Roundup: Talking About History

Kim Long: Rare Moons (On the Occasion of the Year-Ending Blue Moon of 2009)

[Kim Long is a Denver-based author and illustrator. He created the Moon Calendar in 1980, the first publication to show accurate depictions of the moon phases for every day of the year.] Tonight marks that rarest of events, not just the opening of a new year and a new decade but also the heralding of those events by a blue moon. A blue moon is defined as a full moon that occurs twice in the same calendar month. When the date for one full moon falls on or near the beginn

Daniel Martin Varisco: Grinding a Greater Axis of Evil

[Daniel Martin Varisco is Chair, Anthropology Department at Hofstra University.] Terrorism takes a toll far beyond the lives lost everyday, even when a plot is thwarted. On Christmas day a 23-year-old Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab attempted to set himself off as a human bomb on a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit. On the surface he hardly fit the profile of a crazed militant fresh out of a training camp in the hills of Pakistan. His father was a recentl

David Stokes: Christmas Coming In From The Cold

On Christmas day 20 years ago, Nicolae Ceausescu – long time dictator of Romania – was, along with his wife Elena, executed by firing squad just days after fleeing Bucharest, while his tyrannical regime unraveled before the eyes of a watching world. His demise and the surrounding events are etched in the memory of those of us who watched it all unfold via various news reports. The look on the once strong-man’s face as a massive crowd began to boo during a speech on December 21st, w

Jordan Michael: What the Soviets Learned in Afghanistan

[Jordan Michael Smith is a writer based in Washington.] Thirty years ago today, on Dec. 24, 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The United States saw the invasion as unmistakable evidence that the Soviets were committed to aggression in the Middle East and the Third World. It was “the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War,” President Jimmy Carter announced. But archival documents released since the cold war’s end show that the Soviet’s actions were

Martin Wolf: How the noughties were a hinge of history

[Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Times.] The only truly global power was in rapid relative decline. Not long before, it had won a pyrrhic victory in a costly colonial war. New great powers were on the rise. An arms race was under way, as was competition for markets and resources in undeveloped areas of the world. Yet people still believed in the durability of the free trade and free capital flows that had nurtured prosperity and, many believed, had also u

Cristian Segura: China's Rehabilitation of Chiang Kai-shek

[Cristian Segura is a European journalist based in Beijing.] The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, Taiwan's capital city, doesn't look very different from monuments devoted to communist icons in mainland China. The Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) both create propaganda scenarios that mix ideological fanfare, a lack of historical rigor and the colossal architecture commonly used to worship dictators. Maybe because they find it familiar, hun

Michael Meyer: Death of Ceausescu, 20 Years On

[Michael Meyer is author of “The Year That Changed the World.” © Project Syndicate.] Nicolae Ceausescu liked to hunt bears. With his retinue, he would retreat to a lodge in Transylvania and sally forth, locked and loaded. He was accustomed to good fortune, for his huntsmen took precautions. They would chain some poor beast to a tree, drug it to keep it still and conceal themselves around the blind from which the great man would shoot. One day, they did their job haphaz

Maziar Bahari: The Legacy of the People's Ayatollah

[Maziar Bahari is a Canadian/Iranian filmmaker and Newsweek correspondent.] "If you're going to ask me questions about my regrets, plan to spend the next month or so in my house!" Those were the words with which Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri greeted me when I interviewed him at his home in the holy city of Qum four years ago. He was then 83 years old and could look back on a life in which he'd served as a founding father of the Islamic Republic only to become its most vo

Martin Fletcher: Somalia is greatest victim of President Bush’s War on Terror

[Martin Fletcher is associate editor and former foreign editor of The Times.] Afghanistan and Iraq have monopolised the headlines but Somalia is arguably an even greater victim of George W. Bush’s ill-conceived and lamentably executed War on Terror. America’s interventions have proved so catastrophic that its best hope of salvaging something from the wreckage is a president it chased from power three years ago, who controls a few square miles of a country three times the size of Bri

Jack D. Elliott Jr.: Should American Heritage be Preserved?

[Jack D. Elliott, Jr. is a historical archaeologist with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and a Lecturer at Mississippi State University.] Today we are bombarded with allusions to the “culture war,” the conflict over the basic values that govern public life in the West. The war is grounded in a clash between the traditional West with its roots in the Christian heritage and a growing disillusionment with truth and meaning itself arising from a materialistic and s

Jordan Michael Smith: How Panama Invasion Paved the Way for Iraq

[Jordan Michael Smith is a writer in Washington, D.C.] On Dec. 20, 1989, nearly 30,000 U.S. troops invaded Panama and captured the country's military dictator, Gen. Manuel Noriega. The invasion lasted just over a month, and the U.S. military suffered just 23 casualties. Thomas Pickering was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the conflict, and a key advisor to President George H.W. Bush as the United States solidified its position in Central America and ushered in a new

Clare Spark: Assimilation and citizenship in a democratic republic

I have just finished reading a recent book by Eric P. Kaufmann, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America  (Harvard UP, 2004). If Kaufmann’s reading of U.S. history is correct, then almost everything on this website is either mistaken or misguided. But I don’t think so. What his book  does is replicate the same Harvard line that I experienced there in the Graduate School of Education: that “sub-cultures” were the unit for sorting out people. Moreover, it promotes the “multiculturalis

Arthur Herman: The 35-Year War on the CIA

[Arthur Herman is the author, most recently, of Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for 2009. His article “The Gitmo Myth and the Torture Canard” appeared in COMMENTARY’s June issue.] When your own outfit is trying to put you in jail, it’s time to go.” Those are the words of Robert Baer, once a CIA operative in the Middle East, describing the days in 1995 when he found himself under investigation by

Edwin Black: Mesopotamia: Robbing the Cradle

[Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust. This article is adapted from Banking on Baghdad: Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit, and Conflict (Dialog Press)]. Mesopotamia—now known as Iraq--enjoyed a 2,000-year head start on Western civilization. What happened?Part of the answer lays millennia before our current turbulent times. Understanding this pivot

Yŏng-ho Ch'oe: Korean Prisoners-of-War in Hawaii During World War II and the Case of US Navy Abduction of Three Korean Fishermen

[Yŏng-ho Ch'oe is professor emeritus of history at University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has written extensively on pre-modern and modern Korea history and co-edited"Sources of Korean Tradition" and"Sourcebook of Korean Civilization.] Although there has been much attention given to the  Japanese-Americans who were detained in the infamous detention centers of Hawaii and throughout the Western United States during World War II, virtually nothing is known about the Korean prisoners-of-

John McAdams: Another "Unspeakably Awful" Book About the JFK Assassination

James Douglass treads a familiar path in JFK and the Unspeakable. It is yet another book that claims John Kennedy was killed because he had decided to withdraw from Vietnam. Kennedy’s “rejection of Cold War politics was considered treasonous by forces in his own government,” according to Douglass, and supposedly made JFK’s violent removal an urgent necessity.[1] What makes Douglass’s volume unique is that his argument is dressed up in verbiage unfamiliar to JFK assassinati

Oleg Kalugin: How the Soviets Invaded Afghanistan

[Oleg Kalugin served as member of the KGB for more than 30 years, rising to the rank of general. His memoir, Spymaster, is excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, 2009.] I was the head of the KGB's foreign counterintelligence branch when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The fateful order to send our military into such difficult terrain was by no means a foregone conclusion. Before Soviet leaders made the final call, we wrung our hands, considered our options

Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova: How to Avoid the Soviet Mistakes in Afghanistan

[Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova are Russian correspondents for Newsweek.] Talk to Russian veterans of Afghanistan and it's hard not to think that they're rooting for the U.S. to lose. For these proud men, seeing NATO succeed at a job they botched would deepen the humiliation of defeat. Easier to affirm that if the Soviets couldn't win there, no one can. "We did not succeed and you will not either," says Gen. Victor Yermakov, who commanded Soviet forces in Afghanistan from

Senate Foreign Relations Committee: How Osama bin Laden Escaped

[This article is an excerpt of the report "Tora Bora Revisited," prepared by members of the majority staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, and published here with permission.] On Oct. 7, 2001, U.S. aircraft began bombing the training bases and strongholds of al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban across Afghanistan. The leaders who sent murderers to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon less than a month earlier and the rogue govern

Keith Livesey: What's Wrong with "Positive History"

[The author has a BA in British History from Birbeck College .] John Sweeney reports Stalin’s Return: This World, BBC Two, Wednesday, December 2, 7pm. Having been unfortunate to stumble across this programme while channel surfing I must say that this was the worst piece of journalism and history I have seen for a long time. It also shows that the BBC is also responsible for a gross dumbing down of history. The subject matter is a legitimate one the attempt to reh