Roundup: Talking About History

Tad Taube: Auschwitz needs gravitas and tourism, not one or the other

[Tad Taube is chairman of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, president of the Koret Foundation and honorary consul for the Republic of Poland in California. This piece was written for JTA.] More tourists are arriving at Auschwitz — but what kind of experience are they getting? In the past two years, the number of visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland, has nearly tripled to an unprecedented 1 million people annually. These

Tony Dokoupil: The War We Forgot (WW I)

Of the 2 million American soldiers sent to the trenches during World War I, only Frank Woodruff Buckles is still alive. The retired Army corporal, who turned 107 this month, is all that prevents the first world war from slipping into the secondhand past. Harry Landis, the only other known WWI veteran, died at 108 last week in Tampa, Fla. We're about to "lose a living touchstone of history," says Bob Patrick, director of the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project. Yet the United

Andre Vltchek: Indonesia After Suharto – The Last King of Java Forgiven (By Elites)

[Andre Vltchek– novelist, journalist, playwright. Co-founder of Mainstay Press (www.mainstaypress.org), publishing house for political fiction. Editorial director of Asiana Press Agency (www.asiana-press-agency.com). Author of several novels and plays, he also directed a 90 minute documentary on the Suharto dictatorship “Terlena – Breaking of a Nation”. Andre lives and works in Asia and South Pacific an

Gavan McCormack: The Comfort Women, the Asian Women’s Fund and the Digital Museum

INTRODUCTION Six decades have passed since the end of the Pacific and East Asian War and the collapse of the Japanese colonial empire, but responsibility for colonialism, war, and their accompanying atrocities, continues to agitate Japan and East Asia. It is widely believed that Japan refuses to apologize or face the truth of history, much less compensate victims. Such a belief is, however mistaken, although it is true that it took five decades before any such steps were taken and t

James Wolcott: How Bush Stacks Up

Most people fear death. It’s something they’d prefer to skip, if possible, or at least put off to a later date. President George W. Bush entertains a more laid-back, come-what-may attitude toward the big D, and not, I suspect, because he’s assured of a pre-boarding pass to heaven. It’s because death provides the most unassailable of alibis, the perfect getaway. It lets him off the hook, providing an escape hatch for personal accountability while history deliberates on the lasting achievements an

Arthur Herman: The Lies of Tet

[Mr. Herman is the author of "Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age," to be published by Bantam Dell in April.] On January 30, 1968, more than a quarter million North Vietnamese soldiers and 100,000 Viet Cong irregulars launched a massive attack on South Vietnam. But the public didn't hear about who had won this most decisive battle of the Vietnam War, the so-called Tet offensive, until much too late. Media misrepor

Edward J. Larson: LIberal Democrats are ashamed of many of their party's past leaders

[Mr. Larson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is the author most recently of "A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign" (Free Press, 2007). President Bush read his book, liked it, and told him so in a note in which the president seemed to identify with Thomas Jefferson more than John Adams.] ... At one time, Democrats everywhere staged Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinners to honor their party's founders much like Repub

Oliver Kamm: Getting Hiroshima wrong time and again

[Mr. Kamm is a liberal journalist in the UK.] I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the ventures of the Media Lens organisation in the historiography of the Pacific War. ML is a sub-Chomskyite pressure group that purports to expose right-wing bias in the liberal communications media. To read the organisation's output and endless email campaigns is to enter, as Peter Beaumont of The Observer described it, "a closed and distorting little world that selects and twists its facts to s

Jack Bass: Still need truth, reconciliation, 40 years after Orangeburg

[Dr. Bass is professor of humanities and social sciences at the College of Charleston. For more information, go to www.orangeburgmassacre1968.com.] Truth and reconciliation combine to provide the theme of this week’s 40th anniversary of the Orangeburg Massacre. The tragedy of Feb. 8, 1968, left three young men dying and more than two dozen wounded by police gunfire on the third night of turmoil that began when black students attemp

David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies: The Ten Most Absurd Statements of 2007 About the Allies' Response to the Holocaust

Authors who last year distorted the Allies’ response to the Holocaust have received their comeuppance, with the publication by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies of its annual list of the “Ten Most Absurd Statements” about how the U.S. and its allies responded to the Nazi genocide. The list was released in conjunction with last week’s commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. “Sadly, a number of authors last year misrepresented important

Ian Kershaw: How Democracy Produced a Monster

[Ian Kershaw, a professor of modern history at Sheffield University, is the author of the forthcoming “Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution.”] COULD something like it happen again? That is invariably the first question that comes to mind when recalling that Hitler was given power in Germany 75 years ago last week. With the world now facing such great tensions and instability, the question seems more obvious than ever. Hitler came to power in a democracy with a hig

Paul Katz: What shall we do with the dead dictator?

[Paul R. Katz obtained his doctorate from the Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University. A specialist in the history of Chinese religion and society, his leading publications include: Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: The Cult of Marshal Wen in Late Imperial Chekiang (SUNY Press, 1995), The Cult of the Royal Lords in Taiwan (in Chinese; Shang-ting Publishing Company, 1997).] One of the thorniest problems facing fledgling democracies involves how to cope with memories of their fo

Peter J. Kuznick: Defending the Indefensible ... A Meditation on the Life of Hiroshima Pilot Paul Tibbets, Jr.

[Peter Kuznick, author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America, is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University. He is also the author of The Decision to Risk the Future: Harry Truman, the Atomic Bomb and the Apocalyptic Narrative, Japan Focus, 23 July 2007.] On November 1, Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., the man who piloted the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died at his Columbu

Athanasios Moulakis: Twelve Ways to Know the Past

[Athanasios Moulakis was a Southeast Europe Project policy scholar at the Wilson Center during 2006–07. He has taught at universities in Europe and the United States and was most recently director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies at the University of Lugano, in Switzerland.] The universities’ culture wars have abated. Most people have grown tired of the debates between the worth of “dead white males” on the one hand, and the sins of politically correct ideologues on the ot

Salil Tripathi: Does Gandhi still matter?

[Mr. Tripathi is a writer based in London.] Fresh garlands were placed on portraits and statues of Mohandas Gandhi yesterday, as India remembered its founding father on the 60th anniversary of his assassination. In India, Gandhi is everywhere: Town squares, streets and hospitals are named after him; most currency notes in India bear his image. Many Indians feel proud that one among them found a creative way of passive, nonviolent resistance to fight injustice. But does

Craig Childs: How much more of the world's treasures do museums need?

[Craig Childs is the author, most recently, of "The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild."] ... How much more of the world's artifacts do we need? In museum collections across the country, ancient bowls are stacked because there is no more room. I have walked the astonishing corridors locked within the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the overstocked storage space of the Peabody at Harvard University -- four stories of towering

Tony Judt: The 'Problem of Evil' in Postwar Europe

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt's conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understa

Ian Buruma: Legislating history (Re: Spain's new anti-Franco law)

[Ian Buruma is Professor of human rights at Bard College. His most recent book is Murder in Amsterdam: The Killing of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.] In October, the Spanish parliament passed a Law on Historical Memory, which bans rallies and memorials celebrating the late dictator Francisco Franco. His Falangist regime will be officially denounced and its victims honored. There are plausible reasons for enacting such a law. Many people killed by the Fascist

Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon: Reagan's Heir ... Reaching for a Place in History

As President Bush prepares to deliver his last State of the Union address tomorrow night, a legion of pundits, politicians and, yes, historians is already assigning the 43rd president his final place in history. These commentators, and especially those who confidently assert that Bush is the "worst president in history," would do well to remember the British historian C.V. Wedgwood's observation: "History is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story c

Dirty Campaign Trick: The Phony Charles Murchison Letter Upended Grover Cleveland's 1888 Presidential Bid

In the days of party bosses and political machines, one dirty trick in the form of a simple letter may have decided the election of an American president. In 1888, the sitting president was Grover Cleveland, a Democrat who had risked the support of big business by backing a lower tariff and earned a reputation for doing what he thought was right despite the political consequences. Challenging Cleveland was Republican Benjamin Harrison, grandson of ninth president William Henry Harrison.