Roundup: Talking About History
Carl M. Cannon: Frederick Douglass' July 4 Challenge Answered by Obama's Election
David Silbey: The First Rough Draft of History [Boxers, June 30, 1900]
David A Andelman: Versailles, 1919-2009: a new world order’s legacy
Fred Sargeant: It was the second night at Stonewall that pointed the way to gay liberation
Peggy Noonan: In appreciation of our country's founders
Source: WSJ (7-3-09)
Monday, July 1, was heavy and hot, and a full-scale summer storm passed through the city late in the morning. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania rose to speak. He knew he was endangering the respect in which he was broadly held, his "popularity," but he once again counseled caution: Slow down, separation from Britain is "premature," to declare independence now would be "to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper." When he sat down, "all was silent except for the rain that had begun spattering against the widows."
Then John Adams rose. He wished he had the power of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, he said; surely they had never faced a question of greater human import.
He made, again, the case for independence. Now is the time, the facts are inescapable, the people are for it, we are not so much declaring as acknowledging reality. "Looking into the future [he] saw a new nation, a new time, all much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend: '. . . We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.' " Outside the wind picked up and the storm struck hard with thunder and lightning. Storms had in the past unnerved Adams, but he spoke steadily, logically and compellingly for two hours.
After nine hours of debate, the voting commenced. The yeses were in the majority, but there were more noes than expected. Someone moved a final vote be taken the next morning. Adams and the rest hastily agreed.
That night word reached Philadelphia that the British fleet, a hundred ships, had been sighted off New York....
L. Brent Bozell: Oliver Stone, Lousy Historian
Source: Media Research Center (7-2-09)
Dear Oliver,
Many years ago, when Bill Maher’s comedy show was hosted by Comedy Central and he was funny, his formula for success was truly unique. Every week two sets of political and/or cultural opposites were pitted against each other, and he refereed with humor. It was all designed for a good laugh and succeeded because once upon a time Bill Maher was truly funny.
Some producer really thought in extremes when they pitted Oliver Stone and Brent Bozell for one episode. I have to say that you were gracious, charming, engaging, and we enjoyed ourselves – except for that moment when I chastised you for claiming you’re an historian. You bristled and denied ever claming that moniker. I cited the source, an interview in some West Coast paper (I can’t recall which one now). "I’m a filmmaker, that’s all," you told me.
Problem is, Oliver, you’re an historian whether you believe it or not. You make films about history and historical figures. You record history, and that makes you an historian.
Being an historian is not the problem. It’s that you’re a lousy historian.
Your last project was the movie W. I confess I didn’t watch it: I knew it would be a predictable left-wing spin about Bush being dumb and evil, and it could be worse because it could have been Cheney. Yawn. It bombed.
You were back on Maher’s show the other day talking about historical figures. Maher wanted to know why you haven’t done a film about Ronald Reagan, since "that is the type of character you could do very well with." God only knows what he meant by that, but when you gave your answer, you were pretty blunt.
"Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch," you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, "You know, I think that he was," and the audience now cheered and hooted and applauded.
See what I mean when I say you’re a lousy historian? Don’t take my word for it, Oliver.
I turned to Frank Donatelli, the White House Political Director under President Reagan from 1987 through 1989. I asked him what he thought of your observation. Here’s what he has to say:
"Bill Maher and Oliver Stone have both made careers of ad hominem attacks on their political opponents. As Reagan would say, 'It's not that they're ignorant. It's just that they know so much that isn't so.' The literature as written by conservative and liberal observers is overwhelming in concluding that Ronald Reagan was fully engaged in implementing policies during his presidency that resulted in the longest economic expansion in our history and the end of the Cold War and the defeat of Communism. His presidential reputation is growing and history will remember Reagan as one of the great presidents in our nation's history."...
Adam Freedman: Independence, British-Style
Source: NYT (7-2-09)
[Adam Freedman, the host of the Legal Lad podcast at quickanddirtytips.com, is a lawyer.]
Tomorrow night, as you watch the fireworks, don’t forget to raise a toast to George III. After all, it was the annual celebration of that king’s birthday on June 4 that gave Americans the habit of summer “illuminations.” After 1776, the ritual was cleverly rebranded to commemorate the republic’s birthday, just one month later.
That was just one example of the founders’ uncanny ability to cast British traditions in a new mold. Another example is the document we celebrate today: the Declaration of Independence. Little noticed today is that the Declaration co-opted the very language of English law to reject the mother country.
Four members of the committee assigned by Congress to write the Declaration were lawyers (Ben Franklin was the odd man out). As lawyers do, those draftsmen began by looking for a suitable precedent: was there a handy document available to justify getting rid of a monarch? Indeed there was: the 1689 English Bill of Rights. In that document, Parliament endorsed the ouster of the despotic James II as the only means to vindicate the “rights and liberties of the subject.”
The English Bill of Rights, like the Declaration, emerged at a moment of crisis. In 1689, the exiled James was raising an army to recapture the throne (he ultimately failed). To keep parliamentary opinion firmly against the old king, the Bill of Rights sets forth a long list of grievances against the crown....
Kathleen DuVal: Life, Liberty and Benign Monarchy?
Source: NYT (7-2-09)
[DuVal is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina, is the author of “The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent” and a forthcoming book on the American Revolution on the Gulf Coast.]
From the perspective of 2009, democracy in the United States is a great success. This makes it is easy to imagine that the march to democracy was the only path — that there is a clear line from the Declaration of Independence to the presidency of Barack Obama, and that democracy is the only fair society. But republican government was a risky choice at the time of the Revolution, and democracy was almost out of the question. There were more proven alternatives for running a society fairly. A look at two other contenders for control of the continent in 1776 — American Indians and Spaniards — reveals that democracy’s supremacy in promoting human rights was far from inevitable.
There were Indians fighting on both sides of the Revolution and others who tried to stay neutral. But whatever their choice, Indians did not fight for an American republic or a British constitutional monarchy but for their own goals, especially sovereignty. While American Indians were politically diverse, by the Revolution their most common governance structure consisted of multiple chiefs with limited power, advised by councils of elders. Chiefs led by persuasion rather than force. As a Mohawk man of the day explained, “We have no forcing rules or laws amongst us.”
For the British, a signed document was what sealed a treaty; but for the Indians they dealt with, a treaty had no validity without public acclaim. At a treaty negotiation, hundreds of people would gather for weeks, discussing and debating in formal sessions and over elaborate meals. Although not always reached, consensus was the ideal.
Historians and anthropologists have hypothesized that this extreme insistence on shared power was a reaction to the fall of earlier, hierarchical Mississippian chiefdoms, which had ruled much of North America from about 700 to 1600 A.D. Mississippian chiefs could be brutal. Weapons and art depicting violence are abundant at Mississippian archaeological sites. Some chiefs were buried with not only piles of luxury goods but also people, killed to accompany their leader in death.
Later American Indians may have inherited a distrust of centralized authority from their oppressed ancestors. Did Indians build democracies? No. Did they provide liberty and justice for their people? Often, yes. Indians built consensus-style government over time, in response to the hard lessons of history....
Carl M. Cannon: Frederick Douglass' July 4 Challenge Answered by Obama's Election
Source: Politics Daily (7-3-09)
[Carl M. Cannon is the senior Washington correspondent for PoliticsDaily.com.]
Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech on the National Mall, memorably described the Declaration of Independence as a "promissory note" that had guaranteed freedom to Americans of every color. Redeeming that note required a bloody Civil War. Redeeming it fully required a Second American Revolution -- the civil rights movement.
A century and a half ago, the logic and morality of that great struggle for equality was framed indelibly by a black man who asked a haunting question that challenged a nation's conscience, and rang through the decades. Frederick Douglass spoke on July 5, 1852 to an audience of abolitionists who had come to Rochester, N.Y., to hear the acclaimed orator – himself a runaway slave – address the meaning of America's great national holiday. In reference to its most memorable line, the speech is usually called "What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?"
Its official title, however, is "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro." And the uncomfortable implications it explored did not end with Emancipation. It took America more than 100 years to lay Jim Crow to rest; some of its vestiges are with us still. This Independence Day, however, African-Americans can gaze upon the residents of the White House and see faces that resemble their own.
This first Fourth of July when blacks in this nation can say – must say – to their children that the cherished national adage about any American growing up to be president is literally and demonstrably true. Barack Obama did not get to the White House on his own, as he frequently acknowledges, and he owes so much to so many, none of them any braver or more prescient than Frederick Douglass.
During the first half of the 19th century, many preeminent abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison did not look in the Constitution or the Declaration for their salvation. (Garrison once celebrated July 4 by burning a copy of the Constitution.) Was not slavery codified in that document? Was not the Declaration, for all its high-flying prose, written by a slave owner?
Douglass looked beyond all that. Siding with prominent abolitionists in Congress, including Ohio's Joshua Giddings and former president John Quincy Adams, Douglass cited the promise of the American Revolution and the nation's founding documents as soaring rationales for freeing the slaves. He extolled the memory of the patriots of '76. What was wanting, Douglass believed, was not the founders' resolve nor their writing – but the fortitude of their children and grandchildren. Americans, he avowed, had become content to celebrate the Fourth of July with firecrackers and speeches instead of finishing the hard work of freedom begun by their ancestors.
And this was how Douglass began his great speech, extolling the bravery and wisdom of the framers. Even in this opening section, however, his use of pronouns sets the stage for what is to follow. "Your nation," he calls the United States. "Your fathers," he says in reference to the nation's founders.
Then suddenly: "Pardon me," he says, as if to begin the speech anew. "What have I or those I represent, to do with your national independence?"
It took a great deal to answer that question. And with all due respect to John McCain – and every other 2008 presidential candidate – it was still being answered as recently as Nov. 4 of last year. Perhaps the election of Barack Obama has answered that question for all time. If so, one of the patriots whom we ought to toast this Independence Day weekend is Frederick Douglass, the American born into slavery in 1818 on a plantation on Maryland's Eastern Shore to a white father and a black field hand named Harriet Bailey...
Peggy Noonan: The Making of American History
Source: WSJ (7-3-09)
[Peggy Noonan is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and the best selling author of seven books on American politics, history and culture.]
Monday, July 1, was heavy and hot, and a full-scale summer storm passed through the city late in the morning. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania rose to speak. He knew he was endangering the respect in which he was broadly held, his "popularity," but he once again counseled caution: Slow down, separation from Britain is "premature," to declare independence now would be "to brave the storm in a skiff made of paper." When he sat down, "all was silent except for the rain that had begun spattering against the widows."
Then John Adams rose. He wished he had the power of the ancient orators of Greece and Rome, he said; surely they had never faced a question of greater human import.
He made, again, the case for independence. Now is the time, the facts are inescapable, the people are for it, we are not so much declaring as acknowledging reality. "Looking into the future [he] saw a new nation, a new time, all much in the spirit of lines he had written in a recent letter to a friend: '. . . We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.' " Outside the wind picked up and the storm struck hard with thunder and lightning. Storms had in the past unnerved Adams, but he spoke steadily, logically and compellingly for two hours.
After nine hours of debate, the voting commenced. The yeses were in the majority, but there were more noes than expected. Someone moved a final vote be taken the next morning. Adams and the rest hastily agreed.
That night word reached Philadelphia that the British fleet, a hundred ships, had been sighted off New York.
The next day, July 2, the final voting began. It went quickly. This was a pivotal moment in the political history of man. A creative, imaginative, historically conscious person in the middle of a thing so huge and full of consequence will try to notice things, to keep them forever in his eyes and pass them on. Here is a thing John Adams would never forget:
At 9 in the morning, just as the doors to the Congress were to be closed, "Caesar Rodney, mud spattered, 'booted and spurred,' made his dramatic entrance. The tall, thin Rodney—the 'oddest-looking man in the world,' Adams once described him—had been made to appear stranger still, and more to be pitied, by a skin cancer on one side of his face that he kept hidden behind a scarf of green silk. But, as Adams had also recognized, Rodney was a man of spirit, of 'fire.' Almost unimaginably, he had ridden eighty miles through the night, changing horses several times, to be there in time to cast his vote."
All of these quotes are from David McCullough's "John Adams." More on Mr. McCullough in a moment.
The vote was completed: 12 for independence, New York abstaining, no one opposing. "The break was made, in words at least: on July 2, 1776, in Philadelphia, the American colonies declared independence. If not all 13 clocks had struck as one, twelve had, and with the others silent the effect was the same."
On July 3, Congress argued over the wording and exact content of the formal Declaration. An indictment of the slave trade was dropped. In all, Thomas Jefferson saw roughly 25% of what he'd written wind up on the floor.
On July 4, discussion ended, debate was closed, a vote on the final draft of the Declaration of Independence was called, and the results were as on July 2. Congress ordered the document be printed. They'd sign it in a month. For now, John Hancock and one other, Charles Thompson, fixed their signatures.
Those present thought the great day had been July 2—the vote for independence itself. John Adams, who'd emoted over the 2nd in letters to Abigail, didn't even mention the 4th , and Thomas Jefferson famously went shopping that afternoon for ladies' gloves.
But on the morning of July 5, the people of Philadelphia started getting their hands on independently printed copies of the Declaration, and the impact was electric: My God, look what they said yesterday—"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." And on the 6th, a local newspaper carried the text of what had been agreed upon on the 4th. And so the celebration of the Fourth of July as one of the signal moments in the history of human freedom, was born. And so we mark it still.
On David McCullough: Almost all the details in the above come from his "John Adams" and "1776". He is America's greatest living historian. He has often written about great men and the reason may be a certain law of similarity: He is one also. His work has been broadly influential, immensely popular, respected by his peers (Pulitzer Prizes for "Truman" and "John Adams," National Book Awards for "The Path Between the Seas" and "Mornings on Horseback") and by the American public. It is not often—it is increasingly rare—that the academy shares the views of the local dry cleaner, the student flying coach and the high school teacher, but all agree on Mr. McCullough, as they did half a century ago on, say, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. He is admired by normal people and esteemed by the intellectual establishment.
Why? Here are a few reasons. He has the eye of a gifted reporter and the depth of a historian. He sees and explains the true size of an incident or endeavor, he factors in, always, the fact that we are human, and he captures the detail that is somehow so telling—it was a scarf of green silk, not soft muslin, that Rodney wore to the vote on American independence. He writes like a dream, of course. He is broad gauged and has range—the Johnstown flood, the building of the Panama Canal, the founders.
Mr. McCullough betrays no need to be contrarian but is only too happy to knock down history's clichés, to wit George III, the mad doofus, who was in fact "tall and rather handsome" and played both the violin and piano. "His favorite composer was Handel, but he adored also the music of Bach." He rendered "quite beautiful architectural drawings," assembled a distinguished art collection, collected books that in time constituted "one of the finest libraries in the world," loved astronomy, was nonetheless practical, and had a gift for putting people at their ease. He impressed even crusty old Samuel Johnson, who after meeting him called him "the finest gentleman I have ever seen." As for the famous madness, he suffered not during the American Revolution but later in life from what appears to have been "prophyria, a hereditary disease not diagnosed until the twentieth century."
One can't know if Mr. McCullough is correct in his judgment here, or fully so. One can know he inspected the available data, pondered it, and attempted a fair-minded assessment. He is reliable. (Of how many can that be said?) And he loves America. His work has gone to explaining it to itself, to telling its story...
Duncan Currie: Whose Reagan Is It, Anyway?
Source: National Review Online (7-2-09)
[Duncan Currie is managing editor of The American. Prior to joining the magazine in September 2007, he spent more than three years writing for The Weekly Standard. He has been a “Publius” fellow at the Claremont Institute and a Phillips Foundation journalism fellow. His essays have been featured in a number of publications, including The National Review. (Courtesy, The Journal of American Enterprise Institute).]
Ramesh has a smart piece in the latest NR on the right and wrong lessons to draw from Ronald Reagan. “When invoking Reagan,” he writes, “conservatives are prone to two characteristic vices: hero-worship and nostalgia. To hear some conservatives talk, you would forget that Reagan was a human being who made mistakes, including in office. You would certainly forget that movement conservatives were frequently exasperated with Reagan’s administration.”
Indeed, during Reagan’s final years in the White House, many conservatives became disillusioned with his embrace of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his pursuit of arms control. In January 1988, the New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article documenting this angst (titled “The Right Against Reagan”). “The president doesn’t need to discard the people who brought him to the dance,” grumbled North Carolina senator Jesse Helms. Conservative activist Howard Phillips labeled Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda.”
Shortly before the Gipper left office, columnist George Will lamented that he had “accelerated the moral disarmament of the West — actual disarmament will follow — by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.” Will also said that “in the Reagan years there has been what [Daniel Patrick] Moynihan calls a hemorrhaging of reality regarding the fiscal requirements for strength and prosperity. This is a consequence of the narcotic of cheerfulness.”
In recent years, both conservatives and liberals have used the 40th president as a cudgel to bash George W. Bush. Yet they have often misrepresented Reagan’s actual record. (Fred Barnes addressed this in a 2006 Wall Street Journal op-ed.)
The Reagan record includes lowering the top marginal income tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent; giving Fed chief Paul Volcker the political support he needed to squeeze the money supply and curb inflation; promoting free markets and limited government; spearheading trade liberalization; making a brief, failed effort to reduce Social Security benefits; putting a slew of judicial conservatives on the federal bench; introducing the pro-life Mexico City Policy on abortion; resisting calls for a nuclear freeze; deploying cruise and Pershing missiles in Western Europe; launching the Strategic Defense Initiative; invading Grenada; aiding anti-Communist rebels in the Third World; bombing Libya; and talking tough on the Soviet Union.
But it also includes raising various taxes; expanding Social Security; endorsing certain protectionist measures, such as tariffs and quotas on Japanese imports; approving an amnesty for illegal immigrants; appointing two of the three Supreme Court justices who would later author the 1992 Casey decision, which reaffirmed Roe v. Wade; withdrawing U.S. military forces from Beirut after 241 American servicemen were killed in a terrorist attack; trading arms for hostages in the Iran-Contra affair; favoring the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons, a desire he expressed at the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev in 1986; signing a landmark arms-reduction pact (the INF Treaty) with the Soviet boss in 1987; and leaving behind a steep budget deficit....
Mara Lazda: Fascism Past and Present, West and East
Source: H-German (7-1-09)
Roger Griffin, Werner Loh, Andreas Umland, eds. Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An International Debate on Concepts and Cases in the Comparative Study of the Extreme Right. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2006.
Reviewed by Mara Lazda (Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts)
Fascism Past and Present, West and East invites readers to take part in an international debate with thirty-one German- and English-speaking experts on fascism. On the surface, some of the key questions that frame the discussion are familiar, long-discussed ones: is German National Socialism best studied as a unique phenomenon or a form of fascism? Is fascism a strictly European phenomenon, confined to the period between 1918 and 1945, or are today's extreme right groups also "fascist"? But the ensuing discussion is hardly a simple revisiting of past questions and debates. Rather, the volume takes important steps in reshaping the study of fascism and in suggesting directions for future research. Significantly, the editors aim to examine fascism in the context of Soviet and post-Soviet studies. As Andreas Umland notes in the introduction, "The study of contemporary mainstream (and not only fringe) politics in Russia is a setting where 'fascism' is still a topical, and not only academic matter" and where fascism is "a concept of societal concern" (p. 22). In addition, Umland points to the significance of Germany as the place of publication, where studies of "totalitarianism" have branched into the discipline of "extremism studies" (p. 23). The volume's goals, then, are not only to rethink definitions of fascism but also to break down traditional divides of scholarship between West and East.
This challenging work--with over fifty short essays by leading scholars of fascism--features the arguments of Roger Griffin, beginning with his essay, which introduces the agenda for the rest of the volume (section 1), followed by critiques of Griffin (section 2),[1] his response to criticisms (section 3), a second round of critiques (section 4), and Griffin's final response (section 5). (The original discussion represented in this piece took place in Erwägen Wissen Ethik in 2004-2005). The Griffin article and discussion are followed by a secondary debate on the "fascism" of Russian political activist Aleksandr Dugin and an afterword by Walter Laqueur.
In this piece, "Fascism's New Faces (and Facelessness) in the 'Post-Fascist' Epoch," Griffin's analysis takes on three main tasks: to offer a "definitional core" of fascism that reflects a "new consensus" of "Anglophone fascist studies" (p. 29); to build a case, elaborated in his longer publications,[2] for the comparative study of fascism, thereby both rethinking the uniqueness of Nazism and examining the nature of post-1945 global fascist "variants" (p. 29); and to challenge German academics in particular who, according to Griffin, continue to resist comparative studies of fascism. Echoing Umland's introductory concerns, Griffin wants to draw attention to "the threat that the extreme right still poses to democracy" (p. 35).
In brief, Griffin offers the following "heuristic tool" for the comparative study of fascism: "fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism" (p. 41). The very vagueness of "national rebirth," Griffin argues, encompasses the "conceptual fuzziness at the ideological core of fascism" (p. 44), which has been seen as both revolutionary and reactionary. Moreover, focusing on "national rebirth" as a key element of interwar fascism allows scholars to trace the development of fascism after World War II and to evaluate how fascist movements adapted to a post-1945 environment where liberal democracy had defeated and delegitimized fascism.
Recent manifestations of fascism, such as the European New Right and National Bolshevism, Griffin argues, have adapted to the post-1945 world in at least three significant ways. First, calls for "national rebirth" have become globalized, based less on the nation than on Western superiority or "white supremacy" (p. 51). Second, instead of using established political channels and processes to gain influence, recent fascists "have vacated the party-political space" and now focus more on "the battle for minds" (p. 51). Third, in contrast to the leader-centered, though still amorphous, structure of interwar fascist groups, today's global fascist movements lack centrality and are divided into small groups, resulting in "groupuscularization" and a "rhizomic" organizational structure (pp. 54-55). As he makes these distinctions between fascism past and present, however, Griffin emphasizes that adaptations of the New Right are not a complete departure from interwar fascism, but indicate instead an evolution of fascism: "Far from fading away to insignificance, fascism has displayed a vigorous Darwinian capacity for creative mutation" (p. 56). In sum, focusing on the "mythic core" of interwar fascism rather than on structural or stylistic characteristics such as the leader cult or militarism not only opens up discussions of fascism to include Nazism, it allows the recognition of an existing fascist threat as well.
Although Griffin finds general support in the material that follows, in particular regarding his call for the comparative study of fascism and inclusion of Nazism in a more general model (see, for example, the still-critical endorsements by Siegfried Jäger and Alfred Schobert, Philip J. Morgan, and Kevin Passmore), both German and Anglophone scholars are reluctant to accept Griffin's "definitional core." Griffin concludes from the responses that "the argument ... has been rejected by a fairly representative sample of contemporary academics" (p. 246). David Baker and Ernst Nolte, among others, note that Griffin's model of "national rebirth" on its own is too abstract to act as a methodological tool (p. 73) without application to specific cases, and, moreover, can be applied just as well to conservative, non-fascist as well as leftist groups; Klaus Holz and Jan Weygand call his ascription of the "myth of national rebirth" specifically to fascist ideologies "ahistorical" and "empirically false" (pp. 123-124). Alexander de Grand argues that, above all, "fascism offered a compelling myth of unity more than it did of national rebirth" (p. 95). Jeffrey M. Bale contends, referencing the work of Zeev Sternhell, that the definitional focus on the "myth of national rebirth" is "incomplete," and that Griffin underestimates the role of the Left in shaping fascism (p. 78).
James Gregor contributes one of the most critical assessments of Griffin's definition, finding objections on several grounds: the concept of "populist ultranationalism" could just as well be applied to the "Marxist" Khmer Rouge, yet Griffin would agree they were not "fascist" (pp. 118, 311); ultranationalism does not adequately account for Nazism and Hitler's racism (not nationalism); "fascism" is too quickly applied to post-1945 extremist groups, especially if one considers that the leaders do not see themselves as fascist. Other respondents are also wary of extending the definitional core to recent extremism, objecting to the overly abstract idea of "groupuscularization" that could describe groups in the interwar period (for example, Jeffrey Bale; Roger Eatwell, and Wolfgang Wippermann). Alexander de Grand points to the contradiction in Griffin's argument that internationalism has replaced nationalism, which then leads to questions the applicability of an interwar fascist model to the postwar context.
After reflecting on the comments of the participants in both the first and second rounds, Griffin offers thoughtful responses and reevaluations that are somewhat conciliatory. He suggests that perhaps he is guilty of "biting off more than I could chew" (p. 244). In particular, he softens his criticism of German scholarship and his depiction of an Anglophone-German divide. In response to accusations of generalization and essentialism, Griffin notes that "generic terms" are the starting point of analysis, and that the "definitional minimum" is not sufficient "without soaking oneself in as many case-studies of the phenomenon as possible" (p. 258). Griffin does modify his theses through the discussions, as do his critics. He concedes, for example, that some concepts in his definition require precision; in the future, he would address the significance of both "myth" and "rational projects" in fascist ideology (p. 434). Nevertheless, Griffin stands by his main arguments: that fascism and Nazism should be considered manifestations of a larger generic phenomenon, and share a desire for "national rebirth," and that notwithstanding differences in organizational structure, fascism has adapted to the post-1945 environment and, in order to understand this mutation, scholars would do well to refer to the experiences of interwar fascism and the conditions that contributed to its emergence.
The apparent impossibility of Griffin and his most severe critics to come to a definitive consensus should not detract from the rich contribution this innovative volume makes to the study of fascism and to European and comparative history. Together, the exchanges advance the study of fascism by pointing to ways in which scholars may benefit from considering fascism together, as Griffin suggests, as both a "political generic concept" and "as a historical term" (p. 277). The participants represent different areas of expertise on fascism and the extreme right, and their discussions suggest intriguing areas for future research, such as the relationship between nationalism and racism--a distinction raised in particular by Gregor.
Perhaps the most significant contribution the volume makes is in shifting common approaches to European and comparative history. In organizing an international forum for the discussion of fascism, the editors challenge Cold War divisions--both the geographic divide between the "West" and "the rest" and the temporal divide of "1945 and after" that regrettably continue to inform much scholarship. This shift would have been even stronger if discussion of the "East" could have been more evenly woven through the work; the most direct engagement now appears as a secondary debate between Andreas Umland and A. James Gregor on Aleksandr Dugin at the end of the book.
This book will be a valuable resource for scholars of fascism in research and for teachers seeking to provide students a glimpse into academic discourse. In his afterword, Walter Laqueur questions how significant the concept of fascism will be for future generations of scholars. The forum in Fascism Past and Present, West and East, however, suggests that debates on fascism will continue to have much value in advancing our understanding of global extremism, as well as in rethinking comparative studies of the past and present.
Notes
[1]. The respondents include the leading scholars of the field, both junior and senior: David Baker, Jeffrey M. Bale, Tamir Bar-On, Alexander De Grand, Martin Durham, Roger Eatwell, Peter Fritzsche, A. James Gregor, Klaus Holz and Jan Weyand, Siegfried Jäger and Alfred Schobert, Aristotle A. Kallis, Melitta Konopka, Bärbel Meurer, Philip Morgan, Ernst Nolte, Kevin Passmore, Stanley G. Payne, Friedrich Pohlmann, Karin Priester, Sven Reichardt, David D. Roberts, Albert Scherr, Robert J. Soucy, Mario Sznajder, Andreas Umland, Leonard Weinberg, and Wolfgang Wippermann.
[2]. See, for example, Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St.Martin’s, 1991); Griffin, ed., Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Griffin, ed., International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). His most recent publication is Modernism and Fascism: A Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Doug Ireland: Queer studies matter
Source: Excerpted from Inside Higher Ed with permission of the author (6-24-09)
[Doug Ireland is a veteran political reporter covering both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently the U.S. correspondent and columnist for the French political‑investigative weekly Bakchich, and international affairs editor for Gay City News, New York City's largest LGBT weekly newspaper.]
Sad to say, much of what comes out of university gay studies programs these days is altogether too precious, artificial and written in an academic jargon that is indigestible to most LGBT people. Reclaiming our own history is still not getting enough attention from these programs (witness Larry Kramer's long and ultimately failed fight to have the Larry Kramer Initiative he and his brother endowed at Yale become more history‑oriented and relevant).
The OutHistory website -- founded by superb, pioneering gay historian and scholar Jonathan Ned Katz -- desperately needs more institutional financial support to continue and expand its important work of creating the world's largest online historical archive of LGBT historical materials. OutHistory's innovative program to cooperatively and simultaneously co‑publish historian John D'Emilio's work on Chicago LGBT history in that city's gay newspaper, the Windy City Times -- a program which it also hopes to expand -- should be a model for the way gay studies programs can become more relevant to the majority of queers outside the hothouse of academe and to the communities by which our universities are surrounded.
We need to know where we've been to know where we should be going, yet there is still a paucity of attention paid to the history and evolution of the modern gay movement, to the death of gay liberation, with all its glorious rambunctiousness and radical emphasis on difference, and its replacement by what Jeffrey Escoffier has called the assimilationist "gay citizenship movement," which is staid, narrow‑gauge in its fund raising‑driven focus (on gay marriage and the like), and inaccurate in the homogenized, white, nuclear‑family‑imitative portrait of who we are that the wealthiest entities in the institutionalized gay movement present and foster.
One of my greatest criticisms of today's institutionalized gay movement is its isolationism. Our largest national organizations shun the concept of international solidarity with queers being oppressed in other countries, claiming their "mission" is only a domestic one. This is in sharp contrast to European LGBT organizations, where the duty of international solidarity is universal and a priority.
Gay studies programs should be encouraging more scholarship on the 86 countries which, in 2009, still have penal laws against homosexuality on the books, and in helping to give voice to the same‑sexers and gender dissidents in those hostile environments who have difficulty publishing in their own countries or where gay scholarship is banned altogether.
To cite just two examples, the ongoing organized murder campaign of "sexual cleansing" in Iraq being carried out by fundamentalist Shiite death squads with the collusion of the U.S.‑allied government is killing Iraqi queers every day, and the horrors of the Islamic Republic of Iran's violent reign of terror against Iranian LGBTs is driving an ever‑increasing number of them to flee their homeland ‑‑ gay scholars have a role to play in helping these people reclaim their history and culture.
Why is it that the most sensitive, rigorous, and complete account of the way in which homosexuality has been extensively woven into Persian culture in sophisticated ways for over 1500 years has just been published by a non‑gay historian, Janet Afary (Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, Cambridge University Press)? In the hands of Iranian queers, this book will become a weapon of liberation against the theocratic regime's campaign to erase that history and keep it from the Iranian people. University presses need to publish more work by queer writers from LGBT‑oppressing countries (as MIT and Semiotexte have just done with Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia's fine autobiographical novel Salvation Army).
In many countries, homophobia and homophobic laws are part of the legacy of colonialism, and were imported from the West. But where is the gay scholar who has developed a serious critique of and rebuttal to the homophobic conspiracy theories of Columbia University's Joseph Massad, who has invented a "Gay International" he accuses of being a tool of Western imperialism (Massad provides a theoretical framework utilized by infantile leftist defenders of Teheran's theocratic regime for attacks on those, including Iranians, who expose the ayatollahs' inhumane persecutions of queers and sexual dissidents)?
One small, concrete and simple but powerful gesture of international solidarity would be for gay studies programs to sponsor book donation drives to make gay history and culture available to those many queers in oppressed countries who thirst for it as they construct their own identities and struggle for sexual freedom. I can tell you from my own reporting as a journalist that making such knowledge available can save lives.
Let's hope that it won't take 10 years to have less artificial, picky intellectual onanism of the obscure theoretical variety and more gay scholarship that's accessible and relevant to people's lived lives and struggles, in other countries as well as our own. "
David Silbey: The First Rough Draft of History [Boxers, June 30, 1900]
Source: Edge of the American West (blog) (6-30-09)
[David Silbey teaches history at a small American university that is, technically, in an extremely eastern part of the American West.]
Journalism is famously the “first rough draft of history” and today I want to look for a moment at what kind of draft it is. To do so, I’ve taken a relatively short article from the New York Times of June 30, 1900, and read it closely. How well does an article written in the heat of the moment stand up for the long term?
The short answer: not well. The long answer, however, is that it is interesting to analyze how the article was constructed, what agendas were served, and where inaccurate or shaded information served some purpose other than simply reporting. As a factual account of events prior to June 30, 1900, the article failed. As a source for a history of that period, the article seems to me eminently useful.
Before we explore those answers further, let me lay out a bit of the background to the article. Since early June, 1900, the crisis in China had grown enormously. Early in the month, the western powers sent several hundred guards–soldiers, marines, and sailors–up to the foreign embassies in Beijing to protect them from the Boxers. Within a few days of that arrival, the train and telegraph lines from Beijing were cut, and almost all communication with the capital was lost. The naval forces assembled off the coast at Dagu in the Yellow Sea put together a scratch force of whatever fighting men they had available, led by Admiral Edward Seymour took the train north from Tianjin, close to Dagu, in hopes of being able to repair breaks in the line and make it quickly to Beijing. They failed, and had to fight their way back to Tianjin, reaching it in late June.
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| Admiral Edward Seymour |
The article is a story about Seymour’s report of his expedition to the British Admiralty. “SEYMOUR’S STORY OF HIS STRUGGLE,” it is headlined. “Fought Against Terrific Odds Till Near Peking. Opposed by Chinese Troops. Captured Immense Stores of Arms and Ammunition” are some of the sub-headlines. The article goes wrong in the second sentence. “It [the expedition] reached Anting, twelve miles from Peking, and was continually engaged with Boxers and sometimes with Imperial Troops.” The expedition did not actually reach Anting, but stopped short at Anping, which is about 30 miles from Beijing. The expedition had engagements with both Boxers and imperial troops, but they were not continual (in the sense that the fighting never stopped). The errors here are relatively minor and are almost surely because Seymour himself made the same errors in his report to the Admiralty. We should note, of course, that the errors all made Seymour’s effort appear more nearly successful and more dangerously difficult than it actually it was.
“The mariner captured great quantities of arms, ammunition, and rice.” Surely true; on the way back to Tianjin, Seymour’s force captured an imperial armory, which contained all that listed, and blew it up. The paper picked this up from Seymour’s report as well, in which the Admiral bragged of capturing “immense” stores of arms and ammunition of the “latest pattern.” That last phrase is key. Seymour seems to me to have been implying that he had denied the use of the weapons to the Chinese, and not just any kind of weapons, but the very latest, most advanced kind. Again, the report, and the news article from which it was taken, put things in a way most favorable to the Admiral.
“As it is now certain that the envoys and attachés were not with Seymour, their fate is as much a mystery as ever. According to a Chinese report, they were safe in Peking on June 25.” Now the paper had to walk back an earlier error, a report that Seymour had reached the legations and rescued the embassy personnel. The reporter framed that correction (fairly enough, I think) as a clarification “As it is now certain…” and his framing (”as much of a mystery as ever”) served to cast doubt on the Chinese assertion that they were “safe.”
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| Washington official? |
“Washington officials have a theory that the members of legations have been hidden by the Chinese Government, and that the latter is sending out misleading reports as to their whereabouts in order to insure their safety front attack.” This was not completely wrong, as the article put the idea down to unnamed Washington officials (nice to see that anonymous sourcing has a long history), but it turned out to be inaccurate: the embassy residents and their guardians never left the foreign enclave in Beijing, and the Chinese government’s reports were actually reasonably accurate. But–assuming for a moment that this anonymous source was planting the idea for a specific reason–what could that agenda be? The United States didn’t favor intervening originally, but by late June that was no longer the case, so it would be odd to be planting the idea that marching on Beijing would be useless. What, then? Was it idle speculation picked up by a reporter? Was it simply bad intelligence? Was it a way to exonerate Seymour even further by making it seem as if the people of the legations weren’t even in Beijing?
“The Viceroys of Nanking and Hankow have cabled to the Chinese Ministers at various capitals the text of a proposed agreement, to be signed by the Consuls at Shang-hai, By it the Viceroys undertake to protect foreigners so long as the powers refrain from armed intervention in the Yang-tse-Kiang region.” Here the reporter went from being a stenographer for Seymour and unnamed Washington officials to being one for Chinese Viceroys. The cable sent by those Viceroys was never likely to be useful in the way presented. An agreement by all the Viceroys would not and could not commit the western powers to anything. In essence, it would be a meaningless document. But what it could be was be a bit of political theater: look, the Viceroys were saying, we have agreed to protect foreigners in our areas (unlike the Imperial Throne). Now, please focus on Beijing and don’t attack us.
The last two sentences of the article have the feeling of being tacked on, for little reason than to fill out space. First: “From Paris a report comes that the powers have reached an agreement as to spheres of influence and the number of troops to be sent by each nation to China.” Accurate, but oddly phrased in the passive voice and with a conspicuous lack of detail. Who is reporting this? What are the spheres of influence? How many troops? Second and last: “A coup d’etat is expected in Peking, if one has not taken place already.” This was a deeply strange last sentence. Who expected a coup? From where is this information coming? Who is going to mount the coup? There’s no transition to what would seem to be a major piece of news, nor were there any specific details mentioned. It seems like a random nugget of information that, wandering by, decided to hop onto this story for a ride.
The article was, factually speaking, almost entirely wrong. In some cases, like the report of the incipient coup d’etat, it would need much more detail simply to rise to the level of incorrectness. But in a historical sense, I find it useful. The mixing of agendas and the various maneuverings seem to illustrate nicely a number of different tensions, invisible forces pulling bits of scenery around the stage. Admiral Seymour had headed to Beijing on vulnerable rail-line, failing to secure his lines of communication. That gamble had failed badly. Now, he was working his hardest to redeem that effort and that gamble, at least to his superiors and to the public. Imperial viceroys, conscious of the inability of the throne to manage either the Boxers or the western imperial powers, were trying to separate themselves and work out their own deals. And, mysteriously, unnamed Washington officials were planting ideas in the head of a reporter, for what purpose remains unclear. The article–like that scenery of a play–may not be an accurate picture of the land it portrays, but as an impression, it evokes quite a bit.
David A Andelman: Versailles, 1919-2009: a new world order’s legacy
Source: OpenDemocracy (6-29-09)
[David A Andelman is the editor of World Policy Journal and the author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today (Wiley, 2007) ]
The real roots of many major recent and current political events - the convulsions surrounding Iran's Islamic regime, the bloody troubles in neighbouring Iraq, the ethnic cleansing and mass murders in the Balkans, even numerous wars and uprisings from Palestine to Indochina - lie in a ceremony that occurred ninety years ago. This was the gathering in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, outside Paris, on 28 June 1919, when the representatives of the victors in the first world war dictated the terms of peace to the quivering representatives of Germany's Kaiser.
"The stillest three minutes ever lived through were those in which the German delegates signed the Peace Treaty", the New York Times correspondent Charles A Selden reported in next morning's newspaper. As American delegate George Louis Beer wrote in his diary, "Two German delegates [were] led like felons into the room to sign their doom. It was like the execution of a sentence."
But it was no less an execution for the billion or more innocent people in territories whose borders were so cavalierly rearranged by the delegates in the fraught months of negotiation that preceded this signing. For the document called the Treaty of Versailles dramatically transformed the world and set the stage for so many contemporary problems (see A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today [Wiley, 2007]).
This treaty, largely forgotten even as the world has so frequently been forced to cope with its consequences, set up a new system of global governance. The victors in what was then known as the Great War were effectively empowered to maintain, indeed expand, a series of entrenched, though already fading global empires.
When the Allied powers arrived in Paris at the end of 1918, barely days after the Armistice that brought an end to hostilities was signed on 11 November, they proclaimed themselves "the world's government" for the period they were assembled in Paris. So for the next six months, the statesmen of the victorious powers - America's Woodrow Wilson, France's Georges Clemenceau, Britain's David Lloyd George, Italy's Vittorio Orlando, even Japan's Viscount Sutemi Chinda - proceeded to redraw the map of vast stretches of the planet. They created a host of new nations with little understanding - and barely a nod to the wishes or desires, prejudices or fears - of the people who lived within the new boundaries they were marking with blurry blue pencils, often in the wee hours of the morning. ...
Timothy Snyder: Holocaust ... The Ignored Reality
Source: NY Review of Books (7-16-09)
[Timothy Snyder is Professor of History at Yale. His most recent book is The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke. He is at work on Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which will be published in October 2010. This text is based on a lecture delivered on May 9, 2009, in Vilnius at the 22nd annual Eurozine conference. (July 2009)]
Though Europe thrives, its writers and politicians are preoccupied with death. The mass killings of European civilians during the 1930s and 1940s are the reference of today's confused discussions of memory, and the touchstone of whatever common ethics Europeans may share. The bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union turned individual lives into mass death, particular humans into quotas of those to be killed. The Soviets hid their mass shootings in dark woods and falsified the records of regions in which they had starved people to death; the Germans had slave laborers dig up the bodies of their Jewish victims and burn them on giant grates. Historians must, as best we can, cast light into these shadows and account for these people. This we have not done. Auschwitz, generally taken to be an adequate or even a final symbol of the evil of mass killing, is in fact only the beginning of knowledge, a hint of the true reckoning with the past still to come.
The very reasons that we know something about Auschwitz warp our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a labor camp as well as a death factory. These survivors were largely West European Jews, because Auschwitz is where West European Jews were usually sent. After World War II, West European Jewish survivors were free to write and publish as they liked, whereas East European Jewish survivors, if caught behind the iron curtain, could not. In the West, memoirs of the Holocaust could (although very slowly) enter into historical writing and public consciousness.
This form of survivors' history, of which the works of Primo Levi are the most famous example, only inadequately captures the reality of the mass killing. The Diary of Anne Frank concerns assimilated European Jewish communities, the Dutch and German, whose tragedy, though horrible, was a very small part of the Holocaust. By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete. Two thirds of the Jews who would be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, the Polish and Soviet Jews, had been killed by bullets fired over death pits or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines pumped into gas chambers at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor in occupied Poland.
Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden —were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today's Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol.
An adequate vision of the Holocaust would place Operation Reinhardt, the murder of the Polish Jews in 1942, at the center of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, Warsaw the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Be zec, and Sobibor. Some 1.5 million Jews were killed at those three facilities, about 780,863 at Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these three death facilities. Be zec, though the third most important killing site of the Holocaust, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is hardly known. Some 434,508 Jews perished at that death factory, and only two or three survived. About a million more Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some at Chelmno, Majdanek, or Auschwitz, many more shot in actions in the eastern half of the country....
John McMillian: Today's Reverberations From the 60s
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (6-29-09)
[John McMillian teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program. He is writing two books, Tom Paine's Children: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media (forthcoming, Oxford University Press) and Beatles vs. Stones: The History of a Legendary Rivalry (forthcoming, Free Press).]
It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama will help the United States finally transcend the divisive culture wars that have beleaguered the country since the 1960s. But by some accounts, we've already begun to witness a calmer climate on American campuses. As Patricia Cohen wrote in The New York Times last July, the graying of the professoriate and attendant influx of younger scholars have reduced "the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades."
Many professors who cut their political teeth in the New Left and civil-rights movements during the 60s went on to fight fierce battles over multiculturalism and identity politics in the 1980s and 1990s. By contrast, younger scholars have come of age in an era of comparative tranquillity. Many of us are saddled with enormous loan debt, and in today's hypercompetitive job market, even those who are politically minded may not feel inclined to take to the hustings.
This is something I see from a special vantage. Along with Jeremy Varon, an associate professor of history at Drew University, and Michael S. Foley, professor of history at the University of Sheffield, I have founded and edit a new journal, The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture, published by Routledge. Born between 1964 and 1970, we're too young to have ever been fully in the decade's thrall, but we're old enough to know that we missed something big.
We are part of a boom in the scholarly study of the 60s. In addition to a recent spike of public interest in the culture of that decade — evident in a profusion of film, television, and stage treatments, books, articles, and memoirs — in the past couple of years, perhaps a dozen academic conferences in the United States and overseas have been devoted to the 60s (and of course many of them coincided with the 40th anniversary of 1968, the watershed year for global political protest).
Since our initial call for papers in June 2007, we've been deluged with more high-quality essays than we can hope to print. Much of the new work on the 60s has been fascinating. In recent years, the historiography of the black-power movement has been rewritten to stress its international roots and its connection to longstanding African-American organizing traditions. Studies of the New Left and counterculture now tend to broaden their focus from epicenters like New York and San Francisco to include less-celebrated locales. And those who study "the global 60s" are doing more than just exploring overlooked geographies; they're also examining the global structures that produced dissent in such diverse settings. Finally, a wealth of new scholarship explores how the 60s are constructed in memory, and how that decade continues to shape our politics and culture....
Bill Kauffman: The 'little red schoolhouse' of legend, whatever its flaws, made more sense than the warehouse-schools of today
Source: WSJ (6-30-09)
[Mr. Kauffman's most recent books are "Ain't My America" (Holt) and "Forgotten Founder, Drunken Prophet: The Life of Luther Martin" (ISI). ]
Tacked to my wall is a lithograph of the famous Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington. For many years, it graced my mother's one-room schoolhouse in Lime Rock, N.Y. Antiquarian relic or enduringly relevant image? The same question may be asked of the "little red schoolhouse" itself, whose reality and legend are the subject of "Small Wonder." Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at New York University, sets out to tell "how -- and why -- the little red schoolhouse became an American icon." Mr. Zimmerman proves a thoughtful and entertaining teacher.
First, the chromatic debunking: One-room schools were often white and seldom red. The teachers were usually young unmarried females, pace the most famous one-room schoolteacher in literature, Ichabod Crane. They swept the floor, stoked the stove, rang the hand-bell and taught their mixed-age students by rote and recitation. The schools could be a "cauldron of chaos," in Mr. Zimmerman's alliteration, as tyro teachers were tormented by Tom Sawyers dipping pigtails in inkwells and carving doggerel into desks.
Yet these one-room schools, Mr. Zimmerman notes, were "a central venue for community life in rural America." They hosted plays and dances and box socials and spelling bees and Christmas pageants.
In 1913, Mr. Zimmerman says, "one-half of the nation's schoolchildren attended one of its 212,000 single-teacher schools." By 1960, progressive educationists, growing cities and the centralizing pressures of two world wars and a Cold War had reduced the total to just 1%.
The attempt to abolish one-room schoolhouses, whether by the carrot of state aid or the stick of government fiat, set off one of the great unknown political wars of U.S. history, pitting farm people who "invoked classic themes of liberty and self-rule" against the "mostly urban elites" who "would wage zealous battle against the rural one-room school." Typically, two Delaware schoolconsolidators informed the hicks that "modern education . . . is less romantic and more businesslike, more formal, more exact, more specialized, done according to tested methods and a standard schedule." Such grim exactitude sounded like prison to parents used to the comparatively anarchic and localized governance of rural schools....
Eboo Patel: When Muslims Saved Jews
Source: WaPo (6-25-09)
"As Muslims we welcomed them all. We welcomed them with bread, salt, and our hearts."
We hear many accounts of what happened during the Holocaust. The atrocities committed; the times and places in which unspeakable acts against humankind occurred; the millions of lives stolen too soon.
But the story told above by Nazlie Alla, whose Albanian Muslim family sheltered Jews from Greece, Slovakia, and Germany, is less well known.
It's hard to imagine that in any European country there were more Jews at the end of World War II than before it began. But almost every single Jew in Albania, whether they were Albanians or refugees from other nations, survived during the German occupation.
And Albania was the only European country to have a Muslim majority.
The Jews were protected, through the raids and searches and the times in between, by Albanians who followed the national code of Besa: a code of honor, the deepest promise a person can give, and the word that is never broken. Under Besa, Albanians took Jews into their homes, treated them as family, fed and clothed them, and sacrificed their own safety and the safety of their families for the sake of their guests.
Norman Gershman, a photographer and historian who traveled throughout Albania documenting the accounts of Muslim families who protected Jews, put out a book entitled Besa: Muslims who Saved Jews in World War II. He recalled that "What Besa says is that if some one knocks on your door you have an absolute obligation - no matter who that person is - to save their lives."
Albania at the time had around 800,000 citizens, only about 200 of whom were Jewish - though over 2,000 refugee Jews from Greece, Austria and Italy were taken in to the homes of Albanians as well. And it wasn't just Muslims making sacrifices - the entire population, approximately 70% Bektashi Muslim, 20% Orthodox Christians and 10% Catholic - risked their lives to save Jewish strangers....
Christian Caryl: 1979 ... The Great Backlash
Source: Foreign Policy (6-22-09)
[Christian Caryl is a contributing editor of Newsweek.]
If you want to understand the surge of politicized religion, post-communist globalization, and laissez-faire economics that has defined our modern era, forget 1968. Forget even 1989. It's 1979 that's the most important year of all. A remarkable chapter in international affairs—and intellectual history—began that year, and it had the strangest group of authors imaginable.
It was in 1979 that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran and showed once and for all that "Islamic revolution" is not an oxymoron. The Soviet Union made the fateful decision to invade the poor backwater of Afghanistan, sparking a different kind of Islamic uprising that hammered the first nails into the coffin of the communist empire. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher blazed a conservative resurgence in Britain that not only changed the rules of politics in the West but also shaped the subsequent age of market-driven globalization. Pope John Paul II's first pilgrimage to his Polish homeland in the summer of 1979 emboldened freedom-loving peoples throughout Eastern and Central Europe and set events in motion that would culminate in the nonviolent revolutions of 1989. And throughout 1979, a stoic and unlikely visionary named Deng Xiaoping quietly took the first steps to prepare communist China for its long march toward the age of markets.
Thatcher seems to have nothing in common with the ayatollah and Deng, and even less with the pope. Yet there was something that connected these seemingly disparate people. They all set out to overturn, in their unique ways, the defining spirit of their age—the progressive, secular, materialist order that had, until then, dominated the political landscape of the postwar 20th century. Theirs were not just political movements, but moral rearmaments that passionately rejected what they saw as the decay, malaise, stagnation, and suffocation that resulted from heavy-handed technocrats trying to accelerate humanity’s march toward the end of history. In this way, the transformational events of 1979 were linked by the impulse of counterrevolution, whether against Soviet communism, social democracy, modernizing authoritarianism, or Maoism run amok.
The counterrevolutionaries of 1979 attacked what had been the era's most deeply held belief: the faith in a "progressive" vision of an attainable political order that would be perfectly rational, egalitarian, and just. The collapse of the European empires after World War i and the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, and the triumph of wartime bureaucracy and planning during World War II all gave forward thrust to this vision; postwar decolonization and the rapid spread of Marxist regimes around the world amplified it. By the 1970s, however, disillusionment had begun to set in, with a growing sense in many countries that heartless (and in some cases violent) elites had tried to impose a false, mechanistic vision on their countries, running roughshod over traditional sensibilities, beliefs, and freedoms. As a result of the late 1970s revolt, we live today in a world defined by pragmatic and traditional values rather than utopian ones.
At the time, the success of these counterrevolutions was far from a sure bet. Most observers failed to comprehend their implications in 1979. And those who did just as often condemned them as retrograde forces of mass destruction. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's men accused Khomeini of trying to turn back the clock, while Deng’s enemies vilified the Chinese leader as a "capitalist roader." To the Soviets, the Afghan mujahideen were representatives of "the old feudal order," the pope a force of "neocolonialism." But these were labels that the accused, as often as not, wore with equanimity. On the campaign trail in April 1979, Thatcher proudly told a Conservative Party rally how her opponents had dubbed her a reactionary. "Well," she declared, "there's a lot to react against!"
Indeed there was. And perhaps there is again—for 30 years later, the transformations of 1979 have themselves grown into decadent established orders, the excesses of which may now be inspiring new reactionary movements and counterrevolutions...
Sean Wilentz: Abe Lincoln, Politician
Source: New Republic (7-15-09)
[Mr. Wilentz is a historian at Princeton.]
... Lincoln has never lacked for critics, ranging from pro-Confederates on the Right to black nationalists on the Left. Yet he has inspired far more approval and even adoration than animosity among historians--including one admiring line of argument that can accommodate even his unsavory attack on Pierce in 1852. That interpretation runs roughly as follows. For most of his adult life, Lincoln was an enormously ambitious and partisan Whig Party organizer and officeholder who, after a single frustrating term in Congress, retired from politics in 1849 to become a highly successful lawyer in Springfield. Then the enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act five years later stirred his moral aversion to slavery and re-awakened his political aspirations. Thereafter--his enormous human sympathy aroused, his conscience pricked by eloquent radicals such as Frederick Douglass, and his hand forced by ordinary slaves who flocked to Union lines during the Civil War--Lincoln the hack politician gradually transformed into a philosopher-statesman and a literary genius.
This account appears in many different forms. It is consistent with--or can be made to be consistent with--a particular view of American political history that emerged out of the radicalism of the 1960s and is widely held today. On this view, elected officials, even the most worthy, are at best cautious and unreliable figures who must be forced by unruly events--and by outsiders--into making major reforms. Thus Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement had to compel the southern wheeler-dealer Lyndon B. Johnson to support civil rights and voting rights for blacks. Thus John L. Lewis and the left-wing Congress of Industrial Organizations had to push a reluctant Franklin Delano Roosevelt into making and then enlarging the New Deal. And thus Frederick Douglass and the runaway slaves, not Abraham Lincoln, deserve the real credit for the Emancipation Proclamation.
Without question, what Lincoln called "public sentiment" is and always has been a key battleground; and insofar as agitators such as the abolitionists affect that sentiment, they have a crucial role to play in democratic politics (as Lincoln also recognized). But it is one thing to acknowledge the effects of outsiders and radicals and quite another to vaunt their supposed purity in order to denigrate mainstream politics and politicians. The implication of this anti-political or meta-political narrative is that the outsiders are the truly admirable figures, whereas presidents are merely the outsiders' lesser, reluctant instruments. Anyone who points out the obvious fact that, without a politically supple, energetic, and devoted president, change will never come, runs the risk of being branded an elitist or worse. (Hillary Clinton discovered as much during last year's presidential primaries, when she spoke admiringly about how Johnson pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) Lincoln may be the only one of these presidents who, having seen the light, went on to earn a kind of secular sainthood; but his redemption from grubby politics and self-interested prudence had to precede his martyrdom and canonization. That redemption came as a result of the dramatic resistance of the lowly slaves, and of the words and the actions of uncompromising abolitionists.
The "bottom up" populism of this line of argument got its start in the ideal of participatory democracy forty years ago, but its incomprehension and belittlement of politics and politicians originated much earlier. Historians, like most intellectuals, have long felt uncomfortable with scheming, self-aggrandizing political professionals, preferring idealists whom they imagine were unblemished by expedience and compromise. One of the exceptions among the historians, Richard N. Current, wrote with a touch of embarrassment in 1958 that, for Americans, "politics generally means 'dirty' politics, whether the adjective is used or not."
The hostility of some Americans toward partisan competition and political government is as old as the republic, but it gained special force among writers and publicists linked to the patrician, politically moderate, good-government Mugwumps of the late nineteenth century. Today's historians who uphold the radical legacies of the 1960s consider themselves anything but patrician and moderate--their sympathies lie, of course, with the poor and excluded, not with the virtuous, educated, genteel classes whom the Mugwumps championed. But the recent contempt for conventional party politicians shows that Mugwumpery has evolved, paradoxically, into a set of propositions and assumptions congenial to the contemporary American academic Left.
Like the Mugwumps, many present-day American historians assume that political calculation, opportunism, careerism, and duplicity negate idealism and political integrity. Like the Mugwumps, they charge that the similarities between the corrupt major political parties overwhelm their differences. Like the Mugwumps, they equate purposefulness with political purity. Consequently, their writings slight how all great American leaders, including many of the outsiders they idealize, have relied on calculation, opportunism, and all the other democratic political arts in order to advance their loftiest and most controversial goals. And they slight how the achievement of America's greatest advances, including the abolition of slavery, would have been impossible without the strenuous efforts of the calculators and the opportunists in the leadership of American politics.
At its most straightforward, caustic, and predictable--as in the balefully influential works of Howard Zinn, who has described Lincoln as at best "a kind man" who had to be "pushed by the antislavery movement" into emancipation--this post-1960s populist history writing is just as skewed as the tendentious "great white male" historiography that it has supposedly discredited. Other populist historians are more generous, allowing Lincoln--and, occasionally, Franklin Roosevelt--to escape relatively unscathed, and even ennobled. But if it is history that we really care about, then we must recognize that the populist storyline of Lincoln's redemption and transfiguration, like the other versions, makes a hash of his actual life and times....
Michael Ballard: Deep in Mississippi’s piney woods, Confederate deserters fought a different sort of war
Source: WSJ (6-27-09)
The idea is beguiling: a region in the South during the Civil War where the inhabitants, disgusted by slavery and unwilling to support the Confederate cause, take up arms as Union loyalists. Better still, for storytelling purposes, would be a charismatic leader who organizes the resistance.
Such is the legend of what became known as the “Free State of Jones,” a county deep in Mississippi’s piney woods. The area was one of many pockets in the state where dissatisfaction with the Confederacy boiled for much of the war, but only Jones County was elevated by folklore, especially in the decades after the war, into a scene of noble rebellion. It helped that the anti-Confederate faction there was led by a tall, stern backwoodsman named Newton Knight.
The operative words here are “legend” and “folklore.” Although Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer labor mightily in “The State of Jones” to make the case for Newt Knight and Jones County as emblems of enlightened “insurrection” within the Confederacy, the truth, alas, is hardly as inspiring as the authors suppose. Far from being a haven for the high-minded, Jones County was a magnet for Confederate deserters. Their hostility to being executed, imprisoned or pressed back into the service of a lost cause was the men’s animating principle.
Even among Jones County residents who were noncombatants, an antipathy for the Confederate government did not automatically translate into pro-Union feelings: The Confederacy was so preoccupied with prosecuting the war, and its finances were so precarious, that the government was scarcely able to protect ordinary citizens, much less provide basic services. Anger at one’s own bureaucracy does not mean embracing the enemy’s.
Still, Ms. Jenkins, a journalist, and Mr. Stauffer, a historian, have brought fresh attention to a little-known and interesting sidebar of Civil War history. They freely acknowledge their debt to Victoria Bynum’s “The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War” (2001), which is the most scholarly treatment of the subject to date—though, as the subtitle indicates, Ms. Bynum was also rather taken with the romantic notion of the troubles in Jones County....
Doug Ireland: A Truly Queer History
Source: Gay City News (6-26-09)
[A complete collection of the Gay Liberation Front’s newspaper, ComeOut!, has just been posted on the excellent OutHistory website, founded by pioneering gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz, at outhistory.org/wiki/Come_Out%21_Magazine%2C_1969-1972 along with a collection of the original police reports on the Stonewall riot. Tommy Avicolli Mecca’s web site is at avicollimecca.com/. Doug Ireland can be reached through his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.]
Myth has it that the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village were the first open queer rebellion against discrimination. Not so. In 1965, the first queer sit-ins on record took place at a late-night Philadelphia coffee shop and lunch counter called Dewey’s, which was a popular hangout for young gays and lesbians, and particularly drag queens and others with gender-variant attire. The establishment had begun refusing service to this LGBT clientele.
As an April 25 protest rally took place outside Dewey’s, more than 150 patrons were turned away by management. But four teens resisted efforts to force them out and were arrested, later convicted on charges of disorderly conduct. In the ensuing weeks, Dewey’s patrons and others from Philadelphia’s gay community set up an informational picket line protesting the lunch counter’s treatment of gender-variant youth. On May 2, activists staged another sit-in, and the police were again called, but this time made no arrests. The restaurant backed down, and promised “an immediate cessation of all indiscriminate denials of service.”
In August 1966, there was a riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a 24-hour San Francisco eatery popular with drag queens and other gender-benders (this was long before the word “transgendered” was in use), hustlers (many of them members of Vanguard, the first organization for queer youth on record, founded some months earlier), runaway teens, and cruising gays. The Compton’s management had begun calling police to roust this non-conformist clientele, and one night a drag queen precipitated the riot by throwing a cup of coffee into the face of a cop who was trying to drag her away. Plates, trays, cups, and silverware were soon hurtling through the air, police paddy wagons arrived, and street fighting broke out. Some of the 60 or so rioting drag queens hit the cops with their heavy purses, a police car was vandalized, and a newspaper stand was burned down. The Compton’s Riot eventually led to the appointment of the first police liaison to the gay community, and the establishment of the first known transsexual support group in the US.
These are just two of the many nuggets of little-known or forgotten queer history to be found in “Smash the Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay Liberation,” the new anthology edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca, himself a veteran of the earliest gay liberation struggles, and today an activist, gender-bending performance artist, and writer well-known to San Francisco queers.
By the time of the Stonewall riots in June 1969, rebellion and radicalism were in the air. The country had been riven in two by the mass agitation against the war in Vietnam. The multiracial civil rights movement was being replaced by the Black Power movement, the Black Panthers had been born four years earlier, and America’s cities had exploded in urban riots by the black underclass. Feminists had begun to articulate their own liberationist ideology and burn their bras. Stonewall and the militant gay liberation movement to which it gave birth arose out of this ’60s turbulence, and cannot be properly understood separated from this context.
If the first night of the Stonewall riots was spontaneous, and led principally by drag queens like the legendary Sylvia Rivera, a street hustler who always claimed she’d thrown the first beer bottle at the cops, the ensuing nights of protest benefited from some more consciously activist participation. As Mark Segal, who for 32 years has been the publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, puts it in his contribution to this anthology, “Marty Robinson recruited me into the ‘activist group,’ a subgroup of Mattachine New York. If there were organizers of the demonstrations on the nights following the [first] Stonewall riot, it was us. After the first incident in which cops raided the bar, Marty had the brilliant idea to have us write in chalk on Christopher Street, ‘Stonewall Tomorrow Night.’ For three more nights, we gathered and protested.”
What made Stonewall the much-evoked milestone in queer activist history that it’s become was that it was followed in the ensuing weeks by the launch of a concrete and militant political organization, the Gay Liberation Front, into which Robinson and his Mattachine action group merged. Many of the 37 men and women who participated in the founding meeting of GLF, and others who later joined, were youthful veterans of other ’60s struggles, and GLF’s radical politics were multi-issue. Within two years, imitators of the New York GLF had launched some 300 independent Gay Liberation Front cells across the country. At GLF demonstrations, one frequently heard the chant “2-4-6-8, Smash the Church, Smash the State!” — hence the title of Avicolli Mecca’s collection of articles, largely first-person reminiscences of the earliest and most radical wave of gay liberation struggles, the bulk of them specifically written for this volume.
As Nick Benton, a founder of the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front and of its offshoot, the seminal queer newspaper Gay Sunshine, writes, for him and his fellow GLF activists “gay liberation was part of the larger struggle of human beings for liberation, in solidarity with the civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and Third World liberation struggles.” The first editorial of Gay Sunshine proclaimed that gay liberation would represent “those who understand themselves as oppressed — politically oppressed by an oppressor that not only is down on homosexuality, but equally down on all things that are not white, straight, middle class, pro-establishment… It should harken to a greater cause — the cause of human liberation, of which homosexual liberation is just one aspect — and on that level take its stand.”
GLF supported the Black Panthers — and were rewarded with a much-publicized “Open Letter to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters” by the Panthers’ charismatic theoretician, Huey Newton, reproduced in this anthology, proclaiming that homosexuals “might be the most oppressed people in the world,” and adding that “we should be careful about using those terms that might turn our friends off. The terms ‘faggot’ and ‘punk’ should be deleted from our vocabulary, and especially we should not attach names normally designed for homosexuals to men who are enemies of the people, like Nixon.”
Early gay liberation saw itself as a cultural paradigm shift from the stultifying atmosphere of the Nixon years. As the first editorial in the New York GLF’s newspaper, ComeOut!, proclaimed, “We will not be gay bourgeoisie, searching for the sterile ‘American dream’ of the ivy-covered cottage and the good corporation job, but neither will we tolerate the exclusion of homosexuals from any area of American life.”
The personal testimonies collected for “Smash the Church, Smash the State!”, augmented by manifestos and documents of that early period and biographical sketches of important movement figures, help recreate those heady, joyously rambunctious days of “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll” as queers, influenced by the hippies, Yippies, and Zippies, built their own radical wing of the prevailing youth counterculture, and created their own influential publications — like Boston’s Fag Rag, in which a notorious Charlie Shively article proclaimed “Cocksucking As an Act of Revolution.”
There are numerous contributions by women who tired of the male domination of GLF and founded groups like RadicalLesbians, RedStockings, and Dyketactics. There are also accounts both of radical gay liberation’s earliest and often campy direct actions and of the factional fights that eventually destroyed GLF and led to its replacement by the much larger — and single-issue — Gay Activists Alliance, which emerged just six months after Stonewall.
Avicolli Mecca has not abandoned the anarchic radicalism of those early days. He writes in his introduction, “In many ways, the new millennium gay movement is the antithesis of the early ’70s gay liberation. It cavorts with politicians who may be good on gay issues, but not on concerns affecting other disenfranchised communities. It is in bed with the Democratic Party establishment that gave carte blanche to George Bush to wage two illegal and immoral wars in the Middle East. It courts corporate support for its gala events, even its pride parades, which used to be protest marches and celebrations of the Stonewall Riots. Now those marches seem more of a market than a movement.”
On this 40th anniversary of Stonewall, that’s a critique that deserves to be heard.
Fred Sargeant: It was the second night at Stonewall that pointed the way to gay liberation
Source: NYT (6-25-09)
[Fred Sargeant is a retired lieutenant from the Stamford, Conn., police department.]
I WAS 19 years old when I met Craig Rodwell. He was 26. It was just after Thanksgiving in 1967, shortly after he’d opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Mercer Street near the New York University campus.
One day in the shop — considered to be the first literary gay bookstore — the beat cop stopped by to tell us we needed to pay him off each week. Craig told him we wouldn’t pay; a few days later we had a break-in and the cash box was taken. For Craig, it was an opportunity to make the connection between police corruption and prejudice, a topic that he would bring up time after time in the shop’s newsletter, “The Hymnal.”
This was the backdrop to our lives in late June 1969, when we were on our way home from a Friday night dinner with friends in Washington Square Village. We swung by the Oscar Wilde because anti-gay vandalism was a continuing problem. Then we headed home. When we crossed Sixth Avenue we began to see people out on Christopher Street near the Stonewall Inn....
After things settled down on Friday night, we decided that we had to take action — to bring a larger purpose to the evening’s events. And so the next day, we started to leaflet. It sounds primitive today, but in 1969 it was an effective means of communication. People were accustomed to getting leaflets, and they would read them. And Craig knew how to write them.
Craig also made calls to the newspapers, letting them know that there would be a lot of people converging in the Village on Saturday night.
Getting coverage was a challenge. The press had a bias against gays then, and it perpetuated the view of Stonewall as the time the drag queens fought back. But for Craig and for me, it was the moment the gay-rights movement shifted from what we thought of as a “letterhead” movement of press releases to one of action. Older gays saw the path to equality as going through the power structure. We saw it as going around the power structure. We wanted to exploit the attention this riot received, attention that we had not been able to get before.
That second night turned into a general melee — more police, more protesters — but Craig and I stayed until the end. For us, the end was the beginning....
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