Roundup: History Being Talked About
Alan Wolfe: The Nazi Thinker Who Is a Source for Ideas on Both the Left and the Right
A Seminary Professor Defends the Truthfulness of the New Testament
John Taylor: 30 Years After Watergate -- What We Need to Remember
The Hungarian Town Where the Women Decided to Murder Their Husbands by the Dozens After World War I
Brown University Taking Heat for even Considering Slavery Reparations
Thursday, April 1, 2004
Alan Wolfe: The Nazi Thinker Who Is a Source for Ideas on Both the Left and the Right
Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public
Life and professor of political science at Boston College, in an article about
the pro-Nazi German thinker Carl Schmitt, a source of ideas for both the left
and the right in America today. In the Chronicle
of Higher Education (subscribers only) (April 1, 2004):
... [T]here are, I venture to say, no seminars on [Carl] Schmitt taking place anywhere in the Republican Party and, even if any important conservative political activists have heard of Schmitt, which is unlikely, they would surely distance themselves from his totalitarian sympathies. Still, Schmitt's way of thinking about politics pervades the contemporary zeitgeist in which Republican conservatism has flourished, often in ways so prescient as to be eerie. In particular, his analysis helps explain the ways in which conservatives attack liberals and liberals, often reluctantly, defend themselves.
In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that every realm of human endeavor is structured by an irreducible duality. Morality is concerned with good and evil, aesthetics with the beautiful and ugly, and economics with the profitable and unprofitable. In politics, the core distinction is between friend and enemy. That is what makes politics different from everything else. Jesus's call to love your enemy is perfectly appropriate for religion, but it is incompatible with the life-or-death stakes politics always involves. Moral philosophers are preoccupied with justice, but politics has nothing to do with making the world fairer. Economic exchange requires only competition; it does not demand annihilation. Not so politics.
"The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism," Schmitt wrote. War is the most violent form that politics takes, but, even short of war, politics still requires that you treat your opposition as antagonistic to everything in which you believe. It's not personal; you don't have to hate your enemy. But you do have to be prepared to vanquish him if necessary.
Conservatives have absorbed Schmitt's conception of politics much more thoroughly than liberals. Ann H. Coulter, author of books with titles such as Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, regularly drops hints about how nice it would be if liberals were removed from the earth, like her 2003 speculation about a Democratic ticket that might include Al Gore and then-California Gov. Gray Davis. "Both were veterans, after a fashion, of Vietnam," she wrote, "which would make a Gore-Davis ticket the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire." (Coulter recently displayed her vituperative talents by calling former Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee, politically "lucky" for having dropped a grenade on his foot while serving in Vietnam.) Liberals, by contrast, even in their newly discovered aggressively anti-Bush frame of mind, stop well short of Coulter's violent language. Interestingly enough, Schmitt had an explanation for why conservative talk-show hosts like Bill O'Reilly fight for their ideas with much more aggressive self-certainty than, say, a hopeless liberal like Alan Wolfe.
Schmitt argued that liberals, properly speaking, can never be political. Liberals tend to be optimistic about human nature, whereas "all genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil." Liberals believe in the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions, but to Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule -- even an ostensibly fair one -- merely represents the victory of one political faction over another. (If that formulation sounds like Stanley Fish when he persistently argues that there is no such thing as principle, that only testifies to the ways in which Schmitt's ideas pervade the contemporary intellectual zeitgeist.) Liberals insist that there exists something called society independent of the state, but Schmitt believed that pluralism is an illusion because no real state would ever allow other forces, like the family or the church, to contest its power. Liberals, in a word, are uncomfortable around power, and, because they are, they criticize politics more than they engage in it....
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A Seminary Professor Defends the Truthfulness of the New Testament
From the Baptist Press News (March 31, 2004):
Should the Bible be categorized with fads and fallacies? Or, is the Bible the inerrant Word of God?
Robert Stewart, assistant professor of philosophy and theology at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, defended Scripture’s reliability March 22 during an event at the University of New Orleans.
Jointly sponsored by the Baptist Collegiate Ministry and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at the university, the event was organized in response to questions raised by two course offerings at the university that raise questions about biblical inerrancy. The title for the event, “Fads and Fallacies or Truth and Conviction?” played off the name of one of the courses.
Beginning with the question of the purity of the text, Stewart posed four tests for the trustworthiness of Scripture: How many manuscripts do we have? What is the time lapse between the original manuscripts and existing manuscripts? How complete are the available manuscripts? How much variance between manuscripts is there?
The reliability of the New Testament manuscripts far exceeds that of other books of antiquity, Stewart said. He added that the number and completeness of the New Testament’s manuscripts, the early dating of the manuscripts and the small, mostly inconsequential variance between the manuscripts is a solid foundation for confidence in the transmission of the text.
He then charted the differences between the New Testament and the works of authors such as Homer, Plato and Tacitus. Nearly 5,000 complete manuscripts of the New Testament are in existence, and the earliest partial manuscript -- the John Ryland fragment -- is thought to be within 70 years or so from the original, he said.
But Homer’s “Iliad” comes in a distant second to the New Testament, having only 643 complete or partial manuscripts with a time gap of 500 years from the original, Stewart noted.
Critics sometimes disparage the trustworthiness of Scripture by pointing to 150,000-200,000 points of variance between manuscripts, Stewart said, adding that the number is somewhat misleading. For example, one misspelled word in 3,000 copies would be considered 3,000 variants. Philip Schaff, a biblical scholar from the 19th century, said that of these only 400 are truly variants, with only 50 of these being of any significance, and none endangering a tenet of the faith, Stewart said.
Those considered outside the conservative evangelical camp also acknowledge the wealth of New Testament manuscripts, he said.
“Textual reliability is a must for the Bible to be historically reliable but in and of itself does not ensure that the biblical authors actually wrote the truth,” Stewart said.
Unanimous acceptance of the authorship of the gospels by the early church and the early dating for the original manuscripts strengthen the case for reliability, he said. The gospels and the book of Acts were affirmed as being written by apostles or close associates of apostles, he said.
Eyewitness accounts were an important commodity for the early church and signify historicity, Stewart said. He noted that Judas’ replacement was required to be an eyewitness to the resurrected Christ.
Paul’s defense of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 is built on the testimony of eyewitnesses, Stewart said
“Paul’s reference to the 500 who saw the resurrected Jesus has the ring of truth when he identifies the witnesses by stating that ‘most of whom are alive today,’” Stewart said.
Another indicator of historical reliability is the gospel writers’ use of writing style consistent with the historians of their day, Stewart said. Luke prefaced his works stating his intention to use earlier sources, eyewitness interviews and oral tradition, all of which were tools of the trade for ancient historians, such as Josephus and Herodotus, he said.
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Wednesday, March 31, 2004
April Fools Hoaxes: Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell
From a review of major April Fools hoaxes, published by National Geographic (March 31, 2004):
On April 1, 1996, readers in five major U.S. cities opened their newspapers to learn from a full page announcement that the Taco Bell Corporation had purchased the Liberty Bell from the U.S. government. The announcement reported that the company was relocating the historic bell from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Irvine, California. The move, the corporation said in the advertisement, was part of an "effort to help the national debt."
Hundreds of other newspapers and television shows ran stories related to a press release on the matter put out by Taco Bell's public relations firm, PainePR. Outraged citizens called the Liberty Bell National Historic Park in Philadelphia to express their disgust. A few hours later the public relations firm released another press announcement stating that the stunt was a hoax.
White House press secretary Mike McCurry got into the act when he remarked that the government would also be "selling the Lincoln Memorial to Ford Motor Company and renaming it the Lincoln-Mercury Memorial."
As a marketing ploy, the hoax was successful, PainePR said on their Web site. The firm says that more than 70 million Americans were exposed to the story, which resulted in a U.S. $500,000 sales increase for Taco Bell on April 1 and a $600,000 increase on April 2.
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Sean Wilentz: Garry Wills's Howlers
Sean Wilentz, in a cover story in the New Republic (March 29, 2004), commenting on Garry Wills's new book, "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power:
[Garry Wills's] main argument is the old Federalist canard that the three-fifths clause was the only reason that Thomas Jefferson was elected president and that the Democratic-Republicans won control of Congress. With that control, the Democratic-Republicans, led by slaveholders and with their national interests inextricably bound up with slavery, created legislation to shore up human bondage and to permit its expansion. "On crucial matters," Wills writes, "the federal ratio gave the South a voting majority." That influence lasted long after Jefferson left office--preventing, according to Wills, the exclusion of slavery from Missouri and in the late 1840s dooming the Wilmot Proviso that would have banned slavery in territories won from Mexico . The chief political beneficiaries were Jefferson, his party, and their successors, who were opposed prophetically but unsuccessfully by Federalists like the unsung hero Timothy Pickering.
There are many howlers in this argument. It is hard to know where to begin. The three-fifths clause certainly did not prevent the exclusion of slavery from Missouri in 1819, for the simple reason that the House passed the anti-slavery resolutions proposed by the Republican James Tallmadge, only to have the bill rejected by the Senate, where the three-fifths clause made no difference at all. The same was true of the Wilmot Proviso, which passed the House on numerous occasions. So the House was not as rigged for slavery as Wills thinks. He also confidently reports as an outrageous fact the Federalist claim (which many professional historians have fallen for as well) that the Federalists remained the majority party in 1800 and that except for the three-fifths rule John Adams would have defeated Jefferson. Based on a quick look at the numbers, this would appear to be true. But Wills, like others, slights the Federalists' partisan shenanigans in heavily Jeffersonian Pennsylvania, which led to Adams getting as many as seven more electoral votes, and Jefferson getting seven less, than they respectively deserved. (Jefferson swept Pennsylvania in 1796 and 1804, as did every other Democratic-Republican presidential hopeful through 1816, and in 1800, Democratic-Republicans swept the state's congressional elections.) Without the pro-Adams manipulation, and without the three-fifths rule, Jefferson still would have defeated Adams by anywhere from six to ten electoral votes. Without the three-fifths rule but with the chicanery, the Jeffersonians could have charged that the Federalists had stolen the election, and they would have been correct.
Given the Senate's role in deciding so many vital matters concerning slavery, Wills's preoccupation with the "federal ratio" is badly skewed. Then, as now, each state had equal representation in the Senate, which, unlike now, was elected by the state legislatures and not directly by the voters, making it in many respects the less democratic house of Congress. For most of Jefferson 's presidency, the North enjoyed a majority in the Senate. In 1804, the year Timothy Pickering plotted Yankee secession, the Northern states held an eighteen-to-sixteen edge; in 1812, midway through Madison 's presidency, the balance became equal, but in 1816, after Indiana 's admission as a state, the North regained a two-seat advantage for two of the next three years. Wills is confused: on many "crucial matters," for the entire period under discussion, either the North enjoyed the "vot-ing majority" in the deciding chamber, the Senate, or the chamber was evenly divided. And even so, the Senate repeatedly backed slavery and its expansion.
Wills distorts the early political history of slavery in order to make Jefferson look as bad as possible and his foes look as good as possible. He notes, correctly, that Jefferson cast a cold eye on the Haitian revolutionaries, but he fails to mention that most Federalists, Northerners and Southerners, tried to exploit the revolution by blaming it on the spread of Jefferson 's political principles. He notes, again correctly, that slavery was more of an issue in national debates than some pro-Jefferson historians have been willing to allow, but he gets the politics, and the importance of the three-fifths clause in Congress, almost completely wrong. The approval of the Louisiana Purchase --an essentially pro-slavery move, in Wills's eyes, which is a view that Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy Adams knew better than to endorse--was yet another matter determined by the Senate, not the House. In 1798, a New England Federalist in the House proposed an amendment to ban the spread of slavery into Mississippi Territory, and only two members, both Republicans (including Albert Gallatin, Jefferson's future secretary of the treasury), spoke on the amendment's behalf. In joining the vast House majority against the bill, the Federalist stalwart Harrison Gray Otis, Timothy Pickering's friend and ally, declared haughtily that he "would not interfere with the Southern states as to the species of property in question," and that "he really wished that the gentlemen who held slaves might not be deprived of the means of keeping them in order."
he most important congressional vote about slavery during Jefferson 's presidency, apart from the vote on shutting down the transatlantic slave trade, came in 1804, on the so-called Hillhouse amendments. Proposed by the Federalist James Hillhouse, a senator from Connecticut , the amendments would have banned slavery in Louisiana Territory , but they failed to win passage. Once again, though, the crucial vote involved the Senate, not the House; pace Wills, the three-fifths clause was irrelevant. And the record on the vote is highly revealing. Although Hillhouse was a Federalist, the bulk of his support came from Northern Jeffersonians . The northern Federalists, meanwhile, split right down the middle, with the pro-slavery position getting the backing of, among others, Wills's hero Pickering! (Wills has Pickering voting for the amendment banning slavery, which is another howler.)
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John Taylor: 30 Years After Watergate -- What We Need to Remember
John Taylor, executive director of the NIxon Foundation (March 29, 2004), at a conference held in memory of Watergate at the Lou Frey Institute of Politics & Government at the University of Central Florida in Orlando:
Our gathering this week is timely indeed and not just because of the approaching anniversary of the end of the Nixon Administration.
During the recent Presidential primary season, it sometimes felt like 1972 all over again.
Nearly ten years after President Nixon's death, Howard Dean denounced President Nixon's so-called Southern Strategy which was a little ironic, since Gov. Dean had himself said he wanted the votes of guys with Confederate flags on their windshields.
John Kerry told audiences at his rallies that he was proud of having stood up to Richard Nixon over Vietnam.
President Bush was questioned about his service in the National Guard during the Nixon Administration.
We rely on gatherings such as this one, among many other devices, to remind ourselves of events that otherwise would begin to slip behind the veil of memory.
But we evidently don't need reminding when it comes to Richard Nixon and the dramatic events of his Presidency.
In politics in culture in our spiritual and family lives we tend to revisit our foundational stories, sometimes because of their power to inspire us, and sometimes because of the pain they embody.
Over the next two days, we will be preoccupied with the trauma of Watergate.
But I would suggest that when we think about the Nixon years, the subject that really bedevils us that haunts our politics that even influences the way leaders make decisions about war and peace in the age of terrorism that subject is not Watergate but rather the war in Vietnam.
In a quarter-century working for the former President and his library, I've had my share of conversations and debates about Richard Nixon. Many have begun with Watergate. Most get around eventually to Vietnam.
When President Nixon ordered bombing raids and incursions into Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, was he invading a peaceful, neutral country -- or was he saving lives by taking the battle into sanctuaries the North Vietnamese were using to launch attacks on our troops and allies in South Vietnam?
When he ordered B-52s to attack targets into North Vietnam in December 1972, was it the act of a maddened tyrant, as his critics said or a lonely but necessary step to break the will of the leaders in Hanoi and bring our prisoners of war home?
After President Nixon brought an end to U.S. involvement in Vietnam with the Paris Peace Accords, did Saigon fall 27 months later because of the superiority and skill of the North Vietnamese -- because history was on the side of that crushing, neo-Stalinist regime -- or because the Congress of the United States let South Vietnam run out of bullets?
Was Daniel Ellsberg -- the Vietnam war architect-turned-antiwar activist who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press -- was he a hero, or a rogue?
Did the United States have interests and obligations in Vietnam, or did it not?
These questions are still lively and painful -- especially for anyone whose life and family were touched by the war. They will not be resolved by us this week.
Some of us may even be saying to ourselves that this is not a conference about Vietnam, but a conference about Watergate.
I do suggest that because the war begat the scandal because Watergate grew out of America's argument with itself about Vietnam history should weigh the two subjects side by side.
I also suggest that Richard Nixon's standing in history is held hostage to the simmering tension of these same unresolved questions.
As for the specific links between Vietnam and Watergate, they are innumerable.
On a purely practical level, there would have been no one to break into Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate if the Nixon White House had not created the so-called Plumbers unit to investigate the largest wartime national security leak in human history the Pentagon Papers.
And when President Nixon angrily ordered his aides in June 1971 to blow the safe at the Brookings Institution to find out if officials there were involved in the Pentagon Papers leak, it was the anger of a commander-in-chief during wartime.
It is of course hard for most of us to understand what it is like to be responsible for the lives of troops under our command.
Today President Bush must bear the burden, along with their families, of losing 560 courageous Americans in Iraq in a little over a year.
At the height of the Vietnam war in May 1969, that many young Americans died in four and a half weeks.
Regarding the Brookings Institution, President Nixon's anger passed. No one blew its safe. But because President Nixon's passion was preserved on tape, the historical Nixon is still called to account for his anger.
I sometimes wonder how FDR might have felt in a similar moment. Think, for instance, about the siege of Corregidor in the Philippines during World War II, when Roosevelt thought he was about to lose Douglas MacArthur and had no way to stop it.
What if, at that time, one of his aides told him that a War Department aide-turned-pacifist had given some pre-war Japanese cables to the press to try to weaken the case for the war in the Pacific?
Would Roosevelt have gotten angry? We may imagine so. Would history have forgiven him his anger? We hope so.
Yet history tends not to lump Richard Nixon with FDR, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson.
Our young people are not taught automatically to think of him as a wartime commander-in-chief.
When schoolchildren come to the Nixon Library, I often ask them for the first word that comes into their head about President Nixon. They almost always say Watergate.
I respond with carefully studied patience. That's okay, kids, I say. What's the second word that comes into your heads?
If there is a second word, it is almost never Vietnam.
And yet when I ask them how many of their families were touched by the war, usually a quarter of them raise their hands. When they learn that President Nixon may have commanded their fathers or mothers -- their uncles or grandfathers -- they seem to regard the displays in our museum with more alert eyes.
Of course by the time President Nixon inherited the Vietnam War, the elite consensus about the war's aims and prospects had eroded.
No one who thought the war illegitimate or illegal was likely to afford Richard Nixon the latitude that most war Presidents had enjoyed.
By the same token, President Nixon's conceptions of his responsibilities -- and of the resources available to his office -- were not influenced by others' judgment that the war had been a bad idea.
This disconnect between the President and his critics over his war powers rooted in a disconnect over the morality of the war helps explain why the aspect of the President's Watergate defense that was rooted in national security was not persuasive and eventually become the focal point of ridicule.
Let me be clear. I would not ask history to excuse everything or indeed to excuse anything that President Nixon did or said purely on the basis that he was a war President.
I merely hope history will remember that he was a war President.
I hope history will construe his passions as being legitimately rooted in his profound sense of obligation to our troops and our nation's security and standing in the world.
I hope history will understand that his critics in the Congress were subject to passions of their own that were also rooted in their beliefs about the war and America's role in the world.
I hope history will see that some in Congress pursued Richard Nixon with the same determination and even enthusiasm as Bill Clinton's Republican critics exhibited when he was impeached.
So I do hope that the historical Nixon remains a work in progress. Perhaps that is just a friend's wishful thinking.
Yet as the 2004 campaign amply demonstrates and our two days together likely will as well, Richard Nixon continues to provoke strenuous debate.
He liked to say that in politics, the one thing worse than being wrong was being dull.
About a politician who has been gone these ten years, he might say that the one thing worse than being controversial is being forgotten.
The Frey Institute deserves thanks and praise for convening this conference dedicated to the proposition that history still has work to do.
And yet one senses in some quarters the desire to pronounce a premature judgment by associating Richard Nixon directly with Watergate's two most fateful acts.
On top of the scandal the cover-up the tapes -- President Nixon's humiliating resignation, some seem intent on finding some proof that he ordered or knew in advance of two burglaries: In June 1972 at the Watergate, and in September 1971 at the Los Angeles office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Lewis Fielding.
Lacking proof, some writers and journalists proclaim that he must have known about them. Such was the combative mentality of the Nixon White House. Such is the combative mentality of some Nixon historians.
The first of these break-ins, at Dr. Fielding's office, was authorized by domestic policy aide John Ehrlichman, who did not inform the President except to say that an operation had been aborted in Los Angeles. So far, there is no proof that President Nixon learned that it had occurred until the spring of 1973.
This is a vital point, since the President allegedly covered up Watergate to keep the FBI from learning of the Plumbers's prior illegal activities. But if he didn't know about any illegal activities when the cover-up began, his own account becomes entirely defensible.
As for the Watergate break-in itself, until last year, no one had reliably accused President Nixon of ordering it. Then PBS broadcast a documentary in which campaign aide Jeb Magruder said that he overheard President Nixon authorize the break-in during a telephone conversation with John Mitchell when Mitchell and Magruder were together in Florida in March 1972.
Magruder's account contradicted his earlier writings and statements. Fred LaRue, another campaign aide, was in the meeting, and he says it didn't happen. Most important, the White House tapes and logs show that President Nixon made no such phone call.
The PBS producers did not seek out Fred LaRue to try to confirm Magruder's story. If they were aware that the tapes contradicted it as well, they did not say so in the broadcast.
Your keynote speaker this evening, Bob Woodward, calls the Nixon White House tapes the gift that keeps on giving.
It is unfortunate that PBS failed to give President Nixon the gift of the benefit of the doubt by telling its viewers that the tapes contradicted Magruder's momentous charge.
PBS was perhaps too eager to show that it had unearthed Watergate's Holy Grail -- that it had finally proven President Nixon's original sin.
Was Watergate indeed merely the result of Richard Nixon's nature?
Or was it the culmination of a national argument about war and peace as pained and poisoned as any that had occurred in our country since the Civil War?
Richard Nixon believed vital American interests were at stake in Indochina. He also hoped that the United States would give the people of Vietnam and Cambodia the chance to live in freedom. He chose to remain in Vietnam when it would have been politically wiser to withdraw.
George W. Bush believes vital American interests are at stake in Iraq. He also hopes that the United States will have given the people of Iraq the chance to live in freedom. He chose to spearhead an invasion of Iraq that it would have been politically wiser to avoid.
In 2004, we once again find ourselves divided over a controversial military intervention divided Democrat vs. Republican, blue vs. red, multilateralist vs. unilateralist, hawk vs. dove. Already the rhetoric is heated, even caustic.
There is almost no doubt that history will judge President Bush largely on his decision to go to war in Iraq, just as President Nixon is symbolically associated with America's devastating defeat in Vietnam.
At no time since President Nixon's resignation does it seem more advisable to study Watergate with an eye to understanding how policy differences can become political, personal, and ultimately poisonous. Let us bear that in mind in our two days together -- and in the months leading up to the November election.
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004
The Mayor of Hiroshima Remembers Hiroshima
Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba delivered this address (published in Japan Focus,to the inaugural conference of the Asia office of UNITAR in Hiroshima on November 17, 2003:
We have long continued our effort to raise public awareness of the need to abolish nuclear weapons by conveying to the world the facts of the atomic bombing and the message born out of the suffering and struggles of the hibakusha, the survivors of the atomic bombings. Our hope and wish is to create a 21st century of peace and humanity free from nuclear weapons and violence and free from all hatred and terror.
The theme of my presentation today is ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. According to Ernst Heinrich Haeckel and Sigmund Freud, it means that the development of the individual is a short and quick recapitulation of the development of the entire human race. I am interpreting this rather loosely to mean that the rebuilding of Hiroshima recapitulated the essence of human history by recapturing the wisdom and legacy of the entire human race. Actually I am saying more. In order for evolution to occur, the arrow should also be directed the other way as well. The rebirth and re-creation of Hiroshima should become a model for building the future for all of us.
A-bomb Damage
On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a single atomic bomb on the center of Hiroshima. At the time, approximately 350 thousand people were living in the city and by the end of December 1945 about 140 thousand of them were dead.
The combined effects of heat, blast, and radiation instantaneously slaughtered a hundred thousand human beings and reduced Hiroshima to rubble -- an experience that was, to those who witnessed it, the "end of the world." Conditions in the city immediately after the bombing are impossible to convey adequately in words. People became ghosts or demons, their skin charred and dangling from their bodies, their flesh and even bones exposed. Mothers tried desperately to nurse charred babies. Babies clung desperately to the breasts of dead or dying mothers. Those who managed to survive had lost everything, even hope. Many who survived sincerely envied the dead. In fact, we know from eyewitness accounts that many victims took their own lives as soon as they were fully conscious of having survived.
To make matters worse, uninjured survivors and even relief workers or relatives who entered Hiroshima after the explosion fell ill and died of what was then called A-bomb disease. We know it now as radiation poisoning.
Including these "entry survivors," 85 thousand official A-bomb survivors were living in Hiroshima City at the end of March 2003. Even now, a half-century later, thousands still suffer the physical and emotional aftereffects. A-bomb survivors, or hibakusha, know in their bones the devastating inhumanity of the atomic bomb. What they saw of "the end of the world" was enough to convince them that nuclear weapons are an "absolute evil." They are determined "never to allow anyone else to experience such horror." Having seen the end of the world, they have worked for five decades to prevent it....
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The Hungarian Town Where the Women Decided to Murder Their Husbands by the Dozens After World War I
Jim Fish, in BBC News (March 29, 2004):
A two-hour drive south-east of Budapest, the village of Nagyrev is like countless others dotted across the Danubian plain.
Modest single-storey homes line its few muddy streets. But beneath its pastoral exterior, Nagyrev nurses a dark secret. Nearly a century ago, with World War I raging, the womenfolk here began to poison their husbands.
Now aged 83, Maria Gunya was a little girl when her father, a local official, was asked by the police to help investigate a series of unexplained deaths in the village.
It turned out that the woman behind many of the deaths was the village midwife, Zsuzsanna Fazekas. At that time, under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was no resident doctor or health service.
The midwife enjoyed a monopoly of basic medical training.
"The women used to come to Mrs Fazekas with their problems," Mrs Gunya recalls.
She said that when they complained about their drunken or violent husbands, Mrs Fazekas told them: "If there's a problem with him, I have a simple solution".
That solution was arsenic, distilled by the midwife by soaking flypaper in water.
Over the years, with the village cemetery filling up, police suspicions grew. They started to exhume bodies.
Out of 50 bodies examined, 46 contained arsenic. Fingers pointed towards the midwife....
As for their motives, theories abound. Poverty, greed and boredom are just a few. Some reports say that the women had taken lovers from among the Russian prisoners of war drafted in to work the farms in the absence of their menfolk at the front.
When the husbands returned, the women resented their sudden loss of freedom, and, one by one, decided to act.
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Tuesday, March 23, 2004
Brown University Taking Heat for even Considering Slavery Reparations
Alan Power, in the Guardian (March 23, 2004):
One of the buildings at the Ivy League Brown University bears a plaque that says: "Erected in 1822 by Nicholas Brown." What it does not add is "with money his family made from the slave trade".
Rikki Baldwin, 18, a first-year student walking into the building, wears a thoughtful expression. "It's history, it's ugly," she says. "Mmm, slavery. It's bad, but it's not this generation and I'm not sure if we deserve . . . it."
That final "it" refers to the attempt currently being made to go some way towards making reparations for the damage done to African-Americans through slavery by offering apologies and economic compensation.
Brown has now launched an investigation to clarify links between the college, its eponymous founding fathers and their role in the Rhode Island slave industry - and to decide what to do about it.
Baldwin is from Texas, not far from Houston, and her parents went to the rival high school of fellow Texan and now president of Brown, Dr Ruth Simmons. Simmons herself is a descendent of slaves. She beat some of the stiffest odds imaginable not only to get to college in the southern US but to end up as the first African-American to head an Ivy League college. "The neighbourhoods I grew up in were brutally segregated. The boundary between black and white was absolute," Simmons says.
Almost three years into her presidency, she has turned the spotlight on the fact that part of Brown's elegant campus, on the hill above the attractive New England port of Providence, was built with slave labour and on slavery's profits.
The four Brown brothers of Providence were wealthy merchants and manufacturers who also traded slaves, owned slave ships and used slaves in their factories. In the early 19th century, the brothers fell out; three renounced their former trade and joined the abolition movement while the fourth entrenched himself to the point where he continued to ship slaves even after it was illegal. All the brothers in some way put money into the founding of the college.
Now Simmons has appointed a committee to uncover more details, consider reconciliation and, she hopes, cut a path for other American colleges nervously considering atoning for their guilty secrets. "Brown's history makes this an issue with a special obligation and special opportunity to provide thoughtful inquiry," she says.
The college plans to invite advice from experts on the Holocaust, South Africa's post-apartheid truth and reconciliation process and Japanese- Americans who were given cheques as compensation for internment during the second world war.
Simmons says she hoped the committee will "help the campus and the nation come to a better understanding of the complicated, controversial ques tions surrounding the issue of reparations for slavery."
Many have jumped to the conclusion that this means the college, known as the most liberal in the Ivy League, will simply start throwing cash at anyone who claims to be a descendant of a Rhode Island slave. Committee chairman Professor James Campbell was horrified after being invited on to Conservative Talk Radio in Virginia to be bombarded by callers accusing Brown of representing "namby pamby liberals" prepared to participate in a "black money grab".
Some alumni have already contacted the college saying they will not give any more money to Brown's endowment if it is to be used for "writing cheques to blacks" - and yet the study has only just begun and will not report until November 2005. Others accuse Simmons of being on nothing more than a personal crusade. On the other side, many believe reparations should not only be hefty but should be personal: that not just the college but also surviving members of the Brown family and other local slave traders in Rhode Island should individually donate money from their ill-gotten inheritances.
Campbell is frustrated that what they planned as a careful, sophisticated debate was so quickly thrown to the floor by bigotry and anger. But this is one of the reasons why the US government continuously skirts the incendiary topic of reparations at a federal level, to the point where it has become almost taboo among both Republicans and Democrats.
Indigo Bethea, a postgraduate student at Brown, said at a public debate held on campus last Thursday: "Every country that has participated in slavery should consider reparations. It extends beyond economics but it includes economics. It is systemic - you should look at economic packages to improve healthcare, education and, if I had my magic wand, give more people in the ordinary community access to the Ivy League."
Indeed for Brown, although the issue has national and international implications, it is also a case of charity beginning at home. Even many locals are entirely unaware that Rhode Island was a hub for the US slave industry. Ships owned by merchants in the RI ports of Providence, Newport and Bristol accounted for more than 60% of slaving voyages during the 18th and early 19th centuries between the US, Africa and the Caribbean.
The human cargo was offloaded at the waterfront in what is now downtown Providence, traded in the market square and the profits banked with Providence Bank, of which the Brown brothers were directors and which later became part of the major US retail banking chain Fleet. Slaves worked in factories, on farms and in households in New England.
Historian Dr Joanne Pope Melish, of Kentucky University, said at the debate that this was a fact that had largely been erased from northern US inhabitants' taught history and consciousness. "It instils a particularly insidious and vicious racism - we the 'virtuous Yankees' over the evil southern slaveholders.
"Blacks have been in New England for 300 years and their problems are not imported from the south or derived from something innate, as northern racists will claim," she said.
The debate took place in the same hall at Brown where reactionary commentator and author David Horowitz stood last autumn and defended a 2001 advert he had placed in college newspapers headlined: "Ten reasons why reparations for slavery is a bad idea". The advert caused uproar on campuses nationwide.
Horowitz maintains that black Americans are prospering today and should be grateful that their forebears were brought to the US, and that this generation should not be held responsible for slavery.
Campbell wants to widen the debate and insists that reparations are "not about dollars" or rather, not only about dollars and definitely not about writing cheques.
Instead, the committee plans to look at options that might combine an apology with ideas such as creating scholarships to bring more African-American students to Brown, local programmes to boost education, or health, and the following idea: "We brought slaves from Africa, why don't we bring some students from Africa to study at Brown?"
No financial figures have yet been discussed.
Posted by Editor at 8:45 PM | Comments (0)
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Historians Who Are Putting 9-11 into Perspective
Robert Sibley, in the Ottawa Citizen (March 21, 2004):
If you read only one book on this first anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, it should be be Harris's Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History (Free Press).
Harris has been described as "the philosopher of 9/11," and rightly so. He is one of a few scholars and commentators who recognize that 9/11 was what the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel called a "world-historical moment;" that is to say, an event that forced a fundamental shift in the way we think about the world.
Essentially, he argues that if we want to defeat the Islamists we must understand them on their terms. "Our first task is to try to grasp what the concept of the enemy really means ... Before 9/11, the very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary ... (but) the enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it is his reason, and not ours."
In a dozen cogently readable, jargon-free chapters, Harris explores everything from the concept of the enemy and the dangers of false tolerance to the nature of western rationalism and the chances of bringing democracy to the Islamic world. He not only works through why Islam's extremist adherents want to kill westerners, but, more importantly, why westerners are so reluctant to acknowledge this hatred.
Consider 9/11: The attacks on New York and Washington were acts of war. But Harris, unlike many commentators who see in these acts the consequence of the West's failure to address the "root causes" of the Islamic world's victimization, detects the re-emergence of a cultural mindset that dates to the ancient world. Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda are not fighting a war in any modern, Clauswitzian sense of wanting to conquer territory or seize wealth. They are acting out a script rooted in a "fantasy ideology" born of a kind of zealotry the Greeks and Romans encountered in the barbarian tribes that challenged their civilizations.
"The targets were chosen by Al-Qaeda not for their military value -- in contrast, for example, to the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor -- but entirely because they stood as symbols of American power universally recognized on the Arab street. They were gigantic props in a grandiose spectacle in which the collective fantasy of radical Islam was brought vividly to life."
Harris suggests this explains why the U.S. was not hit after 9/11 with small-scale attacks -- 9/11 was not a rational act of war as understood in the West. That is, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were a "symbolic fantasy drama," a ritual act intended to convey a message not to Americans or the West but to Muslims.
"We are fighting an enemy who has no strategic purpose in anything he does, whose actions have significance only in terms of his own fantasy ideology," Harris concludes.
Paradoxically, this lack of a "sense of the realistic," the Islamist's psychological adherence to what the philosopher Eric Voegelin described as a "second-order reality," is what makes Islamic extremists so dangerous -- they are willing to entertain fantastical notions that more rational, strategically oriented minds would find difficult to conjure and, therefore, to prevent. The implications are obvious: The only way to defeat the Islamists is by responding with such ruthless efficiency that their fantasy world is blown away, whether by the reality of U.S Marines taking Baghdad or B-52s laying down a string of BLU-82 "daisy-cutter" bombs that, ultimately, frees Afghanistan's women from the Taliban.
This point comes through as clear as an air raid siren in Victor Davis Hanson's recent essay collection, Between War and Peace: Lessons from Afghanistan to Iraq (Random House). If Harris is the philosopher of 9/11, then Hanson is its military historian.
Hanson, who teaches at California State University, first gained public attention with his 2001 book, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (Doubleday), published only months before 9/11, in which he argued that the success of western civilization is due in part to its willingness to seek decisive battle in confronting its enemies and its extreme ruthlessness in killing its enemies -- "the western way of war," as he put it.
Between War and Peace is a collection of three dozen essays Hanson has published between January 2002 and July 2003. He ranges widely, considering the war on terrorism, the dilemmas of the Middle East, Israel's difficult predicament, European anti-Americanism, "empire" and the sur-real reality of postwar Iraq.
The theme connecting these essays is Hanson's puzzlement at many educated people (I'd include Canadians) embracing such a reductive worldview toward the role and character of the United States. As he writes, it's as if "the more America proved itself powerful and moral in its efforts to eradicate medieval fascists and implant democracies in their places, the more many of our own experts sought to demonstrate that we either could or should not."
Against the blindness of a pampered intelligentsia, Hanson sets his deep respect
for the soldiers who, in the course of three weeks and at a cost of a few hundred
lives, subdued a country of 26 million, and, even now, in confronting ongoing
terrorist attacks, "somehow remain oblivious to unfounded criticism, confident
in their own prowess and convinced that their nation and its military are clear
forces for good."
Posted by Editor at 8:16 PM | Comments (0)
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Adam Cohen, in the NYT (March 21, 2004):
The presidential elections of 1876 and 2000 have the sort of eerie parallels that make amateur historians' pulses race. Both ended in a deadlock, with Florida holding the key. Each time, Florida officials who were partisan Republicans gave the state's electoral votes to the Republican candidate, and Democrats challenged the result. Both challenges were decided by a single vote, cast by a Republican Supreme Court justice, in favor of the Republicans.
In 2000, William Rehnquist led the court that, by a 5-to-4 vote, called the election. In 1876, Joseph Bradley broke a tie, giving the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes over Samuel Tilden. Now, Chief Justice Rehnquist has written "Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876," which casts Mr. Bradley in the hero's role. It is a strange book, and even readers keenly interested in history may have trouble seeing it as anything but an allegory, and apologia, for the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore.
More than the election itself, Mr. Rehnquist's subject is the "opprobrium," a word he uses repeatedly, that he believes was wrongly visited on Mr. Bradley. The syllogism lurking just below the surface is that if Mr. Bradley has been wrongly criticized, so has the Bush v. Gore majority. But Mr. Rehnquist glides too quickly over the critical difference between how the 1876 and 2000 elections were resolved. If he is seeking absolution, he does not find it in this story.
Mr. Rehnquist starts setting out the similarities between the 1876 and 2000 elections in the first sentence. He is so eager to find parallels -- each year was "special," he writes, one the nation's centennial, the other the millennium -- that at times he sounds like a trivia buff listing the uncanny coincidences between Abraham Lincoln's life and John F. Kennedy's. ("Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy; Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln.")
If the two elections were in many ways alike, the methods of breaking the deadlocks were not. Rather than ending up in the Supreme Court, the 1876 election was given to a commission made up of members of Congress and Supreme Court justices. The plan was to have seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one member with no political allegiance. But when the independent Supreme Court justice who was to hold the balance of power declined, he was replaced by Mr. Bradley, a onetime Republican candidate for Congress, who cast the deciding vote.
Much of the country was outraged. To avoid having his inauguration disrupted, Hayes, who was dubbed "Rutherfraud," was sworn in privately. Mr. Bradley was a particular target. The book has seven pages of, as his index entry puts it, "newspaper articles against." But Mr. Rehnquist argues, in reasoning he might apply to Bush v. Gore, that "the nation avoided serious disturbance or bloodshed and went on about its business."
There was a key difference, however, between Mr. Bradley's role and Mr. Rehnquist's. Mr. Bradley was appointed to the commission, a political body, by Congress, and it was understood his decision might end up being political. Mr. Rehnquist and his colleagues took the Florida case in their capacity as judges, with the implicit promise that they would make a legal determination.
In the eyes of their critics, however, that is just what they failed to do.
The Bush v. Gore majority, made up of Mr. Rehnquist and his fellow conservatives,
interpreted the equal protection clause in a sweeping way they had not before,
and have not since. And they stated that the interpretation was "limited
to the present circumstances," words that suggest a raw exercise of power,
not legal analysis....
Posted by Editor at 8:14 PM | Comments (0)
