Past & Present

 

Former Czech president Vaclav Havel joins the 20th anniversary celebrations in Prague. Photo from AP

The now divorced Czechs and Slovaks are celebrating peacefully together.

When Mr Panek and his friends gathered to plan demonstrations against one of Europe’s most hardline communist states, they feared the battle would take years. “We didn’t expect change to happen so suddenly, although now that seems strange,” says Mr Panek . . .

Norman Borlaug has died after a life spanning 95 years. The life began around Cresco, Iowa, found early achievement as a formidable Golden Gopher wrestler at the the high level of University of Minnesota, and reached a pinnacle at Oslo in 1970, where he was handed the Nobel Peace Prize.

His prize came in recognition of his work as a plant scientist developing a strain of dwarf wheat that did well in hungry countries such as Mexico and Pakistan, places that turned from net importers to net exporters of grain. His achievement was central to what was then being dubbed a “green revolution.”

The ideas and effects of the green revolution are justifiably criticized and Professor Borlaug was understandably defensive.  This scientific approach married the farm economy of  countries to a more capital- and chemical-intensive type of farming, which ignored most of  a country’s indigenous knowledge and neglected the plight of its poorest farmers. 

I’ve studied those harms more than most people, but still believe Professor Borlaug is underappreciated and deserves wider recognition. This article in The Atlantic by a right-leaning writer agrees for reasons with which I disagree (great portrait though). I have to admit, part of my sympathy stems from my fellow experience as an Iowa kid who went out for wrestling.

I also had the honor of  meeting Professor Borlaug when he spoke in Platteville around 1988.

from the New York Times

The Nation magazine supplies a dead-on example of the way many conservatives are now criticizing the Obama administration. Only the criticisms come from early in the twentieth century. Father Charles Coughlin, a progenitor of today’s radio celebrities such as Rush Limbaugh, says of Franklin Roosevelt “So help me God, I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from the chair once occupied by Washington”, while people like Limbaugh today accuse Obama of being a communist.

The article (you will need a subscription to read it in its entirety),whether you embrace or reject the magazine’s leftist slant, does a great job of unearthing an anti-government thread running through the past century.

On Aug. 18, 1920, the nineteenth amendment granting women’s suffrage was ratified.

The blog Edge of the American West  rides on the shoulders of the towering TV feature “Schoolhouse Rock” (ask your parents) to tell part of the story, and adds the story of the final fight for passage in the state of  Tennessee.

Taking as his cue the death of the last World War I combat veteran this week, Gwynne Dyer writes a well-done reflection on that war. Mr. Dyer believes the lessons of that war have sunk in deeper than I think they have.

It’s almost a century now since anybody but fascists and fools saw war as glorious. The government may tell us that our “glorious dead” have “fallen”, but we know that they were only teenagers, and that they died in agony and lost all the rest of their lives. Sometimes, we even worry about the fact that we have sent them to kill people for us.

But I applaud any discussion of this war. We devote almost too much attention to the second world war, and too little to the first.

I just had a nice visit with a woman who was an exchange student in East Germany. Here is an insightful essay from a man comparing his time in Hungary before the fall of the Soviet Union with the Hungary of today.

When I first visited, as an exchange student in January 1989, Budapest was the capital of Communist Hungary. And despite the moroseness that hung over the city like a cloud, it held a certain charm beneath layers of dirt and gloom. When I returned last month, a journalist on vacation, Budapest was Europe, as European as Paris or Barcelona, and as dazzling.

 

A massive U.N. sponsored digital library has come on line, according to the Washington Post. I haven’t taken the time to explore, but it looks terrific.

A campaign rally in 1983 for Raul Alfonsin attracted over a million.

The death last Tuesday of former president Raúl Alfonsín from lung cancer has provoked sincere and large-scale signs of grief. Although not as massive as when Evita Perón died in 1952, the public displays of mourning have included lines waiting to view the body of Mr. Alfonsín extending for 6 blocks.

Alexei Barrionuevo, the Latin American correspondent for the New York Times, reports that the reputation of Mr. Alfonsín has only grown since he left office in 1989. Barrionuevo writes:

He launched a truth commission to investigate the disappearance or outright killing of thousands of people during the dictatorship. He also set in motion investigations and trials that led to the jailing of military leaders and some leftists for crimes during the “dirty war” of the 1970s.

 

I have to think the nostalgia for that man’s term draws from the excitement of the times, when the country’s military dictatorship, and with it the infamous dirty war, were coming to an end.

This is pretty good. Here’s just a nibble of the history told with living maps from Auschluss in 1938 and on into the Cold War.

Someone has lots of free time and artistic talent, along with their old notes from college.

I try to work into any relevant history class some mention of the lovable Luddites, the working-class radical movement that emerged in the North England area around Nottingham in the 1810s. The luddites were mostly a type of textile worker called a cropper who used giant scissors to trim the edges of woven cloth. It’s this trade that no doubt gave its name to what we call cropping a photogaph.

The luddites broke into factories with sledges and crowbars to destroy the new-fangled shearing frames that did the same job cheaper and faster. Besides being a fascinating story, the history of the luddite is useful because the term is still heard from time to time when someone is referring to a person resisting technological change. Like I used to be, many people are probably aware of the antni-technology meaning of the term and that it had some root in the past, but unaware of the actual story of the folks who signed their warning to factory owners with the fictitious name Neil Ludd.

Proof that “luddite” still pops up came in the New York Times where I see the term used in two places on the same Sunday. Here’s how it is used in the first case, a profile of musician M. Ward:

It’s not that he’s a Luddite — he buys songs on iTunes and does late-night YouTubing like everyone else — or a misanthrope who believes that art was better in someone else’s day.

This got me curious enough to type the term into google news where I found a page worth of entries for just the past two days.

I would theorize that the frequency of this metaphor from 200 years ago points to the fetishizing of electronic technology in our times, and the success that gadget makers enjoy in the corporate trick of “planned obsolescence”.  We are supposed to worry about being behind the times, or at least about being insulted by others for being behind the times. You’re not a luddite are ya?