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.

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.

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?

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

 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.

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.”

For now the courts are siding with the National Archive, historians, and a watchdog group in a legal case to compel Vice President Dick Cheney to publicly preserve his papers for the sake of research. It is more important in Cheney’s case to preserve his records for posterity because his influence within the Bush White House has been greater (far greater?) than the influence of any other vice presidents over their respective administrations. At least, so I am told. But I have to plead quilty to ignorance of the potency, or in most cases even the names, of most vice presidents in history.

A lawsuit was filed this month by many historians and a group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington out of fear that Cheney would destroy his papers rather than follow a 1978 law (spawn of Watergate) compelling documents of a presidency to be preserved. I can see grounds for this fear, since this vice president has spurned access and shown contempt for the spirit of openness during his tenure. The deliberations he presided over regarded energy policy in the first Bush term is an example of this, because Cheney fought to the end to keep those deliberations, involving energy industry leaders, secret. Cheney’s staff has also begun to assert that he is legally a part of the legislative branch (presiding over the Senate) rather than executive branch, suggesting that they would claim the presidential records law of 1978 shouldn’t apply to Cheney. 

A U.S. District Judge agreed enough with the merit of the suit this week to issue a temporary injunction against destroying any Cheney papers.

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.