Past & Present

World War I Hero Sgt. Stubby

For better or worse, many animals in addition to the obvious horses have been used in war.  I have used in class some images of dogs in World War I, making the point that dogs were used as another innovation during the flurry of  adaptations to the new style of fighting early in the twentieth century.

The role of dogs in war is in the news due to the latest award ceremony in Britain to a canine in conflict. The Dicken Award went this year to a labrador retriever that sniffed bombs in Afghanistan.

At least a few U.S. papers have noted that the U.S. has its own veteran dogs, including a famous one I had not heard of  before from World War I.

There’s no equivalent to the Dickin medal in the United States, although military animals have been honored with medals or memorials on an unofficial, ad hoc basis.

The most famous U.S. recipient, a World War I mutt named Sgt. Stubby, served in 17 battles, was wounded in a grenade attack and survived several gassings. Between locating wounded Allied soldiers in the trenches, he even managed to help nab a German spy.

Stubby, now stuffed and on display at the Smithsonian, was awarded several medals, including a Purple Heart, and the canine was made a lifetime member of the American Legion. But the practice of giving medals to animals was eventually abandoned by the U.S. military on the ground that the practice risks devaluing the awards given to soldiers.

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 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.

Lamentable news from the torrid swamplands of Tabasco state in Mexico, where the ruins at La Venta of just about the most ancient civilization of meso-America is located. The L.A. Times reported:

Vandals have caused more than $20,000 (300,000 pesos) worth of damage to archaeological artifacts in the park and museum La Venta in Villahermosa, Tabasco.

Three people were arrested by police after they entered the park and performed religious rituals on a number of stones that date to Mexico’s Olmec culture. According to Milenio, 23 pieces were damaged by the vandals who used salt, oil and grape juice on the stones, some of which are more than 3,200 years old.

Many may not recognize the name of the Olmecs, or not be able to distinguish them from the jumble of names of indigenous civilizations of what is now Latin America. But you may recognize their most enduring artifact, which survives 3,000 years because it is made from stone and weighs dozens of tons. It is the colossal head, a replica of which from the National Museum of Anthropology is shown above. Does anyone remember that opening to the Simpsons TV show when that adorable family is heading for the couch and it turns out there’s a colossal head in the room?

Elections and natural disasters are the two causes that steer U.S. attention briefly to otherwised overlooked corners of the world. And so Ghana, which on Jan. 7 inaugurated a new president named John Atta Mills, earns some ink this week. Interesting enough was the coverage of the Washington Post  , but it stays in the present and contrasts Ghana’s functioning democracy with the breakdown in Kenya and the pathologies of Zimbabwe.

However, as a historian I was more tickled by the New York Times and the fact it looks back  into what the reporter Lydia Polgreen called the “iconic” role in Africa’s history that Ghana plays. Ghana, formerly the British-run Gold Coast, pioneered  nationalist (anti-colonial) revolution a half-century ago. Here was Polgreen’s well-wrought summary of that role:

AS the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to win independence, in 1957 from Britain, Ghana was a beacon to black people everywhere. Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s visionary but autocratic post-independence leader, was an icon of anti-imperialism, laying out a Pan-African ideology that reverberates on the continent and beyond to this day.

But his rule did not last. Mr. Nkrumah bankrupted the nation and was overthrown in 1966. Ghana suffered through a decade of chaos until Mr. [Jerry John] Rawlings, then a little-known air force officer, seized power in a coup in 1979.

 The bulk of the article is a profile of Mr. Rawlings, who remains a player in Ghana politics by running the party of the new president. Not knowing anything of Mr. Rawlings, I’m ashamed to admit, I was struck by the description of him as a “vast slab” of a man because it reminded me that Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda, was also freakishly large.

Here is a map locating Ghana within Africa

The 1950s was the decade in which the U.S. stepped into the role of world superpower, and learned the hard way the limits of that power. The hot wars within the Cold War taught such lessons, but so too did the Cuban Revolution. It was this week that Fidel Castro and his guerrillas traveled triumphantly from their original base in the east of Cuba to Havana. The victory was triggered by the decision to flee by the dicatator Fulgencio Batista, who had recently lost the support by the U.S.

 Admirably but not surprisingly, the Miami Herald  is doing a deep examination of Cuba and the history of this revolution. Here is how they paint the moment of triumph in one of their stories:

At 12:35 a.m., Batista quit. At dawn, a plane with 44 people aboard, including Batista, took off for the Dominican Republic, triggering a mad scramble in Havana. Batista’s allies fled by plane or yacht as the news spread by shortwave radio. They were in mortal danger, and they knew it.

The fact the U.S. failed in its overt attempt at overthrow at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, and then failed for decades after to topple Castro, highlighted the obstacles in fighting the Cold War. Castro’s own failures to bring an open society and political system is also ironic, given his pronouncements against Batista’s tyranny before the revolution. But Castro’s social reforms were significant and a revolution-sized improvement over life under Batista and colonizers before. That’s the side of Castro you won’t hear much about in the U.S., given that we still wage an impotent information war against him now 50s years on.

The economic crisis has made us think again about how much a government should intervene in the economy and for what purposes. The silly exchange this week between Barack Obama and Joe (the plumber) Wurzelbacher has focused the question on the idea of “spreading the wealth.”

I don’t know this blog at all, but I found Mahablog did a terrific job of excavating President Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas on capitalism, state intervention, and economic justice. Very timely. Here ’s Mahablog quoting TR:

“The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise.

My only moral to the story is to try to tamp down this anti-intellectual streak in political talk that wants to replace social science with anecdotes and gotchas: The U.S. government is going to play a role in a twenty-first-century economy. Do not pretend we are all Jefferson’s yeoman farmers any more or the pin-maker of Adam Smith.  The smarter question is what that government role should be, and to whose benefit? By saying “don’t spread the wealth”, conservatives are leaving unsaid their real message: “keep spreading it upward.”

The New York Times gives a video-and-sound format for comparing our current economic crisis and the Depression of the 1930s. That’s good for the text-averse, but this isn’t that exciting. Thankfully it has some nice images at the end.