Fist Of History

Book Review: Occupation, The Ordeal of France, 1940 – 1944

July 21st, 2010

Book Review: Occupation, the Ordeal of France, 1940 – 1944, Ian Ousby
Ian Ousby is a non-professional historian who has grappled, successfully, with a highly charged and complicated topic, the period from the fall of France in 1940 to a military assault by Germany through its internal political upheavals following the lost war and the subsequent change in government known as the Vichy period.  Ousby provides an excellent overview of the major political events that occurred prior to the outbreak of war in 1939, the actual military campaign of 1940, and the immediate fall/usurpation of the Third Republic of France into the Vichy government structure under Petan.  (The legality of such this change is one of the issues debated by historians and people in 1944 in France and Ousby provides a brief summary of aspects of this controversy in the period in his final chapter.)  Overall the book is strong in its initial examination of the events under the Vichy period but the heart of the book is a series of chapters examining the cultural and social impacts of the Vichy regime upon France and its citizens, a useful exercise in historical review but also one that skims on chronically the actual events of the Vichy period in detail.  Generally social histories can be forgiven such shortfalls but Ousby is attempting to write a general history that can allow someone who knows very little of the events in France from 1940 to 1944 to better understand the period, by omitting details of the political actions of the Vichy government Ousby leaves the reader with a feeling about the oppressive nature of the Vichy regime but less information about what that regime did politically to rule France.

As well Ousby does very little work on the impact politically that Germany had upon conquered France, Ousby touches upon some of the economic impacts and the minimal headway the Vichy regime was able to make in lowering the impact of paying the Occupation costs to Germany, but Ousby goes no further.  He provides no information on what those economic impacts were on France in the form of goods moved, lightly touches upon the demand for French goods and arms by Germany, and also only lightly describes the structures of government and political action in both Occupied France and Free/Unoccupied France.  In doing so his work leaves the reader swimming a bit when discussing the years from 1940 to 1944 in a soup of impressions, emotions, and reactions with minimal moorings of what the actions where that people were reacting to during that period.  That said though this is an excellent introductory history on the subject and is highly recommended for any general readers interested in the Occupation of France or French history from 1940 through 1944.

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Book Review: The Man Who Sold The World

April 13th, 2010

Title: The Man Who Sold The World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America

Author: William Kleinknecht

Publisher: Nation Books

I read this book about a month ago and I’ve been meaning to post a brief review of it, I purchased it a year ago because it promised to examine the legacy of Ronald Reagan and the actions of his administration and how Reagan’s actions as President of the United States undermined the culture, economy, and political system of the United States.  The author attempts to prove nothing less then Ronald Reagan, or at least those he put in power, deliberately engaged in a series of policies that were intentionally designed to transfer wealth into a smaller pool of hands within the United States, destroy the environment of the United States, and undermine economic organizations and regulations that protected small businesses, small towns, and individual consumers within the United States.  One of the major central arguments the author puts forward is that culturally Reagan undermined the idea of government competence with any sphere of society in the United States and also undermined the idea of community as a guiding force within the United States culturally.  Specifically Kleinknecht argues that Ronald Reagan, in his campaign for the Presidency as well as his administration, emphasized the ideal of the individual over the community, personal gain over societal gain, “me ahead of you” to put it crudely.

The problem however is that Kleinknecht in his book dabbles more in politics and in crafting an opinion then in actually reporting the history of the domestic policies of the Ronald Reagan administration, more critically he misses the target of his subject and instead drifts over a wide range of accusations against various conservative forces that took a leading role in the federal government while Reagan was in office.  Kleinknecht though does not limit his proof to that period, instead he draws upon events that happened while Reagan was in office, George W. Bush Sr. was in office, and William Clinton was in office, attempting to use all of these to prove a more broad hypothesis that conservative elements in the United States, since 1981, have engaged in a constant series of policies that have undermined what Kleinknecht argues are core values of the United States.  Specifically Kleinknecht argues in favor of federal regulation of markets and business, federal control and limitations on the economy, and returning the United States politically towards a system of federal control closer to that of the 1960s and 1970s then the system the United States currently operates under.

All valid outlooks to hold and argue but not matters of history – they are matters of policy and politics.  The line may seem a fine one to draw but Kleinknecht avoids dealing with the history of the Reagan administration directly and instead grapples with the ideology of the Reagan years, but even that task is not attempted in a neutral tone.  Kleinknecht has a point to argue, that Reagan and those Reagan brought into power undermined Kleinknecht’s ideal vision of the society of the United States.  If you are looking for a book documenting the history of the United States in the 1980s and the massive cultural revolution it underwent, a topic of considerable complexity and breadth, this is not a book I can recommend as a starting point.

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Book Review: King Leopold’s Ghost

February 19th, 2010

Recently I finished reading an incredibly well written book titled King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa written by Adam Hochschild, this book is focused upon the acquisition by Belgium of an African colony in the Congo region and the subsequent economic, social, and political exploitation and terror of that region by various different forces within the region.  In summary Hochschild argues that Belgium’s acquisition of a large colony in the Congo was due mainly to the territorial ambitions of its king at the time, King Leopold II, and Leopold gained that territory through a clever campaign of subterfuge, misdirection, diplomacy, intrigue, and lobbying both directly by King Leopold and by a web of his personal agents.  Hochschild then proceeds to examine the actual policies and actions of the various organizations and companies that ran Leopold’s newly acquired Congo colony.  Hochschild spends considerable time skillfully showing how Leopold ruled the Congo directly and treated it as a personal fiefdom, those agents acting within the territory did so at his personal approval and the funds raised from the various raw materials gathering efforts in the Congo went directly into Leopold’s personal fortune.

Probably the cornerstone value of this work is how Hochschild focuses attention upon both the atrocities conducted in the Congo by the agents of Leopold throughout his personal control of the colony, the extreme focus upon extracting the highest return of resources possible from the Congo during this period (specifically ivory and subsequently rubber), and the pioneering efforts by various concerned individual missionaries and reformers to bring about an end to Leopold’s abuses in the Congo.  Abuses is a highly appropriate word as evidence from various sources cited by Hochschild provide convincing evidence that during the roughly thirty years that Leopold personally ruled the Congo colony approximately fifty percent of the total indigenous population, or between 8 to 10 million people, died from both direct violence and indirect suffering at the hands of Leopold’s Congo policies and agents.  In addition to the high death count many survivors of this period lost their right hand to violence, a policy in the Congo was that it was expected for every round of ammunition fired an indigenous individual was to be killed.  Local soldiers who used their weapons to hunt would often take the right hand of a person still alive to even out their count.

As well Hochschild also does an incredible job of detailing the link between the novel Heart of Darkness and its authors real time spent in the Congo region.  Hochschild details how many of the events depicted in Heart of Darkness are directly drawn from Conrad’s own time in the Congo during this period.  The only complaint I would have for this book is, honestly, the title, it seems to imply a focus upon the post-Leopold II time in the Congo and the impact that ruler had on the region after his demise.  However this topic is only lightly covered in the final chapter of the book itself, most of the focus is on Leopold II and those who directly opposed him.  But beyond that minor complaint, this is an excellent book and I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in either the colonial era in Africa, Belgian politics in the Congo, or a good very character focused history.

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German Hyper-Inflaction of 1922 to 1923

February 19th, 2010

An interesting event of the interwar years in Europe (1919 – 1939) was an incident that occurred in the German Weimar Republic between 1922 to 1923, an incident in which the currency of Germany lost almost all real value.  The collapse of the value of Germany’s currency was due to a series of different forces that came together to put an incredible strain upon Germany’s economy between 1919 to 1922.  First Germany, under the Treaty of Versailles, was required to make a series of reparations payments to France and Great Britain, reparations payments that had to be made in gold backed currency.  Second Germany with the end of the First World War had to switch its economy from a wartime economy, based upon heavy government borrowing and spending on items of war, to one of peacetime productivity in which the Weimar government greatly diminished the amount of money the German government pumped into the economy.  Third Germany, due to territorial losses, entered the 1920s with less industrial productivity and a smaller raw materials base upon which to build its economic recovery, although Germany even in this diminished state was still a dominant economic power in Europe.  Fourth Germany from 1919 – 1922 went through a period of strong political unrest, during this period several armed coups and attempts to overthrow the government shook public confidence in the stability of Germany politically and socially.  Fifth, and finally, the Weimar government due to intense political pressure could not raise taxes to meet the expanded social support obligations it had taken on with the end of the First World War, as part of Germany’s movement from a monarchical imperial structure to a socialist republic.  This intense political pressure came from parties on the political right in Germany, who treated any effort to raise taxes by the Weimar government as a form of appeasement to the Allied powers and their demands for reparations, demands many in Germany considered unfair and inflammatory.

So the German Weimar government, unable to raise sufficient capital through borrowing, unable to raise revenue in taxes, needing to finance the private sector’s efforts to change the economy to a peacetime footing, needing to pay for social services and the function of government, and needing to purchase gold to back the banknotes with which it paid the Allied reparations, resorted to the only technique available to it to meet these needs: it simply issued more currency into the economy.  Vast amounts of currency, the collapse of the value of the Reichmark to other currencies was rapid and total, from early 1922 to late 1923 the Reichmark to the US Dollar fell from 7000 marks to the dollar in December 1922 to 4,200,000,000,000 marks to the dollar in December 1923.  This sudden collapse in the value of currency had several interesting impacts on Germany society, first it meant that those who lived on any fixed incomes found the value of their income disappearing quickly.  Those who owed debts on items found the value of that debt collapsing quickly, meaning a debtor could repay a debt with currency worth far less then the currency they had borrowed, in buying power terms.  German businesses often took advantage of this fact to purchase new equipment at effectively deep discounts, paying the debt as late as they could with vastly devalued currency.  The collapse was only arrested from 1924 onwards through careful conservative banking, currency deflation through issuing a brand new currency, and fiscal stringency.  The net effect of this economic collapse though was many Germans coming into the mid-1920s found themselves starting over economically.

Historically this incident is interesting because it has an impact on many key events that happened later in the 1920s and 1930s, first and most critically this incident undermined the faith of the German public in the capacity of the Weimar government to effectively lead Germany.  Although from 1924 until 1929 public confidence increased in the capacity of the Weimar republic to govern, this disaster was blamed on the policies of Weimar and when the Germany economy collapsed again due to the events of the massive global economic contraction of the 1930s, the public took this as further proof the Weimar state could not lead Germany effectively.  The German hyperinflation of 1922 through 1923 hurt Germany’s economic recovery in the mid-1920s, many German businesses having bought considerable new equipment during  the hyperinflation to take advantage of a period of unintentional “discounts” in cost found themselves with too much productive capacity for the demands of the Germany economy.  Germany halting payments on the reparations, in part due to the hyperinflation, lead to the French and Belgian occupation of the Ruhr territory in 1923, an event which further seemed to indicate the weakness of the Weimar government.  (On a side note the policy of passive resistance implemented by the Weimar government, requiring it to pay millions of Germans who agreed not to work to prevent France and Belgium gaining benefits from the occupied productive resources of the Ruhr, simply lead to more expenditures by the Weimar government in worthless currency.)

Finally though the hyperinflation of 1922 to 1923 gave considerable political capital to both of the extreme ends of the German political spectrum, the extreme right and the extreme left.  Many in Germany in reaction to these events, and the future economic collapse of the 1930s, were increasing willing to consider more “radical” political solutions to Germany’s perceived and real problems.  Political capital gained from these events, as well as the apparent weakness of the Weimar government it seemed to indicate to the German public, certainly played a part in the eventual rise of Adolph Hitler to political leadership in Germany.  It certainly lead in part to the political instability Hitler attempted to take advantage of on 9 November 1923 with his failed putsch attempt in Bavaria, an event that helped spark Hitler’s national political career in Germany.

Sources:

The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans

The Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, Warren B. Morris, Jr.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy

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The Declaration of Independence – a perspective

February 16th, 2010

Probably one of the most cited political documents in the political landscape of the United States, perhaps cited only less then the actual Constitution of the United States itself, is the Declaration of Independence penned by Thomas Jefferson in 1776.  Most citizens of the United States are familiar with the portions of the opening lines of the Declaration, usually the most famous quote of all: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Some who are particularly familiar with the document will also know that right after those famous words Jefferson proceeds to state that governments are created by groups of people to safeguard those rights and, should a government fail to do so, it is the duty of the citizens under that government to remove it and replace it with one that does safeguard those rights.  Sadly though most citizens of the United States have never read the rest of the document nor are they particularly familiar with the political reality with which Jefferson and his fellow delegates at the Continental Congress were attempting to grapple, a nearly despotic government in the literal sense of the word.

Right after the famous introduction to the Declaration of Independence Jefferson proceeded to state a specific list of charges against the King of England and the King’s government over the colonies, specific charges of misconduct that were the reason that the American colonies needed to end their long standing allegiance to the British crown and instead seek out to forge a new independent nation.  I highly recommend you take a moment and pursue these charges leveled against the King and his government, check out the source linked below for an accurate rendition of the text of the Declaration of Independence.  Probably the most common theme that Jefferson writes about is how the King, through various means, has prevented the colonies from passing legislation to administer their own affairs efficiently, properly, and internally.  In addition the King is accused of taking active steps to make it very difficult for the legislatures of the colonies to meet or conduct their business on behalf of those who have elected them to office.  In addition Jefferson also charges that the British crown has taken from the colonists property without proper compensation, by forcing them to quarter troops on their own property, and maintained standing armies on the soil of the colonies without the consent of those forced to provide for, and live among, those troops.  Finally Jefferson outlines many cases in which citizens of the colonies have been denied what could be considered a fair trial, through mechanisms such as being transported to England for trail, false trails for crimes committed on behalf of the Crown’s interests, and individuals being simply seized for service in the British navy without any sort of recourse.  Finally Jefferson outlines several cases in which the policy of the British crown has arbitrarily imposed taxes upon the citizens of the colonies and has blocked the natural economic growth of the American colonies.

The key element to the Declaration of Independence that many modern citizens of the United States fail to comprehend is that Jefferson was writing against a system of government that was, for the colonies, very nearly a true tyranny.  The British crown had considerable authority within the American colonies, by 1776 many of them had had their charters revoked and had instead been turned into Crown colonies, meaning that their political, civil, and judicial leadership was answerable solely to the British crown.  The citizens of the American colonies had no legal recourse to appeal against the edicts imposed upon them by the British crown and executed by military forces loyal to the British crown, military forces that were disconnected from the communities in which they enforced the law.  (Hence the charge by Jefferson that the British crown had placed mercenary forces in the colonies, specifically German mercenaries whose loyalty was purchased by the British crown, a long-standing relationship.)  Even the British parliament, a legislative force that could restrict the power of the British crown in any way it chose to, had no representatives from the American colonies within it to promote the interests of the colonists.

The Declaration of Independence was a statement of desperation in many ways, as well as a potent tool of political propaganda, Jefferson and his fellow delegates were arguing the case for independence more to their own fellow citizens then stating their causes to the British crown.  None the less though the Declaration clearly argues that because of all the violations by the British crown of the basic human rights held by the colonists, and because the British crown was unresponsive to all efforts to end these abuses, the colonists had no choice but to take up arms to win their independence from an unresponsive, tyrannical form of government.  Fortunately modern citizens of the United States have another option short of armed rebellion to instill change in their government, the ballot box, which despite the feelings of some citizens of the United States is a powerful tool by which the citizen base not only provides its consent to be ruled but also directly shapes the nature of government.  Now this is not to say that democracy in the United States is not without its serious flaws, historic and modern, but the very fact that citizens of the United States can vote, and those votes do select the leadership of the various governments of the United States, marks this nation as one which has moved far from the tyrannical roots that the Jefferson with his Declaration of Independence cried out against.

As an interesting additional exercise after reading the Declaration of Independence review the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, specifically the Bill of Rights, you will notice that each amendment in the Bill of Rights neatly addresses some aspect of the abuses of power outlined in the Declaration of Independence.  It is a brilliant symmetry of design and one often not appreciated today.

Sources:

The Declaration of Independence, a full text

The Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States of America, a full text

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Morality coloring history…

January 19th, 2010

One of the challenges that I consider central to the study of history, in fact one of the cornerstone duties of every historian, is to attempt to write history as neutral as humanly possible on a topic.  Now it is probably impossible to be truly neutral, the very process of analyzing history or choosing a topic to explore puts a bias on things, however I still feel a historian should do their absolute best to try to present the material that is free of emotion or effort to direct the readers’ emotions.  The book that I read recently that caught my eye with its textbook example of such emotional coloring was World War I: An Illustrated History by David Scott-Daniell, printed in 1965 in London by the Ernest Been Limited Corporation.  It is a entry level short history of World War I, I picked it up originally because the library had mistakenly bound it as a World War II history but filed it properly in World War I, so I gave it a whirl.

The quote that exemplifies the moral/emotional coloring of the book throughout is as follows, from page 76 of the book:

“Captain Bell [British pilot] was officially credited with the destruction of forty-one enemy aeroplanes in battl, but there were others not reported.  Richthofen [German pilot] had eighty victims, all British.  Richthofen had eighty victims, all British.  Richthofen was a pilot of outstanding skill and daring, even among his fellow heroes of the air.  He led the famous ‘Richthofen Circus’, twelve Fokker fighters, all painted bright red, and flown by outstanding pilots proud of the honor of following Richthofen.  Like the other ‘aces’ Richthofen died in battle in the air.”

For those who might not have caught it, Captain Bell, a British pilot, destroyed forty-one enemy airplanes, Richthofen had eighty victims, and in that simple word choice an emotional and moral slant is bluntly placed upon a historical point of fact.  Neither pilot skimmed through the air hunting down innocent civilian pilots who happened to be taking a pleasant flight through an active combat zone, both pilots engaged other fellow combatants in battle during a period of active, declared war.  Any of the pilots who were shot down, and killed, by Richthofen would have gladly killed him in turn had the chance presented itself.  (In fact one did, Richthofen was killed in a confused air battle in which ground artillery and a British pilot in combination resulted in Richthofen’s combat death.)  Describing anyone who goes into a war as an armed combatant as a victim of enemy action is at best emotionalism and at worst misleading, the business of war is death and destruction and those who march forth to engage in it should be remembered as such.  Fellow combatants joined in a test of strength, economic, political, social, and military strength, a contest in which some on both sides will die.  This in no way lowers the emotional impact or tragedy of their deaths, but historians have a duty to my eye to record these deaths in a tone free of emotion.  Either everyone who falls in a battle is a victim or no one is if you are a historian, to write otherwise is to shirk your duties as a scribe of the past.

Which though leads itself to a more pressing question in history, in this era of modern war were can one use the term victim selectively to describe individuals caught up in the actions of war who should not have been.  Using the word “victim” for everyone in war misses the point and power of the word but who, in a modern war, is actually an honest victim when two or more nations war with each other?  Civilians are no longer a clear distinction because during a total industrial war some citizens engage directly in war production, generating materials of war, where these individuals work is generally accepted as a viable target for military strikes.  What of the citizens who raise food, some of which feeds the working population and some of which directly feeds the armies in the field fighting the war, are they a viable target?  What of the crops they raise, is famine a valid tactic of war or does it create victims of the conflict?  The children of dead soldiers, are they victims or is their loss acceptable because their fathers and mothers marched to war?  What of those killed in military actions who are only engaged in a war to the extent they are citizens of a nation engaged in hostilities?

Plus then of course that opens another dimension to this question, what of the contrast of aggressor to defender nations, many historians writing of World War I and World War II will describe Belgium, France, Greece, Holland, Norway, Russia, and Yugoslavia as all victims of German aggression, and therefore by implication the suffering of their populations in all forms as that of victims.  But is that the marker and, if so, does that place upon a historian a duty to try to tease out which nation struck first, which nation is the true aggressor, to even create a framework to analyze that difficult relationship.  Take the current military action the United States is engaged in Afghanistan, the United States argues its actions are justified because of the events of 11 September 2001, that terrorists with direct links to an organization based in Afghanistan represent a threat to the security of the United States, i.e. the United States and its losses on 11 September 2001 made it the victim of aggression.  Not by a nation state but by a rogue organization, but what of those who were then injured in United States military actions only peripherally associated with terrorism in Afghanistan, are they victims or aggressors dying  a death due to a chain of action they began?

The use of victim is a powerful term, I do not have answers to the above questions, I don’t believe historians will, or should, ever have definitive answers to these questions, but I do know that a historian should use the word victim with care and careful thought and, to my eye, only in the most unique circumstances when speaking of combatants operating in the field of combat.

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Bad History – Malmedy Massacre

January 13th, 2010

To fully appreciate this entry you first will need to travel to You Tube and watch a preserved clip of a broadcast by Keith Olbermann in which he dresses down Bill O’Reilly for his attributing the events of the Malmedy Massacre to the United States Army, rather then to the German SS.  Overall the commentary of both men has aspects that are correct, Keith Olbermann is correct in asserting that Bill O’Reilly is wrong in attributing the events of the Malmedy Massacre to the armed forces of the United States, captured American soldiers were executed in a field near where they were taken prisoners by members of the German SS.  The SS, speaking broadly, was a military organization that was semi-separated from the regular German Army, the Wehrmacht, the SS had its own chain of command, supply systems, rules of engagement, military culture and organization, and was treated effectively as an “army within an army.”  The reason though they can only be considered as a semi-separate part of the Wehrmacht is that the SS did work in military operations in cooperation with the Wehrmacht and the two military commands were expected to operate together towards overall tactical and strategic goals.

This is important to understand because the policies of the SS reflect an extreme dimension of policies followed and often supported by the leadership of the Wehrmacht, especially on the Eastern Front.  That fact is important because Bill O’Reilly is also correct, there is solid evidence that the armed forces of the United States did execute some German prisoners taken in battle, some after the events of Malmedy in retaliation and also some German prisoners of war taken in earlier battles.  In the airborne landings prior to the Normandy amphibious landings (popularly referred to as D-Day) in the early hours of 6 June 1944 the deployed airborne units were widely scattered, disorganized, and lacked the capacity or facilities to handle German’s taken prisoner.  Some soldiers did execute German prisoners of war, a sad fact but one well documented by testimony on both sides of the battle lines.  Furthermore during the Normandy landings some German’s who attempted to surrender were executed by American forces, either immediately following the conclusion of the battle or shortly after the battle.  So Bill O’Reilly is correct, American armed forces did engage in actions that could be seen as atrocities against German prisoners of war.  What both commentators miss though is the broader context of the situation and, in that, lies the real key critical aspect of these events and why Bill O’Reilly’s comments represent a horrible twisting of history.

Massacres of German prisoners of war, conducted by American forces in the Normandy campaign, and earlier in the Italian campaign of 1943, were actions of individual units of soldiers.  The highest levels of command authorizing such actions, to my knowledge, were commanders in the front lines of individual units, no order of that nature came from the central leadership of the United States armed forces or from any political leadership of any Allied power.  To put it more simply, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, and Churchill never issued any orders following the events of Malmedy to kill German prisoners of war.  However in Germany, on the Eastern Front, the situation was quite different – Russian prisoners of war were executed in vast numbers, through forced labor, starvation, and direct violence upon prisoners taken on the Eastern Front.  This savage policy was an extension of Germany’s policies regarding “racial purity” and the overall plan of the Nazi leadership to destroy the various Slavic ethnic/linguistic populations in Eastern Europe to replace them with ethnic German settlers.  Slaughtering Russian prisoners of war, in brutal and calculated fashion, was the official policy of the high command of the German SS, it was a policy followed and often supported by the command of the German Wehrmacht, and it was a policy endorsed and orchestrated by the highest levels of command in the Nazi government of Germany.

In other words – evidence indicates solidly that Adolph Hitler was the central figure behind a systematic policy of execution of any Russian prisoners of war taken from 1941 onwards and that he was supported in this policy at most, if not all levels, of the command structure of his military forces and the government of Germany.

So why does this link to the events on the Western front in which American prisoners of war were killed by a German SS unit?  It matters because the massacre of the American prisoners of war is an extension of a Nazi policy of war on the Eastern Front, meaning that this massacre was undertaken in a military environment far different then that facing American military personnel.  It was unacceptable to the higher levels of command in the United States armed forces that German prisoners of war would be executed if taken in battle, it was a breech of the rules of engagement and punishable.  For the SS units going into battle in 1944, it was not an unacceptable policy and might have even been ordered by the Nazi high command.  Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann miss the broader impact of the Malmedy massacre and the executions of German prisoners of war that occurred at the hands of American soldiers, when German prisoners of war were shot by Americans it was an action by an individual unit acting on its own, in violation of the rules of engagement and standing orders.  When German military figures executed American prisoners of war in a field in Belgium, it was an extension of a policy in operation, with official blessing, in how the German military conducted its wars from 1941 onwards.  One is a single incident that is a regrettable human failing, the other a systematic policy of slaughter and brutalization with the aim of spreading terror among ones opponents and, more darkly, destroying an entire ethnic and cultural group.

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The Fist – President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan – 1 December 2009

December 4th, 2009

The fist must be deployed no matter how much one might personally like the person giving a comment that is based on questionable (or downright bad) history, even in the case of President Barack Obama.  In his speech at West Point outlining the changes in policy Obama intends to implement regarding the United States and its military presence in Afghanistan Obama included the following comment:

“For unlike the great powers of old, we have not sought world domination.  Our union was founded in resistance to oppression. We do not seek to occupy other nations.  We will not claim another nation’s resources or target other peoples because their faith or ethnicity is different from ours.”

I am afraid that the history of the United States simply does not bear up to this comment when our actions are compared to our peer nations at any point that I know of in our history as a nation, sadly I am no expert but from what I do know of United States history and the history of the various Great Powers in existence and operation during our own history, the breakdown is roughly as follows:

1781 – 1880s:  The United States expands territory under its direct political, economic and cultural control through a policy of continued expansion in a western direction.  These territories are acquired through a combination of diplomatic efforts and the use of military force, during this period as a matter of policy the United States government assumes semi-complete control over the affairs of the various Native American/American Indian groups residing on territory later claimed by the United States government.  Key acquisitions include the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon I of France in 1803.  Acquisition of Florida from Spain in exchange for the cancellation of debts owed by Spain to the United States government/United States government assuming debt owed by Spain to United States nationals, 1819.  United States gaining one half (roughly) of disputed Oregon Territory from Great Britain, 1846.  United States gaining southwestern territories including California, New Mexico, Arizona, and part of Colorado as war concessions from the Republic of Mexico, 1848.

In each of the above cases the United States either used military force or threatened to use military force to gain territory from established, and diplomatically recognized, nations of equal sovereignty.  (In the case of Florida the United States had already in the past sent military forces into the territory and in regards to Louisiana the United States had already engaged in limited schemes to try and spark revolt in the territory from earlier Spanish control.)  In addition to this the United States government through diplomatic pressure and brute military force either subjugated or expelled native tribal groups from their long-standing association with certain territories.  Granted the United States would sign treaties with tribal chiefs or leaders, in some cases making said leaders up from whole-cloth to validate its actions, but this is not that different from the techniques used by European Great Powers in their own territorial gains in Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and Africa.

As well the policy of the United States federal government, as well as that of many state governments during this period was decidedly opposed to the idea of allowing native tribal religions or social structures to survive, it was the policy of many levels of government in the United States to “civilize” native peoples, a war on cultural and religion if ever there was one.

1880s – 1930s: The United States government engages in direct colonial/imperial acquisitions of territory including the annexation of Hawaii in 1900, a sovereign kingdom nation previously recognized by the United States government as well as other national governments, as well as the seizure of former colonial possessions held by Spain after the Spanish-American war of 1898.  These newly gained territories included Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba and the Philippines.  Of these territories the United States still holds Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam.  The Philippines was not granted full independence until after World War II and were not granted Commonwealth status until the 1930s.  In fact the United States was gaining these territories at the same time that the various Great Powers of the world President Obama is probably speaking of, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, and the United States was gaining these territories using the same methods employed by other Great Powers.  The United States also directly intervened in the internal affairs of many nations in the Caribbean during this same period, using military force to modify or suppress local rebellions in many Caribbean republics or dictatorships.  As well the United States engaged in one of its most brutal and prolonged military campaigns from 1900 through 1904 in the Philippines, suppressing a local uprising that attempted to militarily defeat the United States through irregular warfare and establish an independent Philippine republic.

It was not until the 1930s that the United States, under President Roosevelt, undertook a new direction in its relations with its neighbors in the Caribbean, the Good Neighbor policy, and renounced the use of force to defend United States interests in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.  However at the same time Great Britain and France had also begun to reduce their use of military force to intervene in colonial affairs.  Which makes our policy not exceptional but instead more of a reflection of the general shift in diplomacy in the 1930s, the recognition by many of the Great Powers of a need to shift their focus from gaining territory through military force to working with local populations and leaders to maintain the empires held, a policy also followed by the United States with our, admittedly, smaller imperial territorial holdings.

1930s – 1940s: The period of the infamous land grabs by Germany, Italy, Romania, Hungary, the Soviet Union, and Japan in a bid to redefine the global balance of power militarily, economically, and culturally.  The United States did not engage in such antics but, at the same time the various Great Powers in operation at the time did not recognize territorial changes through the use of arms.  It may be a fine point but the territorial shifts of the 1930s were achieved through diplomacy and consent, the actual seizure of territory by force was, broadly stated, rejected diplomatically and resisted militarily.  Land seized by the Soviet Union is an interesting case, it was not actually seized but instead ideologically loyal puppet states were installed to rule over the territories in compliance with the policies of the Soviet Union.

1950s – 1990s: the United States and the Soviet Union engage in a mutual dance for dominance stretching across a span of forty years roughly and the globe, known collectively as the Cold War.

So overall President Obama your statement does not appear, after analysis, to truly be accurate against the lens of history.  Unless you are speaking of quite ancient empires in which case you are correct but one could also argue the United States had not engaged in such behaviors of rape, conquest, and devastation such as Rome, the Persians, or the Huns engaged in because, in large part, we were not on the scene yet as a nation.

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Historically Interesting Films – Metropolis

December 1st, 2009

For those who have not heard of it, Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis is an incredibly powerful silent era work of science-fiction that has a powerful resonance even today in our inherited cultural backpack.  Metropolis story-wise tells a rather heavy-handed story about what happens if a society divides into two halves, one a mass of unskilled workers and the other leaders/capitalists who rule society and profit from its surpluses.  Metropolis is a heavy-handed film because Lang resorts at several points uses direct analogies to stories out of the Old Testament and to Christian imagery to drive home to the viewing audience the dangers of allowing such social division to reach endemic proportions.  Metropolis is usually considered a work of science-fiction because it presents a dystopian society and addresses issues of dehumanization, mechanization and its impact on human life and the human experience, and, of course, the impact of non-human mechanical humanoids upon society.  In particular Metropolis is among the first films to explore the question of what happens when something created by humanity that is non-organic expresses a will and mind of its own.  (In Metropolis apparently said non-organic entity is blessed with a lovely human appearance and decides to go into the lucrative field of naked dancing.)

So why see this film today?  First off because it was made in 1927, a year of high stability for the Weimar Republic (ruling interwar government of Germany and worthy of an introductory post of its own in the future) but also a year in which the ideological challenge and questions raised by Communism created an interesting resonance in the minds of people in Western Europe and the United States.  For people at all class levels an interesting question was raised, what was society to do with its unskilled laborers?  They produced much of the growing material prosperity of the 1920s but it was a prosperity that these same laboring classes were not as easily able to partake of as the expanding managerial classes.  What makes Metropolis particularly interesting is that at the same time the unskilled laboring classes are increasing in number the professional managerial classes overseeing the new engines of production were also increasing in number, it was this second group to which the film was addressed and was the most common viewing audience.  Yet, at the same time, that class does not appear much in Metropolis, if at all, and by its absence raises questions about the impact of that class in society and its long-term viability.  Issues which a newly minted professional class was itself struggling with in the 1920s, enjoying the benefits of increased leisure time and wealth but also the worries of how real said freedom was and what it meant to society that it existed.

Which is all well and good for the cultural value of Metropolis but that is not why you should see the film, although it is a valuable side aspect of the film.  No everyone should see the film because Metropolis provided us with the cultural image kit that we associate today with the idea of “dystopian Gothic city-scape.”  The feel of every Batman film made from the 1990s onwards, the feel of dystopian films such as Dark City, Dark Man, Blade Runner – all of these draw upon the images first pioneered by Metropolis.  The image of a the android to the modern mind, a humanoid figure made of shiny metal, that also owes a debt to Metropolis to the point that seeing such a figure today in cinema we immediately associate it with a mechanical humanoid entity.  Think of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz, without that cultural back ground of information already present in society the idea of a mechanical man made of tin is just an odd one.  The idea said mechanical figure could aspire to human emotions is even more unsettling, but the cultural groundwork for the idea rests with Metropolis.  Today the idea of mechanical creations of our own hand rising up to overthrow us or aspiring to capture the human aspects of our own personality is a theme so common in popular culture many joke about the “robot apocalypse” or nervously believe it real and likely once the popular construct of true “artificial intelligence” is achieved, whatever that might mean.

But the main reason people should see Metropolis is to properly understand the parentage of the imagery in Madonna’s music video “Express Yourself” comes from, apparently the modern mindset believes that imagery comes from the 1990s Batman franchise of films and not this silent film classic.

Sources:

Wikipedia Entry on Metropolis

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Bad Moments on the History Channel – Ancient Alien Contact

November 30th, 2009

The History Channel is a fine resource for individuals with a casual interest in history to learn about many exciting topics, the History channel attempts to introduce people to a wide variety of periods and events in history, often it does an okay job in its introductions.  Unfortunately it also on occasion wings out onto a bizarre tangent of doom in which it will present, in full cable glory, a theory of incredible madness as either proven fact or as a compelling question for people to consider.  Probably one of the finest examples of this is the History Channel’s efforts to explain the idea that ancient visiting alien beings, from off-planet, had an impact upon early forming human cultures.  Theories about the level of this impact range from the aliens landing, giving our ancestors a “high-five” on being intelligent and farming, and then blasting off back to the nether regions of space to the aliens teaching us everything from stone-cutting to urban development.  Some believe that these alien visitors would have been perceived as divinities by our ancestors, citing rock-carvings depicting “odd occurrences” in the past that could be depictions of alien contact.  These usually involve stone carvings of objects flying through the sky, carvings of beings apparently sitting in stars or spheres in the sky, up to an ancient Meso-American deity depicted in a space-ship capsule.

Those who hold to these theories dismiss the notion that the carvings could be metaphors, depicting supernatural events, or that they could be attempting to capture in stone tales of the divine with cultural impact for the viewers.  Although those who support ancient alien visitors will admit that could be the case, they will then say with a smile and a twinkle of hope in their eye, “But what if they depict something else instead…”  Normally I am one to allow individuals their fantasies and if it gives people a warm fuzzy feeling to believe that the divine beings of our ancients were space aliens rather then a personification of the Earth in female form making passionate love to a personification of the Sky, so be it.  Certainly it is no more odd then believes that humans came from the armpits of a dead god who fell from the sky and decayed on the ground.  However looking at rock carvings as a possible source of this proof is faulty at best and a bad application of history, because it ignores the highly likely fact these carvings depict mythical or symbolic relationships that were understandable to those who they were carved for but whose meaning we have lost.  What frustrates me most is that people seem to understand this but actively don’t want to believe it, on this show they argue over and over again that our ancestors would have carved something depicting something flying in the sky only if they had seen it, where else might they get the idea?

Do me a favor, take a dollar bill out of your pocket, look at the portrait side, and then flip it over.  See on the back, see the two symbols that make up the Great Seal of the United States, one to a side, check out the one left, the giant eyeball floating over the unfinished pyramid, the eyeball with rays coming out of it.  You know what that means, or should, it depicts the all-seeing eye of the Judeo-Christian divinity looking over the work of the founding fathers, unfinished, as represented by the pyramid.  (If you like it represents the all-seeing eye of the Masons looking over the world and the pyramid is just another sign of the Masons, either way though, you know it means something human and earthly in origin.)  But bury a bronze medallion with that seal on it in the ground for a millennium, dig it up, and suddenly you will find people arguing that the floating eye represents the aliens, looking over us, as we build our city structures under their guidance.  People we can talk with items floating in space today, if we go through another period in which knowledge contracts and only those stories get through, how long before it was aliens showing us how to achieve that goal?  I have never seen a giant disembodied eyeball floating over a pyramid, neither have you, at least not sober, but we were able to create this symbol with meaning out of our imagination.  I am annoyed that many “experts” on this subject seem disinclined to provide the same abilities to our forebears.

As well the other annoying argument from that show, “with their level of technology this level of precision carving was impossible, simply impossible.”  To which I reply “timescale, you are forgetting timescale, the timescales of our forebears were not the same as our own.”  Our civilization builds things in months and years but past civilizations built things in decades and centuries, in fact it was only seven centuries or so ago when Europe built stone temples to the Judeo-Christian divinity that could take a full century to finish, three lifespans, yet no one would contend today that these items were built using amazing technologies from the stars.  No cathedrals of the Middle Ages were built the same way that ancient stone monuments were built: slowly, with great skill, with great patience, and with a great attention to detail.  You can carve a stone with amazing precision if you do it over a span of a year, you can move huge boulders great distances if you have a gang of a hundred working on moving one or two stones per season.  Sure it might take two centuries to finish, but when building for the divine, human time scales are not so critical.

Do I have more proof then those on the History Channel?  No, sadly, at the moment I do not, and neither do they, however I call upon those who see these sorts of shows to think carefully, what is more reasonable?  Humans working for centuries to build monuments to the divine, massive undertakings built to impress and awe, behavior we have ample written evidence of already in our history OR that aliens came to Earth and moved the boulders for our ancestors?

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