Past & Present

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?

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?

I may be one of the last to see this, but I am posting it anyway. I share the misgivings of a lot of people about PowerPoint, or more precisely, about how ubiquitous it has become. It has its place. But PowerPoint is not always the best means to communicate, and it is a heck of a lot worse than a well written and well spoken speech in some cases.

Take for example, the best speech in history, the Gettysburg Address. 

Hilarious.