most disingenuous, megalomaniacal (or both) president in American history (or at least since John Kennedy, as Richard Cohen writes in the [Washington] Post. Does he understand how this kind of language sounds to anyone who's either familiar with the history and contemporary realities of US foreign policy or who has experienced the fire first hand? Does he even care how such language, in light of the reality of US actions around the globe, inflames people against the US?
Jan. 24, 2005
Don Emmert in USA Today:
If history is any indication, the party may not last for Bush in his second term.... Political scientist Colleen Shogan of Virginia's George Mason University compared legislative successes in the first and second terms for Reagan and Clinton. Her conclusion:"Power dissipates over time, and opportunities for legislative reform diminish." In her study of major campaign proposals, Reagan's success rate of 100% in his first term fell to 25% in his second; Clinton's rate of 87% in his first term dropped to 38%.
Jan. 22, 2005
From two news stories in the London Independent (same day):
The University of Bielefeld recently found that 62 per cent of Germans were"sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews", preferring their Nazi past to be firmly consigned to history. Many appear to feel that in a country where wearing a Nazi uniform can land you in jail, where most children will visit a concentration camp, and where one magazine accused its countrymen of"memorial madness", enough has been done to confront Germany's Nazi past: it is time to move on.Officially, such sentiments are strictly taboo. Although he is not due in Poland this week, the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, will deliver the key address on Thursday at a special televised event in Berlin attended by Israeli representatives. Several German broadcasters have already cleared their schedules to make way for special Holocaust programming.
Later this year, Mr Schroder, who was the first German Chancellor to take part in D-Day commemorations, is expected to visit Moscow to mark the Red Army's struggle against Nazi troops.
And:
Anti-Semitism in Britain and Europe is worse than 20 years ago and public figures are partly to blame, according to a leading academic.Professor Peter Pulzer, an expert in Jewish history, says politicians and the media are responsible for reinforcing"pre-Holocaust stereotypes" when referring to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"We are not back in the 1930s, but at a time when anti-Semitism should have been dispersed the trend has reversed direction. One now has to worry about it again in a way that 10 or 20 years ago you did not," said the Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration at the University of Oxford and fellow of All Souls College.
Jan. 24, 2005
Douglas Brinkley:
The right has hijacked the word 'freedom' from the progressive movement. It's now becoming associated with the global liberation policy of the Republican Party. The left hasn't put up much of a fight to stop it.
Jan. 22, 2005
My first thought about the party where Prince Harry dressed up like a Nazi was whether it was really a costume party or a come-as-you-are party. I recalled the admiration some of his family had for Hitler; how his great-great uncle King Edward the VIII was photographed smiling and sucking up to Hitler; how his family was not even called the House of Windsor until after World War I in order to cover up its German roots. At first I feared that this hereditary Nazi sympathizing had tragically reached into a new generation.Then the real terror hit me. It was a quiet terror I have felt in the presence of American 20-year-olds who are nowhere near to being the third in line to the British throne: Harry and many of the kids I see have no idea what they are doing, because they have no knowledge of history whatsoever. Their parents are better but not by much. It would be comforting in a sinister way to imagine that Harry was making an informed statement of agreement with Nietzsche, Goebbels and Himmler about the natural rights of the natural ruling class of Aryan white people. But the terrifying truth of this silly incident is that Harry probably put on the costume for no deeper reason than that it looked funny and cool. If pressed about its meaning he might have blurted out that it had something to do with some war, but he wasn’t really sure beyond that what the whole thing was about.
Jan. 22, 2005
Gil Troy, commenting on President Bush's second inaugural address:
It's striking -- you could shuffle the text of George W. Bush's inaugural address in a pile of high-minded, interventionist speeches given by FDR and JFK Democrats, and, except for his elliptical reference to the rights of the 'unwanted' -- deem Bush a classic, post World War II, Four Freedoms, Pay any Price, Bear any Burden liberal. Clinton Rossiter talked about the Great Intellectual Train Robbery of American History occurring in the nineteenth century, when corporate America hijacked Jeffersonian, small government liberalism, to oppose government interventionism. Now, George W. Bush may be completing the 2nd Great Intellectual Train Robbery of American history -- the first in Foreign Policy -- begun by Ronald Reagan. Bush was not only challenging the world and the Democrats -- he was also challenging the isolationist wing of his own party, with its venerable history of opposing interventionism. If Bush continues with his interventionist and freedom-spreading strategy, and if Democrats continue to be so infuriated with him that they sour on traditional liberal interventionism just because he's supporting it, we could be in for some clarity on foreign policy within the parties and a further red-blue polarization on foreign policy lines.
Jan. 21, 2005
The jury is still out on whether the government's eventual move to Washington was our loss or our gain. On one hand, we have missed out on billions in tourist dollars. On the other, we've been spared Watergate, Gary Condit and the McLaughlin Group. It's probably a wash.
Jan. 18, 2005
Historian Gil Troy, commenting on the appropriateness of a $40 million inauguration at a time of war:
You don't want to be seen as fiddling like Nero while Rome or Mosul or Baghdad is burning. But there is something powerful about having an inauguration that is smooth.
Jan. 18, 2005
At least the Germans under Hitler had the Gestapo and Nazi oppression to deal with. We do not - which makes us even more complicit and guilty in “allowing” this nation to turn into what it has become. When offered an opportunity, a majority of Americans in November knowingly chose for more of the same. For that we shall be judged. History will note we did not a have gun held to our heads. One day the verdict of nations and the gods will be, “You Americans put Bush in office - twice. You got what you wished for and you deserve it.” And that day may come sooner than we think.Clio, the muse of history, has an uncanny knack for having the last word, if not the last laugh, in human folly. There is another work of history besides Medvedev’s Let History Judge that is very fitting for our time. It is a book by Barbara Tuchman. Its title: The March of Folly.
Jan. 18, 2005
Coretta Scott King:
People thought I was crazy running around the country behind this man, but I didn't know how much longer he was going to be here, so I was there.
Jan. 18, 2005
I'd been putting it off for months. But we needed the space. We'd done our homework: His widow had taken the books she wanted; she didn't want his papers.So one morning a colleague and I steeled ourselves and slid open the top drawer of the first file cabinet belonging to our late chairman, retired three years before, dead from cancer within months, the man who had pulled my cold inquiry letter from a pile nearly five years earlier.
Because of his instincts back then, I now had tenure and his job, and here I was, uninvited, opening his meticulous files, prepared to pronounce judgment on his career. What should we keep, and what should we discard?
It felt like sacrilege. For centuries we historians have made our livings hunting for treasure in the thankfully preserved files of the famous and (more recently) the less so. Thanks to the wisdom of our ancestors in not throwing away diaries, letters, snapshots, journals, grocery lists, newspaper clippings, postcards, memoranda, ledgers, receipts, handbills, visiting cards (the list is endless, really), and that of archives in storing and cataloging those records of past lives, we can ply our peculiar trade -- the only respectable job, a friend once observed, where you get paid for reading other people's mail.
Down to business. A folder from History Day 1980 yielded a brochure, a list of involved students, a program, a button. Sure, I said confidently, a keeper. But what about History Day 1981, and 1982, and 1983? My colleague raised an eyebrow.
Oh boy, I thought. Two historians consigning History Day to the round file.
Jan. 13, 2005
Some presidents make the history books by managing crises. Lincoln had Fort Sumter, Roosevelt had the Depression and Pearl Harbor, and Kennedy had the missiles in Cuba. George W. Bush, of course, had September 11, and for a while thereafter -- through the overthrow of the Taliban -- he earned his page in history, too.But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they're more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office -- the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security -- he concocted crises where there were none.
Jan. 11, 2005
Q: Do you know a good historian joke?A: Only that they're like economists — if you string them end to end, you never reach a conclusion.
Jan. 11, 2005
Militarism in America has long been a strange bird, since our society lacked most of the normal trappings of a militarized state. But it's an even stranger creature post-9/11. After all, the militarists driving policy are a group of men almost none of whom were ever in the military (no less saw service in a war) and many of their policies have been opposed by honorable (and horrified) military and intelligence officials who recognize madness, stupidity, and illegality when they see it and have little interest in having their names or services dragged through the imperial mud. (Hence all those leakers to the press.)
Jan. 11, 2005
Census data on family and household income are grossly misleading when families and households are getting smaller over the years. When two working members of a household today earn as much as three working members earned a generation ago, that is not a"stagnation" in income -- as the media love to report it -- but a 50% increase in per capita real income that has enabled one member to go set up another household.
Jan. 11, 2005
Fortunately, Thomas Jefferson can't see the ugly concrete barriers and metal fences impinging on his monument; he is facing the other way, looking out across the Tidal Basin.
Jan. 6, 2005
Publisher's description of Simon Winchester's book, Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded:
The legendary annihilation in 1883 of the volcano-island of Krakatoa -- the name has since become a byword for a cataclysmic disaster -- was followed by an immense tsunami that killed nearly forty thousand people. Beyond the purely physical horrors of an event that has only very recently been properly understood, the eruption changed the world in more ways than could possibly be imagined. Dust swirled round die planet for years, causing temperatures to plummet and sunsets to turn vivid with lurid and unsettling displays of light. The effects of the immense waves were felt as far away as France. Barometers in Bogot and Washington, D.C., went haywire. Bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. The sound of the island's destruction was heard in Australia and India and on islands thousands of miles away. Most significant of all -- in view of today's new political climate -- the eruption helped to trigger in Java a wave of murderous anti-Western militancy among fundamentalist Muslims: one of the first outbreaks of Islamic-inspired killings anywhere.
Jan. 6, 2005
If it's OK to show us images of dead Indians, Sri Lankans, Thais and Indonesians killed by a giant wave, then isn't it OK to show us images of dead Americans?
Jan. 4, 2005
Northeastern University professor Shahid Alam:
I have since been wondering why my suggestion that al-Qaeda--like the American colonists before them--was leading an Islamic insurgency has provoked such a storm of vicious attacks.
Jan. 4, 2005
Harold Meyerson, in the Washington Post:
Once upon a time, in a land that stretched from one great sea to another, half the elderly were poor. When their work life was done, they retreated into their rented room or their trailer, or their room at their children's home, or even the county poorhouse. Their rulers looked at their plight and concluded that,"at least one-half of the aged -- approximately eight million people -- cannot afford today decent housing, proper nutrition, adequate medical care . . . or necessary recreation."And the name of this nation, and the unimaginably distant time when half the elderly lived this way? The United States of America in the year 1960.
Jan. 3, 2005
Presidential elections often produce a clear story line, a lesson for winners and losers alike. Not this one, at least not yet, and that is a matter of increasing concern for Democrats who would like to learn from the past as they face a series of critical decisions, including picking a new party chairman and laying out a plan to avoid even more losses in the 2006 Congressional races.
Jan. 3, 2005
Rebecca Solnit, writer and activist:
You can say in some ways that what has happened in Iraq is a tsunami that swept ten thousand miles from the epicenter of an earthquake in Washington DC, an earthquake in policy and principle that has devastated countless lives and environments and cities far away -- and near at hand, where friends and families of dead soldiers also grieve, and tens of thousands of those kids sent abroad to carry out a venal foreign policy are maimed in body and spirit. You can add up the numbers we spent to achieve all this devastation like that of the tsunami, the more than $150 billion it cost us to make this suffering and devastation. You can compare that price to the tiny offering of money Bush made, when he was forced to interrupt his Texas vacation -- first $15 million, then $35 million (approximately the cost of his inauguration), and then, under shaming pressure, $350 million. You can understand the harnessing of the forces of nature -- aerodynamics, chemistry, atomic fission -- as means of making war more like natural disaster in its indifference, its scale, its ruination. But never natural.