Monthly Archives: February 2006

by | 5 February 2006 · 5:22 pm

David Hackett Fisher Interviewed

Historian David Hackett Fisher is interviewed at The American Enterprise Online. Here are a few bits that struck my fancy.

TAE: Your religious background is Protestant and you end up teaching at Brandeis.

FISCHER: My parents were both Lutheran and I was confirmed in a Lutheran church. Then I married a Methodist and we encouraged our children in the Protestant spirit to find their own way. One became an Episcopalian and the other became a Unitarian and is now a Buddhist. I live in a town that’s predominantly Roman Catholic and I teach very comfortably in my 85th semester at Brandeis, which calls itself non-sectarian Jewish.

TAE: Did you have any expectations about Jewishness that were either confirmed or shattered upon coming to Brandeis?

FISCHER: I found a kind of excitement that I didn’t find anywhere else. There were other schools that I had offers from at the same time. One was an old New England school and the people who interviewed me there were interested in who my grandparents were and where I got my sportcoats. I had another offer from a Big Ten school. They wanted to know if I could teach the General Survey course. I said, “How big is the class?” They said it’s usually about 500 students. And then I went to a very good Southern school and they said, “We normally have gatherings to talk about subjects of current concern. Do you want to come over and join us?” I said I would be delighted. What’s the subject? “Capital punishment.” So I went over, rehearsing my arguments against capital punishment—and the discussion was about methods of execution….

TAE: Judging from the books my daughter brings home from elementary school, kids today are learning that the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were fought primarily by runaway slaves and girls who dressed as boys in order to carry a gun. Is this didacticism more of a problem now in elementary grades and high school than in the university?

FISCHER: There are lags. Whatever was in fashion in the universities remains in fashion in other places a little bit longer. But what’s really interesting is to see how military history is rapidly expanding. I was down at the annual conference of the Society for Military History in Charleston last year, and their morale has never been higher. They have a sense that history is with them. And the morale amongst the social and cultural historians has never been lower: they think that history is against them. About ten or 15 years ago it was quite the other way. And I think that’s a straw in the wind. I’m very bullish about the way things are going. Each lunacy we go through holds open the possibility of a revisionist movement that is rational, mature, and thoughtful, and that’s what we need. These are exciting times for a historian….

TAE: The word “liberty,” a rhetorical cornerstone of the Democratic Party throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pretty much disappeared during the New Deal, and has seldom been on Democrat lips since. Is this a mistake?

FISCHER: Absolutely. The worst mistake that Kerry and Gore made was that the value of liberty was rarely mentioned. This was another instance of a party losing touch with the core values of society. The results when parties do that are always the same: they lose elections. I’m a card-carrying Independent. I really hope that the Democrats can reconstruct these great American values in a way that will give them new meaning and give them something other to do than complain about the Republicans.

TAE: Have you ever voted for a Republican for President?

FISCHER: I’ve never voted for a Republican for President in a general election, but I voted in the Republican primary for John McCain, who is my ideal of a strong centrist leader.

I’m not quite so keen on McCain, but I did vote for John Anderson when I couldn’t bring myself to vote for either Carter or Reagan in 1980. I even collected signatures to get him on the ballot in a solidly Democratic state. I’d do it again if there were a strong centrist third-party candidate.

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by | 5 February 2006 · 7:11 am

Is Iran Pushing the Cartoon Offensive?

Laurence Jarvik wonders whether the sudden ratcheting up of the current Cartoon Offensive, which was just a local Danish phenomenon back in September 2005, isn’t perhaps being pushed by Iran in retaliation for pressure from the EU on its nuclear program.

Anyone who has seen the cartoons knows they are “tame” and not on their face offensive. Yet the organized and international nature of the protest would indicate state support as well as religious sensitivity. Given that the original offense took place four months ago, the outbreak of violence at this point raised the question:

What if this is a shot across the bow to the EU and the non-Muslim world that an attack on Iran could lead to the Muslim “street” exploding around the world?

Just a working hypothesis at this point–but all the more reason for the US and UK to take a stronger stand in support of the Danes, if true. For if this was a test, then the US and UK look like they have failed the test. They have been intimidated. And the Europeans, so far have not.

Which means military action, if it does take place, will require a great deal better diplomatic and public relations support than the Iraq war.

If you look where the principal violent outbreaks have occurred so far in the Middle East–in areas where Iranian allies remain most influential: Hamas in Gaza, the Assad regime in Damascus, and now possibly Hezbollah in Lebanon–Iran’s possible handiwork does seem likely.

Jarvik also links to the apparently newly assembled Mohammed Image Archive:

While the debate rages, an important point has been overlooked: despite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are nothing new; it’s just that no other images of Mohammed have ever been so widely publicized.

This page is an archive of numerous depictions of Mohammed, to serve as a reminder that such imagery has been part of Western and Islamic culture since the Middle Ages — and to serve as a resource for those interested in freedom of expression.

Personally, I think ridicule is one of the most potent weapons against religious totalitarianism. And I’m not inclined to feel very sensitive to the feelings of people who, in the name of religion, (a) burn embassies, (b) blow up infidels, and (c) demonstrate with signage that contains variations on the formula “Kill/Exterminate/Massacre/Behead Those Who Insult/Defame/Slander/Ridicule [Insert your religion here].”

And here’s a nice quote posted by Kansan Bart Hall on a long, fairly temperate, and sometimes thought-provoking comment thread on Winds of Change about the Cartoon Offensive.

“Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure. Fundamentalism is, therefore, inevitable in an age which has destroyed so many certainties by which faith once expressed itself and upon which it relied.”

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) [liberal theologian]

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by | 3 February 2006 · 10:08 pm

Macam-Macam on Cambodia’s Photographer of Death

I neglected to link to Macam-Macam‘s recent post on Nhem En, photographer of death. It starts with a wall of 50 mugshots.

It is a modern tragedy that these photographs are amongst the most famous photos ever taken by a South East Asian – meticulous mug shots of Cambodian prisoners accused of counter-revolutionary crimes by the Khmer Rouge and admitted to S-21, an institution dedicated solely to the incarceration, torture, extraction of “confessions” and documentation of enemies of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Almost all prisoners who passed through S-21 were eventually executed, or “smashed”.

The man who took most of these shots is Nhem En, a country boy who joined the Khmer Rouge in 1970, aged only ten. Sent overseas to China to study because of his academic promise, his job as photographer at S-21 started in 1976 when he returned to Cambodia and was sent to Tuol-Sleng, the site of S-21. He was only sixteen at the time.

Read and view the whole thing.

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by | 3 February 2006 · 9:25 pm

Indonesia’s Helsinki Agreement

In August 2005 in Finland, representatives of the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement signed an agreement which sets down the outline of a comprehensive settlement to the Aceh conflict. Until recently, this conflict had appeared close to intractable. Earlier attempts to reach a negotiated settlement between 2000 and 2003 broke down in acrimony and the Indonesian government launched a military offensive, vowing to wipe out the rebels once and for all. Why did the two parties agree to resume talks so soon after the earlier failures? And what are the chances that the peace agreement will hold this time?

Written by a leading expert on the Aceh conflict, this study examines the factors that prompted the belligerents to return to the negotiating table, surveys the course of the negotiations, analyses the deal itself and identifies potential spoilers. It concludes that the Helsinki agreement represents Aceh’s best chance for peace since the separatist insurgency began almost thirty years ago. The deal is more comprehensive than earlier agreements and its monitoring provisions are more robust. There is also more good will on both sides, based partly on greater awareness that previous violent strategies had failed. Even so, there are powerful forces opposed to the deal, and backsliding or equivocation on either side could easily prompt a return to violence if implementation is not managed skillfully.

SOURCE: THE HELSINKI AGREEMENT: A More Promising Basis for Peace in Aceh? by Edward Aspinall. Policy Studies 20. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2005. x, 104 pp. Paper, $10.00.

Meanwhile, Macam-macam reports that Indonesia is not nearly so willing to compromise over 43 West Papuan separatists seeking political asylum in Australia.

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by | 3 February 2006 · 5:49 pm

Yale Press Website Banned in Thailand

Inside Higher Ed reports that the Thai government is banning internal access to Yale University Press‘s website.

Thailand takes lèse-majesté seriously — as Yale University Press is finding out.

The Thai government has blocked access in the country to the Yale University Press Web site because it includes information about a forthcoming, critical biography of Thailand’s king. The King Never Smiles: A Biography of Thailand’s Bhumibol Adulyadej is described in Yale publicity materials as the story of “how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical could in fact be so deeply political, autocratic, and even brutal.” The author is Paul Handley, a journalist who spent much of his life reporting from Asia, including 13 years in Thailand.

The book is due out this summer — in a year in which Thailand will be celebrating the 60th year of the king’s reign. The book acknowledges his popularity with the Thai people, but — according to the press — “portrays an anti-democratic monarch who, together with allies in big business and the murderous, corrupt Thai military, has protected a centuries-old, barely modified feudal dynasty.”

Well, I for one refuse to believe it until I see actual video on CNN of well-armed bodhisattvas brandishing their weapons, of masked mendicant monks carrying C4 in their begging bowls, of Theravadan thugs in Gitmo-orange robes chanting “Death to Elis” “Hasten the Retrograde Reincarnation of Elis as Flies!”

This illustrates in a small way the fatal weakness of area studies in academia: One can never be too critical of the areas one studies. One must always be their advocate and apologist. Well, except perhaps in American studies.

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by | 2 February 2006 · 12:07 pm

A Wreath of Herring Tails and Potatoes

The Prussian government appointed [Julius Maximilian] Schottky as a professor of German language and literature at the gymnasium [in Poznan], believing that he would be able to kindle the interest of the restive student body. But his curriculum fell flat in an institution dominated by Polish sympathies, and his lack of pedagogical skill led to chaos in the classroom. [Marceli] Motty was enrolled at the gymnasium at the time and recalls in his memoirs how his fellow students would chatter among themselves, run from bench to bench, and hide behind the furnace while Schottky tried to teach. On one occasion the professor entered a classroom full of uncharacteristically silent students, only to discover that they had placed upon his lectern a herring ringed with potatoes, along with a note that read: “Out of herring tails and potatoes is Schottky’s laurel wreath composed.” Schottky lasted there just two years….

More typical of Poznan’s German intelligentsia in the early nineteenth century was another professor at the local gymnasium, Michael Stotz. Stotz was first hired in 1814 to teach history, geography, and Latin. He served as director of the institution from the 1820s to 1842. Stotz never earned a reputation as a serious scholar or pedagogue. He published little, and, according to Marceli Motty’s memoir, when he taught, “the greater part of the hour normally would pass in light banter about the news, recent events inside and outside of school, and historical anecdotes.” Despite his shortcomings, Stotz was beloved by his students, Germans and Poles alike. His popularity rested in large part on his appreciation of the region’s cultural diversity and his ability to navigate with ease between the German and Polish spheres. In marked contrast to the nationalist focus of Schottky’s scholarship, Stotz was, in Motty’s words, “utterly indifferent to matters concerning nationality and politics.” Although he spoke German at home and socialized mainly with Germans, Stotz was equally at home among the city’s Polish majority, leading Motty to conclude that Stotz was “a Pole in spirit and instinct.” Like many long-term German residents of the Poznan area, Stotz was a product of the region’s cultural blending. In fact, his students used to joke that he would begin every lecture with the phrase: “We Poles, we Germans….”

SOURCE: Religion and the Rise of Nationalism: A Profile of an East-Central European City, by Robert E. Alvis (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), pp. 73, 74

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by | 1 February 2006 · 6:21 pm

T. G. Ash on the Luck of the Poles

Timothy Garton Ash, who did some of the best reporting (in English) from Poland during the rise of Solidarity and the Götterdämmerung of the Soviet Empire, recently published a catch-up piece in the New York Review of Books.

Peoples can be luckier than people. People are only young once. They seize their chances or miss them; then they grow old and die. Despite the anthropomorphic similes beloved of romantic nationalists—”young Italy,” “young Germany”—peoples “live,” in some important sense, for centuries, even millennia, sustained by real or imagined continuities of political geography and collective experience. They can be “sick” or “old” for hundreds of years, but then become renewed and youthful.

China today is one example, Spain another, and Poland a third. For two hundred years, from the end of the eighteenth century, when the first Polish rzeczpospolita, or republic (actually an elective monarchy), was divided up like a Christmas turkey between the Prussian, Russian, and Austrian empires, to Poland’s achievement of full independence (within very different frontiers) at the end of the twentieth century, the Poles had only two decades of fragile self-rule in a single state— their “second republic,” between 1918 and 1939….

Peoples can be luckier than people. But in a given time, what matters most is the happiness of the individual people who make up a given people. Honesty demands a plain acknowledgment that for millions of Polish men and women, especially among the workers, the poor, the old, and those living in the south and east, the years since 1989 have been painful and disappointing. For them, the reality of freedom has proved very different from the dream.

There is, however, another side to the story. One of the unexpected delights of the Solidarity anniversary reunion was to meet not just old friends and acquaintances, but their children —now, like my own, in their early twenties. Back in 1980, my Polish friends and I lived in different worlds. Not just the political possibilities but the life chances, in the broadest sense, of a young Pole were incomparably more limited than those of a young Brit. In the generation of our children, that is no longer true. Today, the life chances of an enterprising young Pole are altogether comparable with those of a young Brit, and by no means only for those from a privileged background, as I see every day among the Polish students and student-workers in Oxford. Something has been won.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by | 1 February 2006 · 5:33 pm

Harper Lee, Gregarious?

The New York Times on 30 January reports on Tuscaloosa’s equivalent of Groundhog Day.

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., Jan. 27 — Of all the functions at the president’s mansion of the University of Alabama here, none has acquired the mystique surrounding a modest annual luncheon attended by high school students from around the state.

They come with cameras dangling on their wrists and dressed, respectfully, as if they were about to issue an insurance policy or anchor the news. An awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the occasion attracts no actor, politician or music figure. Instead, it draws someone to whom Alabamians collectively attach far more obsession: the author of the book itself, Harper Lee, who lives in the small town of Monroeville, Ala., one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters….

The students write with longing for the kind of unmanaged childhood experienced by Jem and Scout Finch in the rural 1930’s Alabama of Ms. Lee’s rendering. Some tell of the racial tensions they witness in their school cafeterias, others of the regional prejudices they experience at the hands of Northern peers who assume anyone from Alabama must drive a pickup truck or live in a mobile home. In an essay a few years ago one girl likened the trial of the book’s Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of raping a white girl, to the 1999 murder of Billy Jack Gaither, a young man living in Sylacauga, killed because he was gay….

Ms. Lee is quick-witted and gregarious. At the ceremony she greeted a server at the mansion whom she remembered from luncheons past. “I went back to my friends and I told everyone that I’d met you,” the young woman said. “Nobody believed me. I said, ‘Oh, yeah, I did, and she is the nicest, sweetest lady.” Ms. Lee looked at her with amused suspicion and started to laugh.

During lunch she reminisced about her old friend Horton Foote, who wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed 1962 film of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” starring Gregory Peck. Ms. Lee spent three weeks on the set, she said, and took off when she realized everything would be fine without her.

“I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made,” she said. Ms. Lee attended Peck’s memorial service in California three years ago. About her friend Mr. Foote, who is 89, she said, “He’s become quite amazing looking in old age, like God, but clean-shaven.”

When Mr. Carruthers approached and asked why he hadn’t received a letter from her in so long — the two have become good friends — she answered that she would get to him “once I finish off all the letters I have to write.” Since the release of “Capote,” much of her time has been spent writing demurrals to reporters seeking interviews about her life. Someone suggested she come up with a form-letter response to such requests.

What it would say, she joked, “is hell, no.”

via Arts & Letters Daily

To my mind, Catherine Keener’s Harper Lee character in the film Capote was almost a eulogy to the passing of common sense and the common touch among literary types in our age of celebrity mania.

P.S. I didn’t realize Harper Lee was a descendant of Robert E.

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by | 1 February 2006 · 4:51 pm

The Last Telegrams

Donald Sensing of One Hand Clapping recalls some of the roles that telegrams have played in his blogpost about the demise of Western Union’s telegram service. (Wire transfers are now their primary business.)

Cheap long distance telephone service and email did telegrams in. Their passing is the demise of real Americana. For military members telegrams always had a measure of foreboding. In World War II the services notified next of kin of death and serious injuries by sending a telegram. This practice was gradually modified over the years so that by the time of 1991’s Gulf War the Army made death notifications in person but sent telegrams to notify kin of soldiers listed as Very Seriously Injured or Seriously Injured….

It used to be a custom, in the South, anyway, that brides and grooms would send a telegram to their parents the day after their wedding to thank them for the occasion. Sometimes the telegram would be sent from their honeymoon location. Cathy and I sent such a telegram.

I never heard of that custom, but I suppose it makes sense that private telegrams announced only the most important events: weddings and funerals. Be sure to read the first comment to Rev. Sensing’s post, about the lengthy telegraph traffic into the town of Bedford, VA, in the wake of D-Day.

The last telegram I can recall sending was in China in 1988, when we sent a message to some fellow teachers from the porcelain-making town of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province during our Spring Festival trip to Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Jingdezhen during our year in Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province. I wrote out the short message announcing our arrival date and time into the square blocks of the telegram form and handed it to the clerk. She then translated each Chinese character into its 4-digit telegraph code, charged us a small fee per character, and passed the message on to the stack awaiting the transmission clerk, who must have shown up for work that day because our friends were waiting for us when our train pulled into the station at drab, sooty Jingdezhen, where street vendors hawked porcelain factory seconds.

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