Roundup: Talking About History

Stanley I. Kutler: Trashing history ... Bush and Vietnam

[Stanley Kutler is the editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (Scribner's, 1995) and the The Wars of Watergate (Alfred A. Knopf). He is the E. Gordon Fox Emeritus Professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin, and also professor of law.] The good news is that George W. Bush at last has found parallels between his Iraq misadventure and the Vietnam War. The bad news is that he is again writing his own revisionist history. The president is on dangerous ground

Brian Concannon Jr.: Whitewashing the History of Abolition

[Brian Concannon Jr. is a human rights lawyer and directs the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, www.ijdh.org] This week the world officially commemorated one of the pivotal events of modern history with deafening silence. On August 23, 1791, a group of slaves in Haiti led by a man named Boukman ignited a revolt that changed the world. They attacked their French masters, and kept fighting until Haiti wrested independence from Napoleon in 1804. Haiti's rebellion metas

Philip Jenkins: PBS and historical objectivity

Ever since Americans discovered that Islam still mattered, writers and film-makers have worked to meet the demand for knowledge about the history of that faith. Unfortunately, many of these accounts have been tendentious, and at their most extreme, they present a wildly romanticized Islamic Golden Age as a rhetorical counterpoint to an ignorant and bigoted Medieval West. This Occidentalizing trend reached its height in the starry-eyed 2002 PBS documentary Empires of Faith, which is still widely

James Bowman: It's a question of honor (Bush, Vietnam analogy)

[James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New Criterion, and The American Spectator's movie critic. He is the author of the recent book, Honor: A History (Encounter Books).] Nothing that's happened in this summer's Silly Season so far has amused me half so much as President Bush's suddenly upsetting the media's whole rhetorical apple-cart by comparing Iraq to Vietnam. The media take that has now prevailed since the American-ba

Wolde Tinsae Prescod: Barbados ... Why is African history not taught here?

PERHAPS at the upcoming African Global Conference to be held here, one of the presenters will tell us why, with a Commission for Pan-African Affairs, a 90 per cent black population and a large Christian majority, black Barbadians know so little about the glorious role their foreparents played in early Christianity. Or, about two of the oldest churches on the African continent and indeed the world – the Egyptian Orthodox Church established by St Mark the gospel writer in AD 58 and th

Joseph A. Palermo: History Through a Bush

[Mr. Palermo is Assistant Professor, History, CSUS.] I wasn't going to write about George W. Bush's recent disfigurement of the history of the Vietnam War because I didn't believe it was worthy of a response. But when I read David Kirkpatrick's piece in The New York Times saying that Bush's remarks "sent historians scurrying toward their keyboards," I felt I better join my esteemed colleagues and "scurry" (like a rat?) to my computer. On August 22,

Richard Pells: Leaving art out of history is a mistake

[Richard Pells is a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include "Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture Since World War II." A longer version of this article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education.] How did George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" reflect both the Jewish and African American experience in America? Why was Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" so influential for

Robert Buzzanco: Bush is wrong on history

[Buzzanco is professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Houston. He is also author of "Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era and Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life." Readers may e-mail him at buzz@uh.edu.] In his continuing attempts to justify escalation of the war in Iraq, President Bush has resorted to historical analogy, warning that a hasty retreat from the Middle East

Andrew Bacevich: Vietnam's real lessons

[Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is a Vietnam War veteran.] FINDING IN THE DEBACLE of the Vietnam War a rationale for sustaining the U.S. military presence in Iraq requires considerable imagination. If nothing else, President Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars earlier this week revealed a hitherto unsuspected capacity for creativity. Yet as an exercise in historical analysis, his remarks proved to be self-ser

Arch Puddington: Albert Shanker stood for good old-fashioned liberal ideals

[Mr. Puddington is director of research at Freedom House and author of "Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor."] It is odd and perhaps unfortunate that Albert Shanker (1928-97) may be remembered principally as the man who in 1968, as head of the New York City teachers union, shut down the city's schools with a series of strikes. It was all in a good cause, to be sure, but the controversy of that episode, over the years, has stolen drama from much else of note in Shanke

Hillel Halkin: Moral of the Armenian Genocide

The latest flap, involving the Anti-Defamation League and its director Abraham Foxman, over Jewish recognition of Turkey's genocidal killing of Armenians during World War I is more pathetic than anything else. It is sad and shameful that, under pressure from Israeli governments fearful of antagonizing the Turks, Jewish organizations in both Israel and the Diaspora have been so reluctant to acknowledge a historical truth that is well-documented and beyond serious challenge. Whether t

Evan R. Goldstein: The ADL's hypocrisy (Re: Armenian Genocide)

[In this article Mr. Goldstein, a writer, chastises Abraham Foxman, leader of the Anti-Defamation League, for his comments about the Armenian massacre.] ... This historical episode has become a political flashpoint in Washington, D.C., where all kinds of influence peddlers have been engaged in a fierce struggle over whether Congress should officially codify the Armenian massacre as genocide. The Turkish government has spent millions of dollars and twisted countless arms in an effo

David Forsmark: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan

Every August, assorted pacifists, lefties and other spotlight-lovers who want to make a show of how "peace loving" they are turn their attention toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki, genuflecting before nuclear weapons like the simian cult in "Beneath the Planet of the Apes." There are, of course, no memorials for the millions of Chinese slaughtered by the Japanese (the incredible orgy of up-close-and-personal brutality known as the Rape of Nanking killed more people th

John Pilger: The Friends of Pol Pot

[John Pilger has twice won Britain's highest award for journalism. His documentary films have won awards in the United States and Britain.] It is my duty," wrote the correspondent for The Times of London at the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Belsen, "to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That was how I felt in the summer of 1979 when I arrived in Cambodia. In the silent humidity, houses, office blocks, hotels and schools stood empty, as if va

Matthew Rothschild: Bush Rewrites History of Vietnam War

You can tell Bush is really getting desperate because now he himself is bringing up the Vietnam War. But instead of recognizing it for what it was—a reckless imperial overreach, just like his own Iraq War—Bush twists the history of the Vietnam War to try to buttress the one he’s got us in now. Check this out: He says we should have stayed in Vietnam longer. “The price of America’s withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens,” he told the Veterans o

Jim Hoagland: Bush's Vietnam Blunder

Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq. Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging ki

Michael Hirsh: Why America's Pullout From Vietnam Worked

[Michael Hirsh covers international affairs for Newsweek out of Washington.] The Soviet Union was in its final days of existence when I visited Vietnam in late December of 1991. The cold war was about to end forever with the collapse of one of the two adversaries that had kept it going for 40-odd years. A lot had changed in Vietnam, too, I discovered during my trip. The coziness between Moscow and Hanoi, once comrades within the Soviet bloc, had curdled into mutual hatred. Throughou

Max Boot: President Bush's analogy to Iraq is not inaccurate, just incomplete

[Mr. Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "War Made New: Weapons, Warriors and the Making of the Modern World" (Gotham Books).] Ever since the mid-1970s, critics of American military involvement have warned that any decision to deploy armed forces abroad--in Lebanon and El Salvador in the 1980s, in Kuwait, Somalia, and Kosovo in the 1990s, and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan--would result in "another Vietnam." Conversely

Ronald Radosh: Another example of bias at NYU

Last month at TNR.com, I wrote about the new Center for the U.S. and the Cold War established by the Tamiment Institute and NYU's faculty of Arts and Sciences (my article can be found here). I argued that the programs they are running are all one-sided--essentially favorable to the far pro-Communist Old Left--and that they are failing to provide what any good university

Oliver Kamm: Hiroshima and ethics

This is the third post dealing with objections to my Guardian column a fortnight ago on Hiroshima Day. I had intended it to be the last in the series, but there will in fact be one more after this.In my article, I argued that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible but not a crime. The previous