Historians in the News Archive
This page includes, in addition to news about historians, news about political scientists, economists, law professors, and others who write about history. For a comprehensive list of historians' obituaries, go here.
Linton Weeks, in the Wash Post (3-31-05):
Sniping at Allen Weinstein from ivory towers.
Blasting him in the blogosphere.
Suggesting he could become an accomplice in presidential coverups.
He's been called a stonewaller and a "sloppy" manager. His scholarship has been challenged, his appointment questioned. The guy's been slapped around more than the third Stooge.
He would like to get on with his formidable tasks as the newly confirmed Archivist of the United States -- the ninth since 1934 -- but try as he might, he just can't escape the thing that has gotten him where he is: the past.
When you finally see Weinstein, at his ceremonial swearing-in at the McGowan Theater in the National Archives on a recent Monday morning, it's hard to believe that he is what he is: a porch light for the moths of controversy.
He is a slight 67-year-old man with a slight voice and slight wisps of gray hair. He's in a standard-issue blue suit, white shirt, red tie and wire-rims. Wally Cox might have played him in the movies; Dana Carvey in a remake. At the pre-swearing-in reception, he shuffles from person to person in a deliberate fashion, floatingly, like a ghost.
Before administering the oath of office, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg tells the crowd of 300 that Weinstein is "a scholar whose work I have long admired."
He just sort of appears at the lectern and swears, with his right hand raised, to do the right thing. When he turns to give his inaugural speech, the microphone is not working and no one can hear a word he says. A technician adjusts things so that if you strain, you can hear him. And, speaking very softly and very swiftly, he stakes out his claim of sovereignty.
"Under my stewardship," he vows in his first official appearance before staff and world, the Archives "will remain non-political and professional."
Weinstein (rhymes with fine-wine) has heard a lot of the criticism. Before sitting down to answer a few questions, he sends word through an intermediary that he hopes the interview will be forward-looking.
Odd request, coming from a historian. The bases of two statues at the Pennsylvania Avenue entrance to the Archives read: "Study the past" and "What is past is prologue."
In his office in late afternoon, Weinstein is at a table. Susan L. Cooper, the Archives' director of public affairs, and Adrienne Dominguez, Weinstein's wife, insist on sitting in. He doesn't object. His wife hops in with answers and opinions on occasion. Weinstein talks about his childhood, his professional past and the challenges ahead.
He has great plans. With 3,000 employees, the National Archives is often lost in the shadows of Washington's high-profile cultural institutions, the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. But it is responsible for keeping track of the official notes, e-mails and other records of American governance. It's the repository for, among other things, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights; the arrest records of Rosa Parks; the first report of the Titanic crashing into an iceberg; and the papers of a dozen presidents.
If the Smithsonian is the nation's attic, the Archives is the nation's sock drawer....
Juan Cole, at his blog (3-27-05):
The Google search has become so popular that prospective couples planning a date will google one another. Mark Levine, a historian at the University of California Irvine, tells the story of how a radio talk show host called him a liar because he referred to an incident that the host could not find on google. That is, if it isn't in google, it didn't happen. (Levine was able to retrieve the incident from Lexis Nexis, a restricted database).
It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far rightwing friends of his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent, which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to journalists and politicians as though they were actual information.
Recently Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa, an Israeli defender of the terrorist groups around the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, was commissioned by Horowitz (and probably others of that circle) to do yet another hatchet job on me, the second in just a few months. I replied to the earlier smear at my blog.
Plaut cited the earlier hatchet jobs and rightwing bloggers as authorities. (One defamation now becomes a" citation" for the next one!)
The GoogleSmear references a body of falsehoods. It creates a nexus of links that increase the chance that the calumny will come to the top of a google search.
Many thanks to Matthew Barganier for pointing out that Plaut just made up allegations against me, of having published an op-ed in the New York Times in which I am supposed to have praised the Syrian elections (?) and spoken against democracy. He must have been imbibing something illegal when he came up with that complete fantasy. Although Plaut at length removed the falsehoods from the page when repeatedly challenged, he did not apologize or issue a formal correction. Moreover, he posted the false allegation to a bulletin board under an assumed name (just to be sure that future GoogleSmears can reference the now-missing paragraph, elsewhere on the Web).
Thanks also to Justin Raimundo for his acerbic dissection of Plaut's tripe.
The GoogleSmear depends on subtle changes of wording that make the individual sound like an idiot. For instance, in one column, I wrote that "much of the Arab world has a formal peace treaty with Israel." Egyptians constitute about a third of the Arabs, and with Jordan account for some 75 million persons. Over a third of the Arab population would be"much", and the statement is perfectly correct. Moreover, the whole Arab League offered Israel a comprehensive peace only 2 years ago, which doesn't sound like they want to destroy Israel, as the Zionist Right keeps alleging. Anyway, in the GoogleSmear version, it is implied that I said that a"majority" of Arab"states" have a peace treaty with Israel, which is not true (though the way things are going, it may soon be. Oman, Qatar and others are threatening to break from the Arab League consensus, as Egypt and Jordan have already done).
The Zionist far right is also upset that I pointed out that Palestinian and Hizbullah terrorism had its roots in Israeli military occupation of other people's land. They argue that this thesis is invalidated by the military occupations that have not produced terrorism, as with Tibet in China.
But in fact the Chinese occupation of Xinjiang has produced some small terrorist movements. And the Chinese government certainly saw the Kampa revolt of 1959 to be a terrorist action. There are intervening variables in these matters, in any case. For instance, the Tibetan population was not socially mobilized (had low levels of literacy, urbanization, industrialization, modern communications, etc.), which reduced its organizational capacity.
Another stupid thing in Plaut's GoogleSmear (there are so many) is a typical 189 Fallacy argument. The Zionist Right maintains that you can't criticize Israeli violations of basic human rights and international law until you first criticize all the other 188 countries in the world. Plaut's variation is to bring up the Sudan. (There are lots of massacres, deaths and tragedies in the world that I don't have time to cover in my little blog; indeed, Iraq most often exhausts my time and energies all by itself.) As with the Zionist Right generally, he makes the mistake of racializing the Sudan problems, using anti-Semitic language accusing"Arabs" of killing thousands of"black Africans."
But the"Arabs" of the Sudan are black (some are brown or lighter shades of black, but not by any means all, and anyway so are e.g. Eritreans just to the south). The Sudanese"Arabs" just speak Arabic or identify with the Arabs. It isn't a matter of US-style race, which is based on color. Moreover, the people of Darfur are Muslims and many know Arabic. So the massacres in Darfur are not about"Arabs" versus"black Africans." They are between two groups of Muslim black Africans.
I defy anyone to tell me which is the"black African" and which the"Arab" Janjawid in these pictures.
The rightwing Zionists want to racialize the Sudan conflict in American terms, as"Arab" versus"black African" because they want to use it to play American domestic politics, and create a rift among African-Americans and Arab-Americans. Both of the latter face massive discrimination in contemporary society, and they should find ways of cooperating to counter it. What is happening in Darfur is horrible with regard to the loss of life and the displacement of persons, but the dispute is not about race. It is about political separatism and regionalism.
I am well aware that the GoogleSmear and other techniques of propaganda may well succeed. Horowitz and his minions are funded to the tune of millions, and I am just one lone individual. And, maybe it is even dangerous to tangle with someone who admires Kahane and his followers.
But as of September 11, I'm not going to stand by and let extremists of any stripe drag my country into danger, as the Likud Party is doing. Silence is not an option.
Steve Plaut, at frontpagemag.com (3-29-05):
The new head of the Middle East Studies Association, Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan, has responded on his own web page to the in-depth expose of his bias I published recently in Frontpage Magazine. In that article, Cole’s long history of distortion, ignorance, and bias was carefully documented. In particular, I challenged the Cole Doctrine, which holds that all terrorism is due to “occupation.” I showed that most terrorism has nothing to do with “occupation,” that most occupation does not cause terrorism, and that terrorism is more often the cause than the consequence of “occupation.”
Cole is apparently unable to defend his record against the criticism contained in my piece and instead complains, in a column on his own web page, that he was a “victim” of a “GoogleSmear.” By this he means critical analysis of what he writes, which then gets cited and reposted on the web, something he dislikes (but can’t answer). He is upset when web commentators publish correctives to his extremist and unfounded views, and then these show up whenever someone googles his name in the web’s best known search engine.
But more importantly, this is all a bit like the libelous pot calling the kettle black. Cole’s habitual response whenever anyone exposes his errors and bias is to whine that he is being “smeared.” But Cole has a long history of smearing and threatening respected scholars like Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, who – unlike Cole – are careful with the facts. “Googlesmearing” -- as opposed to the fact-filled documented analysis I wrote in the above FPM article -- is hardly a “new way of discrediting a political opponent,” as Cole described it. Indeed, Cole and his leftist friends have been doing it for years.
In his attempt to defend his indefensible record, Cole writes, “The GoogleSmear depends on subtle changes of wording that make the individual sound like an idiot.” In all candor, we do not think anyone needs word changes nor Google to assist in making Juan Cole sound like an idiot. Noam Chomsky has said, “Juan Cole is a very serious and knowledgeable analyst.” Need we say more.
Cole’s “idiot” reference is actually meant to refer to a small piece of my original article (before I corrected it), which mistook a spoof of what Cole writes for the real thing. But what does it say about Cole that’s hard to tell the difference? In any case, unlike Cole, I am happy to acknowledge an error when I make it, since it is not – as it is with him – the very substance of my discourse.
No sooner does Cole complain about “dubious facts” in the Frontpage piece about him and about his being a victim of “GoogleSmear” than he himself decides to illustrate GoogleSmear for his readers by performing it against me. Thus, his first and main defense of his good name is to repeat a lie about myself invented earlier this week by his crony, superior ship’s officer, and editor at antiwar.com, Dennis “Justin” Raimondo. Cole clearly regards Raimondo as a legitimate, authoritative source of information, while complaining that his critics rely on dubious sources. We counted 14,400 web pages in which the names Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo appear together.
One is known by the company that one keeps and Cole keeps intimate company with Raimondo, who is best known for fabricating a conspiracy theory reprinted on neonazi web sites all over the Internet about how Jews supposedly knocked down the World Trade Center to make poor bin Laden look bad. Raimondo has even self-published this theory as a “book.” Cole obviously has no problems being associated with a crackpot like Raimondo nor with citing his libelous ravings as “authoritative.” And then he complains that we at Frontpage Magazine are responsible for his own damaged reputation.
Cole rests the better part of his “self-defense” on labeling me “an Israeli defender of the terrorists (sic) around the late extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane,” the fellow who set up the Jewish Defense League. So what is the source of this invention reported with scholarly seriousness by Professor Juan Cole? Why, it is Justin Raimondo himself, of course! In fact, Cole thanks Raimondo profusely on his web page for smearing me as a supposed Kahanist.
The only problem is that I am not. Raimondo’s evidence for this smear against me is that he googled my name and the word “Kahanist” together, and discovered two articles of mine in which I used the word “Kahanist” in the text. But that was all he found. In neither article did I express any support for the Kahanists or Kahanism. Talk about Googlesmears! Cole, also accuses me of posting comments under a false name on a web bulletin board and accuses me of using illegal drugs, which is equally fanciful and absurd.
Not only have I never been a Kahanist, but - on the contrary - I have been a critic of Kahane and his organization for well over 30 years, and have been attacked by the Kahane movement on more than one occasion. But such facts cannot be expected to deter the scholarly head of the Middle East Studies Association, Juan Cole, and his conspiracist mentor Raimondo in their zeal to discredit my analysis of Cole's actual positions and performance. Cole, by the way, is as fond of infantile conspiracist “theories” as Raimondo, and – again like his mentor – likes to spread anti-Jewish libels. Both Raimondo and Cole have a habit of responding to any documentation of their lies by shrieks and slanders and with threats.
Cole never quite gets around to addressing the main criticism against him that appeared in my FPM article, namely that his theory that “terrorism is caused by occupation” is without empirical foundation. In his column, he simply repeats his "theory" that occupation produces terrorism, whereas in fact the reverse is more commonly the case.
If the Cole Doctrine were true, why did the illegal Chinese occupation of Tibet not produce terrorism? – that was one of the many questions I asked in my column attacking Cole’s “theory”! Cole responds on his web page: because "the Tibetan population was not socially mobilized," adding, "the Chinese government certainly saw the Kampa revolt of 1959 to be a terrorist action." Actually, a handful of Kampas struggled against the Maoist colonialists, starting in 1951. Leave it up to a socially-mobilized apologist for Maoism like Cole to denounce these Kampa rebels, who never targeted civilians, as terrorists, while Hizbollah and Hamas – real terrorist organizations that embrace Osama’s jihad – are legitimate anti-occupation protest movements in Juan Cole’s eyes.
Cole then adds: "The Zionist Right maintains that you can't criticize Israeli violations of basic human rights and international law until you first criticize all the other 188 countries in the world." Cole is not too far off this time. Human rights are a hundred times better respected and protected in Israel than in the next-best Middle East countries and better than in close to 188 others. Someone who harps constantly on supposed human rights abuses by Israel – which is a way to demonize and delegitimize Israel, a country under threat of annihilation from the Arab dictatorships Cole supports - while ignoring human rights in other countries is acting in behalf of malevolent political agendas.
It is exactly like those who shrieked in the late 1930s about human rights abuses of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, while ignoring the fact the human rights record of Czechoslovakia was far better than in the countries seeking to delegitimize and destroy it. Professor Cole resents anyone questioning his real motives. Does he really imagine that his bluster against the “Zionist Right” will hide his attempts to promote the agendas of the anti-Semitic Left?
Cole takes sanctimonious exception to the fact that I referred to the Sudanese murdering people in southern Sudan as "Arabs" and noted that those being massacred in Sudan are black Africans. The ruling classes in Sudan consist of people who speak Arabic, are Moslems, run a program of coerced "Arabization" in the country, and Sudan is a member of the Arab League. Their victims are black Africans, even if much of the Sudanese murdering class is also black.
After raising the Sudan race issue, which was never mentioned at all in the Frontpage piece criticizing him, Cole insists that this proves that "The rightwing Zionists want to racialize the Sudan conflict." We wonder how many people are capable of reading Cole's web site without the constant need to shout "Huh??!!" By the way, lots of Israeli Jews are black also. What does that make them, Professor Cole, well - besides right-wing Zionists?
Standing back to view the man whom the leftwing Middle Eastern experts on America’s college campuses have made the quarterback of their anti-American game plan, here is Cole’s view of bin Laden and 9-11 and the war on terror, taken from Raimondo’s site, where Cole has published many articles:
"The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the U.S. fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum.... Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians.... Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason."
He then adds:
"Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate bin Laden's wisdom and foresight.... The U.S. is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the U.S. has of its."
In sum, the more Cole complains about those who criticize his extremist political agenda, his undeniable bias, and his general absence of scholarship, the more he proves how correct in fact they are.
A young historian's book on the 1937 atrocity unleashed a tide of repressed anguish and international recriminations that continue even after her suicide
THOSE who knew Iris Chang used to worry about how she could cope with the gloom of her chosen work. But when they visited the house in California that she shared with her husband and saw him playing with their two-year-old son by the swimming pool in the backyard, they were reassured.
The 36-year-old historian would sip lemonade with her friends at a Chinese café called the Tea House and, for a while, the torrent of terror that she frequently invited into her life would seem far away.
Were it not for the crinkled maps of China, the pictures of mass graves and the two desperately overstuffed Rolodexes on her desk, Chang might have been just another former high school homecoming queen from the aptly named Sunnyvale. But she had become one of the foremost young historians of her generation after publishing, seven years ago, a bestselling account of the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst episodes of human cruelty in recent history.
Her book brought international acclaim and controversy, and many spoke of a stellar future. It was not to be. In November she killed herself, no longer able to bear the weight of horrors from seven decades ago.
The Rape of Nanking in 1937 began with the march of invading Japanese soldiers up the Yangtse River. They occupied the Chinese capital of the time and soon conquest was followed by bloodlust. Soldiers slaughtered between 100,000 and 300,000 civilians sheltering in a few city blocks. Slowly.
Over a six-week period, up to 80,000 women were raped. But it wasn’t so much the sheer numbers as the details that shock — fathers forced at gunpoint to rape daughters, stakes driven through vaginas, women nailed to trees, tied-up prisoners used for bayonet practice, breasts sliced off the living, speed decapitation contests.
During the war the massacre was well known, but both Tokyo and Beijing preferred not to mention it over the four decades that followed.
Iris Chang was pitched into this maelstrom of history as a child when her immigrant parents, who had escaped from wartime China to the US, told their daughter how the Japanese “sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths”. In the introduction to her book she wrote: “Throughout my childhood [the massacre] remained buried in the back of my mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil.”
When, at 27, she read one of the few accounts of the atrocity still circulating in the West, she sensed a mission in life. “I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.”
Chang soon made her first trip to China and sought out Sun Zhaiwei, a history professor in Nanjing, as Nanking is known today. “I provided her with an assistant and fixed appointments with some of the survivors,” he says. Chang was given free lodgings and unlimited access to archives on the tree-lined campus near where the Japanese breached the old city wall before beginning their slaughter.
When the book based on her research — The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II — was published two years later, it sold more than half a million copies and Chang became an instant celebrity in America. Hillary Clinton invited her to the White House and Stephen Ambrose, the doyen of US historians, described her as “maybe the best young historian we’ve got”.
She was also widely praised for the emotion and commitment she brought to her work. On book tours the slim, ponytailed author spoke with an intensity that few listeners expected. Many broke down by her side, feeling compelled to recount their own tales of horror even if these were unrelated to her subject.
Orphans, rape victims and Holocaust survivors all wanted to bare their souls to her, finally relieving themselves of agonies sometimes decades old. They felt encouraged by the passion that she brought to the sort of grievances few of them could tackle on their own.
Chang cried when they cried. She was enraged even when they no longer were. It was unthinkable for her just to pass the paper tissues and wait until people had composed themselves again. Chang invited memories of atrocity and abuse with a seemingly limitless appetite. ...
Since November 2004, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole has served as the "Rais" (the Palestinian term for head of state) of the Middle East Studies Association. MESA is far less an academic organization for scholars than it is an anti-America and anti-Israel advocacy group, operating a nonstop jihad against Bush's war against terrorism. A professor of Modern Middle Eastern and South Asian History, Cole has been named one of the eight most biased professors in America. Cole, who led the lobby to clear Saddam of any ties with terrorism, believes that a group of Jewish “neo-conservatives” largely runs U.S. policy toward the Middle East. His recurrent theoryis that a nebulous ‘pro-Likud’ cabal controls the U.S. government from a small number of key positions in the Executive Branch. Jonathan Calt Harris has declared:"He (Cole) is blindly anti-Israel to the point of being an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, an apologist for radical Islam, and someone who despises American public opinion." Some of Cole's most outrageous statements include: “Much of the Arab world has a formal peace treaty with Israel.” (Actually only Egypt and Jordan have, and the former is observed by Egypt mainly in its non-compliance.) “Chemical weapons are not weapons of mass destruction.” “Supporting orphans is, in any case, not the same as funding terrorism." (Cole is referring to subsidies to the families of suicide bombers by Saddam, the Saudis, and others. Of course there is nothing wrong with the PLO making Jewish children orphans in Old Juan Cole’s eyes.) Cole has also pushed the Israel divestment campaign by campus anti-Semites, supposedly because Arabs are"mistreated" by Israel. Never mind that Arabs in Israel are treated a thousand times better than are Arabs in Arab countries. Of course, Cole’s so-called passion for speaking out against human rights abuses in underdeveloped countries is rather one sided. Concerning the atrocities and massacres in Darfur, Cole has blamed it on the U.S. and the U.K., claiming the Iraq War took attention away from Sudan. Imaginary mistreatment of Arabs by Israel upsets Cole, while mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Christians and Black Muslims by Sudanese Arabs is not worth a Michigan yawn. And Cole has been notably quiet about the 200,000 people massacred in Algeria. Maybe he could not figure a way to blame the Jews or the neocons for those. Needless to say, Cole has never called for divestment from Syria until it frees Lebanon, nor from Iran or any other anti-American regime for which tenured extremists feel enlightened affection. A while back Cole crayoned a piece in which he complained that the media are ignoring America's"historians of Iraq" — people who"know about the country in its historical context.” He is referring, of course, to the academic members of MESA, who by and large hold the same opinions as Cole. Middle East Scholar Martin Kramer has shown that the dearth of real scholarship on Saddam's Iraq was due to pressure from the pro-Arab MESA professors to treat Saddam with kid gloves. Cole has endorsed conspiracy theories concerning the CIA about which one ordinarily has to go to neo-nazi web sites like RENSE to read. IraqPundit calledCole"dependably misinformed" and poked fun at him and his insane conspiracy theories, mentioning how some Iraqis refer to Cole's site as"Misinformed Comment," a play on the title of his web page"Informed Comment." The Bay2beirut weblog writes: "So what does Cole do? What he does best. Weave conspiracy theories that of course involve the Neocons (see that second link to IraqPundit for another one of those) on how Iraq The Model is 'suspicious' and how 'far out of the mainstream of Iraqi opinion' the posters are. Yes you heard right. An Iraqi site, whose authors have formed a pro-democracy liberal Iraqi party, based in Iraq, living through the war and its dangers (esp. when Cole's favorite, Sadr, was bullying other Iraqis and when Jihadists are killing anyone pro-American, while Cole is sitting pontificating from his Michigan office) is not reflective of Iraqi opinion, which Juan Cole is supposedly an expert on! The pretentious self-importance is nauseating. "But there's more. This amounts to the worst 'Orientalism' (in the Saidian sense) there is. It presumes that Iraqi opinion must not only be monolithic, but it must also conform to an anti-US, pro-Arabist party line (because Arabism is the 'authentic' voice of the East)! Or, it must be what Juan Cole says it is! If not, it's an attempt 'to spread disinformation ... It is a technique made for the well-funded Neoconservatives,' i.e., not only must 'Arabs' have one opinion, but if they are dissenters then they are passive agents of manipulation by outside (Jewish) forces! (Iraq the Model was quoted by Wolfowitz a while ago in a WSJ op-ed. Well that 'proves' they're Neocons!)" Another weblog operated by pro-democracy Iraqis, IraqtheModel, writes: "I came across this article by Dr Juan Cole that made me feel ashamed of myself. This man who doesn’t live in Iraq seems to know more about the history of Iraq than I do. In his article he was criticizing the westerns, journalists in particular, for making judgments without knowing much about Iraq’s history, which I must admit is true..... What Dr. Cole was trying to tell us, as you can see in his article, is that Fallujah is celebrated in Iraq’s history as a symbol for the large rebellion/revolution against the British back in 1920." The blogger then notes that no such incident ever took place. Fallujah was under the control of the British army the whole time. Cole was one of the people spreading around anti-Semitic blood libels about Israel before the invasion of Iraq, claiming that Israel was going to commit atrocities and mass murders against Palestinians as soon as the Allies landed in Iraq. He once wrote that Larry Franklin had"a Brooklyn accent" even though"he himself was not Jewish." Nevertheless he was close to Wolfowitz and"the predominantly Jewish Neoconservatives" and thus he was part of"a clever scheme." Cole also cast suspicions on Sephardic Jews for possibly being infiltrated by the Mossad. Cole responds to criticism of his fanaticism and doubts about his scholarship by groups like Campus Watch or individuals like Martin Kramer, with ad hominem shrieks, threats, and insults. He routinely sends letters to people like Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, threatening to sue them for criticizing his writings and statements. He sees Jewish cabals manipulating the Pentagon and other organs of power, including when Arabs whom he dislikes are involved. He has written:"The FBI should investigate how Phares, an undistinguished (Arab) academic with links to far rightwing Lebanese groups and the Likud clique, became the 'terrorism analyst' at MSNBC." Andrew Sullivan, who is not Jewish, thinks Cole is an anti-American crackpot. He adds:"If you ask me, that's why the far-left Middle East academic elite has had so little influence over this debate. Their shrillness crowds out their expertise." Cole himself was targeted by the Middle East Media Research Institute, which threatened to sue him for lies he published about MEMRI's finances—claims which, according to MEMRI's president Yigal Carmon, were factually untrue. Cole claimed that MEMRI was funded"to the tune of $60 million a year" (an absurd figure), that MEMRI is biased, and that it is somehow linked to the Likud party. MEMRI demanded a retraction on all three points, and threatened Cole with possible legal action if he fails to do so. Lately scholar Cole has turned to historic revisionism and simple misrepresentation to serve his political agenda when it comes to Lebanon. He tells his readers (yes, he has more than one reader) that, first, "The Israelis expelled 100,000 or so Palestinians north to Lebanon in 1948." In actual fact, they lost their war to annihilate Israel and fled at the orders of the Arab militia commanders. Cole went on to say,"The prospect of a PLO-dominated Lebanon scared the Syrians. Yasser Arafat would have been able to provoke battles with Israel at will, into which Syria might be drawn. Hafez al-Assad determined to intervene to stop it. First he sought a green light from the Israelis through Kissinger. He got it."The Syrians were hardly upset about the prospect of PLO power in Syria, which they had long promoted and built up.Some of the PLO's component organizations had their offices in Damascus. Kissinger did not invite the Syrians to annex Lebanon and the civil war was only the pretext for Assad to pursue his imperial ambitions regarding Lebanon. Then Cole adds,"In 1982 the Israelis mounted an unprovoked invasion of Lebanon as Ariel Sharon sought to destroy the remnants of the weakened PLO in Beirut." Unprovoked apparently means that since terrorists operating against Israel freely in Lebanon, firing missiles and rockets and mortars, only killed Jewish Untermenschen, these murders and aggressions should not count. Syria’s occupation Lebanon was part of Syria's official doctrine of establishing a"Greater Syria," which holds that all of Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon rightfully belong to Syria and are under temporary alien control. Syrian maps often portray all of Israel and Lebanon as southern Syria. Cole feins to be unaware of that doctrine, while he routinely refers to the"policies and decisions of Tel Aviv.”Seems he has never discovered that Israel’s capital city is Jerusalem. Tel Aviv is where you can go to the beach. But Old Juan Cole's biggest fear these days is that President Bush might get some of the credit for Syria's sudden pusillanimous behavior. Cole writes,"I don't think Bush had anything much to do with the current Lebanese national movement except at the margins." Of course, we would not want anyone to credit Bush's removal of the Taliban and of the Ba'athists in Iraq with spurring calls for democracy in the Middle East. It is very common among leftwing extremists to find that their entire world-view is based on reversing cause and effect. Hiroshima was the cause of Pearl Harbor, for example. Comrade Cole seems to have based much of his"academic" career on such inversions. Consider his diatribe on the History News network,"Want to End Terrorism? End Foreign Occupations." In it, he claims that Iraqi terrorism is a byproduct of Allied"occupation" of Iraq, and also that Palestinian terrorism is a byproduct of Israel's occupation of"Palestinian lands." Here is Cole at his most vociferous and least scholarly: "You want to end terrorism? End unjust military occupations. By all means have Syria conduct an orderly withdrawal from Lebanon if that is what the Lebanese public wants. But Israel needs to withdraw from the Golan Heights, which belong to Syria, as well. The Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank must be ended." Palestinian anti-Jewish terrorism actually began in the 1920s, back when"Palestine" was governed by the British, under a League of Nations Mandate, after Britain freed it from its Turkish colonial rulers. Palestinian anti-civilian atrocities escalated in the 1950s, conducted by"fedayeen" terrorists sponsored by Egypt and other Arab fascist regimes. All of this was many years before the Six Day War of 1967. In other words, neither Gaza nor the West Bank were"occupied" by Israel when Palestinian terrorism developed and escalated. Instead, they were occupied by Egypt and Jordan (the latter illegally holding the West Bank). Egypt and Jordan could have set up a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip had they wished to, any time between 1949 and 1967, without the need even to ask Israel what it thought. Cole likes to denounce Israel for its"land grab.” Let us note that this is the same Israel that is the size of Massachusetts and whose land in total is far less than 1 percent of the land controlled by the 22 Arab states which surround it. This is the same Cole who refers to Tel Aviv as the capital of Israel, while the suburbs around the actual capital, Jerusalem, were gained by"illicit land grabs.”As far as we know, Cole has never denounced Ann Arbor as an illicit grab of Indian lands nor offered to restore his own real property there to those Native tribes from whom he grabbed it. Cole routinely refers to Middle East terrorists as"guerillas." He defends Hizbollah thusly: "It (Hizbollah) cannot simply be ignored or dismissed as a terrorist organization. Hizbullah isn't that different from the Dawa Party or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which the US just helped to power in Iraq." "When Ariel Sharon sends American-made helicopter gunships and F-16s to fire missiles into civilian residences or crowds in steets, as he has done more than once, then he makes the United States complicit in his war crimes and makes the United States hated among friends of the Palestinians. And this aggression and disregard of Arab life on the part of the proto-fascist Israeli Right has gotten more than one American killed, including American soldiers." Once again, Cole is reversing cause and effect.He absolutely refuses to consider the possibility that Israel's gunships were operating because the PLO was sheltering, sponsoring and assisting suicide bombers to conduct mass murders of Israeli civilians, many of them children. In Cole's view, these choppers were just shooting for absolutely no reason, just because the"proto fascists" in Israel, who were not elected the same way Cole's democratic Assads were, felt like it. It never occurs to Cole that, had the PLO complied with its Oslo obligations and prevented terror attacks on Israel, no Israeli choppers would be targeting Palestinian terror leaders at all, and no Palestinian civilians would get hurt in the aftermath. In the same article, Cole cites as his scholarly source Uri Avnery, who in fact is an Israeli cross between Larry Flint and Lord Haw Haw, an anti-Israel street protesters with no academic credentials, which is why Alexander Cockburn also uses him.Perhaps the University of Michigan's Department of Middle East Studies should be renamed the Department of Duh. Now if we were to test the Cole Doctrine on history, it fails. US occupation of Hawaii, Alaska, Guam, Diego Garcia, and Samoa have never produced terror. Soviet occupation of the Baltics and Siberia did not either. Romanian occupation of Transylvania has not.Italian occupation of Sardinia has not. Spain's occupation of enclaves on the North Moroccan coast has not. Nor has China's occupation of its Moslem colonies and Tibet.Nor Turkey's"occupation" of Syria's Alexandretta region. On the other hand, there are lots of examples of terrorism arising where there is no occupation. The Moslem terror against Malaysia, Thailand, and Algeria, the Bader-Meinhof gang, the Weathermen, the Hizbollah terror against Israel AFTER it fully withdrew from Lebanese soil, the Michigan militia that bombed Oklahoma City, all these are examples of terror in the absence of occupation. Cole is incapable of placing any"occupation" in historic context, nor of asking what produces occupation. In fact, Israel's"occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza (which are more"Jewish Lands" than they ever were"Palestinian", in any case) was a consequenceof Arab terror and aggression against Israel, not their cause. The Arabs attacked Israel in 1967 when it was not occupying anything except Israel. (Why will they be excused if we suspect that Cole regards Tel Aviv and Haifa as illicit occupations of Palestinian lands as well.) The West Bank and Gaza were"occupied" in Israel's counterattack against aggression. The Golan Heights had belonged to Syria before 1967, although its claims to the area were dubious even back then; the only use the Syrians made of the Golan Heights was to bombard Israeli civilians in Galilee. Israel's annexation of the Golan after the war is also one of those"occupations" that Abu Cole thinks must be ended. Cole says,"People need a sense of autonomy and dignity, and occupation produces helplessness and humiliation. Humiliation is what causes terrorism." Actually, occupation is a consequenceof fascist aggression, not its cause. The American occupation of Germany and Japan was just like the Israeli"occupation" of"Palestine.” The difference is that the Germans and Japanese underwent denazification. So terror is in fact the consequence of an absence of denazification. Cole has consistently opposed any form of anti-terrorist campaign by the US, other than capitulation to terrorist demands. He denied Saddam had any terror connections at all, saying:"The idea that Iraq is deliberately harboring Islamist terrorists is absurd, since the Baathists would be afraid of them themselves." Here is the Cole take on bin Laden and 9-11, taken from the pro-al-Qaeda"antiwar.com" web site: "The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the U.S. fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum.... Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians.... Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason." He then adds: "Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate bin Laden's wisdom and foresight.... The U.S. is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the U.S. has of its." Cole's atrociously written rants are not simply the proliferation of shallow and wacky ideas about the Middle East. Cole is a horrendous writer in general, who can barely construct a proper sentence, and sometimes spouts juvenile nonsense about other things besides the Middle East. Consider the following: "Before the rise of the neocons in the 1970s, it was well understood by minority communities in the United States that they had to work against bigotry in general. Because if an atmosphere was created or allowed to persist that allowed one minority group to be targeted, it had the potential to boomerang on the others, as well. Racialist hatred is no respecter (sic) of persons. Now I perceive a cockiness among some minorities in the U.S., such that they--former victims of discrimination—advocate racial profiling and discrimination, even demonization, for some. I solemnly predict that if they continue on this path, they will eventually come deeply to regret it, as shall we all." Cole recently went ballistic in response to comments by Fred Ikle in the Wall Street Journal, who wrote: "Those who out of cowardice use their wealth to pay danegeld to the preachers of hate and destruction must be taught that this aggression will boomerang. A nuclear war stirred up against the 'infidels' might end up displacing Mecca and Medina with two large radioactive craters." Cole denounced Ikle as"racist, ignorant and monstrous. Why aren't Paul Gigot and James Taranto forced to resign over this monstrosity?" My guess is that Ikle can correctly name the capital of Israel, unlike Cole. Moslem atrocities are not racist and monstrous, in Cole's opinion. He writes,"What is the difference between talking about nuking Mecca for political purposes and Mulla Omar's destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which was rightly denounced as barbaric? The difference is that no human beings were vaporized at Bamiyan." In other words, non-nuclear atrocities just do not count. Why hasn’t Cole been fired by U-M because of his anti-Semitism? To sum things up, the entire thesis concerning"occupation" and terror by the learned Cole is a lie. Cole is incapable of going beyond his bumper-stick-depth methodology of analysis by slogan.After all, if the Russian occupation of Afghanistan triggered terror, as did Indian"occupation" of Kashmir, this must mean that Middle East terror is a desperate act of protest against US and Israeli occupiers and helicopters. Cole's claims to being an expert on the Middle East are about as persuasive as Ward Churchill's claims tobeing an Indian chief.
Related LinksRalph Luker: Critique of this Article
THE DEATH last week of George F. Kennan concentrates the mind. The great American statesman was 101 years old. His longevity was second to his influence, though, and a chorus saluted him as the father of ''containment," the foundational idea of US Cold War thinking. But Kennan always insisted that his famous formulations -- the Long Telegram and the ''Mister X" article -- were misunderstood. His warnings about Soviet intentions and ideology, he said, were meant as a call to political action, not military build-up. The threat was less the Red Army than the discontent of impoverished peoples who might turn to Communism.
Beginning almost 50 years ago, Kennan decried the American emphasis on war-readiness at the expense of diplomacy and economic development. Across the US reliance on a massive nuclear arsenal that prompted Moscow to reply in kind. The waste and dangers of the arms race were unnecessary. The arc of Kennan's life suggests that American responses to the Soviet Union could have gone another way. What would the world be like today if his views had prevailed?
The civil war on the Korean peninsula would not have been magnified into a transcendent East-West clash, licensing the permanent Stalinism of the north.
Washington would have seized the diplomatic opportunity offered by the death of Stalin, supporting the emergence of reform-minded leaders in Moscow before the arms race began in earnest.
The United States would have refrained from testing and deploying the hydrogen bomb, with notice to Moscow that such grave escalation to a genocidal weapon would take place only if the Soviets went first.
The revolutionary movements of the Third World would have been seen as rejection of colonialism and normal nationalism instead of as global conspiracy centered in Moscow.
There would have been no American war in Vietnam.
The US crusade for ''freedom" would have been mitigated by a sense of modesty, with respect for the differing political impulses of other cultures.
Washington would have remained faithful to the post-World War II American sponsorship of structures of international cooperation, centered in the United Nations.
How we remember the past determines the shape of the future. If Kennan's life reminds us that there was nothing inevitable about the militarized confrontation of the Cold War, it can also help us see an alternative to the belligerent course now being set by Washington. Here is what a Kennan-like preference for political and diplomatic responses over military ones would mean today ....
Tim Stoddard, in the B.U. Bridge (3-18-05):
Kathryn Bard had “the best Christmas ever” this past December when she discovered the well-preserved timbers and riggings of pharaonic seafaring ships inside two man-made caves on Egypt’s Red Sea coast. They are the first pieces ever recovered from Egyptian seagoing vessels, and along with hieroglyphic inscriptions found near one of the caves, they promise to shed light on an elaborate network of ancient Red Sea trade.
Bard, a CAS associate professor of archaeology, and her former student Chen Sian Lim (CAS’01) had been shoveling sand for scarcely an hour on their first day of excavation on a parched bluff rising from the shore at Wadi Gawasis when a fist-sized hole appeared in the hillside. “I stuck my hand in, and that was the entrance to the first cave,” Bard says. “Things like that don’t happen very often in archaeology.”
Led by Bard and Italian archaeologist Rodolfo Fattovich, the team uncovered the rectangular entrance to a second cave, constructed with cedar beams and blocks of limestone that were former ship anchors. Inside they found a network of larger rooms and an assortment of nautical items, among them ropes, a wooden bowl, and a mesh bag. She also found two curved cedar planks that were probably the steering oars on a 70-foot-long ship from Queen Hatshepsut’s famous 15th-century b.c. naval expedition to Punt, a trade destination somewhere in the southern Red Sea region. Buried in sand outside the second cave, Bard found a piece of rope still tied in what she believes is a sailor’s knot. “It must have come from a ship,” she says. “It couldn’t have been used for anything else.” Fragments of pottery scattered near the artifacts date to Egypt’s early 18th dynasty, circa 1500 b.c., around the time Hatshepsut reigned.
She also discovered several stelae (pronounced steely), limestone slabs about the size of small modern tombstones, installed in niches outside the second cave. Most were blank, but Bard found one, face down in the sand, with the cartouche of King Amenemhat III, who ruled about 1800 b.c. The text recounts two expeditions led by government officials to Punt and Bia-Punt, whose location is uncertain. “That this stela has been preserved with very little damage for that long is really unusual,” she says, “and the preservation of organic material in the caves is truly remarkable. I’ve worked in Egypt since 1976, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
[Jonathan Kay is managing editor of Canada's National Post and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.]
MOST PEOPLE who earn Ph.D.s aspire to tenure-track professorships, think-tank jobs, or careers in government. When Stanford University awarded Victor Davis Hanson his classics degree 26 years ago, he chose to become a farmer.
"My grandmother was 93 and living alone," Hanson tells me as his pickup bounces along a dirt road winding through his family's grape vineyard. "My brothers, cousins, and I decided we'd come home and see if we could put the farm right."
But his career as a full-time farmer lasted just four years. In 1984, the price of raisin grapes fell from $1,300 per ton to $450. Struggling to make ends meet, Hanson reluctantly dusted off his résumé, got into his truck, and drove to the closest university, California State at Fresno. "I was dressed like this," he tells me, gesturing to his red and black lumberman's jacket and work-worn blue jeans. "The dean couldn't believe I was a Stanford Ph.D. The chairman made me go home and get my diploma."
On weekdays, Hanson would wake at 5 a.m. to prune his grape vines, then drive 25 miles to Fresno where he taught Greek and Latin to Mexican immigrants and working-class students. In what time remained, he managed to author a slew of weighty tomes on the wars of the ancient Greeks that made his name as one of America's preeminent military historians.
Farmer and classicist in equal measure, Hanson has led something of a double life. But read his work and it becomes clear that the two identities are intimately joined. From his early books on the Peloponnesian campaigns to his widely read post-9/11 essays on Afghanistan and Iraq, the connection between agriculture and war emerges as a constant theme.
Most classicists trace the advent of Greek democracy to the urban culture of Athens. Hanson takes another view. In his 1995 book, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and The Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization, he argues that such institutions as constitutional government and property rights originated in large part with rural landholders. The patterns of rural life also influenced the way Greeks went to war, he believes. As Hanson notes in Carnage and Culture, most Greek foot soldiers, the hoplites, were not full-time conscripts like those of Persia or other Eastern powers, but rather volunteer farmers who were needed back home at harvest time. Greek armies thus favored quick, decisive infantry battles. The resulting theory of war, Hanson argues, has survived through the centuries and even finds echoes in campaigns fought by modern Western armies.
Hanson, representing the fifth generation of his family to work this land since it was first homesteaded by Swedish ancestors in 1871, also sees an important connection between farm life and America's role in the world. The farm is a "crucible of character" and martial valor, no less in the United States of today than it was in ancient Thebes. Hanson takes as his model the citizen-soldier, a humble creature of the land who puts down his hoe and takes up the rifle in a proud tradition carried on by America alone.
"There's an element in this country that is unchanged in the last 200 years," he says. "It cannot be defined by race or religion. They are the people who made this country unique and retain a tragic sense. They gravitate to the military or live in rural America or work with their hands. If you talk to captains or lieutenants in Iraq, you won't find anything in them that is different from their equivalents in World War II."
And so, even as Hanson has spent the years since 9/11 filling the pages of Commentary, City Journal, and National Review with articles about fighting militant Islam, he spends as much time worrying about what corporate agriculture and demographic trends are doing to his native San Joaquin Valley. Fresno County is home to six of the ten poorest towns in California, and attracts a steady stream of illegal immigrants looking for agricultural work. In 2003, Hanson wrote a book focusing on their plight, Mexifornia. (The provocative title was not his idea, he's quick to mention.) His politically incorrect prescription for the region's woes is a return to the melting pot. From watching two generations of farmhands work his property and teaching students at CSU-Fresno, he's concluded that Mexican-American children must learn proper English or inherit their parents' limited prospects.
DRIVING TOWARD TOWN, we pass a row of farms, and Hanson recites the names of families who worked them back when he was a child. Most have moved on. The days of the family farm are gone, he laments, and with it, Selma's civic pride. Lawns have become dumping grounds for refuse and parking spots for mobile homes. Back roads have been turned into slalom courses of discarded garbage and old furniture. Even the old timers seem to have stopped caring. Meanwhile, nearby Fresno is rapidly expanding. Sooner or later, all of this land will be given over to strip malls and tract housing. Selma's "crucible of character" is crumbling before Hanson's eyes.
"Sometimes I go back and read copies of the Fresno Bee from the 1950s, and it breaks my heart," he tells me. "I was reading an article from 1957 that went something along the lines of: 'Mr. Smith was arrested when a syringe was found in his family's house. The family members expressed shame.' Or 'the Lion's Club failed to meet its fundraising goal. They promised to do better next year.' There were high moral standards without cynicism or nihilism. Now, you pick up the paper and there are two kinds of stories: crime hit pieces and 'feel good' vapid multicultural be-all-you-can-be stories. 'Mr. Rodriguez bought two Christmas trees this year'--that's a story."
Hanson places much of the blame for this decay on America's elites, who he says have fostered a cult of postmodernism, identity politics, and affirmative action--or, as he puts it, "diversity without standards." As a classicist, he sees this as nothing less than a renunciation of the intellectual traditions bequeathed by the Greeks.
"Multiculturalism, in preference to a multiracial embrace of Western culture, has become what pulp was in the 1950s," he tells me as he navigates the truck between a rotting sofa and a bed frame. "Plato told us this was inevitable: The more you embrace a state-mandated egalitarianism for its own sake and radical democracy, . . . the more you will be driven to the common denominator of a therapeutic, happy-go-lucky culture, simple stories, lowbrow entertainment, minimal expectations--rather than the hard work of using education to uplift the majority."
If Hanson's great hero is the citizen-farmer, his great villain is the effete, left-wing urbanite--the relativist, the poseur, the spoiled gadabout who has ignorantly embraced fashionable opinions. Hanson himself is a registered Democrat, but he loathes "boutique liberal multimillionaires" and freely acknowledges the party he admires has been extinct since the days of Truman and JFK. "There are a lot of people who are simply not equipped for capitalism," he tells me. "You have to look out for them. The Democratic party is supposed to be about giving ordinary people a stake in society. But those aren't the people who speak for the Democrats these days. The people who write for Harper's, you put them in a trailer out here, they'd go nuts."
When Hanson gets on this theme, his voice rises slightly. One senses he has not entirely forgiven the sneering welcome he received at Fresno State a quarter century ago. Railing against America's intellectual establishment, he hits his target from both sides--as both a rural farmer who feels urban America's patronizing sting and as a scholar who can easily unmask the elites' intellectual pretensions.
"Go out and quiz a history post-grad," he says. "What were the tactics employed at Gettysburg? Who was General Thomas? What was the Anaconda plan? They won't know. Look instead at the titles of their dissertations: The Cuban medical system, the history of footwear, gender in the revolutionary war."
"Do you know why Michael Moore doesn't like people filming him when he speaks?" he asks, summoning a name that appears often in his writing. "It's because he can't finish a sentence. Because he's uneducated, and that's exactly how he sounds. I saw him speak on C-SPAN once and it went mostly like this: 'You know, like, they're coming to get--you know--like you and you. For the army. And it's for oil, man. You know. Bush and Cheney.' And that was the range of his delivery. We apparently no longer apply any litmus tests to public figures who assume positions of wisdom. We no longer ask, 'Is the man educated? Does he speak well? Is he a man of honor who speaks the truth?' . . . There is only one way to be educated. Read narrative history, read the great novels, read philosophy, learn foreign languages. But we've forgotten all that in our therapeutic culture."
By 21st-century political typology, Hanson's love of the pastoral life, distrust of large corporations, and embrace of old-fashioned values might put him in the paleoconservative camp. And indeed, he was once horrified by the "neocon" projects he now defends. "I remember it was 1998 and I was in the library reading a magazine article about the [Project for the New American Century's] letter to Bill Clinton asking for regime change in Iraq," he tells me. "And I thought, 'That's crazy!' The whole idea of preemption in Iraq made no sense to me."
But then came 9/11, and Hanson's thinking changed radically. Like the campaigns against Prussian militarism and Nazism, the war against militant Islam is not one of America's choosing, he argues. As a student of military history, he believes there is only one way to wage it--ferociously and single-mindedly, in the tradition of Patton, Sherman, and the Theban general Epaminondas. The result of Hanson's political shift is a worldview that looks back to the ancient virtues even as it defends the most modern of wars and the controversial Bush Doctrine, thus reconciling the two major strains of the conservative movement.
Later, as we sit at his farmhouse dinner table, he points to a chair. "That's where my paternal grandfather would visit, sit, and tell us about World War One, with my other maternal grandfather, the host, in rapt attention," Hanson says. "I used to listen to him, my father, and my uncle-in-law, and they'd count off the family members who'd been killed or wounded in war. That number included my father's cousin--my namesake Victor Hanson--who died at Okinawa. My grandfather himself was gassed in the Argonne. And my father flew 39 missions in a B-29 over Japan. But they had no regrets. I was never tutored in isolationism."
HANSON IS NOW one of the Bush administration's most passionate and prolific defenders. Having recently taken early retirement from Fresno State and joined the Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, he devotes much of his time to writing essays. He also contributes 1,800 words per week to National Review Online, and has begun a syndicated weekly column distributed through Tribune Media Services. Later this year, Random House will release his new book on the Peloponnesian War. As if that weren't enough, he also maintains a website (victorhanson.com), where he answers readers' questions about the Iraq war, ancient military tactics, and the modern academy.
Many war pundits have done their best to situate the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts in historical perspective. But few can go back as far as Hanson. In the June 2004 Commentary, he defended the number of U.S. troops deployed in Iraq with the dizzying observation that "Alexander the Great, who never led an army numbering more than 50,000 men, defeated hordes five times that size in battle. . . . Julius Caesar conquered and held much of Western Europe with legions that numbered fewer than 40,000. The British defeated both Cetchewayo and the Great Mahdi with a few thousand redcoats, [and] Thucydides did not believe the Athenian disaster at Syracuse was necessarily caused by the smallish armada sent over by imperial Athens."
Hanson's expertise has brought him political influence. When I visited his farm in January, he had just come back from a meeting at the White House, where he was among five experts who'd been asked for their critiques of the Iraq war. The other four were Charles Krauthammer, Elliott Abrams, Fouad Ajami, and John Lewis Gaddis. Impressive company for a humble farmer. And one senses it all makes Hanson a little uncomfortable. "Everyone I met in D.C. was gossiping about this important guy they met and that guy they met," he tells me. "Me? I spent yesterday negotiating with a Sikh farmer who was renting some of my land."
While gaining national prominence as a pundit, however, Hanson has become unpopular here in Selma. His books on immigration have turned him into a target for local diversity boosters. His stance on Iraq, too, has lost him friends. Hanson has two brothers, one a twin. Thanks to political differences, neither will speak to him. "I've lost almost all the friends I grew up with," he tells me. "People will come up to me, wag their finger, and tell me, 'I knew your mom. Now you're just a Bush lover.'"
Selma is becoming less hospitable in other ways, too. Methamphetamine labs are now common. On one recent occasion, police drove across Hanson's farm in hot pursuit of drug dealers. On another, Hanson had to escort a pair of fugitives off his property at gunpoint. His three sons now grown, Hanson, who lives with his wife of 28 years, is musing about spending more time in Palo Alto. But it's hard to imagine him off the farm: So much of his identity and intellectual energy is tied up with the land. Moreover, Hanson doesn't play so well with others. At a recent meeting at Hoover, he strained to remain polite when a free-market colleague blithely dismissed America's family farmers as road-kill on the path to efficient markets. At a meeting in Europe, he shocked his Bush-loathing Swiss host by lecturing him about the profits his nation made from Holocaust loot. And, needless to say, Hanson's views on affirmative action would make him anathema to most elite university administrations. The safe bet seems to be that he will continue to spend most of his time in Selma, chronicling the breakdown of rural America even as he urges it to rescue the cities from George Soros and Osama bin Laden.
The decay of Hanson's natural habitat, however, only partly explains his melancholy air. There is a sense of unfulfillable longing about the man--for an ideal of citizenship, of culture, of honor and decency and shame that is passing irreversibly into history. (In a recent National Review Online essay, he wrote that visiting Normandy leads one to "prefer the wisdom of the noble dead to the ignorance of the shameful living.") This longing is a powerful muse: Few writers combine such a broad understanding of the ancient world with a deep desire to resurrect its virtues. One suspects also that the tragic nature of the project takes its toll.
But Hanson isn't going to give up the battle any time soon. In fact, he has just started a new project--a novel. "It's about the Helots, the indentured servants of the Spartans," he tells me. "They were freed by Epaminondas. He was accused of all sorts of heresies and ulterior motives. The book's about preemption, multilateralism, confronting your enemies, democracy for the dispossessed, and ending tyranny.
"It's an allegory, I'm afraid," he adds. "That should be pretty obvious."
Nat Hentoff, in the Village Voice (3-11-05):
On February 15, The New York Sun, in a front-page story, reported:"A Columbia University professor who has called Israel a 'racist' state with an 'apartheid system,' and who has supported attacks by Palestinian Arabs on Israelis, is scheduled to lecture a group of New York City public school teachers on how to teach Mideast politics to schoolchildren.
"The professor, Rashid Khalidi, is director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. His professorship is named in memory of Edward Said, a divisive scholar, and is paid for in part with a donation from the United Arab Emirates."
Three days later, the Sun, in a celebratory editorial,"The Klein Example," lauded the New York City Department of Education (DOE) and its chancellor, Joel Klein, for"promptly severing" its relationship with Professor Khalidi. Klein's press secretary, Jerry Russo, explained:"Considering his past statements, Rashid Khalidi should not have been included in a program that provided professional development for DOE teachers, and he won't be participating in the future."
The free-speech war began. In a February 25 story in the weekly Forward ("N.Y. School Board Bans a Controversial Arab Professor"), mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, a Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, and the American Jewish Committee agreed with Chancellor Klein. They believe it was right to expel Khalidi from this 12-week program in which, each week, a different Columbia professor, paid by the university, talks about a different aspect of the Middle East.
Disagreeing, however, with Klein's removal of Khalidi were Columbia president Lee Bollinger, who threatened to pull out of the program, and Marc Stern, director of legal affairs at the American Jewish Congress. Marc Stern is on my list of First Amendment experts whom I call on for questions of church-state, free speech, free assembly, and other issues. Said Stern, for the American Jewish Congress, to Forward:
"It's not as if we're rejoicing that Khalidi gets an audience. But we don't think the way to go about it is by treating Khalidi as if he is not qualified to teach on the Middle East."
At the most basic core of the First Amendment is the precept"The answer to bad speech is more speech." Agreeing with Marc Stern that Klein summarily violated that precept by flunking Khalidi is Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), of whose advisory board I'm a member.
In quoting Greg Lukianoff, Forward noted, as I have in the Voice, that FIRE"has stood squarely with the Jewish students in the Columbia melee [about its Middle East studies department]." Said Lukianoff:"The department was under no obligation to hire [Khalidi] in the first place [but] rescinding the invite after the fact does send a bad message."
I am referred to correctly in the Forward roundup of this free-speech war as a"strong supporter of Jewish students at Columbia who have alleged that they have been subject to intimidation by several Middle East studies professors."
I am then accurately quoted by Forward as saying:"They made a mistake in saying [Khalidi] can't teach because of his political views. [They] should have brought in a team teacher for the course so that it wouldn't be a one-sided indoctrination." (Actually Khalidi, in his classes, has not been charged with intimidation by Jewish students. And when he lectured for city teachers, he spoke non-controversially on only geography and demographics.)
In a lead editorial that same day, The New York Sun mocked my team-teaching proposal:"[Hentoff is] a First Amendment expert who reckons the American Constitution requires New York taxpayers to pay for two Middle East teacher-trainers. . . . Maybe the First Amendment requires a teacher-trainer who says the Earth is flat and another who says it's round."
As I wrote to the Sun, consider how educational it would be for the public school teachers in the course and for the public if Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz were to team-teach with any of the bristlingly biased Middle East studies professors who squelch disagreement in their classrooms. ...
Veteran comic actor Douglas Brinkley, best known for his pitch-perfect television cameos as a shamelessly sycophantic, celebrity-smitten history professor--Scrapbook readers will doubtless remember Brinkley's hilarious performance as "the candidate's biographer" on last season's since-cancelled John Kerry Show--may finally be getting the A-list entertainment-industry treatment he's long deserved.
Brinkley's standing among his fellow thespians has never been in question, of course: Despite his relative obscurity in a less-prestigious medium, even the biggest of big-screen personalities clearly consider him one of their own--both socially and professionally. It was just a couple months ago, after all, that New Orleans Times-Picayune society columnist Chris Rose reported the following Tinseltown-on-Location-in-the-Big-Easy megascoop: "Saturday night, [Sean] Penn showed up at The Columns on the Avenue, taking a front porch table with a group of guys that included local historian Doug Brinkley, whose connection to Penn is that they're mutual friends of Hunter S. Thompson." And there "with Brinkley and Penn was [Jude] Law, whose mere physical proximity has caused bronze nudes to melt into smoldering puddles of molten lava."
But Mr. Brinkley, thank goodness, appears to have survived that evening in solid form.
Item the first: Brinkley has lately inked a development deal to become the featured star of a new, independently produced reality show set in New Orleans. Its creators haven't yet settled on a name for the program, but Brinkley will play the role of "director" at the "Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization"--described in the show's promotional materials as a division of "Tulane University." We're laughing already.
Item the second: Even as he pursues this unprecedented opportunity, Brinkley apparently remains contractually free--and eager--to continue accepting a full range of walk-on roles with established productions back in Los Angeles. As recently as February 27, for example, Brinkley did a show-stealing turn on page two of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, a revered if low-rated Sunday morning institution in Movieland. The gag for Brinkley's episode involved the Times asking his character, a "distinguished professor of history," to review a new oral-history biography of a certain celebrity whom the professor considers a personal friend. And the professor, desperate to further ingratiate himself with his marquee-named pal, decides to accept the assignment, notwithstanding his conflict of interest, which he nowhere acknowledges in the review he winds up turning in.
The result? A direct hit to the funny bone! C'mon: Who else but Douglas Brinkley could pull off side-splitters like these:
"Several things become clear when reading Richard T. Kelly's Sean Penn: His Life and Times. . . . Unflinching in his artistic integrity, Penn over the last two decades has forged fast friendships with such gifted actors as Jack Nicholson [etc., etc.]. . . . Penn championed the underdog even at an early age, growing up in the fashionable communities of Woodland Hills, Sherman Oaks, and Malibu. . . . A staunch advocate of prison reform, Penn would have become a civil rights lawyer if he hadn't been an actor. . . . And one thing is for certain. Whether he is acting, directing, writing, or dissenting, he will do it his way, with the least amount of negotiation possible." And so forth.
Here, as always, Brinkley's depiction of craven, semi-dishonest, pseudo-scholarly toadyism is so riotously funny and compelling that one almost forgets it's only comedy--that he isn't really a "distinguished professor of history" at all.
Just days after announcing a $22 million project to re-engineer the Chicago Historical Society for its 150th anniversary, museum President Lonnie Bunch said Tuesday that he is leaving to head the Smithsonian Institution's yet-to-be-built African-American history museum in Washington.
Highly regarded in museum circles for his vision and fundraising talent, Bunch takes on a monumental challenge in creating what is expected to be a major new hub in the nation's cultural landscape.
A scholar who is himself African-American, Bunch faces the delicate task of creating an institution that tells the full story of the black experience in America. First proposed in the 1920s and authorized by Congress in 2003, the museum may not be ready to open for another 15 years, at a cost of $300 million to $400 million in public and privately raised funds.
Reached by phone on a long-planned vacation in Mexico, Bunch seemed both moved by the honor of taking the new position and conflicted about having to leave Chicago.
"I had anticipated spending the rest of my career in Chicago at the Historical Society," said Bunch, 52, whom the society hired away from the Smithsonian four years ago. "My family and I have grown to love Chicago so much, and my work at the Historical Society has been work that has truly nurtured my soul.
"But, as this opportunity at the Smithsonian emerged, I thought it was work that would nurture the soul of my ancestors, and that is too powerful to turn down."
Bunch said he would continue at the Historical Society until June, helping propel the ambitious plans he announced March 3 to add exhibit space and redo 75 percent of the permanent exhibits at the Chicago museum. The work must be completed by autumn 2006 for a 150th birthday celebration.
`A super president'
"It's a very sad thing to see Lonnie go," said the society's board chairman, John Rowe, who is CEO of Exelon. "He's been a super president, but we can understand that this sort of opportunity he has at the Smithsonian is one that he simply couldn't pass up."...
Creation of a national African-American museum has been a long time in coming.
It was first approved by Congress in 1928, and the next year President Calvin Coolidge signed enabling legislation. Those plans were thwarted by the Great Depression and World War II, and they were eventually abandoned.
Attempts to revive the plans during the civil rights movement in the 1960s were defeated by political opposition in Southern states.
In the late 1980s, Georgia Democrat John Lewis introduced legislation in the House for creation of the museum, and in 1991, a Smithsonian study commission concluded such a museum was sorely needed.
Lewis reintroduced his museum legislation every year for 15 years until the measure passed and President Bush signed it into law on Dec. 16, 2003. So far Congress has authorized $3.9 million for engineering studies, planning and hiring staff.
The Smithsonian already has appointed a board of directors for the museum, largely made up of prominent African-American leaders. Chicagoans Oprah Winfrey and magazine magnate Linda Johnson Rice are among those serving on the board.
Under Bunch, one of the first orders of business will be to find a prominent place for the museum in Washington's crowded, historic landscape.
A study of four possible sites is under way, including the Smithsonian's Arts and Industries Building on the National Mall. Smithsonian officials say they want to make a decision early next year.
Daniel J. Hemel, in the Harvard Crimson (3-3-05):
A small package arrived last month at The Crimson’s office with a slender book and a brief handwritten note that read: “Thought this might be of local interest. With compliments, TNP.”
“TNP,” I learned, stands for The New Press, a small New York City not-for-profit outfit that claims to publish “works of educational, cultural, and community value.”
Given those criteria, it’s unclear how the enclosed book, Historians in Trouble, by University of California-Irvine professor Jon Wiener, passed the publisher’s test.
And the innocuous note signed “with compliments” should have mentioned that in fact, Wiener has very few compliments for The Crimson. More accurately, Wiener excoriates The Crimson’s coverage of a 1988 campus controversy that erupted when several African-American students leveled charges of racial insensitivity against Winthrop Professor of History Stephan A. Thernstrom.
Since Wiener specifically takes aim at The Crimson, it’s hard to review his work without at least a twinge of defensiveness. And perhaps Wiener is correct that The Crimson blew the Thernstrom controversy out of proportion, contributing to the politicization of what was in reality a civil disagreement between a teacher and his students over a course syllabus. One chapter later, however, Wiener gets his facts flat-out wrong when he launches an unwarranted attack on Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the Phillips professor of early American history at Harvard.
One could say that Wiener’s book is flawed from page one, but that would be inaccurate. Rather, the flaws start on page viii, in the prefatory “acknowledgments” section, in which the author writes that he is “indebted” to Thernstrom—among others—for agreeing to be interviewed.
Wiener’s profession of indebtedness is patronizing and disingenuous. Thernstrom, for one, won’t ask for that debt to be repaid any time soon. “I once knew Jon well, but we are not on speaking terms,” Thernstrom said last week.
When asked if he had read Wiener’s book, Thernstrom replied, “I haven’t bothered. I don’t think it would be worth my time.”
Thernstrom’s off-the-cuff assessment isn’t far off the mark. ...
Bill Broadway, in the Wa Po (3-12-05):
From an interview with Huston Smith, a religious icon and a strongly opinionated individual:
Q: Professor Smith, you've said that Westerners have been "ravished" by science, taken in by technologies and inventions that make life easier but offer little insight into spiritual reality. What do you mean by that?
A: Science is empirical, all about physical senses that tell us about the world. But physical senses are not the only senses we have. Nobody has ever seen a thought. Nobody has ever seen a feeling. And yet thoughts and feelings are where we live our lives most immediately, and science cannot connect with that.
What are the religious trends in the world today?
A huge fact that affects that answer is that we're at war [against terrorism]. Both sides claim that God is
on their side, that they are champions of God's will, and the enemy is the Devil. . . . The rhetoric is exactly the same on both sides: We're defining God's will and the enemy is the Axis of Evil or the Evil Empire. They say exactly the same thing about us. Just change the name.
Did you support the war in Iraq?
I emphatically did not. I think our hope is to work together, and here [the United States is acting] unilaterally. We started our verydevastating war, and look what it's done to our finances, our deficit.
We're paying for it with a credit card, and our kids are going to have to pay off our credit card.
At 85, Huston Smith is one of the most revered and longest-working historians of religion. He has studied, practiced and taught for a half-century and achieved crossover status by finding an audience among academics as well as the general public.
His book "The World's Religions" has been on college and seminary reading lists and sold 2.5 million copies since its publication in 1958 as "The Religions of Man." In 1996, Smith was the subject of a five-part PBS series, "The Wisdom of Faith," and was introduced by host Bill Moyers as "the most influential religious scholar of the 20th century."
Smith, who was interviewed by telephone this week, will make a rare appearance in Washington on Wednesday when he presents the 23rd annual Zeidman Memorial Lecture at Sidwell Friends School in Northwest. On Thursday, he will attend classes and talk with students, said Jon Zeljo, chairman of the history department and director of Sidwell's 22-year-old Chinese studies program. ...
In his lecture, " China's Place in World History," which is open to the public, Smith said he will focus on the Chinese emphasis on relationships rather than individual achievement. ...
Smith's work hasn't been without criticism. During a teaching career spanning four decades at major universities -- Washington University, MIT, Syracuse University and the University of California at Berkeley -- some colleagues accused Smith of lacking objectivity.
"I'm not afraid of losing my objectivity as I grope" for answers, he responded when Moyers asked about that criticism. "I think it's transparent to the student from the first class that I don't want to indoctrinate them. I'm honest about that.
"I really try to make myself a plate-glass window so they're not listening to me, they're not looking at me. They're looking at these wisdom traditions and what they say. And if you give students, the students with all their busy-ness, if you put something before them of worth, they will see it and move toward appropriating it."
Others attacked Smith for participating in Timothy Leary's early 1960s experiments at Harvard University involving the mind-altering drugs psilocybin, mescaline and LSD.
"I took some hallucinogens and got criticized for it. But I don't care," Smith said. "No one in human history has given as much thought to the interweaving of altered states of consciousness and religion as I have. It's an immensely important issue which nobody is touching today."
While most of U.S. President George W. Bush's domestic critics are on the left of the political spectrum, there are also traditional conservatives who object to his policies, as historian John Lukacs reminded a Toronto audience this week.
Speaking as part of the Grano Lecture Series, Lukacs launched a bracing critique of American foreign policy, complaining that it was motivated by a "cheap and dangerous" nationalism.
Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have wanted to go to war for the sake of national security, Lukacs contended, but he suspects Bush went to war to be popular.
Arguing against the idea that the United States has a mission to spread democracy throughout the world, Lukacs alluded to the words of an earlier conservative president, John Quincy Adams, who said "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy."
Lukacs, who advocates a more modest vision of America's role in the world, added, "I doubt anyone in the current administration has ever heard of John Quincy Adams."
Lukacs, 81, offered the audience a brisk survey of American foreign policy over the last two centuries, arguing that the educated elite that once governed foreign policy has been replaced by populist leaders who use crude displays of military power to gain popular favour.
Many in the audience, including members of Toronto's business elite and conservative intellectuals, were taken aback by the severity of Lukacs' polemic against Bush's foreign policy.
Throughout his talk, Lukacs returned to the themes of his new book, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred, which offers a dark vision of modern democracy being destroyed by nationalist demagogues who gain power by bullying unpopular minorities and pursuing a belligerent foreign policy.
"The Republicans have become the populist party," Lukacs noted. "There is nothing conservative about American conservatism."
The increasing prevalence of right-wing nationalism in the U.S. is part of "the sad descent of democracy into populism." Despite its electoral success, populism doesn't necessarily reflect the true will of people, Lukacs contended, because in an age in which media can be manipulated, "hard minorities" can sway ``soft majorities."...
These arguments are all the more striking because they come from a man of the right, albeit an idiosyncratic one. A staunch defender of Catholic social policy, Lukacs in his new book takes aim at "laws approving abortions, mercy killing, cloning, sexual `freedoms,' permissiveness, (and) pornography.'' But he has hardly been gentle when it comes to contemporary conservative heroes.
Ronald Reagan?
"Superficial, lazy, puerile (despite his age), an expansive nationalist.''
George W. Bush?
Blessed with a "mind and character'' that are "often astonishingly lazy.''
In both his new book and his Toronto lecture, Lukacs pointed out the deep fissure between traditional European conservatism and the contemporary American variety. Historically, the great conservative thinkers, from Edmund Burke to Jakob Burckhardt, have been wary of democracy, let alone populism. And in conversation, Lukacs is pessimistic about current American politics, arguing that mass democracy is vulnerable to demagogic manipulation.
He eschews the label of "conservative,'' preferring to describe himself as a "reactionary,'' instinctively skeptical of the claims of progress whether from the left or right. The reactionary'' is a patriot but not a nationalist,'' Lukacs explained in his 1990 autobiography, Confessions of an Original Sinner....
Robin Wilson, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (3-14-05):
Mine Ener would have liked the Oriental rug and the two copper end tables. They have the kind of international flair the late professor admired. That's why her Villanova University colleagues, still saddened by her death in 2003, chose them when they furnished a student lounge in her honor. They placed them in a corner of the lounge, along with a few chairs and wrought-iron lamps. The gesture, they thought, might help the campus remember the well-liked professor of Middle Eastern history.
On a cold morning this January, 50 people gathered to dedicate the memorial and a large bronze plaque."This Study Area Is Dedicated to the Memory of Dr. Mine Ener," it said."Scholar, Teacher, Mentor, Friend."
But outside the study lounge, in the foyer of the campus library, a handful of people silently protested. They were upset because of what the plaque didn't say: A year and a half ago, Mine Ener (pronounced Minn-uh Eh-nuhr) suffocated herself. But even more horrifying, three weeks before that, she killed her baby.
As soon as the plaque went up, alumni of this Roman Catholic university began flooding administrators with complaints. Honoring Ms. Ener, they said, mocked the church's stance on the sanctity of life. Parents of children who -- like Ms. Ener's baby -- were born with Down syndrome were angry too.
After two local talk-radio hosts and Fox News's Bill O'Reilly entered the fray, Villanova received nearly 1,000 calls, e-mail messages, and letters.
Troy S. Memis, who co-owns an auto-restoration shop in nearby Philadelphia, heard about the memorial on the radio. He waited in the library foyer that January morning with his 2-year-old son, J.T., who has Down syndrome. A psychiatrist had determined that Ms. Ener had been suffering from postpartum psychosis when she killed her baby. Mr. Memis knows that, and he doesn't want to demonize her, he says, but"someone needs to stick up for the child."
The torrent of criticism immediately put Villanova on the defensive. University officials, some of whom agreed that Ms. Ener deserved a memorial, agonized over what to do. Should they take down the plaque and appease the critics? Or wait, hoping that the controversy would blow over? ...
Eric Alterman, in the Nation (3-28-05):
That the Boston Globe is a great newspaper can be in no doubt, as its brave (though flawed) reporting on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has recently demonstrated. But the paper's opinion columnists have proven a constant source of embarrassment in recent years, producing not merely the fantasist Patricia Smith but also two plagiarists, Mike Barnicle and Jeff Jacoby.
No less a source of shame for the paper has been its publication of a previously obscure right-wing pundit named Cathy Young. Her most recent transgression involves yours truly, but it's hardly the first time she has embarrassed her employers.
In March 2004, relying on a faulty translation, Young misquoted European Commission President Romano Prodi making the unlikely argument that"using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists," and then spun the misquote into a fatuous equation of Europe's opposition to Bush's Iraq folly with"appeasement" of terrorists. But the really odd thing about Young's mistake, as Tim Francis-Wright has pointed out, was that when she finally got around to correcting the mistake, she didn't. The Globe's correction simply restated the original false rendering of Prodi's quote.
Young's attack on me shared some of these bizarre qualities. She seized on a brief blog item I wrote on Altercation.msnbc.com, in which I noted the insensitivity of demanding that Arabs attend Holocaust remembrance ceremonies that (of course) made no mention of what many Arabs believe to be the Holocaust's connection to what they consider their own" catastrophe"--namely, the founding of the State of Israel. Young distorted my argument to accuse me of anti-Semitism and self-hatred, using an ellipsis to make it appear as if I were describing the founding of the Jewish state as a" catastrophe" rather than attributing that view to Palestinians and their Arab supporters. She went even further, insisting that by acknowledging that Palestinians and their supporters perhaps had reason to be less than thrilled with the creation of Israel, I was actually--I kid you not--blaming"long-dead Holocaust victims" and arguing that"every Muslim is justified in viewing every Jew as the enemy." (In fact, the item in question spoke of Arabs, not"Muslims." Neither Young nor her editor, Nick King, appears to understand the difference.)
Were it not for the fact that the approximately 474,845 people who read the daily Globe now consider me an anti-Semitic, self-hating Jew, the episode would be ridiculous. Young describes herself as a"nonobservant Jew." She sure got the nonobservant part right. A former girlfriend of Wall Street Journal right-winger John Fund--which may or may not explain everything--Young has no profile whatever in Jewish affairs, Middle East debates or discussions of anti-Semitism. Your columnist, on the other hand, is not only a pretty serious Jew--bar mitzvah, educated in Israel, lights candles on Friday night, goes to shul, sends the kid to Hebrew school, contributes to the Forward, etc.--but has been writing on Israel and anti-Semitism, speaking in synagogues, minoring in Jewish studies during doctoral work, etc., since first publishing on anti-Semitism at Yale, in, um, the Boston Globe twenty years ago, when he was the paper's stringer there. (The piece was deemed so sensitive to Jewish concerns, I received a congratulatory letter from none other than Martin Peretz, who invited me to contribute to The New Republic.)
When I attempted to redress some of Young's damage with a letter to the paper containing the original blog item, the Globe truncated it, preventing its readers from seeing the evidence. The paper also refused to publish letters from a number of prominent Jewish voices, like that of M.J. Rosenberg, policy director of the Israel Policy Forum, and Jo-Ann Mort, a national board member of Americans for Peace Now (some of the letters the Globe didn't publish can be found at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6980484/). When the editors did finally run a letter in support of my work, from Boston attorney and Jewish peace activist Geoffrey Lewis, they not only edited it self-protectively but mistitled it,"He's Pro-Israel," as if that were somehow the point. (Just ask Jerry Falwell if it's possible to like Israel and still claim all Jews are going to hell.) The paper's own ombudsman, meanwhile, termed Young's column"ad hominem" and"not worthy of an opinion page where readers expect (and usually get) thoughtful analysis and insight."
Boston Phoenix media critic Dan Kennedy wondered,"How could a toxic suggestion that Alterman is a 'self-hating' Jew make it through the editing process?" True, it is the kind of thing one reads all the time in the swamps of the conservative blogosphere--indeed, David Horowitz ran it untouched. But the Boston Globe? King, Young's editor, has admitted to me that he never read the blog item in question--you can read it at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6968346/#050215--and would not say that he thought her accusations accurate. Rather he termed them to be"provocative"--as if this were a sufficient excuse for an attempt to ruin someone's reputation. For her part, King's boss, editorial page editor Renee Loth, in response to a series of questions I e-mailed her for this column, declined to address any of them because, she said, they"get into internal editorial operations." So the Globe feels it is entitled to destroy a reputation established over two decades while simultaneously investigating the internal operations of any powerful entity it chooses, but when one of the victims of its own abuse of power who happens to have a media column seeks to clarify just how it took place, its editors claim the equivalent of"executive privilege." Is it any wonder so many people resent the media?
Whether she sought payback for what I've written in The Nation about her ex-boyfriend or merely to silence anyone who expresses sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, the result of Young's clumsy slander is to aid the cause of anti-Semitism by revealing the political motivation of those who use the accusation as nothing more than a convenient ideological weapon. As Peace Now's Jo-Ann Mort wrote to the Globe,"With friends like Cathy Young, the Jews don't need enemies." Neither does journalism.
Reprinted with permission from the Nation. For subscription information call 1-800-333-8536. Portions of each week's Nation magazine can be accessed at http://www.thenation.com.
Another professor of OSU’s Peace Studies program is Mark Grimsley, who teaches History in Columbus, and who has been the recipient of the university’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. Grimsley has taught the Peace Studies elective course “History of War.” On his website, entitled, the “The Kinder, Gentler Military History Page,” Grimsley sets out to admonish his colleagues who teach war history classes from a perspective in which war can be seen as a viable alternative. He insists:
Too often military historians take what might called the “drawn gun” approach to their subject. It is as if they focus not on the individual who has drawn the gun (his reasons for drawing the gun, why he has one in the first place), but focus on the gun itself – the armed forces – and take violent conflict resolution as a given. Still worse, military historians tend to utilize the same intellectual categories as the military establishment. That tendency, to the degree in which it is indulged, makes independent, critical analysis more difficult. Peace Studies provide a highly useful corrective.
On his website, Grimsley also provides links to a number of biased, anti-American and anti-Israel organizations, including Friends for a Non-Violent World, a group which has ignored the brutal dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein and blamed the Iraqi people’s pre-liberation suffering on U.S. economic sanctions.
On his blog, “War Historian,” Grimsley has plainly acknowledged that there is a left-wing predisposition inherent at Ohio State University, especially at the graduate level. He has reduced this trend to a “self-fulfilling prophecy” whereby conservative students fear scorn from the biased nature of the school, and therefore “do not apply to grad school in the first place.” Grimsley has failed to recognize the contributions he and his colleagues make to advance this trend.
Grimsley has also used his blog as a forum with which to lambaste Front Page Magazine editor-in-chief David Horowitz, who has done a great deal to expose the bias in the university. Grimsley writes, “Personally I do not think that Mr. Horowitz is interested in the free exchange of views.” However, Horowitz has sought to represent both conservative and liberal students who have had gripes with any university.
On his blog, Grimsley also failed to condemn Ward Churchill’s remark comparing casualties of the 9/11 attacks to Nazi-resembling “little Eichmanns,” about which he instead attempted to argue the statement’s metaphoric effectiveness. Grimsley writes:
I continue to wrestle with the issue of whether the “little Eichmanns” metaphor can be made coherent. As I have said, a major problem with the Ward Churchill essay is that the essay fails to deploy the metaphor effectively, at least as an aid to analysis. As an aid to incitement, it has proven to be quite effective.
In other words: If only Ward Churchill had hated his country in more vivid metaphor! Grimsley goes on to praise the merits of Churchill, stating, “There are those, like me, who think opinions can be valuable especially if they seem dangerous or disagreeable.”
Related Link
Steven Plaut, at frontpagemag.org (3-7-05):
The University of California at Berkeley has developed a new academic specialty, providing a home for anti-Israel Israelis. The anthropology department at the University of California, headed by leftist Lawrence Cohen, a leading scholar in “queer studies,” recently hired an Israeli anthropologist who had been forced to resign from the Hebrew University, reportedly over fabricating research results. UC-Berkeley has misused the “Diller Grant” it receives from a fund established by Helen Diller, a Berkeley alumnus, contributed to promote Jewish and Israeli studies on campus, to host one of Israel’s worst anti-Zionist extremists: Oren Yiftachel, a geographer from Ben Gurion University. According to Martin Kramer, an expert on Middle East Studies and on pseudo-scholarship, “Yiftachel is...a shining light in the post-Zionist pantheon, a ‘critical scholar’ whose criticism runs overwhelmingly in one direction: against Israel. Yiftachel was the kind of Israeli that an Edward Said-boosting, Saudi-connected Middle East center could not only tolerate, but embrace.”
But one of the worst anti-Israel extremists from Israeli academia is Neve Gordon, a Marxist political scientist at Ben Gurion University in Israel’s south, who is currently a “visiting scholar” at UC-Berkeley’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and its “Human Rights Center,” which is associated with with the leftist Human Rights Watch. Among Berkeley’s Human Rights Center projects is a study purporting to prove that slavery still exists in the United States and several that denounce “globalization.” The Center for Middle East Studies is a bastion of Israel bashing that is financed in part by Saudi money, including donations from those connected with terrorism.
Neve Gordon has been under increasingly under attack in recent days in the Israeli media for his anti-Israel activities. As a columnist for Alexander Cockburn’s anti-Semitic Counterpunch magazine, Gordon routinely declares Israel to be a fascist, racist, apartheid terrorist country. Gordon was paid by Notre Dame's far-left Kroc Institute, which has attempted to hire Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Arab anti-Semite with ties to al-Qaeda, in order to produce a “research report” claiming to prove that Israel is a terrorist state. Gordon is so anti-Israel that his columns have been published on the neo-Nazi Zundelsite website operated by Ernst Zundel, the Nazi whom Canada recently deported to Germany, and on Islamic fundamentalist pro-terror web sites. Gordon ran an international campaign of defamation and vilification against his own army commander, a private citizen and not a public figure, accusing him on communist and other anti-Semitic web sites of being a “war criminal.” He might have been trying to get this officer indicted before the World Court in the Hague or some other den of kangaroos. Gordon was arrested for illegally trying to interfere with the Israeli army’s anti-terror activities by serving as a human shield for Arafat and the wanted terrorists being hidden in PLO offices.
This past week, two of Israel’s main daily newspapers attacked Gordon for his anti-Israel extremism. First, the Jerusalem Post ran a piece by P. David Hornik, which was reprinted in Frontpage Magazine, on the anti-Israel extremists at Ben Gurion University in Israel, Israel’s worst oasis of academic radicalism. Hornik writes: “There are, of course, radicals at other Israeli universities as well, but they are particularly well represented at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Dr. Neve Gordon of BGU's political science department, for example, has written: ‘Israel's gravest danger today is not the PA or even Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, but the one it faces from within: fascism.’ And in a column on the far-Left Counterpunch Web site, he accused General Aviv Kohavi, currently IDF commander in the Gaza Strip, of ‘blatant violations of human rights’ and of being a ‘war criminal’. Not surprisingly, Gordon's articles have been posted on anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi sites.”
A second attack came from Israel’s second largest daily, Maariv. Ben Dror Yemini is a columnist and senior editor at Maariv, and is himself left-of-center and a supporter of the failed Oslo peace process. But Yemini also is militantly opposed to the far-left anti-Zionists in Israel, especially the academic extremists. On the above-discussed Oren Yiftachel’s appointment at Berkeley he commented, "Is Yiftachel the best choice to effectively counter the ugly anti-Israeli stream that already dominates at Berkeley? Common sense dictates not. So what was the point of the exercise? Well, it failed. Which means, Jews are as prone to folly as anyone else."
This past Friday Yemini's column was devoted to showing how worldwide anti-Semitism is being fanned by the activities of Israel’s anti-Israel extremists. Yemini observes how anti-Semites in France and elsewhere claim Israel is exploiting the Holocaust as an excuse to conduct atrocities against Palestinians, relying on Israeli far leftists when they do so. He refers Israel Shamir as an open anti-Semite. Russian-born Shamir lives in Israel, but almost no Israelis have heard of him. He is an open neo-Nazi who spreads his anti-Semitic propaganda all over the web. Yemini observes that others are like Ilan Pappe from the University of Haifa and Neve Gordon from Ben Gurion University almost as bad. Both of them - Yemini writes - “spread their articles with anti-Israel poison all over the world, some of which appear on anti-Semitic web sites. Those web sites love these people.” Finally, Yemini holds such Israeli leftists responsible for the spread of anti-Semitism around the world and mocks their claims that they are simply promoting “anti-Zionism.” He refers to the “anti-Semitic front” comprised of leftist Jews and Israelis who toss around words like genocide and ethnic cleansing when they attack Israel as a way of demonizing the Jews.
Other Israeli web sites have also been attacking the “visiting scholar” at UC-Berkeley. Here is what NGO Monitor, a website run by the non-partisan Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, says about Neve Gordon: “The Montreal-based organization Alternatives demonstrates the ease with which NGOs can contradict their own stated objectives by obscuring contexts and distorting facts...Yet the group engages in a wide variety of highly unbalanced and politicized activities both within Canada and abroad. Rather than ‘truly mirror(ing) the expectations of all Canadians,’ the organization’s focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reveals an extreme approach….
“Its domestic advocacy is unceasingly critical of Israel even as it downplays Palestinian human rights abuses and ignores Palestinian terrorism. An op-ed on the Alternatives website by Neve Gordon on the subject of the construction of the security fence accuses Israel of 'ethnic cleansing' and ignores the complex reasons behind the wall. Instead, Gordon resorts to simplistic slogans such as exhorting ‘international leaders’ to ‘tell Prime Minister Sharon that at this historical moment he has an option between walls and ethnic cleansing, on the one hand, and open borders and freedom, on the other.’ Moreover, Gordon simplistically compares the State of Israel to Nazi Germany: ‘As the government of the Jewish state forces the Palestinians in ghettos, history must be turning in its grave… yet the so-called security wall does not separate these Palestinian residents from Jewish Israelis, but rather from their brethren in the West Bank.’”
Berkeley, once the front line of the free speech movement, is promoting anti-Israel propaganda by hosting anti-Israel extremists who are Israeli as a way to pretend that the Arab campaign to destroy Israel is “balanced” and “objective.” It would a bit like having an American Studies department with Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, and Robert Jensen – but then universities already do.
Martin Kramer, in his newsletter and blog (2-28-05):
The spotlight in the Columbia crisis has shifted to Professor Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia's Middle East Institute and the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies. He's not a part of the reeking mess over at the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) department, where extremist professors stand accused of browbeating their students. But he's become more outspoken on their behalf, and he's been swept into the general controversy surrounding anti-Israel agitation by faculty.
As a result, the New York City Department of Education has dropped him from an outreach program to city teachers. Khalidi's banishment is the subject of an article in today's New York Ti
mes and a lengthy news piece in the current issue of the weekly Forward. People are asking just what Khalidi stands for.
Or who stands with him. In such confrontations, it's often better to have someone else explain what you stand for--a prominent champion, preferably from the other side of the aisle, who'll swear to your scholarship, moderation, and bona fides.
Khalidi has one in Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, former president of the American Jewish Congress, historian of Zionism, and frequent critic of the Jewish establishment and Israeli policies. The Forward aptly titled a review of his autobiography"The Great Gadfly." As it happens, Hertzberg deems himself a great expert on Khalidi, with whom he co-taught a Columbia course some decades back. On that basis, he's set out to reassure the Jewish public that Khalidi is a tough but decent adversary, whose views aren't out of bounds.
He did that back in November, in an article he wrote for New York's Jewish Week. There he revealed how he once intervened to overcome Jewish faculty opposition to Khalidi's appointment at the University of Chicago."I wrote the president of the University of Chicago that I found Khalidi to be a solid and serious academic, and that his personal politics were no more offensive than mine.... That was the end of the furor and Khalidi's appointment went through." In this week's Forward, Hertzberg is quoted a
s saying that Khalidi"is about as virulently anti-Israel as the Likudniks are anti-Arab. Have we decided that we are going to throw all the Likudniks out of public life?" This evening, he and Khalidi are to appear together at the Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at New York University, to speak about"Academic Freedom in a Time of Conflict." It's quite likely this venue will provide an opportunity for more endorsements and encomiums.
Now Rabbi Hertzberg is a very great authority on many things. I took his course on Zionism at Columbia nearly thirty years ago, and I wouldn't want to get into a debate with him over Ahad Ha'am. But when it comes to his Palestinians, the rabbi is no maven.
Consider, for example, Edward Said. Hertzberg once told this very revealing story about what happened when he appeared together with the Palestinian champion, back in the early 1980s:
When I suggested beforehand that, in this superheated atmosphere, with the Israelis in Lebanon, we should make the most peaceful noises, he agreed absolutely. So, for 45 minutes, I gave my most dovish speech. He then came on the dais and made his most fire-eating speech. Afterward, he came up to me and said,"Arthur, now we must continue our conversation at breakfast when we get back to Columbia."On the face of it, this is a story about Said, but it really says more about Hertzberg. I'm guessing that Said didn't give his most fire-eating speech. He simply gave his usual speech. If Hertzberg was taken aback, it's because he'd made wishful assumptions about Said. The story isn't about Said's duplicity. It's about Hertzberg's naivete.
But there's an even more telling example of his misreading of Said. In 2003, Hertzberg published a short book entitled The Fate of Zionism. In it, he rehashes his various intellectual battles, with himself cast in the role of defender of Israel and critic of Israeli policies. Hertzberg tells of how Said started out as"a proponent for the creation of an Arab Palestine, which he was sure would treat a Jewish minority with generosity of spirit." Hertzberg then (rightly) denigrates this fantastic idea, and crosses swords with those other (Jewish) champions of the"one-state solution," Noam Chomsky and Tony Judt. But then he offers this eye-opener (pp.137-38):
The only one who seems to have made some progress in his thinking, with the passing of the years, is Edward Said. He has apparently finally arrived at a rather unhappy acceptance of the partition of Palestine.... Said no longer calls for a unitary state in Palestine. He knows that if the Palestinians are not to lose all of Palestine, they must accept the partition of the land into two states. Said makes no secret of his hatred of Israel--not merely for Sharon and his followers, but for Israel as a whole--but he knows that it will continue to exist.Said accepted the partition of Palestine? On what planet was Rabbi Hertzberg living, where he could have missed Edward Said's celebrated migration from a two-state solution back to a one-state solution? At what point did he stop reading the New York Times Magazine, where Edward Said published an articleentitled"The One-State Solution" in 1999? (Said:"Palestinian self-determination in a separate state is unworkable.") At what point did he stop reading the weekend Haaretz, where Said made the case for one state directly to the Israeli public, in an interview in 2000? (Said:"The two-state solution can no longer be implemented.")"For all his sloganizing abilities," Herztberg announces,"Said is capable of being realistic." You might reach that conclusion, if you'd become too blind to read Said's words or too deaf to hear them. Hertzberg obviously gave Said his blessing much like Isaac gave his to Jacob--thinking he was someone else altogether.
And that brings us back to Rashid Khalidi. There was a tim e when Khalidi, too, was a clear supporter of a two-state solution. It won him a reputation as a moderate among liberal Jews who were quick to embrace him. That reputation, maintained through the 1990s, also eased his transition from Chicago back to Columbia. On learning of Khalidi's appointment, Columbia's Hillel rabbi at the time called him “a reputable scholar with a balanced reputation who advocates a two-state solution.”
Well, maybe not. Khalidi often takes equivocal positions. He supports the Palestinian right to resist occupation, but he opposes terrorism. He denounces Israeli policies as racist, but won't label Israel itself as racist. The same equivocation now clouds his approach to a solution. Khalidi, when asked, now says that it may be too late for two states--exactl y the argument Said made when he became a one-stater. At a recent Columbia panel, Khalidi had an ideal opportunity to reaffirm his support for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He didn't take it, and he left the impression that he thought two states had become impractical. It seems that since coming to Columbia, Khalidi has moved along the same trajectory as Said, gradually closing the gap between his past positions and the positions of the man whose name now figures in his title.
And have no doubt what the"one-state solution" means: it is a"final solution" for Israel, a denial of the national aspirations and right to self-determination of nearly six million Israeli Jews. Indeed, support for a"one-state solution" is a more clear-cut marker of extremism than support for terrorism. The list of terrorists who've become statesmen is long, and it includes Israelis and Palestinians. But adoption of the"one-state solution" is a call for the elimination of the state of Israel in its entirety--a kind of mass destruction that goes way beyond the tactic of terrorism. For that reason, one-staters have nothing to contribute to any form of dialogue, and no interest in it either, since they have only non-negotiable demands: the unilateral and unconditional surrender of Israel, the complete dismantlement of its institutions, and the final submersion of the remaining Jews beneath a wave of Palestinian"refugees" claiming their inalienable"right of return."
This is where Edward Said ended up, and this is where Rashid Khalidi is headed, if he isn't there already. That's not the Palestinian equivalent of the"Likudnik" position, which today is predicated on disengagement and the road-map to a two-state solution. And that's why Rabbi Hertzberg should look again before blessing Khalidi again, lest he look (again) like an out-of-touch fool. Sure, Khalidi is entitled to the full protections of academic freedom (and they aren't endangered). But is he entitled to the full sympathies of the people who will fill NYU's Center for Jewish Student Life, as someone who's part of the solution to the MEALAC problem? Or is he now part of the problem--a glib version of a MEALAC extremist (without the abuse), and someone whose views desperately need to be balanced at Columbia?
Hertzberg (in The Fate of Zionism, p.120) makes this promise:"Even Jews like me who have been opposed to the creeping annexation of the West Bank since it began in the late 1960s, will never make common cause with those who want to put an end to the Zionist state." Well, rabbi, you'll wind up doing just that if you don't pay closer attention to what your Palestinian intellectual friends are saying, or if you deliberately look the other way. That means asking tough questions and insisting on clear answers. When might that start? How about tonight?
The campus may look different, but the fond memories and comfortable feelings associated with Brandeis never change for Deborah Lipstadt, who returned to her alma mater on March 2 to participate in a leadership conference and speak about her new book.
"I always love coming back," said Lipstadt, who earned a master's degree at Brandeis in 1972 and a Ph.D. four years later. "But this is different to come back to this kind of welcome and this response."
Lipstadt participated in Truth at Stake, a conference on the protection of historical truth, but the events at the Shapiro Campus Center centered on Lipstadt's book about her libel trial against a Holocaust denier. Before the conference, she spoke about her book as part of the Office of Communications' Meet the Author series.
"History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving" recounts the hardships of being sued for libel by David Irving, a man Lipstadt named the most dangerous of Holocaust deniers in an earlier book.
Irving was dangerous not only because he was a revisionist historian, but also because he was broadly read and even praised by the mainstream media, according to Lipstadt.
Lipstadt's triumph in the London courtroom changed people's opinion of him. Irving is now infamous for being a Holocaust denier, a discredited historian, and a liar.
"I have not dealt a death blow to Holocaust deniers - it doesn't go away," said Lipstadt, the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University and the director of the school's Institute for Jewish Studies. "You don't win the battle, but you keep fighting the war."
[Sean Wilentz is professor of history and director of the program in American studies at Princeton University.]
For 30 years I have tried to write history. It is extremely hard work, but gratifying over the long haul. Landing a Grammy Award nomination for a brief historical piece was never in the cards, but a fluke, the result of strange twists of good fortune.
Forty years ago, as a 13-year-old, I attended a Bob Dylan concert at Philharmonic Hall in New York City. My family ran a bookshop in Greenwich Village that helped nurture the beat poets of the 1950s and the folk revivalists of the early 1960s, and my father, Elias Wilentz, edited The Beat Scene, one of the earliest anthologies of beat poetry. Down from the bookshop, on MacDougal Street, was one of the epicenters of the folk-music explosion, the Folklore Center, run by my father's friend Izzy Young, an outsized enthusiast with an impish grin and a heavy Bronx-Jewish accent. On pleasant Sundays, we'd take family strolls that almost always included a stop at Izzy's place, which was wall-to-wall with records and stringed instruments and had a little room in the back where musicians hung out. My first memories of Bob Dylan are from there, although they are dim, despite my later efforts to brighten them. (Only much later did I learn that Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg, late in 1963, in my uncle's apartment above the bookshop.) Nothing in that setting was anything I had sought out, or had any idea was important, or was going to become important....
By now [the 1990s] I was writing about the arts as well as about history, and over the next few years I published a few articles about Dylan and his work. Somebody, possibly from the old days, must have noticed, because in 2001 a phone call came from out of the blue asking if I would like to write something about a forthcoming album, called Love and Theft, for the official Dylan Web site. I agreed, with the provision that if I didn't like the album I wouldn't do it. Fortunately I loved what I heard, the people who had contacted me liked what they read, and it was the beginning of a beautiful set of friendships. I wrote more for the Web site over the ensuing months, and took the somewhat facetious title of its "historian-in-residence," a job nobody else seemed to be angling for, its home office suspended in cyberspace.
Sometime in 2002, plans took shape for an official release, as part of a retrospective series, of the tape made on that long-ago night I first heard Bob Dylan in concert. I knew nothing about the project; nor did Dylan's management know I'd attended the show, until, apropos of something I forget, I mentioned it to someone at Dylan's office. Soon after, the offer arrived to write the liner notes for what would become Bob Dylan Live 1964.
It was an intimidating assignment. When he hasn't written the notes himself, Dylan has always managed to land some exceptionally fine writers and experts, including Johnny Cash, Tony Glover, Pete Hamill, Nat Hentoff, Greil Marcus, and Tom Piazza. Could I even come close to their level? I also worried about what it would be like trying to describe a scene from so long ago without sounding either coy or pedantic. How much would I even remember?
The memory part turned out to be easy. Listening to the tape brought back in a rush the feel of the occasion -- the evening's warmth; the golden glow of the still new Philharmonic Hall in the still-under-construction Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; the intimate, sometimes giddy rapport that Dylan had with the audience (unimaginable in today's arena rock concerts); the special thrill of watching Joan Baez walk on stage during the second half of the show to sing some duets; and most of all, the pounding, modal shock of listening to a brand new song that Dylan was then calling "It's Alright Ma, It's Life And Life Only," a song I could only comprehend in shards, but whose images of tongues on fire and glowing plastic Christs were stunning....
[Mr. Wilentz was nominated for a Grammy for his notes. He says he "badly wanted to win." He did not.]
It hurt when the presenter read someone else's name, and I couldn't hide it. From the row in front of mine, an elegantly dressed woman, older than me, noticed my dejection and extended her hand.
"Don't you worry, honey, I didn't win myself, and ain't it great being here?"
I kissed her hand, suddenly feeling better, welcomed, if only for a weekend, into the ranks of hard-working musicians and artists.
Lynne Duke, in the Washington Post (2-27-05):
What a dream. So bizarre. How strange to see himself shrunken, like a pocket-size person. But there he was, Kenneth Maxwell, renowned scholar, rendered a tiny creature trembling at the windswept ramparts of his dream. Gargantuan figures loomed above, gazing down on this mere morsel.
Maxwell awoke. The dream trailed him out of bed.
"I've seen this somewhere before," he thought, vexed for a while until he realized that a picture from his favorite childhood book had scripted his subconscious. He'd become Gulliver, but little as a Lilliputian, facing giants in the phantasmagoric land of Brobdingnag.
The dream seemed to track loosely with Maxwell's reality. He had faced some towering figures of his own. And in a paper to be published that day, Dec. 2, on a Harvard University Web site, he would criticize the credibility of the vaunted Council on Foreign Relations, his former employer and the grande dame of all think tanks.
Maxwell, 64, had been a senior fellow at the council for 15 years. For 11 years, he also reviewed books for Foreign Affairs, the prestigious council journal. And now he would accuse both entities of suppressing debate and silencing his voice because of pressure from Henry Kissinger, the former national security adviser, secretary of state and global power broker.
Maxwell's writings indeed upset Kissinger, say Kissinger's associates. Maxwell had revisited a bitter debate, still red-hot after three decades, about Chile and Kissinger and the depth of U.S. involvement in the fall of one regime and the rise of another.
It is, at bottom, a debate about history and the battle to define it. It is about power -- its uses, its abuses.
"In the foreign-policy world, history is power," says Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the council. "Who is right or wrong in the past either gives or withholds power today."
Chile sounds like old news, except that it still is news. The country's former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, keeps popping up in headlines -- most recently regarding the Riggs Bank money laundering scandal. And in December, a Chilean judge ruled that Pinochet can be tried for kidnapping and murder.
Chile still reverberates along America's ideological divides over human rights and foreign policy, echoing the old realpolitik-vs.-moralism debate heard during the Cold War, when Kissinger and people like him saw in Chile a domino about to fall.
So the battle over Chile goes on, with the latest skirmish revolving around this question: Did the council cave to pressure from Kissinger and his allies and stop Maxwell's writings about Chile? Council officials deny that they responded to any pressure. Kissinger himself won't comment.
Or did Maxwell, sensitive to any perceived threat to his intellectual freedom, overreact? Maxwell firmly believes his perception of Kissinger's influence was based in fact. And Maxwell is not alone in his belief, for Kissinger, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, is known for hitting back at critics, for staunchly policing his image.
"Our sense is that Henry does that all the time," says Riordan Roett, a supporter of Maxwell's who has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations for 25 years and is director of Western Hemisphere studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
Maxwell awoke that December morning and realized Kissinger was among the giants in his dream.
"What the hell have I done, taking on all of these people?" he thought.
A Lofty Place
The Council on Foreign Relations is a formidable place filled with formidable people -- former Cabinet secretaries and ambassadors, current CEOs and pundits of the media elite -- who've fired their reputations over the years in the foreign policy kiln.
Even its headquarters -- at Park Avenue and 68th Street in Manhattan, in a mansion once owned by a Standard Oil director -- speaks of status, of power.
High officials leaving government go to the council to roost. Those seeking the reverse trek use the council to launch government careers. Heads of state give speeches there. Diplomats mix it up. Journalists gather to hash over issues of the day (this writer spoke on such a panel there 5 1/2 years ago). And task forces meet to craft reports on pressing national and global policy.
That's how Kissinger, now 81, got his start back in the 1950s, on a council study group. Council intellectuals, back then, were at the cutting edge of U.S. foreign policy. Those were the days of George Kennan and the doctrine of "containment," of Paul Nitze, the architect of Cold War policy. Kissinger, then the young upstart from Harvard, arrived at the council and wrote a 1957 book, "Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy," that planted the notion of "limited" nuclear war in the policy mind-set.
The original limited-war concept actually was Nitze's, Walter Isaacson wrote in his 1992 book, "Kissinger: A Biography." And when Nitze wrote a negative review of Kissinger's book, Kissinger threatened to sue for libel (but didn't). The two men remained at odds for decades, Isaacson wrote.
Over the years, Kissinger's name became virtually synonymous with the council, even though the only high office he held there was a four-year term on the board ending in 1981.
And the extent of his power at the council can be traced through his personal
and business relations. He and his New York-based international consulting firm,
Kissinger Associates, are closely linked to two of the council's most powerful
figures.
