Roundup: Talking About History
This is where we excerpt articles about history that appear in the media. Among the subjects included on this page are: anniversaries of historical events, legacies of presidents, cutting-edge research, and historical disputes.
[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is an English journalist and author. His most recent book is ‘‘The Strange Death of Tory England.’’]
‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’’ Forty years ago the historian A.J.P. Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs Terkel called his famous oral history of it: ‘‘The Good War.’’
In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive...
Alexander H. Joffe, at the website of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum (5-10-05):
[Alexander H. Joffe directs Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum, He holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Archaeology.]
Archaeology is once again making news in Iraq. Iraqi archaeologists trained in England have returned home to begin excavations of mass graves. More mass graves are being discovered weekly, including those of Kuwaitis murdered during the first Gulf War. And on March 8th Dr. Sinje Stoyke of the German group Archaeologists for Human Rights was honored with the Human Rights...
Nicholas Birch, in the Irish Times (5-5-05):
Turkey's new criminal code was supposed to be a crucial part of its efforts to bring itself in line with European norms. Instead, it stumbles from one controversy to another.
Last autumn, voices were raised over plans to criminalise adultery. The centre of attention now is an article that looks as if it sets the courts loose on anyone describing the 1915 mass expulsion of Ottoman Armenians as a "genocide".
Article 305's prescription of between three and 10-year prison sentences for individuals acting "against fundamental national interests" originally only affected Turkish citizens. Late on Tuesday, though, hours before a revised draft of the criminal code was due to be presented to Turkey's parliament, three MPs succeeded in extending its remit to include "foreigners in Turkey". "According to the legal changes we have made, those materially benefiting from claims...
Hans-Martin Hinz, in the Australian (5-5-05):
... German museums have established a tradition of helping come to terms with the realities of the Third Reich and exhibitions are extensively discussed in the media.
Political criticism is not entirely absent. A few years ago a travelling exhibition about the crimes of the Wehrmacht, prepared by a private research institute in Hamburg, went almost unnoticed in the first five German cities it visited. Then conservative politicians started an outcry over the accusations made against German soldiers, which made it a first-rate media event and resulted in a large number of visitors for the rest of its tour.
All in all, however, direct influence of politics on museum work in Germany is rather small and academic freedom, guaranteed in the constitution, is largely a reality. What political regulation there is generally occurs through the granting or denying of public funding for specially commissioned...
Jonathan Zimmerman, in the Christian Science Monitor (5-4-05):
[Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education. He is the author of 'Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools.]
Should history textbooks make you love your country? Most people would say "yes." And that's why textbooks inevitably distort the past - even here, in the good old USA. Americans like to think they've reckoned with their history, while other nations remain mired in propaganda and distortion. Americans should think again.
Consider the recent controversy over history textbooks in Japan. Last month, Chinese and Korean protesters took to the streets to condemn a new set of Japanese junior high school texts. The books omit mention of "comfort women," the roughly 200,000 females - mostly from Korea and China - whom the Japanese forced into...
From FromPageMag.com (5-6-05):
This is the first of a series of exchanges between Jacob Heilbrunn, an LA Times editorial writer and author of a forthcoming book on neoconservatism, and David Horowitz to discuss the themes of Horowitz’s book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left and DiscoverTheNetwork.org...
[Bonnie J. Morris is an adjunct assistant professor of women's studies at George Washington University.]
Last fall I was deeply moved when one student took the time to offer me her condolences. No, I had not experienced a death in my family or been turned down for tenure. The student was responding to the fact that 11 states had passed new laws forbidding gay marriage or legal recognition of same-sex unions.
"I'm from Oklahoma -- I tried to speak out against it," she told me, and I assured her that I didn't hold her responsible for her state's new homophobic legislation. None of my 175-plus other students, all of whom know I'm gay, had spoken to me about how the new laws and election results might affect me or my family members. That young woman was the only one to reach out and ask how it feels to be the target of state...
Seymour Topping in a letter to the editor of the NYT (5-4-05):
Re "The War We Could Have Won" (Op-Ed, May 1):
Stephen J. Morris writes about confrontation with the "profoundly ideological and aggressive totalitarian regime" of North Vietnam over five decades. But he doesn't mention how that came about.
In 1945, President Harry S. Truman abandoned President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal for transformation of Indochina into a United Nations trusteeship and yielded to Charles de Gaulle's demands for assistance in restoring French control of the colony in return for cooperation in Europe.
As described in Robert S. McNamara's book "Argument Without End," "This was how U.S. involvement with Vietnam began: absentmindedly, almost as a kind of 'throwaway' in a grand bargain for the heart of Europe, to appease its defeated, temperamental and proud French ally."
Truman never replied to at least eight appeals...
Gertrud Mackprang Baer, in the Toronto Star (4-29-05):
[Gertrud Mackprang Baer is the Ottawa-based author of In the Shadow Silence - From Hitler Youth to Allied Internment: A Young Woman's Story of Truth and Denial, which was short-listed for the 2002 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction]
The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has produced an extraordinary global response. Leaders have met at the former extermination camp and in the German capital of Berlin, after 10 years of bickering and three years of construction, architect Peter Eisenman's monument to the Holocaust is now ready for inauguration on May 8.
I visited the memorial last summer when it was still a muddy construction site. Built almost atop the former Reich Chancellery and the Fuehrer-Bunker, the four-acre monument of dark-grey slabs discourages easy analysis.
One message, however, is clear: This must be the final line; man cannot create anything...
Jack Torry and Joe Hallett, in the Columbus Dispatch (4-29-05):
Building a government that enjoys popular support. Creating a modern army willing to fight a powerful insurgency. Maintaining widespread support on the home front.
The United States fell short of those goals in Vietnam. Thirty years after the fall of Saigon, the country is giving them another go, in Iraq.
Americans have not suffered anything like the casualties they endured in Vietnam, but the war in Iraq bears eerie similarities to the one that ended so long ago in Southeast Asia.
"I happen to believe there are more parallels between Iraq and Vietnam than not," said retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a military historian who served in Vietnam. "In both cases, you have a government that hopes to be democratic struggling for legitimacy in the midst of an insurgency that would topple it. The bulk of the population, which has never lived under democracy, is the...
Lynda Hurst, in the Toronto Star (4-30-05):
...
Who was Adolf Hitler?
What was he? ...
In the unstable Germany of the 1930s, there was a desire for a strong leader, says McGill University historian and author Peter Hoffmann. "But a lot of people shook their heads when they saw the crowds' reaction to him. They thought these people were fools or black sheep."
An acknowledged expert on the German Resistance (which included his father), Hoffmann says ordinary people didn't want another war. Berliners flatly refused to cheer when troops marched through the streets in September 1938, and Hitler delayed his plans in consequence.
As American journalist William Shirer recorded in his 1947 Berlin Diary, "they stood at the curb in utter silence ... the most striking demonstration against the war I've ever seen."
War came, nevertheless, exactly one year later, declared by Britain and France after Hitler...
: Hugo Hamilton, in the Irish Times (4-30-05):
Hitler is dead. The war is over. It is 60 years ago, five times the duration of the Third Reich, since the greatest disaster of Europe came to an end with the capitulation of the German command on May 8th, 1945. The world has moved on, Europe has come together as never before, and yet there is something about the events of the Nazi era which makes time stand still. The Holocaust is always yesterday. We are no distance from history. ...
Since the war, Germans tried to prove that they are benign, non-aggressive imitators rather than instigators. In the dysfunctional 1970s, they placed their parents on trial. They could not love their mothers. Even less their fathers. They had no dream-life, and, in the process of exorcising the Nazi crimes, Germans have paid a heavy price in denying their own heritage, an emotional discontinuity which has given them a strangely homeless, orphaned status.
...
Kelly Patterson, in the Ottawa Citizen (5-1-05):
Crammed along the Via Sacra in Rome, thousands of faithful hold their breath in anticipation. At long last, the new pope, in full regalia, comes into view, wending his way from St. Peter's to the Lateran Basilica.
Suddenly the primate crumples to the ground, doubled over in pain. The crowd gasps in horror: the Pope is giving birth!
Yes, under those fetching robes, Pope John VIII was really Pope Joan, the most daring cross-dresser in history, believers say.
Joan, who reigned from AD 853 to 855, was stoned to death on the spot by the incensed mob, they say. According to another version, she was dispatched to a distant convent; her child grew up to become the Bishop of Ostia.
It sounds like the mother of all urban legends, but to this day Pope Joan has a surprisingly large and loyal following, with non-fiction books and (of course) websites preaching the gospel that there was once a papa...
This Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. For a child born today, that war is as ancient as World War II was for someone born in 1975. But for some, Vietnam is still current events, not history.
The cliché is that generals like to fight the last war. The phrase is usually invoked to suggest (often inaccurately) that military types are behind the times. But in America, even if generals were fighting the last war, that would still put them several wars ahead of much of the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood.
The gravitational pull of Vietnam analogies is so powerful in some quarters that it can bend not only light but logic. At The New York Times, especially, there seems to be a hair trigger for such comparisons. It's as if their computers have macros designed to...
[Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch; author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter); and editor of the essay collection The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: Islamic Law and Non-Muslims (Prometheus). He is working on a new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades (forthcoming from Regnery).]
"It’s not like a stupid Hollywood movie,” said French actress Eva Green about the English director Sir Ridley Scott’s Crusades flick, Kingdom of Heaven.
That’s true. It’s, like, a stupid English movie.
The Crusades are hot, and Ridley Scott (director of Alien) is about to make them hotter. “Muslims,” gushed the New York Times after an...
[Roger Pulvers is an Australian author, playwright and theater director, and a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. A collection of his fiction and nonfiction writings,"Half and More," will be published by Shinchosha in March 2005. His website is: http://www17.ocn.ne.jp/~h-uesugi/secondpage.htm]
Way back in 1964 and 1965 I made extended trips to and around the Soviet Union. Memories that are 40 years old are hard enough to relate to the reality of the present, let alone when they are of a country that has ceased to exist. This, though, is precisely what I aim to do. Being able to speak Russian, I traveled about with considerable freedom from Moscow, Leningrad and Novgorod in the north to Kiev, Kharkov and the lovely Crimean port town of Yalta in the south. I found a country that was multiracial and multicultural, despite the efforts of the government's cynical technocrats to suppress such variety. But wherever I went, I was...
... The Yale union battles, whatever their outcome, have already left a lasting imprint that goes deeper than the leaflets and counterleaflets piling up in New Haven. In a small way, the conflict has left its mark on scholarship itself.
Several of the graduate-student union's most visible organizers in the mid-1990s -- an era marked by a bitterly contested grade strike -- are now junior professors of history, political science, and American studies at other campuses across the country.
Those young scholars bonded at Yale a decade ago in part because of their mutual frustration with then-fashionable academic leftists "who were willing to...
Brent Staples, in the NYT (5-1-05):
Film directors who once stood helpless while studios recut their movies can now console themselves with "directors' cuts" put out on DVD. This option was not available to the influential Japanese director Ishiro Honda, whose 1954 classic "Godzilla" - known in Japan as "Gojira" - made a household name of the towering reptile who stomped a miniature Tokyo into the ground while raking the landscape with his fiery thermonuclear breath.
A fire-breathing reptile is pretty much the same in any language. But the butchered version of the film that swept the world after release in the United States was stripped of the political subtext - and the anti-American, antinuclear messages - that had saturated the original. The uncut version of the film is due out on home video early next year, and should push...
Stephen J. Morris, in the NYT (5-1-05):
[Stephen J. Morris, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, is writing a book on the Vietnam War in the Nixon years.]
THE Vietnam War is universally regarded as a disaster for what it did to the American and Vietnamese people. However, 30 years after the war's end, the reasons for its outcome remain a matter of dispute.
The most popular explanation among historians and journalists is that the defeat was a result of American policy makers' cold-war-driven misunderstanding of North Vietnam's leaders as dangerous Communists. In truth, they argue, we were fighting a nationalist movement with great popular support. In this view, "our side," South Vietnam, was a creation of foreigners and led by a corrupt urban elite with no popular roots. Hence it could never prevail, not even with a half-million American troops, making the war "unwinnable."
This...
Stephanie Coontz, in the Wa PO (5-1-05):
Thirteen years ago, Vice President Dan Quayle attacked the producers of TV sitcom's Murphy Brown for letting her character bear a child out of wedlock, claiming that the show's failure to defend traditional family values was encouraging America's youth to abandon marriage. His speech kicked off more than a decade of outcries against the "collapse of the family." Today, such attacks have given way to a kinder, gentler campaign to promote marriage, with billboards declaring that "Marriage Works" and books making "the case for marriage." What these campaigns have in common is the idea that people are willfully refusing to recognize the value of traditional families and that their behavior will change if we can just enlighten them. But...
