Roundup: Talking About History

Jon Clarke: Nazi Gold Train bound for Gibraltar

THE meeting WAS HELD in the centre of Madrid on a shivery cold morning in February 1945. Taking place in the plush top floor office of the Instituto de la Moneda, the director was meeting with the heads of both the German and British secret services. The topic: to decide, allegedly, how to divide up the enormous piles of Nazi gold – much of it looted from Jews – that had found its way into Spain towards the end of the Second World War. “There were two Briti

David Silbey: The “traditional forms of history are dying” meme

[David Silbey teaches history at a small American university that is, technically, in an extremely eastern part of the American West.] The “traditional forms of history are dying” meme is strong within conservative precincts, and, oddly, the New York Times. “Traditional” in this case usually means one of a choice of political, diplomatic, economic or military history. The regular story is that these important kinds of history are being excluded from academia by (unstat

Vaclav Havel: Ghosts of Appeasement Haunt Europe

[Vaclav Havel was president of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and president of the Czech Republic (1993-2003).] One of the fundamental pillars of Europe's political architecture is a strong and enduring belief in the universal validity of equal, universal, and inalienable human rights. At the core of this is a belief in the rights of human beings to a life of freedom and the protection of their dignity. In the years after World War II, this humanist ideal becam

Gwynne Dyer: Rewriting history in Russia

[Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.] In the Soviet Union, the future was always certain; only the past could change without notice. The signal that it had changed was often the publication of a pseudo-scholarly article that denounced the "falsifications" of the existing version of history. Here we go again. Recently Col. Sergei Kovalev, director of the scientific research department at the Institu

Ron Maxwell: On the Occasion of President Obama’s Wreath for the Confederate Memorial

Related Links James Loewen: Separate but Equal Wreaths are Not a Permanent Solution to the Memorial Day Conundrum Edward Sebesta and James Loewen: Dear President Obama: Please Don't Honor the Arlington Confederate Monument Ron Maxwell is the writer-director of the motion-pictures Gettysburg, Gods & Generals and Verna:USO Girl, among others.

Matthew Dallek: Not Ready for Mt. Rushmore: Reconciling the Myth of Ronald Reagan with the Reality

[Matthew Dallek is a professor of history and politics at the University of California Washington Center. He is the author of 'The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan's First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics,' and writes a monthly column for Politico.] When Ronald Reagan stepped down from the presidency in 1989, he had acquired a reputation as a resilient, savvy politician. To his acolytes on the right, he had become a hero, a man whose love of country and desire

Simon Heffer: Russia wheels out the evil weapon of history

[Simon Heffer is associate editor at the Daily Telegraph.] There are few things more dangerous or terrifying than when a nation, or the state apparatus that controls it, falls into the grip of a collective delusion. Such was the case in Nazi Germany, when a straightforward decision was taken to scapegoat Jews, Communists and, in the end, anyone else who didn't agree with the prevailing madness, and persecute them to the point of mass murder. Stalin, in his own pursuit of totalitaria

Vladimir Ryzhkov: Russian History Under Lock and Key

[Vladimir Ryzhkov, a State Duma deputy from 1993 to 2007, hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.] The only way to fight a real battle against the falsification of history -- something that President Dmitry Medvedev has made a priority after creating a special commission to handle this issue -- is to keep government archives as open as possible for historians. Unfortunately, the government is doing the exact opposite, depriving historians access to the most sensitive and i

Michael C. Moynihan: Baader-Meinhof myth exploded

[Michael C. Moynihan is a senior editor of Reason magazine.] ON June 2, 1967, the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, exited a performance of The Magic Flute at the Berlin Opera House to a throng of rock-throwing protesters, already into their second hour of battle with police. As the situation escalated, Karl-Heinz Kurras, a detective sergeant in the West Berlin police force, approached an unarmed student he misidentified as a ringleader of the protest. After tussling

Karl E. Johnson: The Curious Case of Galileo Galilei (in which he does not go to jail)

[Karl E. Johnson is Director of Chesterton House, a Center for Christian Studies and affiliate of Cornell United Religious Work in Ithaca, NY.] Last week, the Niels Stensen Foundation, a Jesuit study center in Florence, Italy, convened a conference entitled “The Galileo Affair” to show how recent research “might alleviate the ‘tension and conflict’ still clouding the relationship between the Church and science.” Indeed, four hundred years after the Florentine astronomer’s extraordi

Ronald Spector: What Students Need to Know About the Vietnam War

[Ronald Spector is professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University. This essay is based on his talk at the FPRI Wachman Center’s History Institute for Teachers on What Students Need to Know About America’s Wars, Part 2: 1920-present, held May 2-3, 2009. ] The Vietnam War—or as the Vietnamese call it, the American War—is the longest war in American history (so far) and the first one the U.S. clearly lost. More significant

William Leuchtenburg: The Wrong Man at the Wrong Time (Re: Herbert Hoover)

[From the book HERBERT HOOVER from The American Presidents Series by William E. Leuchtenburg; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Sean Wilentz, General Editors. Copyright © 2009 by William E. Leuchtenburg. Reprinted by arrangement with Times Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.] ... Hoover never declared that prosperity was “just around the corner” (that fatuous statement came from his vice president, Charles Curtis), but he did refuse to face reality. In May 1930 he announc

Lauren Hilgers: Forgetting June 4th

[Lauren Hilgers is a writer living Shanghai. She has written on China’s political, economic and legal issues for publications including Waters Magazine, the China Economic Review, Newsweek Select and is a regular contributor at the legal blog Balkinization.] In a year fraught with sensitive Chinese anniversaries, June 4th is by far the most resonant in the United States. I was eight years old when Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party secretary and advocate of political reform that h

Herbert London: On D-Day, the U.S. saved Europe from itself

[Mr. London is president of the Hudson Institute and professor emeritus at New York University. He is the author of "Decade of Denial" (Lexington Books, 2001) and "America's Secular Challenge" (Encounter Books, 2008).] The skies over Normandy are invariably filled with dark rain clouds. But on one day in late April the sky was cloudless and the English Channel tranquil. Youngsters built sand castles on Omaha Beach and dogs romped in the surf. It was a vastly diff

Melinda Liu: When We Talk About Tiananmen

[Melinda Liu was named Newsweek Beijing bureau chief in late 1998, returning to the bureau she herself opened in 1980... Her coverage of the Hong Kong handover in 1997 and Sino-U.S. relations in 1996 helped win the magazine the Overseas Press Club's Ed Cunningham Memorial Award for best magazine reporting from abroad....Liu was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a magna cum laude graduate of Radcliffe College, Harvard. She is President of the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China, and in Octo

Lübeck: The town that said no to Hitler

Flying Ryanair is a pretty horrible thing to do at any time, but there is one advantage of flying it to Hamburg. With its customary reliability, the airline does not make too much noise about the fact that its Hamburg airport is in fact five minutes in a taxi from the centre of Lübeck (and not quite so near the centre of Hamburg, which is a mere 40 miles down the road). However, Lübeck is a sight – or rather a collection of sights – well worth seeing. Like its much bigger neighbour,

Anouar Majid: Why we should remember the 400th anniversary of the expulsion of Spain's entire Muslim population

[Anouar Majid is the author of We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades Against Muslims and Other Minorities (2009). He is director of the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England in Maine.] This year, a few scholars are commemorating the 400th anniversary of one of the darkest episodes in history, an event that should be widely known and discussed, but which, alas, has remained buried in the archives of memory. In April 1609, King Philip III of Spain and

Todd Crowell: The Hidden Truth About Tiananmen

[Todd Crowell covered Tiananmen as Chief of Correspondents for Asiaweek.] The 1950 Japanese film Rashomon owes its enduring appeal to director Akira Kurosawa’s superb treatment of an ancient and universal theme: What is the truth? A samurai and his bride come upon a bandit in a forest grove, where the traveler dies and his wife is ravished. The only witness is a woodcutter. The story turns on the magistrate’s efforts to extract the facts from completely different yet equally plausib

Yevgeny Kiselyov: When Interpreting History Becomes a Crime

[Yevgeny Kiselyov is a political analyst and hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio.] I would be fascinated to know if Westerners can fully appreciate the political significance behind President Dmitry Medvedev's decision to create a special commission "for counteracting attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia's interests." Most foreigners would probably say, "This is very strange. Doesn't Russia have more pressing problems it needs to tackle,

Klaus Wiegrefe: Who Ordered the Construction of the Berlin Wall?

[Klaus Wiegrefe is a Spiegel editor.] They met in Stalingrad, where they fought on the same side in 1942. One of them, the son of a miner from Ukraine, organized the city's defenses against the German Wehrmacht forces, while the other, a German exile, used a bullhorn to encourage infantrymen to change sides. This much is certain, and it is also certain that the two men -- the impulsive Kremlin dictator Nikita Khrushchev and the calculating founder of the German Democratic Republic,