Roundup: Talking About History

Shai Secunda: Our Zoroastrian Moment

Shai Secunda is a Mandel fellow at the Scholion Center for Interdisciplinary Jewish Research, and a lecturer in the Talmud department at Hebrew University.  He blogs at the Talmud Blog, which he founded and now co-edits.The great contemporary scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith once remarked that the omnipresent substructure of human thought lies in the human capacity to make comparisons.  In ancient Sumer, scribes crafted intricate similes.  In classical Greece philosophers discussed and employed the critical tools of analogy and metaphor.  And following the European Enlightenment, university professors made their contribution by inventing the field we know today as "comparative religion."  From the field's earliest days, Zoroastrianism—the ancient dualistic religion of Iran, whose adherents worshiped Ahura Mazda ("Lord Wisdom") and his heavenly hosts and battled the evil Angra Mainyu ("Foul Spirit") and his demonic minions—has played a central role in the way the modern academy has studied the religions of the world.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom: On William Gibson's "Distrust that Particular Flavor"

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chair of the History Department at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2010). I NEED TO BEGIN with a confession: I was a late arrival to the cyberpunk party. I wish I could say that, as an avid fan of Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949), I was keeping my eye out in that year that Orwell made famous to see if some important new dystopian novel would appear. But I really wasn't doing anything of the kind. Deeply enmeshed in graduate work on Chinese history, I did not even notice the publication of William Gibson's now world-famous first novel Neuromancer. In fact, I don't think I read a single word by Gibson during that whole decade. And I have to admit further that, when I finally did first encounter his prose in the early 1990s, it was not by reading a novel or essay, but rather a book cover blurb, the one he wrote praising Mike Davis's City of Quartz as "more cyberpunk than any work of fiction could ever be."

Christoph Gunkel: The Good Göring ... How a Top Nazi's Brother Saved Lives

Christoph Gunkel writes for Spiegel Online.

Matthew Alexander: Osama bin Laden Was Not Caught Because of Torture but in Spite of It

Matthew Alexander is a twenty year veteran of the Air Force and Air Force Reserves.  He supervised or conducted over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq and led the interrogations that located the Al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed in an airstrike.  Alexander's latest book is Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist. He is currently a Fellow at UCLA's Burkle Center for International Relations. 

Steven Plaut: Holocaust Lesson: Genocide Always in the Name of ‘Human Rights’

Steven Plaut is a native Philadelphian who teaches business finance and economics at the University of Haifa in Israel. He holds a PhD in economics from Princeton. He is author of the David Horowitz Freedom Center booklets about the Hamas  and Jewish Enablers of the War against Israel.Every single act of genocidal aggression is couched in the language of human rights and the need for self-determination for minorities.   One of the most infamous began as a supposed struggle to defend the human rights of an oppressed minority group, as an innocent demand for self-determination.   All Hitler wanted was to achieve self-determination for the Sudeten Germans, to free them from oppression and mistreatment at the hands of democratic Czechoslovakia.

Adam Arenson: Stonewall Jackson's Arm Lies Here

Adam Arenson is an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso and the author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. He blogs at adamarenson.com. This week in 1863, the celebrated Confederate General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson was returning from a nighttime reconnaissance ride near Chancellorsville, Virginia, when he was mistakenly shot by his own camp's picket guards. On May 2, Jackson's wounded arm was amputated; Jackson's chaplain, Beverley Tucker Lacy, buried it the next day in a nearby family graveyard. Seemingly on the mend, Stonewall Jackson was removed far behind the battle lines to recuperate at Fairfield Plantation, but his condition soon worsened. Stonewall Jackson died eight days later, on May 10, 1863, of pneumonia.General Robert E. Lee assessed the gravity of the situation for himself and the army when he first heard of Jackson's amputation. "William," Lee declared to his cook, "I have lost my right arm. I'm bleeding at the heart."

Matthew J. Franck: The Founders Loved Mandates? Not So Fast

Matthew J. Franck is director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.

Jose A. Rodriguez: The Path to bin Laden’s Death Didn’t Start with Obama

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a veteran of the CIA and the author of Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives.

Thai Jones: The First of May

Thai Jones has a PhD from Columbia University. His new book—More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy—tells the forgotten history of a protest movement that divided the city in 1914. It is published by Walker Books and is in stores now.New York’s labor unions had a banner day planned for the First of May in 1914, with parades and celebrations scheduled across the city. Finnish and Bohemian socialists were congregating on the Lower East Side. Carpenters and cloak-makers would begin their march from Chelsea, while the United Hebrew Trades intended to start near Little Italy. By the afternoon, all these various strands would join in Union Square for an inspiring demonstration of working-class power in the nation’s greatest metropolis.Yet a note of apprehension threatened to spoil this grand pageant of solidarity. Anarchists and members of the Industrial Workers of the World—radicals far to the left of the socialists and trade union members—had their own designs on May Day. The various factions had a long history of rancor and rivalry, and officials feared that a confrontation could flare into catastrophe.

Tim Cavanaugh: How the L.A. Riots Changed Nothing

Tim Cavanaugh is managing editor of Reason.com.On the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, there are several pieces of good news. First up: Jessica Evers, who while still in the womb was hit by a bullet that penetrated her seven-months-pregnant mother’s belly in 1992, is now a healthy and apparently happy young woman, coming up on her twentieth birthday as the celebrated "youngest victim" of the mayhem that followed the acquittal of four police officers in the beating of Rodney King. 

Yossi Klein Halevi: Bibi’s Political Inheritance

Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Engaging Israel Project of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem and a contributing editor at the New Republic. He is completing a book about the paratroopers who fought in Jerusalem in 1967.Benzion Netanyahu, scholar of the Inquisition, secretary to Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and father of Bibi, was the last of the purist Revisionist Zionists. He carried Revisionism’s bitter battles against the Zionist left to the end of his 102 years. And his complicated relationship with his son tells the story of the successes and failures of the Revisionist movement.Through the 1930s and ’40s, Revisionist and left-wing Zionists argued vehemently about the nature of the future state and how to create it. Labor Zionists were socialists, Revisionists capitalists. Labor cooperated with the British mandate; the Revisionists revolted. And Labor accepted the division of the land of Israel, while Revisionists opposed every partition plan, including the first partition in 1922, which created the Kingdom of Jordan. The future state, argued Jabotinsky, would need ample borders in which to accommodate millions of future Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Max Holland: New Questions About Deep Throat in ‘All the President’s Men’: Watergate Revisited

Max Holland, a contributing editor at The Nation and the Wilson Quarterly, is the author of Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat.For several decades following the 1974 publication of All the President’s Men, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have had to fend off critics of their bestselling account. For the most part, they have succeeded wildly, sloughing them off as ill-informed skeptics, untrustworthy revisionists, and plain sore losers.But now comes a criticism from perhaps the one person capable of putting All the President’s Men in its place by poking holes in the Deep Throat saga. That’s because the voice of dissent is Ben Bradlee, The Washington Post editor made equally famous by the book and eponymous movie.

Michael Auslin: Lessons from Byzantium ... The Empire Fell But Didn’t Have To

Michael Auslin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. The Byzantine Empire’s long run — 1,100 years — may seem remote from the 21st century, but a reading of its history offers at least three timeless lessons. Understanding some of the fatal weaknesses in the Eastern Roman Empire may help clarify the political and economic problems that America faces today and the choices we have in responding to them. Founded in 330 by the emperor Constantine, the eastern half of the Roman Empire was centered in Constantinople, the New Rome. By the fourth century, the empire had endured more than a century of instability, internecine warfare, and economic decline. In that context Rome’s eastern lands, arcing around Asia Minor, the Levant, and northern Africa, were especially attractive, being richer and more settled than the comparatively backward parts of western Europe. It was in part to assure continued access to these sources of wealth that Constantine relocated his capital. By ad 476, Rome had been overrun by barbarian tribes, and before long only Constantinople in the East had a seat for the emperors. The first lesson for America to take from the history of Byzantium is about individualism and freedom.

Gordon Crovitz: The Battle Over 'Mein Kampf'

Gordon Crovitz is a media and information industry advisor and executive, including former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group. Officials in the German state of Bavaria never wanted to publish "Mein Kampf," the book written by Adolf Hitler that has been unavailable in Germany since the end of World War II. The Internet has now made them do it. The government of Bavaria inherited the copyright to "Mein Kampf" in 1945, when the state took over the Nazi party publishing house Eher-Verlag as part of the de-Nazification program. Under German law, copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author, which in this case means in 2015. The text is available on many websites, making it impractical to continue suppressing the book. Instead, Bavaria announced last week that it will issue an edition that includes scholarly critiques of Hitler's bitter themes of anti-Semitism, German expansion into the territory of its neighbors, and his conceit of a 1,000-year Aryan empire...

Bruce Anderson: Spencer Perceval Deserves Better from Posterity

Bruce Anderson is a British conservative political columnist. We are approaching the 200th anniversary of the death of a largely forgotten prime minister. Yet it is odd that he should be ignored. Spencer Perceval is unique – our only prime minister to be assassinated – but he has several other claims on our attention. For a start, he had an interesting and unconventional youth. The younger son of an extravagant earl, he had to make his own way, which he did, as a lawyer. He fell in love with the daughter of a rich businessman, who was unimpressed by the suitor’s lineage and sought to reserve his chick for a rich man. But true love prevailed. On her 21st birthday, Jane climbed out of her father’s drawing-room window and the pair eloped. They began married life in rented lodgings above a carpet shop in Bedford Row. Overcrowding pursued them. Jane Perceval bore 12 surviving children; their Downing Street must have recalled the tale of the old woman who lived in a shoe. If the elopement makes Perceval sound like a Regency buck, that is an erroneous impression. A committed evangelical, he was profoundly religious (one reason why he hated slavery).

Gil Troy: Celebrating Israel's Six Great Achievements

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and a Shalom Hartman Research Fellow in Jerusalem. The author of Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today, his next book will be Moynihan’s Moment:  The Fight against Zionism as Racism.Rumor has it that mellowness comes with age. Golden agers are who they are. When Brian Mulroney was Canada’s middle-aged Prime Minister during the 1980s, he recalls being more thin-skinned, much less at peace with himself, than his elderly American colleague, President Ronald Reagan.Alas, as Israel hits 64, it lacks the tranquility that should be accompanying its age. Lately, our national leaders have demonstrated a surprising skittishness.  Israel’s Interior Minister feels compelled to ban an aging German blowhard whose great work dates from 1959, after he writes a pathetic propagandistic poem.  And the Prime Minister, who never bothered sending an ardent Zionist like me a letter, feels compelled to write a letter chiding troublemakers who tried swooping into Israel on their “Flytilla.”

Dennis Showalter: The Wehrmacht Invades Norway

Dennis Showalter is Professor of History at Colorado College, Past President of the Society for Military History, and the Editor in Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Military History. Joint Editor of War in History, he specializes in comparative military history and the military history of modern Germany. His recent monographs include The Wars of German Unification, Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century, and Hitler’s Panzers.

Christopher Layne: The Global Power Shift from West to East

Christopher Layne is professor and Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A & M University’s George H. W. Bush School of Government and Public Service. His current book project, to be published by Yale University Press, is After the Fall: International Politics, U.S. Grand Strategy, and the End of the Pax Americana. When Great powers begin to experience erosion in their global standing, their leaders inevitably strike a pose of denial. At the dawn of the twentieth century, as British leaders dimly discerned such an erosion in their country’s global dominance, the great diplomat Lord Salisbury issued a gloomy rumination that captured at once both the inevitability of decline and the denial of it. "Whatever happens will be for the worse," he declared. "Therefore it is our interest that as little should happen as possible." Of course, one element of decline was the country’s diminishing ability to influence how much or how little actually happened. We are seeing a similar phenomenon today in America, where the topic of decline stirs discomfort in national leaders.

Conrad Black: Obama’s No FDR ... FDR’s Policies Revitalized America

Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom, Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, and, just released, A Matter of Principle. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com. Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal is a brilliant columnist, I almost always agree with him, and regret that I could not have written the same opinions as well as he. But I am stirred to respectful dissent by his column of April 19, which effectively announced his adherence to the heresy that Franklin D.

Clare Spark: The Subtle Racism of Edna Ferber and Oscar Hammerstein

Clare Spark is a historian, with degrees from Cornell University (B.S. ‘58), Harvard Graduate School of Education (M.A.T. in Science Teaching ‘59), and UCLA (Ph.D.’93).1929 poster for Showboat filmLiberals like to think of themselves as anti-racists, and struggle valiantly to distinguish themselves from blood and soil (Blut und Boden) Nazis, the hereditarian racists par excellence. But there are more subtle, more insidious forms of racism, because they masquerade as antiracism, for instance in one kind of “environmentalist” logic or in primitivism/exoticism. (For the racism inherent in “multiculturalism” see http://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multiculturalism-blogs/. Briefly, it is believed that there are no universal ethics or universal facts, for diverse languages and cultures create reality, and no one culture is better than another, nor is it legible to “the Other.”)