Past & Present

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.

The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had other points to make in a recent piece, but I wanted to use his first, preliminary idea here because it’s about the presence in the present of our past. He puts it well:

Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, ever as from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today. 

And it’s also why the furor over Barack Obama’s praise for Ronald Reagan is not, as some think, overblown. The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.

Along with Neville Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement of 1938 or the homecoming reception of veterans during the Vietnam era, Ronald Reagan’s presidency is about the most used and abused piece of our past that you see in action these days.  

Republican promoters have intensified the use of the Reagan strategy during this campaign season because Republicans calculate that evoking thought of more recent Republicans such as George W. Bush would not help matters, at all.

I picked up this quotation from “Unconscious Colossus: Limits Of (& Alternatives To) The American Empire” by Niall Ferguson. The quotation also appeared earlier in the Wilson Quarterly issue in the summer of 2005.

Had policymakers troubled to consider what befell the last Anglophone occupation of Iraq they might have been less surprised by the persistent resistance they encountered in certain parts of the country during 2004. For in May of 1920 there was a major anti-British revolt there. This happened six months after a referendum (in practice, a round of consultations with tribal leaders) on the country’s future, and just after the announcement that Iraq would become a League of Nations mandate under British trusteeship rather than continue under colonial rule. Strikingly, neither consultation with Iraqis nor the promise of internationalization sufficed to avert an uprising.

In 1920, as in 2004, the insurrection had religious origins and leaders, but it soon transcended the country’s ancient ethnic and sectarian divisions. The first anti-British demonstrations were in the mosques of Baghdad, but the violence quickly spread to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, where British rule was denounced by Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi, the historical counterpart of today’s Shiite firebrand, Moktada al Sadr…

This brings us to the second lesson the United States might have learned from the British experience: reestablishing order is no easy task. In 1920 the British eventually ended the rebellion through a combination of aerial bombardments and punitive village-burning expeditions. Even Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for the Royal Air Force, was shocked by the actions of some.

And despite their overwhelming technological superiority, British forces still suffered more than two thousand dead and wounded. Moreover, the British had to keep troops in Iraq long after the country was granted full sovereignty. Although Iraq was declared formally independent in 1932, British troops remained there until 1955.