Roundup: Talking About History
Aaron Zelinsky: Obama's Forgotten Inspiration: Theodore Parker
Humberto Fontova: Cuban Stalinism at 50--and the Media Lies Continue
Rory Carroll and Andres Schipani: As hard times bite, Cubans show little appetite for celebration
Jeff Stein: Jimmy Carter's Frosty Meeting With Spy Chief Bush
Phil Mason: The course of history often hinges on small accidents of chance
Archie Bland: The Big Question ... How important was Charles Darwin, and what is his legacy today?
Tom Parfitt: Medieval warrior overcomes Stalin in poll to name greatest Russian
Spiegel Online: 'Eroding One of Turkey's Biggest Taboos' (interview)
Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: An Oral History of the Bush White House
Roger Pulvers: The Death of a Russian Poet 70 Years Ago ... and Why He Deserves to be Remembered
Editorial in the Independent: Benazir Bhutto's divisive legacy to Pakistan
E.J. Dionne: The Jesus Of Christmas And The Holiday's True Meaning
J.R. Dunn: Candy-coating the Holocaust
Source: American Thinker (1-4-09)
The "Angel at the Fence" story has been proven to be a hoax, and that's a good thing.
It's not a good thing because two aged and troubled people have suffered the humiliation of being exposed as liars. It's not a good thing because the publishers, agents, and producers, not to mention Oprah, have been exposed as foolish and credulous -- though that's not necessarily a bad thing.
It's a good thing because "Angel at the Fence", if it had been published, would have been yet another step in the candy-coating of the Holocaust.
By now the "Angel" story has spread almost universally. As a young man in Europe, Herman Rosenblat was barely hanging on at a subcamp of Buchenwald when a girl who lived nearby began tossing him apples though the fence. For seven months she threw him an apple a day until, in the last weeks of the war, he was transferred to another camp.
After the war, he moved to the U.S. and settled in New York. Twelve years later he went on a date with a younger woman. While speaking of their war experiences, she recalled that while hiding out in Germany with a Polish family, she tossed apples to a young man in the local concentration camp. And lo -- a legend was born.
The falsity of this story should have been obvious to anyone hearing it. Apples, along with everything else edible, were almost unknown in Germany by the war's end. Polish families were not living peacefully in Germany in those days. Even the timing is off -- "seven months" beginning in the winter of 1945 puts the war in Europe's end sometime in July, nearly three months late. A number of scholars, in particular Ken Waltzer and Deborah Lipstadt, were quick to point out the inconsistencies. Neither Rosenblatt's agent, his publisher, or the movie producer who bought the rights were interested in hearing any of it until at last irrefutable evidence (including the fact that the only place where the two could have met was right beside the camp's SS barracks) was presented in The New Republic. Last week Rosenblat at last admitted the hoax to his agent. Only a day later, Berkley Books announced that it was canceling publication.
There is no point in blaming the Rosenblats. An ordeal such as that which they survived leaves scars on the personality impossible for luckier individuals to grasp. They should be allowed to fade out of the public spotlight with no further suffering.
But it remains a good thing that the book was exposed before it was published. The problem here is that the story is exactly what Oprah said it is -- heartwarming. And if the Holocaust is anything at all, it is not heartwarming. There are actual events quite similar to what occurred to the Rosenblatts. Simon Wiesenthal emerged from the camp at Maidenek convinced that his wife was dead. And she, on her way back to their hometown, by then annexed by the USSR, thought the same was true of him. Through an incredible series of coincidences, she learned that he was alive only moments before boarding the train that would have taken her behind the Iron Curtain.
But that story, pleasant as it may be, is not the Holocaust. Wiesenthal lost 89 members of his family to the extermination program. That is the Holocaust.
....
Aaron Zelinsky: Obama's Forgotten Inspiration: Theodore Parker
Source: Huffington Post (11-7-08)
[ Aaron Zelinsky is a member of the Yale Law School Class of 2010. He is the founder of PresidentialDebateBlog
I noted earlier that Obama sought to unify and inspire last Tuesday night, and that he employed two of America's great oratorical figures to do so: Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Invoking Lincoln, Obama declared, "Government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth." In a nod to King, Obama exhorted his listeners to, "Put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day."
Notably, neither of these memorable quotes originates from Lincoln or King. In fact, they stem from a single man: Theodore Parker, an abolitionist Unitarian minister who died just before the start of the Civil War. In an 1850 speech, Parker defined democracy as "a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people." In an 1853 sermon, Parker proclaimed, "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I can calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice."
Mike Thomson: 'Good old days' under Bokassa?
Source: BBC (1-2-09)
[Mike Thomson is a BBC correspondent.]
For more than three decades his name has been synonymous with the worst excesses of the sort of dictators who have bedevilled post-colonial Africa.
History largely remembers Jean Bedel Bokassa - or Emperor Bokassa I as he crowned himself in 1977 - as one of the continent's most colourful yet bloodthirsty monsters.
He was a demagogue as ruthless as Mobutu and more flamboyant than Amin.
When Bokassa was overthrown in 1979, jubilant crowds vented their hatred on a giant statue of the tyrant who for almost 14 years ran the Central African Republic (or the Central African Empire as Bokassa had renamed it) like a modern-day Nero.
But for Jean Serge Bokassa - one of the emperor's several dozen children - history and the mob have got it wrong.
He argues that his father was "a patriot" who served his country well and who has been smeared by those who wanted to topple him.
Jean Serge was only seven when he was hastily withdrawn from his Swiss boarding school after the French intervened to overthrow Bokassa's regime while he was away on a state visit to Libya.
It was not until Jean Serge and other family members were flown to exile in Gabon that they begin to understand the reason for the interruption to their privileged existence.
"We started to see reports and newspapers saying our father was no longer in power in the Central African Republic," Jean Serge says.
"There was a character assassination by media. They called him a cannibal and a criminal who massacred children."
He adds: "There is a saying here that when you don't like your dog, you declare that it's got rabies."
There are indeed many lurid stories about Bokassa.
Ears cut off
He was variously accused of being a cannibal who ate body parts from those opponents who he did not feed to the lions and crocodiles in his personal zoo.
Even if these allegations were entirely untrue, there is plenty of evidence of the extreme brutality of Bokassa's rule that cannot easily be dismissed as French disinformation.
Political rivals were murdered or tortured.
Thieves were punished by having their ears cut off.
For most of his rule Bokassa enjoyed the support of the former colonial power France, in whose army he served for more than 20 years.
In 1966, Bokassa, then commander-in-chief of the Central African armed forces, took power in a coup unseating President David Dacko, who was later reinstalled by the French.
Ebbing support
Bokassa enjoyed particularly close relations with the French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing.
The latter even went so far as to declare that he regarded Bokassa as a "friend and family member".
But by 1979 French support was ebbing away from Bokassa.
The final straw may well have been a massacre in which about 100 children and teenagers were killed for protesting against Bokassa's proclamation that they would have to wear expensive uniforms that were only sold by a company that belonged to one of his 17 wives.
According to Amnesty International's report, Bokassa was personally involved with some of the killings.
However, this is all at odds with Jean Serge's recollections of his father in private life.
Monstrous extravagance
"As a son, I have many warm memories," he says.
"He was very affectionate. He loved children. He loved children a lot. And for that reason that he had about 50 kids."
Another allegation against Bokassa which is hard to contest is the monstrous extravagance which was a hallmark of his rule.
When the title President for Life was no longer sufficient, he decided to make himself emperor.
Bokassa spent tens of millions of dollars of public money staging a lavish and ludicrous coronation for himself in the capital Bangui.
Wearing costumes styled on Napoleon, he rode in a carriage flanked by soldiers dressed as 19th Century French cavalrymen.
Prison sentence
After he was deposed, Bokassa and several of his children were allowed to enjoy a comfy exile in a chateau in a Paris suburb.
But in 1986 he decided to return home even though a Central African court had sentenced him to death in his absence.
That sentence was upheld by a retrial but later commuted to a prison sentence.
Bokassa was eventually released in 1993. He died three years later from a heart attack aged 75.
Astonishingly, some older Central Africans now look back on the Bokassa years - or at the least the early part of his rule - as a sort of good old days...
Humberto Fontova: Cuban Stalinism at 50--and the Media Lies Continue
Source: American Thinker (1-1-09)
"Cuban mothers let me assure you that I will solve all Cuba's problems without spilling a drop of blood." Upon entering Havana on January 7, 1959, Cuba's new leader Fidel Castro broadcast that promise into a phalanx of microphones. As the jubilant crowd erupted with joy, Castro continued. “Cuban mothers let me assure you that because of me you will never have to cry."
The following day, just below San Juan Hill in eastern Cuba, a bulldozer rumbled to a start, clanked into position, and started pushing dirt into a huge pit with blood pooling at the bottom from the still-twitching bodies of more than a hundred men and boys who'd been machine-gunned without trial on the Castro brothers' orders. Their wives and mothers wept hysterically from a nearby road.
On that very day, the U.K. Observer ran the following headline: "Mr Castro's bearded, youthful figure has become a symbol of Latin America's rejection of brutality and lying. Every sign is that he will reject personal rule and violence."
These two events perfectly symbolize the Castro/Cuba phenomenon, even half a century later. The Castro regime oppresses and kills while issuing a smokescreen of lies not merely devious but downright psychopathic. The worldwide media abandons all pretense as "investigators" or "watchdogs" and adopts a role, not merely as sycophants, but as advertising agency. As Cuba's Stalinist nomenklatura celebrates fifty years of repression and high living this week --from Time magazine to USA Today, and from the BBC to Der Spiegel to the very U.K. Observer (now the Guardian) -- the usual idiocies on Cuba are spouting forth their usual sources, but in much greater profusion.
If what we constantly heard and read about Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution in the mainstream media and college textbooks was merely in error it might be less obnoxious. Instead the media/academia clichés usually upend the truth. We get the precise opposite of the truth. Ignorance (usually willful) of conditions in pre-Castro Cuba, of Fidel Castro's background, of U.S.-Cuba relations pre-1960 all contribute to the cliché-ridden Castro legend. With the media wallowing in a Castro-cliché orgy on this hideous anniversary let's examine them one at a time, in no particular order of importance.
Cliché no. 1: A plucky Castro succeeded in defying a relentlessly hostile U.S. that worked ceaselessly to topple him.
The Facts: “We ended up getting exactly what we'd wanted all along," wrote Nikita Khrushchev about the Missile Crisis Resolution.
"Security for Fidel Castro's regime and American missiles removed from Turkey. Until today the U.S. has complied with her promise not to interfere with Castro and not to allow anyone else to interfere with Castro. After Kennedy's death, his successor Lyndon Johnson assured us that he would keep the promise not to invade Cuba."
Henry Kissinger, as Gerald Ford's secretary of state, renewed the pledge. After the Missile Crisis "resolution," Castro's "defiance" of the U.S. took the form of the U.S. Coast Guard and even the British Navy (when some intrepid exile freedom fighters moved their operation to the Bahamas) shielding him from exile attacks. Far from "defying" a superpower, Castro hid behind the skirts of two superpowers, plus the British Empire....
Deborah Lipstadt: A Danger Greater Than Denial
Source: Forward & Lipstadt blog (12-31-08)
The news that Herman Rosenblat’s Holocaust memoir “Angel at the Fence” is a fraud has the press buzzing and the publishing world reeling. The book, which the publisher apparently anticipated would be a best-seller, was pulled right before it was to be shipped to bookstores. No one who has paid close attention to the story, however, has a right to be surprised.
I first heard Rosenblat’s story in June of 2007. I was on a bus headed to Birkenau together with other scholars who study genocide. None of them were Holocaust specialists. One passenger began to read aloud from an e-mail he had received about a boy in Buchenwald who was saved because a young girl threw him an apple over the camp fence every day for seven months. Years later, the two met as adults. He learned that her family had been slave laborers in the nearby town. They were posing as non-Jews. They fell in love, married and recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
Long before my fellow passenger got to the fairy tale ending, I was skeptical. How could a young girl stand at a concentration camp fence without guards noticing? Would a Jewish family passing as Polish non-Jews permit their daughter to wander around near the camp? Could a prisoner go near the fence without being shot? Was the fence low enough for a small girl to throw an apple over?
When the professor finished, I declared, “Fiction. Bad fiction.” Some of the scholars suspected that years of skirmishes with Holocaust deniers had made me a hardened skeptic. After later coming across numerous renditions of the story — which, it turned out, was all over the Internet — and learning that the Rosenblats had appeared on “Oprah,” that a children’s book on the story was already published and that a memoir and film were forthcoming, I felt I could no longer remain silent. On my blog I stated that this story could not be true. The attacks came in quick succession: How could I question Holocaust survivors? Who was I to defame them?
The most vituperative attack came from Harris Salomon, who was making a film based on Rosenblat’s story. In an e-mail to me, he pronounced my opinion “worthless.” He declared that, since he had traveled throughout Eastern Europe doing research, “i may be more of a more of a [sic] holocaust expert then you.” He closed by accusing me of having committed “the greatest sin to the memory of all those perished so long ago.”
In the interim, Michigan State University historian Ken Waltzer, an expert on Buchenwald, had done the research that reporters, publishers and producers did not do. He spoke with historians who knew the layout of this sub-camp and with people who were interned there with Rosenblat. The story was clearly a lie.
The New Republic’s Gabriel Sherman spoke with additional survivors who further confirmed that this was a hoax. Even Rosenblat’s sister-in-law admitted never having heard the story of the girl with the apples, either at the Rosenblats’ wedding or in the 40 years that followed.
In response to the growing scrutiny, Salomon went ballistic. He complained to one of Waltzer’s deans and intimated that he would hold Waltzer “responsible” if Rosenblat’s health suffered because of the questions being raised about his memoir. The publisher, Penguin’s Berkley Books, stonewalled anyone who contacted them.
When Sherman found yet more survivors who contradicted Rosenblat’s story, the whole thing fell apart. The publisher pulled the book. Rosenblat admitted making up the story. Suddenly, Salomon, the great historian, told the press that he was “extremely angry” about being the victim of a scam (although he has said he still plans to make his film, albeit now as an acknowledged work of fiction).
Sadly, Herman Rosenblat overshadowed his genuine Holocaust story with a completely fabricated one. What really happened to him and his family has been lost in his lies.
There are various lessons to be learned from this: Facts about the Holocaust must be checked. Historians should never build their understanding of events based on one story from one person. But Rosenblat had enablers. His publisher, agent and movie producer pounced on his story. Reporters never bothered to check it out. They all seemingly wanted a story that made the Holocaust heartwarming, even though, as Waltzer aptly put it, the “Holocaust experience is not heartwarming, it is heart rending.”
Salomon believed that this kind of “candy-coated message” would reach “Middle America” and “do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done.” Jewish sources also allowed themselves to be co-opted. Aish HaTorah featured the story on its Web site. A Chabad rabbi, whose relatives died in the Holocaust, was swept off his feet by this phony tale and arranged a belated bar mitzvah for Herman, garnering even more publicity for the Rosenblats and himself.
I have spent much of my academic career studying Holocaust denial. But the much greater danger to our collective memory of the event is posed by Holocaust trivialization and romanticization. What the Rosenblats and their enablers did was create yet another obstacle for the remaining survivors to convince others that their stories are true.
Rosenblat claims that all he wanted to do was make people love each other more. The Chabad rabbi probably thought the story would inspire faith. Salomon wanted to teach Middle America about the Holocaust.
These may be worthy goals. But the Holocaust should not be reduced to a means for trying to fulfill these or any other ends. The instrumentalization of the Holocaust, the use of it to fulfill something else, is the ultimate degradation of the event. If Holocaust deniers were smart, they would sit back and let the Rosenblats, Salomons, Berkley Books and the like peddle their wares. Within a short time, no one would know what was truth and what was fiction.
Rory Carroll and Andres Schipani: As hard times bite, Cubans show little appetite for celebration
Source: Guardian (UK) (1-1-09)
[Rory Carroll is the Guardian's Latin American correspondent and Andrés Schipan is Bolivia contributor for the BBC and contributor on Latin American issues for the Guardian.]
Carmen Gonce remembers the triumph of Cuba's revolution as the happiest day of her life. Fidel Castro and his guerrillas swept down from the Sierra Maestra and delivered the island from a corrupt and brutal dictatorship. People danced in the streets and welcomed the "bearded ones" into their homes. It was 1 January 1959 and a time for hope. "We were nearly all Fidelistas," she said.
Half a century later, the girl of 15 is a pensioner of 64 who watches sunsets over the Caribbean from a cracked chair on the balcony of her Havana home a few blocks from the Karl Marx theatre. Much has happened since that day, yet it seems close enough to touch. "It feels just like last year."
Gonce still supports the revolution's principles and is grateful for a recent heart bypass operation. "A top surgeon - and I didn't pay a cent!" But celebrating the anniversary is not an option. The former author and book editor is nearly destitute. She has no money for decent food, cooking oil or soap, let alone treats. So she will stay at home, follow the anniversary commemorations on TV and reflect on a process that has simultaneously inspired and impoverished her. "The ideals are good but the reality of daily life ... " Her voice trails off.
The ambivalence reflects the complex legacy of a revolution which invested in health and education, crushed dissent and provoked admiration and revulsion. Cuba reaches today's milestone with the echo of the prediction Fidel Castro made from the dock as a young revolutionary in 1953: "Condemn me, it does not matter. History will absolve me." Well, did it?
Crisis
There is no disputing the revolution's durability. It survived the Bay of Pigs invasion, the missile crisis and the Soviet Union's collapse. Castro outlasted 10 US presidents and dodged countless CIA assassination attempts. Absolution or not, history will certainly remember him.
The anniversary coincides with a period of flux. Castro, 82, resigned as president last year because of an intestinal illness, but his recent partial recovery has revived his influence. His brother and successor, Raúl, 77, signalled modest reforms, but they have stalled. Barack Obama has promised to ease draconian US restrictions and shake up a policy pickled in vinegar since JFK.
"It feels that the end of the story has not been written. Nobody knows what is going to happen and that is unsettling," said Daniel Erikson, a Cuba expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based thinktank.
One safe bet, however, is that there will be no mass outpouring of jubilation to mark the anniversary, for a simple reason: living standards are dire. "Our situation is so precarious nobody wants to celebrate," said Gabriel Calaforra, 75, a former ambassador and high-ranking official. "There is almost total indifference. People are waiting for change."
The authorities have booked popular musicians for a free concert at the Anti-Imperialista Tribune on the Malecón, Havana's seafront, so there will be dancing. But joy, like so much else on the island, will be scarce. The struggle for decent food and basic goods makes people obsess about vegetables and conserving everything from soap to toilet roll. Few are in party mood.
Material hardship was eroding trust in the system, said Erikson. "A lot of people think the revolution has important accomplishments but pervasive scarcity puts economic questions at the front of their minds."
The government blames the long-standing US embargo. Unquestionably it has wrought havoc, but most analysts say communist central planning, stifling bureaucracy and lack of economic freedom have proved even more ruinous.
The state controls about 90% of the economy, obliging almost everyone to work for it, but pays an average monthly wage of about £12. A ration of rice, beans and other staples, and supposedly free public services, keeps people alive but does not avert grinding poverty.
To buy goods in the few decently stocked shops Cubans must change near worthless pesos into convertible pesos, a dual currency worth 24 times more that was designed for tourists.
"After I pay my rent I have $2 left for the month," said Miguel, 32, a whip-thin hospital doctor. As a favour, a European friend recently married Miguel to help him obtain an exit visa. "I want to get out," he said.
Poverty reeks from the decaying, overcrowded buildings of central Havana. Though from a distance they are picturesque, up close you see the grime and smell the plumbing. Likewise, the 1950s Chevrolets and Fords, surreal mechanical marvels, lose their charm if you are a sardine-wedged passenger or pedestrian choking on the fumes.
Cuba became dependent on tourism after the end of Soviet subsidies in 1991 triggered savage austerity and a need for foreign currency. With a casual tip dwarfing state wages, scientists, teachers and other professionals quit their jobs to become waiters, chambermaids and taxi drivers. "Our most brilliant minds - serving coffee," lamented Alvaro, a university lecturer turned tour guide...
Chris Hallam: The long shadow of 1979
Source: Guardian (UK) (1-1-09)
[Chris Hallam is a journalist specialising in current affairs.]
The year 1979 was the easily the most critical in Britain's 20th century peacetime political history. It is a landmark which polarises public opinion like no other and, 30 years on, the nation is still yet to fully recover from it.
For the left, it marks the point at which the nation took a fatal step in the wrong direction, turning against the warm certainties of the welfare state, towards the harsh realities of the Thatcherite market economy.
For the right, it is the year in which the nation saw the light, with the Conservative election victory in May 1979 heralding the beginning of a heroic and necessary onslaught against socialism and the trade unions. At the time, there were few signs that the general election result heralded a real sea change. True, Britain now had its first woman prime minister, but the Tory manifesto was not dramatically different from that of Ted Heath's short-lived government elected in 1970.
Thatcher's victory was also the sixth change of government in 35 years and with the Tories securing a middling majority of 43, there seemed little reason to think Labour, who had seemed sure of re-election only six months before, would not soon be back in office.
It was only later that 1979 would achieve its powerful historic resonance. The next three General Elections would see Tories evoking dramatic – frequently exaggerated - images of the 1979 "winter of discontent" (in reality, a series of strikes, barely worse than the Three-Day Week which had brought down Heath's Tories five years earlier) in a successful bid to demonstrate how far Britain had come.
To the right, 1979 marked the nadir of Britain's postwar fortunes, an image essential towards their campaign to transform the nation into a US-style market economy.
The success of New Labour in 1997, did at least, ensure that these images would never again be used to prop up a Tory election campaign. Yet New Labour was essentially a product of 1979 too, Blair recreating a party a world away from that led by Wilson and Callaghan 20 years before.
Thirty years on, the evidence of Britain's disastrous change in direction is only too apparent. The folly of the nation's over reliance on the markets and its neglect of public transport and the rights of the workforce are clear for all to see...
Jeff Stein: Jimmy Carter's Frosty Meeting With Spy Chief Bush
Source: http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk (12-31-08)
In light of CIA Director Michael V. Hayden's virtual plea to be kept on in the Obama administration, it's interesting to look back at a similar instance in 1976, when George H.W. Bush tried to get President-elect Jimmy Carter to retain him as his spy chief.
Carter loved the CIA briefings he had been getting during his campaign against President Gerald R. Ford, according to the agency's official history of presidential transitions.
Sometimes the sessions, which usually took place at his modest home in Plains, Ga., went on for six hours.
"Carter was a very careful and interested listener and an active participant," writes longtime CIA official John L. Helgerson, the study's author.
"All who were present remember that he asked a great many questions, often in minute detail. He was especially interested in the nature of the Intelligence Community's evidence, including satellite photography of deployed Soviet weapons."
Later, after winning the election, Carter "seemed to enjoy and benefit from the substantive discussions held at Blair House during his visits to Washington in the transition period."
Not so, though, when Bush, a future president himself, came to Plains looking to keep his job as DCI.
Carter was cold, Helgerson writes.
"Carter was unambiguous in his response after Bush finished his discussion of the pros and cons of his staying on as Director. The DCI had finished with an observation that -- all things considered -- he probably should be replaced. The President-elect, according to Bush, 'simply said, okay, or something like this, with no discussion, no questions about any of the points I had made.... As in the rest of the briefing, Carter was very cold or cool, no editorializing, no niceties, very business-like."
During their talk, Bush described "more than a dozen sensitive CIA programs and issues" for Carter, the CIA history says.
In contrast to the lively sessions he'd been having with his regular CIA briefers, "Carter had virtually no comment and asked no questions during the whole session" with Bush, the CIA history says.
"He had not indicated whether he thought the operations were good or bad, or that he was surprised or not surprised. He asked for no follow-up action or information. Bush commented that Carter 'seemed a little impatient, he didn't say much but seemed to be a little turned off. He tended to moralize.'"
The former Navy submarine nuclear officer found some CIA operations not to his liking, according to the CIA history.
"In fact, Carter was 'turned off' and uncomfortable with many of the Agency's sensitive collection programs. He ordered some discontinued ..."
Carter's running mate, Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale, tried to break the tension by complimenting Bush on his handling of the agency in the wake of a rash of revelations about CIA assassination plots and domestic spying carried out by his predecessors, "rather generously (saying) that things had gotten better since I'd been there."
But the three quickly moved on to "a discussion of the timing of the announcement of a new CIA Director-designate."...
SHUR: The Israeli myths debunked by the New Historians
Source: SHUR Working Paper Series. CASE STUDY REPORT – WP5. Israel – Palestine field research report (6-1-08)
[European research project Human Rights in Conflict: the Role of Civil Society (SHUR). Click here for an explanation of SHUR.]
1.Historical landmarks:
In this section, we will not focus on the chronology of the Palestinian-Israeli issue since 1948: such chronological description is easily accessible, whether in books or in in-depths articles,regularly published in quality publications such as Le Monde Diplomatique 5 . However, forthe sake of precision, a brief chronology of the main stages of the conflict is available at theend of the report. The aim of this section is to give an overview of the different narratives ofhistory presented by the different parties involved: these divergent narratives have had adramatic influence on past and present practical developments of the conflict. Simply put, wewill present first the “new historians”’ research on the establishment of the State of Israel thatis today increasingly acknowledged by the international community as the most validreference. Then we will consider the major issues that are at the heart of the Israeli andPalestinian narratives.
a) The “New Historians” 6 In 1978, archives were declassified in Israel, thus becoming accessible to academicand public scrutiny. Among the historians who worked on these archives, some of thembecame known as the “new historians”, offering a revised version of the historical narrative ofthe, until then, dominant view of Israel’s victory over its enemies. Avi Shlaïm in his latestbook entitled The Iron Wall, briefly presents the official Zionist version of the 1948 war: “Thenew born Jewish State engaged in a desperate battle, heroic and finally victorious, againstoverwhelming forces. In this war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians sought shelter inneighbouring Arab states, mainly following their leaders’ orders and awaiting a triumphalreturn. At the end of the war, the Israeli leaders strove for peace but could not find anyinterlocutor to talk to.” 7
Avi Shlaïm and other new historians such as Ilan Pappe, Tom Segev and BennyMorris present quite a different narrative, according to which the expulsion of the Palestiniansthat took place in 1948–49 was pre-planned by the Zionist leaders and implemented through aseries of military offensives against Arab towns and villages in the weeks preceding theestablishment of the Jewish state. David Ben Gurion, who proclaimed the State of Israel onMay 14 th 1948, refused to comply with the borders as defined by the 1947 UN Partition Plan. He sought to expand the territory allocated to the Jewish state and also to secure a minimum80% Jewish population. This implied a military strategy of driving out 500 000 to 800 000 Arabs from their towns and cities. On May 15 th, war was declared by the neighbouring Arabstates opposing the Partition Plan. Contrary to the accepted Israeli narrative, the armed forcesof the surrounding Arab States were on an equal footing only in the first three weeks of the war; Israeli troops gained superiority quite rapidly. The historians’ studies have been highly controversial in Israel, although their individual political positions vary significantly 8 . The practical impact of their work on Israel public opinion is difficult to evaluate. However, their work can be considered as a major milestone for Israel, insofar as we admit that peace may only come once historical injustices are acknowledged.
A handful of persons in Israel have been working for some years to bring about anIsraeli acknowledgement of the Palestinian narrative of the nakba, the catastrophe that befellthe Palestinians in 1948: ZOCHROT is one of the oldest and most respected one. Accordingto Eitan Bronstein, “we believe that knowing this narrative is essential in order toacknowledge the loss imposed on the Palestinians by Israeli Jews, and this recognition is anessential step for any future reconciliation. Even if we have peace tomorrow, realreconciliation between the two peoples will not happen until the Israelis recognise thePalestinian loss.” 9...
Phil Mason: The course of history often hinges on small accidents of chance
Source: Independent (UK) (12-31-08)
Ronnie of the Commies?
Ronald Reagan, the slayer of the "Evil Empire", might have been ruined before his political career began had his attempt to join the American Communist Party succeeded. He was rejected because the Communists thought him too dim. It emerged in a 1999 authorised biography that he had tried to join in 1938. Some of his closest friends were members. One, scriptwriter Howard Fast, revealed that he had felt "passionate" about it. But the Party refused him. "They thought he was a feather brain... a flake who couldn't be trusted with a political opinion for more than 20 minutes." As the anti-Communist blacklisting in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s destroyed many careers, Reagan flourished as an actor, then as President of the Screen Actors Guild, the actors' union. And, most importantly, his political credentials remained all-American.
The key to this disaster
The Titanic disaster might have been prevented had a member of the crew not forgotten to hand over the key to his locker. Second Officer David Blair was removed from the ship's roster at the last minute before the Titanic's departure in April 1912. In the haste of being replaced, Blair failed to pass to his replacement the key to the crow's nest locker, which held the binoculars. After the disaster, one of the surviving lookouts, Fred Fleet, giving evidence to the US inquiry, confirmed that they did not have any binoculars. Had they done so, he testified, they could have seen the iceberg earlier. When the inquiry chairman asked, "How much earlier?" the lookout replied, "Well, enough to get out of the way."...
Ronald J. Pestritto: Theodore Roosevelt Was No Conservative
Source: WSJ (12-26-08)
[Mr. Pestritto is the Shipley Professor of the American Constitution at Hillsdale College and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. Among his books are "Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).]
We know that Barack Obama and his allies identify themselves as "progressives," and that they aim to implement the big-government liberalism that originated in America's Progressive Era and was consummated in the New Deal. What remains a mystery is why some conservatives want to claim this progressive identity as their own -- particularly as it was manifested by Theodore Roosevelt.
The fact that conservative politicians such as John McCain and writers like William Kristol and Karl Rove are attracted to our 26th president is strange because, if we want to understand where in the American political tradition the idea of unlimited, redistributive government came from, we need look no further than to Roosevelt and others who shared his outlook.
Progressives of both parties, including Roosevelt, were the original big-government liberals. They understood full well that the greatest obstacle to their schemes of social justice and equality of material condition was the U.S. Constitution as it was originally written and understood: as creating a national government of limited, enumerated powers that was dedicated to securing the individual natural rights of its citizens, especially liberty of contract and private property.
It was the Republican TR, who insisted in his 1910 speech on the "New Nationalism" that there was a "general right of the community to regulate" the earning of income and use of private property "to whatever degree the public welfare may require it." He was at one here with Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who had in 1885 condemned Americans' respect for their Constitution as "blind worship," and suggested that his countrymen dedicate themselves to the Declaration of Independence by leaving out its "preface" -- i.e., the part of it that establishes the protection of equal natural rights as the permanent task of government.
In his "Autobiography," Roosevelt wrote that he "declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization to do it." The national government, in TR's view, was not one of enumerated powers but of general powers, and the purpose of the Constitution was merely to state the narrow exceptions to that rule.
This is a view of government directly opposed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 84. Hamilton explains there that the fundamental difference between a republican constitution and a monarchic one is that the latter reserves some liberty for the people by stating specific exceptions to the assumed general power of the crown, whereas the former assumes from the beginning that the power of the people is the general rule, and the power of the government the exception.
TR turns this on its head....
Anne Applebaum: Words That Matter
Source: WaPo (12-30-08)
On Christmas morning, my husband found a CD of "The Greatest Speeches of All Time" in his stocking. It was, if I may say so, an inspired gift. The title did prove somewhat misleading: Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" speech really didn't belong in this august collection, and I might not have chosen Winston Churchill's 1940 radio address as the sole example of his wartime rhetoric ("I have invincible confidence in the French army and its leaders"). There is also a fundamental problem with any such audio collection, which is by definition limited to the 20th century and can't include Abraham Lincoln, let alone Cicero. Any recorded collection purporting to be "the greatest speeches of all time" thus has to be taken with a grain of salt.
Still, after a presidential campaign marked by an unusually high standard of political rhetoric, it was weirdly revealing to listen to Martin Luther King Jr., Ronald Reagan, JFK and RFK, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and even Nixon, one after the other, out of chronological order. For one, their themes were surprisingly consistent, over the years, across parties, at different events and occasions. To some degree, this is to be expected: It's clear, when you listen to them together, that the authors of Ronald Reagan's 1987 Berlin wall speech ("We come to Berlin, we American presidents, because it's our duty to speak, in this place, of freedom") had carefully reread JFK's 1963 "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech ("Lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today, to the hopes of tomorrow beyond the freedom merely of this city of Berlin . . . to the advance of freedom everywhere").
But some of the other echoes were less obvious. Who remembers now that a 1983 speech by Reagan, forever famous because he used it to call the Soviet Union "an evil empire," also contained the following:
"Our nation, too, has a legacy of evil with which it must deal. The glory of this land has been its capacity for transcending the moral evils of our past. For example, the long struggle of minority citizens for equal rights, once a source of disunity and civil war, is now a point of pride for all Americans. We must never go back."
In that one paragraph, there are echoes of John F. Kennedy ("Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect") as well as of King, who so brilliantly appropriated the language of America's founding documents and made them into an irrefutable argument for civil rights:
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' "...
Archie Bland: The Big Question ... How important was Charles Darwin, and what is his legacy today?
Source: Independent (UK) (12-30-08)
[Archie Bland graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School in Journalism in 2007. He joined The Independent comment desk earlier this year after a stint on The Independent on Sunday.]
Why are we asking this now?
From the back of a £10 note to the awards in his name that celebrate those who remove themselves from the gene pool by dying in foolish ways, Charles Darwin's legacy is everywhere. He has been on more stamps than anyone save members of the royal family, and yesterday the Royal Mail unveiled another one, to celebrate 2009 as the 200th anniversary of his birth, and the 150th of the publication of his landmark work, The Origin of Species. But that's not the only way the occasion is being marked, and Darwin's influence is felt in far more profound ways than his popular cultural contributions to this day.
Why were Darwin's ideas so important?
It's a mark of how extraordinary a step Darwin took on humanity's behalf that a principle that seems so straightforward and uncontroversial today – that random mutations would make some species better suited to their environments than others, and that those species would be more likely to breed – could have caused such extraordinary upheaval as recently as 1859. Still, that's what happened.
The general idea of evolution preceded Darwin, and he shied away from making the explicit and incendiary claim that even humans were evolved from other creatures. But his explanation of natural selection as a mechanism that made evolution plausibly able to explain the origin of species without reference to a creator up-ended the contemporary orthodoxy. It set a new course that no subsequent scientific work could ignore. And according to the eminent late evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, "Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day."
How did Darwin first come to science?
Born in 1809, Darwin's early life was not especially distinguished. He was removed from school in Shrewsbury because of his poor progress, and dropped out of a medical course at Edinburgh University because he was revolted by working on bodies; "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching," his father wrote to him, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." But on a divinity course at Cambridge, in preparation for life in the church, Darwin's interest in natural history really began to develop, as a protege of the botany professor John Stevens Henslow.
Why are we asking this now?
From the back of a £10 note to the awards in his name that celebrate those who remove themselves from the gene pool by dying in foolish ways, Charles Darwin's legacy is everywhere. He has been on more stamps than anyone save members of the royal family, and yesterday the Royal Mail unveiled another one, to celebrate 2009 as the 200th anniversary of his birth, and the 150th of the publication of his landmark work, The Origin of Species. But that's not the only way the occasion is being marked, and Darwin's influence is felt in far more profound ways than his popular cultural contributions to this day.
Why were Darwin's ideas so important?
It's a mark of how extraordinary a step Darwin took on humanity's behalf that a principle that seems so straightforward and uncontroversial today – that random mutations would make some species better suited to their environments than others, and that those species would be more likely to breed – could have caused such extraordinary upheaval as recently as 1859. Still, that's what happened.
The general idea of evolution preceded Darwin, and he shied away from making the explicit and incendiary claim that even humans were evolved from other creatures. But his explanation of natural selection as a mechanism that made evolution plausibly able to explain the origin of species without reference to a creator up-ended the contemporary orthodoxy. It set a new course that no subsequent scientific work could ignore. And according to the eminent late evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, "Eliminating God from science made room for strictly scientific explanations of all natural phenomena; it gave rise to positivism; it produced a powerful intellectual and spiritual revolution, the effects of which have lasted to this day."
How did Darwin first come to science?
Born in 1809, Darwin's early life was not especially distinguished. He was removed from school in Shrewsbury because of his poor progress, and dropped out of a medical course at Edinburgh University because he was revolted by working on bodies; "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat-catching," his father wrote to him, "and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family." But on a divinity course at Cambridge, in preparation for life in the church, Darwin's interest in natural history really began to develop, as a protege of the botany professor John Stevens Henslow.
And how did he develop his ideas?
In 1831, after graduating from Cambridge, Darwin joined the HMS Beagle as the ship's naturalist on a five-year voyage around South America. Darwin later credited that trip with establishing the knowledge and working methods that would sustain his subsequent scientific career. His observations in South America, particularly on the variation in mockingbirds on different islands in the Galapagos, gave him the first inkling of what would subsequently become The Origin of Species. Famously, the first surviving record of his insight is in a sketch of a simple evolutionary tree under the tentative heading "I think". Over the next twenty-three years, he continued to develop and test that hypothesis, until in 1859 he was finally ready to publish the scientific theory that rocked the world.
Why was it so controversial?
Because before Darwin came to the subject, even the most devout adherents to the evolutionary theory had failed to come up with a good explanation of exactly how species became better suited to their environment over time. "Up until 1859," noted Ernst Mayr, "all evolutionary proposals endorsed linear evolution, a teleological march toward greater perfection."
Darwin stripped away that sense of fate. Simultaneously, he made available to the general public an understanding of the development of humankind that did away with the need for a creator. and introduced a way of looking at the world that seemed dangerous to many members of the establishment. Well aware of the subversive implications of his discoveries, he once said that explaining his beliefs was like "confessing to a murder".
What was the public reaction at the time?
The first public presentation of Darwin's ideas, alongside those of fellow pioneering evolutionary biologist Alfred Russell Wallace, drew little public reaction. But the publication of The Origin of Species sparked massive international interest, and the first print run of the book sold out before it appeared. While many hailed his findings as a huge step forward – including some within the clergy – the work also drew much opposition.
"Why not accept direct interference, rather than evolutions of law, and needlessly indirect or remote action?" one early review asked. "Having introduced the author and his work, we must leave them to the mercies of the Divinity Hall, the College, the Lecture Room and the Museum." And Darwin was denied a knighthood for his achievements by the influence of the church. Natural selection did not become a widely accepted principle until the 1930s. But in the end, one measure of how widely accepted Darwin's significance was, came in his death, when he became one of only five people outside of the royal family to be buried in Westminster Abbey in the nineteenth century.
So how influential are Darwin's ideas today?..
Tom Parfitt: Medieval warrior overcomes Stalin in poll to name greatest Russian
Source: Guardian (UK) (12-29-08)
[Tom Parfitt has been a correspondent in Moscow since 2002.]
Joseph Stalin was edged into third place in a nationwide poll to name Russia's greatest historical figure yesterday amid controversy over the results.
The Name of Russia project, which captivated the country for several months, ended with accusations that the final tally was rigged.
More than 5 million votes by telephone, text and the internet were registered in the poll, which named Alexander Nevsky, a medieval warrior prince, as the winner. Stalin had led the poll early on and narrowly missed the top spot.
The dictator took 519,071 votes compared to Nevsky's 524,575.
Critics said the results were massaged to produce winners convenient to the Kremlin. Nevsky rallied Russian forces against foreign invaders in the 13th century and has been promoted as a national hero by the Kremlin, which hints that Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and the president, Dmitry Medvedev, are unifying figures from the same mould.
In second place was Pyotr Stolypin, an early 20th century prime minister and noted reformer. Stolypin, who served under the last tsar, Nicholas II, has often been lauded by Putin as a role model whose attempts to achieve stability he would like to emulate.
Alexander Pushkin, the poet, came fourth while Catherine the Great, the only woman on the shortlist, was 11th.
Communists said the vote had been "cunningly" manipulated to prevent Stalin or first Soviet leader Lenin (who came sixth) winning because the Kremlin was embarrassed at their popularity.
In a statement, the Communist party said it had "no faith in the organisers of the voting project", who had decided Stalin and Lenin were "bad lads" who should not win. The results prompted the "same level of trust as in the central electoral commission", it said, in reference to Kremlin rigging of the presidential election in Russia earlier this year.
Launched in May, the project offered voters a chance to choose from 50 candidates, a number that was whittled down to the 12 most popular in September...
Spiegel Online: 'Eroding One of Turkey's Biggest Taboos' (interview)
Source: Spiegel Online (12-30-08)
More than 25,000 Turks have added their names to an online statement apologizing for Ottoman war crimes committed during World War I. SPIEGEL spoke with campaign initiator Baskin Oran.
SPIEGEL: Since the beginning of your online campaign, more than 25,000 Turks have signed a statement apologizing for war crimes committed by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. More than a million Armenians lost their lives in the catastrophic events which began in 1915. Is this the beginning of a critical examination of the past?
Oran: The Turks who are now apologizing are not responsible for the sins of 1915. There is no collective crime, but there is a collective conscience. With our campaign, we are eroding one of Turkey's biggest taboos. But still, the campaign is coming decades late.
SPIEGEL: Turkish nationalists say that you are damaging the country's image. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan agrees.
Oran: I disagree. I think that our image abroad will actually improve. Beyond that though, it is for the grandchildren of the Armenians who finally should hear an apology -- in a country like Turkey that has no "culture of apology."
SPIEGEL: What effect will the campaign have on Turkish-Armenian relations?..
Anne Applebaum: The sinister resurrection of Stalin
Source: Telegraph (UK) (12-29-08)
Who is the greatest Russian of all time? In the unlikely event that you answered “Stalin”, you would be in good company. One of the 20th century’s most horrific dictators has just come third in an opinion poll conducted by a Russian television station. Some 50 million people are said to have voted.
Myself, I have some doubts about the veracity of this poll, particularly given that the television station in question is state-owned, and therefore manipulated by the Kremlin. Also, first place went to Alexander Nevsky, a medieval prince who defeated German invaders – and an ideal symbol for the Putinist regime, which prides itself on its defiance of the West. Second place went to Piotr Stolypin, a turn-of-the-century economic reformer who, among other things, gave his name to the cattle cars (Stolypinki) in which prisoners were transported to Siberia – another excellent symbol for the “reformer with an iron fist” label to which both Prime Minister Putin and President Medvedev aspire.
Both seem too good to be true; neither had ever before seemed like candidates for such an august title. Had the poll been completely free, I expect Stalin would have come in first place. Why wouldn’t he? After all, the government, media and teaching professions in Russia have spent a good chunk of the past decade trying to rehabilitate him – and not by accident.
All nations politicise history to some extent, of course. But in Russia, the tradition of falsification and manipulation of the past is deeper and more profound than almost anywhere else. In its heyday, the KGB retouched photographs to remove discredited comrades, changed history books to put other comrades in places where they had not been, monitored and tormented professional historians. Russia’s current leaders are their descendants, sometimes literally.
But even those who are not the children of KGB officers were often raised and trained inside the culture of the KGB – an organisation that believed that history was not neutral but rather something to be used, cynically, in the battle for power. In Putinist Russia, events are present in textbooks, or absent from official culture, because someone has taken a conscious decision that it should be so....
Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum: An Oral History of the Bush White House
Source: Vanity Fair (2-1-08)
The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong? A sweeping draft of history—distilled from scores of interviews—offers fresh insight into the roles of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and other key players.
###
January 20, 2001 After a disputed election and bitter recount battle in Florida whose outcome is effectively decided by the Supreme Court, George W. Bush is sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States. In foreign affairs he promises an approach that will depart from the perceived adventurism of his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in places such as Kosovo and Somalia. (“I think the United States must be humble,” Bush said in a debate with his opponent, Al Gore.) In domestic affairs Bush pledges to cut taxes and improve education. He promises to govern as a “compassionate conservative” and to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He comes into office with a $237 billion budget surplus.
On the day of the inauguration the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, declares a moratorium on the Clinton administration’s last-minute regulations on the environment, food safety, and health. This action is followed in the coming months by disengagement from the International Criminal Court and other international efforts. Nonetheless, the early presumption is that the administration’s affairs are in steady hands, though some disquieting signs are noted.
In the Oval Office on January 20 the first President Bush and the new President Bush greet each other with the words “Mr. President.”
Dan Bartlett, White House communications director and later counselor to the president: It was a bitterly cold day. They got back to the residence from the inauguration. The president was going over to have his first moment in the Oval Office as president of the United States. And he called for his father because he wanted his father to be there when it happened. If I recall correctly, George H. W. Bush was soaking in the tub trying to warm up, because it had been so cold on the viewing stand. Not only did the former president quickly get out of the tub, but he put his suit back on, because he was not going to enter the Oval Office without a suit. His hair was still kind of wet.
Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: We thought we were going back to the old days of Bush 41. And ironically enough Rumsfeld, but even more Cheney, together with Powell, were seen as indications that the young president, who was not used to the outside world, who didn’t travel very much, who didn’t seem to be very experienced, would be embedded into these Bush 41 guys. Their foreign-policy skills were extremely good and strongly admired. So we were not very concerned. Of course, there was this strange thing with these “neocons,” but every party has its fringes. It was not very alarming.
Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: We had this confluence of characters—and I use that term very carefully—that included people like Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice, and so forth, which allowed one perception to be “the dream team.” It allowed everybody to believe that this Sarah Palin–like president—because, let’s face it, that’s what he was—was going to be protected by this national- security elite, tested in the cauldrons of fire. What in effect happened was that a very astute, probably the most astute, bureaucratic entrepreneur I’ve ever run into in my life became the vice president of the United States.
He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush—personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum....
Roger Pulvers: The Death of a Russian Poet 70 Years Ago ... and Why He Deserves to be Remembered
Source: Japan Times (12-28-08)
We live apart from our land
Our words dying at 10 paces
And anything put edgewise
Concerns the Kremlin backwoodsman
His coarse fingers are thick, like worms
His statements trusty, like the weights
on a scale
Cockroaches smile on his upper lip
And the rims of his shoes blind
He is surrounded by a flock of
pencil-neck hacks
He plays on the servility of half-men
Who whistle, who meow, who sob
But he alone roars and sticks it in
Forging his edicts like so many
horseshoes
One in the groin, one on the brow, one in the eye
Execution is his relish, this Southerner
With an open heart
By Osip Mandelstam, November 1933;
translation © Roger Pulvers, 2008
Has there ever been a poet with more courage? This is Osip Mandelstam's "ode" to the Russian dictator Josef Stalin (1878-1953). His reading of it to a small group of people, one of whom informed on him, led to his arrest and death on his way to the gulag 70 years ago, on Dec. 27, 1938.
Mandelstam's take on the world had never adjusted to what was called "Soviet reality." For one thing, he was a neo- classicist much too intimately tied, in his mind, his lifestyle and his poetry, to the pre-Russian Revolution idea of what constituted civilization. He himself wrote that he was dedicated to "the golden coin of the European humanist legacy."
Jewish, born in Warsaw on Jan. 15, 1891 — when Poland was part of the Czarist Russian empire — Mandelstam grew up in St. Petersburg and studied in France and Germany before returning to St. Petersburg to enter university in 1911. Even his early poetry, from this period, is stunningly mature, with rich geometric lyrics always under intense control but replete with innovative rhyming and subtle, often mischievous, wordplay.
As a child he became enchanted by the "sacred and festive" architecture of St. Petersburg. What he wrote of the 1917 Russian Revolution tells us a great deal about how it assaulted his sensitivities.
"The door to the old world has been opened to the masses. All of a sudden, everything is common property. . . . Go and take. Everything is accessible . . . all labyrinths, all hideouts, all hidden passageways."
I can think of no better way to describe his own poetry than as art with labyrinths, hideouts and hidden passageways.
By 1921, Mandelstam was living in the House of the Arts in St. Petersburg, writing that the city was "like a ship broken off its anchor." Residents there, among them satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and author/scholar Viktor Shklovsky, called him "the marble fly," an apt epithet given his slight frame and enduring, classical tastes. To Mandelstam, St. Petersburg was like his own immense amphitheater in which to declaim and remonstrate.
On May 17, 1934, a year after writing the poem on Stalin, he was arrested, becoming Case No. 4108. By all accounts, the interrogation (read torture) he underwent broke his health, if not his spirit, and he never recovered. (The poem is cited in the interrogation record, and he even wrote it out for his interrogators and signed it!) He was forced to tell them who he had shown the poem to; and when his wife, Nadezhda, visited him, he asked her to warn those people.
After his release he was sent into exile, living in a series of towns, including Voronezh, where he wrote some of his most brilliant poetry. The poet Anna Akhmatova was, after his wife, the person closest to him, though as she was in trouble herself with the man on whose upper lip the cockroaches smiled, there was little she could do for him.
The only person who might have been able to save Mandelstam — though it is doubtful anyone could have — was fellow poet, and novelist, Boris Pasternak (author of "Doctor Zhivago"). Pasternak approached Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent Bolshevik and then editor of the daily newspaper Izvestia, but Bukharin, too, was on his way to becoming a non-person (and was executed in March 1938).
"Why didn't you come to me instead of Bukharin?" said Stalin in an unexpected telephone call to Pasternak that was to become a traumatic event for the poet for the rest of his life. "If I were a poet and my friend were in trouble, I would do whatever I could to help him."
Stalin, as was his wont, enjoyed maintaining a pretense of equanimity, even to the extent of defending those who, with his own pen, he condemned to death.
Mandelstam was rearrested on May 1, 1937. This description of his final days, made by another prisoner, is telling . . .
"He just lay [in his bunk] for four days . . . not saying a word, his left eyelid kept twitching, he said nothing, but his eye kept winking."
If his wife Nadezhda had not committed his poems to memory, most of them would not have come down to us today. "In the last year in Voronezh," she wrote, "he couldn't go out alone. Even at home he was calm only when I was with him."
In a letter to Pasternak in April 1936, Mandelstam saw his Voronezh exile giving him "a second life." As he wrote to his father from there, he even started studying Spanish.
But he longed for someone to read poetry to, or with whom just "to have a conversation on the stairs." He called Voronezh his "caprice," his "knife" and his "raven" — the latter playing on sound associations in Russian between the words "raven" and "Voronezh," as well as with the name given to the black cars that came to get you in the dead of night.
Mandelstam, as his wife describes him in her two wonderful books, "Hope Against Hope" and "Hope Abandoned" (nadezhda, her name, is also the Russian word for "hope"), was a man with "an infinite sense of joy." This joy, and wonderment at all life's beauty, permeates his poetry.
The untimely loss of a single life, particularly by violent means, is always a tragedy, whether that person be Ivan the plumber or Osip the poet. But the silencing of a voice like Mandelstam's — lyrical, compassionate and profoundly humane — shouts to people across decades and centuries that this is a crime against all humanity.
It forces us to listen to — in a phrase that is the title of one of Mandelstam's books — "the noise of time."
Editorial in the Independent: Benazir Bhutto's divisive legacy to Pakistan
Source: Independent (UK) (12-27-08)
Pakistan's calendar is replete with difficult commemorations. But the first anniversary of Benazir Bhutto's death must be accounted among the most perilous of recent years. Always a divisive figure, Ms Bhutto still inspires sharply conflicting passions. With tens of thousands of people converging on the Bhutto family home today to pay their respects, elaborate security precautions will be tested to the full.
For all the despair of one year ago and the doom-laden forecasts for Pakistan that followed, the balance sheet has not been all negative. Ms Bhutto's death, in the midst of a keenly fought election campaign that her party had looked set to win, did not unleash the widespread violence that had been feared. The delayed election brought her People's Party to power.
The country also completed the transition to civilian rule, set in train by President Pervez Musharraf the previous year – even if it did not happen quite as he might have envisaged. Any suspicion that the former general's doffing of his uniform entailed no more than symbolic change was dispelled in August when Mr Musharraf resigned rather than face impeachment. The man who had reluctantly allied himself to Washington's anti-terrorism campaign after 9/11, at considerable risk to his authority at home, had paid a high price for his choice.
It is also worth noting that the government formed after last February's elections remains in power. After looking into the abyss of inter-communal warfare a year ago, Pakistan stepped back from the brink. A result has been a measure of welcome, and – it has to be said – unexpected, political stability in a country that has seen precious little of it down the years.
None of this, however, should obscure the potential for instability and violence that remains. That Ms Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari, essentially won the presidency on the back of the prime ministership that would have been hers illustrates the continuing sway of the clan, and the Bhuttos in particular, in Pakistan. The People's Party was, and continues to be, Benazir's party. Prospects for a durable system of civilian party politics remain slim. Each new transition, expected or unexpected, can be a flashpoint...
E.J. Dionne: The Jesus Of Christmas And The Holiday's True Meaning
Source: New Republic (12-25-08)
Each era depicts Jesus in its own characteristic way, and the late historian Jaroslav Pelikan wove a brilliant book around this theme. He traced images of Jesus from the earliest days of Christianity as "the rabbi" and "the king of kings" to more modern portrayals as "the teacher of common sense," "the poet of the spirit" and "the liberator."
The Jesus of Christmas, Pelikan tells us in "Jesus Through the Centuries," owes a particular debt to St. Francis of Assisi, who preached "a new and deeper awareness of the humanity of Christ, as disclosed in his nativity and in his sufferings."
It was St. Francis who, in 1223, set up the first creche in the Umbrian village of Greccio, depicting Christ's infancy in the rather less-than-regal circumstances of the manger. St. Francis founded a religious order that stressed liberation from the tyranny of material possessions and, Pelikan notes, the role of Christians as "strangers and pilgrims in this world."
The world is still blessed with many actual Franciscans. But in our time, there is another community of "strangers and pilgrims" whose satisfaction comes not from accumulating material goods or political power.
They are the relief workers and community builders lending their energy to the poorest people in villages and urban slums scattered around the globe.
Many of them are motivated by their religious faith, others by a humanistic devotion to service, but few who are in the trenches worry much about what their co-workers believe about an Almighty. These souls are among the happiest and most personally satisfied people I've encountered, suggesting that St. Francis was on to something in preaching freedom from materialism....
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- Arnold Shcherban on Humberto Fontova: Cuban Stalinism at 50--and the Media Lies Continue
- Arnold Shcherban on Jennifer Lind: Why do apologies for history sometimes work and sometimes don't?
- Bill Heuisler on Jennifer Lind: Why do apologies for history sometimes work and sometimes don't?
- Elliott Aron Green on Michael Radu: Playing games with history
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