Kent State retrospectives

The Cleveland Plain Dealer has plenty of them at its Kent State Shootings 40th Anniversary page.

The Kent State killings were a big event in the symbolic "culture war." Novelist James Michener did a non-fiction account of the killings, Kent State: What Happened and Why (1971). He gave this grim account of one woman in the area, a parent of Kent State students, who his researchers interviewed. To fully appreciate this, you have to keep in mind that the National Guard fired randomly at students on the campus; most of those shot were walking to class or otherwise going about their daily lives:

But no case of parental rejection equals that of a family living in a small town near the Kentucky border with three good-looking, well-behaved, moderate sons at the university. Without any record of participation in protest, the boys found themselves inadvertently involved at the vortex: the middle son ended up standing beside one of the students who was shot (at a great distance from the firing); the youngest was arrested for trespass and his picture appeared in the hometown paper, to the embarrassment of his family. When the family spoke to one of our researchers, the conversation was so startling that more than usual care was taken to get it exactly as delivered.

Mother: Anyone who appears on the streets of a city like Kent with long hair, dirty clothes or barefooted deserves to be shot.

Researcher: Have I your permission to quote that?

Mother: You sure do. It would have been better if the Guard had shot the whole lot of them that morning.

Researcher: But you had three sons there.

Mother: If they didn't do what the Guards told them, they should have been mowed down.

Professor of Psychology (listening in): Is long hair a justification for shooting someone?

Mother: Yes. We have got to clean up this nation. And we'll start with the long-hairs.

Professor: Would you permit one of your sons to be shot simply because he went barefooted? Mother: Yes.

Professor: Where do you get such ideas? Mother: I teach at the local high school.

Professor: You mean you are teaching your students such things?

Mother: Yes. I teach them the truth. That the lazy, the dirty, the ones you see walking the streets and doing nothing ought all to be shot.

I've often wondered what Thanksgiving dinners were like at their house. That's really pretty twisted.

Kent State May 4, 1970This report by Bob Jones for WEWS Newsnet5 (Akron) reports on how the University is officially commemorating this sad anniversary: Kent State dedicates May 4th walking tour 05/03/10:

A ribbon cutting ceremony was held on Monday to mark two major milestones related to the May 4, 1970 campus shootings that killed four Kent State University students and wounded nine others.

The university dedicated a walking tour. Visitors can read seven markers and use their cell phones to listen to a narration describing the the tragic events of that day.

The university also unveiled a plaque recognizing the site on the National Register of Historic Places.

That site also has a 40th Anniversary of May 4 page.

Kent State University itself has webpages on the shooting: Kent State’s WKSU-FM Launches May 4, 1970, Audio Archive 04/29/10; KentState1970.org; Reflections on May 4th: Carole Barbato and Laura Davis; Kent State Presents Events Marking 40th Commemoration of May 4, 1970, Shootings.

Tags: establishment+press

What is the Frankfurt School? (2)

Karl Korsch (1886-1961), a major early participant in the Frankfurt School

Since the Frankfurt School is commonly associated when it's mentioned in popular articles with only a few thinkers such as Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, it's useful to see the figures Schmid and Van Riejen highlight as the most prominent members. Some of them were associated with critical theory their entire careers. Others such as Erich Fromm later took a different direction in their work. Schmid and Van Riejen arrange them by alphabetical order of the last names:

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) is best known for his sociological work on the authoritarian personality.

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) had a major influence in the field of literary criticism.

Franz Borkenau (1900-1957) from Vienna was a Communist activist after the First World War until his expulsion from the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1929, the same year he received support from the Institut for developing his study Die Übergang vom feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild [The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois Worldview] (1934).

Hans Cornelius (1863-1947) was a philosophy professor at the University of Frankfurt who taught the Frankfurt School figures Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Leo Löwenthal.

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) is a famous psychologist who was associated with the Institut from 1930 to 1938 and was the founder of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Frankfurt in 1929 and an analysand of Hans Sachs, another famous figure in the history of psycholanalysis.

Kurt Albert Gerlach (1886-1922) was the first head of the Institut für Sozialforschung.

Henryk Grossmann (1881-1950) became an Assistant to Carl Grünberg, the Director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, in 1925 and authored the first book to appear in the Institut's series of publications, Das Akkumulations- un Zusammenbruchsgesetz des kapitalischtischen Systems (Zugleich eine Krisentheorie) (1930-31).

Carl Grünberg (1861-1940) could be said to have represented the Frankfurt School before there was a Frankfurt School as publisher of the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung. (The editions for 1911-1916 are available online.), known more succinctly as the Grünberg Archives. In 1924, Grünberg took over the directorship of the Institut after Gerlach's 1922 death. He played a key role in the publication of the collected works of Marx and Engels, called in German the „Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe“ (MEGA). Ludwig von Friedeburg perhaps overreaches and bit in calling him "the father of Austro-Marxismus."

Aracdius Rudolf Lang Gurland (1904-1979), born Arkadij Gurland, fled Germand in 1933, worked with illegal socialist organizations against the Nazi dictatorship, and emigrated to the US in 1940. He collaborated with Franz Neumann on his book on Nazi Germany, Behemoth 1942, expanded edition 1944), which is still considered an important and useful source.

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) was the editor of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and is credited with inventing the term "critical theory" to describe the general perspective of the journal and of the Frankfurt School. He became the director of the Institut in 1931.

Otto Kirschheimer (1905-1965) studied under the still-controversial political scientists Carl Schmitt; during the Second World War, he worked with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), one of the predecessor organizations to the CIA.

Karl Korsch (1886-1961) was elected to the parliament of the German state (province) of Thuringia in 1924 on the KPD ticket but was expelled from the Party around 1927. He did a biography, Karl Marx (1938) while working for the Institut.

Siegfriend Kracauer (1889-1966) began sociology-based film criticism in Germany; wrote From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) and Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960).

Karl Landauer (1887-1945) was a psychoanalyst, an analysand of Sigmund Freud, a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society beginning in 1913, and Max Horkheimer's psychoanalyst. He died of hunger in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen.

Leo Löwenthal (1900-1993) was a philosophy Ph.D. who did his dissertation on the conservative 19th century Prussian Catholic reformer Franz von Baader (who incidentally introduced the world "proletariat" into German); eventually worked for the Voice of America (1949-53), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, and as a professor of sociology at UC-Berkeley..

Georg Lukács (1885-1971) had quite a colorful career: People's Commisar of Education in the short-lived Soviet Republic of Hungary (1919), active collaborator with the Institut, refuge in the USSR during the Second World War, deported from Hungary to Rumania for supporting the reform Communism associated with the Hungarian uprising of 1956, reutrned to Hungary in 1957 and lived there until his death. Lukács is known for his brand of Marxism heavily influenced by Hegel and was an important theorists for East German (DDR) dissidents.

Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) was famous (or infamous!) as one of the main intellectual influences on the New Left in the US, West Germany and France in the 1960s. He took part in one of "soldiers' counsels" during the democratic revolution of 1918 in Germany, later studied under Martin Heidegger, did extensive philosophical work on Hegel, Marxism, and Freud, and was notably influenced by existentialism and phenemenology. Franz Neumann brought him to the OSS in 1943, and he worked for the federal government for several years, succeeding Neumann as headof the Research and Intelligence Division of the US State Department in 1947.

Franz Leopold Neumann (1900-1954) is best known as the author of the important study Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942; expanded edition 1944). Also from 1942 to 1947, he worked with Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War and then for the State Department; he contributed research to the preparation of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970)began work with the Institut in 1923, where over the next years he worked on the publication of the collected works of Marx and Engels and a major study of the planned economy in the Soviet Union.

Richard Sorge (1895-1944) is not remembered for the little scholarly work he did but for being one of the most talented spies known to history, successfully spying for the Soviet Union in Japan for most of the Second World War. A good account of his spycraft is found in Target Tokyo: The Story of the Sorge Spy Ring (1984) by Gordon Prange, Donald Goldstein and Donald Goldstein. He was eventually exposed as a spy and executed by the Japanese in 1944.

Andreas Sternheim (1890-1944) contributed to one of the Institut's most important publications, the Studien zu "Authorität und Familie" [Studies on Authority and the Family]. He died in the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) was a noted Christian Protestant theologian who after the Second World War served as a professor at Harvard and the University of Chicago.

Lucio Felix José Weil (1898-1975)was the Argentinian-born son of the wealthy agricultural trader Hermann Weil; Felix Weil studied national economics and played a key financial and organizational role in founding the Institut. His most important published work is The Argentine Riddle (1944).

Hermann Weil (1868-1927) wealthy agricultural trader and philanthropist who supported the founding of the Institut and whose son Felix Weil was the formal founder of the Institut in 1922 along with Kurt Albert Gerlach.

Karl August Wittfogel (1896-1988) was for a time (1926-27) the China expert for the KPD, left the KPD after the German-Soviet Non-Agression Pact (aka, the Hitler-Stalin Pact), became an American citizen in 1941, and eventually became decidedly anti-Communist. in his in his book Oriental Despotism, he described Russia (1947) as "Asiatic Russia".

There were also women associated with the Frankfurt School including Margaret Mead, and others less well known, and which didn't rate their own separate photo and biography pages in Grand Hotel Abgrund. But the main text of book is an essay my Michael Buckmiller, "Die 'Marxistische Arbeitswoche' 1923 und die Gründung des 'Institute für Sozialforschug'", describing a retreat in 1923 at which a number of intellectuals, including several women, discussed the initial perspective and direction of research of the Institut.

Buckmiller notes that it was Richard Sorge who formally convened the group. Sorge was the Assistant Director and was the lead official of the Institut after the death of Gerlach in 1922. Buckmiller notes that Julius Mader observed that most of the participants of the Marxist Working Week were at the time members of the KPD. But Buckmiller argues that it was not a formal KPD meeting. Felix Weil and other participants credited Karl Korsch as having developed the idea for the meeting.

Of those listed above, Georg Lukács, Friedrich Pollock and Karl Wittfogel were participants, in addition to Sorge, Korsch and Felix Weil. Buckmiller gives short sketches of the following particpants, whose presence is documented by a photo taken during the event: Gertrud Alexander (1882-1967) and her husband Eduard Ludwig Alexander (1884-1945); Hedda Korsch (1890-1982); Kuzuo Fukumoto (1894-1984); Margarete Lissauer and her future husband Béla Forgarasi (1891-1959); Hede Massing (1900-1981) and her future husband Juliam Gumperz (1898-1972); Christiane Sorge (1887-?), Richard's wife; Käthe Weil (1902-?), Felix' wife; Rose Wittfogel, Karl's wife; and, Konstantin Zetkin.

Buckmiller identifies by first initial and last names a few other possible particpants based on later memories of known participants: B. Roniger, H. Süßkind, W. Biehahn, H. Büchel, K. Frank, and, K. Schmückle.

The 1923 edition of Carl Grünberg's Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung reflects the early perspectives of the Frankfurt School, including pieces by Korsch, Lukács, and Felix Weil.

Many of the formal associates of the Institut in the early 1930s were Jewish. That along with their activity in left politics and their association with the Institut that was known for its Marxist approach created heavy incentives for many of them to emigrate out of Germany, as a number of them did.

Sources:

Grand Hotel Abgrund: Eine Photobiographie der Frankfurter Schule (1988), edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Willem van Reijen.

Göran Therborn, "The Frankfurt School", New Left Review Sept-Oct 1970

Rolf Hecker, Es begann mit einem Theorieseminar in Thüringen Trend Online Zeitung June 1999 (which apparently first appeared in Neues Deutschland)

Ludwig von Friedeburg Geschichte des Instituts für Sozialforschung, with an English summary.

Tags: frankfurt school

False equivalence

Digby points in Alien Rule 05/02/10 to a recent example of Obama making some decent points in articulating a larger Democratic vision of positive government. But then stepping on it by trying to talk about the extremes of the right and the left.

Obama is facing a hardline Republican opposition that is encouraging crackpot extremist ideology in the form of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party movement. On the fringes of their ideological argument is a terrorist militia movement that responds to many of the same issues that the Republicans emphasize but assume that if people like Glenn Beck and FOX News and members of Congress are talking about the feds coming to take their huntin' rifles and establish a Communist tyranny, that things must be way worse than even their paranoid fantasies supposed.

So on the fringe, we have an increasingly energized and openly violent terrorist element. We have a large segment of the public, inspired by Republican and Christian Right claims and responding to their leadership, who are increasingly hostile to science and are willing to swallow fact-free claims like Sarah Palin's "death panels" and can't distinguish Glenn Beck's absurd picture of the political world from the real thing. Nativism and white racism just manifested themselves in the Arizona SB1070 stop-and-search-the-brown-people law that is in practice a racially-targeted law like the Jim Crow laws in the segregated South.

And on the left we have: Keith Olbermann occasionally being stridently self-righteous. Health care advocates who think a public insurance option would be a good idea. Anonymous commenters on liberal blogs who compare Bush to Hitler.

There is just not a big problem with leftwing terrorism right now. If past history is a guide, someday we'll probably have a new version of the Black Liberation Army or Germany's Red Army Faction (RAF). There are some hardcore ecological and animal-rights groups now who may be inclined to commit violent acts or engage in cyber-sabotage of targeted corporations. But I haven't heard about anything lately along those lines actually occurring, except for Limbaugh's evidence-free speculation about the BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico that caused the current oil spill disaster being sabotaged by eco-terrorists.

In other words, in the United States right now there is a real, practical problem with anti-democratic, rightwing extremism with violent elements. There is no comparable level of problem on the left. Not even close.

So in this situation, to pretend that there are somehow equivalent problems with rightwing and leftwing extremism inevitably minimizes the real existing problem of rightwing extremism. Whether the false equivalence is coming from Obama or anyone else.

Paul Starr in Better Than Tea The American Prospect 05/03/10 recognizes that the Tea Party movement doesn't have a left-leaning equivalent. But, unfortunately, he seems completely clueless about what that means. He writes, astonishingly, "With millions unemployed and home foreclosures at record levels, the country is still suffering acutely from the recession's effects, yet the Tea Party is the only movement that can put thousands of people into the streets."

Except for, you know, people who do. Teresa Watanabe and Patrick McDonnell, L.A.'s May Day immigration rally is nation's largest Los Angeles Times 05/01/10:

Galvanized by Arizona's tough new law against illegal immigrants, tens of thousands of marchers took to the streets in Los Angeles on Saturday as the city led the nation in May Day turnout to press for federal immigration reform.

As many as 60,000 immigrants and their supporters joined a peaceful but boisterous march through downtown Los Angeles to City Hall, waving American flags, tooting horns and holding signs that blasted the Arizona law. The legislation, which is set to take effect in midsummer, makes it a crime to be in Arizona without legal status and requires police to check for immigration papers.

Though the crowd was roughly half as large as police had projected, it was the largest May Day turnout since 2006, when anger over federal legislation that would have criminalized illegal immigrants and those who aid them brought out more than 1 million protesters nationwide. Since then, most activists have deemphasized street actions in favor of change at the ballot box through promoting citizenship and voter registration.

But this year is different. Outrage over the Arizona law, continued deportations and frustration over congressional delay in passing federal immigration reform prompted activists nationwide to urge massive street protests on this traditional day of celebrating workers' rights.

Demonstrations are one manifestation of political movements, though not the only ones. It's a little anachronistic to measure the strength of a movement by how successful they are putting "thousands of people into the streets." Still, if you're comparing movements by that measure, as Starr is, you should at least pay attention to the movements that actually are doing that.

Starr here reflects the Establishment media blinkers that led our celebrity pundits and reporters to pay rapt attention to anti-health care Tea Party demonstrators in Washington but ignore the far more numerous demonstration there in favor of comprehensive immigration reform in March: Clement Tan and Don Lee, Big immigration march in Washington Los Angeles Times 03/22/10.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, radical right, white racism

This should be interesting...

Culture war: the shootin' kind

If this process produces new evidence, that will be an interesting situation: Analysis of 40-year-old tape may reveal whether Ohio Guardsmen were ordered to fire on Kent State protesters by John Mangels The Plain Dealer 04/29/10.

Tuesday, May 4, will be 40 years after the Kent State murders. There is no statute of limitations on murder. No was was prosecuted so far. But then, it took 40 years or more for some murders during the height of civil rights activism to be prosecuted, too.

I posted about the Kent States murders in the context of the "culture war" in The "culture war" in its infancy 05/07/08.

Tags: kent state killings, sixties

What is the Frankfurt School? (1)

"Frankfurt School" refers primarily to a school of thought. It is also called "critical theory" and it appears that the latter term is used more often when referring to the trend of thinking and social criticism, while Frankfurt School tends to refer more to the leading individuals associated with it. The work of Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse are famously associated with critical theory. Jürgen Habermas also is generally considered to be working in the Frankfurt School/critical theory tradition of thought.

There are actual institutions associated with the Frankfurt School, the leading on being the Institut für Sozialforschung, which was formally associated with the University of Frankfurt as an independent academic institute. The Institut was formally founded by Kurt Albert Gerlach and Felix Weil, who developed the agreement with the University to establish the Institut in 1922. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Instutut shut down in Frankfurt and continued its work through offices in New York, London, Paris, Geneva and Los Angeles. In postwar Germany, the Institut was refounded and continues to exist today.

The dating of the founding can seem a bit murky. Rolf Hecker points out Es begann mit einem Theorieseminar in Thüringen Trend Online Zeitung June 1999 (which apparently first appeared in Neues Deutschland) that the formal opening of the Institut took place on June 22, 1924, with Carl Grünberg as Director. But the agreement with the University by Gerlach and Weil took place in 1922. So here I'm calling Gerlach the first Director even though the Institut didn't formally open until after his death and under Grünberg's leadership.

A useful source for the origins of the Frankfurt School is Grand Hotel Abgrund: Eine Photobiographie der Frankfurter Schule (1988), edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and Willem van Reijen. Göran Therborn also provides a helpful history of the evolution of critical theory in New Left Review Sept-Oct 1970. Schmid and Van Riejen describe the original purpose of the Institut für Sozialforschung as being "research work on Marxism, the workers movement and the root causes of anti-Semitism". Ludwig von Friedeburg provides a Geschichte des Instituts für Sozialforschung at the Institut's present Web site, with an English summary also available.

Therborn describes the general approach of the Frankfurt School and the issues with which they wrestled. He writes, "Critical theory’s epistemological basis is a metaphysical humanism." He sees critical theory as a continuation of German Idealism that also took as it historical point of reference the Marxist concept of the development of capitalism leading to the taking of power and transformation of capitalism into socialism by the working class:

What was this philosophy which could thus be substituted for both science and politics in a revolutionary stance? In fact, the theory outlined in Horkheimer’s programme and developed by the Frankfurt School from the 1930’s to the present was by no means a completely original intellectual formation. It was rather an extreme development of the most philosophically self-conscious form of Marxism available to the Frankfurt theorists—the philosophy of the young [Georg] Lukács and [Karl] Korsch, which was itself a development of a whole trend of 19th- and 20th-century German sociological thought represented most completely by Max Weber’s work. The central concern of this tradition was that of ‘capitalist rationalization’.

Therborn speaks there as though Lukács and Korsch were outside the trend of critical theory, when actually they were key figures. This is part of the limitation of Therborn's approach in that article, in which he explicitly limits his focus: "The core members of the School are Horkheimer, Adorno
and Marcuse. ... [T]his article is devoted almost exclusively to the work of these three core members."

Social Democratic politics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had proceeded on an assumption, which was largely confirmed in the politics of those centuries, that the urban industrial working class constituted a relatively coherent interest group fundamentally opposed to that of the capitalist class. To a degree hard to imagine now, the events of the end of the Great War (First World War) had an apocalyptic cast. Four great empires collapsed: the German, the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman Empires. The Social Democrats, despised by the royalists and the democratic capitalists alike, took power in Germany and Russia and established parliamentary democracies. A more radical faction of Social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, took power in St. Petersburg, with a bloody civil war ensuing. The Social Democratic parties of Europe and the rest of the world generally split into Social Democratic and Communist factions, the latter following the model of the Russian Revolution.

But despite these huge changes, the capitalist systems of Western Europe, inlcuding Germany's, the largest and most robust of them. And in the Weimar Republic other postwar regimes, the social-democratic parties provided workers a new level of participation in government and delivering real reforms that mitigated some of the worst abuses of the capitalists systems. All parties and political trends of thought had to adapt to a dramatically new situation and understand its implications for their perspectives and parties. The Frankfurt School was one of those attempts, a serious academic one, focusing heavily on cutting-edge work in sociology and philosophy.

Therborn also notes that the Frankfurt School was heavily influenced by Hegel's work, though critical theorist interpreted it still more in the sense of Marx's historical materialism, which itself was heavily indebted to Hegel's thought. And he talks about the central role that the analysis of fascism played in the work of the Frankfurt School.

However, a lot of Therborn's analysis strikes me as pretty seriously off-base. For instance:

Critical theory sees itself as humanity’s self-knowledge. Therefore it
cannot and must not have a structure which is (formally) logical and
systematic.

Therborn complains that the critical theorist didn't provide political strategies for addressing the issues they raised, which winds up sounding a lot like complaining that they were not a political party or faction instead of a research institute. And he argues that the critical theorists in their analysis of fascism "focused not on economic and political problems, but on ideological and cultural factors." But the Frankfurt School scarcely ignored economic factors.

And politics is politics. Those "ideological and cultural factors" are very much part of it, as they are of social development. Work like Erich Fromm's efforts to apply the findings of psychoanalysis to sociological and political issues wouldn't deserve to be dismissed as third-rate "ideological and cultural factors". And one of the most famous and influential products of the Frankfurt School, Franz Neumann's Behemoth: The Structure and Function of National Socialism 1933-1944 (1942, expanded edition 1944) very much focused on economic and political-science issues.

On Behemoth, see „Behemoth“ war die erste Strukturanalyse des Dritten Reiches von Manfred Funke PM 421/2004 and The Nazi Behemoth by C Wright Mills Partisan Review Sept-October 1942. Mills' evaluation of Neumann's book gives an idea of the reputation of critical theory in the West, and not just on the left (of which Mills was certainly a part):

Franz Neumann's book represents the best tradition of the social sciences in Germany, which came to full stature during the twenties. He looks down a neo-Marxist slant further subtilized by Max Weber's distinctions and deepened by a sociologically oriented psychiatry. His thinking is thus sensitively geared to great structureal shifts and to happenings in the human mind.

Such reporting as his book accomplishes is of central facts tied down by the best documentation available. And there is no repeating of formulae in it: Marx may bear a nineteenth-century trademark in some matters, but, as Neumann again makes clear by a fresh intellectual act, the technique the elements, and the drive of his thinking is more than ever relevant, and right now. There are so many who have "forgotten" what they once half understood and who take the easy ways out that it is downright refreshing to experience a book which displays a really analytic heritage with perception and with craftsmanship.

Therborn is also bothered by the criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism and positivism in science that Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse elaborated. He makes a point of being more complementary to Marcuse as a person than to Adorno and Horkheimer, noting that Marcuse embraced the radical student movement of the Sixties in a way that Adorno and Horkheimer did not. The particular issues Adorno and Horkheimer had with the German student movement are interesting in the history of the Sixties, but not especially important in understand their careers or their work on critical theory.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school

The Frankfurt School and critical theory

I've been making an effort to familiarized myself with the history of the left in Germany and Austria, and of the Frankfurt School in particular. I'm going to be doing periodic posts on this theme.

This is not entirley new for this blog. I've placed links at the bottom of this post to some of the previous posts in which I engaged with topics touching on the Frankfurt School and its history.

I want to acknowledge here that there are a lot of loony-tunes ideas that pass for political thought in the Republican Party, which is currently blessed with political theorists of the caliber of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. The have many disciples among Republicans elected to office and among the rank-and-file. Language that would have seemed like a hick version of McCarthyism in the 1950s have become common as dirt among "respectable" Republicans like Beck and chief Party ideologue Limbaugh.

In their alternative narrative of reality, Marxism and fascism and socialism and Communism and Nazism and liberalism and the Democratic Party in the US are all pretty much synonymous. Since I'm going to be dealing in this post with people who were involved in various ways in the German social-democratic and communist movements of the first four decades of the 20th century, I thought about whether I should try in these posts to put in explanations to address the Beck-Limbaugh-Republican Party McCarthyist worldview of the moment.

I decided that for the most part I will not. I can't put a whole history textbook's worth of information into a blog post. And attempting de-programming via blogs seems like a pretty unproductive undertaking. So I won't waste my time.

I'm going to assume that readers of these posts will have some minimal ability to form a realistic picture of the history of the 20th century. I don't see how that is possible in the Birchized view of today Republican media stars like Beck and Limbaugh.



Past posts relating to the Frankfurt School

Are there problems with tolerance?

Robert Paul Wolff on going "Beyond Tolerance"

Barrington Moore, Jr., on science and tolerance

Tolerance, social analysis and radical democracy

Herbert Marcuse on repressive tolerance

The need for tolerance, its limits and its "repressive" form

Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

"Critical theory" and war

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (1 of 3)

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (2 of 3)

Herbert Marcuse and the end of Utopia (3 of 3)

Tags: frankfurt school

Drone war and the laws of war

Drone war has some real problems: Nathan Hodge and Noah Shachtman writes in Drone Pilots Could Be Tried for ‘War Crimes,’ Law Prof Says Danger Room 04/28/10:

Loyola Law School professor David Glazier, a former Navy surface warfare officer, said the pilots operating the drones from afar could — in theory — be hauled into court in the countries where the attacks occur. That’s because the CIA’s drone pilots aren’t combatants in a legal sense. “It is my opinion, as well as that of most other law-of-war scholars I know, that those who participate in hostilities without the combatant’s privilege do not violate the law of war by doing so, they simply gain no immunity from domestic laws,” he said.

“Under this view CIA drone pilots are liable to prosecution under the law of any jurisdiction where attacks occur for any injuries, deaths or property damage they cause,” Glazier continued. “But under the legal theories adopted by our government in prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, these CIA officers as well as any higher-level government officials who have authorized or directed their attacks are committing war crimes.”

The drones themselves are a lawful tool of war; “In fact, the ability of the drones to engage in a higher level of precision and to discriminate more carefully between military and civilian targets than has existed in the past actually suggests that they’re preferable to many older weapons,” Glazier added. But employing CIA personnel to carry out those armed attacks, he concluded, “clearly fall outside the scope of permissible conduct and ought to be reconsidered, particularly as the United States seeks to prosecute members of its adversaries for generally similar conduct.”

Drone attacks haven’t just become the primary weapon in the American bid to wipe out Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist networks. “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership,” CIA director Leon Panetta said.

But that “embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radical new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force,” The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer recently observed. Before 9/11, the American government regularly condemned Israel for taking out individual terrorists. "Seven years later, there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy." [my emphasis in bold]

The Obama administration has adopted some of the Cheney-Bush administration's worst polices in the area of Executive power in national security, including the use of "targeted assassinations", even claiming the right to target American citizens for such assassination attempts. That's not a Glenn Beck Bircher fantasy, that's announced US Government policy, though so far they haven't claimed to target alleged terrorists inside the United States for assassination. But they have employed drone strikes of this kind a lot during their months in office.

The Obama administration needs to be unwinding the abusive practices of the previous administration committed with "national security" as the excuse. And they especially need to be prosecuting torture perpetrators. Instead, they're continuing many of the reckless approaches the Cheney-Bush administration took. And sheltering criminal perpetrators from the Cheney-Bush administration from prosecution, while going after whistle-blowers and journalists like James Risen that exposed some of the criminal practices of that administration. This is not good.

Tags: obama administration, terrorism

White racism on TV

I'm sure that Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby won't like it, because he consistently criticizing Rachel Maddow and any other liberal who brings up any issue touching on white racism. But Rachel does a good job interviewing the President of the anti-immigrant hate group FAIR and focusing on its racist track record: Maddow Eviscerates President of the Federation for American Immigration Reform Dan Stein by Heather Crooks and Liars 04/30/10.

The Arizona SB1070 anti-immigrant, anti-Latino law is straight out of the Jim Crow South of segregation days. It mandates police to take actions that will inevitably lead to racial profiling and discriminatory police actions against minorities, though some good white Amurican Republicans may be surprised to find themselves directly affected, too. This is a bad law. You can't understand this law or the movement to enact more like it in other states without understanding the elements of white racism involved.

This is a good example of how far-right and white supremacist types consistently argue in the rare occasions where they are seriously called to account for themselves in public. They usually avoid such confrontations. Stein here tries to bully Rachel Maddow into not asking questions, and responds either by not by addressing the issue raised or changing the subject to talk about something else, in this case the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). When confronted with evidence of FAIR officials with clearly racist views, he either tries to minimize their association with the group or suggest that their comments were "taken out of context". Though in these examples, it's hard to imagine how the context could have made the statements benign. And even if there is, he doesn't do it.

In the world of the far right, and in the view of many base Republican voters, this kind of confrontation with an evil librul like Rachel Maddow will be seen as raising Stein's stature. Not because what he says addresses the issues raised or even makes much sense. But because he defended his tribe (mean white people) against a lesbian star of the Liberal Media Conspiracy.

This is a big part of what American politics looks like today.

Tags: white racism

Latino stars raise profile of the Arizona anti-Latino law

If the embed doesn't work on this video, it's a report on Shakira's visit to Phoenix, complete with a sleazy-looking white legislator telling the reporter that the "foreign singer" should "take it back to your own country." If that fool had any Latino supporters in his district, he just lost them.

One of the reporters knows enough to be impressed at the 22 cameras covering her and suggest that would likely attract a lot of impact. He at least knows that she does "humanitarian work in Latin America". What he doesn't seem to realize that Latin American heads of government are happy to meet with her on her humanitarian projects. I've heard she's the most popular female singer in the world, and I believe her "Hips Don't Lie" song still tops the records for sales of a single song. She has also served as a Youth Ambassador for the United Nations.

Apparently the Republican Governor of Arizona couldn't find time to meet with her, though the mayor and police chief of Phoenix did.

I actually think that her making it a point to come to Arizona and speaking out against the law - and doing it in a shrewd way, invoking the American Constitution in a way that anyone who's not a hardcore Republican can understand - will do a lot to call more attention to this legal atrocity in Latin America, especially. Plus, she appeared on American Idol Thursday evening. Shakira is skilled and experienced at generating publicity for causes she supports, and some of her success is illustrated by the press coverage:

Shakira se une a lucha contra ley de Arizona El Universal (Mexico) 28.04.10;

Shakira heads to Arizona to back immigrant rights Malaysian Insider 04/28/10

Shakira anger at immigration law The Independent (Britain) 04/30/10

Shakira Protests Anti-Immigrant Law New Kerala (India) 04/28/10

Shakira con los inmigrantes de Arizona El País (Spain) 30.04.2010

Shakira in Arizona debate Straits Times (Singapore)

Stephen Lemons, Shakira Meets with Phil Gordon, Blasts SB 1070, Visits Carl Hayden Youth Center Phoenix New Times 04/29/10

Shakira heads to Arizona to back immigrant rights China Daily 28.04.10

Scott Wong and Lily Leung, Shakira condemns Arizona's immigration law Arizona Republic 04/29/10:

Latina pop star Shakira condemned Arizona's new law targeting illegal immigration, saying it promotes discrimination and robs Latinos of human dignity.

Visiting Phoenix City Hall on Thursday, the Colombian-born entertainer told more than 100 members of the media: "I'm in opposition to this law because it is a violation of human and civil rights. It goes against all human dignity, against the principles of most Americans I know.

"As a person and Latina who believes in equal opportunities and who believes that this country has values that I have always admired and defended," she added, "I'm worried about the impact that implementation of this law will have on hard working Latinos."

Shakira was joined by Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and local Hispanic leaders.

"I'm not an expert on the Constitution but I know the constitution exists for a reason," she said. "It exists to protect human beings, to protect the rights of people living in a nation, with or without documents. We're talking about human beings here." ...

Shakira arrived at the center to speak against the new legislation. But she also went to the resource center to listen.

The Colombian-born musician gave the stage to immigrant women and students to share the potential impact the new law would have on their lives.

Pablo Montero, one of Mexico's most popular singers and a telenovela star, also spoke publicly about the law: Pablo Montero, en contra de la Ley Arizona El Universal 29.04.10, describing it as racist.

Other stars speaking out against SB1070 include Paulina Rubio (Paulina se pronuncia contra la ley antiinmigrante El Universal 29.04.10) and Ricky Martin (Ricky Martin critica ley de Arizona La Opinión Ricky critica en los Billboard Ley de Arizona El Universal 29.04.10)

This CNN site has video of an interview with Shakira, followed by Linda Ronstadt, also opposing SB1070.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, shakira, shakira mebarak

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 30: Debating slavery

In my entry for April 28, I quoted from Gary Gallagher in Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten : How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (2008) about four major narratives interpreting the Civil War, including what Gallagher calls the Emancipation Cause narrative. One is the Lost Cause narrative, which is my main target of criticism in what I write about Civil War history every April.

He cites an important early historical work elaborating the Emancipation Cause narrative:

Although not as widely popular as the Union Cause, the Emancipation Cause was well represented in postwar writings. Henry Wilson’s massive History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, published in three hefty volumes between 1872 and 1877, laid out a direct challenge to the Lost Cause. A leading Republican during and after the war, Wilson attacked slaveholders who had “organized treasonable conspiracies, raised the standard of revolution, and plunged the nation into a bloody contest for the preservation of its threatened life.” Like Douglass, Wilson considered emancipation rather than reunion to be the great triumph of the conflict — a triumph that "opened the continent to the forces of a fresher energy and a higher civilization." Seldom read or cited by historians, Wilson’s trilogy is less well known than the standard Lost Cause texts. [my emphasis]

I thought it would be a good conclusion to this year's series of posts to quote from Vol. 1 of Wilson's book. This section deals with the Virginia legislature's debate over slavery in 1831-2, which was held in the wake of Nat Turner's slave rebellion;

But the most eloquent and effective speech of this great debate was made by James McDowell, afterward governor of the State and a representative in Congress. It was a masterly portrayal of the ruin and demoralization wrought by slavery in his native State. Its wonderful and almost magical effect upon the convention is a matter of tradition in Virginia to this day. In describing the panic and terror wrought by the Southampton insurrection [Nat Turner's], and in reply to a member who had characterized it as a petty affair, he declared that it drove families from their homes, assembled women and children in crowds, in every condition of weakness and infirmity, and every suffering that want and terror could inflict, to escape the terrible dread of domestic assassination. " Was that," he asked, "a ' petty affair,' which erected a peaceful and confiding portion of the State into a military camp; which outlawed from pity the unfortunate beings whose brothers had offended; which barred every door, penetrated every bosom with fear or suspicion; which so banished every sense of security from every man's dwelling, that, let but a hoof or horn break upon the silence of the night, and an aching throb would be driven to the heart? The husband would look to his weapon, and the mother would shudder, and weep upon her cradle! Was it the fear of Nat Turner and his deluded, drunken handful of followers, which produced such effects? Was it this that induced distant counties, where the very name of Southampton was strange, to arm and equip for a struggle? No, sir, it was the suspicion eternally attached to the slave himself, — a suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family, that the same bloody deed might be acted over at any time and in any place, that the materials for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for a like explosion. [my emphasis in bold]

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south

Oops!

I didn't publish Confederate "Heritage" Month post for April 28 on time. It's now published below.

What Shakira says

Not that I ever need an excuse to watch Shakira's videos. But this is the most explicit stand I ever recall her taking on a particular political issue. And this woman really is smart. She also knows the American Constitution better than any of the Tea Party clowns that I've heard so far.



Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, shakira, shakira mebarak

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 29: New National Archives Civil War exhibit opens tomorrow

Andrea Stone, National Archives Digs Deep for New Civil War Exhibit AOL News 04/27/10

Discovering the Civil War

Promotional video for the display:



Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south

Immigration news and comment

One of the ugly realities of the US immigration system is that the federal system, even before the new Arizona "Juan Crow" law (SB1070) was actually deporting legal residents and even American citizens:

Jonathan Baum and Rosha Jones, New Report Reveals Devastating Effects of Deportation on U.S. Citizen Children Immigration Impact 04/26/10

The report to which that article refers is In the Child’s Best Interest? The Consequences of Losing A Lawful Immigrant Parent to Deportation March 2010, a joint report of the UC-Berkeley and UC-Davis Law Schools.

This article is from over two years ago, about the deportation of a native-born American citizen: Marisa Taylor, Immigration officials detaining, deporting American citizens McClatchy Newspapers 01/24/2008

Dave Neiwert gives us an idea of the sort of inspiration behind SB1070 in Profiling Arizona legislator Russell Pearce: Author of immigration law is pals with noted neo-Nazi Crooks and Liars 04/27/10.

Rosemary Joyce in Arizona’s border, all of our civil rights Berkeley Blog 04/28/10 writes:

How can police in Arizona enforce the newly passed law requiring them to ask anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant for proof of citizenship?

I don’t mean this as a moral or ethical question, although 52-year-veteran Pima County Sherriff [sic], Clarence Dupnik, calls the law “disgusting” and says that it is “unwise” and a “national embarrassment”, and Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon disclaims the bill as unrepresentative of and “humiliating” for his state’s population.

What I mean is simply this: will all US citizens in Arizona now routinely be required to carry passports, or birth certificates? And if not, what happens when citizens are stopped by suspicious police who think they may be undocumented migrants?

Coverage has rightly emphasized that the law, while claiming to be aimed at supporting detention of undocumented migrants, actually creates new burdens for those immigrants who are in the US legally. Legal immigrants now must carry their papers with them at all times or risk new penalties.

But the requirement to stop anyone “reasonably” suspected of being in the US without legal permission implies more: it will almost inevitably lead to native-born citizens of Hispanic heritage being stopped and asked to produce documents proving they are in the country legally as well. The only way for a native-born citizen to do so would be to produce a birth certificate or passport.

And Markos Moulitsas takes a look at the potential political realignment of Latino voters in Arizona as fallout from SB1070, Immigration law is definitely Arizona's Prop 187 04/27/10.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 28: Four narrative trends about the Civil War

Gary Gallagher in Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten : How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (2008) describes four major narratives about the Civil War. One is the Lost Cause narrative, which is my main target of criticism in what I write about Civil War history every April.

The other narratives he calls the Union Cause; the Emancipation Cause which "emerged shortly after the war from black and white abolitionists and Radical Republicans"; and, the Reconciliation Cause, "a movement toward reconciliation that gained power in the late nineteenth century and remains widely evident today." The Lost Cause and Emancipation Cause narrative are largely mutually exclusive interpretations. But both mixed at various time with elements of the Union Cause and Reconciliation Cause narratives.

The Union Cause was the narrative based on the goal of preserving the Union, which was always the explicit formal war aim of the Union. With the Emancipation Proclamation, the destructive of slavery became officially part of the Union goals.

Gallagher quotes the antislavery leader Frederick Douglass defending the Emancipation Cause narrative and criticizing the Lost Cause version. He notes that Lincoln also laid out important aspects of this interpretive approach:

Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address foreshadowed two crucial parts of the Emancipation Cause. Delivered on March 4, 1865, it left no doubt about slaveholders’ role in precipitating the war and held up emancipation as an outcome that, to a significant degree, preceded final restoration of the Union. “One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it,” Lincoln said in regard to the situation in 1860. “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party . . . anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.” At Gettysburg fifteen months earlier, Lincoln also had acknowledged the centrality of emancipation, placing “a new birth of freedom” alongside restoration of the Union as a fundamental goal of the United States war effort. [my emphasis]

The reconciliation cause was the tradition of celebrating the reconciliation of Americans North and South - white Americans, that is. Gallagher writes:

The Reconciliation Cause included major military and political figures who advocated a memory of the conflict that muted the divisive issue of slavery, avoided value judgments about the righteousness of either cause, and celebrated the valor and pluck of white soldiers in both Union and Confederate armies. It was because of American traits showcased on Civil War battlefields, the reconciliationist interpretation maintained, that a United States economic colossus stood poised by 1900 to assume a central position on the world stage. Reconciliationists often pointed to Appomattox, where Grant and Lee behaved in a way that promoted peaceful reunion, as the beginning of a healing process that reminded all Americans of their shared history and traditions. Although sometimes combining with elements of the Union Cause and even the Emancipation Cause, the Reconciliation Cause most often was characterized by a measure of northern capitulation to the white South and the Lost Cause tradition. [my emphasis in bold]

One part of this happy reconciliation of white people was that Northern whites agreed to look away from the fact that the national Constitution was being daily trampled upon by the denial of basic rights to African-American citizens in the former Confederacy.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south

Missile madness

Obama's nuclear arms control treaty with Russia is an important step forward in removing the worst immediate danger to human survival.

Sadly, though, we've seen Obama do a kind of "two steps forward, one step back" dance a number of times on various policy issue where he takes a progressive stance. Sometimes, like on his evaporated promise to close Guantanamo, it's more "one step forward, two steps back."

So it's consistent with his approach that we get this: Noah Schachtman, Obama Revives Rumsfeld’s Missile Scheme, Risks Nuke War Danger Room 04/23/10:

The Obama administration is poised to take up one of the more dangerous and hare-brained schemes of the Rumsfeld-era Pentagon. The New York Times is reporting that the Defense Department is once again looking to equip intercontinental ballistic missiles with conventional warheads. The missiles could then, in theory, destroy fleeing targets a half a world away — a no-notice “bolt from the blue,” striking in a matter of hours. There’s just one teeny-tiny problem: the launches could very well start World War III.

Over and over again, the Bush administration tried to push the idea of these conventional ICBMs. Over and over again, Congress refused to provide the funds for it. The reason was pretty simple: those anti-terror missiles look and fly exactly like the nuclear missiles we’d launch at Russia or China, in the event of Armageddon. “For many minutes during their flight patterns, these missiles might appear to be headed towards targets in these nations,” a congressional study notes. That could have world-changing consequences. “The launch of such a missile,” then-Russian president Vladimir Putin said in a state of the nation address after the announcement of the Bush-era plan, “could provoke a full-scale counterattack using strategic nuclear forces.”

The Pentagon mumbled all kinds of assurances that Beijing or Moscow would never, ever, never misinterpret one kind of ICBM for the other. But the core of their argument essentially came down to this: Trust us, Vlad Putin! That ballistic missile we just launched in your direction isn’t nuclear. We swear!

This is a bad idea.

Sharon Weinberger at AOL News offers a cheerleading puff-piece on these plans, 5 Ways to Kill Osama Bin Laden in 2 Hours or Less 04/23/10:

The weapons are under development, though not yet deployed. They would provide "conventional alternatives on long-range missiles that we didn't have before," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week in a television interview.

Of course, the No. 1 scenario envisioned for Prompt Global Strike is for hitting what is called a "time-critical target," such as a terrorist who is known to be at a specific location but may soon leave. The most-often-cited case is the 1998 attempt to kill bin Laden. President Bill Clinton ordered a strike after receiving intelligence that bin Laden was at a specific location. By the time cruise missiles hit the intended target, the elusive al-Qaida leader was already gone.

But what exactly are these weapons and how do they work? The idea is to have a weapon that could strike anywhere in the world in two hours or less, something that today can only be achieved using a nuclear-tipped missile.

Sounds great, doesn't it? We can nail Bin Laden without having to send soldiers to get him. Shoot, we want have to go to war any more at all, our magic missiles will just blast any bad guys we decide to kill.

Great except that whole likely-to-start-a-nuclear-war thing.

What goes through the minds of our infallible generals when they plan stuff like this? Are they caught up in boys-with-toys fantasies? Are they hoping for cushy post-retirement jobs from arms manufacturers?

Following up on Schachtman's post, Robert Farley writes in Prompt Global Strike: Still Not Actually Dead. Kind of Alive, in Fact Lawyers, Guns and Money 04/23/10:

Yeah, I’m really not sure that changing to an atmospheric quasi-ballistic missile from SLBMs really helps. For one, the shift would somewhat reduce the promptness of the global strike (although probably not by much). More importantly, it doesn’t really solve the dilemma. If Putin/Medvedev/Hu/Whomever are inclined to worry that a detected launch was the prelude to an all-out nuclear attack, they’ll likely not be reassured by the news that it comes from some “special” location in the US. If the US decided to launch a preventive nuclear assault on Russia or China, wouldn’t we initiate the attack in the most deceptive way possible?

Tags: nuclear nonproliferation, nuclear proliferation

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 27: Re-writing history

Historian Gary Gallagher in Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten : How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know About the Civil War (2008) gives a clear example about how the former Confederate President and Vice President, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens told a very different story about the role of slavery in bringing on the Civil War after the war was over than the did when they were beginning the war:

In the spring of 1861, as the Confederate government began its stormy life, both Stephens and Davis acknowledged slavery’s importance to their experiment in nation-building. On March 21, in his famous “Cornerstone Speech,” Stephens observed that the new Confederate constitution “put at rest forever all the agitating question relating to our peculiar institution— African slavery as it exists among us. . . . This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution ,” Stephens averred, adding without equivocation, “Our new government is founded upon . . . , its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Shortly thereafter, Davis justified secession on the grounds that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party planned to exclude slavery from the territories, in turn rendering “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless, and thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.” Confronted with this threat to economic “interests of such overwhelming magnitude,” added Davis, “the people of the Southern States were driven by the conduct of the North to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.”? The two men’s postwar memoirs told a different story. In A Constitutional View of the Late War between the States, a tedious two-volume work published in 1868 and 1870, Stephens did his best to push slavery into the background. He claimed that the “war had its origin in opposing principles . . . a strife between the principles of Federation, on the one side, and Centralism, or Consolidation, on the other. Slavery, so called, was but the question on which these antagonistic principles, which had been in conflict, from the beginning, on divers other questions, were finally brought into actual and active collision with each other on the field of battle.” Davis took a similar tack in his two-volume memoir titled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. He asserted that the South waged war solely for the inalienable right of a people to change their government— to leave a Union into which, as sovereign states, they had entered voluntarily. “The truth remains intact and incontrovertible,” Davis stated, echoing Stephens, “that the existence of African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.”?

Yes, these great honorable Southern white men just made stuff up to fit their postwar needs. How will we tell the children?

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south

Arizona SB1070

The text of the bill is available online.

This article by JJ Hensley, How migrant law will affect Arizonans Arizona Republic 04/22/10, provides a nothing to see here, move right along version of the law's provisions. It's contradicted by the story of the couple in this report about an incident just before the Arizona Governor signed the new stop-and-search-the-brown-people law: Truck driver forced to show birth certificate claims racial-profiling AZFamily.com 04/21/10.

Jon Stewart in his skewering of SB 1070 also mentioned that the law had a provision allowing US citizens to decline to provide documents, which is a little different from the claim in the Hensley article that someone could satisfy the law's requirement by simply stating to the police that they were a US citizen. But I don't see either in the text of the law.

Momentum is building for a boycott of Arizona, as in this editorial from the Los Angeles Latino paper La Opinión: Diga NO a Arizona 04/24/10, English version Say ‘No’ to Arizona.

The Arizona stop-and-search-all-the-brown-people law isn't likely to make Latino voters friendlier toward the Republicans. But they're also not as likely to be as tolerant of the Obama administration jerking them around on comprehensive immigration reform as Anglo liberals were on being jacked around over the public option. What is it going to take for the Democrats to just get totally fed up with being rolled by smarmy old white guys like Mitch McConnell and nasty little characters like Lindsay Graham?

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month, April 26:

I quoted yesterday from the two-part particle by Lee Benson and Cushing Strout took on some then-contemporary issues in professional historiography in "Causation and the American Civil War. Two Appraisals" [i.e., separate ones by Benson and Strout] History and Theory 1:2 (1961). Today I want to look at another aspect of the issue of historical causation Cushing Strout discusses, the need to examine "what if" scenarios. Or, as Stout calls it, the "conditional query".

Looking at an alternative "what if" scenario can be useful in evaluating the significance of a particular event in the narrative flow the historian is developing. Stout uses the example of an alternative speculation about the 1860 Presidential election:

If the historian wonders why the South seceded after Lincoln's election, he might ask himself what would have happened if Senator Douglas had been elected. Since Southern Democrats had already rejected Douglas at the Charleston Convention, they might have found him intolerable as president. The historian cannot be sure, but the question points up the South's demands and highlights the importance to Southern eyes of Lincoln's being the leader of a sectional party committed to containment of slavery. Since men who act in history must calculate the possible consequences of various alternatives, the historian in trying to understand them is led to do the same.

He offers a different sort of example with considering scenarios in which the Civil War was avoided:

A merely utopian conditional question allows equally plausible but contradictory answers. It has, for example, been argued that if the North had let the South secede in peace, the two nations would have enjoyed future friendly relations, thus saving the terrible costs of war. It is not surprising that a Southerner might find this assumption convincing, but it clearly includes too many imponderables to justify any firm judgment. To raise questions that cannot be reasonably answered is an exercise in futility unless they are treated only as the indirect means of drawing attention to elements of an actual situation. Asking what would have happened if the North had "let the erring sister go", only serves to force a weighing of Lincoln's policy reasons for holding a symbol of federal authority in the South, as well as of the nationalistic sentiments of the Northerners who supported him. Provided the historian maintains his primary interest in what actually did happen, he may with propriety, under certain conditions, ask what might have happened or what would have happened. Such questions are especially useful for evaluating policy. [my emphasis]

Stout's point is that while such devices can be useful in evaluated what actually happened, what's important for the historian is the narrative of what actually happened in its various dimensions. The consideration of hypotheticals is valid as an aid to understanding and explaining what happened, but not as an excuse for ducking that task.

Or, as Strout puts it:

The historian conventionally speaks of "multiple causes" because he knows he has no monistic formula to explain the course of history and no single generalization to cover all the necessary and sufficient conditions for a civil war. This fashion of speech is, however, misleading because he cannot escape his difficulties by multiplying them. If he does not believe that each of the many "causes" could have produced the Civil War by itself, then he must assume that the whole collection of them acted together as one in bringing about that effect. He is then left with the familiar problem of accounting for this causal relation- ship by reference to confirmed generalizations. What he cannot do for one "cause", he cannot do for a set of them acting as one. [my emphasis]

Lost Cause Civil War revisionists like to use the complexity of the events leading up to the war to try to detract attention from the centrality of slavery to causing the war. But if approached realistically, that only multiplies the difficulties in the way that Stout says. If something other than slavery led to the war, one would have to explain how it was that all the major sectional controversies leading up the war somehow turned around the institution of slavery.

And, as Stout says, "It is worth emphasizing that the ultimate verification of any particular explanation of the Civil War will imply the elimination of all other explanations." Lost Cause dogma attempts to do exactly that with slavery: eliminate it as an explanation of the Civil War. But that just cannot be done with honest history.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2010, April 25: Causation in history

Back in 1961, Lee Benson and Cushing Strout took on some then-contemporary issues in professional historiography in "Causation and the American Civil War. Two Appraisals" [i.e., separate ones by Benson and Strout] History and Theory 1:2 (1961). They focused on some of the challenges presented by determining causation for historical events. They were primarily addressing academic historians, so they weren't specifically addressing deliberate falsifications of history like those so common to Lost Cause/neo-Confederate pseudohistory. The Lost Cause/neo-Confederate narrative, of course, is also found in academic history, unfortunately. Though in the professional context, historians have tended to treat the Lost Cause arguments of historians like those of J.G. Randall and Avery Craven as mistaken analysis. There is a difference between bad analysis and just making stuff up, though the former can encourage the latter.

Cushing Stout makes this important point about how the notion of causation emerges in history writing:

The causal problem would be greatly clarified if both historians and philosophers realized that in telling a story the historian is committed to the "logic" of drama. In explaining the Civil War he necessarily seeks to recreate the strife of opposing forces out of which the war came. The connective tissue of his account then has a dialectical form: a person or group takes a position and performs an action because of and in relation to the position or action of another person or group. The historian's story becomes a narrative of this reciprocal response.

This was during the Cold War, so he is careful to specify that his use here of a "dialectical method does not entail any Hegelian scheme."

Thus, by a crude sketch, the explanation of the event would have this character: Lincoln saw in the South's pro-slavery position a threat to the democratic traditions of the American community; the South saw in his election the menace of future interference with their "peculiar institution" and growing domination by an industrial North; Lincoln and the North saw in Southern secession a challenge to federal authority and the prestige of national union; the South saw in the provisioning of Fort Sumter an intolerable danger to independence of the Confederacy... [ellipsis in original] In such terms, but with much greater richness and concreteness, the historian tries to reconstruct the dramatic "logic" of a sequence of events which demands to be humanly understood rather than scientifically explained. [my emphasis]

Stout puts the matter of slavery within the context of the narrative nature of history:

The pragmatic meaning of the assertion that slavery was "the fundamental cause" is only that the institution was so deeply entangled in the issues that divided the sections that it provides a valuable focus for examining the skein of events which culminated in war. [my emphasis]

Taken in isolation, that statement could be twisted to say that Stout was saying that slavery is just a convenient way for telling the story but not the actual cause of the Civil War. But in the context of his article, that is clearly not what he is saying. He continues directly:

The historian does his work in good conscience, despite the difficulties of causality, because so much of his labor does not depend upon causal judgment. Whatever some philosophers may say, he knows that explanation is broader than causal explication. He may tell his readers much about the issues between Lincoln and Douglas, the legal status of slavery, the structure of classes in society, the economic interests of the sections, the character of the abolitionist movement, the balance of power in the Senate, the social and ideological differences between North and South, and the chronology of events without venturing beyond descriptive analysis into causal judgment. Characteristically, the historian explains by showing how a certain process took shape, answering the "why" with more of the "what" and "how". "The careful, thorough and accurate answer to the question How", writes the English historian C. V. Wedgwood, "should take the historian a long way towards answering the question Why..." The historian is inescapably committed to narrative. [my emphasis in bold]

In other words, it is possible for historians to honestly and legitimately disagree about the particular roles that some individuals played in events or what weight should be given to which factors in evaluating what happened.

Making up claims that don't accord with the facts, e.g., Robert E. Lee's alleged prewar opposition to slavery, is a different issue. So is arbitrarily constructing the narrative in a way that falsifies actual occurrences, i.e., the pretension that Southern leaders were so deeply dedicated to "states rights" in the decades leading up to the Civil War that the fact that slavery was also a "states rights" issue made slavery incidental to their commitment to "states rights" as their reason for seceding. And so is deliberately ignoring the obvious, like the Lost Cause habit of ignoring the many prominent, explicit, and unambiguous references to slavery as the central concern of the secessionists.

Stout's point about the why emerging from the narrative of the what and how (and, obviously, the who) is important. Causation in history can't be tested in a laboratory experiment where the laboratory conditions are repeated many times and by separate teams in different places. They have to be deduced from events, each of which has significant unique features. As Stout puts it:

Grateful as the historian may be for generalizations about, say, the voting behavior of Americans, he is ruefully aware that recurring evidence for the behavior of Americans in civil wars is fortunately not available.

But that doesn't mean that determining causation in history is impossible. Or even necessarily all that difficult, depending on the situation. It just means that history isn't chemistry or physics.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, neo-confederate, slavery, us south

David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories

Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch (2010) by British journalist David Aaronovitch analyzes some older and more recent conspiracy theories and serves as a primer on how to analyze them. He takes on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s, anti-New Deal fanatics who developed the Roosevelt-planned-Pearl-Harbor story, the postwar Red Scare that has come to be described generally as McCarthyism, Kennedy assassination theories, Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana murder theories, 9/11 Truthers.

For American readers, his chapter on conspiracy theories around the 1984 murder of a peace activist, Hilda Murrell, is not likely to be as familiar as some of the others. The 2003 death of David Kelly of the British Ministry of Defense in connection with the leak of materials around the fraudulent claims of "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq will be more familiar to Americans who followed the story in connection with the Iraq War.

He takes a look at the hodgepodge of pseudohistory that went into the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), some of which were incorporated into the book and movie, The Da Vinci Code. He uses this as a lead-in discusses various pieces of pseudoscholarship such as Immanuel Velikovsky's catastrophism and Erich von Däniken's fanciful gods-from-the-sky archaeology. And since he was writing parts of the books after Obama became President, Aaronovitch also looks at the anti-Obama Birthers, using them as an introduction to the anti-Clinton conspiracy theories that proliferated during the last Democratic Presidency.

Aaronovitch's book is particularly helpful in analyzing some of the ways in which scammers and the just plain credulous or careless can go wrong in evaluating evidence of some mysterious occurrence. Even a pro like Seymour Hersh can sometimes get conned, as Hersh did during the preparation of his embarrassing book The Dark Side of Camelot (1997), when he accepted as authentic a group of documents about Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe forged by a man name Lex Cusack. fortunately for Hersh, ABC did an investigation that determined them to be forgeries and "Hersh removed all reference to them from his book." Apparently the forgeries fit so well will Hersh' very dim view of JFK that he neglected to have them properly forensically analyzed before initially accepting them as authentic.

This example he gives is a good caution to keep in mind, because copious footnoting and misleading references to authorities as standard procedures for the Glenn Becks and Mad Annie Coulters of the world:

The conspiracists work hard to give their written evidence the veneer of scholarship. The approach has been described as death by footnote. Accompanying the exposition of the theory is a dense mass of detailed and often undifferentiated information, but laid out as an academic text. Often the theory is also supported by quotations from non-conspiracist sources that almost invariably turn out to be misleading and selective. To give one characteristic example, David Ray Griffin's book about 9/11, The New Pearl Harbor, describes Thierry Meyssan as the head of an organization "which the Guardian in April 2002 described as 'a respected independent think-tank whose left-leaning research projects have until now been considered models of reasonableness and objectivity.' " This is a masterpiece in disingenuousness, given the full Guardian quote: "The French media has been quick to dismiss [Meyssan's] book's claims, despite the fact that Mr. Meyssan is president of the Voltaire Network, a respected independent think-tank whose left-leaning research projects have until now been considered models of reasonablenessand objectivity. 'This theory suits everyone - there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality,' said Le Nouvel Observateur, while Liberation called the book 'The Frightening Confidence Trick ... a tissue of wild and irresponsible allegations, entirely without foundation.'" Not the same thing at all.

I see that what may be the mother ship of conservative conspiracy theories, the John Birch Society, has a review of Voodoo Histories in their publication The New American, No, Sir, That Ain't History: A Review of David Aaronovitch's "Voodoo Histories" by Joe Wolverton II 02/09/10. As of this writing, the Web site with the article prominently features an advertisement asking "Who Really Runs America?" with the logo "The John Birch Society - Standing for Family and Freedom". It's advertising a book called, The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations And The American Decline by James Perloff. The Council of Foreign Relations has always been a favorite bogeyman for the Birchers. Wolverton concentrates the first several paragraphs assuring us that Aaronovich is a snotty know-it-all who looks down at reglur folks who don't agree with him. Apparently for the Birchers, working at Rupert Murdoch's paper The Times of London, as Aaronovich currently does, is prima facie evidence that he's part of the Insiders conspiracy to keep the truth from reglur white folks.

And, hey, doesn't "Aaronovich" sound kind of, you know, Jewish? Wolverton finds it suspiciously notable that Aaronovich devotes the attention he does to the fabrication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which Woverton calls "a text that describes a reputed plan by Jews to dominate the world". Warning: reading Bircher material can send your head spinning at the convoluted double-reverse brand of argumentation you find there.

Wolverton advises his readers:

Those who are truly steeped in the historical record of the rise and fall of the grand republics and empires of history realize that the powerful conspiracies contrived to enslave mankind are not concocted in advertised meetings attended by secretaries transcribing the minutes. Those confabs and the plots hatched therein are more secretive, surreptitious, and ultimately Satanic than any of the fantastical fiction ever produced by the penny press.
[my emphasis]

Tags: conspiracy theories, voodoo histories