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.
SOURCE: Daily Star (Beirut) (4-28-07)
[Mr. Young is the opinion editor of the paper.]
... Halberstam's work on Vietnam [in a sense] was just an earlier rendition of American writing on Iraq today: a foreign adventure that allows Americans to write mostly about other Americans. Along with "The Best and the Brightest," Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie," Michel Herr's "Dispatches," and Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" are all outstanding books about America in Vietnam - and there are others - but you won't find very much about the Vietnamese in them (though to be fair to Snepp, the purpose of his account was to condemn the way the US had abandoned its South Vietnamese allies). When it comes to foreign policy, Americans are prone to falling back into parochial conversations. This may be understandable, but it also shows how the global political ambition of the US is built on soft foundations. If you mainly write about yourself, or more importantly if you can't interest your countrymen in the outside world, then don't be surprised when foreign endeavors that turn sour are suddenly declared the consequence of cruel, inescapable providence.
This fatalism permeated Halberstam when he described Vietnam, and it permeates most American publicists today writing about Iraq who hope to be taken seriously. Yet this neat conceptual composition of hubris followed by nemesis reflected another aspect of Halberstam that was especially noticeable in one of his later books, "War in a Time of Peace:" his desire for unambiguous order in US foreign policy at a moment of growing disorder.
A common attribute of post-World War II foreign-policy thinking in America, at least until the arrival of the neoconservatives, was how conventional and demure it was. It was the thinking you could find at places like the Council on Foreign Relations, on Wall Street, in mainstream Washington think tanks, and in Congress. Its foundation was that ideology should never displace a detached assessment of national duty, that partisanship was best abandoned at the water's edge, and that America had to be a moral citadel, but not to the extent of jeopardizing international equilibrium and harming its interests and those of its reliable allies.
There was something very patrician in the approach, solemn, a feeling that either foreign matters were managed in that established way, the temperate way of the postwar leaders, or it would be bad form. Such reasoning injected rigidity into US overseas relations, which is why the neocons never grasped that in trying to overhaul that system, they were breaking decades of practice for which they had no readyreplacement.
Halberstam's journalistic inquisitiveness and skepticism notwithstanding, in his thinking he often came across as a product of that generation of conceited certitude. He was astute enough to make the dissolution of those Cold War certitudes during the 1990s, and the need for the US to address this new situation, the theme of "War in a Time of Peace." Halberstam's gift, but also his flaw, was to flesh out such complex transformations through his portrayals of personalities. His was a very Yankee way of looking at things, where everything boiled down to human will, as Halberstam turned those he described into agents of broader historical forces. In reading him you often feel you're watching a Hollywood movie, everything leading to a fated, even formulaic, climax.
It all somehow seemed to fit into a tidy vision Halberstam had of foreign affairs: There was a certain way of approaching policy, and it was based on consensus and ritual; if that ritual was broken, if modesty was abandoned in favor of the arrogant exercise of power, then destiny would intervene to discipline its practitioners. Muddling through were the human beings - politicians, presidents, decision-makers, soldiers, activists - players all in a larger drama, their personas brought out in vivid colors. Given Halberstam's tendency to seek out order, both moral and political, perhaps it's clearer now why when it came to Vietnam, he saw early on that the American enterprise had no place in his mental theater of the normal.
Once Vietnam ended, America returned to a world it knew, one that it didn't have to get used to. Things have changed today. After Iraq, what kind of world will the US return to? Maybe Halberstam died at the right moment, because the absence of any obvious answer to that question might only have confounded a master of sharp angles and firm truths.
... Halberstam's work on Vietnam [in a sense] was just an earlier rendition of American writing on Iraq today: a foreign adventure that allows Americans to write mostly about other Americans. Along with "The Best and the Brightest," Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie," Michel Herr's "Dispatches," and Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" are all outstanding books about America in Vietnam - and there are others - but you won't find very much about the Vietnamese in them (though to be fair to Snepp, the purpose of his account was to condemn the way the US had abandoned its South Vietnamese allies). When it comes to foreign policy, Americans are prone to falling back into parochial conversations. This may be understandable, but it also shows how the global political ambition of the US is built on soft foundations. If you mainly write about yourself, or more importantly if you can't interest your countrymen in the outside world, then don't be surprised when foreign endeavors that turn sour are suddenly declared the consequence of cruel, inescapable providence.
This fatalism permeated Halberstam when he described Vietnam, and it permeates most American publicists today writing about Iraq who hope to be taken seriously. Yet this neat conceptual composition of hubris followed by nemesis reflected another aspect of Halberstam that was especially noticeable in one of his later books, "War in a Time of Peace:" his desire for unambiguous order in US foreign policy at a moment of growing disorder.
A common attribute of post-World War II foreign-policy thinking in America, at least until the arrival of the neoconservatives, was how conventional and demure it was. It was the thinking you could find at places like the Council on Foreign Relations, on Wall Street, in mainstream Washington think tanks, and in Congress. Its foundation was that ideology should never displace a detached assessment of national duty, that partisanship was best abandoned at the water's edge, and that America had to be a moral citadel, but not to the extent of jeopardizing international equilibrium and harming its interests and those of its reliable allies.
There was something very patrician in the approach, solemn, a feeling that either foreign matters were managed in that established way, the temperate way of the postwar leaders, or it would be bad form. Such reasoning injected rigidity into US overseas relations, which is why the neocons never grasped that in trying to overhaul that system, they were breaking decades of practice for which they had no readyreplacement.
Halberstam's journalistic inquisitiveness and skepticism notwithstanding, in his thinking he often came across as a product of that generation of conceited certitude. He was astute enough to make the dissolution of those Cold War certitudes during the 1990s, and the need for the US to address this new situation, the theme of "War in a Time of Peace." Halberstam's gift, but also his flaw, was to flesh out such complex transformations through his portrayals of personalities. His was a very Yankee way of looking at things, where everything boiled down to human will, as Halberstam turned those he described into agents of broader historical forces. In reading him you often feel you're watching a Hollywood movie, everything leading to a fated, even formulaic, climax.
It all somehow seemed to fit into a tidy vision Halberstam had of foreign affairs: There was a certain way of approaching policy, and it was based on consensus and ritual; if that ritual was broken, if modesty was abandoned in favor of the arrogant exercise of power, then destiny would intervene to discipline its practitioners. Muddling through were the human beings - politicians, presidents, decision-makers, soldiers, activists - players all in a larger drama, their personas brought out in vivid colors. Given Halberstam's tendency to seek out order, both moral and political, perhaps it's clearer now why when it came to Vietnam, he saw early on that the American enterprise had no place in his mental theater of the normal.
Once Vietnam ended, America returned to a world it knew, one that it didn't have to get used to. Things have changed today. After Iraq, what kind of world will the US return to? Maybe Halberstam died at the right moment, because the absence of any obvious answer to that question might only have confounded a master of sharp angles and firm truths.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007 - 16:16
Comments
SOURCE: Times (of London) (4-29-07)
It was a brutal murder, even by the standards of South Africa. The world-famous historian and storyteller David Rattray, a friend of Prince Charles, is shot at close range in his home. The police, the family and the government insist the motive is robbery — but there is new evidence that much darker forces are at work....
Most white farmers in the region fear that land is the real reason that he was killed. The ANC government, sensing its popularity declining among the poorest blacks, is accelerating its land-redistribution programme. Within seven years, almost a third of the high- yield white farming land must be handed to black ownership. As was the case in Zimbabwe, the process is fraught with the potential for corruption and political score-settling. Blacks have been encouraged to make claims if they can provide evidence that their ancestors were pushed off land now owned by whites. Recently, a vast claim was formally listed in the Dundee area of KwaZulu-Natal, threatening dozens of landowners across 50,000 acres, including the Rattray land at Fugitives’ Drift. A listed farm is blighted: it cannot be sold; loans cannot be taken out against the capital value of the property for fear it will be expropriated. No capital work is done, no fences built, no outbuildings repaired. De Wet says the spectre of land redistribution has subverted the established rural order, leading to mutual suspicion and loathing. “When ? they [the local Zulus] hear a claim has been opposed,” he explains, “they kill a farmer.” Since South Africa’s first democratic elections in ?1994, in De Wet’s region, a 50-mile square expanse around the town of Dundee, there ? have been 53 serious farm attacks: 10 farmers have been killed, and several of their wives and daughters raped. Against this background, it is dangerous to pick fights with Zulus on the ?land issue, as it is so closely tied up with their historical identity and sense of grievance that the white man took their grazing areas. “With Africans around here, you’re dealing with ancestors and issues unintelligible to us,” explains a local landowner, who declined to be named. “It’s a boiling cauldron here on the land issue. I said to Rattray, ‘Be careful – you’ve made a lot of enemies.’ But he wouldn’t listen.” ...
With Zimbabwe slipping deeper into the mire by the week, there is no appetite in South Africa to ?dig too deeply into the implications of land redistribution. The press, which is generally owned by companies tightly locked into South Africa’s political-business elite, has shown no desire to test the botched-robbery theory. Nobody can know for sure the real reason why Rattray was killed. In public he brushed off the land claims against his life’s work at Fugitives’ Drift. De Wet, who strongly feels that Rattray was assassinated, probably for reasons of land, recalled him saying that the ANC would be crazy to take his land away. “He’d say, ‘I’ll go to the courts, I’ll go to government ministers, I’ll go to Prince Charles.’” But in his heart, he probably knew that would not have saved him. Across the Limpopo, fear of the economic consequences of white land seizures has done nothing to curb Robert Mugabe’s zeal in destroying Zimbabwe’s economy in the name of correcting historical injustices.
It is not hard to see why Nicky should prefer the world to think of David’s death as a botched robbery. She is fighting to keep the business going, and she has lost not just her husband, but also the lodge’s main selling point. Rob Caskie is doing his best to keep the flame alight. Immediately after the murder, he said he was sure his friend had been assassinated, and confirmed that to The Sunday Times by telephone. But in person, and after Nicky’s stern intervention, he declined to speak at all about the circumstances of the murder. Any suggestion that Fugitives’ Drift is blighted by land claims or Zulu resentments could be fatal to the business. ...
Most white farmers in the region fear that land is the real reason that he was killed. The ANC government, sensing its popularity declining among the poorest blacks, is accelerating its land-redistribution programme. Within seven years, almost a third of the high- yield white farming land must be handed to black ownership. As was the case in Zimbabwe, the process is fraught with the potential for corruption and political score-settling. Blacks have been encouraged to make claims if they can provide evidence that their ancestors were pushed off land now owned by whites. Recently, a vast claim was formally listed in the Dundee area of KwaZulu-Natal, threatening dozens of landowners across 50,000 acres, including the Rattray land at Fugitives’ Drift. A listed farm is blighted: it cannot be sold; loans cannot be taken out against the capital value of the property for fear it will be expropriated. No capital work is done, no fences built, no outbuildings repaired. De Wet says the spectre of land redistribution has subverted the established rural order, leading to mutual suspicion and loathing. “When ? they [the local Zulus] hear a claim has been opposed,” he explains, “they kill a farmer.” Since South Africa’s first democratic elections in ?1994, in De Wet’s region, a 50-mile square expanse around the town of Dundee, there ? have been 53 serious farm attacks: 10 farmers have been killed, and several of their wives and daughters raped. Against this background, it is dangerous to pick fights with Zulus on the ?land issue, as it is so closely tied up with their historical identity and sense of grievance that the white man took their grazing areas. “With Africans around here, you’re dealing with ancestors and issues unintelligible to us,” explains a local landowner, who declined to be named. “It’s a boiling cauldron here on the land issue. I said to Rattray, ‘Be careful – you’ve made a lot of enemies.’ But he wouldn’t listen.” ...
With Zimbabwe slipping deeper into the mire by the week, there is no appetite in South Africa to ?dig too deeply into the implications of land redistribution. The press, which is generally owned by companies tightly locked into South Africa’s political-business elite, has shown no desire to test the botched-robbery theory. Nobody can know for sure the real reason why Rattray was killed. In public he brushed off the land claims against his life’s work at Fugitives’ Drift. De Wet, who strongly feels that Rattray was assassinated, probably for reasons of land, recalled him saying that the ANC would be crazy to take his land away. “He’d say, ‘I’ll go to the courts, I’ll go to government ministers, I’ll go to Prince Charles.’” But in his heart, he probably knew that would not have saved him. Across the Limpopo, fear of the economic consequences of white land seizures has done nothing to curb Robert Mugabe’s zeal in destroying Zimbabwe’s economy in the name of correcting historical injustices.
It is not hard to see why Nicky should prefer the world to think of David’s death as a botched robbery. She is fighting to keep the business going, and she has lost not just her husband, but also the lodge’s main selling point. Rob Caskie is doing his best to keep the flame alight. Immediately after the murder, he said he was sure his friend had been assassinated, and confirmed that to The Sunday Times by telephone. But in person, and after Nicky’s stern intervention, he declined to speak at all about the circumstances of the murder. Any suggestion that Fugitives’ Drift is blighted by land claims or Zulu resentments could be fatal to the business. ...
Tuesday, May 1, 2007 - 15:55
