Roundup: Talking About History
Neal Ascherson: Solidarity ... The strike that shook the Kremlin
Peter Berkowitz: The Death of Conservatism Was Greatly Exaggerated
Susie Mesure: Never has so little history been known by so few...
Walter Rodgers: Price of August Naps: History's Rudest Awakenings
Bruce Craig: Teaching American History Grants: A Call for Action
James K. Glassman: The Failure of the Liberal Economic Experiment?
John Keown: America's Unjust Revolution: A Rejoinder to Mark Tooley
Daniel Henninger: If Saddam Had Stayed
Source: WSJ (9-2-10)
[Daniel Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.]
From the vantage point of history, Barack Obama's prime-time speech announcing the Iraq war's end is less important than the speech he gave eight years ago as a state senator in Illinois. This was the October 2002 "dumb war" speech to an anti-Iraq war rally in Chicago's Federal Plaza. Back then, Mr. Obama had a more complex view of the stakes in Iraq than he does now.
Today, the Iraq war has been reduced to not much more than a long, bloody and honorable gunfight between U.S. troops and various homicidal jihadists and insurgents inside Iraq, a war sustained by George Bush, Dick Cheney and some neocon advisers mainly to "impose" democracy on the Iraqis.
I think it is a profound mistake to confine the war's significance to the borders of Iraq. Mr. Obama himself raised the central question about Iraq in that 2002 speech: Did Saddam Hussein pose a danger beyond his borders, or not?
"Let me be clear," State Senator Obama told the Federal Plaza crowd, "I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. . . . He has repeatedly thwarted U.N. inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons and coveted nuclear capacity. . . . But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States. . . [H]e can be contained."
This is a widely held view. The Economist's editors this week said Mr. Obama was largely right that Iraq was a dumb war. What the war did, they say, was "rid the Middle East of a bloodstained dictator."
It did a lot more than that.
Let us assume that Mr. Obama's "smarter" view had prevailed, that we had left Saddam in power in Iraq. What would the world look like today?..
Alex Massie: Everybody Hates Tony Blair
Source: Foreign Policy (8-31-10)
[Alex Massie, a former Washington correspondent for the Scotsman, writes for the Spectator and blogs at www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie.]
During a visit to Kosovo this summer, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie met with a remarkable group of children. The young Kosovar boys had each been born soon after NATO's bombing campaign successfully drove Serbian forces from the province in 1999. More significantly, each child was named Tonibler in Blair's honor.
As one of the boys' mothers put it: "I hope to God that he grows up to be like Tony Blair or just a fraction like him."
The curiously touching scene was a reminder that reputation is a matter of perspective. In Kosovo, Blair's leadership of the campaign to oust Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic has made him a hero; in Britain his determination to deal with Saddam Hussein has had the opposite effect. You're not likely to find many young British boys named after Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
These days, Blair's name is mud on the eastern side of the Atlantic. The former prime minister has been entirely disowned. He stands accused of selling his soul and, worse, his judgment to a cowboy American president and, worse still, doing it on the cheap. But three years after his ignominious departure from public office, the most successful politician of his generation is back, touting his memoirs ahead of Wednesday's publishing date. In so doing, Blair has reopened some old wounds and reignited some restive quarrels. The process has also inspired a strange resurgence of what one might call "Blair Derangement Syndrome": an absolute and disproportionate hatred for the former prime minister, shared only by a certain group of Britons and found somewhat inexplicable by the rest of the planet.
In Iraq-war-era Washington, Blair was a beloved figure for interventionists both liberal and conservative, a proponent for their views who could be trusted -- unlike America's then-president. If the British prime minister -- so eloquent, so passionate, so persuasive, so British -- was convinced Saddam had to be confronted, then the case for pre-emptive action couldn't be so flimsy as it now, with chastened hindsight, seems. Even Republicans admitted that Blair was often more convincing than anyone in George W. Bush's administration. Not since the Beatles had a Briton been so popular in the United States.
Then came Blair's fall. The failure to discover the promised Iraqi weapons of mass destruction destroyed Blair's credibility in Britain. Meanwhile, the government was bitterly split between Blair's supporters and Gordon Brown's claque of resentful followers. Brown spent the best part of a decade harassing Blair, demanding that the prime minister resign and hand over power to his jealous chancellor of the Exchequer. The result was a broken government that, in its later years, achieved much less than it could or should have.
The Labour Party -- which Blair led to three historic, crushing election victories -- is now embarrassed by the most successful leader in its history...
Richard N. Haass: The Gulf war at 20; its lessons today
Source: Daily Star (Lebanon) (8-30-10)
[Richard N. Haass, a former director of policy planning at the US State Department, is president of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars.”]
It was 20 years ago this month that Saddam Hussein, then the unchallenged ruler of Iraq, invaded Kuwait. What ensued was the first great international crisis of the post-Cold War era, one that, in less than a year, led to the liberation of Kuwait, along with the restoration of its government. This was accomplished with only modest human and economic cost thanks to the extraordinary multi-national coalition assembled by President George H.W. Bush.
Since then, the United States has used military force numerous times for a range of purposes. Today, the US is working to extricate itself from a second conflict involving Iraq, trying to figure out a way forward in Afghanistan, and contemplating the use of force against Iran. So the question arises: What can we learn from the first Iraq war, one widely judged as a military and diplomatic success?
One important lesson stems from the rationale for war. It is one thing to modify the behavior of a state beyond its borders, but quite another to alter what takes place within another country’s territory. The 1990-1991 Gulf war was about reversing Iraq’s armed aggression, something that was fundamentally inconsistent with respect for sovereignty, the most basic of all rules governing relations among states in today’s world. Once Iraqi military forces were expelled from Kuwait in 1991, the US did not march on Baghdad to replace Iraq’s government – or remain in Kuwait to impose democracy there.
The 2001 war against Afghanistan and the 2003 war against Iraq were markedly different. Both interventions sought to oust the governments in place at the time, and both succeeded in that goal. I maintain that the effort against Afghanistan was justified (to remove the Taliban government that helped bring about the 9/11 attacks), and that ousting Saddam Hussein was not...
Neal Ascherson: Solidarity ... The strike that shook the Kremlin
Source: Independent (UK) (8-30-10)
[Neal Ascherson is a journalist and writer.]
Thirty years ago, ordinary people challenged an armed dictatorship, and won.
On 31 August 1980, the strikers in the Lenin Shipyard at Gdansk forced the Communist authorities in Poland to sign an agreement. It promised them – among many other lesser things – a free and independent trade union, the liberation of political prisoners, plural and uncensored media and the right to strike.
Within days, other strike committees all over Poland were winning the same sort of terms from their Party bosses. Soon all the local agreements ran together into a single movement covering the whole nation, which recruited 9 million members by the end of the year. Its leader was a fast- talking, pious, slightly rascally electrician called Lech Walesa. The name of the movement was "the Independent Self-Managing Trade Union Solidarity".
Everyone who was in that shipyard during the strike came out changed: wiser and perhaps with more faith in humanity. This was an occupation strike, asking strikers to forsake their homes and families for the sake of the common cause. The yard gates, almost hidden behind well- wishers' flowers and pictures of the Pope, were locked, and the workers forbade themselves to come out until they had won.
Inside, thousands of men in grey denim overalls lay on the grass listening to the Tannoy, as it broadcast the interminable negotiations in the Health and Safety hall. Outside the gate, women and children waited through long, hot August days. Sometimes they threw bread, salami and apples over the fence to their husbands, fathers and sons. There was paper and duplicator ink for smudgy bulletins in the yard, but not much to eat. Vodka was banned. In one of Europe's most cigarette-addicted nations, they banned indoor smoking too.
The stakes were very high. The workers inside and the families outside thought about the ZOMO riot police, itching to batter them with clubs. The foreign journalists in the yard thought more about the Soviet armoured divisions that had moved up to the Polish frontier. If they invaded, we assumed that the Poles would fight and there would be what the regime's euphemism called "a national tragedy". But that was a possibility the strikers refused to discuss. It was an extra fear they did not need.
The strikes spread and the government, riven by panicky arguments, finally gave way. On 31 August, Lech Walesa – enjoying every moment of it – took a silly monster pen, a souvenir from the Pope's visit the year before, and signed the Gdansk Accord. Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Jagielski, equally clearly hating every moment, signed too.
That was not the end of the story...
Peter Berkowitz: The Death of Conservatism Was Greatly Exaggerated
Source: WSJ (8-28-10)
[Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.]
Last August left little doubt that a conservative revival was underway. Constituents packed town-hall meetings across the country to confront Democratic House members and senators ill-prepared to explain why, in the teeth of a historic economic downturn and nearly 10% employment, President Obama and his party were pressing ahead with costly health-care legislation instead of reining in spending, cutting the deficit and spurring economic growth.
Still, whether that revival would have staying power was very much open to question. A year later—and notwithstanding the Democrats' steadily declining poll numbers and the mounting electoral momentum that could well produce a Republican majority in the House and a substantial swing in the Senate—it still is.
Sustaining the revival depends on the ability of GOP leaders, office-holders and candidates to harness the extraordinary upsurge of popular opposition to Mr. Obama's aggressive progressivism. Our constitutional tradition provides enduring principles that should guide them.
In late 2008 and early 2009, in the wake of Mr. Obama's meteoric ascent, the idea that conservatism would enjoy any sort of revival in the summer of 2009 would have seemed to demoralized conservatives too much to hope for. To leading lights on the left, it would have appeared absolutely outlandish.
In late October 2008, New Yorker staff writer George Packer reported "the complete collapse of the four-decade project that brought conservatism to power in America." Two weeks later, the day after Mr. Obama's election, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne proclaimed "the end of a conservative era" that had begun with the rise of Ronald Reagan.
And in February 2009, New York Times Book Review and Week in Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, writing in The New Republic, declared that "movement conservatism is exhausted and quite possibly dead." Mr. Tanenhaus even purported to discern in the new president "the emergence of a president who seems more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right."
Messrs. Packer, Dionne and Tanenhaus underestimated what the conservative tradition rightly emphasizes, which is the high degree of unpredictability in human affairs. They also conflated the flagging fortunes of George W. Bush's Republican Party with conservatism's popular appeal. Most importantly, they failed to grasp the imperatives that flow from conservative principles in America, and the full range of tasks connected to preserving freedom...
Susie Mesure: Never has so little history been known by so few...
Source: Independent (UK) (8-29-10)
[Susie Mesure is a journalist.]
If there was ever a date on which to reproach ourselves, it is Tuesday week: 7 September will mark 70 years since the Luftwaffe first switched its attention from bombing our airfields to the streets of London. It stands out among the many Battle of Britain landmarks being remembered this year, because it left ordinary citizens with nowhere to escape from the German bombs that began falling on the capital, night after relentless night, for the next nine months, killing 20,000 and shattering 1.5 million homes.
It will be suitably commemorated with a service at St Paul's Cathedral, itself a survivor of the Blitz, for all who played the biggest part in defending the nation, and by inference, the western world, from the tyranny of Nazi Germany. Or at least, for as many as can fit into that great, contemplative space, some 2,300 in all, with my grandpa, Wing Commander John Tipton, among them.
Unlike many others, however, my sense of guilt doesn't stem from not having served my country, or not knowing what it is like to live through a world war or even its aftermath. No, my feelings of inadequacy will come from the embarrassingly sketchy knowledge I have of what did indeed go on over London's skies that first terrible night, and the many, many more that followed. For I suffer from the guilt of ignorance, an affliction that plagues not only my contemporaries but the vast majority of all those spat out by the education system since me. And I speak as a so-called history graduate with a decent enough degree.
I am, however, the product of a liberal teaching establishment that ran a mile from inculcating any sense of national pride in its students, for fear of being accused of banging the imperial drum. Ordinarily I wouldn't mind that, being of a similarly liberal disposition. On this occasion, however, I would be wrong. As are all those responsible for my lack of knowledge. I share in the blame; given the choice at university, I opted for the glamour of the discovery of the New World, and the creation of an entirely new nation, the United States, rather than dwell on the hegemony of the old. But before that, when the Government decreed what knowledge I needed to reach GCSE and beyond, a healthy dose of British history wouldn't have gone amiss. And what better chapter than our finest hour?..
Walter Rodgers: Price of August Naps: History's Rudest Awakenings
Source: CS Monitor (8-25-10)
[Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, writes a biweekly column.]
The world sometimes falls asleep in August. And when it wakes in September it sorely rues the nap. Some of the most consequential events in modern Western history happened in August. Yet many people still think “not much happens” this month.
It’s understandable. Most of Washington, including Congress, is on vacation in August. So is nearly all of Europe. It’s tempting for the centers of power to go on autopilot. And this has sometimes proved to be ruinous.
World War I
In August 1914, people were dancing in the streets in Britain and France, rejoicing that their countries were about to go to war with the Central Powers: Germany and the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. France, Britain, and Belgium were taking on the Kaiser’s army on the Western Front. In the east, Germany was invading Russia. The opening battles of World War I, the most disastrous conflict in history to that point, were fought in the eighth month of 1914.
Today, it is inconceivable that Europeans celebrated the outbreak of war. What followed was so catastrophic it reshaped the world for the rest of the century. After the 1918 truce, lasting but 27 years, the world again fell asleep at the switch in August 1939 when Adolf Hitler was mobilizing his army to invade Poland, igniting World War II....
Victor Davis Hanson: The Guns of August
Source: National Review (8-26-10)
[Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.]
Historian Barbara Tuchman characterized the events leading up to World War I as The Guns of August.
While there is no statistical evidence that wars break out any more often in late summer than in other seasons, the world was torn apart at that time of year twice during the 20th century: in early August 1914, and then again on Sept. 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Maybe it is the effects of the heat, or the sense of urgency to do something before the cold of winter; but nonetheless, we’ve also seen a lot of late-summer violence the last few decades....
What can we learn from these dog-day cataclysms?
First, for all the rising prewar tensions, the general slaughter to follow was mostly unforeseen. Experts thought August 1914 would lead only to a war “over by Christmas” — not 500 miles of trenches from the North Sea to Switzerland, and 8 million combat dead by 1918. Even after Hitler invaded Poland in a lightning strike, no one dreamed that more than 50 million deaths would follow....
Bruce Craig: Teaching American History Grants: A Call for Action
Source: AHA Blog (8-24-10)
[Bruce Craig was executive director of the National Coalition for History when the TAH was created. He now teaches American history at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.]
Recently, a number of AHA members and others have expressed concern and dismay over the future of the Teaching American History (TAH) grants, a program begun virtually single-handedly by Senator Robert C. Byrd in 2003. True, he was the program’s devoted supporter who brooked no opposition in growing the program from an initial $50 million appropriation to the present approximately $120 million as a line item in the Department of Education’s budget. Now that the senator is gone there are those, in the Obama Administration and elsewhere, who say that history must take second or third place to reading and mathematics, that in the midst of a the most severe recession in several generations the U.S. cannot afford the program, and, some even argue there is no evidence that the TAH program has made much of a difference, or that it has improved history teaching.
Historians, history teachers, and others who support the TAH program need to take a deep breath, step back, and think about what has been achieved thus far with the program. My hope is that supporters will roll up their collective sleeves to continue the work of maintaining and improving the program.
The initial TAH appropriation was simple—$50 million for professional development for teaching history (not social studies). The senator insisted that the money go to local education authorities (LEAS) so as to avoid high university indirect cost grant processing fees. Those of us involved in the early stages of fleshing out the details of the program can remember early on fretting about how it would be possible for LEAS alone to provide high quality professional development. Our task was to convince the senator and education department program managers that it was imperative to mandate the involvement of professional historians in the evolving programmatic guidelines in order to bring the best possible professional development to history teachers.
To that end, I was fortunate to live in Senator Byrd’s home state and as a consequence, I knew several members of Senator Byrd’s personal and committee staff, several of whom were long-time personal friends. Once the appropriation was earmarked, I arranged a meeting with staff of the House Committee on Education with representatives of the major history professional organizations. We also met with Department of Education officials who, it turned out, were congenial to writing regulations for the program that mandated cooperation with departments of history in higher education institutions, historical societies, and other history-related organizations. A year or so later the requirement was mandated when the senator agreed to insert report language to that effect in the Senate appropriation bill.
James K. Glassman: The Failure of the Liberal Economic Experiment?
Source: Commentary (8-25-10)
[James K. Glassman, former undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, is executive director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas and host of the weekly program Ideas in Action on public television.]
The plunge in the U.S. economy in 2008 and 2009 became an irresistible opportunity to pronounce the failure of the form of capitalism that emerged at the end of the 20th century. “One had expected competition and abundance for everyone, but instead one got scarcity, the triumph of profit-oriented thinking, speculation and dumping,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France. The current crisis, he noted with a certain pleasure, signaled the end of the “illusion of public impotence” and the “return of the state.”
There was ample reason for such grave-dancing. Between July 1, 2008, and June 30, 2009, total U.S. economic output, adjusted for inflation, dropped at an annual rate of 3.8 percent—the worst 12-month decline since 1946. The unemployment rate, which started 2008 at 5 percent, had doubled by the fall of 2010. The number of jobs fell for 21 months in a row, and by May 2010 the median unemployed worker had been out of work for 23 weeks—compared with 10 weeks in the depths of the 1973-75 recession.
The quarter-century that began shortly after Ronald Reagan’s election had been widely viewed as a period in which a free-market approach had proved its superiority to state direction of economies. In the United States, cutting top income tax rates in half, reducing regulatory burdens, and spreading free trade seemed to have produced significant prosperity and remarkable stability. Between 1983 and 2008, gross domestic product grew at an average of 3.2 percent annually. Only once did output fall in a calendar year, and that was by just two-tenths of a percentage point. Inflation, interest rates, and unemployment were tame.
Then, suddenly, an asset bubble in real estate exploded, the growth and stability vanished, and the United States suffered its worst economic misery in (take your pick) 34, 53, or 71 years. So you would expect that the American public, following President Sarkozy, would see the recession as a severe setback—or even a death blow—to conservative economic policies that were aimed at limiting the power of government and liberating the private sector.
You would have expected that, and you would have been right—but only briefly. Since the beginning of 2010, a surprising reversal has occurred. Rather than supporting and encouraging government intervention to mitigate an economic calamity caused by “profit-oriented thinking,” Americans have come to believe that government has failed to fix the problem and may, in fact, have made it worse. Now it is liberal, not conservative, economic policies that are suddenly in jeopardy...
Caroline Alexander: The Shock of War
Source: Smithsonian.com (9-1-10)
[Caroline Alexander’s latest book is The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer’s Iliad and the Trojan War.]
In September 1914, at the very outset of the great war, a dreadful rumor arose. It was said that at the Battle of the Marne, east of Paris, soldiers on the front line had been discovered standing at their posts in all the dutiful military postures—but not alive. “Every normal attitude of life was imitated by these dead men,” according to the patriotic serial The Times History of the War, published in 1916. “The illusion was so complete that often the living would speak to the dead before they realized the true state of affairs.” “Asphyxia,” caused by the powerful new high-explosive shells, was the cause for the phenomenon—or so it was claimed. That such an outlandish story could gain credence was not surprising: notwithstanding the massive cannon fire of previous ages, and even automatic weaponry unveiled in the American Civil War, nothing like this thunderous new artillery firepower had been seen before. A battery of mobile 75mm field guns, the pride of the French Army, could, for example, sweep ten acres of terrain, 435 yards deep, in less than 50 seconds; 432,000 shells had been fired in a five-day period of the September engagement on the Marne. The rumor emanating from there reflected the instinctive dread aroused by such monstrous innovation. Surely—it only made sense—such a machine must cause dark, invisible forces to pass through the air and destroy men’s brains.
Shrapnel from mortars, grenades and, above all, artillery projectile bombs, or shells, would account for an estimated 60 percent of the 9.7 million military fatalities of World War I. And, eerily mirroring the mythic premonition of the Marne, it was soon observed that many soldiers arriving at the casualty clearing stations who had been exposed to exploding shells, although clearly damaged, bore no visible wounds. Rather, they appeared to be suffering from a remarkable state of shock caused by blast force. This new type of injury, a British medical report concluded, appeared to be “the result of the actual explosion itself, and not merely of the missiles set in motion by it.” In other words, it appeared that some dark, invisible force had in fact passed through the air and was inflicting novel and peculiar damage to men’s brains.
“Shell shock,” the term that would come to define the phenomenon, first appeared in the British medical journal The Lancet in February 1915, only six months after the commencement of the war. In a landmark article, Capt. Charles Myers of the Royal Army Medical Corps noted “the remarkably close similarity” of symptoms in three soldiers who had each been exposed to exploding shells: Case 1 had endured six or seven shells exploding around him; Case 2 had been buried under earth for 18 hours after a shell collapsed his trench; Case 3 had been blown off a pile of bricks 15 feet high. All three men exhibited symptoms of “reduced visual fields,” loss of smell and taste, and some loss of memory. “Comment on these cases seems superfluous,” Myers concluded, after documenting in detail the symptoms of each. “They appear to constitute a definite class among others arising from the effects of shell-shock.”
Early medical opinion took the common-sense view that the damage was “commotional,” or related to the severe concussive motion of the shaken brain in the soldier’s skull. Shell shock, then, was initially deemed to be a physical injury, and the shellshocked soldier was thus entitled to a distinguishing “wound stripe” for his uniform, and to possible discharge and a war pension. But by 1916, military and medical authorities were convinced that many soldiers exhibiting the characteristic symptoms—trembling “rather like a jelly shaking”; headache; tinnitus, or ringing in the ear; dizziness; poor concentration; confusion; loss of memory; and disorders of sleep—had been nowhere near exploding shells. Rather, their condition was one of “neurasthenia,” or weakness of the nerves—in laymen’s terms, a nervous breakdown precipitated by the dreadful stress of war.
Organic injury from blast force? Or neurasthenia, a psychiatric disorder inflicted by the terrors of modern warfare? Unhappily, the single term “shell shock” encompassed both conditions. Yet it was a nervous age, the early 20th century, for the still-recent assault of industrial technology upon age-old sensibilities had given rise to a variety of nervous afflictions....
Peter Rachleff: 25 Years on, Still P-9 Proud
Source: Labor Notes (8-23-10)
[Peter Rachleff is a professor of history at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 1985-1987, he served as chairperson of the Twin Cities Local P-9 Support Committee, and in 1993 South End Press published his book on the strike, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. He can be reached at rachleff@macalester.edu.]
From the late summer of 1985 into the early spring of 1986, the small town of Austin, Minnesota, figured prominently in the national news. The dramatic themes and issues, twists and turns, of a labor conflict there captured the national imagination. This interest was not merely passive, as more than 30 support committees formed across the U.S. and aid for the strikers came from nineteen countries. This strike touched a raw, deep nerve.
In August 1985, 1,700 meatpacking workers, members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local P-9, struck the flagship plant of George A. Hormel and Company in Austin, Minnesota. They had taken a wage freeze in 1977 as part of a bargain to get Hormel to build a planned state-of-the-art plant in Austin, which had been the center of their operations since the 1920s. Corporations made so many threats in the later 1970s and 1980s to relocate production facilities—and followed through on so many of them—that the best-selling labor books of the era carried titles like Capital Flight and The Deindustrialization of America.
Local and state governments, as well as workers and unions, were challenged by such threats, and they often responded with tax breaks and infrastructure development along with the pay and benefit cuts or freezes that workers provided. Despite these concessions, millions of manufacturing jobs were exported from the U.S., relocated by corporate employers to low-wage, minimally regulated sites from Mexico and Central America to China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore.
In the case of Hormel in Austin, the company received new exit and entrance ramps to I-90, new service roads into and around the plant, tax breaks, and that wage freeze. Workers had also agreed to shift the structure of their wage payments away from a system which, since 1933, had provided them with stable earnings in a notoriously seasonal industry, to a more conventional hourly wage system. This shift also undermined the controls that workers had long exercised over the pace of production. On the basis of these concessions, Hormel built its new plant in Austin....
Gary Bruce: When the Stasi Came for the Doctor
Source: OUPblog (8-24-10)
[Gary Bruce is Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo. His newest book is The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi. The book is based on previously classified documents and interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens and is the first comprehensive history of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. In the excerpt below Bruce looks at how the Stasi impacted one ordinary man’s life.]
Dr. Werner Hoffman studied medicine at Humboldt University in Berlin from 1954 to 1960 before interning until 1963 at the hospital in Fürstenberg in District Gransee…His time in Fürstenberg counted toward his compulsory Landjahr, a year in the countryside required of all new physicians. In 1962, one year after the construction of the Berlin Wall (which made previously available western medicines nearly impossible to obtain) and while still tending to the medical needs of villagers and miners from the southern GDR who had a union holiday retreat near Fürstenberg, Dr. Hoffman began his specialization in internal medicine at the regional hospital in Schwerin.
While vacationing on the Black Sea…he happened upon a high-ranking administrator in the Wittenberge hospital who arranged for his transfer there…Five years later he was promoted to senior physician in charge of the rheumatism division. Within the decade, he had become one of the very few surgeons in the GDR who could treat people who suffered from rheumatism in their knuckles, a surgery that was in its infancy in the West as well.
His first misgivings about the regime came in 1972 when the position of chief of medicine opened up in nearby Bad Wilsnack. Although the position called for expertise in rheumatoid arthritis, Dr. Hoffman was passed over in favor of a younger physician who had no experience in treated rheumatism but was a member of the Communist Party....
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Doug Bandow: Remembering the Unbelievable
Source: American Spectator (8-24-10)
[Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of Beyond Good Intentions: A Biblical View of Politics (Crossway).]
JERUSALEM -- Love it or hate it, Israel is unique. A young nation created amidst conflict and sustained under siege, it retains an ethic forged in the famed "exodus" from Europe after World War II. While Israel exhibits a superficial commonality with Europe -- Tel Aviv has the relaxed feel of other Mediterranean cities -- there remains a hard inner core. One might question the wisdom of particular Israeli policies, but no one should doubt the Jewish people's willingness to do whatever is necessary not to repeat the past.
The best way to understand that commitment is to visit Yad Vashem. Established in 1953 as the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem (the name comes from Isaiah 56:5) is a 45-acre complex on Har Hazikaron, or the Mount of Remembrance, overlooking Jerusalem. The site commemorates the Holocaust, or Shoah (meaning totally unimaginable catastrophe). To visit the history museum is to journey back into a human nightmare highlighting the utter depravity of mankind.
When the horror did end, Israel was one of the unintended results. The museum lives up to its goal of serving "as a bridge between the world that was destroyed and the life that resumed."
A new complex opened five years ago. The museum is built into the mountain using a unique triangular design, with numerous side exhibition halls....
Bret Stephens: The Twenty Years' War
Source: WSJ (8-23-10)
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990. Two decades later, on Aug. 18, 2010, the U.S. withdrew its last combat brigade from Iraq. Throughout those years U.S. military operations went under a variety of names—including Desert Storm, the Gulf War, Operations Northern and Southern Watch, Operation Iraqi Freedom, the War in Iraq—but over time they will be seen as part of an unbroken thread.
It ought to be called the Twenty Years' War. That was probably 19 years too long.
It matters what we call our wars, lest we fail to understand them—and lest we repeat them, because we failed to understand. When the Great War came to be spoken of as "the war to end all wars" (a line variously attributed to David Lloyd George, H.G. Wells and Woodrow Wilson) it underscored how ill-prepared that generation was to prevent the next great conflict.
Similarly in Iraq. In 1991, the first Bush administration failed to understand that its war was not against what Saddam had done in Kuwait. It was against Saddam himself, his regime, and the forces of Arab radicalism he typified and championed. Desert Storm, it turned out, proved an apt name for a military operation that had been blinded to its own real purposes.
Thus Kuwait was liberated but Saddam stayed on for another 12 years, supposedly—as Madeleine Albright notoriously put it—"in a box." In that box, he killed tens of thousands of Iraq's Shiites, caused a humanitarian crisis among the Kurds, attempted to assassinate George H.W. Bush, profited from a sanctions regime that otherwise starved his own people, compelled a "no-fly zone" that cost the U.S. $1 billion a year to police, defied more than a dozen U.N. sanctions, corrupted the U.N. Secretariat, evicted U.N. weapons inspectors and gave cash prizes to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
All this was war by another name, which meant that when the question of invading Iraq arose after 9/11, the choice was not between war and peace. Rather, as former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey wrote in these pages at the time, it was "between sustaining a military effort designed to contain Saddam Hussein and a military effort designed to replace him." For Mr. Kerrey, "the case for the second choice [was] overwhelming."..
Fouad Ajami: The Guns of August, 1990
Source: WSJ (8-23-10)
[Mr. Ajami is professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies and an adjunct senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.]
He struck in early August, 20 years ago, at a time when the Cold War had just ended, and the world was replete with claims that wars of conquest had become a thing of the past. This was Saddam Hussein's summer, and his conquest of Kuwait, the rich principality next door.
He came for the loot; his soldiers headed to the gold souk and the central bank. He also dispatched his armies right up to the Saudi-Kuwaiti border, making a bid for mastery over the Persian Gulf and its oil supplies. He didn't worry about the Americans, since he was sure they did not have the stomach for a fight. But American power would call Saddam's bluff, it would shatter his army, and with it the myth of Iraq as a mighty power—the Prussia of the Arab world.
In many ways, we still live in the grip, and in the shadow, of that summer. A vast force is still in Iraq, 50,000 American soldiers will be there, even as the "combat troops" are withdrawn by the end of this month. A meandering trail led from that summer right up to 9/11 and to the second American campaign against Saddam Hussein in 2003.
For nearly two decades, the Persian Gulf had been left to find its own balance of power. The British had pulled out of "east of Suez" by 1971. They had grown weary of empire, the calling and the wealth needed for imperial burden having ebbed away. The Americans had been reluctant to fill the void.
The interregnum between the British and the Americans had been an unmitigated disaster. Arab "brotherhood" had turned out to be a sham, Saddam had sacked Kuwait to widespread Arab approval. It was an oil well with a flag, radicals said of Kuwait, a rich, selfish place better folded into a new Iraqi power.
The desert Arab powers had no answer to Saddam's brazen aggression...
Seema Jilani: Crown Jewels or Spoils of War?
Source: Huffington Post (8-19-10)
[Seema Jilani is a physician who specializes in Pediatrics, and concentrates on International Health Care. She has worked in Israel, Palestine, Sudan, Lebanon, Egypt and the Balkans. She has been a freelance journalist for Pacifica Radio for eight years. Her radio documentary, Israel and Palestine: The Human Cost of The Occupation, was nominated for The Peabody Award. Dr. Jilani's work has been published in The Guardian, The Independent, Newsweek, The Washington Post and McClatchy Newspapers.]
When I go to London, where much of my family lives, I still enjoy walking the touristy grounds of the Tower of London, where Anne Boleyn was beheaded, where political prisoners' anguished carvings still remain in prison cells and where one can feel the ghosts of yesteryear. To this day, every time we view the Queen of England's crown jewels, my mother still has the same visceral reaction: "Can we have our Kohinoor diamond -- the one you stole from us, the one that now sits in your beloved crown -- back now?"
One person's proud history is another's tragic ancestral humiliation. The crown of England is a dagger that pierces my mother's heart, a remembrance of what was so brutally stolen from her -- not the jewels per se, but the dignity of her family tree. The Imperial Crown of England holds another phenomenal stone in its cross named The Black Prince's Ruby, which was mined in Badakhshan, Afghanistan. It found its way into the possession of the Prince of Wales in 1367. Queen Elizabeth II now wears it at coronations, knighting ceremonies, and yes, even birthdays. To wear the stone of a land that was raped, and of a people who were brutalized, at frivolous British pageantries whilst drinking tea (from India, no less) is the ultimate insult.
Many of the colonized people in the world share a belief: that when our colonizers leave, they intentionally leave behind a chaotic situation destined for more conflict, thereby ensuring post-colonial strife. The British left Kashmir's boundaries hazy, ensuring that Pakistanis and Indians would slaughter each other long after their departure. Afghanistan's intricate political history speaks for itself. Perhaps a more flagrant example is the fact that Afghanistan holds approximately 10 million land mines and Kabul is the most heavily mined capital city in the world.
Knowing all this, how should I approach my task as a a medical aid worker in Afghanistan -- to provide pediatric health care and train Afghan doctors at CURE International Hospital -- without becoming the dreaded cliched colonialist?
When I first told my mother of my medical relief trip to Afghanistan with CURE International, her resistance was expected. I possess a bad combination of titles: American, female, and doctor, not to mention that I have ethnic roots originating in the region, which adds risk given the inter-ethnicity strife. But my mother saw this trip from a much closer perspective. She was transplanted back to her childhood memories of family vacations in Northern Pakistan. The epic landscape of mountains dotted with pristine lakes, and pastures speckled with lazy waterfalls made it a stunning locale. She even recalled a trip the Khyber Pass, the most dramatic entry into Afghanistan, which traverses the Pakistani border, and is now rather difficult to pass. She was despondent at the thought of her faith being warped, and of such an enchanting country, with such charming people, being taken hostage by various military and political parties.
As I departed for Afghanistan, instead of lecturing me on security, she said, with some mix of a twinkle and tears in her eyes, "Don't forget to eat the pomegranates of Kandahar, if you can get them in Kabul. They are famous." Perhaps somewhat proud that I was trying, in my own way, to counter an imperialism of the past and heal people suffering from a military assault of the present, she sent me forth with, of all things, her nostalgia for Kandahar's pomegranates.
Being raised in a similar culture has prepared me for some of the ethnic subtleties, but there are scenarios that I experience which cannot be anticipated and which challenge me. I've decided the best way to approach my medical task is with a healthy dose of humility, and perhaps the colonialists, past and present, could stand to taste a spoonful of this as well. While I think I am here to "teach them", truthfully, I am the student who will be schooled, and who has the most to gain from the extraordinary Afghan people. Their lessons -- the lessons of a tough people -- are the real jewels of Afghanistan.
John Keown: America's Unjust Revolution: A Rejoinder to Mark Tooley
Source: American Spectator (8-17-10)
[John Keown is Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Christian Ethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics of Georgetown University.]
Mark Tooley has kindly replied to my paper which argued that America's War for Independence was unjust. His reply, much of which is taken up with a broadly accurate summary of my paper, makes some interesting points. It fails, however, to dent my argument.
Tooley begins and ends by targeting the "Religious Left" for trying to reinterpret the traditional "just war" criteria into "impossibly stratospheric standards, so that no war can ever be moral." He claims that this "stratospheric standard" seems to afflict my analysis. Not so. Regardless of what the "Religious Left" may or may not think about war, I adopt the traditional just war criteria without gloss. And while those criteria are not "stratospheric" they are strict: a war must satisfy them all, and do so convincingly, if it is to be just. The American War for Independence signally failed to do so.
Tooley notes my conclusion that the colonial uprising may have satisfied two of the seven criteria: "competent authority" and "probability of success." Of the latter he writes that it seems obvious that it was satisfied because the rebels won. This does not follow: the probability of success must be judged at the beginning, not the end. As David McCullough puts it in his impressive book 1776 the result seemed, to those who had been with George Washington from the beginning of the conflict, "little short of a miracle." What, then, of Tooley's response to my conclusion that the war did not satisfy the remaining criteria?
Was war a "last resort"? Tooley comments that the colonial trade embargo was "disrupted by events at Lexington and Concord." These "events" were, of course, the deliberate resort to lethal violence by rebels in order to retain arms they had stolen from the authorities (clearly with a view to turning them on their lawful owners). Lexington and Concord were evidence, as one military historian has put it, of "planned aggression" by the rebels. Moreover, the response of the Continental Congress to these "events" was not the reigning in of the New England aggressors but an endorsement and escalation of their violence....
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Martin Shaw: The Holocaust, Genocide Studies, and Politics
Source: openDemocracy (8-18-10)
[Martin Shaw is a historical sociologist of war and global politics, and professor of international relations and politics at the University of Sussex. His books include War and Genocide: Organised Killing in Modern Society (Polity, 2003); The New Western Way of War: Risk-Transfer War and its Crisis in Iraq (Polity, 2005); and What is Genocide? (Polity, 2007).]
What are, and should be, the relationships between academic research and politics? This core question of historiography and social science has been debated throughout the last century - at least since the social theorist Max Weber attempted to define a “value-free” space for research (even as he acknowledged that scholars’ cultural and political orientations help shape their research interests). Nowhere, perhaps, is it more pertinent than in the growing field of genocide studies.
Here, all scholars share a basic negative judgment on what they are studying - after all, the very idea of genocide was invented by Raphael Lemkin in his successful attempt to criminalise the organised destruction of populations. Yet despite this shared commitment, intellectual disputes which can be traced partly to scholars’ social identities and political orientations are common in the field. Nowhere perhaps are they as contentious as around the question of the relationship between the Nazis’ annihilation of six million of Europe’s Jews in the second world war - “the Holocaust” - and the larger history of genocide....
Over the course of the next half century, the Nazis’ murder of the Jews was increasingly constructed in western - especially American - culture and politics as a universal symbol of evil, “the Holocaust” (or “the shoah”). The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander speaks of the extermination of the Jews having become a “sacred-evil”, the defining evil of modern times. He traces this process through both political events (the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, for example) and cultural ones (such as the publication of Anne Frank’s diaries, the television series The Holocaust [1978) and Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List [1993])....
Alongside the “sacralisation” of the Holocaust, the idea of genocide was narrowed by many writers to Holocaust-like mass murder; this replaced the broad idea of multi-method social destruction (including political, economic and cultural coercion as well as physical violence) which Lemkin had espoused. When genocide studies really took off in the mid-2000s, a common format for many of the impressive books which appeared was a case-by-case presentation - in which the Holocaust remained the central reference-point. “Comparative genocide studies” involves above all (although of course never only) comparison with the Holocaust. Moreover, many books generally compare just a few of what Mark Levene has called the “mega-genocides” - typically, the Armenian and Rwandan episodes, plus one or two others joined the Holocaust as the objects of trans-historical comparison.
At the same time, Holocaust scholarship has become by far the most developed area of research, producing deep knowledge and interpretations which enrich the general understanding of genocide. In part because of this, Holocaust research became a self-sufficient field, little connected to wider genocide studies. A few scholars (mainly from Jewish backgrounds) even reflected the “sacred-evil” status of the Holocaust by advancing the idea that it is “unique” - that is, different in a profound, qualitative way from other genocides. This in turn provoked some scholars from other backgrounds to attack the exclusion of their communities (for example, Roma and Sinti) from some Holocaust narratives, or to appropriate the “Holocaust” term for other genocides - as in David Stannard’s claim that there had been an “American Holocaust” against Native Americans....
Daniel Pipes: Immanuel Kant vs. Israel
Source: DanielPipes.org (8-17-10)
[Mr. Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©2010 by Daniel Pipes.]
As someone who deeply appreciates what Western civilization, for all its faults, has achieved, I puzzle over the hostility many Westerners harbor toward their way of life. If democracy, free markets, and the rule of law have created an unprecedented stability, affluence, and decency; how come so many beneficiaries, fail to see this?
Why, for example, does the United States, which has done so much for human welfare, inspire such hostility? And tiny Israel, the symbol of rejuvenation for a perpetually oppressed people – why does it engender such passionate hatred that otherwise decent people desire to eliminate this state?
Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem offers an explanation for this antagonism in a profound and implication-rich essay, "Israel Through European Eyes."
He begins with the notion of "paradigm shift" developed by Thomas Kuhn in his 1962 study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This influential concept holds that scientists see their subject from within a specific framework, a "paradigm." Paradigms are frameworks that underpin an understanding of reality. Facts that do not fit the paradigm are overlooked or dismissed. Kuhn reviews the history of science and shows how, in a series of scientific revolutions, paradigms shifted, as from Aristotelian to Newtonian to Einsteinian physics.
Paradigms also frame politics and Hazony applies this theory to Israel's delegitimization in the West. Israel's standing has deteriorated for decades, he argues, "not because of this or that set of facts, but because the paradigm through which educated Westerners are looking at Israel has shifted." Responding to the vilification of Israel by offering corrective facts – about Israel's military morality or its medical breakthroughs – "won't have any real impact on the overall trajectory of Israel's standing among educated people in the West." Instead, the latest paradigm must be recognized and fought.
The fading paradigm sees nation-states as legitimate and positive, a means of protecting peoples and allowing them to flourish. The treaty of Westphalia (1648) was the key moment in which the sovereignty of nations was recognized. John Stuart Mill and Woodrow Wilson endowed the nation-state ideal with global reach.
That paradigm, however, "has pretty much collapsed," Hazony asserts. The nation-state no longer appeals; many intellectuals and political figures in Europe see it "as a source of incalculable evil," a view that is fast spreading.
The new paradigm, based ultimately on Immanuel Kant's 1795 treatise Perpetual Peace, advocates the abolition of nation-states and the establishment of international government. Supra-national institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union represent its ideals and models.
Jews and the Holocaust play a strangely central role in the paradigm shift from nation-state to multinational state. The millennial persecution of Jews, culminating in the Nazi genocide, endowed Israel with special purpose and legitimacy according to the old paradigm. From the perspective of the new paradigm, however, the Holocaust represents the excesses of a nation-state, the German one, gone mad.
Under the old nation-state paradigm, the lesson of Auschwitz was "Never again," meaning that a strong Israel was needed to protect Jews. The new paradigm leads to a very different "Never again," one which insists that no government should have the means potentially to replicate the Nazi outrages. According to it, Israel isn't the answer to Auschwitz. The European Union is. That the old-style "Never again" inspires Israelis to pursue the Western world's most unabashed policy of self-defense makes their actions particularly appalling to New Paradigmers.
Need one point out the error of ascribing Nazi outrages to the nation-state? The Nazis wanted to eliminate nation-states. No less than Kant, they dreamed of a universal state,. New Paradigmers mangle history.
Israelis themselves are not immune to the new paradigm, as the case of Avraham Burg suggests. A former speaker of Israel's parliament and candidate for prime minister, he switched paradigms and wrote a book on the legacy of the Holocaust that compares Israel to Nazi Germany. He now wants Israelis to give up on Israel as defender of the Jewish people. No one, Burg's sad example suggests, is immune from the new paradigm disease.
Hazony's essay does not offer policy responses but in a letter to me he sketched three areas to address: building awareness of the new paradigm's existence, finding anomalies to invalidate it, and revitalizing the old paradigm by bringing it up to date.
His insights are profound and his counsel timely.
Aug. 17, 2010 update: (1) I have gnawed away at the mystery of the Left over the past decade, writing on such varied topics as structural differences between the United States and Europe, poor Atlantic relations, opposed European and American "super-systems," the intensity of European guilt, the fear of a mythological "Empire," the mind-bending phenomenon of liberal fascism, the infatuation with international institutions, the legacy of World War I, the impact of President Kennedy's assassination, and the bias of university press publications. I have also published a small avalanche of analyses about the Left's soft spot for Islamism.
(2) Note that the new paradigm applies exclusively to Western states. Syria and Iran, to take prominent examples, get a free pass; it's quite fine for them to pursue national interests in as bellicose a fashion as possible, without invoking the Left's wrath.
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