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In this first installment of his classic four-volume history of the modern world, Eric Hobsbawm presents the development of European socioeconomic aff
In this first installment of his classic four-volume history of the modern world, Eric Hobsbawm presents the development of European socioeconomic affairs—and by extension, those of the rest of the world, since this was an era of accelerating European ascendancy and global domination—between the revolutionary years of 1789 and 1848 as the outflow of a “Dual Revolution�: the “takeoff� of industrial capitalism in Britain, which blew the lid off of nature’s capacity to taper the infinite multiplication of goods, services, and human beings, propelling human civilization into a paradigm of self-sustained growth and perpetual social and technological revolution, making it the most transformative development in human history since the Neolithic era; and its political counterpart, the downfall of the ancien régime, the face of the immemorial order of traditional society, first in France but thence, in fits and starts, throughout the continent, obliterating feudalism and aristocratic privilege, engendering the rise of the liberal bourgeoisie, the triumph of economic reason and social engineering, the commodification of land and labor, the mobilization of a “free� (to work for wages or starve) laboring class, and the emergence of nationalism and socialism, two competing oases of social solidarity. Hobsbawm’s unaffectedly Marxian analytical lens and his posh and sedate British style make the work feel a bit dated, but it nonetheless remains a standard historical reference for a period which created a wall of mutual incomprehensibility between those who lived before and “after� it. Indeed there is no “after,� because we continue to live in a world defined in its deepest structural orientations of thought, identity, lifestyle, and social consciousness by the paradigm of the ongoing Dual Revolution. We are all children of 1789. ...more |
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| 152995018X
| 9781529950182
| B0D6M38PFY
| 4.08
| 297
| Feb 11, 2025
| Feb 11, 2025
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A thoughtful and nuanced essay on the significance of Gaza as a point of intersection between two contrasting “cultures of memory�: the Western mythos
A thoughtful and nuanced essay on the significance of Gaza as a point of intersection between two contrasting “cultures of memory�: the Western mythos of liberal democracy’s triumph over the malignant—and wholly external—forces of fascism, racism, and genocide, necessitating the stewardship of the West over the redemption of global society from the paradigmatic evil of the Nazi Holocaust; and, for the global south, the painful historical consciousness of colonial oppression and exploitation, and the promise of decolonization, conceived not only as the political independence of many Asian and African states from former colonial regimes, but more broadly as the achievement of parity in power, prosperity, and dignity in a world order which, well into the twentieth century, was avowedly constructed and legitimized in terms of racial hierarchy. The bitterly antithetical reactions to the obliteration of Gaza, and the larger debate over the history of Palestine and the nature of the Israeli regime, are largely the product of these radically divergent ways of remembering and making use of the last century. The decentering of the Western narrative, in which Israel symbolizes the defeat of Nazism, the expiation of Western guilt, and the only bastion of defense against a second Holocaust, coupled with the furious attempts in Europe and America to suppress pro-Palestinian speech and activism, portend a paradigm shift as the relative power of the West over the “rest� diminishes, while the West resorts to increasingly dramatic and overtly coercive methods to maintain its centrality in the global system. Relating the construction of a sanitized history of the Second World War, which allowed the West to offload its own legacy of militarism, eugenicism, antisemitism, and racial supremacism onto the now-defeated Third Reich, the transformation of Jewishness in the Western mind from a symbol of a mistrusted leftist cosmopolitanism into a more familiar exemplar of a nation struggling for survival in a zero-sum social Darwinian world, and the parallel development of Israeli and Indian ethnoreligious extremism, Mishra explores the dangers and possibilities that accompany the search for solidarity in a time of rapid change and dislocation. ...more |
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| Apr 27, 2015
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I once saw a video purporting to show a replica of Muhammad’s house—whether in Mecca or Medina, I don’t know—based on descriptions from various hadith
I once saw a video purporting to show a replica of Muhammad’s house—whether in Mecca or Medina, I don’t know—based on descriptions from various hadiths. The setting was intimate and evocative in its rusticity: a rough straw bed, a roof of thatched reeds, a clay water basin and wicker baskets, a gnarled wooden staff, a sword and bow slung to the wall; all of it illumined by streamers of moonlight and Aladdin’s fairytale oil lamp sputtering on the bedstand. Muhammad wasn’t home, despite the late hour; he may have been gathered around a fire with his companions, telling them of journeys to be made and battles to be fought, enchanting them with stories of prophets, kings, and jinn, of two-horned Alexander and the sleepers in the cave; or else channeling, in timeless shamanic fashion, the oracles of God. The scene invited romanticism. The viewer was to understand that the way of life to which these modest utensils bore silent witness—coarse, protean, synergistic, unassuming, vigorous, and complete—formed the vital pulse of a great civilization, without which the latter would wither and die. All the trappings of empire—the urbanity, the wealth, the literature, the luxury, the arts and sciences—were but the outward circumference of this primitive energy, which was destined to expand, dissipate, and at last recede, leaving only fossils in its wake. It was the primacy of this tribal cohesion and drive in dynastic life—the rootedness in a pristine lifeforce which enabled a people to conduct it like electricity to distant climes, overrunning the stale, slavish urbanites in its path—that fascinated Ibn Khaldun and formed the core of his theory of history. He called it ʿṣaⲹ; a term which Franz Rosenthal translates throughout the text, somewhat inadequately, as “group feeling.� Inspired by their faith in Islam and united by a sense of kinship and common purpose that superseded clan ties, the pastoral, semi-nomadic Arabs were invested with an ʿṣaⲹ which enabled them to surge out of their peninsula and conquer wide swaths of the known world, inheriting at a stroke the jewels of Greek and Persian civilization. But as Ibn Khaldun began to write the Muqaddimah near the end of the fourteenth century, the tide of expansion seemed to have reached its apogee: the truculent Berbers who ruled the Maghrib and Andalusia had become detached from the ʿṣaⲹ of the caliphate and then fragmented among themselves; the ummah appeared to be fraying at the edges. He understood civilizations to have a life cycle akin to that of any organism, and therefore it would not suffice merely to chronicle events as had the historians of generations past, since these were so many symptoms manifesting themselves on the surface of history rather than driving it from within. It was rather necessary to examine the internal mechanics at play in the rise and fall of dynasties; not only as applied to any particular regime, but insofar as they reflected universal laws governing all social organization. It is this attention to the universal principles underlying particular events which has led many to credit Ibn Khaldun, despite his idiosyncrasies, as a forerunner of the modern social sciences. I contend that for Ibn Khaldun ʿṣaⲹ is the social counterpart to the bedrock Islamic principle of ٲḥīd*: the affirmation that all things, despite their apparent multiplicity and autotelicity, exist eternally in the One. Like creation itself, history is an exhalation of the One, it is sustained by its underlying oneness at all times, and its destiny is to be regathered into the One. The agent of ٲḥīd, or “one-making� within creation is man, whose purpose is to serve as God’s viceregent (caliph) over the world. This calling to viceregency compels man to exercise dominion over nature and satisfy his innate proclivity for rulership. Civilization, which Ibn Khaldun defines simply as social organization, is necessary because no man can exercise dominion alone, but only in cooperation with his fellows. ղḥīd is obscured and ʿṣaⲹ is weak both in the “state of nature� that “precedes� society—a concept Ibn Khaldun seems to have accepted, despite not explicitly naming it—in which each man lives and works only for his own benefit, and in the state of tyranny which develops after a dynasty rises to royal authority, in which the ruler isolates himself from the group feeling by monopolizing power, employing non-kin to protect and bolster his authority, and using the dynastic apparatus for his own personal enrichment; prompting the emergence of rebel factions on the periphery of the realm—each with its own group feeling—which drive inexorably toward the center as the cohesion of the ruling dynasty collapses. Both anarchy and tyranny subvert ٲḥīd and erode ʿṣaⲹ by elevating the particular over the universal. The bandit and the despot are both in rebellion against the oneness of society, which is itself an image of the oneness of reality. They are political idolaters. The life cycle of each dynasty, therefore, is a symbol of God’s cosmic dispensation: an age, olam, aeon, or kalpa in miniature. Just as the primordial One gives rise to the infinite diversity of created forms, so does the primitive tribe (and nascent empire), in its accommodation of the One through ʿṣaⲹ, give rise to an infinite diversity of specialized roles, lifestyles, and occupations. Just as men, considered outside the body politic, forget their origin in the One and succumb to a conceited sense of self-sufficiency, so do men, considered as artisans, poets, and scientists (not to mention as rulers), forget their ultimate dependence on the whole society, weakening its cohesion and imperiling the edifice that makes such specialized pursuits possible. In both the universal context of creation and the limited context of society, self-limiting faith gives way to the extraneous demands of law, and finally to the void of anarchy, which is then filled by a new ʿṣaⲹ—a new age begins. The absorption of the remnants of one dynasty by the youthful ʿṣaⲹ of another is in essence the collapse of multiplicity into unity; anticipating the recall of all things to the One from which they are derived. In this is a clear sign. [image] NB: According to Ibn Khaldun, the movement from the many to the One—in remembrance, if not in judgment—may be thought of not only in terms of horizontal cohesion, but also as vertical ascent: a quasi-evolutionary progression from lower to higher forms of life. In the hierarchy of living forms, ascending from mineral to plant to animal to human to angel in increasing degrees of rarefaction, the soul has the potential to slide up and down the scale. The most sensuous souls live a bestial existence, while the most spiritual ones—namely, those of the prophets—participate intermittently in the angelic realm of pure intellect, receiving direct revelation and thereby becoming “messengers� like the angels themselves. The two facets of self-othering, faith and public spiritedness, combined as they are in the ideal caliphate, also combine the vocations of spiritual asceticism and civic glory that are typically considered opposites in Christian thought. Ibn Khaldun charmingly imagines that the reason why the earliest surahs of the Quran are among the shortest is because Muhammad’s human nature needed time to become acclimated to its participation in angelicity. * Of course, for Ibn Khaldun, as for classical Islamic thought in general, there is ideally no distinction to be made between faith in God and social cohesion, since both are to be maintained by the Caliph, who combines religious and political authority. ...more |
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| 0691208018
| 3.74
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| Mar 23, 2014
| Feb 02, 2021
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For a period of about three centuries, from the beginning of the fifteenth to the beginning of the twelfth century BC, roughly corresponding to the re
For a period of about three centuries, from the beginning of the fifteenth to the beginning of the twelfth century BC, roughly corresponding to the respective reigns of Hatshepsut and Ramses III, the eastern Mediterranean world—encompassing the Aegean, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt—saw the emergence of a complex, integrated system of trade and diplomacy; a cosmopolitan order on a scale with few precedents before the modern age of globalization. This period—known as the Late Bronze Age—saw the flourishing of Minoans (Crete), Mycenaeans (mainland Greece), Hittites (Turkey), Assyrians (Iraq, Syria), Babylonians (Iraq), Canaanites (Israel/Palestine), Mitannians (Turkey, Syria), Cypriots, and Egyptians as independent yet interconnected powers within a network of contacts that allowed goods and services—and the people who created, traded, and performed them—to travel remarkable distances, created a sizeable market for both essential and luxury items, produced burgeoning cities, and enabled an unprecedented level of specialization. But beginning around the turn of the twelfth century*, this system fell apart. Most of these civilizations either disappeared or were greatly diminished; waves of mysterious “Sea People� (probably from the Aegean and Anatolia; despite the name they travelled by both land and sea) invaded Egypt and the Levant but left little trace of themselves; and the trade routes were severed, ushering in a period of rapid economic decline and deurbanization. While many histories of the ancient world focus on the rise and fall of a particular empire, this “Late Bronze Age collapse� presents an intriguing antique example of the failure of a “global� system. As Cline explores the possible causes, he presents a world with surprising similarities to our own: a world wracked by climate change, drought, famine, earthquakes, political ferment, mass migration, and delicate supply chains. His method is jarringly encyclopedic—much of the book is a seemingly aimless information dump on the textual and archaeological evidence from the period, as well as the varying scholarly interpretations of it—and his conclusions are more conventional than the introduction would lead one to expect: the collapse of such a cosmopolitan system could not have been caused by any single event, but by the confluence of several interrelated environmental, political, diplomatic, and logistical factors. Nonetheless, the book illuminates a little-known historical epoch and raises pertinent questions about the viability of the interconnected world we know today. *1177 BC was chosen somewhat arbitrarily for the title because it marks the year that Egypt repelled a second and final invasion by a coalition of Sea People at enormous cost. ...more |
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| Mar 29, 2007
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An engaging, and at times stirring, memoir of post-1948 Palestinian political and social life from a man who saw much of it up close through numerous
An engaging, and at times stirring, memoir of post-1948 Palestinian political and social life from a man who saw much of it up close through numerous lenses: as a scion of one of Jerusalem’s great patrician families, the Nusseibehs, who traced their residency in the city to the time of Umar, the second Caliph; as a professor, campus activist, and later as a university president; as a journalist-cum-polemicist and clandestine operative during the First Intifada, giving voice to its aspirations and steering it away from violence; as an informal diplomat; as a would-be state builder, helping design a shadow government that served as a guide for the negotiators at Madrid; as a humanist gadfly, articulating the necessity of education, critical thinking, and good-faith engagement with Israeli interlocutors for the achievement and viability of Palestinian freedom—all while facing down threats (and in one case, physical assault) from the fundamentalist factions that would ultimately coalesce around Hamas: factions, Nusseibeh repeatedly notes, which the Israeli government never seemed nearly as interested in suppressing as the peaceful, secular activists for equal rights and dignity who represented the predominant Palestinian political forces for most of this history; as a political prisoner, spending 90 days in “administrative detention� without charge in 1991, likely for working with the Israeli anti-occupation group Peace Now (Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Nusseibeh was leading a spy ring for Saddam Hussein!); and as the Palestinian National Authority’s representative in Jerusalem. Not only an intimate history of the Palestinian experience through decades of war, occupation, and apartheid, it is also the story of Nusseibeh’s personal development as both a thinker and an activist, engaging with the humanities, classical Islamic philosophy (especially Ibn Sina and al-Farabi), and great literature to elaborate on the nature of personal and political freedom; testing his ideas, and those of his students, in the “laboratory� of a real, life-and-death struggle against oppression. Nusseibeh movingly describes how the fundamental human concerns addressed by a typical humanities education—freedom, justice, dignity, citizenship, war, peace—took on a much more immediate and visceral significance for his students—facing death, imprisonment, exile, and the daily deprivations and humiliations of life as members of a subordinate caste—than they ever could for a typical American or European student. The conditions of life imposed upon them by a system of domination that denies their humanity has made the recognition of this humanity, by themselves and others, an object of heroic struggle for Palestinians of all varieties; a dream rather than a fact of life which many people take for granted. A touching and illuminating read for those looking to personalize their understanding of the Palestinian plight. ...more |
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| 9781541704619
| B0CF8T9PMM
| 4.58
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| Jan 23, 2024
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I will stand at the edge of the abyss, And suddenly realise, overwhelmed with yearning, That the whole entire world� is no more than A Ukrainian song. I will stand at the edge of the abyss, And suddenly realise, overwhelmed with yearning, That the whole entire world� is no more than A Ukrainian song. - Leonid Kyselov (1946-68) While this book was initially published in Ukraine three months before Russia began its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Yaroslav Hrytsak introduces this English edition with a Herodotean framing: just as the (admittedly, dubiously-titled) “Father of History� styled his monumental work as a long historical and ethnographic prolegomenon to the Greco-Persian Wars, so Hrytsak offers this history of the Ukrainian people as an explainer for the remarkable (and by many foreign observers, quite unexpected) cohesion and tenacity with which their society has resisted Russia’s illegal war of aggression; the second time since 2014 that Russia has betrayed both the Charter of the United Nations and its own treaty agreements in an attempt to destroy a sovereign, democratic state and expand its borders through military force. Nations, contrary to the opinion of sinister people, are not rooted in blood and soil, but rather in the noetic realm of ideas and language. They are creatures of prosody and song, living poetic remembrances by which a community is reified and from which it derives its historical and metaphysical orientation. They are, in essence, spiritual organisms, not altogether distinct in this regard from “religions,� as a secular Westerner might define that notoriously ambiguous word. Before the latest invasion, Putin and many Western opinionators alike doubted the existence of such a community of faith in Ukraine, dismissing the Ukrainian state as a legal and bureaucratic fiction that would disintegrate before the first strong gust of adversity; much as the Afghan Islamic Republic, despite an enormous two-decade investment of wealth, manpower, and (mostly Afghan) lives, never found spiritual purchase among the people and had consequently collapsed just six months earlier after the withdrawal of American air support. Among such people, the discovery that Ukraine is indeed a “real� country has provoked more rage than reflection. The Russian government, military brass, and state media apparatus have only intensified their genocidal rhetoric, making no secret of the fact that their ultimate goal is the violent liquidation of both the Ukrainian state and nationality. In the United States, the “anti-imperialist� left has fulminated against the Ukrainian “warmongers� and their belligerent resistance to Russia’s campaign of imperial conquest, as well as Ukraine’s stubborn refusal to submit to a regime of territorial dismemberment and ethnic cleansing for the sake of a temporary and already twice-broken peace; the “national conservative� right has vilified the Ukrainians for their insolent display of national solidarity, engaged in non sequiturs regarding the migration crisis at the US southern border, or else pretended to be miserly when it comes to making provision for American foreign policy interests, despite approving some $2.5 trillion in official military spending for the fiscal years 2022-24; and foreign policy “realists� have asserted the strategic folly of making a relatively small investment in hardening Ukraine’s defenses in order to keep America’s second greatest geopolitical adversary from absorbing its land, people, and resources—or, at the very least, dramatically increasing the cost of doing so—and of declining to capitulate to Russia’s nuclear threats*. And yet the Ukrainians, like their Palestinian counterparts—by turns brutalized, slandered, and denied their legitimate national existence—have not given up trying to eke out a life free from violence and foreign oppression. It may behoove us to understand why. How did there come to be a Ukrainian nation—a Ukrainian faith—for which millions of people have proven willing to risk life and limb against long odds? This is, of course, a two-part question. How did Ukraine emerge as a distinct nation, and why has that nation gravitated towards the West despite sharing with Russia and Belarus an East Slavic ethnic kinship**, a Rus heritage, and a predominant Eastern Orthodox faith confession? The first part can be sketched out in a series of historical milestones: The establishment of Kyivan Rus near the turn of the tenth century, with its heartland in present-day Ukraine, as an integral part of European Christendom (in fact, Kyiv was at this time a larger city than London or Paris) and with stronger dynastic ties with the Latin West than the Byzantine East; The absorption of western Ukraine into what became the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after the fourteenth century, sealing its people off from Muscovy and incubating the deepest strata of the future Ukrainian political culture within the Latin/Western side of the East/West (or Orthodox/Catholic) divide, while simultaneously enabling them to retain a distinct identity as Ruthenians within the Commonwealth; The development of the Ruthenian language, the ancestor of the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages, within the Commonwealth, and its later suppression in Russia during the national russification campaign of Catherine II near the end of the eighteenth century—a precursor of Stalin’s brutal russification program in the 1930s, of which the Holodomor was one part—after the Cossack Hetmanate came under Russian control, gradually lost its autonomy, and was finally abolished during Catherine’s reign; Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s Cossack Uprising of 1648, in part an eastern reverberation of the Reformation wars, during which the Cossack state broke away from the Commonwealth and established the first distinctly Ukrainian political entity; The Pereiaslav Agreement of 1654, in which Khmelnytsky accepted the patronage of the Russian Czar for protection from the Commonwealth, beginning a process by which Cossack autonomy was gradually eroded; Ivan Mazepa’s realignment of the Hetmanate with Russia’s Swedish adversaries during the Great Northern War and its subsequent defeat and loss of autonomy at the Battle of Poltava in 1709; The emergence of two Ukrainian national movements in the nineteenth century: a small one in “Little Russia� and a stronger, more sophisticated, and more politically organized one in Austrian Galicia (Austria having annexed part of Polish Ruthenia during the partitions of Poland which took place in roughly the last quarter of the eighteenth century); The “hardening� of Ukrainian identity in wake of the First World War—in the aftermath of which the cause of national self-determination became a major political priority—and the emergence of three Ukrainian proto-states between 1917 and 1921: the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (formed by the Bolsheviks), the Ukrainian People’s Republic (declared independence from Russia), and the West Ukrainian People’s Republic (declared independence from Austria-Hungary); The consolidation of the Ukrainian SSR, which established a national Ukrainian state with a rough approximation of its present-day borders, united “Right Bank� and “Left Bank� Ukraine under a single political entity, and formed the political basis on which Ukrainian nationhood subsequently developed—both within the USSR and, after 1991, as a truly independent state; Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, supported by the majority of the population in all territories, which delivered a coup de grâce to the USSR itself; The Ukrainian presidential election of 1994, in which incumbent President Leonid Kravchuk was defeated by his former prime minister Leonid Kuchma and voluntarily transferred power, establishing a precedent of peaceful power-sharing among partisan and regional factions that never emerged in Belarus and has only ever existed as a crude fiction in the Russian Federation; The Euromaidan of 2013-14, now known in Ukraine as the Revolution of Dignity, in which President Viktor Yanukovych was driven from power after tabling an Association Agreement with the European Union—likely under Russian pressure; And, of course, the Russian invasions of 2014 and 2022, which have sealed Ukrainian national solidarity as perhaps nothing else could have. To explain the second part of the question—why Ukraine has gravitated toward the West rather than Russia—one must start with Hrytsak’s observation that the common assumption that the Ukrainian national consciousness developed under Russia’s shadow is largely false. While Prince Volodymyr’s fateful decision to adopt Byzantine Rite Christianity in 988 formally linked the Ukrainian lands to the autocratic political-ecclesial structure that characterized Byzantine and, later, Russian history—one twentieth century Russian-American Byzantinist, Alexander Kazhdan, went so far as to describe Byzantium as a thousand-year experiment in totalitarianism—the deep roots of Ukraine’s political culture were nourished for many centuries, as noted above, by the rule of Western governance; particularly that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which for most of its history boasted an elective monarchy, a large and politically-enfranchised gentry, and ethnic and religious toleration. It also partook of the unique division of power within Western culture between Pope and Emperor, as well as the independent economic and civil society that emerged through the gap between them. Further, one cannot understand the Ukrainian identity without giving pride of place to the legend and legacy of the Cossacks; a party of bellicose, antinomian, egalitarian, and fiercely independent semi-banditry who roamed the Wild Fields and thrived from raiding their neighbors in all directions. They have often been likened to American cowboys and Indians—they loom at least as large in the Ukrainian national mythology—and the vast, sparsely-peopled Black Sea steppe to the prairies and deserts of the Old West; the main differences being that the United States was not founded by cowboys, and Ukraine’s “Wild West� period lasted for perhaps three centuries or more (very roughly, from the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth). If one is searching for the Ukrainian George Washington, Khmelnytsky is certainly the best candidate, having created, at least in embryonic form, the first independent and distinctly Ukrainian state through an act of rebellion. The quest for absolute freedom and limitless horizons has defined the Ukrainian experience even moreso than the American; immortalized in a rich tradition of poetry and song that has kept Ukraine alive in spirit, even amid occupation, exile, and ghastly bouts of violence. That Ukrainians have lived both within and just beyond the ambit of some of the most comprehensive forms of unfreedom ever devised seems only to have made the taste of liberty all the sweeter; furnishing some hope that a reservoir of joyful Cossack insolence will see them through a dangerous and unpropitious time. [image] * At least in part: there is some reason to suspect that the relatively slow pace of military equipment transfers from the US to Ukraine—not factoring in the long delay in approving the latest aid package—has been part of a deliberate American strategy of trying to help Ukraine survive the war without causing a dramatic military reversal that might provoke Russia to consider nuclear escalation. ** It must be noted that the territory of present-day Ukraine has been home to a highly diverse array of peoples—Rus, Poles, Crimean Tatars, Jews, Romanians, Turks, and others—amply dispelling any myth of Ukrainian ethnic homogeneity. While Ukraine, as a vast, easily traversable, and resource-rich liminal zone, has been the site of innumerable wars and vicious ethnically-based atrocities—one thinks immediately of the Babi Yar and Odessa massacres during the Second World War—modern Ukrainian nationalism has been primarily civic rather than ethnic. ...more |
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A panorama portrait of human duplicity, greed, megalomania, chauvinism, and sadism; but also of nobility, moral courage, self-sacrifice, and the endur
A panorama portrait of human duplicity, greed, megalomania, chauvinism, and sadism; but also of nobility, moral courage, self-sacrifice, and the enduring struggle for justice and humanity. In a world of Leopolds, be a Morel.
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| 4.19
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�Our right to defend ourselves against destruction does not confer upon us the right to oppress others . . . Occupation brings foreign rule; foreign r
�Our right to defend ourselves against destruction does not confer upon us the right to oppress others . . . Occupation brings foreign rule; foreign rule brings resistance; resistance brings repression; repression brings terror and counter-terror; the victims of terror are usually innocent people.� - Matzpen, an Israeli Marxist organization, in Haaretz, September 22, 1967 For those with eyes to see, it is now incontrovertible that Israel is engaged in a genocidal massacre of the Palestinian people in Gaza. The images of ubiquitous devastation, the vicious and dehumanizing rhetoric of Israeli policymakers—including that of several cabinet ministers, and indeed of the prime minister himself—and the harrowing testimony of civilians, aid workers, and journalists on the ground give the lie to apologetic fables: far from “targeted� strikes against Hamas militants in response to the October 7th attacks on Israeli civilians and military personnel, Israel is waging a war of annihilation on Gaza: razing its cities; destroying its electrical, water, and sanitary infrastructure; targeting hospitals, mosques, churches, ambulances, schools, and refugee camps*; flattening entire neighborhoods; killing tens of thousands of civilians (including, at this time, around 7000 children) as well as scores of aid workers and journalists; depriving its people of all but the merest trickle of food and medical supplies (somewhat like putting a band-aid on a severed artery); and forcing most of its 2 million inhabitants—who have been imprisoned in Gaza for sixteen years by an Israeli blockade, afforded little contact with the outside world, and deprived of anything resembling a normal, decent life—into a tiny pocket of the strip with stifling, unhygienic conditions that make it a haven for infectious disease. The world is witnessing a hideous spectacle of racist violence on a scale largely unknown in our young century, and more reminiscent of such historical outrages as the Holocaust and the genocide of the indigenous people of the Americas. Israel seeks the obliteration of Gaza and the death or expulsion of its people as part of a larger project, now more than a century in the making, of achieving ethnic and political supremacy over the whole of what was formerly Mandatory Palestine. Neither the atrocities of October 7th nor the murderous Israeli response are isolated events, but must be understood as part of a larger history: the grotesque fruition of 141 years of colonization; 75 years of mass dispossession with the aid of imperial patronage and terroristic paramilitary violence; 56 years of military occupation and apartheid governance in the post-1967 Palestinian territories; decades of illegal, fascistic, and state-sponsored settler violence in the West Bank, along with the accompanying “Bantustanization� of the post-Oslo Palestinian sector; and, for the people of Gaza, 16 years of imprisonment in what both Israeli and foreign commentators from across the political spectrum have variously described as an open-air prison or a concentration camp, not altogether unlike the reservations onto which Native Americans were corralled in the United States. Much of this ghastly enterprise is often attributed to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British Empire, as a wartime expediency and in apparent contradiction with both the Sykes-Picot Agreement and promises of Arab independence after the Great War, pledged itself to facilitate the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish people� in Palestine, despite the fact that Jews constituted only around 10 percent of the population—most of whom were recent arrivals—and owned an even smaller fraction of the land. Yet even this is only part of a larger history. Balfour provided only for the establishment of a Jewish homeland within Palestine, not that all of Palestine would be controlled by a Jewish ethnostate. It also included the caveat that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine�; a reservation which the British solidified with the 1939 White Paper, which called for radical restrictions of Jewish immigration and land purchases as well as the establishment of a Palestinian state within ten years. The British armed and trained the Haganah during the Great Revolt of 1936-39, but they also became an enemy of Zionist forces (the Haganah, the Irgun, and Lehi—or “The Stern Gang,� as the British called it) when the balance of power between Jews and Arabs shifted dramatically in favor of the former and the Second World War obliged Britain to shore up the loyalties of its Arab subjects. The British used Zionism as a strategic tool to prevent the absorption of British Palestine into French Syria, but the Zionists also used the British for their own purposes; and when the latter became an obstacle to the nationalist ambitions of the former, they didn’t hesitate to engage in armed insurgency, assassinations, and terror bombings against their former British benefactors. In the end, the British were as flummoxed as anyone else by the intractability of the emerging conflict. A broader historical perspective also shows us that the creation of the Israeli state and the tragedy of the Nakba—the “catastrophe,� referring to the mass expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs from what became Israel in 1947-48, most of them never to return—were not the central framing events of the conflict, but rather were themselves framed by it. They were the most dramatic and consequential events in the long feud between Zionists and Arabs in the Holy Land, but they represented only one stage of a process of segregation, displacement, and exploitation that stretched back decades before the 1948 war. Israel is not a state with a settler movement, but a settler movement with a state; a movement synonymous with the exclusivist ambitions of a single ethnic group, making it perpetually unwilling to share power within a single polity. The most ambitious Zionist settlers shared a certain (quasi-)religious sense of national mission with the pioneers of the American West: and the deep kinship between their respective experiences, moreso than the influence of the Israel lobby on American politics or an ideological commitment to supporting “the only democracy in the Middle East�**, is what explains the unconditional and unwavering financial, military, diplomatic, and even emotional support that Israel receives from the United States: even in moments like the present crisis, when Israel’s usage of these boons directly implicates America in crimes against humanity and sours its international reputation. Israelis and Americans, many fleeing religious persecution, both settled an “empty land� that turned out not to be as empty as advertised; they both survived early on with the help of the indigenous population, but were unwilling to integrate with them as equals or include them in their national “story�; both were driven by a concept of “Manifest Destiny� to conquer the entirety of their promised land: “from sea to shining sea� in the American context, and “from the river to the sea� in the Israeli one—or perhaps, in the latter case, even beyond the river, since the most radical Zionist factions decried the “partition� between Palestine and Transjordan in 1922 and insisted that Balfour gave them title to both countries.*** Because of the dramatic imbalance in military power, wealth, and technological sophistication between the Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors, there is unlikely to be any real political solution to the conflict. A two-state solution has become virtually impossible: firstly, because Gaza is being bombed into rubble; secondly, because there is no longer enough contiguous Palestinian-held territory in the West Bank from which a real Palestinian state could be formed; and thirdly, because the lack of any external coercive authority behind a fair implementation of a peace process according to the paradigm of UNSC Resolution 242 allowed Israel to interpret its own obligations under Oslo for itself, and to turn the Palestinian Authority into an appendage of its military rule in the West Bank rather than a real institution of Palestinian sovereignty and self-determination. Alternatively, there has been from the time of the British Mandate a noble tradition of advocacy for a bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoy full equality in civil and political rights: a position historically favored by such prominent Jewish intellectuals as Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Hans Kohn, and Albert Einstein. But although this is more logistically sound, it is unlikely to work well in practice since it would effectively recreate the conditions that existed in Mandatory Palestine, but with an even more extreme power differential between the Israeli and Palestinian elements. Now, just as then, there would be no mechanism to prevent the Jewish/Israeli element from creating its own parallel institutions and either undermining the federal political apparatus or bending it to its own purposes. Such an arrangement could only work if substantial and coercive international pressure could be placed upon Israel, as the stronger party, to respect the equality of the Arab/Palestinian element. But what external actor would be willing and able to take on such a responsibility? The most likely outcome is the hardest to accept on a moral and emotional level: that Israel will simply continue to consolidate its rule over a permanently subordinated and disenfranchised Palestinian caste, and that the Palestinians will not receive any true recourse for generations of repression on this side of the eschaton. But perhaps we can avoid despair by clinging, against the wisdom of this world, to the faith of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.� * Though it must be said that all of Gaza could be fairly described as a refugee camp: about 70 percent of its inhabitants are refugees from the Nakba and their descendants. ** “This country is Jewish and democratic . . . Democratic towards Jews, and Jewish toward Arabs.� - Ahmed Tibi, Knesset member, Haaretz, December 22, 2009 *** The most fascistic elements of Israeli society continue to dream of this "Greater Israel". In March, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich gave a speech in Paris behind a podium featuring a map of Israel that included Jordan as well as the Palestinian territories. ...more |
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it was amazing
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Anyone old enough to remember September 11, 2001 has never forgotten it. The spectacle of carnage that monopolized America’s airwaves and captivated i
Anyone old enough to remember September 11, 2001 has never forgotten it. The spectacle of carnage that monopolized America’s airwaves and captivated its stunned and disbelieving people on that cloudless Tuesday morning was not only a watershed in our national history—one of those definitive before-and-after moments that dramatically and permanently reshaped our self-understanding, our politics, and our station in the world—it also became a fixture in the lives of those who experienced it; whether in person or, like me and hundreds of millions of others, through television, radio, and by word of mouth. So much has followed on from that day—a Global War on Terrorism begun by a nation united in anger, anxiety, and grief, now drawing to an ignominious close in an atmosphere of disillusionment and bitter dissension—so much rhetorical baggage has been attached to it—speaking for it, enlisting it in the service of causes benign and nefarious, compartmentalizing it as a lesson in ticker-tape patriotism, a study in ontological evil, or even as a vast government conspiracy—that one senses the continued presence of a deep-seated apprehension, an unwillingness to face its sheer immensity and its ultimate incomprehensibility. The historian Tony Judt spoke more presciently than he knew when he opined that, like the many other acts of violence and disruption which characterize the era it has defined—from populist political insurgencies to mass shootings�9/11 had no real objective, no logic of cause and effect. The only point was to make a point. In light of this, the day can only speak for itself, in the voices of those whose lives it forever changed. This is the story and the truth of 9/11, conveyed to us by a great Whitmanian panoply of American life. We hear from some of the firefighters who converged on a gruesome and horrifying scene at the World Trade Center, hundreds of whom would perish with the collapse of the Twin Towers, marching heavy-laden up innumerable flights of stairs toward the smoldering wounds to aid and rescue the injured, knowing full well the day could be their last. FDNY Captain Jay Jonas relates a poignant moment of realization and resolve which occurred among the firefighters gathered in the lobby of the North Tower when the South Tower was struck: I’m standing here. It was very loud—as you can imagine, the acoustics in the lobby of the World Trade Center weren’t really good, a lot of echoes—and all of a sudden it got very quiet. One of the firemen from Rescue 1 looked up and said, ‘We may not live through today.� We looked at him, and we looked at each other, and we said, ‘You’re right.� We took the time to shake each other’s hands and wish each other good luck and ‘Hope I’ll see you later,� which is especially poignant for me because we all had that acknowledgment that this might be our last day on earth and we went to work anyway. We meet the air traffic controllers who navigated one of the most chaotic and tragic days in the history of aviation, acting as a vital medium of communication between flight attendants on the hijacked planes, hundreds of pilots in the skies across the country, law enforcement, and U.S. Air Force personnel, monitoring a threat of unknown scale (how many hijacked planes were there, exactly? At the time no one knew) and performing the unprecedented feat of grounding every airplane in the country—save Air Force One, which spent much of the day soaring aimlessly at 45,000 feet to avoid potential threats on the ground. We hear from some of the victims: flight attendants who called their airlines to report the hijackings; passengers who phoned parents, siblings, and spouses to tell them goodbye and send them love—and, in the case of United Airlines Flight 93, to gather information about the day’s events and plan a legendary act of defiance that would save countless lives on the ground while ending their own. Victims trapped above the crash zones at the World Trade Center had heart wrenching conversations with family members and 9-1-1 dispatchers. I had a lump in my throat listening to Beverly Eckert describe her final conversation with her husband Sean Rooney, who was near the top of the South Tower moments before its collapse: It was about 9:30 a.m. when he called. When I heard his voice on the phone, I was so happy. I said, ‘Sean, where are you?,� thinking that he had made it out and that he was calling me from the street somewhere. He told me he was on the 105th floor. I knew right away Sean was never coming home. We learn of Father Mychal Judge: a beloved, gay, wisecracking, recovering alcoholic priest who served as an FDNY chaplain, who entered the North Tower to pray, assist the wounded, and give last rites to the dying before being killed by falling debris, and whose removal from Ground Zero was captured in a photograph that became famous as an American Deposition scene. Fr. Mychal’s death was the first to be certified, making him the first “official� fatality at the World Trade Center. I think he wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was as if he took the lead—all those angels, right through heaven’s gates. That’s what it seemed like to us. If any of those guys were confused on the way up, he was there to ease the transition from this life to the next. - Craig Monahan, firefighter, FDNY I used to say to him, ‘Pray for me.� He would say, ‘I will.� I’d say, ‘It’s more effective if you pray ‘cause you’re in a lot better shape than I am with God.� He would say, ‘Yeah, but it’s better if you do it ‘cause it’s more unusual, and it will be more of a surprise to God.� - Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York City We get one of many remarkable stories of selflessness and survival from Jeff Abruzzo, a quadriplegic who was carried down sixty-nine stories by ten people in an evacuchair that was installed after the World Trade Center bombing of 1993. We hear from two F-16 pilots, Lt. Col. Marc “Sass� Sasseville and Lt. Heather “Lucky� Penney, who scrambled their jets without weapons and with the expectation that if United 93 or any other airliner made it too close to the capital, they would have to bring it down by crashing into it themselves. We meet an armada of unsung heroes who responded to a Coast Guard distress call by gathering along the southern tip of Manhattan at the helm of a vast fleet of tugboats, tourist vessels, ferries, fishing boats, and yachts to help evacuate between 300,000 and 500,000 people from the island: a larger maritime rescue operation than that at Dunkirk during the Second World War. We hear from newscasters, congressional staffers, and FBI agents who suspected immediately that Osama bin Laden was behind the attacks. We get the perspectives of young schoolchildren around the country (of whom I was one), including Muslim and Arab-American children who would become objects of undeserved hatred and suspicion as they came of age in a post-9/11 world. I was a pretty shy and quiet child, but I had made my first friend on my own. After that day, my friend came over and said, ‘We can’t be friends anymore, Hiba. My mom said until this is over, we can’t be friends anymore.� - Hiba Elaasar, a second grade student from Louisiana It all comes together in a moving panorama portrait of a day that never ended. ...more |
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really liked it
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At the beginning of 1974, just before the Carnation Revolution toppled Portugal’s dictatorship and opened the way for the independence of its African
At the beginning of 1974, just before the Carnation Revolution toppled Portugal’s dictatorship and opened the way for the independence of its African colonies, the southern end of the African continent was dominated by the apartheid regime in Pretoria, its clients, and its foreign benefactors. On South Africa’s frontiers were a friendly—if unrecognized—white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe); a de facto colony in South West Africa (now Namibia), which it originally governed under a League of Nations mandate but continued to occupy after the International Court of Justice declared the occupation illegal in 1971 and a UN Security Council resolution called for its withdrawal; and congenial Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique. Though minority rule was unstable by nature and Pretoria faced serious challenges from popular resistance movements—the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) in Namibia, and the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA)—South Africa was the dominant military power in the region, and it effectively projected an aura of invincibility. Furthermore, it could secure American compliance—if not direct patronage—and protect itself from serious international censure by positioning itself as a bulwark against the spread of communism, stemming the tide of the Cuban and Soviet-backed liberation movements. When Angola descended into civil war upon the end of Portuguese rule in 1975, and it became clear that the left-wing and avowedly anti-apartheid MPLA had the upper hand over the ideologically-ambiguous National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), it was with the approval of the Ford administration that the South African army invaded the country from Namibia in support of UNITA and its leader, the savvy and charismatic Jonas Savimbi. The MPLA was little match for the SADF, and the latter might have advanced all the way to Luanda and imposed its will on Angola had it not been for one of the most astonishing geopolitical events of the century: the rapid influx, just after the South African invasion, of 35,000 Cuban soldiers in defense of the MPLA and Angolan sovereignty. Never before or since has such a comparatively small and impoverished nation taken on such a bold foreign initiative, nor achieved such success in reshaping the international order. A Caribbean island under the nose of a hostile superpower, the Cubans endured a U.S. embargo and faced perpetual threats of blockade and invasion. Indeed, Reagan spoke openly about the possibility of a total naval blockade of the island during his presidential campaign, and the administration seriously considered military action against Cuba as a response to a prospective Soviet intervention in Poland to suppress the Solidarity movement. Though formally aligned with Moscow, the Cubans understood that they could not rely on foreign assistance and would likely be left to fend for themselves in the event of direct hostilities with the United States. Cuban adventurism not only enraged Washington; it also confounded the Soviet Union, which feared that the United States would view the Cuban forces in Angola and Ethiopia (1977-78) as Soviet proxies, and that their presence would undermine détente. They were correct on both counts. The intervention becomes even more remarkable when one considers that Cuba had practically nothing material to gain from it, and everything to lose. It received no real compensation from the MPLA; the Cubans even paid most of the expenses of stationing thousands of troops and tens of thousands of aid workers in Angola for fifteen years. The decision to intervene was made at a time when Cuban-U.S. relations were improving, and Washington was enticing Havana with the prospect of an eventual end to the embargo. The Angolan and Ethiopian expeditions were motivated exclusively by a genuine spirit of socialist and anti-colonialist solidarity. Fidel Castro spoke truthfully when he said, “Our soldiers are internationalists; they are not mercenaries.� As a communist country with a mixture of Latin American and African influences, Cuba believed that it had a unique vocation to assist the global south in its quest for liberation: a cause for which it was far more naturally suited than the European socialist states. The United States claimed that the Cubans were unwilling proxies pressed into the service of Soviet imperialism, but in reality Cuba’s actions were taken unilaterally and in the service of popular sovereignty and national self-determination, while the South Africans and their American supporters had far more “imperialistic� designs. The Cuban troops managed to beat back the SADF, forcing it completely out of Angola by 1976. It was South Africa’s first major military defeat, demoralizing the apartheid government, emboldening the liberation movements, and turning Angola into a base of operations for SWAPO and the ANC. From 1975 to 1988, southern Africa became an increasingly active theater of the Cold War, with Cuban and Soviet support for the MPLA, accelerating South African and American aid for UNITA, and periodic South African assaults on SWAPO bases in southern Angola. The Carter administration came into office denouncing apartheid and pledging to make human rights advocacy a central component of its foreign policy, but was constrained in southern Africa by its inability to separate regional conflicts from the demise of détente and the growing public perception that the West was sitting on its hands while international communism was on the march. The administration provided indirect aid to UNITA (skirting the Clark Amendment by working through third parties in a manner analogous to the Reagan administration’s conduct in the Iran-Contra Affair), and facilitated interventions of Moroccan, French, and Belgian troops in Zaire (DRC) during tribal conflicts over the latter’s Shaba region. It was in large part the presence of Cuban troops in Angola (as well as a false belief that the Cubans were behind the Shaba conflicts) that precluded Carter from granting recognition to the MPLA. The Reagan administration continued and increased U.S. support for UNITA while abandoning Carter’s rhetoric against apartheid. It pursued a policy of “constructive engagement,� which entailed a more conciliatory attitude towards Pretoria, and introduced to the Angolan-Namibian question a policy of “linkage,� whereby South Africa’s implementation of UNSC Resolution 435—UN-supervised elections in Namibia, spelling the end of minority rule and South African control of the country (all parties knew that SWAPO would win a free election)—would be conditioned upon the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola. The policy effectively allowed the U.S. to use the Cuban forces in Angola as an excuse for not supporting sanctions and divestment measures against South Africa, even though the Cubans were there exclusively to defend Angola from the SADF. The South Africans, for their part, had no intention of accepting Resolution 435—instead favoring an internal settlement for Namibia that would grant it merely titular independence—but were happy to take advantage of Reagan’s conciliatory approach by raiding southern Angola. Yet in the end, it was the African liberation movements and their Cuban allies who had their way. With the New York Accords of 1988, South Africa agreed to withdraw permanently from Angola and accept Resolution 435 for Namibia. The accords were touted as a success story for the American linkage policy, but in fact South Africa only accepted the settlement because, after a period of particularly intense fighting in southern Angola in 1987-88 (including the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the second-largest battle ever fought on the African continent), the Cuban troops surged, pushed the SADF back to the Namibian border, and threatened an invasion of Namibia. The Cubans had effectively turned the linkage policy on its head. A Caribbean island nation had defied both Cold War superpowers, secured independence for Angola and Namibia, and set the stage for the end of South African apartheid. Pretty wild. ...more |
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| 0743298098
| 9780743298094
| 0743298098
| 3.94
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| Apr 24, 2018
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really liked it
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I didn’t intend it as such, but this turned out to be an apposite read for the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War. Though the author takes pains in
I didn’t intend it as such, but this turned out to be an apposite read for the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War. Though the author takes pains in the epilogue to draw distinctions between Woodrow Wilson and George W. Bush, the continuities between Wilson’s idealistic liberal internationalism and the hubristic exercises of twenty-first century American global preeminence are far more striking. While realists and idealists have tussled throughout the history of American foreign relations, Wilsonianism appeared to reach its apogee during the Bush and Obama presidencies, when America’s unipolar status left it seemingly unencumbered by the traditional strategic considerations of great power politics. If idealist rhetoric had previously been a mask for realist objectives, with the Iraq War the opposite dynamic came into play. “Realist� proponents of the invasion pointed to Iraq’s supposed development of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the supposed links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda; “realist� opponents declared that the war was fought for oil, or for the enrichment of defense contractors, or perhaps so that George W. Bush could one-up his father; but neither camp gave due consideration to the underlying Wilsonian assumptions that midwifed one of the most “idealistic� military adventures in history. Bush and Wilson shared a missionary faith in the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy around the globe. Both believed that the flourishing of liberty throughout the world was impeded by despots who held their people captive, and that once these despots were removed from power, grateful democracies with a natural affinity for the rest of the “free world� would spring up in their place. Both believed that the aggressive usage of American military power, contrary to that of empires past, would be a potent force for liberation rather than domination, and that the nations “liberated� by it would see things the same way. Thus when Victoriano Huerta seized power in Mexico through a coup in 1913, Wilson refused to recognize the new government, armed the Constitutionalists of Venustiano Carranza, demanded Huerta’s ouster, and finally, in 1914, took direct military action. When a German cargo ship sailed from Cuba for Veracruz with supplies for Huerta’s forces, Wilson sent the U.S. Navy to intercept the vessel and ordered a force of marines and sailors to go ashore and seize the customshouse in case the ship made it to port. The landing, which was supposed to be a relatively bloodless affair, turned into a full-scale battle that killed hundreds of people, and was followed by a largely ineffectual military occupation. Though the Wilson Administration took credit for Huerta’s subsequent resignation, the latter probably had much more to do with the advances made by the Constitutionalists in the north; and while Wilson expected constitutional government to be restored after the deposition of the dictator, the upheavals of the Mexican Revolution continued unabated. This was just one of a whopping twelve American military interventions in Latin America during Wilson’s presidency. If Wilson shared Bush’s crusading zeal for democracy, he coupled it with Obama’s cosmopolitanism, his belief in the power of international dialogue to resolve disputes, his overreliance on high-flown oratory to paper over fundamental conflicts of interest; and, perhaps, an overinflated view of his own importance as an agent of international concord. Both men became politicians by way of academia; both were catapulted from obscurity to national prominence with the aid of machine politics; both ascended quickly to the presidency, with Wilson spending most of his two years as governor of New Jersey campaigning for the White House; both were gifted orators who excelled at making speeches but were averse to bipartisan haggling and compromise; and both were accused by their critics of having a messiah complex. Wilson’s herculean efforts to keep the United States out of the Great War—and, once it was compelled to intervene, his insistence on America’s independence as a belligerent and its disinterested role as a promoter of global peace and liberty at Versailles—were ascribed by foreign and domestic observers to a holier-than-thou attitude. Yet there can be no doubting the sincerity of Wilson’s commitment to neutrality; nor the profound physical, intellectual, and emotional investments he made to realize his dream of an international association in which the nations of the world could meet each other as equals, resolve their differences, and avoid future cataclysms. To the American critics who suggested that such an association would be an “entangling alliance� of the kind warned against by George Washington, Wilson retorted that it would instead be a “disentangling alliance,� because it would obviate the need for the complex alliance systems that dragged the European powers into the deadliest war the world had ever seen. Maintaining American neutrality for nearly three years of the Great War was a monumental feat of moral resolve: one for which the country paid a heavy price, and for which Wilson himself endured withering criticism. The war produced devastating disruptions of American trade and finance, duplicitous efforts by the belligerents to propagandize the American public against one another, unrestricted German U-boat warfare against merchant vessels (in retaliation for an unprecedented British blockade of the North Sea) which killed thousands of civilians—including scores of Americans—and attempts by the Central Powers to engineer a U.S.-Mexican war while Mexican rebels were raiding U.S. territory. Neutrality became a terrible—and ultimately untenable—burden; and where Wilson’s supporters saw a noble abstention from frivolous bloodshed, his opponents saw weakness and cowardice in the face of danger. During the election campaign of 1916, Theodore Roosevelt, speaking at Cooper Union in support of the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes, laid down a ghastly indictment of Wilson’s toothless response to Germany’s U-boat warfare against civilians and the meagerness of the Punitive Expedition against the Villistas in Mexico: “Mr. Wilson now dwells at Shadow Lawn . . . There should be shadows enough at Shadow Lawn—the shadows of men, women and children who have risen from the ooze of the ocean bottom and from graves in foreign lands. The shadows of the helpless whom Mr. Wilson did not protect lest he might have to face danger; the shadows of babies gasping pitifully as they sank under the waves. The shadows of women outraged and slain by bandits. The shadows of . . . troopers who lay in the Mexican desert, the black blood crusted round their mouths and their dim eyes looking upward, because President Wilson had sent them to do a task and then shamefully abandoned them to the mercy of the foes who knew no mercy. Those are the shadows proper for Shadow Lawn; the shadows of deeds that were never done; the shadows of lofty words that were followed by no action; the shadows of the tortured dead.� The reverse side of Wilson’s idealism was his obstinacy; and this, more than anything else, is what doomed the ratification of U.S. membership in the League of Nations in the Senate. Many Republican politicians, as well as most of the general public, supported the League in principle. Wilson’s main Republican ally in his campaign for the League was none other than former president William Howard Taft. Most Republican senators only conditioned their support for the League on the addition of reservations that would clarify the terms of withdrawal from League membership, stipulate the exclusive power of Congress to commit the United States to war and to control domestic policy, and ensure that the League would not undermine the Monroe Doctrine. If Wilson had compromised on these fairly minor points, he would have had little problem securing the two-thirds Senate majority needed for ratification. Instead he toured the country hurling invectives at his opposition, causing the latter to dig in their heels and fatefully compromising his own health in the process. Wilson’s moralizing vision was also accompanied by a great deal of hypocrisy: namely, his acquiescence in the segregation of the civil service, his adoption of the Espionage and Sedition Acts (the latter was actually an amended version of the former), which effectively made it a crime to criticize the U.S. government or its conduct of the war in any way, and his creation of the Committee on Public Information: a propaganda outlet that whipped up anti-German hysteria and promoted shallow nationalism over informed patriotism. Nonetheless, Wilson’s vision of America’s role in the world—as a leading power committed to championing right over might, maintaining a global order in which small nations can govern their own affairs free from the coercion of predatory empires—has shaped our national self-understanding, for better or worse, as perhaps no other statesman has. ...more |
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| 019994203X
| 9780199942039
| 019994203X
| 4.40
| 382
| Oct 14, 2016
| Oct 14, 2016
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it was amazing
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By the mid-1780s, it was widely acknowledged that the United States of America had become a shitshow. The federal government, which possessed no indep
By the mid-1780s, it was widely acknowledged that the United States of America had become a shitshow. The federal government, which possessed no independent revenue-raising authority under the Articles of Confederation, was on the verge of defaulting on its foreign debts, unable to pay a nearly mutinous army, and impotent to even offer ransom for commercial ships and sailors taken prisoner by the Barbary pirates. Congress relied for funds on requisitions from the states which were never fulfilled (most states never came close) and which Congress had no power to enforce. States relied on the liberal issuance of government securities that they could not redeem without the imposition of steep poll and property taxes and draconian enforcement measures. With no federal authority to regulate foreign or interstate commerce, the United States was unable to retaliate against punishing British tariffs with the unified protectionist measures that would have enabled it to negotiate a more favorable commercial treaty. American exports declined precipitously—the country was virtually excluded from the international carrying trade—and this, combined with the end of wartime demand, the exodus of wealthy loyalists, and the lack of money in circulation, engendered one of the worst economic depressions in American history. Negotiations between John Jay and the Spanish minister Diego de Gardoqui over a prospective commercial treaty, undertaken in the hope of opening Spanish markets to American exports, became an object of such contention between the northern and southern states that many feared the union would divide into separate confederations. In exchange for opening its ports to American goods, the Spanish wanted the United States to relinquish its claim to navigation rights on the Mississippi River. Because the Mississippi was the main artery through which western settlers—most of whom were from the south—transported their goods to the international market, its closure would depress the southern economy and reduce the value of the western lands that the southern states hoped to sell to pay their debts. Furthermore, most of the American goods that Spain was offering to buy were only produced by the northern maritime states; tobacco, still the south’s primary cash crop, would have been excluded. Unable to reconcile the disparate regional interests, Congress tabled the treaty, leaving both sides of the issue feeling mistreated. Since Congress had the power to make treaties but not to enforce compliance with them among the states, there was a perpetual danger that errant states could drag the entire union into international conflict. Southerners pressed for war with Spain over the Mississippi question. When American diplomats confronted their British counterparts over Britain’s failure to vacate its northwestern forts as agreed under the Treaty of Paris, the latter pointed out that the American states had violated the treaty first by ignoring provisions requiring them to make restitution for confiscated British and loyalist property and to repay prewar debts to British creditors. With no federal courts of general jurisdiction, nearly all legal cases—including those pertaining to potential treaty violations—were tried in state courts under judges who relied on the state legislatures for their pay and tenure in office, and thus had little incentive to side against their state when its practices conflicted with federal law. Nor were substantial corrective legislation or amendments forthcoming, since the Confederation Congress consisted of a unicameral legislature in which each state delegation cast a single vote. Many legislative items required a two-thirds majority, and amendments to the Articles required unanimous state consent. But as severe as the structural deficiencies of the Articles were, nothing so imbued America’s political and economic elite with an urgent sense that drastic measures needed to be taken to save the country than the armed populist insurgency of 1786-87 that became known to history as Shays� Rebellion. In 1776, just after the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, the Continental Congress asked the colonies to draft their own constitutions. Because the Revolutionary War was ongoing and the states needed to appeal to ordinary Americans—farmers, tradesmen, merchants, soldiers, etc.—for the Patriot cause to succeed, the American states in the 1770s and 80s adopted populist constitutions that made them the most democratic polities in the world. These constitutions generally featured annual elections for governors and legislators (in some states governors served terms of only six months), minimal property qualifications for voting and officeholding, large legislative bodies, secret ballots, the popular election of local officials, legislative proceedings open to the public, mandatory rotation in office after a certain number of consecutive terms, and weak executives who often lacked the power to veto legislation and could only act in conjunction with executive councils tied to the legislature. These constitutions were generally popular with Americans of the lower and middling classes, but for the affluent—including the men who would become the Framers of the 1787 Constitution—they represented a dangerous excess of democracy, an unfounded confidence in the capabilities of most ordinary people, and, perhaps most importantly, a populist threat to their property rights. The Revolutionary War left the states with substantial debts. During the war Congress had widely issued notes and other securities with a promise to redeem them after peace was concluded; and this responsibility would fall to the states. During the economic depression of the 1780s, many poor farmers and veterans—still unpaid—were obliged by their desperation for hard currency to sell their securities to wealthy speculators for a small fraction of their face value. By the end of the decade, roughly 90 percent of government securities were in the hands of a small cadre of some of the richest men in the country. These same speculators then sought to turn a huge profit by using their wealth and political influence to pressure the state governments to redeem them at face value. With few means of generating the revenue needed to redeem the securities, states sought to impose poll and land taxes; but these efforts were met with widespread popular resistance; and because of the radical democratic responsiveness of the state governments, populist factions took over state legislatures and implemented tax and debt relief measures. States refrained from prosecuting tax delinquencies, allowed private debts to be repaid in kind rather than cash, and—most horrifying to the speculators—issued their own paper currency to increase the money supply and required creditors to accept paper money in place of specie. In the eyes of the affluent, this was an unacceptable infringement on their property rights, since the issuance of paper money would inevitably devalue their financial assets. Massachusetts was one of the few states that refused to provide tax and debt relief. In 1785, the state imposed heavy poll and property taxes, and began aggressively prosecuting delinquency. The following year, farmers from the western part of the state took direct action: arming themselves, organizing militias, shutting down courthouses to prevent foreclosures (this had become a fairly common practice in the interiors of the states, called “regulation�), and defending their farms from tax collectors. The uprising culminated in January 1787, when Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led a rebel force to Springfield with the intent of raiding the federal armory there, only for the rebels to be intercepted and violently dispersed by state militia. Because neither Congress nor Massachusetts had the funds to raise an army sufficient to suppress the rebellion, the state had to rely for the purpose on private subscribers: many of whom were the very same speculators who stood to make enormous profits if the insurrection was quelled and the new taxes were wrung out of the farmers. The rebellion shocked and appalled men of means throughout the country, including those who would become delegates at the Philadelphia Convention. But perhaps even more disturbing was what happened next: just two months after the insurgency was suppressed, John Hancock, who represented the populist faction in Massachusetts politics, crushed the incumbent governor in an election, winning some 75 percent of the vote, while his populist allies—many of whom had participated in the rebellion—swept the legislature. Massachusetts� experiment with extreme austerity was over. Meeting at Philadelphia from May to September of 1787 in the shadow of Shays� Rebellion, sworn to secrecy, with authorization from their respective states to discuss amendments to the Articles (their subsequent decision to propose a new Constitution altogether was itself, ironically, of dubious constitutionality), the Framers overwhelmingly sought to create a Constitution that was as nationalist and antipopulist as it could be while still having a chance of passing muster with the popularly-elected state ratifying conventions. Soured on the ideal of democracy by what they saw as populist mob rule in the states, the primary aim of the most prominent delegates was to create a supreme national government with minimal democratic inputs, thereby stripping the states of much of their power; particularly that to interfere with private property. One of their first orders of business was to approve a provision that became Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution, barring states from coining money, issuing bills of credit, making anything besides gold or silver legal tender for the repayment of debts, and making any laws “impairing the obligation of contracts.� The Virginia Plan, endorsed by Madison, called for a Congressional veto over state legislation; a federal power of direct taxation on individuals; a federal judiciary; and the establishment of two houses of Congress, both of which would have proportional representation (rather than equal representation between states): either by population or by “quotas of contribution,� whereby the states that contributed the most tax revenue to the federal government would get the most representatives. The convention’s rejection of the Congressional veto over the states was Madison’s greatest disappointment, but the alternative—proposed by Luther Martin of Maryland—was the provision that became the Supremacy Clause, establishing the constitutional basis of judicial review: a highly controversial practice in an era of legislative supremacy, but one that provided a possible mechanism for invalidating populist state legislation. The convention created an upper house of Congress—the U.S. Senate—that was appointed by state legislatures rather than popularly elected, and which served much longer terms than most state legislators—with no term limits. More than a few of the delegates would have preferred Senators (and the President) to have lifetime tenure, but the Senate they ultimately approved was nonetheless an avowedly aristocratic and democracy-tempering institution. Even the House of Representatives, the most democratic element of the government under the Constitution, was structured to mitigate populist influences. While the House would represent the entire country, it would have fewer representatives than any of the state legislatures, making the districts very large and thus (in theory) less responsive to popular unrest. Also unlike most state legislatures, there were no provisions for instruction, mandatory rotation in office, or recall of representatives, making the House a far more independent body. Though the proper “size� of government was fairly uncontroversial—all delegates were proponents of expanded federal power—the question of state representation within the federal government became the most contentious issue. The delegations from the most populous states—Virginia and Pennsylvania—endorsed the Virginia Plan’s provision for proportional representation in Congress, and many delegates spoke of the states themselves with surprising disparagement. Alexander Hamilton personally desired to get rid of the states altogether and create a single national government, referring to the states as “artificial beings� which interfered with the representation of the American people. Though he acknowledged that complete nationalization would never be supported by the states, he was bold enough to propose that state governors be federally appointed. James Wilson of Pennsylvania—whose main contribution to the convention would be to design a Presidency that was more powerful than the British monarchy had been for at least a century—at one point exclaimed, “Can we forget for whom we are forming a government? Is it for men, or for the imaginary beings called states? . . . We talk of states, till we forget what they are composed of.� The small states, however, continued to agitate for equal representation, threatening to walk out of the convention if this condition was not met. The compromise, proposed by Roger Sherman of Connecticut, stipulated that the House of Representatives would have proportional representation based on population, while the Senate would have equal representation between states. Contrary to what some have claimed in recent years, the equality of states in the Senate was not a mechanism for defending slavery; all of the smallest states (Delaware, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island—the only state that declined to attend the convention) were in the north, and it was widely assumed at the time that the southern states would rapidly grow and come to comprise a majority of the national population. The Connecticut Compromise was the signature victory of the small states at the convention. Convention delegates almost unanimously supported property qualifications for voting and officeholding (Benjamin Franklin was the only real dissenter); but because they could not agree on what those requirements should be and feared for the prospects of ratification if they were too strict, they stipulated only that suffrage requirements for Congressional elections would be the same as those of the lower houses of the respective states; and they likewise forwent any uniform qualifications for officeholding, trusting that the states would continue to maintain their own. The American Presidency was another coup for federal power. Whereas most state governors were extremely weak—elected to terms of one year or less, subject to mandatory rotation in office, powerless to veto legislation, unable to independently appoint officials, and required to act concurrently with executive councils—the chief federal executive would have none of these limitations, wielding a veto power over all legislation, appointing federal judges and cabinet officers with Senate approval, prosecuting wars declared by Congress, and maintaining a cabinet largely independent of Congressional oversight for purposes of advice rather than instruction. Even with the endorsements of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin—the two most widely revered men in the country—ratification was an intensely contested and close-run affair. In the end, the Constitution was ratified largely because it was seen to be the only viable option. The convention itself had effectively delegitimized the government under the Articles of Confederation, so to reject the alternative it offered would have left the country in immediate danger of disunion and anarchy. Klarman closes his history by enjoining Americans not to worship the letter of the Constitution with a blind fidelity—indeed, many of its authors saw it as a temporary and flawed expedient—but to consider the interests, ideals, and prejudices of its authors and to reflect on how the Constitution they designed has adapted—or failed to adapt—to the transformations of the last 230 years. ...more |
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Mar 14, 2023
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Feb 23, 2023
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Hardcover
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| 1631496999
| 9781631496998
| 1631496999
| 4.05
| 2,353
| Sep 20, 2022
| Sep 20, 2022
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really liked it
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An admirable, though not entirely groundbreaking, revisionist history of post-Columbian North America; one that shifts our focus away from the colonia
An admirable, though not entirely groundbreaking, revisionist history of post-Columbian North America; one that shifts our focus away from the colonial powers that made ludicrously bold territorial claims but typically lacked the substantial power to make those claims anything more than tenuous, self-flattering fictions, and instead centers the Indigenous nations that dominated the heart of the continent militarily, economically, culturally, and demographically until well into the nineteenth century; the preeminent shapers of the fortunes and folkways of the landmass. Reversing familiar tropes about Native American history, Hämäläinen presents a story not of noble savages, primitive and naïve but spiritually attuned, being inevitably steamrolled by the technological superiority, material greed, lethal pathogens, and eventual population disparities brought to bear against them by White colonists, but rather of the astonishing skill and persistence with which the Indigenous nations, for centuries after the colonial project began, defeated the colonists in battle, coerced them into submission diplomatically, corralled them into isolated settlements, exploited them for access to their weapons and other technologies, pitted them against each other for their own benefit, created vast intertribal bulwarks that shielded great and small nations alike from imperial expansion, and utilized a social system based on personal merit, egalitarian decision-making processes, and extensive, durable, and adaptable kinship networks to foil colonial pretensions and adjust nimbly to changing conditions on the frontier. Consider this remarkable fact: from the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Five Nations (later Six) of the Iroquois Confederacy, decimated by smallpox, began a long series of “Mourning Wars,”—in which thousands of people from rival nations were captured and transformed into born-again Iroquois to replace the fallen, spurring a period of rapid Iroquois ascendancy—arguably until the expulsion of the French from the continent in 1763, the most powerful empire in the present-day United States was not Britain, France, or Spain, but that of the Iroquois themselves. The Iroquois battered the French-aligned Great Lakes tribes into submission, monopolized trade with the French outposts on the St. Lawrence river, assisted the English by helping defeat Metacom’s Wampanoag-Narragansett coalition, established a Covenant Chain between New England and Iroquoia that hemmed in English expansion, and forced Albany and Montreal, each eager for the pelts, lands, and people to which the Iroquois controlled access, to compete as supplicants for the favor of Onondaga. The Five Nations lived in towns imposing enough that European observers often described them as “forts� or “castles,� governed themselves with a sophisticated intertribal political system, conducted an astute and multifaceted foreign policy, and established contacts as far away as present-day South Carolina. The utility of the comparatively weak European settlements as ports of entry for valuable Old World goods often drew the surrounding Indigenous nations aggressively towards the colonists who claimed to rule them, producing furious intra-Indigenous clashes, the victor of which would enjoy the benefits of European products while keeping European power firmly in check. Even after the United States gained a titular continental supremacy in the mid-nineteenth century, the Lakota and Comanche empires, which dominated the great plains and spanned a north-south axis running from Minnesota to northern Mexico, proved an implacable obstacle to the consolidation of the American west. Though by this time far more numerous and well-armed than the Natives, the Americans struggled to project power into the arid, sparse, poorly-navigable, and (for an urban, sedentary society) weakly-defensible lands beyond the Mississippi, leaving the region dotted with small towns based around extractive industries (namely mining and ranching) and vulnerable to reprisals from the horse lords who—far more quickly and successfully than the Americans—made the interior west their home. Because Indigenous power was rooted primarily in kinship networks rather than strategically-crucial cities, forts, or natural features, the Lakotas, Comanches, and smaller nations under their aegis could easily outmaneuver the U.S. Army, avoid giving battle in unfavorable conditions, evade capture, and materialize in unexpected places. The Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, in which George A. Custer’s 7th Cavalry Regiment suffered a legendary defeat at the hands of the Lakota and their Cheyenne and Arapaho allies, far from a mere fluke, was merely a powerful demonstration of the advantages the Natives had over the U.S. Army on their own soil, even into the late nineteenth century. Sadly, it was the very advantageousness of the Native kinship relations that prompted the long-frustrated United States to wage campaigns of genocidal ferocity against them. Following the American Civil War, the United States, as Hämäläinen points out, launched two reconstruction projects, both aimed at accomplishing the real sovereignty of the U.S. government over the territories it officially controlled. In addition to the more familiar Reconstruction regime in the south, the United States also undertook a “reconstruction� effort in the west: namely, a concerted, systematic campaign to destroy Indigenous power and “civilize,� i.e. assimilate, Indigenous people. Since the people themselves were the basis of Native resistance, it was the people themselves who were subjugated piecemeal, cordoned off into reservations, enrolled in Indian schools, and, most notoriously, outright massacred in such infamous atrocities as those at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee. Hämäläinen’s Native-centered history may be an overcorrection of the traditional narrative, but it could be a necessary one. ...more |
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Jan 12, 2023
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| 0393635694
| 9780393635690
| 0393635694
| 3.50
| 975
| Jun 09, 2020
| Jun 09, 2020
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it was ok
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Only the most subtle readers will pick up on this book's allusions to current events.
Only the most subtle readers will pick up on this book's allusions to current events.
...more
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Dec 27, 2022
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Dec 27, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 9780375706363
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| 4.19
| 4,180
| Feb 15, 2000
| Jan 23, 2001
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really liked it
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The definitive conflagration of the eighteenth century—a world war involving every major European power and stretching from Virginia to Montréal, to N
The definitive conflagration of the eighteenth century—a world war involving every major European power and stretching from Virginia to Montréal, to Nova Scotia, to the Caribbean, to Portugal, to Prussia, to West Africa, to India, to the Philippines; and which both established the First British Empire as the world’s leading colonial power and sowed the seeds of its dissolution—began as a tit-for-tat between small parties of French and Anglo-American soldiers, traders, and native allies over control of the heretofore uncolonized backcountry of what is now western Pennsylvania, where the forks of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers merge into the Ohio. The Ohio Country was the domain of the Shawnee, Delaware (Lenape), and Mingo peoples, many of whom had recently migrated into the sparsely-inhabited area to avoid a burgeoning population of Anglo-American settlers; and these tribes, at least in theory, were the clients of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy, which had long claimed the region for itself, and which appointed “half-kings� from the Six Nations to represent the Ohio Indians in their negotiations with the colonists. Since the Iroquois had observed a policy of neutrality between Britain and France from the beginning of the eighteenth century, preferring to play the rivals off of one another for their own benefit, their claims to overlordship in the Ohio Country had for some time effectively forestalled European encroachment. But after the 1730s, as Onondaga (the effective “capital� of the Confederacy) sought to establish itself as the sole purveyor of land rights in the Ohio by acquiescing to a series of dubious treaties with the Anglo-American provincial governments, things began to change. The Iroquois half-kings had no coercive power over the Ohio Indians; their influence was only as strong as the willingness of the latter to cooperate with them. When Onondaga sided with Pennsylvania over the Delawares in their dispute over the validity of the fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737, the Iroquois managed both to alienate their erstwhile subjects and weaken their own influence in the Ohio Country, as the region began to be filled with now-dispossessed Delawares from the east. An even worse blunder came with the 1744 Lancaster Treaty, in which the Iroquois representative agreed to give up any land claims within the borders of Virginia and Maryland. The Iroquois assumed they were only giving up any hypothetical designs on the Shenandoah Valley; but what the Virginia commissioners neglected to mention was that the colony’s charter granted it a domain that extended westward all the way to the “island of California� and northwest from the Potomac to the western shore of Hudson Bay. As far as the Virginians were concerned, the whole of the Ohio Country was now open to settlement. As settlers, traders, and land speculators of Virginia’s Ohio Company began flooding into the valley, the administrators of New France became increasingly apprehensive. For the French, the Ohio Country was strategically crucial as a liminal space between the settlements of the St. Lawrence and those of the Illinois; the missing link in a loosely-connected chain of forts, trading posts, and villages extending in a great arc from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to New Orleans. If the Ohio Country could be secured for France, the French could hem in Anglo-American expansion and present their British rivals with a vast and poorly-defensible frontier that could only be defended with large amounts of money and manpower, thus weakening Britain’s military capabilities in Europe and elsewhere. For the same reasons, the British found it necessary to claim the region for themselves, and both the Ohio Company and New France made plans to erect a fort on the same spot: the site of present-day Pittsburgh. In 1754, the Ohio Company raced to the area and began hastily constructing a pitiful fort, only for a larger French force to arrive during construction and shoo them away. While the French set to work building the far more imposing Fort Duquesne, Lt. Governor Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia sent a small force led by twenty-two-year-old Major George Washington to warn the French to leave the area. Accompanied by a party of Mingos and their Seneca half-king Tanaghrisson, Washington ambushed a French company dispatched to intercept him, inaugurating a cycle of escalatory violence that would eventually encompass much of the globe. Washington created an outpost at Fort Necessity, which was in turn attacked and destroyed by a French expedition from Fort Duquesne. The British government responded to these events by appointing General Edward Braddock as the commander in chief of all British forces in America, giving him virtually viceregal powers over the provincial governments, and ordering him to attack Fort Duquesne. Braddock’s 1755 expedition famously ended in disaster, failing to achieve Britain’s primary military objective while simultaneously escalating the conflict to the point that what was heretofore an undeclared colonial war now threatened to erupt into general war between Britain, France, and their respective allies. 1756, the year in which the Seven Years� War formally began, saw a major realignment in the European alliance system, with Austria, a longtime British ally, partnering with France and Russia in the hopes of recovering the province of Silesia, which was lost to Prussia in the War of the Austrian Succession; and Prussia, formerly allied to France, making a peace pact with Britain, securing the relative safety of Hanover, of which George II was elector, and placating Prussian fears of the rumored French-Austrian partnership by gaining a pledge of British support against any act of aggression toward “Germany�. The British hoped this new alliance system would create a stable equilibrium in Europe, preventing the outbreak of a European war; but they underestimated the boldness of Prussia’s Frederick II, who promptly invaded Saxony, an Austrian ally, and got himself embroiled in a war against Austria, France, Sweden, and Russia. The first two “official� years of the war went disastrously for the British. The French captured Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario and Fort William Henry on Lake George; and as the British garrison of the latter was marching out of the fort, they were attacked, massacred, robbed, and taken hostage by France’s Ottawa and Abenaki allies. The Ohio Indians, most of whom now sided with the French, launched devastating raids along the backcountry of Virginia and Pennsylvania. Lord Loudon, having succeeded Braddock as commander in chief in North America, struggled mightily with the provincial governments, who resented Loudon’s coercive efforts to centralize military, financial, and administrative power, as well as his lack of respect for the provincial legislatures, which responded in kind by denying Loudon funds, manpower, and even suitable quarters for his army. Loudon’s exasperation at the provincials—who considered themselves Britons on equal standing with their compatriots on the home island rather than foreign subjects, and their legislatures more-or-less equal to the British Parliament—anticipated the impasse between parliamentary and provincial prerogatives that would later culminate with the American Revolution. “The delays we meet with,� Loudon wrote to the Duke of Cumberland, “in carrying on the Service, from every parts of this Country, are immense; they have assumed to themselves, what they call Rights and Priviledges, totaly unknown in the Mother Country, and [these] are made use of, for no purpose, but to screen them, from giving any Aid, of any sort, for carrying on, the Service, and refusing us Quarters. . . . opposition [to royal authority] seems not to come from the lower People, but from the leading People, who raise the dispute, in order to have a merit with the others, by defending their Liberties, as they call them.� The provincial governors, Loudon claimed, had “sold the whole of the King’s Prerogative, to get their Sallaries; and till you find a Fund, independent of the Province[s], to Pay the Governors, and new model the Government, you can do nothing with the Provinces. I know it has been said in London, that this is not the time; if You delay it till a Peace, You will not have a force to Exert any Brittish Acts of Parliament here, for tho� they will not venture to go so far with me, I am assured by the Officers, that it is not uncommon, for the People of this Country to say, they would be glad to see any Man, that dare exert a Brittish Act of Parliament here.� Provincial troops resisted service alongside British regulars; firstly, because British military law stipulated that any provincial officer, regardless of seniority, would be considered to rank no higher than a captain when serving with regulars; and secondly, because military discipline in the regular service was extremely draconian. Whereas enlisted men in provincial armies served on a contractual basis, expecting to be well-paid and well-treated during their service because they had other employment options, and usually being led by officers with whom they were personally acquainted and who were often not dramatically wealthier than themselves, the regular enlisted ranks were largely filled with paupers and led by men of superior wealth and social standing, reflecting the greater social stratification of the old England in comparison with the new one. To the provincials, enlisted regulars seemed little more than slaves: “[Under] regular military discipline, insolence to an officer was a crime that carried a penalty of five hundred lashes; the theft of a shirt could earn a man a thousand; and desertion (no uncommon act among New England troops) was punishable by hanging or a firing-squad execution. An average provincial soldier serving with Abercromby’s [who succeeded Loudon as commander in chief in 1757] army could witness a flogging of fifty or a hundred lashes every day or two, a flogging of three hundred to a thousand lashes once or twice a week, an execution at least once a month.� American attitudes and British military fortunes both made a dramatic rebound when the reforms of William Pitt the Elder began to take effect in 1758. Instead of ordering the provinces to raise troops at their own expense, which would then be subordinated to the regulars, Pitt invited them to join the war effort as equals, offering massive subsidies for the provincial armies, promising additional rewards for the provinces that made the greatest contribution to the imperial venture (thus transforming intercolonial rivalries from a liability into an asset), and creating a new policy that made provincial officers inferior only to regular officers of the same rank. The reforms inaugurated a surge of goodwill and patriotism in the provinces, which thereafter had little trouble raising the sizeable armies that Pitt needed to accomplish his new war aim: to deprive France of its colonies, including all of New France, while using coastal raids, equally massive subsidies, and supplementary troops to aid Frederick II and Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick in keeping the French tied down in Europe and protecting Hanover. Pitt’s policies would produce the greatest string of victories in British history: Louisbourg (1758, leading to the tragic expulsion of the Acadians), Fort Duquesne (1758, thereafter renamed Fort Pitt), Fort Niagara (1759), Quebec (1759, in which General James Wolfe, believing he was about to die of natural causes and wanting to die a hero’s death, undertook what he thought would be a suicide mission by leading half his army down the St. Lawrence past the French guns and scaling the cliffs along the riverbank to besiege the city from the west, only for the operation to succeed brilliantly, his army to win the ensuing battle, and for Wolfe to die a martyr’s death anyway, sealing his reputation as one of the great heroes of British history), and, finally, Montréal (1760). Using its naval superiority to isolate France from its colonies, Britain would also deprive its rival of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, its trading posts in West Africa and India, and its main Indian ally in Bengal. When Spain foolishly decided to enter the war on France’s side in 1761, the British promptly deprived it of Havana and Manila, and repelled a Spanish invasion of Portugal. At war’s end, the British Empire seemed to be at the height of its glory; but the fruits of Britain’s postwar policies in North America showed that trouble was brewing. Jeffery Amherst’s reversal of former (British and French) policies toward the natives, depriving them of gifts and trade goods while doing nothing to stop the illegal encroachment of settlers into newly-accessible lands—all in an effort to cut expenditures and centralize power—prompted Pontiac's Rebellion of 1763: “the most successful pan-Indian resistance movement in American history�. Likewise, coercive economic measures taken by parliament against the American colonies—including the Currency Act of 1754, which threatened to deprive the colonies of the right to use their own currencies as legal tender, even for the payment of taxes; the Quartering Act of 1765; the Townshend Acts of 1767; and the Tea Act of 1773—represented a reversion to the punitive, centralizing, and hierarchical approach to the colonies that had prevailed before 1758 and caused so much provincial consternation. Thus Anderson credibly argues that the British Empire was more stable under Pitt’s egalitarian wartime leadership than it was after the war ended, when the home island began attempts to transform its relationship with America from a partnership into a master-subject dynamic. Perhaps the only way for the American Revolution to have been prevented, and the Empire to have remained intact, would have been for Britain to do precisely nothing after 1763; not reverting to older models of empire but instead embracing the messy, disorganized, decentralized tangle of cooperative relationships that the Empire had become. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Oct 20, 2022
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Nov 05, 2022
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Oct 20, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0300021178
| 9780300021172
| 0300021178
| 3.70
| 67
| 1975
| 1975
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it was ok
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Well, the other reviewers weren't kidding. I'm sure there's an interesting thesis buried within this labyrinth of vague, recursive jargon, but I don't
Well, the other reviewers weren't kidding. I'm sure there's an interesting thesis buried within this labyrinth of vague, recursive jargon, but I don't have the patience to try and extract it. The work of Philip Gorski and Richard Slotkin covers much of the same ground, and their writing didn't make me go cross-eyed trying to read it. I'll see if I have better luck with Daniel Walker Howe.
...more
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Oct 07, 2022
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Oct 11, 2022
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Oct 07, 2022
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| 0062997459
| 9780062997456
| 0062997459
| 4.07
| 3,642
| Nov 10, 2020
| Nov 10, 2020
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did not like it
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With a few stellar exceptions, it has become, within the last fifteen years or so, almost prohibitively difficult to find books on early American hist
With a few stellar exceptions, it has become, within the last fifteen years or so, almost prohibitively difficult to find books on early American history or civics that are not written in the limpid pedantics of a children’s story or the dull cant of a trashy tabloid exposé. In the volume here assembled, Thomas Ricks has managed to combine both idioms, while also bookending his work with some inane political banter that contributes nothing to his study, but which likely opened up a few marketing time-slots on the cable news channels. More impressively still, he has somehow managed to write a three-hundred-plus-page book that scrupulously avoids its own ostensive subject matter. One might be led by the subtitle to believe that First Principles is about what America’s founders learned from the Greeks and Romans, and how that shaped our country; but au contraire. Don’t expect to learn much of anything about the Greeks or Romans, or their influence over the Founding Fathers, or how this influence manifested itself in American government, history, or culture, or what lessons we can take away from these things to apply to our contemporary national difficulties. Do expect some biographical trivia and elementary school clichés. And if you manage to learn something, be sure to check up on the primary sources, because it may not even be accurate. George Washington was not widely read in the classics, but he nonetheless embodied Roman virtue, the essence of which is to place the public good above one’s self-interest—patriotism over pride. By so doing, he became an American Cato. Cato was a Roman statesman who opposed Julius Caesar’s bid for power, wound up on the losing side of the ensuing civil war, and died in exile under his own blade rather than submitting to tyranny. He was “upright, honest, patriotic, self-sacrificing, and a bit remote,”—just like Washington. John Adams was a lifelong admirer of Cicero. Cicero was a Roman lawyer and politician who demonstrated his own virtue by exposing and defeating the Catiline conspiracy, but who was also, like Adams, vain and conservative to a fault. This explains Adams� support for the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the overall failure of his presidency. Thomas Jefferson was profoundly influenced by Epicurus: a Greek philosopher who believed that happiness was synonymous with pleasure—the latter defined not as hedonistic debauchery but merely as the absence of pain and confusion—and who was suspected of “disregarding the gods.� Jefferson famously included the protection of the natural right to the “pursuit of happiness� as a fundamental purpose of government; but his Epicurean aversion to discomfort also contributed to his profligacy and hypocrisy. If you read this book, you will scarcely learn any more about Cato, Cicero, or Epicurus than what you’ve just read over the last three paragraphs. You might learn a bit more about Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, but you won’t be able to trust the information, because much of the research for this book appears to have been phoned in from Professor Google. Here are a couple of examples. While mentioning the fact that Jefferson, alone among the Founders discussed in the book, never travelled to the frontier, Ricks makes the following assertion: �[P]erhaps Jefferson was just too much of an Epicurean to want to endure the discomforts of frontier life. As he once wrote in a parting letter to a lover, the beautiful Italian-English artist Maria Cosway: ‘The art of life is the art of avoiding pain.� That is a recipe for Epicureanism, but it also provides a pathway for emotional withdrawal. Indeed, that letter continued, ‘The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.� “This approach might also have enabled him to justify his failure to examine his own contradictions, if by doing so he would suffer pain or confusion. It might have been too discomforting for him to recognize that as a man, he was forward thinking but not forward acting.� Now, Jefferson’s letter to Maria Cosway, dated October 12, 1786, is probably his single most famous letter. Anyone researching Jefferson in depth will come across the letter and read it attentively—but not Thomas Ricks, who completely misunderstands it, quoting statements that Jefferson goes on to explicitly reject. The letter takes the form of a playful dialogue between Jefferson’s head and heart. The head wants to isolate itself with theoretical abstractions so that it may avoid the pains of attachment and separation that inevitably accompany social life. The heart rejoins that life would not be worth living without friendship, the joys and benefits of which are well worth the danger of heartbreak. The head insists that “The art of life is the art of avoiding pain,� and that “The most effectual means of being secure against pain is to retire within ourselves, and to suffice for our own happiness.� But then comes the heart’s rebuttal: “In a life where we are perpetually exposed to want and accident, yours is a wonderful proposition, to insulate ourselves, to retire from all aid, and to wrap ourselves in the mantle of self-sufficiency! For assuredly nobody will care for him who cares for nobody. But friendship is precious not only in the shade but in the sunshine of life: and thanks to a benevolent arrangement of things, the greater part of life is sunshine. . . . Let the gloomy Monk, sequestered from the world, seek unsocial pleasures in the bottom of his cell! Let the sublimated philosopher grasp visionary happiness while pursuing phantoms dressed in the garb of truth! Their supreme wisdom is supreme folly: and they mistake for happiness the mere absence of pain. Had they ever felt the solid pleasure of one generous spasm of the heart, they would exchange for it all the frigid speculations of their lives, which you have been vaunting in such elevated terms. Believe me then, my friend, that that is a miserable arithmetic which would estimate friendship at nothing, or at less than nothing. . . . We have no rose without it’s thorn; no pleasure without alloy. It is the law of our existence; and we must acquiesce. It is the condition annexed to all our pleasures, not by us who receive, but by him who gives them. True, this condition is pressing cruelly on me at this moment. I feel more fit for death than life. But when I look back on the pleasures of which it is the consequence, I am conscious they were worth the price I am paying.� The heart wins the argument: Ricks uses Jefferson’s letter to underpin his claim about Jefferson’s aloofness, when in fact Jefferson’s conclusion in the letter is the opposite of what is suggested in the excerpts quoted by Ricks. Given the stature of the letter and the prominence of Ricks� claims about the negative aspect of Jefferson’s Epicurean influences, this is a pretty big oopsie. For another example, here is Ricks discussing the controversy over slavery that would eventually lead to the Civil War: “Continuing and irresolvable conflict over whether slavery would be permitted in the nation’s new lands, the area acquired during Jefferson’s presidency, would spark the bloodiest event in American history, the Civil War. “John Adams said if it came to a choice, he would favor war. ‘Civil War is preferable to Slavery and I add that foreign War and civil War together at the Same time are preferable to Slavery.� And in a characteristic lament, he claimed that he had been warning the country for some ‘fifty years� about the pitfalls it faced, only to be disregarded. ‘If the Nation will not read them or will not understand them, or are determined to misinterpret or misrepresent them, that is not my fault.� When it came to avoiding blame and dodging responsibility, Adams was nearly as adept as Jefferson.� Ricks would like you to get the impression that Adams declared a willingness to accept civil war in order to impede the expansion of slavery into new western territories. But if one looks to the sources of the three quotations, it is clear that Adams is doing nothing of the sort. The first quote comes from a letter from Adams to Benjamin Rush dated March 23, 1809. Adams was responding to an earlier letter from Rush, in which the latter mentioned reading Algernon Sidney’s opinion that civil war is preferable to slavery for a nation. Adams was agreeing with Sidney on this point. Neither Adams, nor Rush, nor Sidney were talking about chattel slavery as practiced within the United States; each was referring to the prospective “enslavement� of a nation by foreign or domestic tyranny. It’s as if Ricks simply searched a database for the word “slavery� and then copy-pasted the first pericope he found without bothering to read the whole letter and understand its context. The second and third quotes come from a letter from Adams to Samuel Perley, dated April 18, 1809. Here Adams is not referring to anything related to slavery, disunion, or the prospect of civil war. He is referring to the “fifty years� he had spent expounding his thoughts on government, and dismissing those who would continue to “misinterpret or misrepresent� his views in light of this long public record: “That I neither wish for a Monarchy nor a Grecian Democracy nor a Grecian or Roman Aristocracy in these United States is most certain and most evident to this whole Nation if they have ever attended to my words actions or writings for fifty years.—In January 1776 I printed my opinion of a proper form of Goverment under the Title of Thoughts on Goverment in a letter from a Gentleman to his Friend. In 1779 I was a Member of the Convention that formed our Massachusetts Constitution and expressed with great Freedom my Sentiments of Goverment in that Assembly of three or four hundred Gentlemen collected from all parts of the State. Two or three and twenty years ago I published Three Octavo Volumes in Defence of our Massachusetts Constitution with a view to suppress Chaises Rebellion. About Eighteen or Nineteen years ago I published Papers which have been collected in a volume under the Title of Discourses on Davila. In all these writings my opinions upon Government are so clearly expressed that he who runs may read them. If the Nation will not read them or will not understand them, or are determined to misinterpret or misrepresent them, that is not my fault.� Nothing here about the “pitfalls� the country was facing; still less about the specters of slavery or civil war. Adams was just sick of being misrepresented by his political opponents. I must also include this little gem, in which Ricks expresses surprise to find that although Jefferson described himself as a republican, he was not fond of the society described in ʱٴ’s Republic: “Jefferson loved the idea of a ‘republic,� which he saw as a system in which power was held and exercised by the people. So it is a bit surprising to learn that he despised the most famous book with that word as its title, ʱٴ’s Republic. He considered the great Greek philosopher an obscure mystic.� One can only chuckle. Has Ricks read ʱٴ’s Republic?—it obviously describes something quite different from the United States, or from any other country that has ever existed. First of all, the Greek title of the Republic is Politeia, which could naturally be translated as “polity�. The term “republic�, in this sense, refers to a state in which the public good prevails over private, arbitrary interests. The opposite of “republic�, in this context, is not “monarchy�, but something more like “tyranny� or even “barbarism�. The redefinition of the word “republic� to refer to a non-monarchical form of government was largely a post-Renaissance development. Nobody who is familiar with both Jefferson and ʱٴ’s Republic would be remotely surprised by the distaste of the former for the latter. Finally, in the epilogue, for no particular reason at all, Ricks scolds us to reform our campaign finance laws, end gerrymandering, embrace Enlightenment values of reason and open discourse, trust in our institutional checks and balances, embrace a large, robust federal government, and be patient but firm with Trump supporters despite their obvious cultural and intellectual inferiority to people who write poorly-researched, lazy, pompous, dishonest claptrap. Not only will the reader learn little from this book; if the pedestrian, milquetoast, prefabricated “conclusions� announced by Ricks are any indication, then the author himself appears to have learned little from writing it. ...more |
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| 4.23
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| Nov 16, 2021
| Nov 16, 2021
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really liked it
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“What did the people of Greece want to do in 1821? . . . They wanted to establish the reign of the Greeks. Why? I run to the Church for an answer. I
“What did the people of Greece want to do in 1821? . . . They wanted to establish the reign of the Greeks. Why? I run to the Church for an answer. I leaf through the holy scripture and what do I discover? God made man in His image according to His likeness. And He made him master of the earth, its animals, plants, and so on . . . Power has authority, the state virtue, when it is founded in the holy attributes of His image. [When it is not], the scepter shrivels in the hand of the ruler . . . The people of Greece wanted to restore the reign of that image in those heroic days when we cried for joy.� - Gregorios Tertsetis, 1855 [image] The Greek Revolution of 1821 was a watershed moment in European history. The unlikely triumph of a relatively small and scattered subject people over one of the world’s great powers represented, much like the contemporaneous Latin American revolutions or the American Revolution a half century earlier, a “world turned upside down�. It heralded the self-discovery of the nations, both within Europe and ultimately throughout the world; the epochal transformation of the globe from a world of empires to a world of nation-states; a seismic shift in socio-political affairs that the international relations scholar G. John Ikenberry has rightly identified as one of the most consequential but least understood developments of the last two centuries. It was also an episode of fascinating intrigue, rich historical and cultural resonances, and shocking brutality. It featured a secret society, the Filiki Etaireia, which operated a network of merchant-spies throughout the Mediterranean basin who communicated in coded language, ordered assassinations of members who threatened to compromise it, and intentionally mislead its massive following into believing that it was clandestinely controlled by the Russian Czar. For the republican elites of Greece and the adoring publics of Europe who adopted the Greek struggle as their cause célèbre, it represented the rebirth of Hellas: the reemergence of the classical Greek spirit in the modern age. For the ordinary farmers and merchants who did most of the fighting, suffering, and dying—who thought of themselves not as Hellenes but as Romioi (Romans)—it was the making of the Romeiko, the fulfillment of generations of prophetic expectation that would see the recovery of Byzantium and the liberation of Rumelia’s Orthodox Christians. It elevated unlikely heroes; perhaps most notably one Theodoros Kolokotronis, a sometime brigand and mercenary who became a revolutionary and a patriot, scoring one of the most decisive Greek victories of the war. The religious and ethnic nature of the conflict contributed to the genocidal ferocity of both sides, horrifying European observers and prompting, in Russia, Britain, and France, the historical novelty of a movement for military intervention that justified itself on humanitarian grounds. Greeks targeted the Muslim and Jewish minorities of the Morea, while Greeks in Constantinople and throughout the Ottoman Empire were beheaded in the streets. At the outbreak of the uprising, the Ecumenical Patriarch Georgios V was lynched just after celebrating the Paschal liturgy, his body left to hang over the gateway to his Cathedral before being dragged through the city and down to the waterfront. Perhaps tens of thousands were massacred or enslaved on the tiny island of Chios, which made the mistake of aligning itself with the patriot cause; a grim throwback to the fate of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. But at the far end of the maelstrom, a new Greece—and a new Europe—was born. ...more |
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| Sep 06, 2018
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really liked it
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Lost Kingdom is a history of the ambiguous, and ultimately irresolvable, interplay between Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism. Like many mode
Lost Kingdom is a history of the ambiguous, and ultimately irresolvable, interplay between Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism. Like many modern states, including the United Kingdom, Portugal, Spain, and France, Russia acquired an empire before it acquired a nation. But as the British historian Geoffrey Hosking has pointed out, whereas Britain had an empire, Russia was an empire, and has never fully been able to conceive of itself as anything else. Furthermore, to the extent that Russians have attempted to identify themselves in “national� terms—whether tied to ethnicity, religion, language, dynastic inheritance, or any combination thereof—the frontiers of these imagined realms have rarely cohered with Russia’s political borders. Even more uniquely, Russia has, for almost all of its history, shared its mythology of national origins in the civilization of Kyivan Rus� with neighbors that remained stubbornly outside of its political control. From the 1470s, when Ivan III of the Grand Duchy of Moscow threw off the “Tartar yoke�, crushed the Republic of Novgorod, and began styling himself “Grand Prince of All Rus’�; to its interminable conflicts with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over the “liberation� of the Orthodox Christians (most of whom were Uniates, or Eastern Catholics) of its Ruthenian (modern-day Ukraine and Belarus) lands; to its invention of a tripartite Russian nationality comprised of the “Great Rus’� (Russia), “White Rus’� (Belarus), and “Little Rus’� (Ukraine) tribal denominations in the nineteenth century; to its dramatic oscillations in the Soviet Era between Lenin’s policy of national “indigenization� and Stalin’s brutal regime of “Russification�; to Vladimir Putin’s disastrous war on Ukraine and the ideological self-deception behind it; Russia has always been an empire in search of a nation. Yet if it fails to subdue Ukraine, as we must hope it does, it may have proven itself, finally and definitively, unable to be either. What happens then is anyone’s guess. ...more |
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