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.
Zbigniew Brzezinski and William B. Quandt, from the Washington Post (6-17-05):
[Mr. Brzezinski was national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Mr.. Quandt was a senior member of his staff with responsibility for the Middle East.]
The statement President Bush delivered at the conclusion of his recent meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas deserves serious attention. It has been much discussed by the Israeli press but drew scant commentary in the U.S. media. The president, in his formal presentation, declared that any final-status agreement between Palestinians and Israelis "must be reached between the two parties, and changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to."
Lest there be any misunderstanding, the president said that "Israel should not undertake any activity that...
Vaclav Havel, in the Washington Post (6-15-05)
On Sunday Aung San Suu Kyi will celebrate her 60th birthday, which in a Buddhist culture marks an important milestone in one's life. I would like to meet her and give her a rose like the one she is seen holding in a photograph in my study. Such an ordinary wish, however, in the case of such an extraordinary woman as Aung San Suu Kyi may seem a silly idea. The last time I wrote about her in The Post [op-ed, Oct. 12, 2003] was shortly after "unknown" assassins tried to deprive her of her life and Burmese generals put her under house arrest for the third time since 1989. Since then, except for the occasional purge of senior generals, an ever-increasing population of political prisoners and multiplying human rights abuses, nothing in Burma seems to have changed.
Aung San Suu...
Clark G. Reynolds, in Historically Speaking (6-16-05):
The United States has been at war against Middle Eastern-based terrorists since September 11, 2001. Does the American public—much less professional historians and their students—know why? Other than the few specialists in Middle Eastern studies, are historians making serious efforts to learn and teach the causes, stakes, and prosecution of the current conflict?
The short answer is, “No!” Professional and personal excuses for this failure by scholars will not do; their negligence, though understandable, is inexcusable. The major blame lies with the baby boomers who during the 1960s and 1970s sanctimoniously revolted against the consensus mainstream of American culture with their own “counter” (i.e., non-) system—an intellectual “cop out,” to use their...
Brian Morton, in the Nation (6-27-05)
On August 1, 1956, the 84th Congress extended the terms of the President's Emergency Fund and ratified a pet project of the Eisenhower regime, the unrevealingly named Special International Program. A cold war dateline almost inevitably lends the words a sinister and clandestine aura. One can imagine the young CIA zealots who people Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost huddled in Berlin clubs or the crush bar at the opera, nursing steins of beer or glasses of sekt and making sophomoric puns about "SIP." The reality was both more innocent and odder, and clubs and concert halls were the appropriate setting.
In Satchmo Blows Up the World, Penny Von Eschen, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, describes a "can-do" bipartisan foreign policy culture in which postwar "policymakers...
Daniel Pipes, at his blog (12-26-04):
Coming to Terms: Militant Islam or Radical Islam? My title here plays off of Martin Kramer's spring 2003 article in the Middle East Quarterly,"Coming to Terms: Fundamentalists or Islamists?" In it, he reviews the"heated debate" of the past two decades on how to label in English the phenomenon variously known as Muslim fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, political Islam, militant Islam, radical Islam, and Islamism. He concludes the survey by noting that"It is impossible to predict which terms will prevail in the West's own struggle to come to terms with change in contemporary Islam."
True enough, and I have my own colorful history of terms for this topic. In my first-ever article on it,"This World is Political!! The Islamic Revival of the Seventies," Orbis, 24 (1980-81): 9-41, I used neo-orthodox Islam. I then...
Henry A. Kissinger, in the Washington Post (6-13-05)
The relationship between the United States and China is beset by ambiguity. On the one hand, it represents perhaps the most consistent expression of a bipartisan, long-range American foreign policy. Starting with Richard Nixon, seven presidents have affirmed the importance of cooperative relations with China and the U.S. commitment to a one-China policy -- albeit with temporary detours at the beginning of the Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. President Bush and Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell have described relations with China as the best since the opening to Beijing in 1971. The two presidents, Bush and Hu Jintao, plan to make reciprocal visits and to meet several times at multilateral forums.
Nevertheless, ambivalence has...
Henry Mark Holzer and Erika Holzer, in the Frontpagemag.com (6-11-05)
For three decades Jane Fonda obfuscated, distorted and lied about virtually
everything connected with her wartime trip to
North Vietnam: her motive, her acts, her intent, and her contribution to the
Communists’ war effort. With the aid of clever handlers, she so successfully
suppressed and spun her conduct in Hanoi that many Americans didn’t know
what she had done there, and, more important, the legal significance.
Three years ago, our book, “Aid and Comfort”: Jane Fonda in North Vietnam (McFarland & Co.), laid bare the incontrovertible facts, applied the American law of treason to them —and proved, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jane Fonda should have been indicted for (and would have been convicted of) treason.
With the recent publication...
Barry Gewen, in the NYT Book Review (6-5-05):
[Barry Gewen is an editor at the NYT Book Review.]
The founding fathers were paranoid hypocrites and ungrateful malcontents. What was their cherished Declaration of Independence but empty political posturing? They groaned about the burden of taxation, but it was the English who were shouldering the real burden, paying taxes on everything from property to beer, from soap to candles, tobacco, paper, leather and beeswax. The notorious tea tax, which had so inflamed the people of Massachusetts, was only one-fourth of what the English paid at home; even Benjamin Franklin labeled the Boston Tea Party an act of piracy. Meanwhile, smugglers, with the full connivance of the colonists, were getting rich at the expense of honest tax-paying citizens. The recent French and Indian War had doubled Britain's national debt, but the Americans, who were the most immediate beneficiaries, were refusing to...
Victor Navasky , in the Nation (6-27-05)
Whatever their motives, Mark (Deep Throat) Felt; Woodstein (Bob and Carl); Judge John Sirica, who refused to accept the notion that the Watergate break-in began and ended with the men arrested inside the Watergate complex (and the two White House aides who recruited them); Senator Sam Ervin, with the battered copy of the US Constitution in his pocket; Senator Howard Baker, who asked what did the President know and when did he know it; John Dean, who did much to answer that question--all of these, and a constitutional process involving a cast of thousands, deserve history's thanks for helping to reveal that something was rotten in President Nixon's Beltway.
Having said that, it behooves us to remember, in the course of today's debate over whether Felt was a hero or a complicated villain, that he had a pre-Watergate...
Charles Lane, in the Washington Post (6-4-05)
In the debate between Europe and the United States over the death penalty, no country is more vocal than Germany. German media regularly decry executions in Texas. A recent U.S. Supreme Court case concerning the rights, under international law, of foreign defendants in capital cases grew in part out of a German lawsuit before the World Court on behalf of two German citizens on death row in Arizona. (The Supreme Court dismissed the case on May 23 for technical reasons.) German objections to capital punishment slowed Berlin's cooperation with the U.S. prosecution of alleged al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, who faces the possibility of the death penalty -- though the two countries eventually worked out an agreement.
Contrasting their nation's policy with that of the Americans, Germans point...
Hugh Fitzgerald, at FrontPagemag.com (6-6-05)
Gil Anidjar is an Assistant Professor at Columbia, with his primary responsibility the teaching of Comparative Literature – but there is a lot of comparison, and very little literature, in his writing. He offers two Comparative Literature courses. One is on Freud and Derrida. The second, a course that is listed as part of Columbia's Middle East offerings, is called, dramatically, "Hate."
The course on "Hate" is not really about the history or literature of the Middle East at all. It is an extended rumination upon two matters. The first is the evil of Europe, which has for its own purposes not merely created "the Other" (or rather, being especially awful, as Europe will be, creating two "the Others" – "...
Alexander H. Joffe, at frontpagemag.com (6-1-05):
[Alexander H. Joffe is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum that critiques Middle East Studies at North American colleges and universities.]
The latest news from Britain is that the Association of University Teachers (AUT) boycott of two Israeli universities has been overturned. The boycott, rammed through by a virulently anti-Israel faction on a Friday afternoon before Passover almost without discussion, put Britain's university faculty union into universal disrepute. But the threat to academic integrity is not over; in fact, there are disturbing signs of faculty-led boycotts and other activities in the United States.
Though largely ignored in...
... Although Mr. Harris notes that all presidents must "play the hand they are dealt," he adds that the greatest ones "manage simultaneously to create their own circumstances - to impose their own values and purposes on the age." Mr. Clinton did not manage to do this, he suggests, in part because he exhibited "a certain passivity" in office, subjecting issues to agonizing debate and often allowing them to drift before choosing his ultimate course: "This was his pattern in the Balkans in 1993 and 1994, in the confrontation with Republicans in 1995, and in deciding what to do about welfare reform in 1996. Those episodes all ended to his advantage. The same passivity was on display as he confronted the Paula Jones case in...
