Past & Present

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.

Ceremonies

A stricken U.S.S. Arizona at Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941.

 today in Hawaii focus on Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo that sought revenge for Pearl Harbor. I have met the daughters of fathers who flew on that raid. I also once befriended a National Parks worker who guided tours at the Pearl Harbor memorial in her native Hawaii for the winter half of the year. Not surprising, she said the many old men she saw overcome with grief during the tour made that job far from a typical National Parks position.

The last known photographs of Isaiah Oggins as a prisoner in the Soviet gulag, shortly before he was executed in 1947 by injection. Photo by C.J. Chivers of the New York Times

Robbin Oggins, a retired historian of Medievel Europe at Binghamton University, stands after a tragic chapter in his family’s history. The New York Times tells today of his father, the Jewish leftist Israel Oggins working as a spy for Stalin.

An aspiring American professor turned spy for the N.K.V.D., Stalin’s intelligence service, Mr. Oggins had been convicted of treason and espionage by the Soviet Union and completed an eight-year sentence in the gulag.

It was the summer of 1947. He was past due for release. A few months before in New York, his wife and young son had pleaded with George C. Marshall, then the secretary of state, to seek Mr. Oggins’s freedom from the Soviet Union’s grip.

By then a picture of frailty, Mr. Oggins was taken to a medical examination in a Moscow clinic, where a doctor prepared an injection. But this was not a treatment to dress up a mistreated inmate for display. It was a blacker art: the injection contained the neurotoxin curare.

The journalist Andrew Meier made a book about Israel Oggins called “The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service” (W.W. Norton & Co., 2008). In my classes students read about the gulag through the eyes of Alexandr Solzhenitzyn in his short novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Those students who read about the fictional Ivan Denisovich — a willing soldier for the Red Army against the fascists who was sentenced simply for a mild joke in a private letter at Stalin’s expense — would not be surprised to hear in the case of Israel Oggins that the benefectors of Stalinism were also its victims.

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?