Category Archive

I don’t want to cause Ron Paul any extra grief, but I would note that Ron Paul stated his opposition to Lincoln and the War on national television just a few weeks ago and gave a reasonable answer when he was asked about this.  Among other things, he said:

How much would that cost compared to killing 600,000 Americans and where it lingered for 100 years?  I mean, the hatred and all that existed.  So every other major country in the world got rid of slavery without a civil war. 

Those who would like to defend the Unionist cause should ask themselves: “Is there any other conflict where I would view the invading, aggressive party driven by ideology and, among a few, religious fanaticism as the obviously right side?”  The story of the War is that it was tragic, in that it was between two flawed peoples (as all peoples are more or less flawed) who warred against one another to the ultimate detriment of both.  Moreover, unlike in classical tragedies where the hero is destined to suffer, that conflict was avoidable. 

Nowadays, it is possible for some modern historians to see the massacres in the Vendee as a French-on-French ideological “genocide” of sorts, but it seems that we are still a surprisingly long way from coming to terms with our destructive revolutionary experience in the mid-19th century. 

By destroying the states’ right to secession, Abraham Lincoln opened the door to the kind of unconstrained, despotic, arrogant government we have today, something the framers of the Constitution could not have possibly imagined. States should again challenge Washington’s unconstitutional acts through nullification. ~Walter Williams, c. 1998

Via J.H. Huebert

Roger Cohen makes a correction to a previous column of his that I criticised:

I wrote last week of the Tudor-Stuart alternation; I meant succession.

For a Byzantine angle on Huckabee’s remark about Mormon beliefs (”Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?”), I would note that the belief in the fraternity of Jesus and the devil has some loose similarities with the beliefs ascribed to the Bogomils, who allegedly taught something similar about Satan and Michael.  Aside from these associations, there is a more fundamental problem that this belief contradicts the understanding of Christ as the only-begotten (monogenes) Son, co-unoriginate with the Father.     

Update: In the “Huckabee is not running a sectarian campaign” file, you can add his apology to Romney for these entirely innocent remarks.

Appearing on National Public Radio’s light-hearted quiz show “Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me,” which aired over the weekend, Perino got into the spirit of things and told a story about herself that she had previously shared only in private: During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis — and she didn’t know what it was.

“I was panicked a bit because I really don’t know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. “It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I’m pretty sure.”

So she consulted her best source. “I came home and I asked my husband,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Wasn’t that like the Bay of Pigs thing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, Dana.’ ” ~The Washington Post

Via Isaac Chotiner

Not exactly the best messenger for delivering warnings about Iran’s nuclear program and the dangers of WWIII breaking out, is she?  It’s enough to make you miss Tony Snow.

Audio here.

P.S.  She said later, “I feel like I’m in school everyday.”  I’m sure that’s true. 

The United States needs a new beginning. It cannot lie in the Tudor-Stuart-like alternation of the Bush-Clinton dynasties, nor in the macho militarism of Republicans who see war without end. It has to involve a fresh face that will reconcile the country with itself and the world, get over divisions — internal and external — and speak with honesty about American glory and shame. ~Roger Cohen

All right, Roger Cohen likes Obama, but what is this business about the “Tudor-Stuart alternation” of dynasties?  Isn’t Roger Cohen from Britain?  Wouldn’t he know that the Tudors and Stuarts did not alternate?  Apparently not.  One followed the other, and the latter came to power over both Scotland and England because there was no heir for the former (i.e., the Tudors–apologies for any confusion).  The Bushes and Clintons are nothing like the Tudors and Stuarts in this or in any other way.  Whatever else you might say about Cohen’s column, its historical parallels could use some work. 

Turkey’s strategic interests are much more dependent on good relations with the United States than vice versa. If we tolerate Turkey’s blackmail, we actually weaken our position in the strategic relationship and embolden others in the region to blackmail us. ~Roxanne Makasdjian

This is pretty much my view of the matter as well.

How are the mighty fallen! President George Bush, the crusader king who would draw the sword against the forces of Darkness and Evil, he who said there was only “them or us”, who would carry on, he claimed, an eternal conflict against “world terror” on our behalf; he turns out, well, to be a wimp. A clutch of Turkish generals and a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign on behalf of Turkish Holocaust deniers have transformed the lion into a lamb. No, not even a lamb – for this animal is, by its nature, a symbol of innocence – but into a household mouse, a little diminutive creature which, seen from afar, can even be confused with a rat. ~Robert Fisk

It is still a little strange to find myself agreeing with Robert Fisk as often as I have in recent years, but on the subject of the Armenian genocide he has been absolutely right.  Fisk makes many of the points that I did in my column on the genocide last month (10/22 issue).  We have all heard the arguments claiming that “no one denies” that what happened to the Armenians was genocide (I have heard another one of these today), when there is a small industry dedicated to just this kind of denial and our government evidently cowers in fear of them.  Some people, who have gotten their history from some of the denialist historians, come to the debate misinformed and so react very strongly against charges of denialism, since they think (erroneously) there is some legitimate doubt about what happened.  There really isn’t.  Some who are better-informed, but apparently still unaware of the denialists, think it is redundant to say yet again what they believe everyone already acknowledges.  Yet the absurdity of the situation is clear: if “no one” denied the genocide, there would be no controversy over acknowledging it as genocide, since no one would have any stake in preventing recognition.  Clearly, some interested parties are very intent on preventing that recognition, or else there should scarcely have been much attention paid to a House non-binding resolution. 

Speaking of the Turkish threats against our supply lines, Fisk correctly notes: “In the real world, this is called blackmail…”  Exactly so.  And the administration yielded to it without hesitation.    

The main goal is to entirely eradicate European mechanisms of power transfer in Russia and to consolidate the Byzantine model of succession. ~ Sergei Kovalev

Really?  The “Byzantine model”?  Putin wants to create a system in which the previous ruler is either blinded or exiled to a monastery following debilitating civil war?  That was, as often as not, the “Byzantine model” for succession, since there wasn’t actually a “Byzantine model” for succession to the throne.  (Only in the last three centuries was there regularly a reasonably stable hereditary dynasty, which still didn’t necessarily stop the civil wars and assassinations, but simply limited it to members of the same family.)  It was in this respect much like the old Roman system, where contingents of the army rose up around a general or rival claimant and then knocked off the emperor to put their leader in his place.  In fact, I am positive that Putin does not want to institute such a system, since it means that his prime minister will be forced to have him blinded and tonsured in a little over a year.  The system Kovalev is actually describing is actually very unlike the way transfers of power were handled in Byzantium: the transfer promises to be peaceful and ratified by a formal popular vote.  There will be, I expect, no palace coups, no poisonings and no tongue-slitting.

Yes, I know Kovalev is just using Byzantine in the pejorative, ill-informed way that modern people often do–they use it to describe whatever it is they don’t like about another country or, in the case of some modern Russians, whatever they don’t like about their own.  Do you see how Kovalev uses it?  It is the opposite of European, the antithesis of the way things are supposed to be.  Along with the “Mongol yoke” thesis, the Byzantine role in creating modern Russian political culture is another preferred cop-out for explaining why Russian politics has been the way it has.  To refer to what is happening in modern Russia as a revival of Byzantine political practices would be like describing the schemes of Hu Jintao with references to the Tang dynasty.  We would all, I think, see the transparent silliness of that.

P.S. The article reached this silly claim about Byzantine models by trying to tell us about the deep and ancient servility bred into the Russian people (a trait, we are supposed to believe, that none of their Slavic and Baltic neighbours shares), which is the classic Westerniser’s complaint about why Russians don’t like people like him.  The truth is that mass democracy will favour candidates who can provide, or be perceived as providing, security and some measure of stability, because these are the political goods that most people expect from government above all else. 

My column sums up my views on the current debate, but I did have one more thing to say on the subject of the Armenian genocide.  This was brought to mind as I reviewing part of Bruce Clark’s Twice A Stranger this morning before lecturing on the Megali Idea.  Clark has written a fine book on the population exchanges following Lausanne.  In it he has a few sentences about the genocide on page 9:

In one of the most ghastly chapters of modern history, the entire Armenian population in most parts of Anatolia was deported southwards and at least 600,000 died as a result.  To this day, bitter arguments rage between the Turkish government, its defenders and critics over the cause of these deaths.  Were they the result of a deliberate policy of mass killing, or, so to speak, negligence?  A few courageous Turkish historians have argued for the absurdity of the latter position. [bold mine-DL]

And, of course, that is an absurd position, but it is one that you will see Ankara’s apologists use.

There has been a good deal of discussion of my rather angry rebuke to this City Journal piece, which made me wonder whether I had misread what the author was saying.  So I went back to the original piece to find that it said things like this:

In 1861, the faith that all men have a right to life, liberty, and the fruits of their industry was invoked as readily on the Rhine and the Neva as on the Potomac and the Thames.

Really?  As readily on the Neva as on the Potomac?  That must be why the history of Russian liberalism is so long and robust.  Oh, that’s right, this is absurd.  But it is the heart of Beran’s entire thesis: in 1861, America, Germany and Russia were all heading in a liberalising direction, but then something supposedly happened that contradicted or interrupted this. 

Beran wrote:

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. In Russia, in Germany, and in America, grandees with their backs against the wall met the challenge of liberty with a new philosophy of coercion.

The “philosophy of coercion” was based, he says, in paternalism and “militant nationalism,” which, of course, Abraham Lincoln, German liberals and Russian Tsars did not espouse.  No, wait, that’s also untrue.  All of them espoused both to one degree or another.  (Militant nationalism was not the monopoly of 19th century liberals, but they promoted it very actively.)  If the liberals and reformers Beran champions likewise espoused paternalist and militant nationalist doctrines, what does that do to his entire bizarre reading of history?  I think it demolishes it entirely. 

First of all, many of his claims are simply wrong or so one-sided that they cannot be taken seriously.  Privilege did not “rise up” in Russia.  As for paternalism, German and Austrian liberals were very keen on rationalising and organising society according to their principles.  Once in power, they represented a small political elite that sought to institute universal reforms and were hostile to the particular and local institutions of different regions of their states.  Their paternalism was often anticlerical in nature, which hardly makes it less coercive or elitist.  These liberals were strongly nationalistic and became more so as they came to identify the German national cause with their own political doctrine, while they associated other nations (especially Slavic nations) with forces of reaction.  Hence their alliance with Bismarck.  If there were Southerners who wanted to expand into the Caribbean, it wasn’t out of a belief in the equality of nations or a lack of nationalism that kept Northerners from supporting those goals.  Indeed, once the “threat” of expanding slavery had been eliminated, it would be Northerners, particularly Northeasterners, who would become very keen on expanding political and economic power in the Caribbean and Latin America and beyond.  Our colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean were not “slave colonies,” but they were still subjugated against the will of the inhabitants and our rule over them justified in terms of racial and cultural supremacy. 

The likelihood of slavery taking hold in the free states was extremely remote, and the spectre of this takeover was a kind of “it’s them or us” propaganda.  While acknowledging that the claims appear vastly exaggerated in retrospect, Beran takes Lincoln’s rhetoric about “returning despotism” at face value, yet the same language of opposing tyranny and despotism being employed against Lincoln by Southerners naturally receives no attention.  It spoils the myth of noble champions of freedom fighting sinister forces of paternalism.  As Beran tells it, you might be forgiven for thinking that the South was filled with Metternich clones instead of Jeffersonians who  spoke of “the consent of the governed” and invoked the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions.  The point is not to swap the roles in the myth around, but to challenge the sort of awful thinking that tries to reduce historical complexity into a simple morality play or ideological object lesson. 

Beran writes:

The coercive party in America, unbroken in spirit, might have realized its dream of a Caribbean slave empire. Cuba and the Philippines, after their conquest by the United States, might have become permanent slave colonies. Such a nation would have had little reason to resist Bismarck’s Second Reich, Hitler’s third one, or Russia’s Bolshevik empire.

That is the real point of this awful article.  The South had to be beaten so that we could fight the Nazis and become an anticommunist superpower.  In reality, the United States had no reason to “resist” Bismarck’s Second Reich, since we properly had no quarrel with Germany great enough to justify our entry into WWI, and regardless of how the war propaganda portrayed it we did not become involved primarily for ideological reasons.  The actual reason for fighting Hitler’s Germany was a desire to intervene on behalf of Britain and the German declaration of war against America–it was not really that liberalism compelled us to intervene.  His entire interpretation relies on the assumption that it was only the triumph of a liberal philosophy over a ”coercive” one that made it possible to “resist” the Germans and Soviets, as if fighting against other major powers required liberal ideology.

Furthermore, Beran believes that it would not have been enough to allow the South to go its own way, since they would have sided with the “bad guys”:

The historical probabilities would have been no less grim had Lincoln, after initiating his revolution, failed to preserve the U.S. as a unitary free state. The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.

As I have already said, this is not simply silly but it is also a terrible counterfactual.  The South had strong economic ties with Britain and France, and was broadly sympathetic to Jeffersonian political philosophy.  They had no strong cultural or ideological affinities with Wilhelmine Germany.  Besides being uninterested in intervening in European conflicts, as most Americans were through WWI and the interwar period, independent Southerners would have had little reason to ally with Wilhelmine Germany.  Beran shows here that he fundamentally doesn’t understand the pre-WWI American mind, and doesn’t understand American foreign policy before WWI.  Neither does he understand that alliances were not made in this period (or, for that matter, in most periods) on the basis of ideological similarity or solidarity (the Franco-Russian alliance of 1894 ought to be proof enough), but are based in the strategic interests of the states involved. 

Incidentally, in my view, it would have been an equally grave error for an independent Southern republic to become entangled in European conflicts just as it was an error for the U.S. to become so entangled, but there would have been nothing uniquely undesirable or sinister in allying with the Germans rather than with the Entente.  If there had been such an alliance, it would not have been on the basis of ideological affinity in any case, but on the basis of shared interests.   

Three cheers for decent historians:

A Vatican-backed historian has attacked the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age as a “distorted anti-papal travesty” that risks dividing the West just when it should be rediscovering its “common Christian roots” in the face of Islam.

Stuart Reid at The Spectator’s Coffee House blog is making sense:

Any depiction of those years that depicts Elizabeth as the good guy and Philip as the bad guy is comic-book history.

He is also even more hard-core than I am:

What a pity the Armada failed.

Reid and Cardini and I are not alone in our objections to the film:

The Catholic News Service, which is run by the United States Bishops Conference, said: “With the single exception of Mary, Queen of Scots, all the Catholics in the film are twisted, embittered intriguers.”

And even then their depiction of Mary Stuart isn’t exactly flattering.

Thanks to my Scene colleague Nick Desai, I have come across the most remarkable and simultaneously unspeakable article.  There are bad articles, Christopher Hitchens articles, Gerson articles and then there’s this, which is in a class all by itself.  It has practically every lazy assumption and misguided polemical trope that you’ve ever encountered.  There is, naturally, Lincoln-worship involved, and a hefty dose of Teutonophobia, which are the usual prerequisites for truly execrable historical analysis.  I am almost overwhelmed by its breathtaking awfulness, but I will try to make a few points.  Let’s start at the beginning:

In 1861, free institutions seemed poised to carry all before them. In Russia, Tsar Alexander II emancipated 22 million serfs. In Germany, lawmakers dedicated to free constitutional principles prepared to assert civilian control over Prussia’s feudal military caste. In America, Abraham Lincoln entered the White House pledged to a revolutionary policy of excluding human bondage from the nation’s territories.

Spot the nonsense.  It isn’t hard.  By March 1861, several states had seceded from the Union in protest against this “revolutionary” policy, and rather than being “poised to carry all before them,” according to Lincoln 1861 was the year in which free institutions were supposedly on the verge of being subverted and wiped from the face of the earth.  It was so endangered, in fact, because of the dangerous principle that voluntary Union was actually voluntary, which Lincoln made sure would not stand.  There was certainly a coercive reaction to the idea of the voluntary Union, and it was the so-called Unionists who did the coercing.  The “war to save the Union” was, of course, the assassination of the very principle that made it a Union. 

Lincoln was wrong, as he often was, but from the perspective of Mr. Beran 1861 seems an unusually poor year to mark the impending triumph of what he calls “free institutions.”  In Russia, the emancipation of the serfs was realised by the order of an autocrat.  A Christian, humane and decent-minded autocrat, probably the finest Russian ruler of the century, but an autocrat.  Free institutions?  In any meaningful sense, they did not yet exist in Russia.  Indeed, one might observe with some irony how much more easily an autocracy embraced a policy of emancipation than did a democracy, which might tell us something about democracy’s flaws, but no matter.  Meanwhile, in Germany the liberals became the allies of the Junkers, the Prussian “caste” to which Bismarck belonged, and Bismarck was himself the champion of a combination of liberal nationalism (down with all the reactionary Reichsfeinde and no Canossarepublik, he said) and nationalist and anti-socialist social legislation.  Those champions of “free constitutional principles” were the architects and leading cheerleaders of the Kulturkampf against German Catholics.  In this, German liberals exhibited precisely the same hostility that many American Catholics perceived in the Red Republicans, so called by Orestes Brownson and others because of the clear similarities with European liberal revolutionaries.  It is not surprising that many German exiles who had fled the suppression of the ‘48 revolution were sympathetic to the principles of the GOP.  By the way, none of this appears to me to be a compliment to Lincoln.

Beran isn’t done:

But in the decade that followed, a reaction gathered momentum. Around the world, privilege rose up to defend its prerogatives. 

Egads, reaction!  There is something truly strange about trying to associate the Republican Party with something other than privilege.  As a party, it represented (and Lincoln represented), and to some considerable extent still represents, the interests of corporations and finance, just as the Whigs had represented commercial and mercantile interests before them.  The causes of the War are many and complex, but if you said that it boiled down to a conflict between the landed and moneyed interest you would not be far wrong.  The latter won, and it replaced one kind of hierarchy and stratification with another while brutally centralising power into the hands of fewer and fewer people.  Someone will need to explain to me how this represents the victory of ”free institutions,” since I have a funny idea that arbitrary, coercive government is not really compatible with “free institutions.”

It gets even funnier:

The paternalists, Lord Macaulay wrote disapprovingly, wanted to “regulate the school, overlook the playground, fix the hours of labour and recreation, prescribe what ballads shall be sung, what tunes shall be played, what books shall be read, what physic shall be swallowed.”

It should be painfully obvious, but it was in Republican Party-dominated regions of the country where the uniform public school first appeared, and it was among Republican progressives at the turn of the century that you found some of the greatest advocates of regulation of business.  If there were paternalists in the post-War period, they were very often Republicans, the heirs of Lincoln.  Certainly, Southern aristocrats also accepted paternalistic ideas, but the Red Republicans wished to be paternalists for everyone in the country.

And again:

The second idea was militant nationalism—the right of certain (superior) peoples to impose their wills on other (inferior) peoples. Planters in the American South dreamed of enslaving Central America and the Caribbean. Germany’s nationalists aspired to incorporate Danish, French, and Polish provinces into a new German Reich [bold mine-DL]. In Moscow and Saint Petersburg, Panslav nationalists sought to rout the Ottoman Turks and impose Russia’s will on Byzantium.

It was the Republicans who preached American nationalism over against federal and decentralist principles, and it was Republicans who waged a war of unification–not unlike Bismarck, actually–to enforce that nationalism.  (Note that the “Danish, French and Polish provinces” in question were filled mostly with German-speaking Germans.)  It was, again, the Republicans who most forthrightly stated America’s imperial and civilising mission to “inferior” peoples, and who launched our imperialist wars in the Caribbean and the Pacific.  But don’t let that get in the way of a good story.  The Pan-Slavists were a force in Russian politics, and their objectives were shared by no less than that reformer, Tsar Aleksandr II, who waged war on behalf of the Slavs of the Balkans during the 1875-78 crisis. 

Speaking of imperialism, Beran writes:

Had Lincoln not forced his revolution in 1861, American slavery might have survived into the twentieth century, deriving fresh strength from new weapons in the coercive arsenal—“scientific” racism, social Darwinism, jingoistic imperialism, the ostensibly benevolent doctrines of paternalism.    

But, again, it was the esteemed Party of Lincoln where imperialists and progressives espousing such views very often found their home.  The devastation and ruination of the South and the elimination of slavery did nothing to stymy any of these things, but rather allowed them to prosper.  Lincoln’s political heirs embraced most, if not all, of them and promoted them.  It was in the name of both racial and cultural superiority that Americans sought to provide “uplift” for our “brown brothers” in the Philippines (minus those who died because of the war, naturally).

Then comes the ultimate idiocy:

The Southern Republic, having gained its independence, would almost certainly have formed alliances with regimes grounded in its own coercive philosophy; the successors of Jefferson Davis would have had every incentive to link arms with the successors of Otto von Bismarck.

It is amusing to consider that the one counterfactual author who has done the most to play around with the ideas of “what if the South won?”, Harry Turtledove (a Byzantinist by training!), comes to the exact opposite conclusion and held, I think correctly, that an independent CSA would have allied itself, to the extent that it was willing to go against the Jeffersonian grain against entangling alliances, with Britain and France.  Britain and France had been interested, for economic and strategic reasons, to see the Confederacy succeed, and had the South won it is easy to see the Confederacy having become, if anything, a strong supporter of either Britain or France in foreign policy.  It was the Unionists who were very cosy with the Prussian military during the War, and the Republicans who best represented the politics of Bismarck and the National Liberals on the American scene.  The Confederates were, however, heirs of the heritage of Jefferson and Jackson.  They were continentalists, and had a tradition of distrusting the British.  It is likely they would have pursued a strategy of influence and occasional expansion in the Caribbean and in Central and South America, but the odds of their linking arms with the Germans are very poor indeed.  The Yankees always had more in common with the Germans culturally and politically than did the Southrons.  However, since I am not a stupid Teutonophobe, I do not hold this against the Yankees.  I am not so desperate to vindicate the Confederate position, as Mr. Beran clearly is desperate to glorify Lincoln, that I feel compelled to vilify the political evolution of other nations and then randomly link that history with American historical figures that I dislike.   

Cross-posted at The American Scene

And on yet another level, that issue highlights the way the West, including the U.S., has been preoccupied with the killing of 1.5 million Christian Armenians by mostly Muslim Turks and Kurds. ~Leon Hadar

Certainly, there has been some attention drawn to the genocide in the West over the last 90 years, though the attention tended to be greatest when it was happening and has since settled into the background or vanished from collective memory.  But preoccupied?  The West has been anything but preoccupied with the Armenian genocide.  But for active lobbying by Armenians, scarcely anyone would give it a second thought.

Something very strange has happened.  Christopher Hitchens writes about the Armenian genocide resolution and actually makes sense:

If the Turks wish to continue lying officially about what happened to the Armenians, then we cannot be expected to oblige them by doing the same (and should certainly resent and repudiate any threats against ourselves or our allies that would ensue from our Congress affirming the truth).

This has generally been my view since the debate heated up again this autumn.  I have more to say along these lines in my next column in TAC.

I have no excuse.  There were warnings that the Elizabeth sequel was terrible, but I made the mistake of seeing for myself.  This is a perfect example of why movie reviewers are necessary.  You really should take Chris Orr’s word for it: it’s bad!  If anyone is tempted to go see it, just don’t.

When it isn’t painfully boring (which is most of the film), it’s sappy, and when it isn’t sappy it veers into some weird fusion of Patriot-esque speechmaking and retrojected values of liberal tolerance.  As Orr noted, the dialogue is often unpardonably lame.  At one point Elizabeth even gives a little talk on the evils of the Inquisition and England as the bastion of liberty of conscience and thought.  Since pretty much no one today likes the Inquisition, this is an easy way to make her the sympathetic champion of Freedom (her appearance before the assembled English soldiers does have a bit of the Gibsonian “they may take our lives…” element in it), but pretends as if “liberty of conscience” were some universal principle here rather than an invocation of Protestant polemic.  

The director, Shekhar Kumar, has stayed strangely faithful to the original Elizabeth’s studious reproduction of Protestant and English nationalist historiography on film.  Indeed, in the sequel Kumar has ratcheted up the anti-Catholicism of the first movie.  You could just as easily call this Black Legend: The Movie or The Catholics Are Coming To Get You.   

The portrayal of Philip, were it done to an American or British historical figure, would throw certain people into fits of hysteria.  The treatment of Mary Stuart was hardly any better.  The take-home message seemed to be: “The dagoes and Scots are trying to take away your freedom, so you have to kill them.”     Since English historians have long wanted to ignore the fact that Philip II was also briefly Philip I of England, it would hardly bother many to show Philip, as the movie shows him, as some sort of decrepit, superstitious eunuch who is afraid of the sunlight and talks to himself, or whatever it was we were supposed to conclude about him.

This was also the king who sent a significant portion of the fleet that won at Lepanto over the Ottomans, and who was probably among the most accomplished, albeit flawed, monarchs of the early modern period.  Naturally, Elizabeth’s apologists and myth-makers have always had to tear him down to make their heroine appear more important than she was.  This movie is just one of the more recent and execrable efforts along these lines.   

The opening “historical” introduction manages to ignore completely the contemporary Dutch rebels, whose resistance to Philip’s rule was the reason for Philip’s wars in northwestern Europe.  “Only England stands against him,” the writers pompously tell us.  The Dutch role in defeating the Armada is also ignored.  The Golden Age is the English version of Fred Thompson bombast: England stands alone for freedom!  Never mind that the Dutch kept fighting and dying against the Spanish for another two decades after the Armada was defeated and that Spain’s bankruptcy was related to its constant continental warfare against France to protect the Milan road.  We mustn’t diminish the reputation of the most overrated monarch in English history. 

P.S. Even Mike Potemra agrees on the anti-Catholicism of the movie, so it must be pretty obvious.

St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press’ catalogue just arrived, and it includes Andrew Louth’s forthcoming book in SVS’ “The Church in History” series, Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681-1071.  Fr. Andrew’s book will be available as of Nov. 15.  If it is as good as the two other volumes in the series that I have, Meyendorff’s Imperial Unity and Papadakis’ The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy, we should all be in for a treat.

There is a very long, but fairly interesting New Republic book review article on the modern state of classical music, its popularity (or lack of it) and classical music’s apologists.  There’s a lot to it, but this part struck me as especially worthwhile:

The morally charged dichotomization of surface and depth is a romantic trope that–as the musicologist Holly Watkins has shown–goes back at least as far as the writings of Hoffmann. Between Hoffmann and Wagner, however, the metaphor of depth had been claimed by German writers as a national trait; and just as nationalism underwent its general transformation from a modernizing and liberalizing discourse into a belligerent and regressive one in the later nineteenth century, so the notion of spiritual depth had been turned into a weapon of national and racial aggrandizement in Wagner’s hands.

I remember Prof. Lukacs remarking in Democracy and Populism, I believe it was, on this tendency that he identified in German thinkers to ascribe superior value and truth in terms of such ”depth.”  However, I would challenge the idea that nationalism really underwent a transformation over the course of the nineteenth century, when the heart of romantic nationalist myths is the idea of an enduring essence or character that the nationalist scholar or artist claims to be able to define and interpret.  You often hear this–the “good” nationalism of the liberal revolutionaries turned into the “bad” nationalism of a Bismarck and so forth, but the “good” nationalism was almost always intent on unification (which usually involved war) and expansionistic (because it was liberal and therefore eager to spread the revolution and, on a less high-minded note, to open new markets for ”the nation”).  In the mid and late nineteenth century nationalists, many of whom remained political liberals throughout Europe well into the twentieth century, were even more likely to engage in warfare to “redeem” the “lost” territories and countrymen still living under foreign rule.  Nationalism was belligerent in no small part because it was liberalising and modernising.  The strange thing is that we still credit the early nationalists’ self-justifications for their enthusiasm for conflict, when we are quite willing to criticise their later heirs.  We imagine a transformation and a difference where there was neither. 

Used in an exclusionary way, as Wagner does in the citation given by Taruskin or as, say, Zambelios did when addressing Western folklorists who threatened to interpret Greek identity and culture in a way that contradicted his classicising impulses, this essentialism means that only those who truly belong to the nation can understand it or participate in its cultural life.  This rhetoric of depth and essence is, in fact, an appeal to abstraction and an actually very superficial, limited grasp on culture and is used as a means of shrinking cultural participation and production down to the confines of a national dogma. 

Nationalism was always belligerent, warring against the political status quo, against legitimate governments that “denied” national unification, often enough against the Church, and against the past of the nationalists’ own people(s) and country/countries.  It was the bane of the civilised world for most of the nineteenth century and for all of the twentieth, and it was fundamentally the same thing.  

It is, of course, history that has often suffered most violently at the hands of nationalist redactors, and nationalist theories of history are almost by definition “regressive,” so to speak, in that they are almost all defined in terms of a golden age, an age of decline, and the age of palingenesis, which, in theory, is simply the recovery of the supposed golden age (whose character is suitably re-imagined to match whatever suits the liberal nationalist fantasy about his own virtues).  On this point, for example, I have happened to see an English-language textbook on Romanian history sponsored by a Center for Romanian Studies in Iasi that treats the period of the Danubian Principalities as one in which “the Greeks” are merely an annoying, troublemaking intrusion that the Romanians were well rid of, and the enormously productive and active life of the Greco-Romanian culture of the Principalities receives little or no attention.  This is a travesty of a fairly impressive period in Romanian history.  (Of course, it was part of the pre-independence period, and therefore not to be credited with as much importance.)  Bucharest and Iasi were shining examples of an international cultural Hellenism in the early modern period, and the educated elites of the Balkans referred to themselves as Hellenes as a statement of their cultivation and status, taking a name that had no particular ethnic connotations for them, and embracing Greek language and literature much as the educated in western and central Europe used Latin.  Pre-Phanariot rulers cultivated at their courts an idea of a revived Byzantium, understood as a Christian empire and not along the strictly ethnic and irredentist lines of the Megali Idea.  Much or all of this is expurgated out of the history of the Romanians in question.           

I gave up on the dreadful Florida GOP debate before they ever got to foreign policy, but apparently Tom Tancredo had the nerve to attack the genocide resolution at one point.  Nothing new there, you might think, except that Tancredo was one of the original co-sponsors of the bill.  He very quickly abandoned it once it became controversial.  Quoth Tancredo:

We can’t continue to go back to the dust bin of history to condemn actions by empires that no longer even exist.

It seems to me that this is what we do all the time.  We pore over the “dust bin” and dwell on the crimes of the Nazis and Soviets, and repeatedly, endlessly talk about those crimes and compare our present-day enemies with the perpetrators of these crimes.  Earlier this year, the President went to the Holocaust Museum and condemned the actions of an empire that no longer exists.  American politicians condemn the evils of Soviet communism as a matter of course, and are not concerned that this might hurt relations with the Russians.  Of course, there is usually an assumption that post-Soviet Russia is in significant ways still quite different from the old Soviet Union, which means that criticism of the latter need not extend to the modern successor state of the criminal regime. 

Yesterday I said in another post:

I suspect, but I cannot definitely prove, that another element is a weird, unseemly desire to keep the Nazis in the public imagination as the fons et origo of genocidal killing (which would also have to conveniently ignore the genocide of the Ukrainians) to sustain the mythology surrounding the entire WWII period.

Part of my point here was to make the point that the mythology about WWII to some extent requires holding up the Nazis as uniquely and especially evil in some unprecedented way.  They must remain the ultimate villains to better reinforce the memory of WWII as the ‘Good War’.  Part of the novelty and uniqueness of Nazi evil, according to President Bush’s own description, is that the Nazis allegedly introduced state-planned genocide:

Yet in places such as Auschwitz and Dachau and Buchenwald, the world saw something new and terrible: the state-sanctioned extermination of a people — carried out with a chilling industrial efficiency of a so-called modern nation.

To argue that there was actually a precedent and a previous state-sanctioned, organised and planned extermination of a people is effectively to deny the newness and uniqueness of the Nazis’ crimes.  To acknowledge the Armenian genocide as genocide, then, endangers a key part of a certain narrative about WWII, because it means that there had already been something similar in nature to the Nazis’ genocidal killing.  For some bizarre reason, there really does seem to be a need on the part of Armenian genocide deniers to resist acknowledging that the Armenian genocide was the “first genocide of the 20th century,” which would at the very least make the Holocaust the second, as if some special or superior status were attached to being the first one.  The distinction is obviously chronological, not moral.  Later genocides do not matter less because they came after others, nor are earlier ones more significant.  However, the debate over this resolution seems to take it for granted that some are more important than others and some are more worthy of commemoration than others. 

The San Francisco Chronicle sullies its op-ed page with more of Bruce Fein’s denialist prattle.  Armenians in the Republic are taking a keen interest in the resolution’s fate.  Jay Tolson in U.S. News and World Report makes the obvious, but necessary point:

The question is whether Turkey will ever enter a debate in which the consensus of scholars holds that the killings and mass deportations of Armenians did indeed constitute a genocide. According to the International Association of Genocide Scholars, the historical record on the Armenian genocide is “unambiguous”: In the years approaching World War I, a new breed of Ottoman officials, the Young Turks, heirs to two centuries of imperial decline, saw themselves as the defenders of the Turkish remnant state in the Anatolian core of the empire. Embracing an ultranationalist and supposedly secular ideology, Young Turk leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress pointedly excluded non-Muslim minorities, particularly Armenians, from their vision of Turkish purity. The outbreak of war allowed these leaders to paint all Armenians as pro-Russian fifth columnists (which only a small number were) and undertake organized and widespread massacres and deportations that led to further deaths from starvation and disease.

The resolution is opposed by the Bush administration, not necessarily because it disagrees that genocide occurred nearly a century ago, but because such a resolution will inflame passions at a time when there are passions enough in the neighborhood. ~Cal Thomas

Via Sullivan

That must be why the White House said, “the determination of whether or not the events constitute a genocide should be a matter for historical inquiry, not legislation.”  It doesn’t take a genius to come up with the formulation, “Yes, it was a genocide organised by a state that no longer exists, but this resolution is badly timed, provocative and strains an important alliance in wartime.”  That is not the White House’s position.  In fact, that is a fairly rare position in this debate–it is a view held, shockingly enough, by none other than Charles Krauthammer.  Meanwhile, the White House is taking the Ahmadinejad “we need more research” view of the question.  We call Ahmadinejad’s maneuver the tactic of a Holocaust denier.  The same standard should apply to the administration.

Returning to Lerner for another response, I will try to explain how flawed the article is.  As an earlier commenter has noted, Lerner has already tried to stack the deck rhetorically by making a comparison between an exterminationist party and ideological movement and an entire nation:

We must do it, Armenian genocide proponents [sic] tell us, because the Armenian tragedy was the original Holocaust: Armenians in World War I were like the Jews in World War II; Turks in 1915 were like the Germans in the 1940s. Thus, the only moral choice is to condemn the Turks, as we condemned the Nazis.

In fact, it was not “the Turks” who filled the role of genocidaires during WWI, but leaders and members of the CUP, Kurdish irregulars and some Ottoman soldiers.  To make blanket statements about “the Turks” is to go down Goldhagen’s road of collective guilt and engage in precisely the kind of reckless identitarian vilification that, as Kuehnelt-Leddihn has argued in another context, leads to the dehumanisation of an entire people and thus makes it easier to wage campaigns of annihilation against them.  Lerner has phrased things in such a way as to endorse Ankara’s portrayal of the efforts to recognise the genocide.  In this view, it is not just a recognition of crimes committed by agents within the Ottoman government and military, but an indictment of the entire Turkish nation.  If that was what we were talking about, I would also have to object to it, but it isn’t.  “The Turks” as a whole were not responsible, just as “the Turks” today are not responsible for what was done in those years, but it was rather specific groups of Turkish nationalists and Kurdish tribesmen who were responsible for what happened.  So, right away, Lerner clouds the issue by inaccurately describing the terms of the debate.

Lerner says:

The only enemies at home [in Germany in WWII] were the Jews, and they were never a real threat. They were scapegoats, not objective enemies, and they were being methodically eliminated, without exception, in all German-controlled territory.

The implication is that all Armenians in eastern Anatolia were an “objective enemy,” because there were some Armenians who raised rebellions or fought with the Russians, which somehow makes the genocidal campaign against the civilian Armenian population of eastern Anatolia less than genocidal.  In Lerner’s world, it’s only genocide if there are literally no members of the targeted population engaged in subversive or rebellious activity.  In framing things this way, Lerner has already conceded the morality of collective punishment of civilian populations in retaliation for the activities of guerrillas.  Presumably, as she sees it, there was also no genocide attempted against the Serbian population under German-Croat occupation, either, because “the Serbs” were an “objective enemy” engaged in resistance.  For Lerner, deliberate exterminationist campaigns are something other than genocide when they take place in a war zone, which I’m pretty sure is the exact opposite of the way most people understand the term.  Organised killing of a particular group of civilians bound by ethnic and religious ties is not genocide for Lerner if it comes as a “punishment” for the rebellion of a minority of the population.  It’s certainly a different kind of view, but it certainly isn’t moral.

She then obscures the issue by describing the Dardanelles campaign thus:

Fighting there was fierce, and continued until January 1916, but, on this front, there were relatively few civilian casualties, and no massacres.

There were relatively few civilian casualties because the front was largely static and confined to the narrow strips of land near Gallipoli.  There were no massacres because the Ottoman forces had their hands quite full with British and ANZAC forces.  There was also no sizeable Armenian population in the immediate vicinity of the Dardanelles, which makes the comparison seem almost pointless.

While Lerner acknowledges that Armenians fought on the Ottoman side, being subject to the general mobilisation conscription, she does not mention that Armenians in Ottoman units were disarmed after the Ottoman defeat at Sarikamis.  They were then executed. 

Of the aftermath of Sarikamis, Akcam writes on p. 143-44:

The defeat at Sarikamis was a turning point in the treatment of the Armenians, especially those in the army and labor batallions, who were no longer mistreated but frequently murdered.  In many regions, propaganda claimed that the Armenians had stabbed the Turks in the back.  Enver Pasha himself attempted to attribute the defeat to Armenian treachery, and referred to Armenians as a “threat.”….the first measure taken after the Sarikamis disaster was the order sent to army units on 25 February 1915, instructing them to disarm all Armenian soldiers….Reports followed, claiming that the annihilation of Armenians serving in the army had begun. 

Akcam writes more on page 144:

German missionary Jakob Kunzler, who worked with the medical personnel at the Urfa missionary hospital, recounts that the Armenians taken into the labor batallions were killed in March 1915, and that, “mostly knives were used, because the ammunition was needed for the foreign enemy.”  Something similar was related by Ambassador Morgenthau:

In almost all cases, the procedure was the same.  Here and there squads of 50 or 100 men would be taken, bound together in groups of four, and then marched out to a secluded spot a short distance from the village.  Suddenly the sound of rifle shots would fill the air, and the Turkish soldiers who had acted as the escort would sullenly return to camp.  Those sent to bury the bodies would find them almost invariably stark naked, for, as usual, the Turks had stolen all their clothes.  In cases that came to my attention, the murderers had added a refinement to their victims’ sufferings by compelling them to dig their graves before being shot.

Other eyewitness accounts by foreigners serving in the area corroborate the fact that the murder of the labor batallions began only after the defeat at Sarikamis.

Sounds an awful lot like scapegoating to me. 

She also has nothing to say about the leading Armenians of Constantinople who were arrested on April 24, 1915 and subsequently executed.  She has nothing to say about these episodes because these would all point to an organised campaign of extermination.  In the end, Lerner cites the presence of Armenians fighting for the Russians (many of whom hailed from Russian Armenia all along, since the country was, as it has often been, divided between different empires) as if their possessing the same ethnicity gave the CUP or anyone else license to slaughter other, entirely unrelated Armenians.   

The only thing that Lerner can credibly claim is that the situations of the Armenians and Jews were very different.  The differences do not prove that there was no genocide, but only shows that genocide can take place under a number of different circumstances. 

Akcam has a passage on page 126 that happens to address the thrust of Lerner’s article directly:

It was not a coincidence that the Armenian genocide took place soon after the Sarikamis disaster and was contemporaneous with the empire’s struggle at Gallipoli.  As a rule, the acceleration of the process of a country’s decline and partition helps to strengthen a sense of desperation and “fighting with one’s back to the wall.”  As the situation becomes increasingly hopeless, those who have failed to prevent the collapse become more hostile and aggressive.  When the crisis deepens, they resort to increasingly barbaric means, and come to believe “that only an absolute lack of mercy would allow one to avoid this loss of power and honor.”  A nation that feels itself on the verge of destruction will not hesitate to destroy another group it holds responsible for its situation.

Update: Just to make another thing clear, there were also deportations of Armenians from western Anatolia and Thrace following the deportations from eastern Anatolia.  Those who would like to cast this as an eastern front wartime measure and leave it at that have no way to account for this. 

And why on earth should these public bodies lecture historians as to what they should be saying? ~Norman Stone

This is a standard line that I have heard a lot of these past few days.  Never have you encountered so many new passionate defenders of the independence of professional historians as in the last couple of weeks–the concern is truly touching.  Very clearly, Stone has never read the text of the resolution in question, or he would know that it has absolutely nothing to do with lecturing historians. 

The invocation of what we magical historians do bothers me most when someone talks about a matter “best left to historians” as another way of saying, “Let’s please stop talking about this subject publicly and leave it to those ghastly academics to worry about.”  Huckabee has done it before when it comes to debating the merits of the beginnings of the Iraq war (”it’s a question for historians to decide”), and it has now become the favourite refrain of the denialist.  Naturally, the denialist is not interested in proper historical research, nor does he care about interference with that research by “public bodies.”  The denialist complains about “political” interference with research when official bodies recognise the blatantly obvious, but will just as readily denounce as hopelessly biased any research that comes to conclusions that he dislikes.   

No one says that governments are “lecturing” historians when they commemorate the Holocaust or V-E Day or the Armistice or any other major historical event.  Governments commemorate things all the time, lending a certain sanction or authority to this or that reading of history.  As the Turkish government has shown, governments can use this power for distorting and corrupt ends.  That does not mean that we cease all commemorations and public acknowledgements of the past, but that we strive to be scrupulous in how we remember the past.  Certainly governments should not interfere with academics or dictate to them what they ought to say–that is fundamental.  That’s yet another reason to draw attention to the offically sanctioned denialism of the Republic of Turkey.  It is rather amazing to me how so many Westerners became so exercised over the threatened free speech rights of the people at Jyllands-Posten, but have suddenly lost all interest in free speech when it comes to Turkish academics and writers.  Many Westerners were put off by the idea that Muslims should apply the standards of their religion to everyone else and demand that others abide by those standards, but when it comes to abiding by the revisionist propaganda coming from Ankara they are more sanguine.        

It is not the government’s official approval or recognition, to address a concern my colleague James has raised, that adds any truth or significance to the event, and the historical reality would be the same whether or not it was ever officially acknowledged.  The genocide happened, whether or not Ankara and its small army of American and other lackeys will ever accept that reality.  But what we choose to commemorate and acknowledge does reflect on the kind of government one has and the kind of historical memory the citizens of a country have.  Refusal to commemorate and use the proper names for things also reflects on us. 

To cast the current (almost certainly now dead) resolution as a lecture to historians, as Stone does, is especially galling, since the main (indeed technically the only) intended audience of the resolution is the President, who is as much of an historian as I am a jet pilot.  The resolution is entitled: “Calling upon the President to ensure the foreign policy of the United States reflects appropriate understanding and sensitivity concerning issues related to human rights, ethnic cleansing, and genocide documented in the United States record relating to the Armenian genocide and for other purposes.”

Were the resolution to pass, not one historian would be obliged to do anything.  No historians will have been lectured by a public body.  Most historians of the subject, who already acknowledge the genocide, will be unfazed by the terrible burden of a non-binding resolution.  The only historians who would be troubled are those who have, for whatever reason, chosen to deny the genocidal nature of the events.  In any case, they have not yet been persuaded by evidence or conscience to recognise and speak the truth–a vote by the House of Representatives will not weigh heavily on them, either.

Stone invokes Lewy, whose arguments are pretty effectively undermined here, while ignoring the work that directly contradicts that of Lewy.  The Inside Higher Ed refers to a future Akcam work that will reportedly make the case even more clear.  From the article:

To those like Lewy who have written books saying that there is no evidence, “I laugh at them,” Akçam said, because the documents he has already released rebut them, and the new book will do so even more. “There is no scholarly debate on this topic,” he said. 

P.S.  Note to Cohen: the text of the resolution itself includes mention of Lemkin’s views on the Armenian genocide.

The Economist covers the resolution in an editorial and discusses Turkish-Armenian relations in an article.  Naturally, I don’t agree with the editorial, but I’ve already said plenty on that subject for now.  The article is a good overview of the state of affairs in Turkey.

Via Massie, I see that Fallows wrote:

The Armenian genocide was real; many Turks pretend it wasn’t. They are wrong, and we should stand for what’s right. But it’s hard to think of a more willfully self-indulgent step than lecturing Turkey’s current government and people 90 years late.

Er, so it’s willfully self-indulgent to stand up for what’s right?  What do you call it when you permit those in the wrong to prevail?  Virtuous self-sacrifice?  As the last couple of weeks has made quite clear, it isn’t just “many Turks” who deny the genocide, but a small army of water-carrying American apologists as well.  Is it “self-indulgent” to try to defeat willing collaborators in genocide denial?       

There is something deeper wrong with Fallows’ response.  He is not alone in making this kind of argument, so this isn’t aimed just at him.  There is the idea that unless you simultaneously condemn every act of genocide or anything that might reasonably be defined as genocide in the history of the world, you really shouldn’t say anything about one particular genocide.  This is a very strange view to take.  Rather than strengthening the case against recognition and drawing attention to the particular genocide, it simply reminds us of how many such exterminationist campaigns most people never give a second thought.  It reminds us how lopsided and arbitrary our commemoration of past genocides has been up till now, and underscores how poor and limited our historical memory is.  There is something particularly strange about those who actually know about these other slaughters and wish to cite them as reasons for not acknowledging this or that genocide.  They might cry, “What about the Ukrainians?”  But should it ever come time to commemorate the Holodomor, they will turn around and cry, after having belittled the Armenian genocide resolution and the history that it represents, “What about the Armenians?” 

The odd thing is that this push to recognise and acknowledge an historical event requires very little of a nation.  Americans are not being called on to intervene in someone else’s conflict, nor are we being asked to take sides in complex, little-understood struggles on the other side of the world.  The only costs that we might incur derive from the threats of a putative ally.  Americans are being asked to acknowledge, through their representatives, the basic and obvious truth about a terrible, state-organised act of terror and violence against innocent people, and in response their representatives are being intimidated with invocations of the importance of this so-called ally in the “war on terror.”  The absurdity of it is plain for all to see.         

The liars are out in force these days.  Does National Review really want to be known as a venue for genocide deniers? 

She seems to think that a people cannot be made into a scapegoat when things at home are going badly, but only when they are going relatively well.  This is a very unique understanding of what scapegoating is.  It is rather stunning that so many hacks and amateurs can confidently deny what honest scholars of genocide studies and history affirm.  As for those who “excel” at propaganda, Ms. Lerner does not need to look very far, since her article is a classic example of that very thing. 

P.S. Incidentally, it is articles just like this one that confirm my view that passage of the resolution is highly desirable.  Every day that this resolution is blocked is another small victory for these genocide deniers.  Whenever someone argues that the resolution is redundant or “gratuitous” because no one questions that the Armenians experienced a genocidal campaign against them, I will simply point to this article and others like it to show that denialism is flourishing. 

Like Cohen’s shambles of a column the other day, Lerner’s article insists on defining what genocide is based on its identity with the circumstances of the Holocaust.  Since no other genocide in modern history has ever been identical to the Holocaust, this style of argument implicitly denies all the other acknowledged genocides of the 20th century by emphasising dissimilarity of circumstances.  Lerner’s article is a blatant example of “blaming the victim,” pinning the blame for the actions of a relative few revolutionaries on an entire population.  And of course the trials of guilty officers were conducted by the non-CUP elements of the Ottoman government, yet Lerner uses these trials as exculpatory evidence to the advantage of the CUP leadership. 

I don’t know how many times one needs to say this: there was a deliberate and organised campaign of extermination authored by the leaders of the CUP and carried out in a series of massacres and death marches on their orders.  As Akcam has shown, the CUP leaders would send our duelling sets of orders, with one set ordering humane and decent treatment of the deportees and the other ordering their annihilation.  These are obviously war crimes–that much hardly anyone will seriously dispute–and they very clearly meet all but the most peculiar definitions of genocide.  It’s not clear to me what could actually motivate someone to engage in Lerner’s morally abhorrent contortions. 

Here is a good Telegraph review of A Shameful Act.

Denialism is alive and well on the Web.  Here is a specimen of the type, complete with references to Kevorkian and “crafty” Armenians.  Naturally, this brave character does not publish his name–nor would I if I were in the business of spewing filth.

Mr. Krikorian is correct when he says:

First of all, it is simply inarguable that the Ottoman Empire tried to eradicate the Armenian people under the cover of World War I.

Why then do so many prominent Americans keep arguing against it, hedging their statements or tying themselves into knots to trivialise the events?  Of course, it is, or rather ought to be, inarguable, but so long as Ankara’s apologists are able to retain any credibility and cast doubt on the matter there will be a continuing “debate.”

He’s also right when he says:

Our policy toward modern Turkey should have nothing whatsoever to do with acknowledgement of the Armenian Genocide. But caving to Turkish pressure never to use “Armenian” and “genocide” in the same sentence is what has given the current resolution its impetus.

Critics are right that Congress has no business weighing in on historical controversies. But there is no controversy here [bold mine-DL]. This isn’t even a matter of the polite fictions necessary to international diplomacy. Denying the Armenian Genocide is simply a lie, and a lie propagated at the behest of a foreign power. It’s unworthy of us.

Amen to that.

“They have focused on the idea of objectivity, the idea of ‘on the one hand and the other hand,’ ” he said. “That’s very attractive on campuses to say that you should hear both sides of the story.” While Payaslian is quick to add that he doesn’t favor censoring anyone or firing anyone for their views, he believes that it is irresponsible to pretend that the history of the period is uncertain. And he thinks it is important to expose “the collaboration between the Turkish Embassy and scholars cooperating to promote this denialist argument.”

To many scholars, an added irony is that all of these calls for debating whether a genocide took place are coming at a time when emerging new scholarship on the period — based on unprecedented access to Ottoman archives — provides even more solid evidence of the intent of the Turkish authorities to slaughter the Armenians [bold mine-DL]. This new scholarship is seen as the ultimate smoking gun as it is based on the records of those who committed the genocide — which counters the arguments of Turkey over the years that the genocide view relies too much on the views of Armenian survivors.

Even further, some of the most significant new scholarship is being done by scholars who are Turkish, not Armenian, directly refuting the claim by some denial scholars that only Armenian professors believe a genocide took place. In some cases, these scholars have faced death threats as well as indictments by prosecutors in Turkey. ~Inside Higher Ed

Via Cliopatria

Well, there goes any respect I might have had for Bruce Fein (who works, it should be noted, for the Turkish Coalition of America, founded in that august, ancient time of February 2007):

Like Benito Mussolini, Armenians believe truth is an assertion at the head of a figurative bayonet.

Yes, don’t you see–the Armenians are deceitful and treacherous.  You can’t trust them.  Sound familiar?  Note that any similarly gross overgeneralisation about another group of people would be met with fierce denunciations from all sides.  The upshot of Fein’s article is that lots and lots of Turks died in the same period (true), there were atrocities carried out by Armenians in eastern Anatolia (also true) and there have been many Armenian terrorist attacks against Turkish targets in the 20th century (true again).  The purpose of the article, of course, is to make light of the genocide and to equate the organising massacring and death march of over a million civilians by their own government (it is, of course, the intent and organised extermination, not the number, that ultimately matters) with the devastating consequences of near-total war between sovereign governments.  Sounds curiously like arguments that go something like, “Lots and lots of Germans died fighting in WWII, so state-run genocide isn’t that big of a deal.” 

My favourite bit is the accusation of religious bigotry (that would be bigotry against the Muslims, you see), the praise of the notorious genocide denier Shaw for his “academic courage,” and the immediate invocation of none other than Bernard Lewis.  Of course, it was in no small part religious bigotry and supremacism on the part of the perpetrators that fueled the genocide, as Akcam has made clear, and I suspect that it has been the fact that the Turks are Muslim and the Armenians Christian that has kept the genocide from being more widely publicised and recognised for what it was.   

Update: The Turkish Coalition of America takes mendacity to all new lows.  Consider this description of H. Res. 106:

[it] targets Turkish history and heritage, hurts US-Turkish relations and the US national interest.

Impressive how they hardly ever mention anything about the substance of the resolution.  That might make the “Turkish history and heritage” bit a little too hard for some folks to swallow.  This “Action Alert” section is also quite hilarious in a depressing, sickening way:

Sadly, our voice has mostly been absent in this debate.

If you believe that, they have a bridge in Istanbul to sell you. 

Almost a dozen lawmakers had shifted against the measure in a 24-hour period ending Tuesday night, accelerating a sudden exodus that has cast deep doubt over the measure’s prospects. Some made clear that they were heeding warnings from the White House, which has called the measure dangerously provocative, and from the Turkish government, which has said House passage would prompt Turkey to reconsider its ties to the United States, including logistical support for the Iraq war. ~The New York Times

Here’s a true champion of the moral high ground:

“We simply cannot allow the grievances of the past, as real as they may be, to in any way derail our efforts to prevent further atrocities for future history books,” said Representative Wally Herger, Republican of California.

That’s a good one.  Acknowledging genocide is now just a matter of ”grievances of the past.”  This is what people are reduced to saying.  What else can they possibly say?   

Rep. Sherman, a resolution supporter, took the words right out of my mouth:

Since when has it become fashionable for friends to threaten friends?

Alex Massie is right on the mark again:

But of course Lemkin himself deliberately cited the suffering of the Armenians when he first wrote about genocide. He didn’t seem to share Mr Cohen’s belief that there is only one kind of genocide.

I appreciate Mr. Massie picking up on this point.  After all, if someone confronted with the horrors of the Holocaust had been looking for precedents of coordinated state extermination of its own population the Armenian genocide would have been an obvious example in the 1940s.   

What strikes me as so strange about all this is that virtually no one in the Washington political or media establishment has ever applied this same level of skepticism to talk about genocide in Darfur, to say nothing of the much more dubious case of Kosovo.  I expect that I will look in vain for Cohen’s citations of Lemkin from the spring of 1999.  All that needed to be said in 1999 was the word “Balkan” and suddenly everyone who was anyone was convinced that genocide was about to happen again (not that any of the people who wanted to “crush Serb skulls” ever gave a second thought to the genocide of Serbs during WWII at the hands of the forerunners of our good friends and allies in Zagreb). 

Pundits and pols are very free with the word when the regime being accused is one that they don’t much like, which is why I have tended to be very skeptical about people who describe something as genocide in the present.  It has frequently become a one-sided and tendentious political weapon that seems to be deployed for other reasons.  Yet in this case, when the evidence is clear, the government responsible is long gone and all that is being asked of anyone is to recognise the obvious, everyone becomes terribly anxious and reticent.     

Massie also notes a ridiculous Hiatt op-ed:

Then there’s Fred Hiatt, the WaPo’s editorial page editor  who thinks the resolution should be spiked because, well, modern Armenia isn’t properly democratic. Or something like that.

I had seen Hiatt’s op-ed, and my first response was simply to move on to something else.  Then it occurred to me that Hiatt’s column quite unintentionally helps explain why the resolution is necessary.  Hiatt’s argument, such as it is, is that the Armenian Diaspora could have used their time and resources for much better purposes than lobbying for this resolution.  Think of what all that money and attention could for Armenia, Hiatt exulted!  Armenia is a poor and corrupt state with a dysfunctional government, and the Diaspora could work to change that. 

Not that Fred Hiatt has ever, to my knowledge, given a fig for what happened to the Republic of Armenia, mind you, but his tiresome lecture did make me think of something important.  It was, as some of us will remember, Hrant Dink’s argument that the Diasporans should stop fixating on the genocide and work to build a better Armenia.  Dink, a great man, argued that the preoccupation with the genocide would become “poison in the blood” for the people who continued to focus on it so intently.  Dink was actually arguing for the Armenians to move on and try to build a better future for the independent Armenian state that Armenians finally did have–the very thing that Hiatt has suddenly discovered as the right answer–and for his wise counsel he was indicted by the Turkish government for “insulting Turkishness.”  How could that be?  Well, his remarks about “poison in the blood” were taken entirely out of context and turned into an attack on Turks.  When he was talking about poison, according to the government, he was referring to Turks.  This was a malicious and obvious lie, as the government there must have known, but the hysteria in the press that the charges generated led in short order to Dink’s assassination by a Turkish nationalist. 

Dink was right–the genocide should not be an all-consuming passion, and Armenians should work to improve Armenia.  For his efforts to de-emphasise the focus on the genocide (while also insisting on the reality of the genocide), he was prosecuted and then murdered.  His son has since been indicted under the same charge and sentenced to a year in prison.  That is the government for whom the apologists are carrying water. 

Yet here is another reason why recognition of the genocide is important–without widespread recognition and pressure on Ankara to acknowledge the reality of the genocide, the Diasporans will never be able to let go and start the necessary work of building up Armenia.  Not, of course, that Turkey has had any interest in aiding the improvement or reform of Armenia, since they have kept the border sealed in solidarity with the Azeris.  The poverty, corruption and bad government of the Republic have more than a little to do with that situation, which Washington tacitly endorses with its alliances with Turkey and Azerbaijan.  Hiatt has quite unwittingly helped the argument for the resolution, by making clear that Armenia’s development depends in part on the Diasporans’ being able to turn their attention to other things besides this.

Richard Cohen started out all right, but then goes into the ditch:

Of even that, I have some doubt. The congressional resolution repeatedly employs the word “genocide,” a term used by many scholars. But Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish emigre who coined the term in 1943, clearly had in mind what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. If that is the standard — and it need not be — then what happened in the collapsing Ottoman Empire was something short of genocide. It was plenty bad — maybe as many as 1.5 million Armenians perished, many of them outright murdered — but not all Armenians everywhere in what was then Turkey were as calamitously affected. The substantial Armenian communities in Constantinople, Smyrna and Aleppo were largely spared.

Not every Tutsi in Rwanda was “affected,” either, but we don’t quibble about that.  Of course, the Armenian elite in Constantinople was not spared, and tens of thousands of members of the Armenian community in Smyrna was massacred when Kemal’s forces took the city in 1922.  Frankly, this line of argument is a bit like saying, “Well, since there were some Jews left at the end of the war, it wasn’t that bad.”

Cohen is trying hard to reach moral equivalency:

Among them were the Armenians, an ancient people who had been among the first to adopt Christianity. By the end of the 19th century, they were engaged in guerrilla activity.

How nice it must be to sit back and talk about what “they,” the Armenians, all did.  Some Armenians were involved in guerrilla activity, but virtually the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia was “punished.”  The actions of a relative few neither explain nor justify the murderous response of the CUP.

Cohen says:

Within Turkey, Armenians were feared as a fifth column.

Set aside the obnoxious dismissal of the Armenians’ reputation as the “loyal millet.”  Unlike many members of the Rum millet, the Armenians typically did not engage in separatist or subversive activities.  Of all the Christian subjects of the Ottomans, the Armenians had given the least cause for offense, yet they were the ones who suffered the full wrath of the empire to whom the overwhelming majority remained loyal.  Sound familiar?  Need I point out the obvious problem with talking about the nationalist delusions about minorities as if they were mitigating or justifying?  Nationalists and genocidaires routinely treat their victims as collaborators with an enemy, whether real or imagined.  Collaboration is often not happening in any form, but it is assumed by the ideologues for whom “those people” are all inherently treacherous and disloyal.  Sound familiar?

Cohen:

So contemporary Turkey is entitled to insist that things are not so simple. If you use the word genocide, it suggests the Holocaust — and that is not what happened in the Ottoman Empire.

Yes, the past is so very complicated!  Especially when the people who were butchered don’t have anything to do with you.  It’s much easier to talk about context and ambiguity when the humanity of the victims doesn’t really matter as much to you.  If you use the word genocide, it also suggests Rwanda, Cambodia, the Ukraine in the ’30s.  None of these is directly identifiable with the methods employed in the Holocaust, but each is a genocide.  It need not be done in organised camps with gas to count as the same crime.

Cohen then goes deeper into apologist mode:

Its modern leaders, beginning with the truly remarkable Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, have done a Herculean job of bringing the country from medievalism to modernity without, it should be noted, the usual bloodbath.

Except for the bloodbaths that made a more homogenous Turkish state possible, and except for the ongoing repression of the Kurds.  By all means, give Kemal his due for modernising Turkey, but let’s not pretend that it was all done through some pleasant and humane process.  It was brutal, coercive and, more often than his admirers like to recall, quite violent.

Cohen finally comes around, after all of this, to declare Turkey’s threats over the resolution and its efforts to suppress the truth to be unacceptable, but he took such an appalling route to get there I’m not sure that it matters.

Alex Massie gets it:

Ultimately it’s pretty simple: you either treat genocide as genocide or you don’t. But if you don’t at least have the decency to stay quiet about it rather than offering weasel excuses about the national interest and all the rest of it.

Besides it is humiliating to give in to Turkish bullying. To wit:

A top Turkish official warned Thursday that consequences “won’t be pleasant” if the full House approves the resolution.

“Yesterday some in Congress wanted to play hardball,” said Egemen Bagis, foreign policy adviser to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “I can assure you Turkey knows how to play hardball.”

Screw them.

Spengler also has a number of good points, including this one:

The sorry spectacle of an American president begging Congress not to affirm what the whole civilized world knows to be true underlines the overall stupidity of US policy towards the Middle East. It is particularly despicable for a Western nation to avert its eyes from a Muslim genocide against a Christian population.

Thanks to commenter tcowan for the link to Spengler’s article.

During my few days in Toronto, I happened to visit St. Anne’s Anglican Church for the concert I mentioned earlier.  In St. Anne’s, which was inspired in its design and decoration by Hagia Sophia, there is a traditional war memorial to the war dead of WWI and WWII.  The phrasing of the memorial was worth mentioning, in light of the arrogant bluster of a certain American presidential candidate.  Referring to those from the parish who had fallen in battle, the plaques read:

In loving memory for those who gave their lives for the world’s freedom [bold mine-DL] in the Great War of 1914

and

In loving memory for those who gave their lives for the world’s freedom [bold mine-DL] in the Great War of 1939

You can say what you will about the exaggerated claims of these memorials.  In any case, the point is that the people who dedicated these memorials believed that their departed compatriots were shedding their blood for the freedom of the other peoples (indeed, for the freedom of the whole world).  They deserve respect and honour.  This isn’t hard to understand.  Unless, of course, your name is Fred Thompson. 

Only Turks question this history. ~Ralph Peters

There, of course, Mr. Peters is laughably wrong.  If “only” Turks questioned this history, there would be no debate whatever in any academic circles outside Turkey over “whether” there was a genocide.  You would not find academics readily spouting the official Ankara line, nor would you find pundits and hacks mouthing denialist rhetoric.  The truth is that there are a great many willing, non-Turkish collaborators who help cover up or apologise for this “questioning.”  At least Peters has the integrity, so to speak, to acknowledge that his opposition to the resolution is motivated out of his fidelity to the Iraq war.  He is quite happy to quash the resolution and tacitly abet genocide denial if it allows the war to continue.     

Michael Crowley raises a good point that the genocide resolution is providing hay for conservative talk show hosts, who would like to turn the entire question into a debate over national security and the war.  This angle had occurred to me, but Pelosi doesn’t strike me as  being nearly so clever as to engineer such a roundabout, indirect way of making the continuation of the war untenable, and attacks on her along these lines will not persuade anyone who isn’t already steadfastly behind the war.  Actually, if pro-war talk show hosts wanted to go down that road I think it could help the antiwar cause in one respect: it closely links support for the Iraq war to supporting, tacitly or not, genocide denial.  They can keep saying, in effect, “Genocide denial is essential to victory.”  I’d be interested to see how many people buy into such a corrupt bargain.

On a different point, when Pelosi says, “this is about the [former] Ottoman Empire,” she is clearly trying to distiguish between the condemnation of a genocide in the past and the perception that recognising this for what it is somehow entails equal condemnation of the current government or the Republic of Turkey.   

Update: Here is a roll call of the committee vote.

Back from Toronto.  I’ve come across Fisk’s latest on the Armenian genocide.  I also see that Turkey has recalled their ambassador over the House committee vote.  Look for my next column for more discussion of all this. 

Update: Can I just say how genuinely weird it is that everyone at The Washington Note is effectively taking the White House’s side in this dispute, while I support officially recognizing a genocide?  There is also a notion out there that the right way to handle Turkey is to give in to its demands over this, as if it is the proper behaviour of a government to enable its ally in one of its most self-damaging policies.  There is nothing “pro-Turkish” in encouraging the worst sort of behaviour in our ally, especially if you think that Turkey should be implementing the changes that will make it acceptable to the European Union.  I think Turkish entry would be a mistake by the EU, but if I supported Turkey’s bid I wouldn’t be backing them when they’re in the wrong over something that will definitely undermine their bid.  Turkey’s denialism is self-destructive and harmful to their own stated long-term goals, so it is simply amazing that they are willing to take things this far.

Chris Roach makes an excellent point here:

I would be sympathetic with complaints against this Congressional Resolution if they were lodged by consistent realists, who adopt an across-the-board policy rejecting interference with other nations’ internal affairs. But the defenders of Turkey’s right to live in a world without criticism are normal, run-of-the-mill western politicians–these, the same people that piously utter “never again” at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.  In Turkey’s defense, the Madeline Albrights and Cyrus Vances of the world are standing shoulder to shoulder.

My next column will be on the Armenian genocide resolution and the debate surrounding it, so I won’t pre-empt myself with more commentary before I go to Toronto.  However, James Bovard makes many of the right points:

It’s a helluva thing when a war on terror supposedly requires the U.S. Congress to pretend that genocide didn’t occur.  Bush’s assertion that “we all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people” is a lie.   Most people either don’t know or don’t care about the carnage.  And Bush apparently wants to keep it that way.

Here we go:

A congressional panel approved a resolution calling for the U.S. to designate the World War I-era killings of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide, amid warnings that the measure would harm relations with Turkey.

Yglesias refers to a section on Habsburg history in the second part of Paul Schroeder’s article on Iraq in TAC as an “annoying detour,” which I suppose it might be for some people, were it not for the fact that the “annoying detour” was a central part of explaining Prof. Schroeder’s key insights into the essential flaws of the Iraq war.  Here is Prof. Schroeder:

Austria’s leaders were convinced that it was defending not just itself but the rights of all of Europe against international outlaws and that every decent government in Europe, understanding this and appreciating their stand, would support them even if it led to war. This moral hubris, the absolute value they assigned to Austria’s just cause, closed their minds not merely to political and strategic realities but also to competing moral values and judgments. Many Europeans understood Austria’s grievances but placed a higher value on peace, recognized other rights besides historic and legal ones, and understood the necessity and inevitability of change.

The same three strategic errors—a refusal to recognize when a position has become untenable, a reliance on military victory and power to achieve unattainable ends, and moral hubris leading to political and strategic miscalculation—have also brought the U.S. into its current mess in Iraq. 

It might also be worth noting at this point that Prof. Schroder is a modern European history professor who probably has relevant insights into lessons from the history of defunct empires.  Those would be some of those “annoying detours” Yglesias mentioned. 

If Belgium falls to sectarianism, what does that say about prospects for making Europe into a super-Belgium? ~Jonah Goldberg

But it isn’t sectarianism that is dividing Belgium, since sectarianism would imply, well, the existence of rival sects that serve as the basis for political and social divides.  In fact, one of the reasons for the creation of Belgium was the decided lack of sectarian divides among the Flemings and Walloons of the southern half of the southern provinces.  It was through common identity as Catholics that Belgians were originally lumped together.  With secularisation and the general decline of religion as a primary political loyalty, ethnic and linguistic differences inevitably have become more salient.  If Belgium breaks up, it will be partly on account of the breakdown in the original “sectarian” character of Belgian identity.

Alex Massie has more.

Speaking of Bernard Lewis, one of the more unpleasant facts about the man is that he has made a point, using his reputation as a serious Ottomanist, of maintaining the Ankara line on the Armenian genocide (i.e., that it wasn’t planned and wasn’t genocide).  Naturally, Armenian-Americans are rather unhappy that genocide deniers receive presidential awards, and I should think most everyone should be unsettled at the thought that one of the more influential historians advising or inspiring Republican views on the region is committed to denying a genocide.  Lewis’ privileged place as the administration’s reliable Middle East expert helps explain the White House’s fairly despicable attitude on the question of recognition.

Michael Crowley has been doing good work keeping track of the politicking and lobbying surrounding the Armenian genocide resolution, and he has a round-up of the latest news.  Most ridiculous (and depressing) line comes from the White House: “the determination of whether or not the events constitute a genocide should be a matter for historical inquiry, not legislation.”  This comes from the same administration that has felt no compunction about labeling the conflict in Darfur a genocide and the House joined the administration in declaring it as such, whether or not that really is the most accurate term for it.  Mr. Bush has no problem invoking the Cambodian genocide in a tendentious and dishonest revisionist account of the end of the Vietnam War.  Yet the administration and its allies in the House are utterly spineless when it comes to properly describing the genocidal crimes of a regime that no longer even exists because it will offend an allied state.  This is all another very helpful reminder that for all together too many people that the recognition of a genocide that occurred in the past depends heavily on whether it serves or harms present political interests. 

Do you suppose that PM Erdogan would be received in the same way that Ahmadinejad was last month?  I doubt it.  He would be welcomed, cheered as a “moderate” and “reformed” Islamist and a strong ally of the United States, and so on.  He denies a genocide about which relatively few people care, and his government is allied with Israel, which makes his government’s affront to moral and historical truth rather more acceptable to a lot of the very same people who wanted to bar Ahmadinejad from setting foot on U.S. soil.  Erdogan is the head of government in a state that prosecutes people for engaging in just such “historical inquiry,” which is why Turkish historians who wish to speak truthfully about the genocide, such as Taner Akcam, have had to leave Turkey.  When Bush says that there should be more “historical inquiry” into the matter, what other politician does he sound like?

Here is a sentence from the introduction to the brand new Crisis of the Oikoumene:

Loyalty to the Empire that endured until the Monothelite crisis–involving a development on Monophysite Christology–prevented the [Three Chapters] schism from making a lasting mark on the African church.

Can I just tell you how troubling these lines about monotheletism are?  Every year there is some book that comes out about Orthodoxy, Christology, ecumenical councils or Byzantium and inevitably somewhere in such a book you will find a description of monotheletism like the one above.  It’s just not accurate, and yet it gets repeated on a regular basis.  I may have more to say about the book at Cliopatria in the coming weeks.  Christology buffs, stay tuned.  

Update: On the other hand, Richard Price’s chapter explaining the origins of the Three Chapters controversy is absolutely superb and definitely required reading for anyone interested in the question of the authority of Chalcedon and its supposed ‘Nestorianising’ tendencies on account of the reinstatements of Theodoret and Ibas.  I have rarely seen a scholarly treatment of this aspect of the controversy handled so carefully and thoughtfully.  Well worth the wait.

But McCain was precisely correct to say that Judeo-Christian values were a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking that led men like Madison, Jefferson and Adams to believe in individual autonomy [bold mine-DL].

These men were critical of some aspects of Christianity. But to deny that Christian principles were a powerful force behind the founding of this nation, from the impulse to flee Europe to the justification for war to the guiding principles at the Constitutional Convention [bold mine-DL], is to deny historical reality. 

The political thinking of the Founders was profoundly shaped by Christian teaching. Pointing that out would hardly be controversial were not so many people irrationally afraid of religion in general and Christianity in particular. But as John Adams said, men “may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.”  ~ New Hampshire Union-Leader

That first paragraph is remarkable.  Naturally, I don’t agree.  Far more overreaching than anything McCain said, which was ridiculous mostly because it was McCain saying it, the editorial maintains that “Judeo-Christian values were a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking.”  To which I respond: “what part of the Enlightenment do we mean?”  I have been known to refer very broadly and negatively to “the Enlightenment,” when I am really objecting principally to political and social theories of Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau, and I have been reminded on a few occasions that it is worth keeping in mind the differences between Enlightenment thinkers.  Here this is especially worth doing. 

Leibniz, for example, was probably the closest to matching the image of an Aufklaerer who also respected what the editorial calls “Judeo-Christian values” (which is still pretty far removed from being “profoundly shaped by Christian teaching”), but he was an early figure and not representative of the kind of thought that influenced the Founding generation.  Algernon Sydney’s Discourse Concerning Government, which had a great influence on 18th century colonial political thought, is a weighty tome replete with references to Scripture, but it is not so much “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” as it is Whig political philosophy trying to shield itself against Filmer with the Bible.  It is difficult to say that Harrington and Bolingbroke, significant for us because of their influence on Montesqieu and the later Country tradition, were “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” beyond the reality that they belonged to Christian confessions and lived in a culture that was steeped in Christianity.  In my modern Greek history class, I could also say that Moisiodax and Korais were “profoundly influenced by Christian teaching”–profoundly influenced, that is, to run away from that teaching when it conflicted with their philosophical and political programs.  In general, wherever people have been ”profoundly influenced by Christian teaching” they have had no time for prattle about natural rights, the social contract and “individual autonomy.”  It seems right and good to me that they should respond in this way.  Understandably, Christians try to construct some preeminent place for Christianity in the story of “the Founding,” which has itself been given quasi-mystical status by nationalist historians and ideologues, because they have come to recognise that it is only through having a claim to being a key part of “the Founding” that they will be permitted to have any real role in a system dominated by Americanist/proposition nation ideology.  The problem lies not so much with attempts to baptise ”the Founding” as with the distorted and ideological treatment of the early republican period by later nationalist politicians and historians.  If Americanism and American identity itself are to be defined by political propositions, as the adherents of the proposition nation view would have it, it becomes necessary for people to interpret ”the Founding” in a such a way that their beliefs are discovered as the ultimate sources of those propositions.    

As a recent instructor of mine was fond of saying, let’s take this step by step.  It makes sense to describe America as a Christian nation in the following ways:

1) Anglo-American culture, what Russell Kirk referred to as our “British culture,” owes an enormous debt to European Christianity and is inconceivable without it.  North American colonial societies were and are derived from European and Christian civilisation and ultimately belong to that civilisation.  Christianity was a public religion and was, at the state level, an established religion in one form or another in many of the colonies, and this arrangement prevailed for many decades after independence.  Those who think they have found justification in the early republican period for their drive to push religion into the corner and isolate it from public life don’t know what they’re talking about.   

2) It is not possible to understand the evolution of America’s “language of liberty” without referring back to the 17th century religiously-charged constitutional struggles of the British Isles.  In this sense, our constitutional inheritance, which was at the heart of the War for Independence, depended on and derived from precedents that were set during a civil war that had both political and religious dimensions. 

However, the constitutional settlement that emerged out of these conflicts involved to a very large extent the complete abandonment of all political theology.  Any endorsement of ideas of “individual autonomy” would represent a significant departure from “Christian principles.”  “Judeo-Christian values,” fairly meaningless phrase that it is in this formulation, do not lead anyone to believe in individual autonomy.  On the contrary, whether in the Old Testament or the New, what we call individual autonomy is what Scripture defines as sin and pride.  Scripture is brimming with commands for social obligation, fraternity, charity, self-sacrifice and the corporate unity of the People of God.  Traditional Christian social teaching does not recognise an idea of “individual autonomy.”  Unity in the Body of Christ does not obliterate distinctions and personality, but it does preclude autonomy of any kind.  Enlightenment social theories along these lines were considered–and were–subversive because they contradicted the Christian teaching that allegedly so profoundly influenced the thought of Jefferson (!).  It should be enough that Jefferson was a great proponent of decentralism and liberty; we should not need to remake him into a crypto-theologian to appreciate his contribution to our country.  

It is correct to observe that Christian respect for the dignity and integrity of the human person and scholastic arguments on natural law paved the way for later applications of these reflections in political and legal reform.  It is true, as studies of the rhetoric of the Revolution have shown, that the use of originally religious language of covenants, which had already been introduced into political discourse during the English civil war, shaped broader popular understanding of the patriot cause more than did familiarity with Lockean contractual theory.  It is true that the broad mass of the population of the colonies was made up of professing Christians.  In this sense, the people constituted a nation of Christians.  To the extent that they still do, they may be called a Christian nation.  As Dr. Fleming said on this subject:

The United States was never a ‘Christian country’ in a confessional sense, though it was once a nation of mostly Christians.

Watch McCain pander:

I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles, that’s a decision the American people would have to make, but personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith.

Watch him completely abase himself:

I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.

Whenever I hear the claim that “this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles,” much less that the Constitution “established the United States of America as a Christian nation,” I have to wonder what people are thinking when they say these things.  In McCain’s case, it’s easy: he’s repeating what he thinks primary voters want to hear.  Never in his entire career, so far as I know, has McCain ever held forth on America as a Christian nation.  It would never have occurred to him.  The people who champion this or related ideas have been his adversaries within the GOP. 

It is true that America derives her religious culture from European Christianity, and it is true that Americans have been overwhelmingly Christian all along.  I think this religious heritage should be defended and extolled.  It is an integral part of American cultural identity.  What I really don’t understand is the need to make up these myths that the Republic is founded on “Christian principles” or that you can somehow find this claim in the Constitution.  First of all, these myths are unnecessary.  Second, it is an example of the mistaken drive to locate national and cultural identity in our political institutions and key political texts, when those identities really must be defined in other ways if we are not going to reduce them to ciphers or subordinates part of some political creedalism.   

Via Yglesias, I see that Perlstein has a good review of revisionist books on Vietnam.  Not that it will matter to Perlstein, who cannot recognise a basically sympathetic, if perhaps poorly phrased, argument when he sees one, but I happen to find the nationalist habit of revisionism in support of policies of ever-greater militarism and slaughter to be as abhorrent as he does.  His review also succeeds in drawing attention to the revisionists’ comfort with mass killing when it is being done by the ‘right’ people for the ‘right’ reasons, which should help put the crocodile tears many of the same people conveniently shed over the victims of the Cambodian genocide in perspective. 

Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia seems to be working to his advantage back home and in our own press to some extent.  Bollinger’s introduction has been the focus of much of the criticism, which has apparently helped to create sympathy for Ahmadinejad.  It would have been better had the exchange never took place if the only “acceptable” way Bollinger could approach the encounter was as a hectoring critic.

Here’s an amusing item from the Time article/Ahmadinejad press release:

He notes that Americans don’t understand Iranian history, saying that the movie 300 — with which he seems intimately familiar — was a “complete distortion of Iranian history.” Iran, he says, has never invaded anyone in its history.

For modern Iran, this is certainly true.  If the Achaemenids count as being part of the same Iran (and they did call their country Iran), then this would be another one of Ahmadinejad’s “creative” history lessons. 

Via Ross, I see that Mark Steyn makes the right points about Fred “Our Casualty Numbers Are Bigger Than Yours” Thompson:

It’s unbecoming for a serious nation to get into a pissing match about whose pile of war dead is higher.

And:

It should not be necessary in “supporting our troops” to denigrate everybody’s else. 

And:

That’s President Reagan addressing “the boys of Pointe du Hoc” at Normandy in 1984. I know everyone wants Fred to be the new Ron, but I miss the old one’s generosity of spirit. 

And:

But Senator Thompson’s line is a gross sentimentalization.

That all sounds right to me.

Someone else noticed Fred Thompson’s bit of stupidity that I criticised here.  It is apparently also a regular part of his stump routine.  The Post writer notes:

Even if the Soviet Union is not included in the calculation, U.S. military casualties in all wars combined remain lower than those of the British Commonwealth (”a combination of nations,” in Thompson’s phrase) in World War I and World War II. According to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the British Commonwealth lost 1.7 million troops in the two world wars.

Even excluding WWI, which was a fight for the “rights of small nations” only in the delusional mind of Woodrow Wilson and his admirers, Thompson’s claim is false and obviously so.  Of course, in my original post, I didn’t talk about the Soviets, because the idea that the Soviets were fighting for “other people’s liberty” was ludicrous and obviously so.  The Post does itself no favours by even mentioning this, since it has a perfectly solid argument against Thompson’s claim by looking at the sacrifices made by all our free allies in WWII.  There might be another occasion for acknowledging the enormous losses suffered by the USSR in WWII, but this was not it.

Thompson’s claim wasn’t exactly “jingoistic,” though it might be employed in service of future jingoism, but it was certainly nationalist and was rather chauvinistic at that.  It is a declaration of vast American moral superiority over all other nations put together.  These are the words of someone who would be President?  He would be the one to represent our country to the world?  The President, whose words carry tremendous influence for good or ill, cannot long afford to be so reckless and sloppy in his language as this. 

Thompson’s statement was an insistence that Americans have sacrificed more than all other nations combined for the sake of liberty.  It was plainly inaccurate, which is bad enough, but the significance of the remark is much worse.  I say again that this is an example of appalling arrogance and a show of enormous disrespect to all those soldiers of free nations that fought alongside our soldiers.  We expect, no, we normally demand that western Europeans remember the sacrifices made by Americans on their behalf.  They should remember and respect our war dead, just as we should remember and respect theirs.  We were allies, fighting on the same side towards the same end.  

Republican politicians were not always so oblivious to the rest of the world.  We once had a President who proudly acknowledged the contributions of U.S. allies in Normandy:

Do you remember the story of Bill Millin of the 51st Highlanders? Forty years ago today, British troops were pinned down near a bridge, waiting desperately for help. Suddenly, they heard the sound of bagpipes, and some thought they were dreaming. Well, they weren’t. They looked up and saw Bill Millin with his bagpipes, leading the reinforcements and ignoring the smack of the bullets into the ground around him. Lord Lovat was with him — Lord Lovat of Scotland, who calmly announced when he got to the bridge, “Sorry I’m a few minutes late,” as if he’d been delayed by a traffic jam, when in truth he’d just come from the bloody fighting on Sword Beach, which he and his men had just taken. There was the impossible valor of the Poles who threw themselves between the enemy and the rest of Europe as the invasion took hold, and the unsurpassed courage of the Canadians who had already seen the horrors of war on this coast. They knew what awaited them there, but they would not be deterred. And once they hit Juno Beach, they never looked back.

All of these men were part of a roll call of honor with names that spoke of a pride as bright as the colors they bore: the Royal Winnipeg Rifles, Poland’s 24th Lancers, the Royal Scots Fusiliers, the Screaming Eagles, the Yeomen of England’s armored divisions, the forces of Free France, the Coast Guard’s “Matchbox Fleet” and you, the American Rangers. 

“The impossible valor of the Poles” has no place in Fred Thompson’s view of what happened in WWII, nor do the forces of free France or the Royal Winnipeg Rifles.  Apparently, he thinks it’s all about us, or at least it is so much more about our role that everyone else just pales in comparison.  In his view, we must have done all the heavy lifting and all the real work.  The hundreds of thousands of Allied dead?  Fred Thompson doesn’t remember them, doesn’t even seem to know that they exist.  With his embarrassing statement, which he keeps reiterating, Fred Thompson is reminding us why he is not like that President and why he is not fit to be our next President. 

Taking pride in the achievements of our country is admirable and good, and we should be enormously grateful to those who served and those who lost their lives in America’s foreign wars.  Maybe that was Thompson’s original intention in saying what he did, but even the best of intentions do not excuse such historical ignorance and disrespect to some of our oldest, most reliable allies.  Patriots do not need to boast of the greatness of their country or the extent of the sacrifices made by their people.  They do not need to tally up casualties to prove their country’s value, nor do they need to constantly talk about how superior the country is.  Indeed, they can bring disrepute to their country by insisting on its superiority.  As we are reminded (a little too often) in other contexts, Americans have no monopoly on the love of liberty, nor have we outdone all other nations combined in the sacrifices made in its defense.  A patriot loves and admires his country and its people because they are his own and because they possess virtues peculiar to them–not because they are The Best Ever or The Most Heroic Ever.  Such an attitude seems to premise patriotism on the greatness of a people’s achievements, when patriotism should inspire the native of the tiniest, least powerful land in the world. 

It should be enough to say that our armies truly have fought and sacrificed for the sake of the freedom of other peoples.  That is true, that is admirable and that is something that should never be forgotten.  Neither should it be distorted or exaggerated into something that it is not–this is actually to fail to respect the actual achievements of our soldiers and to invent other achievements to take their place.  The reality of American sacrifice in WWII, for example, is sufficient to merit great honour and respect, and it does not need this exaggeration.  Chauvinists exaggerate the reality because they cannot tolerate other nations sharing in the praise and the glory of the achievement–they want it all for their own country.  Chauvinism of this kind is a disorder of the appetitive part of the soul.  It is an excess of pride. 

What can Thompson’s remarks be but a slight (unwitting and ignorant as it may be) to all those British, Commonwealth and free European soldiers who were there together with ours in France, Italy, the Low Countries and Germany?  How would Thompson’s defenders react if a foreign politician said something that excluded and ignored the sacrifices of Americans?  They’d scream bloody murder, that’s what they’d do, and they would have a point.  Well, it works both ways.  Some people have forgotten how to show respect to American allies over the last few years, and in the process they have forgotten that Americans will soon receive no respect if they do not show it towards other nations as well.   

Update: Alex Massie makes other good points related to WWII and modern American obliviousness about Allied contributions in his post on Gelernter.

We often hear about the Brits boffo counterinsurgency in Malaysia. But are the British still in Malaysia? Yes, it was a communist insurgency, which they defeated. But they also left, which presumably sapped the nationalist dimension from equation. ~Josh Marshall

As others have pointed out before, the Malayan case is much less encouraging for us, since the communist insurgents came primarily from the Chinese minority and so did not have nearly as much of a popular “sea” in which to swim.  It was more like a small pond.  The Muslim Malay majority was not sympathetic to their goals, and Malay nationalists supported the British effort in exchange for a promise of independence, which made the insurgents’ political marginalisation and defeat much, much easier.  Decolonisation and independence were already in the works, while communist revolution seemed both unnecessary and undesirable to the majority. 

Both Malaya and Vietnamese insurgencies grew out of the resistance to Japanese occupation, but the chief difference was that the Vietminh could appeal to national identity in ways that the communist insurgents in Malaya could not.  In other words, the Malayan insurgency lost in part because it could not count on a nationalist dimension in its fight, since the insurgents were not representing a nationalist cause, but rather an ideological one and one associated with a small minority group.  (Comparing the Malayan and Vietnamese cases seems to confirm Prof. Lukacs’ view that nationalism is the far more powerful and therefore potentially more dangerous modern ideology when compared to socialism and communism.)  Had the British opted to stay in Malaya indefinitely, as the French chose to try to do in Indochina, there might have been a broader-based anti-colonial rebellion, which would have probably been very different in its outcome. 

The Malayan case was also significantly different in the number of insurgents involved:

In the end the conflict involved up to a maximum of 40,000 British and Commonwealth troops against a peak of about 7–8,000 communist guerrillas.

Estimates of the insurgency’s size in Iraq vary, but I have seen figures this year as high as 60,000.  (As I understand this estimate, this refers only to Sunni insurgents.)  That’s seven to eight times the number of insurgents, while we have approximately four times as many soldiers fighting them.  If the optimal size of a counterinsurgency force is 10x larger than that of the insurgents, the British were much closer to the ideal and had the overwhelming support of the majority, and it still took them nine years before the crisis was formally ended.  The lesson from the Malayan experience is that you should fight very unpopular, isolated, highly ideological insurgencies and you should ally with the local nationalists if you want to win.  It is very difficult for a government, especially one backed by a foreign power, to compete with nationalist insurgents in the intensity and credibility of their nationalism. 

Reacting to these posts, a commenter at Ross’ blog wrote:

No wonder politicians give up and rely on scripts; this kind of henpecking the details and failing to engage on the larger point that Fred Thompson counts himself an unapologetic patriot who generally sees the US foreign policy as good. I’d think his judgement could be addressed on that point without dithering about body count.

Yes, why “dither” about facts?  Why be concerned with historical accuracy?  It’s not as if a deficient understanding of the past could have any consequences for the quality of policymaking. 

Speaking of “larger points,” one might engage the larger point that Thompson lends credibility to the stereotype of the ”unapologetic patriot” as unthinking, ignorant and boastful patriot, which in turn does so much to give proper American patriotism a bad name in the world.  One might engage the larger point that Thompson’s answer reflects not so much patriotism as it does chauvinism, since the patriot, as Chesteron said in Napoleon of Notting Hill, boasts not of the largeness of his country but of its smallness.  One might engage the point that Thompson largely ducked the question about America’s unpopularity today by jumping into a refrain about how much more Americans have sacrificed than all other nations for the “liberty and freedom of other peoples.”  Or a Thompson defender might engage the larger point that ignoring the contributions of our British, French, Commonwealth and other free European allies is an amazing thing for a presidential candidate to do in the announcement of his candidacy.  This is someone who allegedly wants to be President.  He claims to be prepared to run our foreign policy during what he regards as a crucially important time in a major worldwide struggle, and this struggle requires cultivating and tending alliances that have been badly strained over the past few years.  He chooses to launch that effort with an insult to some of our oldest and best allies. 

Suppose for a moment that Thompson genuinely doesn’t know that his statement was, in fact, false–is that supposed to encourage us to regard him well?  Haven’t we had quite enough of presidential candidates who relish their own lack of knowledge about the rest of the world and the history of other nations?  The gaffe, if we can call it that, is indicative of the sort of detail-free campaign he seems intent on running, and yet another example of a Republican who thinks that foreign policy is two parts nationalist rhetoric and one part bombast.  

Here’s another point.  If a Canadian or, God help us, a French politician were to make some similarly overblown statement, the reaction in certain circles in this country would be one of hysterical outrage at the expression of “anti-Americanism.”  Our pols are free to say whatever foolish, ignorant thing they please and can ignore U.S. allies whenever it suits them, but just watch those pols issue denunciations of those same allies the moment their leaders utter the ‘wrong’ thing or fail to show their gratitude to America for all that we have done for them.     

Ross has some good remarks on the previous post, and he’s right to note that WWII casualty estimates vary.  My original statements were based on this source, while the Wikipedia entry gives some different numbers.  While the figures are different, the other source does show that British, French and Commonwealth forces suffered more losses in absolute terms and in proportion to their national populations.  Let me repeat: I do not point this out to denigrate American sacrifice in WWII, which deserves the highest respect, but to insist that Americans remember the sacrifices of the other nations that were on our side in the war.  That shouldn’t be too much to ask from candidates aspiring to be President, or have I missed something?

Ross mentions that Thompson was responding to a question about the declining popularity of the United States.  His complete answer was this (quote near the bottom of the page):

Well, part of that comes with being the strongest, most powerful, most prosperous country in the history of the world.  I think that goes with the territory.  We’re more unpopular than we need to be.  That’s for sure, but our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples in this country [sic] than all the other countries put together….And I don’t feel any need to apologize for the United States of America. 

America was also ”the strongest, most powerful, most prosperous country in the history of the world” during earlier periods in the last century and this did not cause as much widespread hostility.  If some resentment and envy come with the territory of being a superpower, even this cannot account for the extent and depth of negative feeling towards our government (and perhaps towards our country).  Thompson says that he feels no need to apologise for the U.S., which is fine as far as it goes, but apparently he does feel the need to trumpet our vast moral, military and political superiority in just the sort of arrogant way that drives so many people around the world to resent America, or at least to resent our government.  It isn’t enough to say that we have more power and wealth than any country ever, but on top of that he feels he has to make the (false) claim that our nation has more accumulated virtue than all other nations on the planet put together.  For those seeking the beginning of an explanation of why even formerly relatively favourably inclined nations now have very sharply negative views (e.g., Turkey) of our government and our country,  they could do worse than to look at the mentality expressed in Thompson’s remarks.  

During his appearance on The Tonight Show, Fred said something that is rather stunningly and obviously untrue:

Our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples … than all the other countries put together.

There’s nothing terribly edifying in this kind of claim of national nobility-through-high body counts, but you have to wonder what the man could possibly have been thinking that would cause him to say this.  Even leaving aside WWI, where the claims to fighting for liberty are a bit more strained (and where all other belligerents lost far more people than America), this claim is demonstrably false.  It requires either an amazing ignorance about the past or contempt for American allies in WWII. 

Britain and France entered WWII at least officially to safeguard the independence of Poland, which I think gives them some right to claim that they suffered their losses for the sake of the “liberty” of other peoples.  In 1940 alone in a war fought on behalf of Poland, the French lost 90,000 KIA, and the British lost over 68,000.  The British, Commonwealth and Free French soldiers who died during the war were certainly fighting at least in part for “the liberty and freedom of other peoples,” and the number of their fatalities and casualities was necessarily higher than that of the United States.  Our casualties were on the order of 600,000 killed and wounded, while British and Commonwealth casualties (not including India’s 100,000) were approximately 915,000, which does not include civilian deaths in Britain and France.  If we were to judge these losses according to the size of the populations of the different countries, the disparity would be even greater.  Given how much smaller its population was, Britain’s losses were proportionally over three times as great as ours. 

None of this is to minimise the sacrifices that Americans have made.  But leave it to some showboating politician to take something noble and admirable and distort it as part of his talking points, insulting the war dead of our best allies in the process.  This claim of Thompson’s is just the sort of nationalist mythologising that we could stand to have much less of nowadays.  It doesn’t speak well for the management of foreign relations in any future Thompson Administration that the man has no idea how much the rest of the Allied nations sacrificed in WWII.

P.S. It might also be noted that Americans, like all other nations, did not enter the wars of the 20th century primarily because they were interested in fighting for the “liberty and freedom of other peoples.”  Those justifications followed once the country was already involved.  In the process of fighting for our own national interests, we also happened to be defending the cause of the “liberty and freedom of other peoples,” but had we not been provoked and had our government not already been so eager to intervene America would not have done much in the way of fighting on behalf of others’ freedom.  The reasons given for our involvement in the world wars were those of self-defense and retaliation, just as other nations were technically fulfilling their treaty obligations to allied states or fighting in self-defense as well.   

Before I go this morning, I wanted to mention that Fisk has an excellent article on the Armenian genocide.

Perhaps Steve Clemons should stick to foreign policy.  Affrerement, like adelphopoiesis in Byzantium (the terms mean the same thing), is not what the Boswells of the world would like us to think that it is, namely a medieval stamp of approval for homosexual relations.  Byzantinists understand that ceremonies for adelphopoiesis were not ceremonial approvals of homosexual erotic relationships, which neither secular nor ecclesiastical authorities would have approved, but were instead rites designed to formalise a strong social and emotional bond between men or as a mechanism for adoption.  It is strange that some moderns should have such difficulty imagining such fraternal bonds between friends. 

During the question session following his talk on his book Napoleon’s Egypt, Prof. Cole makes a brief remark (around 38:40) about Byzantine Egypt that caught my attention, since one of my professional hobbyhorses is the old claim that the dissenting populations of the Near East “welcomed” or did not put up much resistance to the Islamic invasions.  Of course, they didn’t put up much resistance, but this was not a function of their alienation from the empire.  (Indeed, evidence even for the existence of such alienation is very thin.)  In short, I think this idea that imperial religious policy contributed to the loss of the Near East is a myth fostered by modern historians, which I believe began with Gibbon, who were already biased against Byzantine “theocracy” and regarded the Christianisation of Rome to be a civilisational disaster.  Anything that might lend support to the idea that Christianity or Orthodoxy undermined the security of the state would be seized on, and the Christological controversies became favourite examples, since these controversies already seemed bizarre and ridiculous to many modern scholars.  This idea of disaffected religious dissidents yielding to invaders was also mixed up with some very anachronistic ideas about ethnic separatism and heresy functioning as the expression of national consciousness. 

The “evidence” to which Prof. Cole refers comes from, in fact, suppositions about what must have happened as a way of explaining the success of Islamic arms.  Depicting these provinces as ripe fruits waiting to fall into the lap of the Muslims, this view does not give the Muslims very much credit for their own conquests.  

There is not actually much evidence of local collaboration with or even satisfaction about the Islamic conquests, and there is more that tells us that the invasions were viewed very negatively.  Coptic chronicler John of Nikiu recorded the coming of Islam as a disaster for the empire, to which Copts and other non-Chalcedonians retained strong allegiance.  They just didn’t like that their confession wasn’t in control of religious policy and believed that God was punishing the empire because of the government’s Chalcedonianism.  There is some irony that secular historians have been reproducing a charge of anti-imperial disloyalty against religious dissidents in Byzantium that matched some of the official government views of these dissident groups.     

Prof. Cole said:

Towards the end, of course it was the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire that ruled Egypt, there’s some evidence that the Egyptians didn’t really fight to retain that government when the Arab Muslims came in because the Byzantines had attempted to impose Eastern Orthodoxy in Egypt and the Egyptians were Coptic and had their own [sic].  So even with the Romans towards the end, I think they were weakened by their social policies. 

It is perfectly understandable that Prof. Cole would say this, since this was a common view until not all that long ago.  If you are relying on Ostrogorsky’s classic text, you will come away convinced that this interpretation is right, and it does sound rather compelling at first.  If you are thinking about the intersection of political and religious loyalties from a post-Reformation perspective and assume that religious dissidents would mobilise (or fail to mobilise) politically because of their religious sympathies or disagreements with the authorities, you are going to misunderstand the late antique and early medieval worlds rather badly.  Neither Egyptian nor Syrian Byzantine subjects were organised or mobilised in the seventh century, and they would not have had much, if any, tradition of being mobilised for military service.  North Africa has even less supporting evidence for religious alienation, since Carthage fell some time after all religious controversies between Constantinople and the west had been settled, which has led to some very imaginative but rather far-fetched claims of some enduring legacy of Donatism. 

Their “failure” to fight did not signal a lack of loyalty to the empire as such, but rather reveals that antique and medieval imperial polities did not cultivate the kind of conscious political attachment to a state that might very well be expected in later periods.   Particularly in the absence of effective political leadership or organised military support, armed resistance by the population was extremely unlikely as a response to foreign invasion.  Cities would yield to invading armies because they wished to avoid sack and massacre, and not because they secretly wished for a chimerical “liberation” from religious oppression.  The “ease” of the Islamic invasions was facilitated by Byzantine political and military weakness following the Persian War and particularly by specific Byzantine defeats on the battlefield.  There is an understandable desire to find some “deeper” causes for such a momentous change in the history of the Near East, but there are good arguments that this change can be best understood through old-fashioned institutional and military history.     

Cross-posted at Cliopatria

The only thing wrong with his [Napoleon’s] theory was that it was 115 years ahead of its time. ~Prof. Juan Cole (at approx. 61:20) on Napoleon’s views of the Ottoman Empire during his lecture on his book, Napoleon’s Egypt

Via Antiwar Blog

If you have the time, watch the whole thing.  Prof. Cole’s video takes about an hour, but it is an interesting topic and of obvious relevance to our present predicament.  I would just add that the Egyptian campaign also follows the model of what was supposed to happen in the Fifth Crusade (capture Egypt to dominate/secure the Levant).

As an aside, it was notable, but not surprising, that our textbook this summer, Al-Kitaab, which incorporates some elements of a northern Egyptian dialect into its lessons, included 1798 in a list of famous dates.  (The list was designed to help us practice reading the eastern Arabic numeral system.) 

Update: Prof. Cole has a brief digression about other colonial episodes, saying, “The Americans could do it [dominate] in the Philippines at the estimated cost of 400,000 Filipino lives, by the way, and it tells you something about the callousness and brutality of the American power elite that they actually instanced the Philippines as a success story of American colonialism on the eve of going into Iraq.”  He isn’t referring directly to this, which I commented on here, but it is the same kind of thinking.

There can be absolutely no argument that a million or more Armenians died during World War I.  But, on issue of whether genocide—a deliberate plan to eradicate a people—occurred or not, there is a big gap between the narrative of Diaspora communities and that of prominent historians.  The historical debate is more complex. ~Michael Rubin

Via Yglesias

Well, there is certainly a big gap between historians who take the Turkish government’s view and those who actually properly handle the evidence.  I don’t know whether the Turkish historian Taner Akcam ranks as “prominent” in Mr. Rubin’s world, but the argument he lays out for the deliberate, central planning of the genocide is thorough and persuasive.  Even though it required quite a lot of political pressure to make it happen, the ADL’s belated, grudging and qualified acknowledgement of the genocide is to their credit. 

It goes without saying that similar agnosticism and references to the complexity of historical debate in connection with certain other genocides would be considered despicable, dehumanising to the victims and basically unwelcome in polite society.  The histories and historiographies of Cambodia and Rwanda were and are no less complex, but there were still deliberate genocides carried out in those countries.  Of course, neither the Khmer Rouge nor the Hutu Power maniacs have well-heeled lobbyists, a U.S.-allied government and willing apologists to help cast doubt and cover up for them. 

Update: Due credit to Jeff Jacoby for a good column on this.

Today’s dynamic and hopeful Asia — a region that brings us countless benefits — would not have been possible [bold mine-DL] without America’s presence and perseverance. ~George W. Bush

You know, if I were Japanese (or Taiwanese or Thai, to say nothing of Indian) I think I would get pretty tired of hearing this sort of thing.  Yes, I understand that this was a speech to the VFW and the President is obliged to pay his respects to veterans of the Pacific and Korean Wars, as well he should.  Nonetheless, we peddle these myths about our indispensible role in the reconstruction of many of these countries after the war, and this leads us to make mistakes in our current policies.  Thus Mr. Bush once again trots out post-WWII occupation and reconstruction as some sort of “proof” that current Iraq policy makes sense, which would be interesting, except that Japan was not like the way Iraq is and the two cases are not comparable at all.  If there were people who believed that Japan was unsuited to democracy (if today’s virtually permanent LDP rule they have there is what you want to call democracy), they were evidently too much in thrall to official propaganda about the nature of the Japanese regime, since the Japanese had already had universal manhood suffrage for decades.  They had a liberal constitutional monarchy, and their legal system was based on European models.  (Also, the implicit comparison the President makes between Shinto and Islam is unpersuasive for what I would hope are obvious reasons.) 

For people who normally get so edgy when Vietnam is mentioned in any negative connection with Iraq, the administration is strangely happy to make lame analogies with U.S. involvement with almost any  Asian country now.  For what it’s worth, Japan was fairly “dynamic” before the Pacific War, and they were, I suppose, “hopeful.”  It may have been the hopefulness of a would-be empire and regional overlord, but it was hopefulness all the same.  Indeed, they were rather too optimistic in what they thought they could accomplish.  That’s something worth bearing in mind.

There is one way in which Mr. Bush might have a small point, if he means to refer only to the postwar period and he wanted to talk specifically about, say, South Korea alone.  It was primarily the Japanese themselves who rebuilt their own country and transformed it into the economic dynamo that it became.  Having already industrialised significantly before and during the war, the Japanese were hardly unfamiliar with modern industry, finance and capitalism, and they had also had some experience with parliamentary government.  Having successfully created and sustained these things once before, they were prepared to rebuild and recreate anew.  Our role was to allow this without allowing Japan to rearm and resume its great power ambitions.      

Running throughout this speech is the idea that every nation in the world wants freedom and has the potential to do great things, but none of them could have done or will ever do anything if the Americans don’t show up to “help” or, more precisely, make them do it.  Especially if Mr. Bush is right about the potential and the desire of all peoples to live free, this is appalling arrogance to claim that their success is dependent on us.  On the other hand, if it is so heavily dependent on us, how will it be sustained if we should ever depart?  If the former, our involvement is redundant and pointless, and if the latter our involvement is ultimately futile. 

Pluralistic though it was, Islamic Spain was no democracy. ~Alexander Kronemer

Additionally, Kronemer writes of a generic “Islamic Spain,” as if there were no difference between Umayyads, Almoravids and Almohads.  The latter two dynasties were decidedly much less interested in perpetuating whatever toleration and good intercommunal relations there had been before, and they were, in fact, much more fanatical.  It is remarkable how these dynasties play no role in Kronemer’s description of the worsening relations between Christians and Muslims in Spain.

Since most nations gain independence in armed struggle of one sort or another, armed struggle in which some civilians inevitably suffer, then by the “logic” of the ranteurs about “Naqba Denial” the existence of all those states should also be deemed catastrophes. But Israel alone is singled out for condemnation. ~Steven Plaut

Is it really?  Not by everyone.  The Greeks and Armenians remember their experiences with the forced expulsion of hundreds of thousands of their people for the sake of an ethnically homogenous nation-state in much the same way, or in even stronger terms: as the Megali Katastrofi or as the Tseghaspanut’yun respectively.  The Turkish government goes out of its way in the case of the Armenians to actively deny genocide and prosecutes those of its citizens who even hint that the extermination of the Armenians was planned and deliberate (as, of course, it was).  Naturally, any state that understands that its foundation lies on the graves of the innocent or is based on the forced expulsion or relocation of hundreds of thousands of civilians will be keen to ignore the record or deny the memory of these events.  Do such past crimes “delegitimise” the current state?  I don’t think so.  But the continued refusal to recognise the crimes for what they are is certainly not a legitimate method of defending a state against unreasonable or excessive attacks.   

Of course, the “inevitable” suffering of the civilian population during such conflicts is rather more inevitable when there is a plan of expulsion that results in massacres.  The final justifications in Plaut’s article, citing the far worse death tolls in the mayhem after the Partition or the ethnic cleansing and starvation of Germans after WWII, are typical diversionary moves.  Plaut does not, of course, care a whit about the German victims of these expulsions, nor would any attention be brought to their case except that the scale of suffering and devastation helps to make what happened to the Palestinians seem unimportant.  Rather than an old stand-by excuse that ”lots of bad things happened in that war,” Plaut has offered a different excuse: “lots of worse things have happened in other wars, which means that these events are irrelevant.”  He can impugn the integrity of some (though not all) of the revisionists, but he cannot wish away evidence.   

“We [the GOP] were founded as a reformist party,” he [Rove] said in our conversation this week, “not to be against something, but to help the little guy get ahead.” ~Michael Gerson

Er, actually, the party of “free labor, free soil, free men” was very much founded in direct ideological opposition to slavery and self-interested economic opposition to the low-tariff-supported agricultural interests of the South.  The GOP never had any interest in helping the “little guy” as such, and remained from its earliest days largely the protector of business and corporate interests through support for an impressively high import tariff, and then when multinationals needed lower tariffs the GOP dutifully became the party of “free trade.”  (Yes, there were also progressive Republicans who challenged some of the excesses of corporate power, but they did not define the party for most of its existence.)  This just might be why the “little guys” over the decades have tended to vote Democratic, and why it has only been a very recent development that the GOP has been winning over any of these voters thanks to nationalist, culturally populist and socially conservative appeals.  These voters come to support the GOP in spite of its continued privileging of the interests of corporations.  Perhaps someone could pen an argument in defense of this longstanding support for corporate interests (in which the words growth, progress, technology and modernisation would probably figure prominently), and make the case why it is better to put the government at the disposal of these interests for some greater good, but to describe the primary vehicle of corporations’ political influence as an organisation founded for the sake of helping the “little guy get ahead” is just appalling revisionism (even by the very, very low standards of Karl Rove).    

Update: Incidentally, it used to be an old stand-by of Republican rhetoric that it was not the proper role of government to “help the little guy get ahead.”  Instead, the goal was to remove the burden of government to allow citizens to flourish. 

India was also a real country before the British colonized it, whereas Iraq was a colonial contrivance from the outset. ~Fred Kaplan

Keeping the human losses of the Partition in mind as many throw around ideas of how to decentralise or partition Iraq is something worth doing, and much of Kaplan’s article makes for interesting reading, but I had to marvel at this statement.  Which India does Kaplan mean?  I don’t object to making distinctions between polities that have meaning for their inhabitants and those that have little or none–this is a significant difference between what we can call “artificial” states and “real” ones.  It is the difference between largely fictitious, failing states, such as Bosnia or Somalia, and more “real,” successful ones, such as a Slovenia or a Thailand.  Of course, it is important to recognise that all modern nation-states are to some extent founded on the ruin and death of other even more real countries that they gobbled up and suppressed, but even so there are nation-states today that actually have meaning for their citizens and many that mean next to nothing at all.  At some point, every nation-state is a contrivance and something imposed, because it seeks to unify any number of polities and peoples who have previously not identified or united with one another.  A crucial difference between successes and failures may be related to who is engaged in the contrivance.  With Iraq, the contrivance was largely introduced from outside, the product of gutting the Ottoman Empire and the need for an additional place on which to fob off another Hashemite on the locals.  In India’s case, the contrivance was less sudden, slightly less arbitrary and done with the participation of more of the people.  A longer experience of empire had fashioned a greater sense of identity and solidarity than could have been the case in Iraq.   

Still, Kaplan is attributing a pre-existing “reality,” unity and identity to “India” that certainly did not extend across all or even much of what is today’s India.  This may seem to be tangential to the main argument, but it is actually the crux of the issue.  What makes a state “real” and how it becomes “real” (i.e., able to inspire loyalty and something with which its members identify) are the two basic questions for Iraq today.   

It is significant that the modern nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is heavily, though not exclusively, North Indian in its definition of Hindutva and in its electoral support.  The preeminent place of the Hindi language is also representative of the connection between North Indian culture and the definition of national identity.  (Hochdeutsch played a similar role in unified Germany, and likewise the Tuscan dialect in Italy.)  While it is possible to speak of a shared Indian civilisation in which all of the Subcontinent (including Pakistan) participates, I think it goes too far to say that ”India” was a “real country” in the way Kaplan means it.  In a political sense, and as a matter of the self-identification of people living there, it was no such thing.  “India” was mostly an administrative fiction or more appropriately, as Metternich might have put it, a geographical expression in, say, 1800. 

The regions, polities, cultures and communities with which people identified (and this is true of so many places) were not on such a grand, abstract scale.  This is normal, and it even applied to our own country in the nineteenth century.  Our country, which Kaplan might grant possessed a certain reality, was a number of countries and a number of states bound together in a political federation.  In India, colonial-era railways served and increased political centralisation and more closely connected different parts of the Subcontinent; the shared experience of colonial domination also helped to forge a political-national identity across communities and regions.  Arguably, the numerous, more “real” countries of the Subcontinent were subordinated to the construction of a nation-state, which follows to some extent the model of modernisation and centralisation in Germany and Italy. 

It is true that the Mughals ruled over an expansive stretch of the Subcontinent prior to the arrival of the EIC (and it was a stretch that continued to expand up through the late eighteenth century), and it is true that the last Mughal emperor became a symbolic figurehead associated with nascent anti-colonialist “nationalism” during the Mutiny, but there are large parts of modern India (much of the Deccan, for example) where Mughal writ never ran (and where British influence took longer to be established).  Political fragmentation and weakness (the Peacock Throne didn’t up and leave Delhi on its own!) were the norm prior to colonisation, and it was the centralising, organising activity of British colonialism that created an administrative unit out of a number of very different regions, cultures, languages and polities.  Colonisation brought about administrative and political unification of a number of countries and states (which, I would hasten to add, are also not the same things), and also created the conditions for the forging of something closer to a shared identity.  There are two ways to look at this question: either the British colonisers stayed too briefly in Africa and the Near East to achieve the same results that they did in India, or they did tremendous violence to the many more “real” places and polities out of which they created what became India and Pakistan.  As the violent history after Partition suggests, war has a major role in building up nation-states as “real” states and inculcating shared national identity (which is why so many nationalists are typically very favourably disposed towards war, as they see it, to some extent correctly, as a glue for a variety of peoples who might otherwise see fewer and fewer reasons to remain in political union). 

While Kevin Drum continues to embarrass himself, Ross has another good post on one particular angle of the debate over the designation “progressive.”  The “meme” of progressives as supporters of eugenics and sterilisation comes from the history of early 20th century progressivism.  (Or you can try the short version: just watch Gattaca and see whose politics seem to have prevailed in that world.)  You can merely glance at this period and find progressives who endorsed or upheld either segregationist or sterilisation or eugenics policies: Woodrow Wilson, Oliver Wendell “Three Generations Of Idiots Are Enough” Holmes, and Margaret Sanger.  Sanger saw birth control as a means to reduce the reproduction of undesirable populations.  Every time someone on the left endorses the “right” to abortion today he does accept the idea that there are some who should never be born.  Progressive arguments on behalf of sterilisation and eugenics took it one step further: there were those who should never be allowed to conceive in the first place.   

Those three are not minor, fringe figures in the history of American progressivism.  They are part of the legacy that progressives today call to mind when they use this name.  Today, I assume progressives would abhor state-coerced sterilisation and overtly racist and eugenics rationales for birth control, but it was not always so.  Now there are those on the left who favour a “positive” eugenics that is supposed to be qualitatively different from the bad, old eugenics.  If Kevin Drum doesn’t know about that, that’s hardly Ross’ fault. 

In an otherwise superb piece on the (often cynical) political and lobbying battle over the Armenian genocide resolution, Michael Crowley has this unfortunate line:

Most Armenian-Americans are descended from survivors of the slaughter and grew up listening to stories about how the Turks, suspecting the Orthodox Christian Armenians of collaborating with their fellow Orthodox Christian Russians [bold mine-DL] during World War I, led their grandparents on death marches, massacred entire villages, and, in one signature tactic, nailed horseshoes to their victims’ feet.

This is almost entirely right, which makes the mistake all the more glaring.  Diasporan Armenians often do talk of nothing else when it comes to politics, and the official Turkish line is that Armenian collaboration with the Russians was the “justification” for the deportation of Armenians “away from” the front lines.  However, the main descriptive error here is obvious, or should be, since Armenian Apostolic Christians are of a different confession from the Russians and have been for a very, very long time.  Ironically, this allowed the Armenians inside Russia to enjoy relatively greater ecclesiastical independence as a non-Orthodox church than other non-Russian Orthodox churches, such as the Georgian, but that is a different matter.  The difference here is crucial because the genocide occurred against the “loyal” millet, the one Christian community that could not be directly implicated in the designs of Russian or Greek or some other Orthodox state’s foreign policy, because they were not Eastern Orthodox and were under their own religious authority that had no ties to Moscow or any other center of Orthodoxy.  There were some Armenian revolutionaries who sided against the Central Powers in the war, but they were not representative of Armenians in general, much less could the entire community be reasonably held responsible for the actions of a relative few.  This is what made the genocide that much more shocking and terrible to the Armenians–unlike the other Christian minorities, they had by and large remained loyal and law-abiding subjects.  For the ideologues of the CUP, however, one Christian minority was as much of a threat as any other.  To do full justice to the history of the genocide, it is exactly the difference between Armenian and Orthodox Christians that must be kept in mind.   

Matt Yglesias recommends to us an old Robert Kaplan article on the virtues of the AKP.  Since I am a pretty convinced AKP-phobe, if that is what we can call it, I thought I would take a look.  Within two sentences I decided that the article cannot be a very credible source of insight on modern Turkey, since it manages to get late Ottoman history so profoundly wrong:

The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire, like the coeval multi-ethnic Hapsburg Austrian one, was more hospitable to minorities than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately succeeded it. The Ottoman caliphate welcomed Turkish, Kurdish, and other Muslims with open arms, and tolerated Christian Armenians and Jews.

First of all, you cannot seriously compare Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire on this point.  During the same period of time in the late nineteenth century, before anyone had ever heard of Young Turks, the two empires treated their minorities in very different ways.  In the 1890s, there were large-scale, government-aided massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which had followed the massacres of the Bulgarians in the 1870s.  In Austria, nothing of the kind was happening–the emperor was the mediator and protector of all the subjects in his domains, and was a force working against, not with, any nationalist or supremacist forces within the empire.  Obviously, the Arab subjects of the Ottoman Empire did not regard Ottoman rule quite so highly as Kaplan does in retrospect.  Second of all, it is not exactly true that the empire was more tolerant than the republic, since the empire had done most of the heavy lifting of genocide and expulsion of minorities from Anatolia.  The failure of the Greek invasion of 1919-22 and the Treaty of Lausanne did the rest of the damage.  The main difference is that the empire engaged in a lot of killing of non-Muslim minorities, while the republic turned its attention to oppressing non-Turkish minorities regardless of religion.  In a really twisted way, that’s a kind of progress.  

Kaplan would very much like to distinguish between the Young Turks who “brought down the empire” (small point–it was the Allies who “brought down the empire” and it was the Young Turks who were stupid enough to get into the war that destroyed the empire) and the quasi-constitutional monarchy that existed before 1908, which would be interesting, except that this is mostly a lot of rot.  Anyone familiar with Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act will know that things cannot be divvied up quite so nicely.  The Young Turks were by turns Pan-Turanian, Islamist or Ottomanist, depending on what the circumstances demanded, and to call them “secular-minded” as Kaplan does is to mistake later Kemalism for what the CUP represented when it came to power.  Kemal emerged out of the Young Turk movement, but it is rather obvious that this movement was not really “secular-minded.”  It was a fusion of Islam, nationalism and progressive reformism in one nasty bundle.  The triumvirate wasn’t being purely opportunistic in calling for a jihad during WWI. 

Why does this matter (besides getting the history right and shooting down weird pro-Ottoman sentiments in the West)?  It matters because AKP has been very keenly cultivating a neo-Ottomanist ideology–one that follows up on and goes beyond the neo-Ottomanism of Ozal that Kaplan thinks is so wonderful–that naturally regards the pre-republican period fondly as a time of Turkish greatness and relative Islamic (Sunni) unity.  It is also relevant that the poem that got Erdogan jailed in the first place was written by Ziya Gokalp, the leading ideologist of the CUP and one responsible for many of the nasty ideas that subsequently led to genocide.  Perhaps it tells us something that Erdogan chose to cite that particular author.  I am confident that if a European politician started publicly quoting from the works of fascist or Nazi writers, he would not be winning a lot of sympathy from Western audiences.

Those unfamiliar with this history can be forgiven for indulging in misplaced sympathy for the AKP, but Kaplan almost certainly knows better.  Like many a Western Turcophile, Kaplan finds the integration of Turkey into Europe a wholly good thing and seems willing to concoct the necessary arguments to make this most unpalatable idea go down more easily.

Update: Here is an April post of mine pouring cold water on another one of Yglesias’ “but the AKP isn’t so bad” arguments.

Dan McCarthy, who has reviewed Prof. Lukacs’ excellent George Kennan: A Study in Character for TAC, points us to the WSJ’s reviewer of the same book.  You can read both if you like, but if you’re pressed for time I recommend that you just read Dan’s.  As someone who has read the book and having written a review of it myself (publication to be announced later), I can say with confidence that Joffe does not really do justice to the subject of the study or to the work of the scholar who wrote it. 

Presented with a fascinating character study of an important, learned and serious historian and foreign policy analyst, Joffe takes the predictable route of checking off ideological boxes.  The problem with the review isn’t just that the reviewer gets hung up on Kennan’s lack of enthusiasm for parliamentary democracy in the 1930s (be honest–if you had been around in the 1930s, would you have thought much of parliamentary democratic systems?) and his admiration for certain conservative authoritarian rulers (which is so far from “baffling” that it is baffling that Joffe would find it baffling).  This focus hardly helps to get to the core of the book, which actually has less to do with Kennan’s attitudes towards democracy and dictatorship.  His political views are part of the story, but the brilliance of the book is its illumination of the inner life and, obviously, character of the man.  I don’t want to say more, lest I give away too many of my own thoughts about it. 

In the end, one gets the distinct impression that Joffe does not know, or does not know well, much of anything else that Prof. Lukacs has written, nor does he understand the close affinities between the author and subject that help to explain some elements of the book.  For instance, it is rather relevant that Prof. Lukacs has been a noted anti-anti-communist for decades, but a reader of Joffe’s review would have no idea about any of this.  It is sufficient for a WSJ reviewer to dismiss those lacking in ideological purity.  It is my strong sense that the George Kennan described in Prof. Lukacs’ fine work would not want even the faint praise of someone writing for that paper, since it has become the journalistic center of everything twisted and wrong with American foreign policy thinking in our time. 

I have already done most of the commenting on Mormonism that I am going to do, but since the topic has come up again in Ross’ latest bloggingheads and prompted a reply to Ross’ request for a clarification from Prof. Fox, a longtime friend of Eunomia, I thought I might add a few comments.  Prof. Fox writes:

For example: Matt Yglesias claims in the Bloggingheads video that the Mormon church teaches that “the New World, in pre-Columbian times, was dominated by two vast rival empires.” (Those would be “the Nephites,” the people who carried on the family name and traditions of an early prophet named Nephi, and “the Lamanites,” a group named after his brother and enemy, Laman.) While the history of Book of Mormon interpretation over the past 180 years is actually pretty complicated, the basic facts are that Matt here is correctly describing what most Mormons who read the book believed…up until about 20-30 years ago, that is. The Book of Mormon itself never suggests the existence of massive, continent-wide, roaming empires; rather, serious readers have come to recognize that in fact the book talks about a couple (or actually more than a couple) pretty densely populated yet nonetheless localized tribes, and nearly everything presented in the book as fact takes place, according to its own narrative, within an area that a person on foot could cross within week, if not less. This is what we Mormons called the “limited geography” thesis: specifically, that the book isn’t telling us the whole history of the Native Americans (which many Mormons admittedly thought the primary purpose of the book was for decades), but rather telling the story of some relatively restricted groups, whose story God thought important enough to make certain it would be preserved and brought forth in our day.

However, the official LDS version of the Book of Mormon has this passage (Helaman 3:8):

And it came to pass that they did multiply and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea ^awest to the sea east.

And again, Helaman 11:20:

And thus it did come to pass that the people of Nephi began to prosper again in the land, and began to build up their waste places, and began to multiply and spread, even until they did ^acover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the sea east.

There may be ways to reconcile this language with the “limited geography” thesis (perhaps the land between the two seas is exceedingly small?), and I won’t pretend that I am anything close to being thoroughly versed in these matters, but it appears at first glance that the earlier prevailing view of vast territories is one that seems to have some direct support in a central LDS scriptural text. 

Incidentally, there are other things that will leap out at the reader of the online version of the Book of Mormon (especially since they are hyperlinked).  For instance, there are several references to weapons made of steel.  Leaving aside the technological question, this creates another problem.  The official site does the cross-referencing work for you, pointing you to citations from the Bible that (in the traditional King James language) also refer to steel.  This seems a strange thing to draw attention to, since these passages about steel weapons from the Bible are English mistranslations of the adjective for a bow made of bronze (toxon chalkoun in the Septuagint versions of 2 Sam. 22:35 and Ps. 18:34/LXX 17:34), which tends to confirm that the language was taken directly from the King James mistranslation rather than echoing the content of the Old Testament books to which it is being compared. 

These are probably familiar arguments to Prof. Fox and others, and they may therefore be as tiresome to them as shocked secularist discoveries of contradictions between the Gospel accounts are to me.  Nonetheless, if a Mormon defense of the historicity of their scriptures’ claims is to persuade anyone, it will need to sort out these contradictions.

My Cliopatria post on David Halberstam’s final article is here.

My Scene colleague Cheryl Miller points to these three items.  Despite what seems like a perfectly crafted attempt to bait me into an extremely long response, I would make just a few points.  First, Ms. Grabar’s article was not “preposterous,” though it was weaker than it should have been.  Second, a Jane Austen Christianity is the Christianity of the safe, the unremarkable and the ordinary.  I do not claim that there is no need for such a thing or that it is unimportant, but the idea that it is actually more profound or more powerful than Dostoevsky’s vision seems, well, just silly. Third, no one who understands anything about Dostoevsky would say the following, as Tom West does:

Dostoevsky’s solution, for all its anti-European sentiment, seems to take its departure from the same post-Hegelian premise: only will, and not reason, can guide us.

The principal error of both Peter Verkhovensky (Demons) and Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) is to place their trust in the power of the will and the willingness to overstep the boundaries of the law, both human and divine.  Plainly, for Dostoevsky will alone cannot guide us, and in Dostoevsky’s Orthodoxy–heavily influenced by the Slavophiles and indirectly by the Fathers–there is the understanding that will apart from or in opposition to God is death and isolation.  Willfulness against God is a mark of the demonic; it is at the heart of our ancestors’ rebellion in the Garden.  Further, it is the one-sidedness of reason alone, reason without faith, reason against God, that Dostoevsky, like the Slavophiles, repudiates when he critiques reason.  Likewise, no fair and accurate reading of The Grand Inquisitor could lead anyone to conclude the following about Dostoevsky:

For Dostoevsky, then, either we accept the absolute authority of the father and king and church, or we repudiate human reason and follow nothing but arbitrary will, personal or collective.    

Amazing.  This is totally wrong.  It is entirely backwards.  West claims to be reviewing a work by Joseph Frank, but the Frank works on Dostoevsky I have read would never have made such a claim.  In the story, who represents the (for Dostoevsky) unholy trinity of authority, miracle and bread?  The Grand Inquisitor.  Who represents a religion in harmony with human freedom in this story?  Christ.  Those who have read Dostoevsky’s Writer’s Diary cannot miss his frequent, polemical equations (in which he again echoes the Slavophiles) between socialism, Catholicism and rationalism.  The first two, in Dostoevsky’s view, both share a devotion to authority, miracle and bread.  Dostoevsky’s Christianity, his Orthodoxy, is the Orthodoxy in which Christ did not come down from the Cross because He so respected man’s freedom.  This is the same Dostoevsky who does not have Fr. Zosima’s body exuding the scent of myrrh after his death, because Dostoevsky does not wish to make faith an automatic response to a miracle, but a freely chosen embrace of the Incarnate Truth.  (A good argument can be made that Dostoevsky has gone too far in his opposition to both authority and miracle, since the Orthodox Church acknowledges the importance of both, but that is not at issue here.)  Dostoevsky’s vision is the one in which evil is the proof of human freedom–suffering will exist if man is to be free–and appeal to authority is the mark of a Christianity that seeks to supplant Christ.  His Winter Notes on Summer Impressions is another valuable source for understanding his priorities.  This was someone who did not discard the old scheme of “liberty, equality and fraternity,” but rather refused to let it be defined by liberals and socialists according to their lights.  Setting up Dostoevsky as some embodiment of the most ultra of reactionaries is satisfying to someone already intent on belittling traditionalism (so intent that he misses that Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn hold positions very close to one another in the end), but it does no justice to the complexity of Dostoevsky’s works and the mixture of his liberal background, his later Slavophile-inspired romantic conservative nationalism and renewed acceptance of Orthodoxy.     

What does this mean?  First, let’s consider idaafa.  Idaafa is a construction that expresses the possessive relationship between two nouns in Arabic.  The other day I likened it to the German genitive, and the more I learn about idaafa, the more I think that this is a very good analogy.  It is a very useful way to understand this idea, at least for those who have studied German.  For example, das Buch des Vaters is a genitive construction in German.  Arabic will have the exact same construction with kitab-u al-waalidi.  Like anything in a German genitive construction, the idaafa must take genitive case endings.  Tanween, meanwhile, is the concept of doubling the last vowel in a word.  To have the nominative indefinite, you double the damma, which is equivalent to our short ‘u’, but if you have the tanween al-fatha (this phrase is itself idaafa) you double the fatha (equivalent to a short ‘a’).  This has the effect of making the noun accusative, and you cannot have a random accusative floating around in a genitive construction.  At least, that’s what I’ve managed to understand so far.  Now admit it–you really wanted to know that.  

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So far as I can tell from parsing this solipsistic flapdoodle, John Updike thinks the New Deal should be judged a great success because FDR was politically skillful enough to persuade Updike’s Dad to become a Democrat. ~Ross Douthat

Ross has this right.  In response to Shlaes’ revisionism (in which she basically argues something rather obvious that I learned from the time I was old enough to understand English–namely that FDR made the Depression longer and worse than it had to be through his New Deal policies), Updike tells a story about the human costs of the Depression, which would be all the more compelling for the “governmment-as-human transaction” model Updike is pushing if Hoover had not also helped to deepen and worsen the Depression through his own economic interventionist policies.  Updike’s story is an interesting portrait of how government-exacerbated crises can work, perversely enough, to instill even greater support for the government: the Depression was so miserable that people became grateful for whatever assistance they could get, even though the very programs they were using were working, on a macro level, to perpetuate their misery.  The popular response to national security crises is much the same: rationally, the public should despise the government that allows major terrorist attacks to succeed on native soil, but every time the public rallies around the very government that dramatically failed them out of a mixture of loyalty, patriotism, fear, dependency and, bizarrely, gratitude. 

Shlaes’ counterargument would be, surely, that the very government intervention that Updike’s father found so appealing on a personal level was part of a raft of destructive policies that stifled any chance at economic recovery prior to the both inflationary and expansive pressures of wartime spending.  Whatever else might be said about the flaws of corporations and the real dangers of concentrated economic power, the solution to economic stagnation is not actually to demonise the “malefactors of great wealth” and tax them at exorbitant rates.  The solution to economic weakness is not actually to tighten the money supply by using the Fed as a blunt instrument to batter and crush what recovery had started coming into 1937.  Updike’s argument is, in miniature, everything that is wrong with old-style left-wing economic thinking: it doesn’t matter whether the policy actually works to alleviate poverty or spur economic activity, provided that the government is supposedly trying to do the “right thing” because government is “ultimately a human transaction.”  (As if commercial exchange is any less a “human” transaction than the coercive extraction and redistribution of resources by the state!  Theft is a human transaction, too.)

It would be interesting if sentimental invocations of family history and changed political preferences could trump all other arguments.  If that were the case, I could discredit interventionist foreign policy just by recounting the political conversion of my ancestors from conservative New Jersey Democrats to dedicated Republicans after WWI.  My dad’s family rejected the Democratic Party because of Wilsonian foreign policy, and they deepened in their hostility to the Democracy during the New Deal years.  They despised FDR, their descendants despised FDR and I grew up despising FDR.  So, I come by my opposition to foreign wars and the welfare state honestly.  My great-great grandfather’s brother even wrote a short pamphlet denouncing the New Deal as unconstitutional (which it was).  I think my ancestors were right to reject these things, because I think they were all very bad for the country, but I also think that there are rational arguments to be made against them that go beyond, “My great-grandmother really disliked Roosevelt.”  Of course, those of us who have to fight against conventional historical interpretation of the last century and the established institutions created by now-mythologised Presidents are compelled to make rational arguments, while their defenders can continue to wax poetic about Ol’ Pappy and the soup kitchen.

A large portion of modern wars erupted because aggressive tyrannies believed that their democratic opponents were soft and weak. ~Joshua Muravchik

Except for the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Crimean War, the War of Secession, the Franco-Austrian War (1859) and the other Wars of Italian Unification, the War of the Triple Alliance (South America), Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Turkish Wars, the War of the Pacific (South America), the Boer War, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Sino-Japanese Wars, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, WWI, the Spanish Civil War, Suez, Vietnam, Panama, the Bosnian War, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, the First and Second Congo Wars and the invasion of Iraq, Muravchik’s generalisation holds up pretty well.

I’m not sure we can make too much from the argument that the country has chosen the Southerner five times out of seven in the modern era. Seven is a very small sample! And several of the examples — like when Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976 — are much more easily attributed to historical context. ~Marc Ambinder

This seems right to me.  Leave aside for now the silliness of counting an Eastern transplant such as Bush as a representative of the South.  This was part of the reason why I insisted on pointing out the sheer lack of elected Southern Presidents between 1849 1850 and 1965.  For those keeping track at home, there were exactly two Presidents who took over because of the deaths of their predecessors who hailed from Confederate states at the time they took office (Wilson was a Virginian by birth, but didn’t live there for very long), and there was only one other who was elected while hailing from below the technical Mason-Dixon line.  That would be Harry Truman, who was about as Southern as I am Kenyan–and who only enjoyed his position as incumbent President because of FDR’s demise.  Untimely Yankee President deaths put more Southerners (very broadly defined) into the White House than voters did for over a century.  Until 1964, no one from the states that made up the Old Confederacy was actually elected to that position since Young Hickory Zachary Taylor  That is rather staggering when you think about it (of course, it can be readily explained by the greater population of the Northern states, the War, Reconstruction, etc.).  

Is it possible to imagine a similar span of time in which no one from the states making up the United States, c. 1865, had won the Presidency for 100 years?  Of course it isn’t.  Consider where most declared presidential candidates come from in each cycle: only a handful come from Southern states.  Lately, they have enjoyed success for specific, explicable reasons (it seems to me that Bush v. Gore had more to do with the 2000 election outcome than anti-Yankee sentiment, especially since both candidates were technically Southerners).  Complaining about this would be a bit like someone complaining in 1911 that the sinister New York-Ohio axis had dominated American politics for decades (from 1877 until 1913, every President but one–Benjamin Harrison–came from one of these two states), which would be to ignore all of the reasons why these were centers of political power for the two parties.  Only with Woodrow Wilson were we finally ”freed” from the grinding oppression of New York and Ohio, and that didn’t exactly work out all that well for the country.  

The 2008 field alone practically guarantees Yankee domination for years to come.  The Dems have one Southerner running and the GOP has a potential of three, if Fred will deign to grace us with his lofty presence.  This is actually backwards from the way it should be if the parties wanted to maximise their chances: the Dems need to be running relatively more Southerners and the GOP needs relatively fewer such candidates.  The South is more or less a lock for the GOP in any case, not because they only respond to Southern candidates or refuse to vote for Yankees (which is an unsupportable thesis), but because they prefer GOP candidates who will talk to them in their idiom (even if it is done in a condescending, “I have to please the rubes” way) and pay lip service to their concerns.  Granted, the GOP mostly just pays lip service to their concerns, but lip service is sometimes enough to keep voters loyal.  It works with Democrats and black voters, so why not Republicans and Southern whites? 

President Bush began by paying tribute to the founding father of Czech democracy. “Nine decades ago, Tomas Masaryk proclaimed Czechoslovakia’s independence based on the ‘ideals of democracy.’”

Well, that may be what the Masaryk said, but it is not exactly what he did. In 1918, he did indeed proclaim the independence of Czechoslovakia, confirmed by the Allies at Paris. But inside the new Czechoslovakia, built on the “ideals of democracy,” were 3 million dissident Germans who wished to remain with Austria and half a million Hungarians who wished to remain with Hungary. Many Catholic Slovaks had wanted to remain with Catholic Hungary. Against their will, all had been consigned to Masaryk’s Czech-dominated nation. ~Pat Buchanan

Of all the commentaries I have read in the past six months, this [Luttwak’s] stands out as the silliest. Its tone reminds me of the ill-judged contempt with which the English used to regard eastern Europe. Poland, John Maynard Keynes remarked in 1919, was “an economic impossibility with no industry but Jew-baiting”. Czechoslovakia was nothing more than a fancy name for “the mountains of Bohemia”.

The reality in Keynes’s eyes was that people in eastern Europe would always stew in their mutual hatreds and shared incompetence. The sooner the Germans took over the whole lousy region, the better. After all, it was economically next to worthless as far as Britain was concerned.

Such notions underpinned what would become the policy of appeasement in the Thirties. Later, the same prejudices could be heard to justify inaction when it was Stalin who was conquering Eastern Europe. Indeed, you could still hear the old talk about “quarrels in a far-away land between peoples of whom we know nothing” during the break-up of Yugoslavia 10 years ago. ~Niall Ferguson

It’s not surprising that Ferguson didn’t like Luttwak’s argument–I thought Luttwak was making a good deal of sense, and certainly more than Ferguson has managed in six years of commentary writing.  What is Ferguson’s counterargument?  The 1930s!  Yugoslavia!  He forgot to mention Chamberlain.  Even for many Europeans, Yugoslavia was a “far-away land” or at the very least one about which most Europeans knew little and all the peoples of the former Yugoslavia would have been better off had the West kept out of the entire fight.  Indeed, there might not have had to be quite so much fighting had the West not bolstered and backed the separatist states.  James Baker was later ridiculed for saying “we don’t have a dog in this fight,” but here we are seventeen years later and still haven’t learned the basic truth that Baker was right about that. 

What Ferguson fails to address is the question of whether eastern Europe was actually worth going to war over as far as Britain was concerned.  If eastern Europe was so worthless to Britain, why would any British Government make security guarantees to Poland (which it had no means to defend or resupply)?  In the end, Britain did go to war over eastern Europe, which proved to be a mighty foolish thing to have done, so there is some disconnect here.  The power vacuum created by Versailles and Trianon, the treaties that ripped the guts out of the German Reich and obliterated the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, was going to be filled by one great power or another.  Ferguson takes it as a given that Britain should have been deeply concerned about this, when it was Britain’s concern with eastern Europe that dragged it and France into the war before  their rearmament was anywhere near sufficient and helped bring on Dunkirk and the disaster of France in 1940.   

Anglophone peoples seem to love to get into fights over parts of the world they know nothing about.  Saying disdainful things about foreign lands about which people in your country genuinely did and do know nothing is a reasonable thing to do, provided that you do not then presume to think that these lands are absolutely vital to your national security.  Of course, those preaching intervention don’t know any more about these countries than their opponents and usually know less (this is why they think intervention is a good idea and that it will work).

Ferguson never once addresses the claims of the Near and Middle East’s geopolitical insignificance, its miniscule industrial capacity, its economic retardation and its political sclerosis.  On every matter of substance, Luttwak’s article has not even been touched, much less refuted.  What has Ferguson managed to say?  Ferguson doesn’t like the man’s tone!  Luttwak says outrageous things!  Luttwak is heartless!  Ferguson waves his arms around, moralises and hectors, but does not actually offer a real response.  My conclusion is that a rational argument for the great geopolitical significance of the Middle East is not to be found, or else Ferguson would have at least gestured in its direction.  Instead of that, we get vague and dire warnings about Armageddon, and we’re supposed to come away with the view that Luttwak is the silliest of them all? 

This would be seven successful attempts to win at least a third consecutive term. How many times has one party or the other failed to win a third consecutive term after having won two? Six: 1860, 1920, 1960, 1968, 1976, 2000. It is interesting to note that in three of these five failed attempts - 1960, 1968, and 2000 - only a fraction of the vote separated the two parties. ~Jay Cost

Mr. Cost’s election-counting would be a lot more persuasive if he took the same care with historical analysis that he insists other people take with methodology.  Why didn’t Donatelli include pre-War of Secession elections?  Could it be that the political context before the War was sufficiently different to make meaningful comparisons extremely difficult?  What possible value could be found in making comparisons with the six consecutive terms of Virginia Republicans in the early 19th century?  Is the America of 2007 in any way really politically comparable to America, c. 1807 or 1817?  Why might Donatelli not include war and Reconstruction-era elections?  The answer is obvious: 1860 was an unusually divided election, 1864 was fought under extraordinary domestic wartime conditions and during Reconstruction the game was effectively rigged each time in favour of the forces of occupation, er, the Republican Party.  The one time Tilden should have won, which ended up being the third consecutive GOP term following Grant’s two terms, his victory was taken from him in the “corrupt bargain.”  Properly speaking, the GOP did not actually legitimately win the election of 1876, but kept power as a result of the bargain.  Likewise, 1868 would not have been perceived as an election to a third consecutive Republican term, because most of Lincoln’s second term was served out by his Democratic Vice President.  1872 was obviously an incumbent’s election.  Because of the “corrupt bargain,” 1880 does not really belong to a string of consecutive GOP victories, but represents the break in between the Tilden and Cleveland victories.  FDR was excluded from any comparisons because the advantages of incumbency in 1940 made the contest fairly one-sided.  In other words, FDR’s third consecutive term is not a useful comparison, since no one before or after ever sought to be re-elected a second time.  Hence Donatelli’s qualifications about nonincumbents. 

I grant that Donatelli made a misleading statement when referring to Taft as the winner of a third consecutive term for his party.  It was the fourth consecutive election won by a Republican.  T.R.’s 1904 win is the relevant comparison we should look at, if we want a 2008 comparison, not Taft’s 1908 win.  However, the McKinley-Roosevelt-Taft sequence is highly unusual for at least one reason: most of Roosevelt’s first term was the completion of McKinley’s second, since McKinley was assassinated after his re-election.  Taft was succeeding a President who had been elected in his own right only once, but who had served the better part of two terms.  It might therefore seem at first glance as if Taft was succeeding a President who had won two consecutive elections, when he was actually only succeeding a one-time electoral victor.  The uniqueness of this sequence might tell us something about its poor value for comparison with other periods. 

The best comparison for the relatively unique 2008 cycle is 1928, when the party controlling the White House won the election but did not run an incumbent President or Vice President (where did you go when we needed you, Charles Dawes?*).  1904 and 1988 are poor comparisons for just this reason: the incumbent  President or Vice President was effectively running on a “four more years” platform.  To some degree, any nonincumbent, even if he is from the same party, cannot receive the same credit or blame that accrues to members of the current administration.  Indeed, the main hope that the GOP has is that their eventual nominee runs away from the current administration.  Since that seems unlikely, GOP chances of performing the difficult post-war task of winning a third consecutive term are even worse.  The circumstances in which each election takes place are all important: Hoover’s victory came during a time of peace and prosperity while 2008 will take place in a time of war and general dissatisfaction.  For that matter, 1904 and 1988 were also peacetime elections. 

What we can say with absolute confidence is that no nonincumbent member of an outgoing administration’s party has ever won an election during an ongoing war.  We can say this because the coincidence of an open election during a war that has lasted more than five years has never occurred in the past.  Wartime Presidents usually either win their wars, die in office or choose not to seek re-election.  It has never happened that a President has been re-elected during wartime and the war has continued beyond the end of the second term.  In this respect, there are no clear points of comparison for 2008.  All trends nonetheless point to a repudiation of the party responsible for the war, which is what happened in 1952 and 1968.

*This is a joke.

The communists had an imperial ideology that claimed to know the directions of history [bold mine-DL]. But in the end, it was overpowered by ordinary people who wanted to live their lives, and worship their God, and speak the truth to their children. ~President George W. Bush

The irony of Bush’s statement here–mocking the ideological determinism of the communists in a speech bristling with references to the certain judgements and direction of history–is simply overwhelming.  If I thought his speechwriters capable of it, I would say that they put this line in there as part of an inside joke at Mr. Bush’s expense. 

Mr. Bush’s Prague speech lays out plainly that he thinks modern history is the story of the progressive advance of freedom.  He is horribly wrong, but that isn’t my point.  He believes, as he insists at several points, that it is ”inevitable” that freedom will triumph.  This is a deterministic and ideological statement.  There is nothing inevitable in history.  It is a mark of actual human freedom–our free will–that ensures that there is no sure or straight or inevitable path of development for any one nation, much less for the whole world.  Indeed, if freedom were the inevitable outcome that cannot be denied, there would never really be much need to work for it, cultivate it or fight on its behalf.  It would just happen spontaneously.  Strangely, this is what pro-war ideologues believed would occur in post-invasion Iraq, yet the drive to invade was also fueled by the revolutionary desire to “liberate” and the missionary desire to spread “freedom.”  These are the people who believe that everyone is naturally free but is everywhere in chains and that it is their, our, obligation to break those chains to “restore” people to their natural state.  This consequently turns into a chaotic mess, since people are not naturally free and political freedom is not some spontaneously occuring weed that sprouts out of the ground. 

Why is it that the people who are most intent on spreading an ideology feel compelled to tell others that their ideology is the natural and unavoidable conclusion to which all people must eventually come?  If the claims of inevitability were true and if the truths being preached were actually “self-evident,” every nation would embrace them without any prompting from anyone else.  Yet that does not happen.  So why this talk of inevitability?  It is to soften resistance and weaken the resolve to oppose what others very much wish to oppose.  It is an ideologue’s version of “we will bury you.”  Like Agent Smith in The Matrix, Mr. Bush is saying, “The future is our time.”  As we have seen in Pessimism, however, those who invoke the future do so to legitimise the injustices they are committing in the present. 

But I think there is a sort of presumption in the idea that God is particularly interested in liberating people from Communism, let alone from the rule of Jimmy Carter or of the British Labor Party. His kingdom is not of this world, as Christ unambiguously said. Go to Poland now, and you will find that the church and the Christian faith are, if anything, weaker than they were under the heel of the Communists. I might add that Poland, though freed from the iron manacles of Moscow, is now instead wrapped up in the sticky marshmallow bonds of the European Union, a despotic, secretive, and lawless empire with the strong potential to get much worse than it already is. As for the U.S. and Britain, I will get round to that. I really wouldn’t like to speculate on what God might have wanted to happen, but if He was hoping for the current arrangements, I should be very much surprised. ~Peter Hitchens

There is some presumption in this, and it is the same kind of presumption that once guided confessional Protestant and then Anglo-American secular whiggish historiography, inspired whiggish “rights” theories and which even now creeps in with every claim that “freedom is God’s gift of humanity.”  God offers a different and a better liberation than the one offered by free-market gurus and democracy promoters.  He has loosed the bonds of death and sin–other forms of bondage here below, while they may be vicious, are not and never have been the priority for divine redemption.  The theological assumptions of the Social Gospel do not make any more sense when they are uttered by anticommunists. 

Hitchens has another great line later about Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI:

By contrast, the pope and his less-beloved but more dogged successor did hold fast against the satanic optimism of the free market and opposed both vainglorious Gulf Wars despite the unpopularity it caused them.

Of course, I tend to think that all optimism, rightly understood, is satanic after a fashion, but the one he mentions here is a particularly good example of it.

What Mr. Hitchens gets at here is an important lesson about the dangers of mythologising leaders of any kind, but especially political leaders.  The Reagan-Thatcher worship in particular is the right’s answer to the virtual deification of FDR.  Like the left, the Anglophone right wants to have its epochal, world-changing leaders, too, except that the mythology woven around FDR (”he got us out of the Depression,” “he won WWII,” etc.) is also to a very large degree bunk.  Liberals knock Republicans and conservatives today for their hero-worshipping ways, which is fair, because there is far too much of it and far too little thought, but they have always been great ones for idolatry of political figures, whether it was the posthumous honours bestowed on FDR by generations of liberal historians or the beatifications of the martyrs, JFK, RFK and MLK.  This tendency to revere and venerate political figures is a bad habit.  There may be something in human nature that calls us to do this.  As Dostoevsky said, man needs something to worship.  Yet if we are devoting our attention to enthusing over secular figures, it seems likely that we will lose sight of those actual saints and the Lord Himself Who sanctifies. 

The Psalmist says trust ye not in princes, and there is good reason for this.  The victory over Soviet communism was primarily the victory of the subject peoples of the evil empire over that empire’s rulers.  It was a moral and, in a way, a spiritual victory, and it was undoubtedly very good in itself.  We tell the story about how “we” won the Cold War, but exulting in triumphing over the Soviet system is a bit like congratulating oneself for having outrun and outlasted a paraplegic who was suffering from cancer.  

No stranger to Soviet affairs, George Kennan poured water on the myth of “Reagan won the Cold War” fifteen years ago:

The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous political upheaval, in another great country on another side of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish. (quoted in Lukacs’ George Kennan: A Study of Character, p.181)

Communism failed, would always fail, because it was moral and political abomination contrary to human nature and the law of God.  There were wise and foolish policies that could have been pursued against the USSR, and by and large Reagan and Thatcher can be credited for pursuing wise ones.  However, the final lesson to be learned here is that we should be honest and humble about what it is that we believe our government has been able to accomplish in the past so that we do not foolishly presume that we can work miracles in the future.  Whether they are sincere or not, some Iraq war advocates claim that they took the end of communism in eastern Europe as an example of how they expected liberation in Iraq to proceed: through an outpouring of popular support and mostly peaceful political change.  It is hard not see how the kind of mythologising of the end of the Cold War contributed directly to profound misconceptions about what would happen in post-invasion Iraq.  For sizeable parts of the two generations either raised on or actively participating in this myth-making about the end of the USSR, the expectations of some miraculous democratic transformation were unreasonably high.  These people had come to genuinely believe that all that was necessary for liberal democracy to flourish was for the oppressive regime to go away.  Of course, this ignored vast differences of culture, history, religion, political traditions and all the rest of it that explained why events unfolded as they did in Europe and would not be the same in Iraq, but these errors of historical ignorance were compounded by more of the mad optimism that runs through the myths about 1989 that many on the right today hold dear.  It is not simply too soon for such “confident eulogies”–these eulogies and the mentality that creates them can be positively dangerous. 

Thanks to the invitation of Dr. Ralph Luker, in the near future I will also be starting blogging at History News Network’s Cliopatria.  It is a group blog of historians and history students, who cover all manner of topics from the strictly academic to the contemporary political scene, offering an historical perspective on current events.  I am looking forward to it.

554 years ago today, Constantinople, the God-guarded City, the Queen of Cities, fell to the assault of the forces of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.  Three days of pillage and rapine followed.  The Byzantine Empire came to an end after 1,123 years.

Update: Paul Cella has a good commemoration here.  

Second Update: Dr. Trifkovic also has a very good piece on the Fall of Constantinople.

The suspicion of metaphysics would be more persuasive if, for another example, we imagine that religiously informed governments follow a pattern that invariably ends in some form of the Inquisition, granting civil police powers to religious authorities. ~Joseph Bottum

Mr. Bottum’s entire essay would be more persuasive if he didn’t pepper it with bizarre phrases like “the Counter-Enlightenment of the Left” and bizarre statements like the one quoted above.  The punishments meted out in “the Spanish Inquisition” were carried out by the secular arm.  Religious authorities were never vested with “civil police powers.”  The Inquisition investigated into whether people were heretics, infidels and the like, whereupon it fell to the secular authorities to carry out whatever sentences the law required for profession of heresy or apostasy, and so on.  The ecclesiastical office itself did not carry out any of the punishments that followed from these investigations.  This may seem like a minor point, but Bottum’s essay is riddled with these sorts of lazy claims. 

Having more or less stifled internal dissent, Russia is now ready to play a more aggressive role on the international stage. Remember, it was Putin who restored the old Soviet national anthem. And it was he who described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “national tragedy on an enormous scale.”

It would be a bigger tragedy if he or his successor tried to restore that evil empire. Unfortunately, that is precisely what the Weimar analogy predicts will happen. ~Niall Ferguson

Three points to start.  Putin restored the melody of the old Soviet anthem, but the words have been completely changed.  Call it grotesque, or call it appropriation of different pasts, call it the politicisation of nostalgia, or call it what you will, but he did not simply restore the Soviet anthem as it existed before 1991.  That is a rather misleading statement.  Second, if we understand that Putin is a nationalist and further understand that many Russian people living in the USSR saw the USSR as a Russian project in which Russians were the main actors, it will make a lot more sense that, as a nationalist, Putin will view the collapse of the USSR in terms of a collapse of Russian power and prestige.  Indeed, Russian power and prestige did collapse, and nationalists don’t like it when this happens to their state, but one need not necessarily read anything more into it than that.  None of this is necessarily to praise or defend Putin as such, but simply to understand the political realities of Russia today.  Third, a Weimar analogy does not suggest a revival of the empire that preceded the period of chaos, disillusionment with democratic parliamentarism and hyperinflation, but rather a transformation of the Weimar republican system into something else.  If Ferguson’s claim had been true of the Weimar period, it would have meant that the Hohenzollerns or some family like them would have reconstituted the Kaiserreich, which obviously did not happen.  Instead of a return to pre-1991 Soviet models or the evolution of a hyper-nationalist revisionist regime, we are seeing the development of a quasi-democratic authoritarian nationalist regime.  If there were any interwar comparison that would be more suitable to modern Russia, it would more likely be post-1938 Spain that serves as the model.  For a number of reasons, however, this is an unsatisfying comparison.   Unfortunately, Mr. Ferguson can be very good at understanding the past when he is not actively working on a political project in the present, but here he makes a hash of things.  Since he is part of McCain’s camp, it is no surprise that he would espouse alarmist and Russophobic sentiments.

Historical analogies are indeed inexact and imperfect, especially when they involve Weimar and Nazi Germany.  People find endless points of comparison between their own moment in history and this period, because this is one period they can be fairly sure the History Channel-addled minds  of their readership will be able to comprehend.  These people are also fairly sure that they can conjure up the appropriate reaction of fear and loathing for whatever it is that they are comparing to incipient Nazism.  The analogies are inexact because the arguments are always tendentious.  “Did you realise that Hitler was a vegetarian, and did you know that so-and-so is a vegetarian?  We should fear and hate so-and-so.  I rest my case.”    Read the rest of this entry »

But for me, the more-significant op-ed in today’s Journal is by historian Mark Moyar, whose work on the origins of the Vietnam War — based on part on new information from the communist side of the conflict — has been a revelation (here’s a hint: if Indonesia doesn’t immediately pop into your mind when you think about the reason for the Vietnam intervention, you haven’t read your Moyar). ~John Hood

Well, I haven’t read my Moyar, but it makes sense that there would have been concern about the implications for the region of a successful communist takeover of South Vietnam, since Indonesia was at that time under the rule of a partly Marxist and communist-friendly strongman, Sukarno, Indonesia’s first president and dictator (and father of the former President Sukarnoputri, the first elected post-Suharto Indonesian President).  This doesn’t require reading some guy named Moyar, but would require a basic knowledge of the region’s geography and political makeup in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Since smart people I respect seem to think so much of this VDH column, it seems necessary to point out some of the more fantastically crazy things Hanson says in that column:

Few believed that it was a tragedy brought on by an aggressive Germany; fought heroically by amateur French, British, and American soldiers who defeated the professionalism and skill of the German army (the most lethal land force that had yet appeared); and was a result of two different and largely antithetical visions of Europe. No one dared accept that the post-bellum failure to invade Germany, occupy Berlin, and demonstrate the utter lunacy of German militarism had caused World War II; the problem was that the victorious allies had been too mean rather than too fickle.

Yes, few believe these things, because these things are not true.  WWI wasn’t principally a tragedy brought on by an aggressive Germany.  It was the result of combined Austrian meddling, Russian folly, British hesitation and German diffidence.  The problem with Berlin in the July crisis was its passivity in guiding its allies’ policies, not in its aggressiveness.  German “aggressiveness” in the Schlieffen Plan was an unavoidable result of being encircled by the Franco-Russian alliance.  Blame that on stupid Wilhelmine Weltpolitik and the decision to drop the connection with Russia, which you certainly can do, but spare us the lectures about German aggression.  The two antithetical visions of Europe to which Hanson refers were the vision in which the Entente powers continued to dominate most of the world and the vision in which Germany would be permitted to join them as a first-rank power.  Scary!  It never ceases to amaze me how people can look at the vastly stronger, more powerful alliance in the Entente and see in it some poor victim of overmighty Germany and the allies that it had to carry for the duration. 

Hanson’s “On to Berlin!” idea is stunning.  To believe that this was even possible, much less desirable, by the time the Ludendorff offensive failed is to be quite wrong.  It was possible to occupy Paris because Napoleon had been beaten in the field, but the treatment of the defeated party ensured that it was incorporated into the system of European powers and not treated with the harshness that its aggression might have seemed to merit.  Not only does Hanson find the “Carthaginian peace” imposed on Germany lacking as a punishment, but he seems to think that humiliating and grinding the Germans under the boot even more would have stamped out German nationalism.  This is shockingly wrong.  What was the German response to the Napoleonic invasions and occupations?  It was in part the creation and cultivation of German nationalism.  Does anyone think, supposing it was actually possible to do (and the American public would never have tolerated prolonging the war to capture Berlin), that occupying Germany in the 1920s would have created a less bitter, less resentful, less nationalistic, less revanchist Germany?  Does anyone think that a liberal democratic constitution imposed by the Allied sword directly would have been more acceptable to German nationalists than the one adopted by Germans after the Armistice?  This would only have delayed the resumption of hostilities, but it would have ensured that the revenge meted out by the Germans on those who had occupied their country would have been even more severe.  This is a perfect example of the problem with Hanson’s whole view: whatever the problem, it could have been solved by the application of even more force.     

As I have already mentioned, Poulos’ post is outstanding.  In addition to pointing out the virtues and significance of deliberative rhetoric and its function in channeling political and legal conflict into peaceful forms of disputation, James cuts right to, and through, the heart of one of the more dreadful rhetorical tropes of certain conservative pundits of an empire-friendly bent: the frequent pairing of the “Unionist” assault on the Confederacy with the war against the Axis, in particular the fight against Nazi Germany, as if they were comparable in any meaningful way.  The only real point of comparison is that both wars were waged by the United States government and both resulted in victories for that government–after that, they are not all that similar.  I will return to the first point later, but let me say something about this pairing first. 

There are some obvious problems with this from the start.  The “Unionist” war against the South was fought in contravention of the Constitution (though, quite naturally, it was fought “in the name of” the Constitution, as so many usurpations ever after have been justified) and represented the concentrated effort by an assembly of polities to invade and conquer another.  WWII, whatever one wants to argue about the policies leading up to it and the negative effects that it had on the country (and there were more than a few), was nonetheless a constitutional, declared war fought as a response to an attack on American territory.  The opponents fought by the United States government in the two wars were scarcely comparable in ideological and political terms.  Where one sought to withdraw peaceably from a political arrangement, inasmuch as this was permitted, the other sought to expand its territory by conquering, suppressing and dominating all the nations around it.  One represented a social and political order that was, if anything, attempting to retain some combination of aristocratic and agrarian republican structures out of a profound respect for past precedents and classical models (which is, ironically, one of the reasons why Hanson, a classicist, hates the Old South so much), while the other was a rude, modernising revolutionary force that idolised the future.  At the risk of some oversimplification, the progressive Yankee nationalist could only see in the Southron his antithesis, the embodiment of virtually everything he wanted (and tried) to purge from his country, while the progressive 20th century New Dealer confronted in fascism a hostile variant of his own progressive nationalist managerial statism.  Mass democratic nationalism coupled with the beginnings of a managerial state found itself warring against an ideology with which it had a little too much affinity for some people’s comfort.  As Kuehnelt-Leddihn said of democracy, fascism and communism more generally, the intensity of the hostility between these different systems was that of a family feud, not one of diametrically opposed extremes.  The similarities between these different centralised, managerial statisms may help explain why fascism elicits so much more powerful emotional negative reactions from everyone across the spectrum, as if to overcompensate for these similarities through extra denunciation.    

James quotes from Fred Thompson:

Hansen writes [that’s Victor Davis Hanson we’re talking about here, sic; get out your copyeditors, NR-JP], “The hundred years of talking about slavery was not as important as two days at Gettysburg. The success or failure of Normandy affected Hitler more in an hour than had years of pleading with him in the 1930s.” If for no other reason than that we want to avoid war whenever we can, universities should at least offer the option of studying it.

James credits these assessments as more or less correct (”nothing in this sequence is untrue or inaccurate”), but says also that they miss certain important distinctions that he describes thus:

One is that between Gettysburg and Normandy. Another is between Hanson’s hour of decisive bloodshed and Fred’s hoped-for ideal of eternally postponed bloodshed. And the third is between pleading and studying.

James notes many of the key differences between the wars being mentioned in the same breath.  However, I must very respectfully disagree with my learned associate on the accuracy of the Hanson remarks that Thompson quoted.  On a slightly pedantic level, I would note that Gettysburg was a battle of three days and it was the third, final day that rather made all the difference in making it into a decisive defeat for the Army of Northern Virginia rather than an inconclusive draw.  This might not be such a major objection, except that it was the decisiveness of the battle that lends it its special significance as a “turning point” in the history of the war and so gives it whatever greater importance as an event that it possesses.  It does not exactly help the cause of reviving military history studies to state inaccurately a key detail of one of the best-known battles in American history.  A little less pedantic is the objection to the apparent interpretation (very common for Americans to make) that Normandy was somehow on par with Gettysburg’s significance in the War of Secession by being the decisive turning point in WWII, when that honour really must, for better or worse, belong to Stalingrad.  A more substantive point is that, as a matter of history, the Battle of Gettysburg is not “more important” than the hundred years of debate that preceded it.  If you tried to take that attitude into an American history class today or at any time in the past as a student, you would not do very well.  With respect to the outcome of the war, the battle was an extremely significant event that brought about a sizeable change in the course of the war by ending the Confederacy’s attempts to take the war into the North and hastening ultimate Confederate defeat.  Battles can and do change the course of events in dramatic ways (see Gaugamela, Actium, Yarmuk), because wars are events of profound transformation and wars turn in no small part on the outcome of battles, but this does not make them “more important” than the decades of political argument and struggle that paved the way for the war to happen in the first place.  It is just this sort of talk that can give the study of histoire evenementielle a bad name. 

Some of its partisans rightly want to emphasise that events can be decisive and that history is contingent on events, and they then get entirely carried away by elevating these events into a category of greater significancee than the mundane, plodding periods of peace and the very real structures of institutions and the mentalities of nations.  It is as if some of these partisans cannot argue for the significance of war as a transformative force in history without implicitly (or, in this case, explicitly) devaluing everything outside of war.  Just behind this language of greater importance is the notion that it would have been better to “resolve” the conflicts that these wars “solved” earlier…by means of an earlier war.  Far from seeing war as a catastrophic failure and a great enemy of civilisation, those making this kind of argument see it as a sort of quick fix, a simple answer to very knotty questions.  It declares animosity towards brokered deals, compromises and all of the accommodations that must be made for political life to continue without violent interruption.  The opponents of this approach will quite often attribute to them a tendency to offer simplistic answers, because that is very often the kind of answer they are offering–not because they are fools, but because they really think the answer is that simple. 

The threads of life over the course of decades in all their complexity jumble into something very much like a Gordian Knot, and these folks seem rather too eager to cut right through with a sword.   Behind this is an impatience with deliberation, an intolerance for fussing about with argument and, well, a dislike for basically everything that we know of as politics.  One is reminded of Gladiator’s version of Commodus speaking to the hero: “You are a man who knows what it is to command.  You give your orders, the orders are obeyed, and the battle is won.  But these senators, they scheme and squabble, flatter, deceive.  Maximus, we must save Rome from the politicians.”  So, actually, I think there is quite a lot wrong with Hanson’s statement as quoted by Thompson. 

Thompson himself is right that universities should provide courses in military history, which would, of course, require more institutional support for hiring those with interests in military history.  Part of the reason why there is less interest and less support for those working in this area is that it is seen as being heavily focused on institutions (the military being the main one) and events, which are two kinds of historical research that are not exactly tickets to success and prominence in the discipline today.  They are not popular or fashionable because I think they are viewed as approaches that neglect too many things, unduly privilege discrete events and resemble a little too much the “one damn thing after another” school.  This may be an unfair judgement in certain ways, but because of this atmosphere that makes it that much more important that military historians adapt to at least some contemporary expectations in paying attention to social and cultural dimensions of warfare (and good military historians do exactly this).  We are caught in something of a vicious cycle, where relatively few are being trained to study these things because the study of them in the past has been seen to be lacking, which is hardly helped by proponents of reviving the study of military history making bold statements about the vastly greater importance of single decisive events.

James Poulos has a masterful post on the importance of rhetorical combat and puts the renewed calls for the study of military history into some perspective.  Any post that coherently ties together mentions of Henry Clay and The Untouchables has to win some sort of special award for creativity.

Marty Peretz seems equally enamoured of two articles that flatly contradict one another.  Naturally, he has nothing to say about the merits of either argument, except to say that the dispute is “fascinating.”  This has the sound of the cheerful co-ed in a philosophy class who opines, “I think that everyone can have his or her own opinion and everyone is, like, totally right.”  Earlier, Peretz thought Lewis was absolutely right and obviously so:

This is the history of Western responses even to terrorism, especially to terrorism. We know the consequences.

According to Peretz, Lewis had penned a “cool analysis” and Lewis had forgotten more than his critics will ever know.  Well, his critics seem to include Efraim Karsh, who may not know as much as Lewis forgets, but he seems to know all of the things that Lewis has already forgotten. 

I suppose it is fascinating how Bernard Lewis can be shown in devastating fashion to be completely wrong about the modern history of the region about which he claims expertise.  Despite this, he will still be taken seriously by historically ignorant conservatives (and Marty Peretz) in this country as someone with almost oracular authority on things related to Near East policy.  Bernard Lewis takes a Munich-centric view that American problems in the Near and Middle East are the result of weakness, conciliatory gestures and appeasement (not like those tough Soviets), while Efraim Karsh (writing in the Sun, no less) completely repudiates virtually everything Lewis said, but still manages to make the conflict with jihadis into an unavoidable, epic struggle that apparently had nothing to do with U.S. policies.  Pick your interventionist poison.

Other takes on the Lewis piece are here and here.

It still seems like a decent idea to me, though: current events are intrinsically interesting, and learning about them make you genuinely curious about why the world ended up the way it did. If the lessons are structured with curiosity about causes in mind, this will make you interested in the Cold War, which in turn makes you interested in World War II, which in turn makes you interested in the Great Depression, etc. It’s a solution to the most obvious problem of teaching history: without any context, why should a 16-year-old care about dusty topics like the Missouri Compromise or the rise of the labor movement? ~Kevin Drum

It is hard to exaggerate how much I dislike this attitude towards the study of history.  In addition to confusing students about the workings of causality, giving them a completely skewed understanding of historical significance and basically endorsing quasi-Hegelian, teleological readings of history as the unfolding of some necessary, predetermined outcome and anachronistic “precursorism” as the desirable ways to think about the past, which ought to discredit the method right there, it betrays the assumption that there is something more intrinsically interesting about present events (which may or may not be terribly historically significant) than about events that we know are historically significant.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this method would take the music of System of a Down as a point of departure for talking about the Armenian genocide, rather than trying to show the causes for the genocide and mentioning, in passing, that modern Armenians still consider this to be a defining event in their history. 

This assumption that current events are more intrinsically interesting is one that I imagine the average teenager doesn’t share.  To the average teenager, what happens in contemporary European, Near Eastern or even American political life probably seems just as boring and irrelevant as the Missouri Compromise.  Indeed, the pursuit of relevance is misguided and doomed from the beginning–for example, WWII shouldn’t have to be relevant to you, the ignorant teenager, to make it worthy of study.  Besides, the job of the history teacher is to cause the students to take an interest in things that they would otherwise not be interested in.  Some might call this process “education” and others might call it “broadening” the “minds” of students.  There is nothing at all wrong in relating history to current events or using contemporary references to help explain a concept, but it is important not to muddle things or confuse students about chronology, when they often have a hard enough time appreciating the importance of chronology.  Teaching isn’t supposed to be spoonfeeding students what they already like and then hope, miraculously, that this translates into an interest into other things. 

“The assumption has always been that Mr Bush was planning to bequeath the Iraq war to his successor and that the Republicans in Congress would go along with him,” says Charlie Cook, a leading political analyst. “But that looks increasingly difficult by the day. We could be facing a Nixon in 1975 situation where senior Republicans ultimately prevail on George Bush to change course [bold mine-DL].” ~The Financial Times

I have no idea what this refers to, since Nixon had been gone for approximately four months by the start of 1975 (there was apparently some scandal) and it was not Republicans prevailing on Ford to change course that concluded American involvement in Vietnam.  It was the progress of the North Vietnamese offensive and Democratic opposition to the aid requested by Ford for South Vietnam that brought about the conclusion.  This is like an American newspaper citing a British political analyst talking about a “Margaret Thatcher in 1991 situation”–you have to hope that the analyst was misquoted and the editors and fact-checkers simply forgot to read over this story.  I have seen more or less plausible attempts to create parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, but this one doesn’t make any sense at all.

2008 will be a unique election, but Leon Hadar makes an argument that suggests why it will share many of the characteristics of the election of 1920:

But a more appropriate historical analogy in discussing the impact of the war in Mesopotamia is the disastrous outcome of American fighting in World War I.

The Wilson and Bush administrations have many things in common, and once we started to see Bush’s galloping Wilsonian idealism in action it was easy to imagine his Presidency ending in just as much failure and public repudiation as Wilson’s had done.  The two make for an interesting comparison, since Mr. Bush’s War has so far resulted in comparatively far fewer American deaths, it probably will not end up leading to a much greater slaughter a few decades hence and in contrast to Wilson Mr. Bush has not (yet) engaged in widespread efforts to round up and imprison dissidents against his war.  It is striking just how weak Mr. Bush has been as a President compared to the rather imperious Wilson (not that anyone should want him to start demonstrating Wilson’s sort of “strength”).  Inflexibility defines both men, but the man in the administration who most resembles Wilson’s demeanour–right down to the perpetual scowl on his face–is the Vice President.  Meanwhile, Mr. Bush seems to resemble no one in the Wilson administration more than Thomas Marshall, the Vice President so ineffectual and ridiculous that he refused to assume the Presidency after Wilson was incapacitated with a stroke for fear that it might appear to be a coup.  Mr. Bush has played the role of incurious legacy admission to Wilson’s obsessive academic.  Mr. Bush’s errors have proceeded from knowing little and being interested in even less, while Wilson’s were the errors of presuming to know and see all (even when he didn’t know much at all about the peoples and lands he was helping to divvy up).  Both certainly drank deeply from the poisoned well of optimism, but unfortunately for the world Wilson’s optimistic preaching was received by a weary and disillusioned world as a new hope rather than the misguided folly that it was.  With the benefit of the experience of the 20th century, most nations were less willing to embrace similarly unrealistic talk of hope, reform and liberation when Mr. Bush was offering it.  Wilson could speak as the representative of an America only just stepping fully onto the world stage, while Mr. Bush speaks as the representative of the world’s predominant power.  What sounded like a blessing coming from Wilson ends up sounding like a veiled threat coming from Mr. Bush.  Thus, bizarrely, Mr. Bush will probably be remembered more poorly than Wilson–who is still surprisingly highly regarded by many historians and politicians–despite the fact that he is merely a second-rate imitator of the far worse original.  (Not, let me insist again, that we want to have another Wilson!) 

As large as Iraq looms on the scene today, as politically significant as the war is today, and as much as it will sour the public on intervention in the near future, I think we may be surprised at how quickly the effects of the war pass away and recede into the distance.  Calamitous and awful as it has been, it still remains a war on a relatively limited scale and will wind up having a primarily regional impact.  It has acquired the prominence that it has because it involves the superpower, but it will ultimately probably possess the historical significance of the Boer War or some other colonial misadventure of the British Empire.  The disaster of Wilson’s intervention was global in nature, and it has continued to shape the history of the world ever since, almost entirely for the worse.  If the outbreak of war in 1914 was the most significant turning point in modern history (and it was), marking the end of old European civilisation and ushering in all of the horrors of the 20th century, American intervention in 1917-18 ensured that the consequences of the Great War would be even worse.  Princip’s bullet murdered nations, but Wilson’s overzealous conscience ruined whole continents. 

Mr. Bush’s legacy of failure will probably not be so enormous, but will be, like so much else he has touched, of minimal effect and importance.  Despite high ambitions and overblown rhetoric that mimic Wilsonian pretensions, mediocrity and smallness have been the chief characteristics of Mr. Bush’s policies.  Watching Mr. Bush trying to follow in Wilson’s disastrous footsteps is like watching someone of the stature and ability of Mussolini trying to reconstitute the Roman Empire.  Their ideological eyes are far bigger than their political stomachs.  Wilson really inaugurated and launched the idealist-interventionist school of American foreign policy, ensuring misery for many generations of Americans and foreigners, while Mr. Bush’s bungling will not even manage to kill off this dreadful thing. 

As Dr. Hadar suggests, there may well be a temporary “isolationist” backlash against the clumsy, mistake-ridden interventionism of the last several years.  Yet Mr. Bush will remembered as the head of an administration so incompetent in planning and execution that he could not even manage to fully discredit this approach to foreign policy, because he has ensured that the numerous mistakes in implementation will mask the fundamental mistake of meddling in other countries’ affairs. 

The years after September 11 have seen a welcome surge in the number of faculty positions and courses devoted to Islam and the Middle East, without producing any charges of a distorted intellectual agenda. ~David Bell

Well, yes and no.  There have not usually been charges of a “distorted intellectual agenda” from people who have something to do with these areas of study, but there are routinely accusations of a “distorted intellectual agenda” aimed at Middle Eastern Studies departments around the country.  The accusers both do and do not have a point.  They do have a point that scholars of the Middle East do not actively ridicule and belittle most of the peoples they study, and they have a point that people who know rather more about the region–and who have actually been to the region–tend be surprisingly less reflexively pro-Israel than many of their fellow citizens who do not even possess a passport.  On a more grave note, they have something of a point when it comes to Islamic studies, where scholars of Islam enjoy the luxury of studying something both supremely interesting to the public at the present time and something about which relatively few non-experts can effectively challenge their interpretations, however misleading or simplistic some of them might be.  This gives them a flexibility and level of control over the public debate that is less possible in other areas of study.  Most of the accusers are not concerned about the influence of Turkish denialist policy on Middle Eastern studies, since the Armenians and other such peoples do not interest them very much, but it is true that most Turcologists tend to be very tight-lipped or agnostic about the Armenian genocide because they cannot afford to be publicly associated with something that is illegal to talk about in the country where they must do their research.  This is very unfortunate.  This is not principally what Mr. Bell is talking about (he is writing about the decline of military history), but inasmuch as it does pertain to the history of WWI it is an interesting aspect of another part of the historical record that suffers for both obvious political reasons and reasons of shifts within the discipline.

When I studied alongside other social science students who were not historians, I was impressed by how they wanted to reduce history to nothing but a story of “kings and wars,” as they dismissively put it, so that they probably assume on the basis with their acquaintance with the History Channel (a.k.a., The Nazis We Have Known And Killed Channel) that the only kind of history that exists is political and military!  How disappointed they would be to find that there are so few classes that fit their idea of what history is.  It is interesting that they assume that history was nothing but talking about “kings and wars” and it is also interesting that it was because of this that they had decided years ago that they didn’t like it.  How many sociologists now pester the world because they became convinced of the uselessness of history because of this perceived preoccupation with nothing but political and military history?  This loss of interest in history (which is obviously the most interesting subject anyone could ever study), as I have said repeatedly over the years, is proof that they had poor or unimaginative history teachers. 

History for these social science students was literature done up with a scientific apparatus.  Indeed, I would not argue strongly for the scientific quality of history in the way that this word is applied to the hard sciences or even something like sociology.  For me, contingency and unrepeatability define historical experience and so make the study of history decidedly unscientific by design, but I do understand the impulse of historians who wish to use social scientific methods to advance their craft because they are very much concerned to establish history as a reputable discipline that can match up with any of the social sciences.  History requires rigour, evidence and accuracy, but it obviously cannot involve experimentation.  Even though there are plenty of historians who understand that you have to have a grasp on chronology, narrative and the “kings and wars” to make sense of anything else, they also want to make clear that history is not “just” a story of “kings and wars” (even though it is inevitable that enrollements for classes about “kings and wars” are always much higher than they are for Gender in Renaissance Florence or what-have-you).  Consequently, while every amateur historian wants to talk about Valmy, Gettysburg, Verdun and Kursk, among others, the professionals want to show you how much more there is to the craft of history by talking about things like “Meaning And Identity In The Romanian Fin-De-Siecle” or “The Construction Of Community In Early Modern Tuebingen” or, more obscurely, “The Implications Of Demetrios Of Lampe For Armenian Church Union.”  Most people look at these things and think, “How boring.”  Many of us working in this or that field of history look at the same things and think, “Why didn’t I think of that title?”  (These may not be the best titles, by the way, but they will do for now.)  This isn’t because we don’t think wars are important (they are supremely important as engines of social, cultural and political transformation; they define entire epochs, they change the ”course” of history in dramatic ways) or even that battles are unimportant (the fate of entire regions has sometimes turned on the outcome of a battle), but because we are, I think, attempting to fill out the rest of the story that is not comprehended by the dismissive description of “kings and wars.”   

There is a certain lovely irony that Nicolas Sarkozy is one of the foremost opponents of Turkish entry into the EU, since part of his family comes from Salonika (mod. Thessaloniki, classical and Byz. Thessalonika), which happens to have been the hometown of Mustafa Kemal and the heart of the CUP in its early days before the Balkan Wars restored it to the Greeks. 

Then again, it is quite appropriate that an heir to minor Hungarian aristocracy should be resisting the incorporation of Turkey into Europe, since it was long the mission of the Hungarians to keep Europe from being incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.  In those days Belgrade (Mag., Nandorfehervar) was the front line fortified point protecting the Hungarian Plain from invasion.  As someone who also has Hungarian ancestry, let me say to the soon-to-be President of France, Isten aldd meg a magyart.

This is all nonsense, according to senior White House officials. They say that Bush isn’t delusional at all and that history will vindicate him, just as it vindicated Lincoln and Truman. ~U.S. News and World Report

But “history” didn’t vindicate them and doesn’t vindicate anybody.  Progressive nationalist historians and historians inclined towards an internationalist perspective in foreign policy have worked at vindicating them ever since their terms ended, and for some reason otherwise intelligent people live their entire lives believing that Lincoln was a successful chief executive and Truman was a great leader of men.  Measured by the standard of whether they left their country better than when they took office, both must be counted as miserable failures, among the worst five to have ever held power in this county (Wilson, FDR and LBJ being the other top contenders).  As much as I dislike Mr. Bush and pretty much all of his works, he is actually not even in their league in terms of the damage he has wrought on this country.  A mediocrity in everything, even his flirtation with tyranny, with which these other men had torrid and passionate affairs, has been unimpressive.   

Truman’s and Acheson’s failure in blundering into the Korean War and then Truman’s failing to win it have not been “vindicated” by anyone–the continued division of Korea along a heavily armed border to this day marks one of the lasting legacies of the Truman Administration (even though, yes, the armistice was signed under Eisenhower).  God forbid that 55 years from now we have a division posted in Kurdistan to guard the border with Greater Iran–such might be Mr. Bush’s “vindication.”  Perhaps by then President Sasha Obama, her popularity plummeting thanks to our continued involvement in the Second Nigerian War, will find herself in some difficulty when she compares herself to that paragon of bold leadership, George W. Bush. 

Had Truman run and somehow been re-elected, despite the most abysmal approval ratings in the history of the modern Presidency, it is somewhat questionable whether South Korea would have survived at all.  Had Adlai Stevenson been elected, it is questionable whether we could have held Japan (I exaggerate a little).  Does anyone actually want to be compared with Truman?  Why?

This entire debate is a bit surreal to me, since my test of “great President” is a President who actually follows his oath of office and obeys the Constitution, which Lincoln and Truman were great ones for violating all the time.  Setting aside such quaint notions for a moment so that we can speak in a lingo more familiar to modern helots, Lincoln and Truman did have certain “accomplishments” after a fashion that have certainly been lasting, and so they may be said to have been “great men in history” who shape events.  Lincoln destroyed the constitutional republican Union of states, and Truman permanently and probably fatally subverted the republican nature of our government by committing us to international adventures for what now seems to be perpetuity.  Caesar helped to kill the Roman Republic, but he might at least argue that his hand was forced and he could also claim that he at least won his military engagements.  Pity the empire whose Caesars are men named Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman.  Mr. Bush can only dream to achieve anything as lasting or permanent.  A failure to the end, his Presidency will not even fundamentally change the structures of government that he received from his predecessor.  As much as he is personally ridiculed and despised, he is really not much more than a placeholder President, a cipher, a nonentity.  It is because of this that his profound sense of self-importance and mission is especially disturbing, since even the Lord who chose to make those halting of speech into prophets is not this cruelly ironic.  Sometimes Presidents leave office in disgrace because they were thoroughly bad Presidents through and through, in the sense that they were just really bad at their jobs.  If he is anyone, Mr. Bush is Carter, not Truman. 

That, of course, is the heritage of this land. The people who came to Jamestown 400 years ago may not have all been saints. But they were all pioneers. They crossed the broadest waters and dreamed the grandest dreams. Their spirit is the American spirit. It is why America surpassed our native England to become the world’s most powerful nation. ~Mitt Romney

Dreamed the grandest dreams?  The early settlers in Virginia were primarily looking for land and money.  Nothing to be ashamed of, these things, since these are what pretty much all settlers, pioneers and immigrants are interested in finding.  Occasionally you will have sectarians who want to carry out their mission in a new land, but for the most part you will have normal people.  It is this plain, down-to-earth history of people seeking to find a plot of land and tend it that tells us a lot more about most traditional Americans down through the centuries than talking about people ”dreaming the grandest dreams.”  The New Englanders were more into dreaming, and look at all the trouble they–we–have managed to cause.  We would have done better to have even more sodbusters and even fewer dream-obsessed Yankee Puritans.  I say this as someone with a lot of New England Puritan and Yankee background. 

In any case, it’s nice to see that Romney’s Europhobic chauvinism extends also to the Mother Country, which is remarkable since the “American spirit” exhibited by the settlers at Jamestown was very much an “English spirit” and continued to be decidedly English or, if the last five defenders of the Union prefer, British.  Romney’s little remark is like something out of Hegelianism for Dummies: the American Geist has carried us along and caused us to triumph over all our adversaries. 

I have an alternative explanation for why the U.S. has outstripped the U.K. in world power: World Wars One and Two may have had a small part to play in dethroning England from global predominance.

The footnotes to the modern Armenian translation of Sayat Nova’s Angin akn vret sharats had an interesting explanation for what seemed a partly impenetrable line of verse.  The verse ran:

Khosrov pachayemen toghats, doon Tovoozi takht is, gozal.

Now, takht is the word for throne shared by Armenian, Persian and Urdu.  However, without the explanatory note linking this takht to the invasion of India and raid on Delhi by Nadir Shah in 1739, which was when he made off with the Peacock Throne, my Armenian teacher and I would not have readily made sense of what was meant.  Once Nadir Shah entered the picture, everything came together nicely.  Since this poem was probably written in 1758, Nadir Shah’s exploits would not have been such distant history for the ashugh.  The translation of the line would run as follows:

Left by King Khusrau, you are the Peacock Throne, beautiful one.

Skandari-Zoolghari toghats javahir is, angin lal is

Sharon is the bad guy who seemingly looks forward to a war. ~President Ronald Reagan, from private diary entry on Jan. 16, 1982

And, in fact, Laphroaig does taste like burning plastic. But it’s good burning plastic. ~Mencius Moldbug (that’s the name he uses–really)

I second that.  My introduction to Laphroaig was at the recent ISI/Liberty Fund colloquium at Mecosta.  We had received word from the Scotsman among us that this was good whiskey, and we were not likely to dismiss the informed opinion of a Scot on a matter as weighty as this one. 

As for the matter of restoring the Byzantine Empire, well, let me just say that I have heard of worse solutions to political problems in the Balkans and the Near East than this.  However, past attempts have not exactly done much for the well-being of Christians and Christianity in Anatolia, which therefore makes any resumption of the megali idea undesirable at the present time.  The main problem with reconstituting the empire, assuming it could be done, is that there would need to be a much better and formally defined procedure for succession.  Byzantium’s all-too-frequent usurpations and civil wars were obviously among its more unattractive qualities for those living inside the empire.  In some sense, this was a terribly traditionally Roman thing for them to be doing, but it did not really help in the long run.   

She is trying to have things both ways, a fact that she understands, because she is not stupid. At the same time, she believes she can have things both ways, because she believes that history is on her side. ~David Samuels

America’s public and intellectual elites do not know history. How can we say we know our enemies or know ourselves. [sic] Sun Tzu would be ashamed, no? ~Michael Brendan Dougherty

Perhaps, or perhaps he would take it as evidence that we were pushovers ripe for an invasion.

More seriously, Michael’s post, inspired by Scott McConnell’s article comparing Iraq and Algeria (which Scott discusses at length on Antiwar Radio here), makes an important point about our collective historical ignorance creating the paucity of our foreign policy and geopolitical thinking.  A greater acquaintance with history, whether military or not, would be an invaluable resource for policymakers, pundits and the public alike.  Those familiar with the Mesopotamian campaign or the post-WWI rebellion in Iraq might have given more thought to meddling there in the first place.  Those who knew something of Valmy and Jena and Verdun would not belittle French martial prowess or courage, nor would someone actually familiar with the sweep of French history create preposterous narratives about eternal French enmity towards the Republic they helped to create.  The less educated in history a people is, the more easily it will be misled and confused by the half-learned ramblings of chauvinists and opportunists, and the less able it will be to scrutinise the rival claims of disputing controversialists.  Understanding of and respect for history are vital to remain free of the shackles of propagandists and ideologues who are constantly splicing, editing and redacting the story to serve their present goals (unfortunately, just as so many chroniclers over the centuries have also done).

So you have peculiar situations where authors can report an unending sequence of facts which suggest an epoch of relative material scarcity and decreased social complexity who just won’t admit that judged by these metrics there was a downsizing. ~Razib

I have a couple points expanding on my original response to Razib’s otherwise very good review of Ward-Perkins’ new book.  First, perhaps there are such people as Razib describes, but we would need to be specific about this.  Which authors actually say, “The cities shrank, everyone was poorer and trade weakened, but you cannot say that any of these things actually got worse in material terms“?  The entire argument revolves around which standards you are using to judge the civilisation.  Obviously when judged by material wealth, the scale and frequency of building, levels of trade, the size of the military, the vitality of civic institutions, etc., things got worse, especially after the 4th century and even more so in the sixth and seventh.  The curial class really did effectively collapse by the sixth century, both because the state made it an undesirable role to have and the function it fulfilled ceased to possess the significance that it once had; other institutions (the bureaucracy and Church mainly) were developing that proved more attractive to the leading men of the cities; reduced means and increased burdens made the responsibilities of the curiales harder and harder to meet.  I have no problem acknowledging that the curial class vanished and that this was a change for the worse if we’re talking about preserving the traditional form of the Roman city.  What I am not going to do is beat my breast and lament the departure from late Roman urbanism, since it is not really the purpose of an historian to approach things this way.  Besides, there’s more than one way to assess the accomplishments of a civilisation.  Arguably, given the reduced material conditions of the postclassical period the cultural production of the Mediterranean Christian world in these centuries should be regarded as even more impressive than they already are; these societies managed to produce works of enduring importance and, one might argue, greater value in much more straitened cirucmstances.  The point is not to get into some fruitless back-and-forth over whose period is better, but simply to insist that narratives that privilege one era over another have unhealthy distorting effects on the study of both periods and they cause scholars to constantly look for those things that “anticipate” the decline of the “‘higher” period rather than approaching the evidence less tendentiously.   

Second, it is more likely that the authors who stress change and transformation rather than speaking in terms of decline are historians primarily concerned with questions of meaning and social function, and so do not have much to say about the “relative material scarcity” except to acknowledge that it existed.  Consequently, the ways in which late antique society are not like its grand, paradigmatic classical forerunner are only interesting insofar as they actually illuminate the characteristics of late antique society.  It is better to understand why people lit a votive candle at a saint’s shrine than curse the “Dark Ages.” 

For good or ill (I tend to think it ill), institutional history today generally is in decline (though it has not yet fallen!), while narratives of ”decline and fall” has everything to do with the decline and fall of institutions, whether civic, fiscal, political or military.  Narratives of decline and fall are inevitably focused on the state.  In these narratives, state-building is civilisation is progress.  In a similarly overwrought way, disintegration of the state equals barbarism equals general decay.  There is also more than a little of this applied to the progressive nationalist telling of American, German and Italian (and even early Chinese) history.  According to these views, you are presented with the following absurdities: the genius of American republicanism was somehow secured and made better after the War of Secession under such giants as Grant and Hayes; Leibniz, Goethe, Schiller and Kant were the products of an inferior culture because they lived before  unification; the Quattrocento was the product of a period of Italian decadence because there was frequent warfare between the cities; it was better that the Warring States period that produced Confucius, Mo-tzu and Laotzu, among others, gave way to the stifling centralisation of the Ch’in and the Legalists.  It would seem clear that state-centered narratives of progress and decline are deeply flawed, which is one reason why late antique historians have done all they can to get rid of such a model of the late Roman period. 

Ironically, Byzantine studies is one of the last holdouts for scholars focusing on institutions, even though by the standards of the older classicists Byzantine institutions are all degraded and sub-par (don’t even get them started on the monasteries).  There is always a danger that history will fall into these patterns because so much of the record comes from state records or chronicles and other sources that tend to privilege what the political leadership is doing.  Of course, there is some truth in any narrative tying state formation with advantages in terms of internal security and peace, and there is certainly great importance in understanding institutional structures of any society.  What late antique historians will keep insisting on, I think, is that they want to keep those things in a balance with the study of society, culture and religion.  If man does not live by bread alone, neither should we measure the worth of a civilisation simply or primarily by the continuation of the annona.    

No, it was secular nationalism that killed them, the pseudo-religion that exalts the Turkish nation. ~Morning’s Minion

Undoubtedly pan-Turanism and Turkish nationalism masquerading as Ottomanism were profoundly significant ideological factors in driving the genocide, and I wouldn’t even object to allowing that they were the most significant factors for the architects of the genocide.  In addition to pointing to the basic Muslim identity of the irregulars, both Turkish and Kurdish, who carried out most of the actual looting and killing, I would point to an important feature of the ideology of the CUP leadership that is very often glossed over in many traditional accounts of this group.  Taner Akcam, who will probably not be mistaken for a “right-wing culture warrior” (though I might fairly be described as such), wrote in his masterful A Shameful Act on the Islamic background to the genocide:

In addition to the general subjugation of all its subjects, the Ottoman state specifically oppressed and discriminated against non-Muslims.  Indeed, in the course of Ottoman rule, long-standing assumptions of Muslim superiority evolved into the legal and cultural attitudes that created the background for genocide.  This is not to say that the Ottoman Empire rested only on violence, but that without a grasp of the particular circumstances of the Muslim-non-Muslim relationship, we cannot understand the process that led to a decision for a “final solution” to the Armenian question….The Muslim-Christian clashes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Armenian genocide must be considered against this background.  Accordingly, the view that relative peace prevailed prior to the emergence of nineteenth-century nationalism, [sic] is not only incorrect but also misleading. (p.19-20)

And again:

Solidarity among the empire’s Muslims, no matter what, was the psychological product of decline and disintegration coupled with the belief of being surrounded by hostile forces desiring the state’s elimination.  Thus Pan-Islamism was transformed into state ideology.

For this reason the attacks, mainly against the Armenians, had the nature of pogroms.  The state unleashed its attacks on the slightest provocation, calculating that this would bind Muslims more closely to the empire.  The Austrian ambassador to the Porte reported that Muslims were being armed and set into action against Christians, calling this a policy a “Muslim Crusade.”  From reportss of the various diplomatic missions in Istanbul and eyewitness accounts, it is clear that the massacres of 1894-96 were centrally planned. (p.44)

And again Dr. Akcam wrote:

For all their differences, these divergent currents–Ottomanism, Islamism, Turkism, and Westernism–shared one core premise: the nationalism of a dominant ethnic group, which was understood to mean the Turks. (p.49)

Elsewhere he stresses the flexibility of the CUP in stressing different aspects of their ideology according to perceived need; when it helped to speak of jihad, they spoke of jihad, and when it helped to speak in racialist terms, they spoke as racialists.  Whichever way you slice it, this was a nasty bunch.  They were motivated by a number of different senses of their rightful superiority over Armenians and other minorities, one of which in this case was Islam, albeit an Islam as mediated through a particularly Turkist filter.

Speaking of “right-wing culture warriors” and the Armenian genocide together is notable for another reason, since relatively few “right-wing culture warriors” over here have any familiarity with the genocide and even fewer care very much.  I have noticed that almost the only people who have shown any interest in what I have had to say about the genocide have been on the left or center-left.  It is not for nothing that it is the Democrats who consistently push for recognition of the genocide, if only because Armenian-Americans overwhelmingly vote Democratic.  Christian conservatives, who might theoretically be natural allies for the Diasporan Armenians in this area, seem to be generally uninterested in the question. 

Depressingly, any sense of solidarity with Armenian Christians that one might think Christians in this country would or ought to have is virtually non-existent.  For obvious reasons, American Jews are much more aware of the genocide and they tend to be more involved in promoting knowledge about the Armenian genocide.  Likewise, the slaughter of the Assyrians undertaken at around the same time is also largely unknown to American Christians, just as the sorry fate of today’s Assyrians is overshadowed by an unfortunate commitment to Mr. Bush’s War.  This deplorable neglect of Near Eastern Christians is repeated time and again across much of the American right.  The response tends to be one of ignorance, indifference or some mixture of the two, so I would be very interested to see more “right-wing culture warriors” at least paying some lip service to remembering the Armenian genocide.

Tomorrow is April 24, the day on which Armenians traditionally commemorate the genocide committed against their people.  That genocide began 92 years ago this month.  April 24 was chosen as the day of commemoration because it was on April 24, 1915 that the leading members of the Armenian community in Constantinople (Polis to the Armenians, Konstantiniye for the Turks) were arrested and taken away to be executed in the days and weeks that followed.  That gave the signal for the beginning of the organised attempt to annihilate the Armenians in all those places where they constituted more than 5-10% of the population; the goal was nothing less than the destruction of the Armenians throughout most of Anatolia.  Obviously, the Ottoman triumvirs directly responsible never publicly admitted their responsibility, much less were they punished for their crimes, and all attempts to hold other involved in the genocide were by and large stillborn thanks to post-WWI politics.  The new national government in Ankara early on rejected attempts to hold “the Turks” collectively responsible (this is understandable, in a way), and this hardened into the full-fledged policy of denialism that we see today.  At this point, denialism and Turkish republicanism have unfortunately combined; the hyper-nationalists today are only the most obnoxious of the denialists.  The Turkish Republic is the only ostensible democracy that I know of in which it is a crime to state publicly well-established historical facts.  In other democracies they make it a crime to deny genocides–in Turkish democracy, they make it a crime to use the word genocide.  It is a bad joke that the administration that wants to intervene in Sudan to stop a civil war that they (mistakenly) deem a genocide actively opposes a minimal effort to acknowledge a genocide that only Ankara and their apologists refuse to call by that name. 

Tomorrow Congress is preparing to pass still considering a resolution recognising the Armenian genocide as genocide and acknowledging the role of the Turkish government in it.  If West Germany had had a law on the books criminalising anyone who spoke of the Holocaust or the responsibility of the German government, it seems unlikely that Washington would respond well to threats from Bonn to the effect that relations would sour dramatically should Congress pass a purely symbolic resolution acknowledging the historical reality of the crime their government actively denies.  Today Ankara so threatens Washington with very real retribution for such a symbolic measure, when it is Ankara whose denialist law and repressive government combined to inflame public opinion against Hrant Dink, leading directly to his death.  That is only the most recent and dramatic example of how this genocide denialism has served as a mechanism for suppressing freedom of speech and whitewashing past crimes in Turkey.  It is appalling that such a government believes it is fit to join the nations of Europe as an equal; it is even more depressing that so many Americans are interested in currying favour with such an ally. 

Another tack seems to be to deemphasize material remains and cultural complexity, and suggest that the energies of the post-Roman Western world were funneled into Christianity. Ward-Perkins notes that encyclopedias of Late Antiquity are heavily tilted toward coverage of religious arguments, schisms and transformations, with relatively little space given to architecture, secular learning or politics. In other words, though Late Antiquity might be materially poorer than the Classical Imperial period, at least in the west, it was spiritually superior. Frankly, to me this is reminiscent of Communist era attempts to dismiss the consumer cornucopia of the capitalist world by suggesting that socialist man was spiritually richer if materially poorer. ~Razib

Ward-Perkins, like Liebeschuetz before him, is absolutely right to emphasise the archaeological and material evidence that shows undeniable economic contraction and the relative decline of Greco-Roman urbanism of the classical type.  Indeed, no one working in late antiquity really denies any of these claims of fact, and every decent history of late antiquity in the Mediterranean world takes account of these changed material realities.  Late antique historians certainly talk about architecture, for instance, at least as far as the Eastern Empire goes, since the modeling of church basilicas on secular halls and the magnificent achievement of Hagia Sophia are but two remarkable legacies of the late antique period.  If there is a great deal of attention paid to religious arguments and schisms in late antique studies (in my opinion, there is not nearly enough attention actually paid to religious controversy and heaps and heaps of attention paid to hagiography), that is because there were quite a few of them happening with rather significant consequences for the development of different parts of the Mediterranean world.  Each time you have someone sniff with Gibbonian disdain for religious contentions over an iota, you will wind up with five cultural historians who want to dedicate their lives to defending the importance of such contentions.  Each time someone comes along and says, “But, look, people really were poorer!  Things got worse!” the cultural historians will groan and say, “Yes, we understand.  Now let’s talk about something really interesting.”  These two approaches should not have to be at war with each other, since they are inherently complementary.  Obviously, comparisons of late antique scholarship to commie propaganda in any context will not encourage this sort of happy collaboration.   

Where the cultural and late antique historians part company with the late Romanists and archaeologists is in their evaluation of the worth of the period and its production, or rather the former believe that the period should receive the attention appropriate to a crucial period of transformation that contains answers for, among other things, how the medieval world came into being. 

Late antiquity had to be invented as a separate period and basically as a new concept because generations of classicists had told everyone that once the glory of Rome had passed everything went to hell and wasn’t really worth talking about.  Even traditional church history in the West used to stop at Chalcedon, as if the theologians were conceding that the fate of the empire and the fate of really interesting theology were inextricably linked. 

Church historians obviously have a hard time going along with a full-on decline and fall view, since it quite explicitly devalues the epoch of the Church’s great early efflourescence.  Tell them that the world of the 4th and 5th centuries are a “period of decline” and they will throw Chrysostom and Augustine back in your face, and they are right to do so.  Cultural historians are horrified at the idea that a whole range of centuries, in which cultural production of various kinds (including Neoplatonic philosophical works, the work of the 4th and 5th century rhetoricians and the secular court poetry of, say, Corripus and George of Pisidia) remained fairly high but had changed form, should be put on the back burner because those centuries represent a relative worsening of material conditions compared to an earlier period.  Imagine if early modernists took the same approach, ignoring the 17th century because life was so much more miserable and so much more full of religious controversy in many parts of Europe than in the 16th–how absurd would that be?

On the whole, late antique historians today try to avoid speaking in terms of either decline or superiority.  This is a result of cultural history dominating late antique studies, and there are certain things to be said against arguments about transformation that are so vague that one might conclude that no one is paying that much attention to content, but one has to understand the tremendous prejudices and biases built in to the traditional narrative sweep of European history that late antique historians battle against all the time.  They are compelled to speak in terms of transformation and change because so many people still think of the period as one of collapse and ruin.  The old apologetic interest in the Age of Faith is not what it once was and there is also a reluctance among the scholars, most of whom are not necessarily particularly religious, to engage in a lot of Christian triumphalism.  If anything, late antique studies of late have often been aimed at rehabilitating the religious deviants and heretics of the period to give a complete picture of the social fabric of that world.  That actually seems to me to be a very worthwhile thing to be doing (it is also, in a way, the kind of thing I am doing, though with less heretic-rehabilitation and more focus on the meaning deviant theologies had for their adherents), and it does not require us to dismiss or ignore material evidence and the realities of straitened conditions that this evidence shows.

A few wrote to remind him [Pope Benedict] that, as far as “reason” was concerned, it was Arab rationalists like Avicenna and Averroës who, with their commentaries on Aristotle, had saved Greek thought from obliteration during Europe’s undeniably dark Dark Ages. ~Jane Kramer

Via Reihan

This would be nice, if it were true.  Yes, Muslims preserved the Greek learning that they found in the lands they conquered, but it wasn’t as if Greek thought was ever in danger of “obliteration,” since the vast majority of Greek literature and history was preserved by the, er, Greeks in Byzantium.  Muslims were especially keen on philosophy and scientific texts, and these they made use of and recopied down through the centuries, which then facilitated their introduction into western Europe.  But they had little use for the playwrights, poets and historians, whose works we have primarily because of the Byzantines, who were also preserving the philosophical and scientific texts at the same time. 

It might also be worth noting that Avicenna and Averroes were notoriously “unorthodox” by the Islamic standards of their day with beliefs about the eternity of the world and the like standing in direct contradiction to Islamic revelation.  One of these philosophers felt the need to imagine truth as running on two tracks that did not intersect very often: the truths of reason and revelation were both true, but they were not going to fit together or be reconciled.  Even when Islam had a place for philosophy, it was never as a “handmaid” to theology, but usually more in the role of a scullery maid who would be allowed to scrub the floors as long as she made sure to stay out of the master’s way.  The obvious points would be that al-Kindi, Avicenna and Averroes represent a limited phenomenon that rather underscores and proves Pope Benedict’s Regensburg observation about the nature of Islam.  These three, with perhaps a couple others, represent the greatest achievements of Islamic philosophy for its first six centuries, but they are relatively few in number and ultimately had much less significance for the overall development of Islamic thought than the jurists and mystics had.  There was a moment when a kind of actually Islamic rationalism was on the rise, and it was squashed in the ninth century and never really fully reappeared.  Even then, it was a highly eccentric movement within Islam and one deemed to be wrong on fundamental questions of theology, as indeed it would have to have been if the divinity of Qur’anic authority was going to be confirmed. 

It’s a really sick time we live in when the Holocaust is considered a “contoversial subject” and denial of the atrocity is considered a valid alternative view. ~Philip Klein

Mr. Klein is right, but then it has already been a fairly sick time when the Armenian and Ukrainian genocides have been considered in certain scholarly and political circles to have been simply unfortunate episodes or perhaps even myths propagated by enemies of the revolution. 

This latest pandering to Muslim “sensibilities” in Britain is simply the application of the same politically motivated denialism that we see in the Armenian and Ukrainian cases to the one atrocity that has normally been deemed to be just about the only absolutely undeniable thing.  (Technically, virtually no one denies the events of the Armenian genocide, but they deny their significance, which amounts to the same thing.)  The twisted road by which we have reached the point where Pakistani Muslim schoolchildren in Britain would feel sufficiently offended by the history of WWII in Europe that a significant element of that history would have to be omitted is worthy of a series of posts at some point in the future.  All of this leaves in the background unmentioned the otherwise appalling ignorance of all British schoolchildren about world history outside of that sacred time of 1939-1945.  Those who would like to know “what happened to the Brits” might consider that many of ”the Brits” today have no grasp of some of the most rudimentary elements of British history, nor, thanks to official multiculti nonsense, do they have any sense of what that history has to do with their identity as part of the British people. 

It might be worth noting that this is a lesson in the importance of political expediency for promoting knowledge about past atrocities: the Holocaust became widely, publicly known because it was useful to the Allies to make it so, while the stories of the Armenian and Ukrainian genocides have had no such powerful advocates for their publicity and remembrance.  As much as I don’t like it, what is remembered from the past is tied inextricably to those who have the power to authorise and enforce official memory.  When those who have the power are more concerned to address present needs (such as avoiding Muslim discontent, riots and attacks), a new, airbrushed, revised story will be told.  When there are no victors to publicise an enemy’s atrocities, or when the victors are unable, for whatever reason, to do this, atrocities are usually softened or erased or justified as part of a founding mythology.  Then begins the talk of “necessity” and idealism, and it always sounds the same, whether it is uttered by a Benny Morris or a Turkish nationalist. 

Because of post-WWI squabbling over the carcass of the Ottoman Empire, the Allies were unsuccessful in holding most of the architects and agents of the genocide accountable.  The architects and agents of the Ukrainian genocide were heroes to people of a certain political persuasion, who might well have liked to expropriate a few kulaks in their part of the world, and were never going to be held accountable by their own government, which authorised what they were doing, nor by any other, which had no means of trying or punishing them.  Needless to say, the mass deaths of Germans following WWII are scarcely even remembered, since they are unique in having virtually no advocates for their memory and an unusual number of interested parties who would prefer to keep these events buried as much as possible.

Middle Eastern historians are, on the whole, very bad about repeating pro-Ottoman, pro-Turkish propaganda about the Armenian genocide, and only rarely does anyone bring up the genocide of the Ukrainians except as a tired debating point against people who use the Holocaust as a cudgel with which to beat political opponents.  The ‘wrong’ kind of people were doing the killing in those cases (Muslims, communists) and the ’wrong’ kinds of people (Christians, Slavs) were the victims.  Given the decades of pervasive anti-Christian and increasingly pro-Islamic biases in U.S. and European education, teaching the Ottoman genocide against the Armenians seems not only counterintuitive but perverse (since ”we” all ”know” that Christians are always the oppressor, never the oppressed). 

Sympathisers with the Soviets and communism generally could never really acknowledge that Stalin’s policies towards the Ukraine were fundamentally no different in revolutionary and nationalist motivations and hideous effect from the Holocaust.  To his cheerleaders abroad, Stalin was a “liberal in a hurry,” and if a few kulak eggs got broken, well, that’s the cost of progress.  Admirers of that famed Ottoman “tolerance” and latter-day proponents of the liberalisation and reform of the Islamic world have all been too deeply invested in their respective myths to face up to the hideous realities of what the marriage of progressive politics, Ottomanism and Islam could and did create, despite ample evidence not only of mass killings and deportations but extensive evidence (detailed in A Shameful Act) of government direction and coordination of the entire enterprise.   

Even if liberals detest the Crusades, however, there is no good reason for many of today’s Muslims to care about them, and there is no evidence that they think about the subject at all. ~Dinesh D’Souza

No reason not to welcome D’Souza back to the fold if he just forgets that recent nonsense about all our friends in the Muslim world, even among the mass murderers, who really like Christians and Jews. ~Richard Reeb

It’s true that Muslims historically had no great focus on the Crusades…until recent times when Muslims and Arab nationalists rediscovered the Crusades (and the defeat of the Crusades) as a useful historical precedent for what they saw as their own struggles against the West.  Similarly, few in Russia were ever probably aware of the details of the battle at Lake Ladoga or the Time of Troubles, but they were familiar with the heroic mythology of resistance against invasion that became useful for propaganda during the invasions of Germans.  Thus the communist Eisenstein could make a Russian nationalist epic film about Alexander Nevsky, someone venerated as a saint in the Orthodox Church, because his defense of Novgorod against the Teutonic Knights, although largely incomparable to the Soviet situation, served as a potentially powerful symbol used to inspire people.  The basic message was this, as with all good nationalist propaganda films: those people have invaded before, they lost back then and they will lose again.  Memories of past successes become all the more important as a people has fewer and fewer successes in the present.  Hence it is not only the case that many Muslims today cultivate a grievance about the Crusades, but it was to some extent inevitable (especially with certain obvious geographical parallels with the foundation of Israel) since past victories were bound to become more important as Muslims suffered setback after setback even in the post-independence period. 

The fact that the Crusades have been taken up as a manufactured grievance to impart a sense of enduring resistance against European “aggression” to those who would very much like to model themselves on Saladin and Baybars does not make the real-world effects of that grievance any less potent or less real.  There is no evidence that anyone thinks about this stuff?  D’Souza should get out more.  Some people in Syria to this day celebrate Sultan Baybars’ victory against the Mongols and his successes against the dwindling Crusader kingdoms of the Levant.   

Of course, the Muslim rediscovery of the Crusades as a grievance is a political manipulation of history, not entirely unlike the sudden discovery of the virtue of the Crusades even among largely secular Westerners who would normally denounce the “intolerance” of pre-modern Christian Europe under any other circumstances.  But that sense of grievance does exist today.  That doesn’t mean that we have to make any concessions or blame the Crusaders for our problems today (problems we have, indeed, done much more to bring upon ourselves), but it does mean that D’Souza still doesn’t know what he’s talking about. 

This, of course, is the perplexing thing about the Munich analogy. It’s made with a sort of eerie constancy, like the world is just chock-a-block with Hitlers. The salient fact about Hitler, however, and the world situation in the 1930s, is that it was unusual time and Hitler an unusual person. The suggestion that we should make recourse to strategies that, allegedly, would have, in retrospect, have been optimal for coping with Hitler as our regular basis for dealing with foreign leaders who don’t eagerly submit to American hegemonic aspirations is daft. ~Matt Yglesias

Yes, it is daft.  It is also the sum total of the neoconservative understanding of how to run a foreign policy.  Naturally, Yglesias is commenting on a Ledeen post.  This post tagged Hagel as the “ideal standard-bearer” of appeasers (meaning, of course, all people who oppose Ledeen’s brand of mad interventionism of the “throw a crappy country against the wall every ten years” variety).  Given Hagel’s foreign policy views and his record, that’s like saying Lieberman is the “ideal standard-bearer” of pacifists or McCain is the “ideal standard-bearer” of paleocons.  Hagel is such an “appeaser” that he voted to authorise Bush to attack Iraq; he was such an “appeaser” that he supported the bombing of Yugoslavia and he gives you no reason to think that he would not have been a supporter of the Gulf War and Panama had he been in the Senate at the time…well, you get the point.  When it came time to put up or shut up, the man has never not backed the use of force since he was elected.  This lie about Hagel is very much like the reinvention of Jack Murtha as some sort of lily-livered peacenik–it is the only thing neocons have left in their arsenal when traditionally very hawkish and internationalist figures turn against their lunatic policies.  This does not mean that I think Hagel has actually turned against the war, but that even his pointed criticism of how the war is being fought is enough to put him in the ranks of the new Chamberlains.  This is absurd on every level, as you would expect from Ledeen.  The strange thing is that this view of Hagel is widespread on the right, so it cannot be explained away as the fantasy of Ledeen alone.  Brownback is getting similar treatment because he kinda sorta opposed the holy “surge” (but refused to vote for cloture to bring an anti-”surge” resolution to the floor). 

On the constant Munich and appeasement references of the “1938ist” jingoes, I wrote this last summer along similar lines:

Indeed, these paradigms are likely to distort and confuse us more than help our analysis of the situation, not least because certain examples–particularly the 1938 one–impose a moral and emotional weight on the debate that is dangerous and irresponsible.  If you treat this as 1938 and you really think Hitler is on the rise and about to launch his war, nothing is going to deter you from taking action against him, knowing what you know about Hitler.  This makes people get very excited and muddles their thinking.  There is also the problem that Hitler is dead and we are not actually facing Hitler redivivus.  Indeed, it may be that if we act now as some believe the West should have done in 1938 we will precipitate precisely the kind of disaster that we believe we are going to prevent.  Comparisons of this kind are fun, and they give us historians work to do, but they cannot be the basis for analysing international tensions with any effectiveness.  Besides, any ten year old can come up with these comparisons after watching enough History Channel propaganda.  Historians more than anyone know that it is our attention to historical differences that can tell us the most about any given period relative to others.  

This was a political show trial, and partisans of Joe Wilson will use the guilty verdict to declare vindication. ~James Taranto

Needless to say, perhaps, Fox’s Alan Colmes did a pathetic job of challenging Coulter’s flimsy defense. The whole segment was a show trial in reverse. ~Michael Crowley

I don’t know whether this represents some sort of trend in atrocious uses of language, but it is interesting that both of these ridiculous statements appeared on the same day.  The first refers, of course, to the Libby conviction, and the other to an appearance by Ann Coulter on Hannity & Colmes. 

You can believe that Fitzgerald’s prosecution was driven by political or personal vendetta, as some would like to believe, and you can believe that this case should never have been brought to trial.  I disagree fundamentally with both of these views, since I think that obstructing justice and perjury are wrong regardless of why someone does it (lots of Republicans used to believe the same thing) and that such crimes should be prosecuted if the charges can be proven, but it is possible to hold these other views without becoming a squawking buffoon.  James Taranto, as usual, bounds across that line and never looks back when he calls this a “political show trial,” demonstrating either his tremendous ignorance or his utter corruption of mind.   

A political show trial has a very definite meaning.  These were trials conducted during the Purges of the 1930s whose outcomes were predetermined by the Party and Stalin and therefore whose entire procedure was purely for “show.”  Hence the name.  (Incidentally, Republicans were very eager to talk about ”purges” during the Connecticut Senate primary last year, invoking a word chiefly associated with Bolshevik terror in the context of a domestic election, once again showing themselves to be unfit to comment on anything.)  These trials had no logic or purpose, except to provide a certain veneer of public legitimacy for the deposition of prominent Party men (including top figures such as Zinoviev and Kamenev) that paved the way for their exile, execution and elimination from the historical record.  Unless I have misunderstood the sentences for violations of federal perjury and obstruction of justice statutes, Libby does not stand in much danger of summary execution by NKVD operatives or their equivalent.  He has not been fraudulently charged with crimes he didn’t commit as a way of covering up a purely political prosecution.  The court will not “request” his suicide, nor will his picture be artificially scrubbed out from all official records.  Indeed, we all know that he is going to go scot-free with a pardon, because we are not ruled by laws but by particularly venal and self-serving men, so please spare me the whinging about how Libby is the victim of neo-Stalinist jurisprudence.  This is not only an insult to the millions of victims of Stalinism, but is an insult to the intelligence of the audience.  It is also particularly rich to read complaints about politicised justice coming from the pages of the right’s Pravda, which never thinks that anything the administration does in matters of national security or other policy is as heavily politicised as it obviously is. 

Now to the other example.  While I might theoretically enjoy comparisons of Hannity & Colmes to Stalinist purges, if only to show the relatively greater intellectual integrity of the latter, when someone is silly enough to refer to a cable talk show as a show trial, whether it is in “reverse” or not, it becomes immediately clear how wrong this use of language is.  Most of us do not, I think, make pithy comparisons between certain things we happen to dislike and, say, concentration camps, gas chambers or mass graves.  You don’t usually hear someone say, “Boy, this week’s Meet The Press was a sort of journalistic Kristallnacht–only in reverse!”  I leave it to my readers to puzzle out what “show trial in reverse” even means, but I think it prompts the promulgation of Larison’s First Law of Political Commentary (not to be confused with the Laws of Foreign Policy Commentary): unless you are referring specifically to a contemporary case of politically motivated kangaroo courts that serve as a pretext for the exile and/or execution of political enemies, you never get to compare anything in present-day domestic politics to a show trial; first-time violators should be prohibited from speaking about domestic politics for a period of not less than ten years; repeat offenders are banned for life.

Do my eyes deceive me, or does Stephen “Politics of the Future” Schwartz actually have the chutzpah to attack someone else’s views of the Spanish Civil War as unduly rose-coloured and propagandistic?  What did Schwartz miya have to say about the war a few months ago?  He wrote:

Spain represented a confrontation between the politics of the past, represented by Franco, and the politics of the future, embodied in a confused but nonetheless genuine Republic. 

That this person was at the same time gamely trying to downplay the civil war in Iraq by making pathetic comparisons with the Spanish conflict only made this obnoxious view that much worse.

Victory For POUM, Insh’allah

Can Schwartz miya really be so cheeky as to refer to someone else as a poseur?  But of course he can!  Look on in wonder as the old commie and neocon fellow traveler re-fights old fights over that old worry, “Who lost Spain to fascism?”  All of this might be interesting except for the problem that the Republicans weren’t fighting fascism and the Second Republic was a good example of how democracy can empower the fanatics who lead it to destruction.  Like another old commie, Ronald Radosh, who edited Spain Betrayed in the tradition of the anti-Stalinist radicals of the Republican cause, Schwartz miya is still mired in disputing over whether the Republic’s domination by the Soviets or its lack of domination and direction by them was its undoing.  It is the Soviets’ responsibility in undermining the Republican cause that so energises Schwartz miya, rather than the horrors inflicted by the Republicans in a war precipitated by their radicalism.  It would never cross the mind of this old lefty-turned-Muslim that the Republican side was itself in the wrong and deserved to lose if moral desert has anything to do with military outcomes (it doesn’t).  How neoconservatives can continue to consort with people like this and somehow pretend that they are not still at some level rehashing their old sectarian fights on the left, I do not pretend to know.   

While on quasi-hiatus, it is tempting to look in and remark on the odd ill-advised wager of steak or comment on the idiocy of the Senate’s failed cloture motion connected to the surge “debate” (Al Franken must have Coleman running scared–he even voted for cloture), but really of far greater interest for all, I think, is to comment on my recent reading of the first part of Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act in connection with my L.A. Armenian experience.

Over the weekend, I was in L.A. among many Armenians at a graduate student colloquium at UCLA.  The colloquium was well-done and successful all around, though there was the occasional, minor flaring-up of arevmtyan and arevelyan hay disputes that are fascinating in their subtlety and complete imperceptibility to most of us otarner (foreigners/non-Armenians).  For those who scarcely know what the Armenian language is, the distinction between the two major dialects is even more obscure, and so, too, are the slight cultural variations between the different Armenian communities.   

Part of the dispute is, of course, the different place of the genocide in the collective memory of the Diasporans around the world and the Eastern Armenians living in the Republic, and the other part is the related problem that the Diasporans–because their people came from eastern Anatolia in Van, Erzerum, Cilicia and elsewhere–tend not to see the Republic as their real home country.  This brings us back to the tragic story of Hrant Dink, whose prosecution by the Turkish state–leading to the incitement of the public and Mr. Dink’s murder at the hands of a nationalist fanatic–turned on the twisting of a phrase that he intended for a Diasporan audience.  He had said that the Diasporan preoccupation with Turkish guilt was acting like “poison in their blood,” which some time-serving goons in the Turkish government managed to twist into a claim that Turkish blood was poison.  Mr. Dink’s point, lost on so many Diasporans and even more Turks, was that obsession with recognition of the genocide, the extensive leaning on this one historical event as the definition of your identity, was crippling them as a people and diverting their energies from the necessary work of building up Armenia.  He was essentially right, but it is another tragedy that his murder by a Turkish nationalist will almost certainly drown out his reasonable appeal and make recognition of the genocide that much more of a priority over more practical concerns of aiding the actual state that Armenians finally have. 

As related in one of the talks at the colloquium, Western Armenians, scattered around the globe as they are, are focused more intensely on the nature of their national identity, while the Armenians in the Republic tend to be focused more on the bread-and-butter concerns of economic and political reform in their country.  This is not to say that Eastern Armenians aren’t concerned with their history, since they are very much concerned, or that Western Armenians aren’t concerned about Armenia, because they are quite concerned, but that the primary emphasis for each community, broadly speaking, often lies elsewhere.

This got me to thinking after having read the early parts of A Shameful Act (Dr. Akcam, by the way, will be speaking at the University of Chicago this Friday at the Oriental Institute at 7:00), because it occurred to me that, as often as various early republican Turkish officials insisted that the genocide had been necessary to pave the way for the Turkish national state (hence the Turkish Republic’s obsession with denial), the genocide also served ironically to artificially divide Armenians from the Diaspora and Armenia from one another to some degree.  The memory of this horror has proved to be so much more powerful and central for many Diasporan Armenians in a way that was never entirely possible for the Eastern Armenians whose ancestors did not experience it, and it has probably come to form a larger part of the Diasporan identity because it is directly part of their history–rather than part of a general national history in which their immediate kin never directly participated–and has thus managed to introduce a barrier of sorts between them and their fellow Armenians.  Its final bitter fruit has been to create something of a gap in understanding between the two largest parts of the Armenian world.  Of course, I think it is fair to say that almost all Armenians still desire recognition of the genocide as genocide from Turkey, but even then it is possible that this recognition will not mean quite the same thing–and so may have very different effects in the two communities–because the genocide does not have quite the same meaning for both.           

Matt Yglesias has lately started trying to clear a path through the impenetrable bramble that is the foreign policy non-debate about American-Israel relations and the influence of pro-Israel lobbying groups and pro-Israel hawks on the shape of American Near Eastern policy.  Predictably, he has received a lot of grief for making some observations that seem controversial mostly to those who foreign policy and pro-Israel views are more or less implicated in what he writes.  Ezra Klein has a little more on this point.   

It was therefore inevitable that someone should call forth the memory of Charles Lindbergh, every internationalist’s favourite American pinata and hate-figure from the 1930s.  Lindbergh is their target primarily because of his 1941 Des Moines speech for the America First Committee.  Yglesias replies here to the Lindbergh comparison.  In his response, Yglesias easily sees why Goldberg reached so very deep into his bag of tricks for this comparison (what with comparisons between foreign policy debates of today and the 1930s being so rare and unusual at NRO):

I’ll cop to not actually knowing anything about the real historical record of Lindberg [sic], but I take the point of the reference to be a not-so-thinly veiled effort to once again call Wesley Clark and myself anti-semites.

In fact, it isn’t veiled at all.  On the right today, flinging the name Lindbergh (even while pointing to posts where you acknowledge that the person being referred isn’t really nearly as dreadful as everyone would normally take him to be) at anyone has a very simple purpose: to impute on the one hand horrible anti-Jewish prejudice (of which Lindbergh was supposedly guilty) and to imply that the person’s foreign policy views are profoundly immoral (because they are like pre-WWII “isolationism” in some way).  Goldberg makes whatever qualifications about Lindbergh that he does in order to show that he seems to possess some more detailed understanding of the man than the “cartoonish demonization” of him allows, but essentially accepts the fruits of that demonization and relies on the “cartoonish demonization” to do most of the work in his anti-Yglesias post.  He takes it for granted that his audience will read the name Lindbergh and summon to mind the “cartoonish demonization” that generations of New Dealers, internationalists and jingoes have cultivated and made into a conventional part of the narrative of American history.  In this way, he endorses that demonisation and confirms that he is employing the comparison primarily for the purposes of demonising Yglesias. 

It’s a pretty effective, if unethical, rhetorical move, not entirely unlike the well-known Ciceronian ploy of vicious character assassination dressed up as a sort of concession to the accused, “I’m not going to talk about the man’s despicable nature and how he has betrayed his wife and friends…I am going to talk about the matter at hand.”  Thus Goldberg effectively says: “Have you noticed the similarities between Yglesias and Lindbergh, whom I despise?  They’re not entirely similar–they’re just similar in all of the worst possible, anti-Semitic ways.  But don’t take this as an insult, Matt, because I have relatively less contempt for Lindbergh than most people who use these sorts of shoddy attacks.”   

In the exceedingly simple calculations of certain interventionists who use these attacks, if Lindbergh was an anti-Semite and he opposed entry into WWII, it was probably from bad motives and sneaking sympathy with the Axis–both which have been pretty unfairly imputed to Col. Lindbergh.  You can read the Des Moines speech and see for yourself how well-deserved these charges of prejudice and sympathy with the Axis are.  I think it is fair to say that they are essentially untrue.  Those charges represent one of the more famous examples of disgusting lies being deployed against a sincere patriot trying to keep his country from needless war. 

It also somehow follows for such interventionists that whatever held “true” for Lindbergh could be applied in broadbrush fashion to pretty much anyone in the America First Committee and, later, to anyone who looks back at the AFC with anything other than mocking derision.  The demonised caricature of Lindbergh can be readily used against those modern-day non-interventionists who happen to be opposed to the foreign policy views of these very interventionists and pro-Israel hawks, especially when more than a few of these hawks are Jewish.  I’m not saying that any of the connections interventionist make along the way really make any sense, but it is what interventionists and internationalists today often do whenever they fear that a new crop of “isolationists” (i.e., conservatives who think American interests are not served by hyperactive foreign policy and at least one major military adventure per decade) is on the rise.   

Yglesias also catches Goldberg in one of his attempts to read in a message to his opponents’ views that isn’t there.  Goldberg wrote:

Regardless, Lindbergh believed Jews were pushing American foreign policy in an unhealthy direction, and so does Yglesias and, more significantly, so does Wes Clark.

That isn’t what Yglesias or Clark said.  They weren’t speaking about “Jews” as a whole or abstractly as some single-minded entity, as the criticism implies, since everyone understands that these claims are bound to be riddled with exceptions and it can be questionable even to make such sweeping claims.  Come to think of it, essentially no one makes such claims about “Jews” generally.  (This is why it is so crucial for interventionists to circulate the lie that neocon is a “code word” for Jew, so that they can pretend that opponents of these hypernationalist, pro-Israel militarists of all backgrounds are saying outlandish things about “the Jews” when they are not.) 

Goldberg often inserts such a gross overgeneralisation in someone else’s argument.  Here is one example that comes to mind immediately.  When someone makes a specific accusation about a certain faction or interest group, if any one of the accused is a Jewish person Goldberg will declare that the accuser has made outrageous generalisations about “the Jews.”  This allows him to dismiss the charge as absurd on its face and proof of the accuser’s bias, when the only one who has made outrageous generalisations and absurd claims has been Goldberg.  But Yglesias has some fun with this:

Look back through this current controversy and you’ll see that I don’t accuse “the Jews” of having a pernicious influence on anything. If you do want to talk about “the Jews” as a class, we’ve had a beneficial impact on US foreign policy lately, voting in overwhelming numbers for congressional Democrats, putting Nancy Pelosi in the Speaker’s Chair and thereby somewhat restraining Bush’s poor national security policies. 

The Armenian leadership openly sided with Turkey’s enemies, demanded a state on Ottoman land and formed anti-Ottoman militias. Many Turks were killed by these Armenian groups.

Turkey fears an official apology for the Armenian deaths would trigger claims on its land or on seized Armenian assets. Turks cannot believe the sincerity of foreign parliaments which, usually ill-informed about the Turkish case, give in to Armenian diaspora lobbying for genocide declarations. (One such bill looks likely to pass the U.S. Congress in April.) Politics often seems to trump history. [bold mine-DL] Would the French Parliament have made it a crime last year to deny a “genocide” by the Turks if an unrelated desire to keep Turkey out of the European Union had not been prevalent? ~Hugh Pope

The first statement is a shocking overgeneralisation.  Mr. Pope has evidently written several books on Turkish history, so he ought to know better than to say broad and sweeping things about “the Armenian leadership.”  Much of the flower of Ottoman Armenian political and intellectual leadership in Constantinople (or Konstantiniye as it was still called at the time) was wiped out in the days and weeks following the mass arrests of Armenian journalists, professionals, clergy, scholars and parliamentarians on April 24, 1915 (April 24 is now the day when the genocide is now commemorated).  This leadership had remained quite loyal to the Ottoman Empire, maintaining the Armenians’ reputation as the “loyal” millet in contrast with the Orthodox Christian Slavs and Greeks who had been breaking away from the empire for decades.  For their loyalty, they were rewarded with death, and the deaths of these leading figures gave the signal to the Turkish and Kurdish irregulars in eastern Anatolia to begin the massacres and forced deportation of Armenians from Van, Erzerum and Cilicia, among other locations.  The Young Turk government during WWI coordinated with these irregulars to achieve maximum destruction of the Armenians in Anatolia.  After the Ottoman defeat, there were even some trials of some of those who had participated in the slaughter.  The slaughter was unfortunately not an entirely new thing, since there had been widespread massacres  of Armenians in 1894-96 in the previous generation and no foreign war on which they could later be conveniently blamed.  What was different starting in 1915 was the scale and organisation of the killing and the official backing of the government.   

There were some Armenian nationalists in eastern Anatolia who sided with the Russians in the hopes of establishing an independent Armenian republic (a goal which was briefly realised at war’s end before it was swallowed up by the Soviets and became Armenia SSR), but to refer to these people as “the Armenian leadership” or to treat the problem as if it were one of general subversion of the empire by the entire Armenian community in time of war when it was not the case is unworthy of someone who claims the role of historian.  Indeed, Mr. Pope’s column reads very much like something out of the Turkish government’s own propaganda, including the scare quotes around the word genocide and the outrageous statement that it is somehow the Turkish government that has history, rather than politics, on its side.  It is fairly obvious to most thoughtful people, whether Armenian, Turk or some other nationality, that the massacres did happen and did constitute the first modern genocide.  It has been the political repression of the evidence and speech about this inside Turkey that has been the only real source of doubt about the genocide.  It has been this persistent denial imposed by the Turkish government that has continued to frustrate and embitter the Armenian Diaspora. 

As the late Mr. Dink had tried to argue, preoccupation with Turkish acknowledgement of the genocide has become for many Diasporans a consuming passion, even an unhealthy one.  However, I can hardly blame them for wanting official acknowledgement that this did happen and was a deliberately orchestrated state-sanctioned attempt to annihilate an entire people.  I don’t know why exactly Mr. Pope feels obliged to carry water for Ankara and the argument that “lots of people died–hey, there was a war on!”, especially when the latter is typically the refuge of the Holocaust-denier, but he lends his name to a bad cause and does not do his duty as an historian by lending credibility to the Turkish government’s self-serving justifications of a horrendous crime.  Politics often seems to trump history all right, at least as far as Mr. Pope’s misleading description of the genocide goes.  

For those interested in what a more serious historian has to say about the matter, Taner Akcam’s A Shameful Act is reputed to be an excellent study.  (I regret that I have not yet had a chance to read it, but I plan to do so this year.)  It confirms, as one would expect, that the genocide was “a deliberate, centralized program of state-sponsored extermination.”  This is the work of a Turkish scholar who is keenly aware of the anxieties of Turks about acknowledging this crime, but who is also concerned to tell the truth about these terrible events.  That is the sort of historian we should be heeding.   

Do these overbroad claims for the necessity of religion suggest that the theocons are running scared? Perhaps.

Up to half of the conservative writers and thinkers whom I know are non-believers. And yet because of the rule that one may never ever question claims made on behalf of faith, they remain in the closet. At some point, however, they may emerge to challenge the idea that without religion, personal and social anarchy looms.

8) If you are 18 and figuring out what course of study to pursue for the next 4 years what changes would you make to your educational path now that you have some hindsight?

I would study a lot more history. Thanks to my college’s refusal to tell its ignorant students what an educated person should know-heaven forbid that it actually exercise intellectual authority!-I was required to study no history and didn’t know enough to do so on my own. ~Heather Mac Donald

Okay, for those who are in danger of being all “Mac Donalded” out, I have just one more thing to say about Ms. Mac Donald’s review before I turn to other things.  The juxtaposition of the remark about theocons arguing for the necessity of religion and Ms. Mac Donald’s admitted lack of study of history caught my attention.  It struck me that her admitted lack of a proper education in history, which she laudably wishes to remedy, might explain a lot about Ms. Mac Donald’s atheism. 

Atheists are great ones for posing what they think are really baffling conundrums for believers, but their acquaintance with history, as far as religion is concerned, is typically with the black marks and scandals.  There was religious fanaticism!  Well, yes, and there was far, far worse atheist fanaticism, so which would you rather see dominating society?  They seem uninterested to query why it is that every organised society from the earliest tribes to the most technically sophisticated civilisations have had one form or another of propitiating, worshipping and otherwise interacting with the supernatural and divine.  If they do ask the question, they have ready-made answers handy: ignorance, fear of death, fear of the unknown, opiate of the masses, etc.  It usually does not seem to trouble them that the greatest minds in every period of our history not only acknowledged one divinity or another but insisted on the importance of reverence for God or the gods for the well-being and virtuous life of man.  They were caught up in the superstitions of their time, or they were afraid to challenge the religious authorities, the atheist will reply.  Maybe, but what of the numerous philosophers who claimed to be able to show, by means of reason, the necessity of the existence of God?  Though all these men considered the possibility of atheism, at least in passing, the absurdity of it always prevented them from embracing it. 

It is no wonder then that, when faced with something like the ontological proof, which they no longer even attempt to answer, most atheists retreat to tired arguments from theodicy.  Having repeatedly failed to disprove God’s existence in the realm of logic, which was their only real chance, they now hope to shame believers with the scandal of the fallenness of the world.  “Look, a tsunami!  What about your loving God now, eh?” they cry.  This can sometimes scandalise believers, but it does not do much to disprove God’s existence.  

Doesn’t the awesome weight of all of these historical precedents make the ”skeptical conservative,” the conservative atheist, think twice about whether he has gone awry somewhere?  Surely it is one of the marks of conservatism to defer to the authority of tradition on the assumption that the “individual is foolish, but the species is wise” and that the tradition has accumulated the wisdom of centuries as compared against your brief lifespan.  These are not definitive proofs in favour of the claims of the tradition (deference to tradition is based heavily on experience and an assumption that time-tested ways are best, which do not yield proofs as such), but for the conservative they are important claims that have to be taken into account when forming a view about anything. 

Perhaps the most stunning thing about atheism is the sheer presumption of it.  I don’t mean simply the presumption against God, which would be enough in itself, but the presumption that you and a few other adventurous souls have figured out something that the vast majority of mankind has never known about a subject for which the atheist can obviously have no empirical evidence one way or the other.  Heady stuff, indeed.  Say whatever else you will about it, this setting of the ideas of the self over and against the inherited wisdom of ages is one of the main things that is unconservative about atheism.  Even if atheists were right, we should be clear that there would be nothing conservative about their position, but would, if adopted by society as a whole, quite obviously involve a cultural revolution and destruction of a significant portion of our cultural inheritance.  In the end, what is it that atheists would conserve of our civilisation, when so much of the substance of our civilisation has its origins in Christianity or in the cultural derivatives thereof? 

Would greater familiarity with history weaken an atheist’s certainty that religion is unnecessary for the healthy flourishing of society?  I almost have to think that it would.  The nightmare of the 20th century, defined to such a great extent in so many parts of the world by organised godlessness and the official repudiation of all religion, should give any convinced atheist pause.  If man does not flourish in a godless regime, and if godless regimes have a record of unusually great barbarity and human cruelty, it does at the very least suggest that religion aids in human flourishing and probably has some moderating effect on the use of political power.  On sheer pragmatic grounds alone, someone familiar with the historical record would have to conclude that atheism, at least if embraced officially, is bad for the health of society.     

Since no one has yet offered me a large pot full of treasures that would keep me otherwise occupied, I thought I would point readers to an interesting article (via Razib) about the Alevi sect in Turkey.  This is one of the many sects that fill the fissiparous and wildly diverse universe of Shi’ism.  Somewhat like the Druze, they have roots in Shi’ism, but have developed into an entirely different religious group.

Speaking of fairly obscure Near Eastern sects, I was introduced indirectly to the existence of a small religious minority in Armenia through reading the beginning of Namus, one of the works of Armenian author Alexander Shirvanzade.  Namus, as I have discovered, is a Mediterranean and Near Eastern code of honour, and would seem to form part of the Pashtuns’ pushtunwali surveyed by The Economist late last year. 

What was the obscure sect I discovered?  The Malakans (as transliterated from Armenian) or Molokans (as transliterated from Russian).  Not to be outdone by anyone else, the Molokans have their own webpage.  From what I have been able to learn about them so far, you could not find people less likely to follow anything remotely resembling pushtunwali than the Malakans, who appear to be the very embodiment of meekness and longsuffering. 

Relating this to some current events here in America, I would note that Molokans apparently also were supposed to have had a tradition of plural marriage at some point and were either pejoratively identified or otherwise associated with Mormons in the 19th century.  According to a 1993 New York Times article, the Molokans “comprise a rather late Russian sect that emerged at the close of the 18th century.”

The article continues:

Like other anti-clerical movements in Russia and in Europe, Molokan preachers focused on immediate personal contacts with God, refuting ritual and reverence for saints and icons as idolatry. They recognize as the sole fountainhead of truth the Holy Scriptures, emphasizing that both Old and New Testaments are to be viewed metaphorically not dogmatically.

Basic is meeting for prayer which reduce to hymn singing and the joint reading and interpretation of Scriptural texts. There is no hierarchy, with the congregations chaired by an Elder, usually one of the older and better educated members of the community. They resemble more the western Quakers and Baptists.

Apparently, along with other dissident sects, the Molokans were resettled in the Caucasus under Nicholas I.  This is presumably how they entered into the history of Armenia.

Update: Somehow I forgot to mention this earlier.  There is also a movie called Namus, which is based on Shirvanzade’s story.  There is now a restored version available.  From what I have heard about the story’s melodrama, it sounds as if it will be Armenia’s answer to a Bollywood plot.  Unfortunately, it is a silent film, so there won’t be any big song-and-dance numbers.

Needless to say, that final conclusion is open to debate. But it is true that leaders are susceptible to policies of escalation if they believe that victory can be achieved. That is because, as in Iraq, the potential rewards of victory outweigh the consequences of guaranteed defeat. Still, psychological errors are neither the lone nor the most important cause behind policymakers’ reluctance to “cut their losses.” Considerations of honor also play a factor, as do aspirations to glory—two concepts that go unmentioned in our social sciences (because they are difficult to quantify) and in our foreign-policy debate (because they are out of intellectual fashion).

But these two ideas, along with power, ideology, weakness, morality, and interest, are central to any comprehensive understanding of international relations. And they are key to understanding whether hawks or doves triumph in a given policy debate. That Kahneman and Renshon mention none of them in their essay only undermines its persuasiveness. That they restrict the scope of the biases they identify to hawks suggests their piece is less a work of social science than it is a polemic. One might even go so far as to say they exhibit clear biases of their own. ~Matt Continetti, Foreign Policy

Via Reihan

This conclusion of Mr. Continetti’s response to the Kahneman/Renshon FP essay (on the relationship between psychological biases and hawkish tendencies in foreign policy decision-making) reminded me of J.H. Elliott’s masterful biography of Olivares, the early seventeenth-century privado to the king and effective head of government of Habsburg Spain at the beginning of Spain’s slow, centuries-long decline from hegemon to second-rate power.  This is not just because Elliott’s biography is an outstanding portrait of how men in government can help bring greater ruin on their nation through activist foreign policy undertaken for the sake of reputacion above all else, but because it emphasises the centrality of reputacion in the considerations of 17th-century “policymakers.”  Its lessons can be applied to our current predicament. 

Honour and glory are relevant in any discussion of the administration’s refusal to withdrawal from Iraq–which is not to say that men in the administration are honourable men or that they have brought anything but disgrace upon our country.  Perhaps they believe they are keeping their word to Iraqis, such as it is, or perhaps they think that the only honourable thing in a war is to see it to its bitter end, no matter what.  It is, of course, precisely this confusion of insane pigheadedness with honour that has helped bring the very notion of honour into disrepute over the decades; it is the inability to distinguish selfish pride from the desire to have a clean and respectable reputation that made the idea of a “war for honour” appear to be the most horrible, meaningless kind of war.  It was because of such perversions that dulcet et decorum est became a ringing indictment of treacherous governments everywhere rather than an admirable expression of patriotic love.  Nonetheless, some distorted idea of honour lives on in high government circles that compels them to persist in the Iraq folly.  

No one in his right mind believes, for instance, that withdrawal from Iraq would constitute a strategic disaster for the United States.  It would lead to many ugly things, most of all for the Iraqis, and there would be damage in the short term to our credibility and our ability to project power (for those of us who see few occasions when we need to project power, this is less disturbing than it is for the hegemonists), but the damage would be done quickly and could be repaired relatively easily.  What many believe is that the appearance of the withdrawal will deal a powerful blow to national prestige.  The people worrying about this are usually the same people who cavalierly spat upon the opinion of the world only three and half years ago and declared that what the world thought of America was irrelevant when our “security” was at stake.  (Perhaps if our security had been at stake, world opinion might well have been irrelevant.)  Still, it is fascinating all the same to watch the people who practically only yesterday loathed the very idea of being in any way governed by concern about international reaction now start screaming about the damage to our reputation if we should now abandon Iraq to its fate.  Those who gleefully mocked any government, ally or no, that dared question the wisdom of the invasion are now terribly concerned that the same governments they once ridiculed as irrelevant will think less of American strength.  Trust me, folks, in some of these countries it is impossible to worsen the reputation of the United States, because there is nowhere for it to go but up.  Fears of further wrecking American prestige are misplaced–it is not possible to sink a wrecked ship a second time.  

There is something elemental and primal in their newfound concern for national reputation: no one wishes to appear to be a fool, and no one wishes to suffer the “humiliation” of having to acknowledge his limits.  Withdrawal from Iraq highlights the limits of what Americans are willing to tolerate and support for the sake of ambiguous, shifting or meaningless goals, which means that Americans have no stomach for wasteful expeditions of empire or hegemony or whatever you would like to call it.  This is embarrassing, most of all for those who think that the United States guarantees world stability.  Withdrawal would also be an admission of national folly and recklessness, which would vindicate to some degree the international critics and make the bulk of our foreign policy establishment look like a gang of idiots (the truth hurts, doesn’t it?). 

No one in or near that establishment really wants this to happen, which is why we now have the growing consensus that the Iraqis failed to make proper use of the glorious gift we gave them: why couldn’t they make more of their untidy freedom?  The idea that most of the political class and almost the entire professional foreign policy elite botched the biggest policy question of the last 15 years is too terrible for them to consider.  That is why they think we must keep fighting in Iraq: to help save their reputations long enough to shift the blame to the miserable people of “liberated” Iraq, all in the name of preserving the good name of the United States, in spite of the fact that they have already trashed our good name and made our nation’s name a curse in the mouths of the people who have “benefited” from our intervention. 

Reputacion is always the concern of people in government, concerned as they are as much with the appearance of things as with anything of substance, and it does drive policy decisions.  Unfortunately, as happened with Olivares’ costly and ultimately failed campaigns in the Netherlands and against France, wars fought for reputacion, not unlike wars fought for ideological or other intangible reasons, are wars that tend to go on for much longer than the state of affairs suggests they should and they tend to be much harder to terminate because calling off a war fought for the sake of reputacion is to put something as paltry as the good of the actual country and people ahead of the airy prestige of the government.  Few governments are willing to do that.  Democratically elected governments are among the worst in this regard, because they can, with some plausibility, claim to be acting out the will of the people, which can make concluding a war seem to be an act of betrayal of the nation (an accusation nationalists from 1918 to 1975 to today and forever after will always make about the end of wars they and people like them helped to start).  Sadly, only too many nations are willing to allow their governments to value reputacion more highly than those governments value the well-being of their peoples.  Reputacion does drive decision-making, but it is not at all clear that it should or that the importance of reputacion should be anything but a black mark against the policymakers who follow the imperatives of maintaining reputacion.  Some conception of honour is something we should keep in mind when we try to understand why governments go to war, but we must also remember that the government’s so-called honour usually comes at the expense of the people’s well-being, whereas the real honour of the nation is usually served when its government does not foment or seek conflict.  

Some libertarians, but of course not all, are political, not cultural, libertarians: they consider that state power should not be deployed to prevent individuals from selecting things to do. But cultural libertarians, on my view of things, consider that, even in the absence of state and statute, no social convention should prevent individuals from choosing things to do — with themselves and each other.

The distinction is crucial. On the first account, preventing the oppressive overreach of governmental tyranny — a unique power and danger in the world — is the goal, one that conservatives (sigh — generally) share. On the second, promoting the remissive outreach of personal autocracy — a unique power and danger in the world — is a goal no conservative can ever share, for once he or she does, he or she ceases to be a conservative in the decisive sense. Peisistratan tyranny may find even conservative sympathy; not so Calliclean tyranny. ~James Poulos

You would have a hard time convincing me that Peisistratos’ apparent maintenance of the Solonian reforms was the mark of bad government.  An abiding concern of the Athenian aristocracy was a well-ordered polity, for whose benefit they laboured and donated a great deal of wealth.  The sort of self-indulgence that today parades under the banner of “individual autonomy” and the idea of being autonomous from the political community were simply not considered legitimate or ethical alternatives in the life of the polis–this kind of apragmosyne had no place in the community. 

If nomos is not our ruler, but each is a nomos unto himself, you have a recipe for social anarchy sliding towards despotism.  Slavishness and passion truly are linked, and without restraint of the latter there is no way to escape the former.  If no restraints are imposed from within, constraints will be imposed from without.  Cultural libertarians are emancipating themselves straight into the prisonhouses of Leviathan. 

The problem for those who have tried to steer the United States away from its long history of expansiveness, then and now, is that Americans’ belief in the possibility of global transformation — the “messianic” impulse — is and always has been the more dominant strain in the nation’s character. It is rooted in the nation’s founding principles and is the hearty offspring of the marriage between Americans’ driving ambitions and their overpowering sense of righteousness. ~Robert Kagan

But, of course, this is all a lot of rot.  This is a clever set-up: the argument we are now having over foreign policy is a very old argument that goes all the way back to the beginning, but my side is the bigger, more powerful one and will always win (so stop arguing with me)!  But it isn’t true.  Not that it would make a messianic foreign policy wise or desirable even if it were, but just watch how interventionists twist history to give themselves a much older, more distinguished pedigree.  The best he can find is to dig up an old line about “empire” that Hamilton gives, which is to take Hamilton, who was an extremist even among the Federalists, as somehow representative of anything–this is a significant error in itself.    But Hamilton’s line about “empire” can be matched by a similar line from Benjamin Franklin that comes from before the War for Independence, but this does not mean that either Hamilton or Franklin necessarily believed in an activist or moralising or messianic foreign policy.  Even the more centralised government under the Constitution did not have the power or the ability to engage in such a foreign policy, and no one desired to give it so much power that it could engage in such a policy.  As for the statement itself, John Adams understood the word “empire” to mean a state subject to no fundamental law, a state that was sovereign–it was in this sense that Thomas Cromwell first designated England an “empire” in the time of Henry VIII in an assertion of the monarch’s rights vis-a-vis Rome (he did not therefore anticipate and foreshadow the Raj and the United Empire Loyalists!).  A constitutional state, by Adams’ definition, could not have been an empire in any case; a republic or other constitutional polity is subject to a fundamental law.  It is therefore not necessarily obvious what usage of ”empire” was being employed in every case, nor is it clear that saying favourable things about “empire” makes one a proto-interventionist, much less a raving mad messianic visionary in waiting.   

This is cherry-picking and teleological history at their worst: because we have an interventionist, meddlesome foreign policy and a messianic impulse to transform the world now, we must have always potentially had one.  A very bad historian will then find this eternally existing foreign policy by engaging in what R.W. Southern mockingly dubbed “precursorism” as he tries to read into earlier national debates our present-day conflicts.  People do the same thing in Western Civ-style history, lamely picking up on the precursor elements of modern democracy in the ancient German tribal things while ignoring most of what was actually interesting and important about the early medieval barbarian kingdoms or treating the Reformation as some great advance towards modern individualism when this is the last thing any of the Reformers desired and was exactly the opposite of what they were proposing.  It is a very superficial sort of intellectual history that presumes the seeds of a current debate or division must have existed from the beginning or from a very early stage of development.  In church history, we have long been treated to a very tired “search for the origins of the schism” in every minor dispute or disruption of communion in the 5th century between Rome and Constantinople.  Bad interpretations will say that the divisions of the 7th century presage and foreshadow the later schism in the 11th century, which is to see the 7th century in an entirely anachronistic and false way.  You would come away thinking that the churches become less united in the 7th century, when, in fact, they become more united; claims of papal authority actually become weaker because of the condemnation of Pope Honorius, etc. 

Likewise, Americans had debates over the nature of the Union and questions of territorial expansion, but these do not anticipate later debates over entirely different questions.  There was a national consensus on foreign policy for at least a century after independence that the affairs of the Old World especially were not really our problem and were best left to others.  Relations and commerce were desirable, but not entanglement. 

If the “messianic impulse” was always so dominant, it continually failed to dominate or express itself.  To the extent that “empire”-building and universal liberal ideals did find expression, it was over internal disputes about the nature of the Union.  But even then it does not follow that all, or even most, Northern Republicans believed in overseas intervention or advocated for such a policy.  At each stage where elite interests have pushed for a more expansive, activist foreign policy, the public has been reluctant to go along.  Interventionism has always needed some calamitous event or provocation to win broader public support–and even then, the public is often unwilling to endorse the “messianic impulse.”  Certainly, WWI stands out as a perfect example where the messianism of the President and the willingness to go to war of the Congress were completely unrepresentative of a large part of the country (70% in Apr. 1917 did not want to enter the European war and opposition continued to run at this high level until the end).  Even after the German declaration of war, Americans generally were not terribly interested in fighting Germany in 1942 and American soldiers were never able to work up the elemental hostility to Germans that they had for the Japanese (for one, the Germans had never attacked us, so our fight with them seemed much less obvious).  Americans grow weary of “nation-building” enterprises because, as much as they believe in the exceptional qualities of their own nation, this same exceptionalism militates against making other nations to imitate us.  If we are exceptional (and we are, properly speaking, not), it is even less likely that our model can be followed by anyone else.  

We have had the bad misfortune to suffer from people in the political class who believe as Kagan does, but the wilder ideas about “global transformation” do not belong to Americans generally but, at most, to a very specific subsection of Americans from back east and mainly from the Northeast and to a fairly limited circle of intellectuals and politicians.  This part of the country and this particularly narrow segment of the population have dictated the course of our foreign policy in the 20th century, and in every case they have represented an elite consensus that was deeply at odds with public sentiment, especially when it came to the wars resulting from the elite (mis)management of our foreign policy.  Wilson’s messianism was terrifically unpopular and not widely shared in his own time; each time it is revived–usually in some time of national security crisis, real or perceived–the people have gone along with it (because of the crisis) without ever sharing the messianic impulse.  Yes, Americans are generally exceptionalist.  They like to flatter themselves that history does not apply to them, and so are constantly baffled when it “catches up” with them.  What many frequently overlook, or what they often do not want to see, is that it is not “history” that has caught up with us (as in, the “holiday from history” coming to an end on 9/11) but that the consequences of bad elite foreign policy decisions have finally come about. 

What Americans want are leaders who have confidence in our ideals but who do not therefore believe it is necessary to send off military deployments to “advance” those ideals in all corners of the globe.  Americans who have sufficient confidence in those ideals do not believe in the need for crusades or militant messianism, since they assume that these ideals, if they are in any sense universal, will succeed abroad without recourse to the sword.  Those who believe strongly in these ideals, but who do not assume them to be simply universal, are even less enthusiastic in forcibly taking them out into the world because they are unsure that the ideals will take in foreign soil. 

History, of course, is not on anybody’s “side,” and you can tell a hack from an historian by whether or not he uses language like this, but if we do learn something from our own history it is that the American people will keep trying to throw off the yoke of a wild-eyed, utopian foreign policy elite and as a result will be treated to the pious hectoring of interventionist court historians who keep spreading the false story of the eternally messianic and interventionist America.  If there were no real danger of interventionism being discredited forever by disastrous misadventures like Iraq, if our “messianic” national spirit were so deeply ingrained and our desire to meddle so profound, all of these things would not need an army of apologists and deeply entrenched powerful supporters to keep them from being tossed out.  The only way that interventionists continue to have any hold on the imagination of any large part of the population is by distorting history and making interventionism into a long-standing national tradition (thus conning nationalists and some conservatives into embracing this supposedly ancient “tradition”) and by making the elite’s power interest in keeping interventionism around into a defense of high-minded American idealism (thus reducing its enemies to a kind of cynicism or, God help us, “realism” or “isolationism”).  In other words, interventionism survives only by distortion and deception, which is the only way that it ever achieved any prominence in the first place.  It is alien and contrary to the American tradition and the American spirit.  It can only thrive by perverting and abusing the native patriotism and trust of the people to other ends.  Because the government’s interests are served by an activist and meddlesome foreign policy, such a policy will be extremely hard to overthrow, but because it is so profoundly against the national interest and the welfare of the people there is always some small possibility that it will finally and permanently collapse. 

Peter Suderman points to this Apocalypto review in TNR, which led me to look at this story:

Gibson raised eyebrows when his “The Passion of the Christ” was done entirely in the archaic language of Aramaic. Now Diesel has revealed that he wants to make a three-part swords and sandals epic based on the life of Hannibal. And he wants to do the films all in Punic, the language that was spoken by the Alps-crossing conqueror, but not by anyone for 2,000 years.

That last note isn’t quite true.  There were apparently still Punic-speakers in the time of St. Augustine, as I believe he relates in his correspondence (and Wikipedia tells us that it might have survived into the 7th century, though I do not know of any references to Punic-speakers in the 7th century), but then the history of Punic is not something I would expect entertainment reporters to know all that well.  A Carthaginian trilogy would be great fun (but who would pay to make it?), and Hannibal is probably one of only a few great generals of classical antiquity whose story has never been, as far as I know, brought to film.  Shih-huang-di has been covered, but Ashoka fans everywhere are impatiently awaiting a proper adaptation of his life that does not have Kareena Kapoor in it. 

The question I have is this: when will the Armenians in Hollywood get their act together and produce a screen adaptation of the epic story of the Vardanank’ (entirely in Grabar, of course)?  For some background information on the Vardanank’, read the entry on the Battle of Avarayr (451). 

You can also read this, but try to ignore the Theodore Rshtuni worship in the section on the 7th century if you can.  If Theodore Rshtuni initiated a policy of “compromise between Arabs and Byzantines,” Vidkun Quisling was a hero to his country.  Rshtuni’s “compromise” was effectively to side with the Arabs against the Byzantines, who were still ruling the country at the time.  Some Armenian nationalists have long regarded him as one of the great national heroes because he helped overturn the church union with Constantinople, thus reestablishing Armenian “independence” in church matters at the expense of making a deal with the Muslims.  (And, yes, I do see the parallels with the Byzantines in the 15th century–but I would not therefore say that Lukas Notaras and Mark Evgenikos initiated a policy of compromise between the Latins and the Turks!)

However, telling the story of the Vardanank’ these days might be complicated by some recent developments.  Because Armenia has been pinned between the basically hostile states of Turkey and Azerbaijan, it has been forced to rely heavily on its ties to Moscow and Tehran, which has also necessarily hurt her position with Washington.  Partly as a result of this close relationship with Iran, the long and close connections between Armenian and Iranian cultures have become much more important for a lot of ethnic Armenian scholars and Western scholars of Armenian history (Armenian vocabulary is heavily dependent on Iranian words).  Part of this shift has involved something of a revisionist effort aimed at the Battle of Avarayr and the memory of Vardan Mamikonean, who is also commemorated as a martyr and saint in the Armenian Apostolic Church.  In some of these new interpretations–which are by no means widespread, but which are becoming more popular–seeing Avarayr as a fundamental clash between the Christian Armenian and Zoroastrian Iranian worlds has become less fashionable and there is a tendency to judge Vardan, who has hitherto been the archetypical national hero, as someone who led his people into disastrous resistance against an overwhelming foe.  (It is as if Scots started to belittle William Wallace for being too confrontational.) 

Earlier, pre-Soviet efforts by Armenian intellectuals to emphasise their people’s considerable common ties to the European and wider Christian world no longer necessarily command the attention that they once did, and the story of cultural exchange and interdependence between Armenians, Iranians and other peoples in the region has consequently gained in prestige.  Before the Vardanank’ suffers from the revisionist idiocy that has afflicted other great mythic moments of national struggle, we need a major feature about Vardan.  Maybe there is an opening in Gibson’s schedule. 

Historically victory in foreign war has always meant hegemony: You win, you take over. ~Shelby Steele

Unless world history only extends from 1799 to 1945, this is a remarkably inaccurate statement.  If he is speaking strictly of American wars, this is once again not really true.  For much of history, and especially before the modern rise of insurgencies and guerrilla warfare, victory entailed defeating the enemy’s armies in the field, seizing the objectives of the war (which did not, until the modern period, normally even theoretically include the enemy’s capital) and extracting concessions from the defeated party.  It did not necessarily require the occupation of the enemy’s territory, much less the ability to dictate terms about how the enemy governed his own domain.  Only in uncivilised, total warfare or wars of conquest and empire does this definition of victory apply.  To think of war in this way is to think of it in WWII-centric terms, which is typical of a lot of Americans, for whom this war is now the standard and the archetype of all other wars (hey, they watch the History Channel–they know it is!), is to misunderstand every other kind of war.    

Take a couple famous examples across history of where this definition does not apply.  For instance, Heraclius’ war against Persia–which was a defensive war that he won through a large counteroffensive thrus