Past & Present

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.

Presidential palace in Santiago burns on the day of the coup

Sept. 11 has not been just any ol’ date in Chile either. That’s because in 1973 a military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet attacked the government of the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende on that date. Allende died during the attack for reasons that are still disputed.  Pinochet ruled as dictator for the next 17 years.

The case of 1973 is a good lesson in historical probity. I have been told more than once by people or in print that the U.S. overthrew Allende. Whatever your politics might lead you to want to believe, the U.S. in this case helped the cause of overthrowing Pinochet but did not lead it. If you want a case where the CIA piloted the overthrow of a left-leaning but democratically elected Latin American president, look instead at Guatemala in 1954.

More detail about CIA actions in Chile, and the active role of Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, has emerged recently. They might be justified in some minds by the perceived need at the time to fight any whiff of communism. But they hardly seem noble in hindsight.  

The CIA subsequently acknowledged it had supported the 1970 kidnapping of Chile’s top general, Rene Schneider, for refusing to use the army to prevent the country’s congress from confirming Allende’s election. The kidnapping failed, but Schneider was killed in the attempt — and Allende’s election was confirmed. . . The subsequent coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government on Sept. 11, 1973.

As dark as this chapter is in Chile’s history — and even most supporters of Pinochet’s coup found his rule too oppressive over the long haul – it is heartening to realize that the current president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, was once a political prisoner under the Allende regime.

The concept of a public memory is an intriguing one, if slippery. Russia scholar Stephen Cohen wrote recently about the polarizing effect of Stalin’s memory, especially while the Soviet era lumbered on after Stalin’s death in 1953. There were millions of survivors of the gulags called zeks, and they were obviously bitter, and some made their way back into government, and this explains the sincerity of Nikita Khrushchev –a repentent enabler of Stalin’s purges, especially in Ukraine —  when he sought to “destalinize” the U.S.
S.R.

It involved a “movement of the heart,” as Solzhenitsyn and other victims concluded, which had been influenced by “Khrushchev’s zeks.” How else to explain his astonishing proposal, at a Party congress in 1961, to build a national memorial to Stalin’s victims?

Both China and Russia dominate the headlines lately. Reflecting on the two nation’s current role, Chrystia Freeland’s article on the return of authoritarianism has gained a lot of warranted attention. Was the gloating by liberal democrats in 1991 a failure to prognosticate?

The New York Times reporter Semoni Sengupta finds the promises of  India’s so-called Green Revolution era now emptied. At the same time,  the environmental harms endure to this day that were inflicted by these farm modernization programs of the 1960s in South Asia.  

The surge this year in food prices has brought some attention back to farming, which is normally willfully neglected by most of the people who eat. That greater attention is a good thing, even if food shortages are not. Good also is examples such as this article of looking backward at the history of agriculture of the 20th century, which deserves to be termed a “revolution” (for better and for worse) every bit as much as the agricultural revolution that was centered in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

 I have used this article by Gregg Easterbrook in my classes on Twentieth Century World History as an introduction to the Green Revolution. It’s a compelling overview, and I agree that it is curious how unfamous is Norman Borlaug, even though the wheat plant he bred saved millions from starvation and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 (I had the honor of meeting Dr. Borlaug and interviewing in Platteville, Wisconsin about 20 years ago).

Unfortunately, Easterbrook’s article doesn’t say enough about the social and environmental problems brought on by the Green Revolution; the Times article today clearly points out that some consequences have been unforeseen and regrettable.

With the 60-year anniversary of the creation of Israel upon us, I expect lots of attention on this messy history. And that’s good. I also predict zealots on both sides will mangle the facts, and strangle the parts that stain their side.  

Newly opened documents flesh out the problems that Britain faced trying to manage Palestine just after World War II. Yes, the British’s interest in ruling the former Ottoman territory after World War I flowed in part from the oil of the Mideast. There were also Brits who led them into the snake pit with earnest concern for both Arabs (T.E. Lawrence) and Jews (Alfred Balfour). But it is one of those episodes that from hindsight looks so obviously to have been a predictable quagmire. What were they thinking?

Zionists, especially, were so understandably militant due to the  holocaust that no patience was possible toward British aims to balance the population in Palestine between Arabs and Jews. I remember reading Golda Meir’s autobiography and her conviction at the time that no one in the world cared for these European refugees except the yishuv of Palestine.

The new documents show Britain officials agonizing as much about their own image as about the plight of the victimized Jews of Europe when a renegade ship called the Exodus, overloaded with those European Jews, tried to break through with this cargo of huddled masses the British embargo on any additional immigrants to Palestine.

The Exodus’ ordeal focused world attention on the British blockade of Palestine and the plight of Jews fleeing Europe after World War II.

The documents show that diplomats and military officers knew that sending Jews back to Germany and putting them in camps so soon after the Holocaust would set off protests.

Although the British worried about effects of these acts on worldwide p.r., I wonder instead what role these episodes played in propelling militant zionists such as the Irgun who would embrace terrorist tactics and kill Brits and Arabs in Palestine until the British left on May 14, 1948.

Does the Torah, like the Old Testament, also contain that passage about sowing the wind?

The New York Times features a slide show of the exhibitions concerning the Pre-Columbian and Early Colonial past of Latin America, one at the Field Museum in Chicago and the other at the Library of Congress in Washington.