Wed - April 18, 2007

Remember Maiwand


Eric Margolis reflects on some lessons from history in Afghanistan. Here is the guts of the article:
"The death last Sunday of six Canadian soldiers in southern Afghanistan reminds us of Santayana’s famous maxim that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.
The soldiers were killed near Maiwand, a name meaning nothing to most Westerners. But there, on July 27, 1880, during the bloody Second Anglo-Afghan War, the British Empire suffered one of the worst defeats in its colonial history.
Two years earlier the Raj (Britain’s Indian Empire) had invaded Afghanistan for a second time. The British put Afghan puppet rulers into power in Kabul and Kandahar.
Ayub Khan, son of Afghanistan’s former emir, rallied 12,000 Pashtun (or Pathan) tribal warriors to fight an advancing British force whose mission was, in London’s words, to “liberate” Afghan tribes and bring them “the light of Christian civilization.” Today, the slogan is “promoting democracy.” The fierce Afghan tribal warriors routed the imperial force, composed of British regulars, including the vaunted Grenadier Guards, and Indian Sepoy troops, after a ferocious battle. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used a British army doctor who fought at Maiwand as his model for Sherlock Holmes’ companion, Dr. Watson.
I recall this epic Afghan victory against British colonialism because understanding today’s war in Afghanistan requires proper historical context. A century and a quarter after Maiwand, Pashtun warriors of southern Afghanistan continue to resist another mighty world power and its allies, who have been faithfully following the imperial strategy of the old British Raj.
What we are really seeing is a war by Western powers seeking to dominate the strategic oil corridor of Afghanistan, directed against the Pashtun people who comprise half that nation’s population. Another 15 million live just across the border in Pakistan. What we call the “Taliban” is actually a loose alliance of Pashtun tribes and clans, joined by nationalist forces and former mujahedin from the 1980s anti-Soviet struggle.
The U.S. and NATO are not fighting “terrorists” in Afghanistan and they are certainly not winning hearts and minds. They are fighting the world’s largest tribal people. The longer the Westerners stay and bomb villages, the more resistance will grow. Such is the inevitable pattern of every guerrilla war I have ever covered.
If 160,000 Soviet troops and 240,000 Afghan Communist soldiers could not defeat the Pashtuns in ten years, how can 50,000 U.S. and NATO troops do better?"

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Zinn and Chomsky on Empire and War


Hoawrd Zinn and Noam Chomsky are interviewed on Democracy Now about parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. Chomsky has an interestingly optimistic take on the state of the anti-war movement. He argues that it much more advanced today than it was at a comparable stage during the Vietnam War.

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Gore Vidal on the end of the American Empire


Once again Gore Vidal uses his acerbic tongue to lash the New York Times and "our weird little emperor".

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US Strategic Bombing in WW2


I am reading Robert Jay Lifton's book on Hiroshima in America (1996) which examines how the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan was made and then what impact this decision has had on American society since then. In the course of reading this book I was reflecting on the success or failure of the US "strategic bombing" (i.e. targeting entire cities with all their inhabitants) of European cities and Tokyo, so I went looking on the web for the original documents of the post-war assessment of the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign. Here is what I found: Here is the Summary Report for the European War ; the Summary for the Pacific War ; official documents dealing with the dropping of the nuclear weapons on Japan ; a summary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings; more documents at the Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

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Tue - April 10, 2007

End of a 100 year old war tax


This article cheered me up a lot yesterday as I was preparing my tax returns. Amy Goodman reminds us to claim a rebate on a tax on telephone charges which was first imposed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 when telephone usage was the exclusive privilege of the very wealthy. I claimed my $60 with thanks but the historian in me made me reflect on why it has taken so long to get rid of this particular tax and how long it will take to get rid of all the other, "temporary" war taxes which have been imposed on us since then. I also thought about how 1898 was a turning point in the history of American imperialism. Up until that time, American imperial expansion was internal and continental seizing or "buying" territory from France, Spain, Russia (much like the expansion of the other great continental empire in the 19thC, Russia). After that time the US turned its attention to expanding beyond the North American continent - the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii - and now, according to Chalmers Johnson with over 300 military bases in over 130 countries. In another 100 years time that should produce a very pretty tax refund...

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Sun - February 26, 2006

David irving revisited and free speech defended


Robert Scheer, who was sacked by the LA Times for his outspoken opposition to the Iraq war, defends the right of Irving to express his nonsense about the Holocaust. Scheer quotes a 16th century German peasant's song which was revived during the Nazi period for obvious reasons ("Thoughts or ideas or free"):
I think as I please
And this gives me pleasure.
My conscience decrees,
This right I must treasure.
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator,
No man can deny --
Die gedanken sind frei.
He concludes his article in the San Francisco Chronicle (which employed him after his shameful sacking by the lA Times) as follows:
Speech that is not felt by some powerful group to be loathsome is hardly in need of protection. The value of an absolutist opposition to the censorship of speech, as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment, is that it holds out the prospect that the right to speak will be honored even when the content of those utterances is not. What is disturbing in both the Irving and Muhammad cartoon situations is the stuttering hesitancy of many who claim to be committed to free speech to speak out in opposition to those -- be they Muslim clerics or Austrian judges -- who seek to limit the free expression of individuals expressing views they detest.
In both instances, the world has been presented with a teaching moment, in which the argument for free thought -- that die gedanken sind frei ("thoughts are free") that the Nazis and every other absolutist dictatorship have excelled in crushing -- was not advanced by those who know better. As a result, a world sorely in need of a crash course in the efficacy of free debate received nothing of the sort. Instead, the lesson has been that the suppression of ideas is valid, as long as the suppressors are convinced that they are in the right.

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Mon - February 20, 2006

The end of MASH


The inspiration for the film and long-running TV series M*A*S*H was a system of mobile army hospitals in the US military which, on the one hand, undoubtedly saved thousands of lives of soldiers who would have surely died in previous conflicts without such prompt medical help, but on the other hand created a moral dilemma for doctors who are sworn under their Hippocratic oath to cause no harm, to make it possible for the modern military to fight such wars. This dilemma was confronted now and again by Hawkeye in the TV show but never satisfactorily resolved. It was always drunk into oblivion. The real life equivalent of the MASH are being disbanded by the US military in favour of smaller, more mobile field units which can save the lives, if not the bodies, of even more of the unfortunate casualties of war. The courage of the makers of MASH was that they brought some of the carnage of war to prime time TV while a war was in progress, or rather winding down to its shameful conclusion. Admittedly, it was one war removed, not Vietnam because that was too immediate, but Korea. The equivalent today would be a show which depicted the horrible carnage of say, the Vietnam War, while the current war in Iraq is in progress. It would never happen given the spinelessness of the American media. Farewell and goodbye...


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90 anniversary of the Battle of Verdun


This month is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Verdun in northeastern France during WW1. 32 million shells were dropped in an area 50 miles square killing over 300,000 French and German soldiers over 4 months. Numerous myths about Verdun have emerged over the years, mainly patriotic French myths and German excuses, as the article describes. As horrible as the slaughter of Verdun was, it did not equal the combined slaughter of the previous year, 1915, when 1.5 million soldiers were killed, or the major battle which followed it in 1916, the Battle of the Somme. It also did not equal the even more industrialised killing of WW2 when 135,000 were killed in one night's fire bombing of Dresden. Nevertheless, I'll dip my head and wear a poppy to work in memory of those who died in WW1 and the classical liberal order which also died in 1914.

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Holocaust denier David Irving jailed for 3 years in Austria


Austria is showing the world the limits of free speech in the West with the conviction of David Irving for violating an Austrian law which bans any denial of the Holocaust. See reports in the Guardian , the Independent , the Times . Irving was arrested on charges dating back to 1989 when he gave speeches outside a pub to right wing groups. Although he built a reputation on his strong denial that Hitler knew about the Holocaust, or that Germany had any policy to liquidate the Jews of Europe, he now conveniently claims that he has changed his mind since giving those speeches 17 years ago. Apparently he has read some new sources that were not available to him then but were available to other historians at the time. In 2000 he spectacularly failed in a libel suit in London against an American historian Deborah Lipstadt who accused him in a book published by Penguin (one I used in course on the Holocaust I used to teach in Australia) of being a Holocaust denier. Irving lost the case and was forced into bankruptcy in order to pay the legal fees against him. Irving was an independent scholar who in his earliest books, most notably on the allied bombing of Dresden, used sources other historians had not bothered to look at and so wrote a pretty good book. His other works were very patchy, using some hitherto unexamined sources but largely ignoring the work of other historians. This eventually led him down the garden path towards Holocaust denial. Some of his supporters in Adelaide tried to force their way into the lecture theatres when I was teaching a course on the Holocaust to insist on giving them equal time. They would quote the work of Irving to justify their actions. The Times quotes Anthony Beevor, the military historian, who said: “However nauseating, these people should be confronted in debate rather than chucked into jail and turned into martyrs.”

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Sun - April 17, 2005

The US and the Atomic Memory Hole


In the dystopian novel 1984 George Orwell came up with the idea of the "memory hole" where an authoritarian state would control the present by controlling what people remembered about the past. Winston Smith's job was to rewrite the past in the light of the current needs of the regime. Historical figures or events which challenged the current regime's purposes were literally removed from history and consigned to a "memory hole" from which they never returned. Something similar is happening with the history of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WW2.

Greg Mitchell in Editor and Publisher notes the latest chapter in this saga of denial and rewriting of history. The Las Vegas Atomic Testing Museum continues the practice established by the Smithsonian's Enola Gay exhibit by focussing almost exclusively on the technical and scientific aspects of the bomb testing or the bomber (with just a nod to patriotism and manifest destiny) and removing all reference to the historical context and the impact on civilian society (whether Japanese or Nevadan). [More]

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The Empire of Bases


Chalmers Johnson coined the expression "empire of bases" to describe the sprawling network of US bases in over 100 countries which spans the entire entire world and which sprang up during the Cold War (aka Christian America's crusade against communism). Michael Klare adds to Chalmers thesis by showing how the most recent bases created since 9/11 are designed to begin the shift away from a Cold War view of American Empire to one focussed on controlling the oil rich Moslem world from Central Asia through the Middle East to Africa.

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Sun - March 27, 2005

Is Emperor George more like Napoleon or Cromwell?


Historians like to make comparisons and I thought an interesting one to make would be to compare George Bush (or Kaiser Busch as I prefer to call him) to some other historical figure. Gary Leupp , a Japanese historian who writes for Counterpunch.com, has compared Bush to Cromwell, an English general who secured the English Revolution and brutally conquered Ireland in the 1640s, and the Japanese general Hideyoshi who unified Japan in the 1590s. Both were successful generals who went on to have political careers, both justified their actions as being part of God's will to bring English/Japanese civilization to the barbarians (Irish/Koreans), both committed horrendous atrocities in doing so as the people being subdued were regarded as less than human in some respects, and both engendered long-term hatred of the invaders for centuries by the Irish/Koreans. He also notes the glaring gap in the comparison: that Kaiser Busch has not had a military career of any success or glory. His time in the Texas Air National Guard borders on desertion or a cushy sinecure for the sons of the rich and powerful. [More]

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The Pentagon Papers 35 Years On


Anthony Lewis has a review in the April 7 edition of the New York Review of Books of a book edited by John Prados and Margaret Pratt Porter called Inside the Pentagon Papers (University of Kansas Press). It brings together a number of essays about how and why the Pentagon Papers (PP) were published by the New York Times in 1971 from the perspective on those within the Pentagon who authorized this internal history of the US involvement in Vietnam up to 1968, the man on the inside Daniel Ellsberg who released the history to the NYT, those in the government who desperately wanted to prevent the publication of the PP, the owners and editors of the NYT who published the PP in defiance of the government, and the courts who were asked to rule on the legality of publication. [More]

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