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Javier E

150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War - Tony Horwitz - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...277022

Civil War history war Reconstruction historiography

shared by Javier E on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • n recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?
  • Unlike the revisionists of old, Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war's great achievement. But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching.
  • Nor did the war knit the nation back together. Instead, the South became a stagnant backwater, a resentful region that lagged and resisted the nation's progress. It would take a century and the Civil Rights struggle for blacks to achieve legal equality, and for the South to emerge from poverty and isolation.
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  • Emancipation and reunion, the two great results of this war, were badly compromised," Goldfield says. Given these equivocal gains, and the immense toll in blood and treasure, he asks: "Was the war worth it? No."
  • Gary Gallagher, a leading Civil War historian at the University of Virginia, argues that the long-reigning emphasis on slavery and liberation distorts our understanding of the war and of how Americans thought in the 1860s. "There's an Appomattox syndrome--we look at Northern victory and emancipation and read the evidence backward,"
  • Recent scholarship has also cast new light on the scale and horror of the nation's sacrifice.
  • hindsight has dimmed recognition of how close the Confederacy came to achieving its aims. "For the South, a tie was as good as a win," he says. It needed to inflict enough pain to convince a divided Northern public that defeating the South wasn't worth the cost. This nearly happened at several points, when rebel armies won repeated battles in 1862 and 1863. As late as the summer of 1864,
  • Allen Guelzo, director of Civil War studies at Gettysburg College, adds the Pennsylvania battle to the roster of near-misses for the South
  • Imagining these and other scenarios isn't simply an exercise in "what if" history, or the fulfillment of Confederate fantasy fiction. It raises the very real possibility that many thousands of Americans might have died only to entrench secession and slavery.
  • Very few Northerners went to war seeking or anticipating the destruction of slavery. They fought for Union, and the Emancipation Proclamation was a means to that end: a desperate measure
  • J. David Hacker, a demographic historian, has used sophisticated analysis of census records to revise the toll upward by 20%, to an estimated 750,000, a figure that has won wide acceptance from Civil War scholars. If correct, the Civil War claimed more lives than all other American wars combined
  • many historians, who cited the numbing totals of dead and wounded but rarely delved into the carnage or its societal impact.
  • That's changed dramatically with pioneering studies such as Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, a 2008 examination of "the work of death" in the Civil War: killing, dying, burying, mourning, counting.
  • "When we go to war, we ought to understand the costs," she says. "Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to forget that
  • "When you incorporate these elements, the war looks less like a conflict over lofty principles and more like a cross-societal bloodletting."
  • Just as the fight against Nazism buttressed a moral vision of the Civil War, so too have the last decade's conflicts given us a fresh and cautionary viewpoint. "We should be chastened by our inability to control war and its consequences," Brundage says. "So much of the violence in the Civil War is laundered or sanctified by emancipation, but that result was by no means inevitable."
  • The last century's revisionists thought the war was avoidable because they didn't regard slavery as a defining issue or evil. Almost no one suggests that today. The evidence is overwhelming that slavery was the "cornerstone" of the Southern cause,
  • But Lincoln's proposals for compensated emancipation fell on deaf ears, even in wartime Delaware, which was behind Union lines and clung to only 2,000 slaves, about 1.5% of the state's population.
  • Nor is there much credible evidence that the South's "peculiar institution" would have peacefully waned on its own.
  • "It was stronger than it had ever been and was growing stronger."
  • Most historians believe that without the Civil War, slavery would have endured for decades, possibly generations.
  • We are commemorating the four years of combat that began in 1861 and ended with Union victory in 1865. But Iraq and Afghanistan remind us, yet again, that the aftermath of war matters as much as its initial outcome.
  • Looking backwards, and hitting the pause button at the Gettysburg Address or the passage of the 13th amendment, we see a "good" and successful war for freedom. If we focus instead on the run-up to war, when Lincoln pledged to not interfere with slavery in the South, or pan out to include the 1870s, when the nation abandoned Reconstruction, the story of the Civil War isn't quite so uplifting.
  • In some respects, the struggle for racial justice, and for national cohesion, continues still.
maddieireland334

Most-wanted German Nazi Sommer 'unfit for trial' - BBC News - 0 views

diigo.com/07o2b4

Nazi history policy

shared by maddieireland334 on 28 May 15 - No Cached
  • maddieireland334 on 28 May 15
     
    Former SS lieutenant Gerhard Sommer, at the top of a most-wanted list of Nazis, has been declared unfit for trial by prosecutors in Germany. They said he had severe dementia. Sommer, 93, was one of 10 ex-Nazi officers found guilty in absentia in Italy of one of the country's worst civilian wartime massacres.
Javier E

The Real Story of How America Became an Economic Superpower - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...384034

economic history WWI WWII international financial US relations foreign policy

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire.
  • The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end.
  • “Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916,
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  • what about the United States? Before the 1914 war, the great economic potential of the U.S. was suppressed by its ineffective political system, dysfunctional financial system, and uniquely violent racial and labor conflicts. “America was a byword for urban graft, mismanagement and greed-fuelled politics, as much as for growth, production, and profit,”
  • as World War I entered its third year—and the first year of Tooze’s story—the balance of power was visibly tilting from Europe to America. The belligerents could no longer sustain the costs of offensive war. Cut off from world trade, Germany hunkered into a defensive siege, concentrating its attacks on weak enemies like Romania. The Western allies, and especially Britain, outfitted their forces by placing larger and larger war orders with the United States
  • His Wilson is no dreamy idealist. The president’s animating idea was an American exceptionalism of a now-familiar but then-startling kind.
  • That staggering quantity of Allied purchases called forth something like a war mobilization in the United States. American factories switched from civilian to military production; American farmers planted food and fiber to feed and clothe the combatants of Europe
  • But unlike in 1940-41, the decision to commit so much to one side’s victory in a European war was not a political decision by the U.S. government. Quite the contrary: President Wilson wished to stay out of the war entirely. He famously preferred a “peace without victory.” The trouble was that by 1916, the U.S. commitment to Britain and France had grown—to borrow a phrase from the future—too big to fail.
  • His Republican opponents—men like Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Elihu Root—wished to see America take its place among the powers of the earth. They wanted a navy, an army, a central bank, and all the other instrumentalities of power possessed by Britain, France, and Germany. These political rivals are commonly derided as “isolationists” because they mistrusted the Wilson’s League of Nations project. That’s a big mistake. They doubted the League because they feared it would encroach on American sovereignty.
  • Grant presents this story as a laissez-faire triumph. Wartime inflation was halted. Borrowing and spending gave way to saving and investing. Recovery then occurred naturally, without any need for government stimulus. “The hero of my narrative is the price mechanism, Adam Smith’s invisible hand,
  • It was Wilson who wished to remain aloof from the Entente, who feared that too close an association with Britain and France would limit American options.
  • Wilson was guided by a different vision: Rather than join the struggle of imperial rivalries, the United States could use its emerging power to suppress those rivalries altogether. Wilson was the first American statesman to perceive that the United States had grown, in Tooze’s words, into “a power unlike any other. It had emerged, quite suddenly, as a novel kind of ‘super-state,’ exercising a veto over the financial and security concerns of the other major states of the world.”
  • Wilson hoped to deploy this emerging super-power to enforce an enduring peace. His own mistakes and those of his successors doomed the project,
  • What went wrong? “When all is said and done,” Tooze writes, “the answer must be sought in the failure of the United States to cooperate with the efforts of the French, British, Germans and the Japanese [leaders of the early 1920s] to stabilize a viable world economy and to establish new institutions of collective security. … Given the violence they had already experienced and the risk of even greater future devastation, France, Germany, Japan, and Britain could all see this. But what was no less obvious was that only the US could anchor such a new order.”
  • And that was what Americans of the 1920s and 1930s declined to do—because doing so implied too much change at home for them: “At the hub of the rapidly evolving, American-centered world system there was a polity wedded to a conservative vision of its own future.”
  • The Forgotten Depression is a polemic embedded within a narrative, an argument against the Obama stimulus joined to an account of the depression of 1920-21. As Grant correctly observes, that depression was one of the sharpest and most painful in American history.
  • Then, after 18 months of extremely hard times, the economy lurched into recovery. By 1923, the U.S. had returned to full employment.
  • “By the end of 1916, American investors had wagered two billion dollars on an Entente victory,” computes Tooze (relative to America’s estimated GDP of $50 billion in 1916, the equivalent of $560 billion in today’s money).
  • the central assumption of his version of events is the same one captured in Rothbard’s title half a century ago: that America’s economic history constitutes a story unto itself.
  • Americans, meanwhile, were preoccupied with the problem of German recovery. How could Germany achieve political stability if it had to pay so much to France and Belgium? The Americans pressed the French to relent when it came to Germany, but insisted that their own claims be paid in full by both France and Britain.
  • Germany, for its part, could only pay if it could export, and especially to the world’s biggest and richest consumer market, the United States. The depression of 1920 killed those export hopes. Most immediately, the economic crisis sliced American consumer demand precisely when Europe needed it most.
  • But the gravest harm done by the depression to postwar recovery lasted long past 1921. To appreciate that, you have to understand the reasons why U.S. monetary authorities plunged the country into depression in 1920.
  • Monetary authorities, worried that inflation would revive and accelerate, made the fateful decision to slam the credit brakes, hard. Unlike the 1918 recession, that of 1920 was deliberately engineered. There was nothing invisible about it. Nor did the depression “cure itself.” U.S. officials cut interest rates and relaxed credit, and the economy predictably recovered
  • But 1920-21 was an inflation-stopper with a difference. In post-World War II America, anti-inflationists have been content to stop prices from rising. In 1920-21, monetary authorities actually sought to drive prices back to their pre-war levels
  • James Grant hails this accomplishment. Adam Tooze forces us to reckon with its consequences for the rest of the planet.
  • When the U.S. opted for massive deflation, it thrust upon every country that wished to return to the gold standard (and what respectable country would not?) an agonizing dilemma. Return to gold at 1913 values, and you would have to match U.S. deflation with an even steeper deflation of your own, accepting increased unemployment along the way. Alternatively, you could re-peg your currency to gold at a diminished rate. But that amounted to an admission that your money had permanently lost value—and that your own people, who had trusted their government with loans in local money, would receive a weaker return on their bonds than American creditors who had lent in dollars.
  • Britain chose the former course; pretty much everybody else chose the latter.
  • The consequences of these choices fill much of the second half of The Deluge. For Europeans, they were uniformly grim, and worse.
  • But one important effect ultimately rebounded on Americans. America’s determination to restore a dollar “as good as gold” not only imposed terrible hardship on war-ravaged Europe, it also threatened to flood American markets with low-cost European imports. The flip side of the Lost Generation enjoying cheap European travel with their strong dollars was German steelmakers and shipyards underpricing their American competitors with weak marks.
  • American leaders of the 1920s weren’t willing to accept this outcome. In 1921 and 1923, they raised tariffs, terminating a brief experiment with freer trade undertaken after the election of 1912. The world owed the United States billions of dollars, but the world was going to have to find another way of earning that money than selling goods to the United States.
  • Between 1924 and 1930, world financial flows could be simplified into a daisy chain of debt. Germans borrowed from Americans, and used the proceeds to pay reparations to the Belgians and French. The French and Belgians, in turn, repaid war debts to the British and Americans. The British then used their French and Italian debt payments to repay the United States, who set the whole crazy contraption in motion again. Everybody could see the system was crazy. Only the United States could fix it. It never did.
  • The reckless desperation of Hitler’s war provides context for the horrific crimes of his regime. Hitler’s empire could not feed itself, so his invasion plan for the Soviet Union contemplated the death by starvation of 20 to 30 million Soviet urban dwellers after the invaders stole all foodstuffs for their own use. Germany lacked workers, so it plundered the labor of its conquered peoples. By 1944, foreigners constituted 20 percent of the German workforce and 33 percent of armaments workers
  • “If man accumulates enough combustible material, God will provide the spark.” So it happened in 1929. The Deluge that had inundated the rest of the developed world roared back upon the United States.
  • From the start, the United States was Hitler’s ultimate target. “In seeking to explain the urgency of Hitler’s aggression, historians have underestimated his acute awareness of the threat posed to Germany, along with the rest of the European powers, by the emergence of the United States as the dominant global superpower,” Tooze writes. “The originality of National Socialism was that, rather than meekly accepting a place for Germany within a global economic order dominated by the affluent English-speaking countries, Hitler sought to mobilize the pent-up frustrations of his population to mount an epic challenge to this order.”
  • Germany was a weaker and poorer country in 1939 than it had been in 1914. Compared with Britain, let alone the United States, it lacked the basic elements of modernity: There were just 486,000 automobiles in Germany in 1932, and one-quarter of all Germans still worked as farmers as of 1925. Yet this backward land, with an income per capita comparable to contemporary “South Africa, Iran and Tunisia,” wagered on a second world war even more audacious than the first.
  • That way was found: more debt, especially more German debt. The 1923 hyper-inflation that wiped out Germany’s savers also tidied up the country’s balance sheet. Post-inflation Germany looked like a very creditworthy borrower.
  • On paper, the Nazi empire of 1942 represented a substantial economic bloc. But pillage and slavery are not workable bases for an industrial economy. Under German rule, the output of conquered Europe collapsed. The Hitlerian vision of a united German-led Eurasia equaling the Anglo-American bloc proved a crazed and genocidal fantasy.
  • The foundation of this order was America’s rise to unique economic predominance a century ago. That predominance is now coming to an end as China does what the Soviet Union and Imperial Germany never could: rise toward economic parity with the United States.
  • t is coming, and when it does, the fundamental basis of world-power politics over the past 100 years will have been removed. Just how big and dangerous a change that will be is the deepest theme of Adam Tooze's profound and brilliant grand narrative
Javier E

The Central Question: Is It 1938? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...386716

history lessons learning munich analogy iran israel

shared by Javier E on 03 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • differences on Iran policy correspond to answers to this one question: Whether the world of 2015 is fundamentally similar to, or different from, the world of 1938.
  • the idea of recurring historic episodes has a powerful effect on decision-making in the here and now. Disagreements over policy often come down to the search for the right historic pattern to apply.
  • the idea that Europe on the eve of the Holocaust is the most useful guide to the world in 2015 runs through arguments about Iran policy. And if that is the correct model to apply, the right "picture in our heads" as Walter Lippmann put it in Public Opinion, then these conclusions naturally follow:
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  • • The threatening power of the time—Nazi Germany then, the Islamists' Iran now—is a force of unalloyed evil whose very existence threatens decent life everywhere.
  • • That emerging power cannot be reasoned or bargained with but must ultimately be stopped and broken
  • • "Compromisers" are in fact appeasers who are deluding themselves about these realities
  • • The appeasers' blindness endangers people all around the world but poses an especially intolerable threat to Jews
  • • As a result of all these factors, no deal with such an implacable enemy is preferable to an inevitably flawed and Munich-like false-hope deal.
  • Also, and crucially, it means that the most obvious criticism of the speech—what's Netanyahu's plan for getting Iran to agree?—is irrelevant. What was the Allies' "plan" for getting Hitler to agree? The plan was to destroy his regime.
  • If, on the other hand, you think that the contrasts with 1938 are more striking than the similarities, you see things differently. As a brief reminder of the contrasts: the Germany of 1938 was much richer and more powerful than the Iran of today. Germany was rapidly expansionist; Iran, despite its terrorist work through proxies, has not been. The Nazi leaders had engulfed the world in war less than a decade after taking power. Iran's leaders, oppressive and destructive, have not shown similar suicidal recklessness. European Jews of 1938 were stateless, unarmed, and vulnerable. Modern Israel is a powerful, nuclear-armed force. Moreover, the world after the first wartime use of nuclear weapons, of course by the United States, is different from the world before that point.
  • Here's what I understand the more clearly after these past few weeks' drama over Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech. These differences in historic model are deep and powerful, and people with one model in mind are not going to convince people with the other mental picture.
Javier E

America Fails the 'Rule of Law' Test - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...374274

rule of law US 9-11 law

shared by Javier E on 12 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • The U.S. Army field manual defines "the rule of law" as follows: "The rule of law refers to a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires, as well, measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness and procedural and legal transparency."
  • it would be difficult to conclude that US targeted strikes are consistent with core rule of law norms," they declared. "From the perspective of many around the world, the U.S. appears to claim, in effect, the legal right to kill any person it determines is a member of al-Qaida or its associated forces, in any state on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret evidence, evaluated in a secret process by unknown and largely anonymous individuals—with no public disclosure of which organizations are considered 'associated forces,' no means for anyone outside that secret process to raise questions about the criteria or validity of the evidence, and no means for anyone outside that process to identify or remedy mistakes or abuses."
  • Unfortunately, the U.S. government violates "rule of law" norms in other areas too. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not operate with "procedural and legal transparency." The Office of Legal Counsel adopts highly contestable yet totally secret interpretations of statutes that dramatically affect policy outcomes. Citizens and corporations are served with secret court orders and often feel confused about whether they are even permitted to consult with counsel. Laws against revealing classified information are not enforced equally—powerful actors routinely leak official secrets with impunity, while whistleblowers and dissidents are aggressively persecuted for the mere "mishandling" of state secrets. The director of national intelligence committed perjury without consequence. President Obama has blatantly violated a duly ratified, legally binding treaty that requires him to investigate and prosecute acts of torture. He also violated the War Powers Resolution by participating in the military overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi without securing the approval of Congress. And he won't even clarify exactly what groups he considers us to be at war with! That is only a partial list.
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  • The rule of law's erosion in post-9/11 America was begun by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration. Congress has failed to stop it. The Washington, D.C., establishment has done far too little to object. Partisan voters all across America have excused the transgressions of their side.
  • Unlike the Civil War, World War I, or World War II, there will be no definitive date when the War on Terrorism ends. The pattern of wartime abuses followed by a peacetime course correction will not automatically reassert itself in coming years. If the rule of law is to be recovered, lawbreaking officials must be held accountable for their actions, rather than presuming that they can invoke terrorism and do what they please. Congress must stop abdicating its responsibilities as a check on the executive branch. Transparency must once again govern what the law is and how it is applied.
Javier E

Remains From Lincoln's Last Day - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ns-from-lincolns-last-day.html

GOP lincoln politics policies history

shared by Javier E on 12 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Could the Republicans who control Congress in 2015, the party of no, ever pass a Homestead Act? That law, which went into effect the very day, Jan. 1, 1863, Lincoln’s wartime executive order to free slaves in the breakaway states did, carries a clause that very few Republicans would support now.
  • Former slaves, “famine Irish,” Russian Jews, single women, Mexicans who didn’t speak a word of English — all qualified to claim 160 acres as their own. You didn’t have to be a citizen to get your quarter-square-mile. You just had to intend to become a citizen.
  • Consider the vision to stitch a railroad from east to west, an enormous tangle of infrastructure. In 1862, Lincoln signed legislation spurring construction of the transcontinental railroad. That same year, he approved a bill that led to the creation of land grant colleges.
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  • Today, Congress will not even approve enough money to keep decrepit bridges from falling down, and has whittled away funds to help working kids stay in college. It’s laughable to think of Republicans’ approving of something visionary and forward-looking in the realm of transportation, energy or education. Government, in their minds, can never be a force for good.
  • In 1864, Lincoln signed a bill that allowed California to protect the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of giant Sequoias — wild land that would eventually become part of the National Park system. Republicans of today are openly hostile to conservation, a largely Republican idea.
  • The great, nation-shaping accomplishments of Lincoln’s day happened only because the South, always with an eye on protecting slavery and an estate-owning aristocracy, had left the union — ridding Congress of the naysayers.
  • you can say this with certainty: what unites the Republican Party, on this 150th anniversary of the murder of Lincoln, is that they are against the type of progressive legislation that gave rise to their party. Lincoln is an oil painting in the parlor, to be dusted off while Republican leaders plot new ways to kill things that he would have approved of.
aqconces

'Gesture of healing': South Korea and Japan reconcile on World War II sex slaves - LA Times - 0 views

www.latimes.com/...sex-slaves-20151228-story.html

south korea japan world war ii

shared by aqconces on 30 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Japan and South Korea reached a breakthrough agreement Monday to “irreversibly” end a controversy over Korean women, euphemistically known as “comfort women,” who were forced to work in Japan's wartime brothels
  • South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged to use the agreement to improve bilateral ties
  • “We should not allow this problem to drag on into the next generation,”
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  • marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II on Aug. 15. “From now on, Japan and South Korea will enter a new era.”
Javier E

Seoul's Colonial Boomerang - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...seouls-colonial-boomerang.html

japan korea foreign policy culture history WWII

shared by Javier E on 10 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Talking to South Koreans about Japan today, you might think they are still fighting an occupying force. Starting in elementary school, children learn to dislike Japan. Many South Koreans of a certain age use pejorative language when they refer to the Japanese. Books like the best seller “Japan’s Got Nothing,” published in 1993, and “The Lie That Japan Is an Advanced Nation,” translated from Japanese in 2008, have pandered to the crowd. A 2015 survey showed that more than 72 percent of South Koreans had unfavorable impressions of Japan.
  • The anti-Japanese sentiment serves the left particularly well in discrediting the right. Many wartime collaborators morphed into pro-American, pro-business, anti-Communist figures in the post-independence era and became active in conservative politics. It’s easy to make the charge — perhaps fairly — that today’s conservatives and business elites are the biological and ideological offspring of collaborators.
rachelramirez

In Guatemala, Military on Trial for Sexual Slavery | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...-trial-for-sexual-slavery.html

guatemala military slavery crisis

shared by rachelramirez on 03 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • In Guatemala, military stands trial for sexual slavery
  • Sitting at the defense table, Asig sat with his head tilted toward the floor in apparent boredom. Reyes Giron flipped through case documents with one hand, his other arm clasped tight over his gut. A former lieutenant in the Guatemalan army, Reyes Giron is accused of leading what the prosecution has described as a strategic effort to crush peasant resistance.
  • During that war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, battles between the state and Marxist guerrillas often served as impetus and cover for massacres that left an estimated 200,000 people dead and another 45,000 missing — the vast majority of them civilians.
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  • According to the prosecution, in August 1982, Guatemalan soldiers responded to a Maya land-rights campaign by raiding valley communities and taking many men — including the husbands of six of the women in the courtroom — to Finca Tinajas, never to be seen again.
  • They said the soldiers knew their husbands had been taken and the women were defenseless. “The soldiers said, ‘No one asks about you anymore. No one cares about you. You belong to us now,” said Petrona Choch Cuc.
  • Since 2007, the U.S. and U.N. have funded the Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, an international mission dedicated to help Guatemala’s independent prosecutor’s office, the Ministerio Publico, prosecute difficult cases of corruption and organized crime.
  • Rios Montt and Byron Lima Oliva, who was convicted of murdering one of the authors of a report published by the Catholic Church that laid out a detailed and fact-checked record of wartime atrocities, including mass rape.
mcginnisca

8 facts about the Armenian genocide 100 years ago - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Armenia genocide history

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, which began 100 years ago Friday, is said by some scholars and others to have been the first genocide of the 20th century, even though the word "genocide" did not exist at the time.
  • Some Turks still view the Armenians as having been a threat to the Ottoman Empire in a time of war, and say many people of various ethnicities -- including Turks -- were killed in the chaos of war.
  • The Ottoman Turks, having recently entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were worried that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire would offer wartime assistance to Russia. Russia had long coveted control of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which controlled access to the Black Sea -- and therefore access to Russia's only year-round seaports.
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  • How many Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire at the start of the mass killings?Many historians agree that the number was about 2 million. However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as they marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.
  • on the night of April 23-24, 1915, the authorities in Constantinople, the empire's capital, rounded up about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. Many of them ended up deported or assassinated.
  • Estimates range from 300,000 to 2 million deaths between 1914 and 1923, with not all of the victims in the Ottoman Empire
  • Some show Ottoman soldiers posing with severed heads, others with them standing amid skulls in the dirt.The victims are reported to have died in mass burnings and by drowning, torture, gas, poison, disease and starvation. Children were reported to have been loaded into boats, taken out to sea and thrown overboard. Rape, too, was frequently reported.
  • The issue of whether to call the killings a genocide is emotional, both for Armenians, who are descended from those killed, and for Turks, the heirs to the Ottomans. For both groups, the question touches as much on national identity as on historical facts.
  • Who calls the mass killings of Armenians a genocide?Armenia, the Vatican, the European Parliament, France, Russia and Canada. Germany is expected to join that group on Friday, the 100th anniversary of the start of the killings.
  • No. Genocide was not even a word at the time, much less a legally defined crime.The word "genocide" was invented in 1944 by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin to describe the Nazis' systematic attempt to eradicate Jews from Europe. He formed the word by combining the Greek word for race with the Latin word for killing.
  • Who does not call the mass killings a genocide?Turkey, the United States, the European Commission, the United Kingdom and the United Nations. A U.N. subcommittee called the killings genocide in 1985, but current U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declines to use the word.
  • While Turkey vehemently continues to reject the word "genocide,"
  • Turkish FM: Why we won't recognize Armenian killings as genocide 05:07
mcginnisca

Japan and South Korea Settle Dispute Over Wartime 'Comfort Women' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-women-south-korea-japan.html

japan south korea dispute new york times politics US

shared by mcginnisca on 07 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve their dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s Imperial Army.
  • The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s defeat in 1945
  • “We are not craving for money,” said Lee Yong-soo, 88, one of the women. “What we demand is that Japan make official reparations for the crime it had committed.”
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  • The United States has repeatedly urged Japan and South Korea to resolve the dispute, a stumbling block in American efforts to strengthen a joint front with its Asian allies to confront China’s growing assertiveness in the region, as well as North Korea’s attempt to build a nuclear arsenal.
  • “The issue of ‘comfort women’ was a matter which, with the involvement of the military authorities of the day, severely injured the honor and dignity of many women,”
  • the Japanese government will give the $8.3 million to a foundation that the South Korean government will establish to offer medical, nursing and other services to the women. Japan initially offered considerably less
  • Historians say that at least tens of thousands of women, many of them Korean, were lured or coerced to work in brothels from the early 1930s until 1945. The Korean women who survived the war lived mostly in silence because of the stigma, and many never married. Only in the early 1990s did some of them begin speaking out.
  • Japan has maintained that all legal issues stemming from its colonial rule of Korea were resolved with the 1965 treaty.
  • “The women were missing from the negotiation table, and they must not be sold short in a deal that is more about political expediency than justice,”
Javier E

About Japan: A Teacher's Resource | Women in Modern Japanese History | Japan Society - 0 views

aboutjapan.japansociety.org/men-in-modern-japanese-history

japan history women

shared by Javier E on 28 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • This paper addresses these assumptions about Japanese women as “behind” and suggests that their lives have been far more varied throughout history and in the present than the stereotypes suggest.
  • Rather than assuming that the west is somehow ahead of the rest of the world, I use what historians call the concept of “coevalness” throughout. By “coeval,” I mean that the situation of women around the world unfolded in relatively similar ways at roughly the same time.
  • I submit that it would be a mistake to blame Japanese women’s supposedly low status on “tradition” or “culture.” This assertion prevents us from seeing the diversity in the historical record and the ways patriarchy—that is, male dominance—was remade and even strengthened in the modern period.
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  • Western visitors drew on the writings of Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and others and used the “low” status of women among other “barbaric” Japanese practices to justify the previously-mentioned series of unequal treaties.
  • The overturning of these treaties was one of the main goals of the Japanese state after 1868, a goal achieved by the mid-1890s. This focus led to considerable discussion and reform across several decades. Government officials, intellectuals, reformers in the Japan and across East Asia focused on the “woman question” as a critical part of modernization, necessary to build a strong state and attain equal status with the western powers. Strikingly, they tended to accept the idea that the status of women in East Asia was low. In the process, commentators of all stripes painted a picture of women’s status in the premodern East Asian past that was static and uniform, a view not at all in line with the richness and diversity of the past, a past where some women were highly educated and produced masterful works of art and literature and others had political power and influence.[4]
  • Let us turn briefly to the period before Japan’s transition to modernity. Until quite recently, scholars have tended to see the preceding Edo/Tokugawa (hereafter Edo) period (1600-1868) as representing the nadir of women’s status. Scholars assumed that warrior rule and Neo-Confucian discourses led to an unparalleled subordination of women. Recent studies have challenged this view and revealed a more complicated and nuanced picture, one where women’s lives varied widely by status, age, locale, and time period. In short, scholars have demonstrated that gender ideals promoted by male scholars that stress women’s inferiority tell us little about the lives of the vast majority of women. Moreover, research shows that merchant women enjoyed more property rights than women of samurai (warrior) and peasant backgrounds.
  • One example that demonstrates the variety of women’s experiences lies in the area of education. Access to education grew dramatically during the Edo period. Particularly notable are the growth of what are sometimes called temple schools, where girls and boys learned basic reading and arithmetic. As a result of this development, Japan had one of the highest literacy rates in the early modern world. Moreover, some women of means had access to quite elite forms of education equivalent to those available to elite men
  • This situation would change dramatically in the modern period, for the advent of the nation-state after 1868 and the establishment of universal education in 1872 would eliminate the variety of potential experiences women had, and replace them with a uniform education deemed appropriate to women. In short, after 1872, a greater number of women had access to education than ever before, but the content of this education was more circumscribed than it had been in the past
  • Modern times saw concrete changes in gender roles within households especially in urban settings. In the Edo period, households in villages were productive units where husbands and wives shared labor
  • But as some people moved to the cities—a trend that accelerated in the modern period—husbands went out to work leaving middle class wives at home. Urban families increasingly lived in nuclear units, rather than in extended family groups. In the process, middle class women’s lives increasingly became defined in terms of motherhood, something that had not been highly valued in the Edo period. From the turn of the twentieth century on, middle class women in particular were called upon to be “good wives and wise mothers” (ryōsai kenbo)
  • For poor women, work in the textile mills and sex work continued to be the main occupations as they had in the preceding period. Some scholars have pointed out that Japan’s successful industrial transformation in the nineteenth century was accomplished on the backs of poor women, especially those who toiled in the textile mills. Meanwhile, some women from the middle class were able to pursue a limited number of professions including work as physicians, nurses, and teachers. As Sally Hastings has demonstrated, state policy actually supported these limited opportunities for women because the work was deemed appropriate to their gender. We should not imagine that all Japanese women before 1945 were wives and mothers; professional women existed in the prewar era. In fact, this group of professional women in the 1920s and 1930s played a role in the prewar suffrage movement. They also helped authorize a public role for women and laid the groundwork for women’s enthusiastic participation in political life in the immediate post World War II years.
  • The 1920s saw the rise of a vibrant women’s rights movement in Japan, one related to the movement for women’s suffrage in the west after World War I when American and British women finally gained the vote. The Japanese government reacted to women’s demands with a gradualist approach. In 1925, it granted universal manhood suffrage and by 1930 and 1931, the lower house of the Diet (legislature) passed bills granting women’s suffrage at the local level. However, as the political situation abroad changed dramatically in the 1930s and the Japanese military began a war in China, the movement to grant women’s political rights went by the wayside. Women’s rights advocates mostly supported the state during the period, hoping that their loyalty would enable them to influence policy on mothers and children.
  • Women’s political rights were granted after the war in 1945. But the story of how they came to be deserves some attention. The main issue here is what Mire Koikari has called the “myth of American emancipation of Japanese women,” for this period has often been misunderstood. In the fall of 1945, the head of the Occupation (SCAP) General Douglas MacArthur presented a list of demands to the Japanese government, including the demand that women get the vote. However, feminist leader Ichikawa Fusae and her fellow activists had already been lobbying the Japanese cabinet to grant women’s suffrage even before the Occupation arrived. Ichikawa did not want a foreign power to be responsible for granting women the right to vote. The Japanese cabinet was supportive of her initiative. Nevertheless, the subsequent course of events—a revised electoral law granting women the right to vote and stand for office was passed in December 1945—meant that the Occupation could take credit for enfranchising women. This view overlooks the efforts of Japanese women as early as the 1920s as well as their activities in the immediate aftermath of war, as well as the Japanese government’s support of their demands.
  • Most familiar to western audiences is the story of Beate Sirota Gordon’s role in proposing the gender equality clauses in the postwar Japanese constitution (Articles 14 and 24). At the time, Gordon, who was born in Vienna to Russian-Jewish parents but grew up in Japan, had returned to work for the Occupation as a naturalized American citizen. She was part of a group of Americans charged with the task of rewriting the constitution. Gordon later published her memoir The Only Woman in the Room (1997) relating her critical role in writing this legislation. She has been celebrated in some western and Japanese circles ever since. Yet Gordon’s story has also been subject to critique from several angles. For example, Mire Koikari sheds lights on Gordon’s participation in “imperial feminism,” since Gordon portrayed herself and was portrayed by others as liberating Japanese women. As Koikari adds, “In drafting women’s rights articles, Gordon tapped into her childhood memory where the Orientalist imagery of oppressed and helpless Japanese women predominated.”[7]
  • The point here is not to ignore Gordon’s contribution to the constitution for she did indeed draft the gender equality legislation, but rather to place her work in a larger context. In fact, as we saw, Japanese women had been working for political rights for decades. The granting of women’s political rights and guarantees of gender equality cannot be seen as a case where a progressive west granted passive Japanese women political rights.  (On a different but related note, acknowledging the agency of Japanese women also means recognizing their complicity in wartime militarism and nationalism, as Koikari emphasizes.)
Javier E

Why people like Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-bcd5-9d911c784c38_story.html

gop support fascism resentment whitelash

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • The results of the Helsinki summit are in. President Trump couldn’t handle statecraft or, for that matter, double negatives, but he came out of the meeting undefeated and invincible.
  • The post-summit poll numbers are instructive. While 50 percent of Americans disapproved of the way Trump handled Vladimir Putin, his Republican base stayed both loyal and comatose. In a Post-ABC News poll, 66 percent of Republicans approved of Trump’s performance. An earlier Axios-SurveyMonkey poll put the GOP figure at 79 percent, not only more impressive but also downright eerie.
  • As far as the evangelical community is concerned, nothing has changed. Trump has been accused of adultery and of buying the silence of his alleged paramours. He has referred to impoverished nations as “shithole countries” and — unforgivably — belittled the wartime torture of Sen. John McCain. None of this shook his base. On the contrary, his support within the Republican Party has risen and solidified. It now stands at around 90 percent, which is what tin-pot dictators get in rigged elections.
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  • The upshot is that we now have two political parties — one pro-Trump and one anti-. Some celebrated Republicans — George F. Will, for instance — have already declared their apostasy. Will is now “unaffiliated,” but no one runs for president as that. In this country, if you’re anti-Trump, realism says you’ve got to vote Democratic.
  • it’s clear that something beyond economics — and certainly not foreign policy — motivates Trump’s people. My guess is that it’s a low-boil rage against a vague and threatening liberalism — urbane, educated, affluent, secular, diverse and sexually tolerant. It is, in other words, some of the same sentiment that once fueled European fascism.
  • Those of us who write newspaper columns know that sheer brilliance, should it happen, gets a silent nod of the head, but affirmation — saying what readers already think — gets loud hurrahs. This is Trump’s appeal as well. He validates the thinking — some of it ugly — of many Americans. To them, Helsinki doesn’t matter and even Putin doesn’t matter. Only Trump does. To them, he hates the right people.
Javier E

Today's Voter Suppression Tactics Have A 150 Year History - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...actics-have-a-150-year-history

vote suppression history gop Politics democracy

shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • The tools that broke American democracy were not just the Ku Klux Klan’s white sheets, vigilantes’ Red Shirts, and lynch mobs’ nooses; they were devices we still encounter when we vote today: the registration roll and the secret, official ballot.
  • Along with exclusions of felons and permanent resident aliens, these methods swept the entire United States in the late 19th century, reducing nationwide voter participation from about 80 percent to below 50 percent by the 1920s.
  • turnout in the United States has never recovered; by one 2018 survey, the country ranks 26th of 32 developed democracies in participation.
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  • the flood of 200,000 black men into the U.S. Army and Navy inspired them — and others — to claim the vote as their due. “If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel armies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting against rebel citizens at the ballot-box?
  • In the early 1800s, as organized political parties began to fight over issues like banking and infrastructure, that changed; turnout rose to 70 percent in local and state elections. Still, presidential polls remained dull and ill-attended. That changed in Jackson’s second run for the presidency in 1828. Heated debates and even-hotter tempers attracted men to the polls
  • Democracy for white men did not, however, spill over to democracy for everyone; in this same period several states rolled back laws that permitted free black men to vote.
  • For white men, the United States became a democracy by degrees, not by design, and it showed in the chaotic voting systems
  • While colonial Americans cast beans, peas, and corn into containers or called their vote aloud, in the 1800s most men either wrote the candidate’s name on a blank sheet of paper or turned in a ballot helpfully printed for them by the local political party or newspaper. Outside of Massachusetts, almost no one registered to vote
  • Today, the ubiquity of voter registration blinds us to its impact. It is a price we all pay for voting and so no longer think of as a price at all. But nineteenth-century Americans understood the costs. Registering in person months before the election minimized the chance of fraud but doubled the difficulty of voting and the possibility of interference
  • Alexander Keyssar’s excellent history of voting called the 1850s a period of “narrowing of voting rights and a mushrooming upper- and middle-class antagonism to universal suffrage.”
  • Once the war came, hundreds of thousands of Irish and German immigrants enlisted in the U.S. Army. For a time this flood of foreign-born soldiers swept nativism away. In the years after the Civil War, 12 states explicitly enfranchised immigrant aliens who had declared their intention to become naturalized but had not yet been made citizens. Voting by non-citizens who planned to become naturalized was “widely practiced and not extraordinarily controversial” in this period, political scientist Ron Hayduk argues.
  • Another way to bar African-American men was to expand the number of disfranchising crimes. Cuffie Washington, an African American man in Ocala, Florida, learned this when election officials turned him away in 1880 because he had been convicted of stealing three oranges. Other black men were barred for theft of a gold button, a hog, or six fish. “It was a pretty general thing to convict colored men in the precinct just before an election,” one of the alleged hog thieves said.
  • By the fall of 1867, more than 80 percent of eligible African-American men had registered. During the subsequent elections, at least 75 percent of black men turned out to vote in five Southern states. Democracy has a long history, but almost nothing to match this story.
  • Smalls and his compatriots tore down racial barriers; established public school systems, hospitals, orphanages, and asylums; revised tenancy laws; and tried (sometimes disastrously) to promote railroad construction to modernize the economy. Reconstruction governments also provided crucial votes to ratify the 14th Amendment, which is still the foundation of birthright citizenship, school desegregation, protection against state limits on speech or assembly, and the right to gay marriage.
  • , South Carolina, the counter-revolution was brewing in the upcountry by summer 1868. Ku Klux Klans and other vigilantes there assassinated Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a wartime chaplain, constitutional convention member, and newly elected state senator, as well as three other African-American Republican leaders. Nevertheless black South Carolinians turned out in force, carried the 1868 election, and helped elect Ulysses S. Grant president.
  • In his March 4, 1869 inaugural, Grant called on states to settle the question of suffrage in a new 15th Amendment. Anti-slavery icon Frederick Douglass said the amendment’s meaning was plain. “We are placed upon an equal footing with all other men.” But the 15th Amendment did not actually resolve the question of who could vote or establish any actual right to vote. It merely prohibited states from excluding voters based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its own language acknowledged that states could legitimately strip the vote away for other reasons
  • proposed prohibitions on literacy, education, property, or religious tests died at the hands of northeastern and western Republicans who feared expanding the power of Irish and Chinese immigrants.
  • Nor did the 15th Amendment protect voters against terrorism. As Smalls and other African-American Republicans gained seats in Congress, they and their white allies tried to defend black voting through a series of enforcement acts that permitted the federal government to regulate registration and punish local officials for discrimination. But the Supreme Court soon undercut those laws
  • Using data painstakingly compiled by Philip Lampi, historians have discovered that somewhere between half and three-quarters of adult white males were eligible to vote before the Revolution; by 1812, almost the entire adult white male population could cast a ballot.
  • Keeping African-American people away on election day was difficult, and potentially bad publicity, so white Democrats over the 1870s and 1880s passed registration laws and poll taxes, and shifted precinct locations to prevent black people from coming to the polls at all. In 1882, the South Carolina legislature required all voters to register again, making the registrar, as one African-American political leader said, “the emperor of suffrage.
  • To disfranchise rural laborers, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and other Southern states doubled residency requirements.
  • Without hope of victory, federal prosecutions for voting crimes fell by 90 percent after 1873.
  • By the 1880s, this so-called “kangaroo voting” seemed the solution to every political problem. Reformer Henry George and Knights of Labor leaders hoped the Australian ballot would free workingmen from intimidation, while reformers in Boston and New York hoped it might eliminate fraud and make it difficult for illiterate men to fill out ballots.
  • Massachusetts leapt first in 1889, and by the 1892 election a majority of states had passed the bill. In Massachusetts, turnout dropped from 54.57 to 40.69 percent; in Vermont from 69.11 to 53.02. One statistical survey estimated that voter turnout dropped by an average of 8.2 percent. The Australian ballot’s “tendency is to gradual disfranchisement,” the New York Sun complained.
  • by stripping political parties’ names from the ballot, the reform made it difficult for illiterate voters, still a sizable portion of the electorate in the late 19th century. But even more profoundly, the effort to eliminate “fraud” turned election day from a riotous festival to a snooze. Over time many people stayed home
  • In New York, voter participation fell from nearly 90 percent in the 1880s to 57 percent by 1920
  • The 1888 election was almost a very different turning point for voting rights. As Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and White House for the first time in a decade, they tried to bolster their party by establishing federal control of congressional elections so they could protect African-American voting rights in the south (and, Democrats charged, block immigrant voting in northern cities). The bill’s dual purposes were embodied in its manager, anti-immigrant, pro-black suffrage Massachusetts Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge. Although the bill passed the House, it died in a Senate filibuster. Democrats swept the House in the fall 1890 elections and soon repealed many of the remaining voting rights provisions.
  • African-American registration in Mississippi soon fell from 190,000 to 9,000; overall voter participation dropped from 70 percent in the 1870s to 50 percent in the 1880s to 15 percent by the early 1900
  • “We have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods,” Alabama’s convention chairman said in 1901, “but in the future we’ll disfranchise them by law.”
  • These laws and constitutional provisions devastated voting in the South. When Tennessee passed a secret ballot law in 1889, turnout fell immediately from 78 percent to 50 percent; Virginia’s overall turnout dropped by 50 percent. For African-American voters, of course, the impact was even more staggering. In Louisiana black registration fell from 130,000 to 1,342. By 1910 only four percent of black Georgia men were registered.
  • Poll taxes, intimidation, fraud, and grandfather clauses all played their part, but the enduring tools of registration and the Australian ballot worked their grim magic, too, and made voters disappear.
  • In the landmark case Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts turned the disfranchisement of the 1890s into a racial and regional exception, one that had since been overwhelmed by the national tide of democracy. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.
  • This is part of what political scientist Alexander Keyssar critically called the “progressive presumption” that there is an “inexorable march toward universal suffrage” interrupted only by anomalous, even un-American, regional and racial detours.
  • But the tools that disfranchised Jackson Giles were not all Southern and not only directed at African-American men. When the United States conquered Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it imposed the Australian ballot there, too.
  • in 1903, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Massachusetts native, denied Giles’ appeal on the grounds that the court could not intervene in political questions. If citizens like Giles suffered a “great political wrong,” Holmes intoned, they could only look for help from the same political system that had just disfranchised them
  • The great writer Charles Chesnutt wrote that “In spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States are bound to respect.” It was a “second Dred Scott decision,” white and black activists lamented.
malonema1

The Jewish forgers who outwitted the Nazis - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...orgers-who-outwitted-the-nazis

US politics Trump Obama

shared by malonema1 on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Jewish forgers who outwitted the Nazis
  • Now 91 years old, David tells Witness about his wartime exploits and his part in one of the largest rescue operations organised by Jews during the Holocaust.
  • Congressional Republicans have announced parallel inquiries into a uranium deal under President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's emails.One committee will investigate how the Obama administration approved a 2010 acquisition that gave Russia control of 20% of the US uranium supply. Two other panels will scrutinise the FBI decision not to charge Mrs Clinton over her private email server.Democrats pilloried the inquiries as "a massive diversion".
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  • President Trump has sought to draw attention to the story, tweeting last week: "Uranium deal to Russia, with Clinton help and Obama Administration knowledge, is the biggest story that Fake Media doesn't want to follow!"
draneka

Czar Nicholas II, Under Arrest and Doomed to Die - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-arrest-and-doomed-to-die.html

new york times

shared by draneka on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • By the time the photograph appeared in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial 100 years ago, it was two months out of date. The imperial family had already been moved to western Siberia.
  • Times Insider is offering glimpses of some of the most memorable wartime illustrations that appeared in The New York Times Mid-Week Pictorial
oliviaodon

The Atomic-Bomb Core That Escaped World War II - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...557006

shared by oliviaodon on 05 May 18 - No Cached
  • In 1946, shortly after the end of World War II, the physicist Louis Slotin stood in front of a low table at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, concentrating intensely on the object in front of him. His left thumb was hooked into a hole on the top of a heavy beryllium dome, fingers bracing the side as he carefully cantilevered it on its leftmost edge. In his right hand he held a flathead screwdriver, its head wedged under the right edge of the dome to keep it from closing completely. Through the gap on the right side you could just barely catch a metallic gleam, a glimpse of the 14-pound plutonium sphere that was slated to become one of the United States’ next nuclear weapons.
  • Going from plutonium nitrate to a finished bomb core had proven to be a major challenge for the metallurgists at Los Alamos Laboratory. By the time they made the demon core (the third plutonium core, after those in the Trinity and Nagasaki bombs) they had worked out many of the kinks. They first converted the plutonium salt into plutonium metal by reacting it with metallic calcium, a relatively straightforward process. The metallurgists weren’t done, though: Early studies had found that plutonium produced this way is incredibly brittle, cracking with every attempt to make it into the needed shapes. To solve this, the metallurgists tried mixing the plutonium with various other metals to see if they could improve its workability as an alloy, eventually finding gallium to be ideal. The plutonium-gallium alloy of the demon core was hot-pressed into two hemispheres and then coated with a thin layer of nickel to protect the plutonium from rusting; joining these two hemispheres together completed its manufacture.
  • An opportunity came in the form of Operation Crossroads, a testing program to determine the impact of nuclear weapons on warships. However, now that the wartime pressure was off, the scientists realized that it would be useful to run some more tests on their creation.
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  • Los Alamos ended hand-manipulation of nuclear cores in criticality experiments after Slotin’s death. That was certainly for the best. And yet, Feynman’s quip about the test—comparing it to tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon—also kept the certainty of unimaginable destruction close at hand.
sarahbalick

Putin backs WW2 myth in new Russian film - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-37595972

putin myth russian film WW2

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  • Putin backs WW2 myth in new Russian film
  • A new film showing Red Army soldiers outnumbered by invading Germans but battling on heroically has become part of the Kremlin's campaign to restore Russian pride.
  • State television showed Russian President Vladimir Putin watching the film last
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • week, alongside Kazakhstan President Nursultan Nazarbayev, in the Central Asian leader's capital Astana.
  • The Kremlin promotes the idea of World War Two as a heroic victory that united the Soviet state against fascism - and still unites Russia today against a similar threat they say has resurfaced in Ukraine.
  • The 28 were immortalised - posthumously decorated as Heroes of the Soviet Union - and Soviet children learnt about their last stand in school.
  • Yet historians say the story is not true.
  • According to the Soviet mythology, 28 soldiers from the Red Army's 316th Rifle Division, mainly recruits from the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Soviet republics, stood unflinching against the advancing might of Hitler's Wehrmacht.
  • When, in June last year, Russian State Archive director Sergei Mironenko, citing historical documents, said the story was in fact a myth, he earned a sharp rebuke from Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky.
  • The USSR suffered the heaviest losses in the war - more than 20 million civilians and military - though scholars dispute the exact toll.
  • Nazi Germany and the USSR signed a non-aggression pact in August 1939 - the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret protocol, they agreed to carve up Poland between them.
  • Mr Putin and other officials have repeatedly talked about the need to counter the "falsification of history" or "rewriting history". They oppose interpretations of World War Two or other episodes of Soviet history that deviate from officially approved narratives.
  • Mr Medinsky, the culture minister, defended Panfilov's 28 Men, saying "even if this story was invented from start to finish, if there had been no Panfilov, if there had been nothing, this is a sacred legend that shouldn't be interfered with. People that do that are filthy scum."
  • t was accused of smearing the memory of WW2 veterans by asking whether residents of wartime Leningrad could have been saved by surrendering the city to Nazi forces.
  • Under this law, Vladimir Luzgin, a blogger from Perm region in the Urals, was fined 200,000 roubles ($3,200; £2,500) for reposting an article about the war on the Russian social network VK (VKontakte), the daily Kommersant reported in July.
  • The court said Luzgin had falsified history by stating "that the communists and Germany jointly attacked Poland, unleashing World War Two, or in other words, that Communism and Nazism co-operated honestly".
  • as justified.
  • the punishment of Luzgin w
  • n February 2013, President Putin ordered a single history syllabus for schools, offering a standardised narrative. A new state "History" TV channel was launched that year too.
  • In another incident, last year, the authorities in Sverdlovsk region banned the works of two British historians - Antony Beevor and John Keegan - saying they were imbued with Nazi propaganda. The Vedomosti daily described (in Russian) the order to remove the books from public libraries as "full of nonsense from start to finish".
  • Many Russians may not know how the state embroidered the tale of Panfilov's men - but many may not care either.
manhefnawi

1704: Blenheim, Gibraltar and the Making of a Great Power | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...braltar-and-making-great-power

Europe in 1700s Philip V of Spain War Succession Gibraltar British Military Marlborough General

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  • glories of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), ‘that short period of our History, which contains so many illustrious Actions
  • The most significant of these actions were in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13, Britain not involved until 1702), as the European powers jostled for control of the Spanish empire following the death of the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II, in 1700. On July 23rd, 1704, British naval forces captured Gibraltar and held out against Franco-Spanish attempts to regain it, while a few weeks later on August 13th, John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, heavily defeated a Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in Bavaria
  • The Blenheim campaign was crucial in preventing French hegemony in western Europe. Allied with Britain and the Dutch against France, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (r.1658-1705) was central to the struggle on the European mainland as his defeat would have allowed the French to dominate both Germany and northern Italy and to concentrate against the Anglo-Dutch efforts in the Low Countries and the lower Rhineland
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  • A combination of Louis XIV of France, the Elector of Bavaria, Max Emanuel, and Hungarian rebels, threatened to overthrow Leopold, and thus to end the Habsburg ability to counter-balance French power
  • These depots enabled the army to maintain cohesion and discipline, instead of having to disperse to obtain supplies
  • Marlborough had been more successful than his opponents in integrating cavalry and infantry; his cavalry were better trained for charging; and the artillery, under Colonel Holcroft Blood, manoeuvred rapidly on the battlefield, and was brought forward to help support the breakthrough in the centre
  • The victory ended the threat to Austria. Most of the Franco-Bavarian army was no longer effective after the battle and its subsequent retreat to the Rhine. The Allies followed up the battle with the conquest of southern Germany, as Bavaria was ‘taken out’ of the war, and took the major fortresses of Ulm, Ingolstadt and Landau before the close of the year. It was not until 1741 that French forces were again to campaign so far to the east – and later, and more seriously, in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when no British army marched to the Danube. In contrast, Marlborough’s advance into Germany had prepared the way for George II to campaign there in 1743, a campaign that culminated in another victory for the British and Austrians over the French at Dettingen, to the east of Frankfurt
  • Under Marlborough at Blenheim, the British army reached a peak of success that it was not to achieve again in Europe for another hundred years, until Wellington
  • Marlborough’s army was the most battle-hardened British army since those of the Civil Wars of the 1640s, but the armies of the Civil Wars had not been engaged in battles that were as extensive or sieges of positions that were as well fortified as those that faced Marlborough’s forces
  • The British in Gibraltar were now besieged on land by the French and the supporters of Philip V, but, as with the lengthy siege of Gibraltar by the Spaniards in 1780 during the American War of Independence, British fleet action proved crucial to the relief of the besieged garrison
  • As Marlborough was Master-General of the Ordnance as well as Captain-General of the Army, he was able to overcome any institutional constraints on co-operation between artillery and the rest of the army
  • Like Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War seventy years earlier, Marlborough made his cavalry charge fast and act like a shock force, rather than as mounted infantry relying on pistol firepower
  • Marlborough went on to win other battles – notably Ramillies (1706), Oudenaarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) – but none had the dramatic impact of Blenheim, in part because that victory ended the danger that the anti-French alliance would collapse. But he also found that victory did not make it any easier to get the Allied forces to work together, and this, combined with differences in military and diplomatic strategy among the political leaders (the Dutch were especially cautious), made his task very difficult
  • Meanwhile, a few weeks earlier the seizure of Gibraltar had brought together Britain’s role as a Continental power with her interests as a maritime state. British troops were engaged in Iberia in support of ‘Charles III’, Leopold I’s second son and the Habsburg candidate for the crown of Spain, against Louis XIV’s second grandson, Philip V of Spain, who had been installed in 1700 under the terms of Charles II’s will. It proved far easier for Britain to intervene on the littoral, however, than to control the interior
  • the seizure of Gibraltar proved important as it registered the shift of naval hegemony from France to Britain. In the early 1690s Britain and France had contested the English Channel, but following the British victory at Barfleur in 1692, the navy had become far more effective in the Mediterranean. The dispatch of a large fleet under Russell to the Mediterranean in 1694 had been followed by its wintering at the then Allied port of Cadiz, a new achievement. The competing interests of Austria, France and Spain in the western Mediterranean ensured that this area was the cockpit of European diplomacy
  • n 1702, Sir George Rooke had concentrated on Spain’s Atlantic waters as a consequence of an attempt to intercept the Spanish treasure fleet from the New World. His attack on Cadiz had failed, but the Franco-Spanish fleet at Vigo was successfully attacked. British naval strength encouraged Portugal to switch sides in 1703; but, in an even more significant move, the same year Sir Cloudesley Shovell entered the Mediterranean and persuaded Victor Amadeus II of Savoy-Piedmont to abandon his alliance with Louis XIV
  • Rooke’s capture of Gibraltar on July 23rd, 1704, when the landing force was crucially supported by naval gunfire that silenced the enemy battery on the New Mole, led the French to mount a naval response to regain Gibraltar for Philip V and to demonstrate that France was still the leading naval power in the Mediterranean
  • Marlborough’s battles were fought on a more extended front than those of the 1690s, let alone the 1650s
  • These blows led the French to abandon the siege. Gibraltar’s inhabitants had been allowed to remain in the town if they took an oath of fidelity to ‘Charles III’, but ultimately the victory of Philip V, the Bourbon claimant, in the wider war removed this option, and instead the British acquired Gibraltar under the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. In an attempt to improve relations with Spain, in 1721 George I promised to approach Parliament for consent to return Gibraltar to Spain, but this was not deemed politically possible
  • Three years later a fleet based at Gibraltar discouraged a junction between Bourbon naval forces in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when the Mediterranean formed a frontline between the alliance systems of two clashing empires, Gibraltar was a key British resource
  • Maintaining a presence in Gibraltar thereafter ceased to be of vital strategic concern to the British and became a curiosity to many; but its major role for a quarter-millennium of national history should not be underplayed.
  • It failed, after a night-time error in navigation led to the loss of eight transport ships and nearly 900 men in the St Lawrence estuary, but the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 left Britain with recognition of its wartime gains: not only Gibraltar and Minorca, but also Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. This weakened the defences of New France and left the British clearly dominant in North American waters
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Spain - The French invasion and the War of Independence, 1808-14 | Britannica.com - 0 views

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Ferdinand VII of Spain

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  • Joseph could count on the support of cautious, legalistic administrators and soldiers, those who believed resistance to French power impossible,
  • After the deposition of King Ferdinand, “patriot” Spain outside the control of the French armies split into a number of autonomous provinces. Resistance centred in provincial committees (juntas) that organized armies.
  • Napoleon then invaded Spain and by 1809 was in control of most of the peninsula. The Spanish regular army, led by incompetent generals, suffered defeat after defeat.
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  • The Central Junta and its successor, the regency, were compelled to summon a Cortes in order to legitimize the situation created by the absence of Ferdinand VII, who was a prisoner in France. Conservatives conceived of this task as the mere supply of the sinews of war on behalf of an absent king.
  • With the help of an army corps and of conservative sentiment that had been outraged by the liberalism of 1812, Ferdinand returned from exile in France to rule Spain as an absolute monarch. In 1820 he was forced by military sedition to return to constitutionalism during the Liberal Triennium (1820–23). For the last, “ominous” decade of his reign, he returned to a relatively enlightened form of ministerial despotism. From 1814 to 1820 Spain attempted to reestablish its rule in America and to maintain an inflated wartime army with a permanent economic deficit.
  • When, on September 29, 1833, Ferdinand died, Isabella was proclaimed queen, with María Cristina as regent, precipitating almost immediately the outbreak of the First Carlist War (1833–39).
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