Past & Present

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.

You’re not happy to hear about massacres, but it is better the truth oozes out late than never.

Survivors say that U.S. soldiers first forced them from villages on July 25, 1950, and then stopped them in front of U.S. lines the next day when they were attacked without warning by aircraft as hundreds sat atop a railroad embankment near No Gun Ri, a village in central South Korea.

I know, I know, it came out a while ago now, but for those after a readable account of the schism in the early history of Islam, Time magazine delivers. The issue with this article also had a terrific graphic display of where the Sunni and Shi’ite muslims live in the world. But that’s not available on-line.

He might call himself “The Slouch”, but sports columnist Norman Chad is doing my work as well as his own. Trying to tamp down the hype for CBS commentator Jim Nance and his “historic journey” through three major sports events, Slouch takes a swipe at the tendency to call things “historic” that probably are not. Chad compares Nance to Hannibal, among the protagonists of other actual historic journeys:

Hannibal: He marched over the Alps into Italy — over the Alps– in 218 B.C. with tens of thousands of infantrymen and war elephants. Elephants! Over mountains!!! Clearly, the No. 1 Carthaginian commander of all-time.

I guess the lesson is that even a self-described slouch needed at some point to learn him some history.

The historians at Middlebury College in Vermont are taking a noble stand against the gray mush that passes for references in this Internet age. They have forbidden students from citing the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in their research papers.

If you have heard of Wikipedia, you probably already know that it allows volunteers to contribute online. Without controls its information is often wrong, or deliberately stated in order to score some ideological jab. The best known example of the political trickery was an entry for “swift boat” that was obviously from a right-wing partisan who hated the Iraq War protester Cindy Sheehan.

I am not saying that Wikipedia is not an impressive example of the power of collaboration that the Internet can foster. I’m not the anti-Internet luddite I once was. I am just saying that Wikipedia is a crappy tool for a student doing historical research — even more crappy than a real encyclopedia. I remember rolling my eyes when I found myself in a high school classroom last spring, and saw Wikipedia recommended on the blackboard as the recommended reference source.

The Middlebury history department is not banning students from using Wikipedia, only from using it as a reference in papers. Many point out that an outright ban would be futile, like banning a kid from listening to rock and roll. Notice, though, that the original problem for the department was students using Wikipedia for their exam answers about an episode of Japanese history.

When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’ Japanese history class at Vermont’s Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong.

The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few who were in Japan were in hiding.

He figured out the problem soon enough. The incorrect information was from Wikipedia – the collaborative online encyclopedia – and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam.

The citation ban will not address the tendency to use Wikipedia instead of the assigned readings to prepare for an essay exam. The problem I have encountered, more so than in exams, is that among sloppy attempts at plagiarism, the source from which students cut and pasted most often was Wikipedia — which is often the first response that is listed by Google when a panicked, unscrupulous student in a history class types in “imperialism”, “Jacobo Arbenz Guzman”, or “Shimabara Rebellion”.>

The assassination in June, 1914, of the Austrian archduke led to World War I. Now his great granddaughter says that Franz’s offspring should never have been evicted from their cozy little place where they lived in Bohemia.

The New York Times adds lots of tasty historical background.

(requires login — it’s free)

Does anybody need a reminder that we are not over Vietnam, now thirty years later? A new piece of evidence is the quantity and quality of emotion that is erupting in response to Jane Fonda’s presence at the D.C. anti-war rally Saturday. You can see it in many blogs. I am sure many of these posts will cover for those younger than 45 or so the one act by Jane Fonda that defines her for many, which is her visit as an opponent to the Vietnam War to Hanoi in 1972. There she spoke on a radio program about her opposition, and posed at an anti-aircraft gun installation. She has since expressed regret for participating in that photo.

I am sure the topic of Jane Fonda and her visit to North Vietnam will also take up beefy chunks of the airtime on radio and cable television programs tomorrow as well. I marvel at how selective this recall of Vietnam is in the preponderance of news chatter over the last several years. A few shreds of that experience are amplified, and even distorted, such as the mantra of how soldiers were spat upon at airports when they returned from service. See here for research that rebuts that image. Meanwhile, so much else about that war and that time remains unspoken.

My estimation of this bare-knuckles political brawler is dragged down more by his involvement in the 1954 Guatemala coup than by his admittedly sleazy work for Richard Nixon.

In an interview two years ago, Hunt talked about his CIA work to overthrow the left-leaning, democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.

Hunt: He was in power then, yes. But his wife was by far the smarter of the two and sort of told him what to do. She was a convinced communist. … I waited for orders [from Washington]. A couple of [CIA and military] officers came down to join me, and it became apparent that there was going to be an effort to dislodge the communist management [laughs] of Guatemala. Which indeed happened. We set up shop and had some very bright guys working against Arbenz, and the long and short of it was that we got Arbenz defenestrated. Out the window. [Laughs]

A conflict covered today on page 1A of the New York Times (may require log in) pits a historian against a public artist. Caught in the middle is the legacy of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The artist plans to make a concrete image of a quilt, to accompany a statue of Douglass, that refers to the idea that some antebellum quilts contained coded messages to help fugitive slaves elude capture.

The memorial’s link between Douglass, who escaped slavery from Baltimore at age 20, and the coded designs has puzzled historians. . . It’s “a myth, bordering on a hoax,” said David Blight, a Yale University historian who has written a book about Douglass and edited his autobiography. “To permanently associate Douglass’s life with this story instead of great, real stories is unfortunate at best.”

My own teaching and research is removed from the topic of U.S. slavery and the abolitionists. But it is fascinating to find these conflicts, whatever the historical matter, between a vision of the past expressed by folks in the arts and the version of the past accepted by historical professionals.

This reminds of the more common conflicts ignited by the type of artists known as filmmakers when they put out films set in the past. I just saw Apocalypto, and let me tell me, first of all . . .

Maybe I should be ashamed to admit confusion about the way Mideast violence works. The specialists such as Juan Cole would probably think so.

But here is a recent story about a lawsuit that claims Iran, or Hezbollah to be more precise, was responsible for the bombings in 1996 in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 Americans.

Partly based on interviews with Osama Bin Laden himself, and because this is within Saudi Arabia, I had the impression this was an Al Qaeda attack. There is a difference, as wide as the Shia/Sunni chasm, between the two groups. Right?