The Christmas Truce of World War I: The Two Sides of Humanity

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I love this story! It was a bright spot in a horrible war. It gives me faith in humanity, and exposes the folly of war. It breaks my heart when these young men are forced to return to the trenches to begin killing each other for no reason. Soon suffering and propaganda fostered a hatred that ensured that they could no longer see each others humanity. There would be no more truces.

History News Network | The Christmas Truce: A Sentimental Dream.

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History News Network | Conservatives go after UCLA’s historian James Gelvin

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Does anyone else find this disturbing? An organization called Campus Watch audits the courses of professors who teach in the area of Middle Eastern studies to ensure that they align with their pro-Israeli perspective. On their website they claim that their organization “reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them. The project mainly addresses five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students. Campus Watch fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds.” A review of their activities show that they are only perpetuating the “problems” they profess to be fighting against. While they do have the right to free speech their efforts to harass professors with views that are different from their own goes beyond their right to criticize those they disagree with. It is a very dangerous trend that I believe does not actually serve their real purpose (promote Israel as innocent of all wrong doing). James Gelvin, professor of history at ACLU, is their latest victim. One of Campus Watch’s representatives, Cinnamon Stillwell, attacked Gelvin in an article entitled “UCLA Prof Assigns Pro-Israel Book in Order to Trash It.” In one of his courses, Gelvin had required his students to read Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel in order to critique it. Stillwell claims that this critique was not extended to other assigned material. But Gelvin pointed out that he also assigned a book with the opposite perspective and that “the assignment explicitly states that significant errors from both books must be cited, critiqued, and corrected.” For the full debate go to:

History News Network | Conservatives go after UCLA’s historian James Gelvin.

The goals and practices of Campus Watch go beyond the right to free speech, it amounts to harassment with the goal of stamping out all view points on campuses across America that do not conform to their ideological viewpoint. I believe that this trend is dangerous to not only to academic freedom but also to the prospects of peace in the Middle East. It serves only to perpetuate hatred and undermines any real attempts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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History News Network | How to Read the Senate Report on CIA Torture

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Alfred McCoy, historian and author of the books Torture and Impunity and A Question of Torture, interprets the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture within the broader history of United States’ conflicted relationship with torture. In conclusion, he writes: “Despite its rich fund of hard-won detail, the Senate report has, at best, produced a neutral outcome, a draw in this political contest over impunity. Over the past forty years, there have been a half-dozen similar scandals over torture that have followed a familiar cycle—revelation, momentary sensation, vigorous rebuttal, and then oblivion. Unless we inscribe the lessons from this Senate report deeply into the country’s collective memory, then some future crisis might prompt another recourse to torture that will do even more damage to this country’s moral leadership.” Read his entire essay at:

History News Network | How to Read the Senate Report on CIA Torture.

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History News Network | Does Texas Care About the Truth in the Textbooks It Approves?

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Christopher Rose discusses his experience with the Texas State Board of Education and textbook approval in this article on the HNN. He concludes: “What I have learned from this experience is that it is important for scholars like those in the Department of History to get their voice out there. As Dr. Jones pointed out in her testimony, what’s being taught in Texas schools has a direct bearing on what happens in university classrooms. We have to be active as public scholars and historians—and for me that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned.” Read his interesting account at:

History News Network | Does Texas Care About the Truth in the Textbooks It Approves?.

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History News Network | The Forgotten Futility of Torture – An Analysis

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I’m shocked that some Americans think that torture works! Even before I started studying history I thought that the issue was settled. After years of studying history I’m even more convinced that torture doesn’t work. The evidence does not support it. All it has done is spread human misery and suffering. Lawrence Davidson reminds us of the history that debunks the myth that torture works in his article “The Forgotten Futility of Torture – An Analysis.” I would like to believe that a familiarity with history could make a difference in changing minds, but I’m afraid that Davidson is correct when he concludes that “[n]o one has yet been able to secure a meaningful place for relevant and accurate historical knowledge either in the mind of the general public or in the deliberations of policy makers. However, in both cases, ignorance and false assumptions seem secure in their positions of influence.”

Please read his full essay on this topic at:

History News Network | The Forgotten Futility of Torture – An Analysis.

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More Evidence That Corporate Interests Are Undermining Public Education

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The historian Alan Singer speaks out against the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) for giving in to corporate interests at the HNN: “What we have in the C3 Framework is standard teaching at best but a lot of poor teaching and propaganda as well. Instead of challenging Common Core, the NCSS begs to be included. Instead of presenting multiple perspectives, it sells advertising in the form of lessons to its corporate and foundation sponsors. But worst in their own terms, in a time of mass protest against police brutality by high school and college students across the United States, active citizenship in a democratic society is stripped of meaning and becomes little more than idle discussion and telling student to vote when they are eighteen.”

North Carolina Newspapers Mostly Silent As ALEC And Koch Brothers Rewrite History | Blog | Media Matters for America.

 

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Freedom of Religion Shouldn’t Be Unconditional

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We are likely to see another bill like this brought up in the AZ legislature next year. This time it may pass because our new governor Doug Ducey is likely to sign the bill rather than veto it as Jan Brewer did.
While I agree with Rabbi Miller I disagree with his characterization of these laws as laws for religious freedom. The right to the free exercise of religion does not include the right to violate the rights of others. I will be writing more about this in a future post on the disestablishment of religion in the early republic.

History News Network | Why Now Is the Time to Remember the Thousands of Frenchmen Who Volunteered to Fight for Hitler

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The historian Robert Zaretsky makes an interesting comparison between the Frenchmen who volunteered to fight for Hitler during WWII and the Frenchmen who are volunteering to fight for ISIS today. I think it’s a useful reminder that this kind of thing is not new.

Zaretsky writes: “Drawing these parallels between France’s past and present is more than a simple parlor game. Instead, they offer lessons that are both sobering and comforting. From one generation to the next, there will always be those susceptible to the siren call of millenarian movements that offer a heightened sense of purpose, along with the weapons and language to pursue it. Moreover, just as historians rightly underscore the extremely small percentage of Frenchmen who joined the Charlemagne ranks, future historians will no doubt do the same in regard to the French contingent in ISIS. Finally, that the parallels should recall to France, whose large Muslim community already and unfairly serves as a lighting rod for many discontents and disappointments, that Islam is no more responsible for the bloody-minded recruits to ISIS than liberalism was for those who flocked to the colors of the Charlemagne Division seventy years ago.” Read his entire article at:

History News Network | Why Now Is the Time to Remember the Thousands of Frenchmen Who Volunteered to Fight for Hitler.

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History News Network | Every 30 or 40 Years We See Flagrant Attacks on Free Speech. Here We Go Again.

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While the present attack on academics who speak out against Israel is not as egregious as those that happened during the McCarthy Era, they are just as damaging to free speech. The critics are usually denounced as anti-Semitic and under that guise they are discredited as racist. On those grounds those defending Israel feel justified in their efforts to destroy the careers of those academics (the Salaita case is just the most prominent). The problem is that this is to confuse antisemitism with actions of the state of Israel (some may have done so intentionally as a way to shut down opinions that they do not like). One doesn’t have to be an anti-Semite to object to the actions of the state of Israel.  I find antisemitism abhorrent (and I have said so often), but I also find some of the actions of the Israeli government abhorrent as well. And there have been many Jews who have spoken out against the Israeli government on this topic as well. One of the most powerful statements comes from Theodore Bikel, who wrote in the Jewish Journal against “the death of Arab children.” “People see suffering and unless it is Jewish suffering they are silent. How dare they?” We should follow Theodore’s example and take a stand against injustice no matter who is committing it.
The Israeli government does not and should not get a free pass just because of the long history of antisemitism.
The historian Lawrence Davidson points out that attempts to shut down speech is a historical pattern that is unlikely to end. But he believes that we can “minimize the consequences of these repeated assaults” if we “continuously defy them. In other words, only by maintaining a counter-pattern of vigorously defending and using the right of free speech and academic freedom can space be sustained for critical voices. If at any time we fail to sustain this space we risk the possibility of being overwhelmed by a combination of closed-minded ideologues and the mass indifference of the majority.” Please read his article at the HNN:

History News Network | Every 30 or 40 Years We See Flagrant Attacks on Free Speech. Here We Go Again..

See also: “Did Salaita Cross the Line of Civility?” The New York Times

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Russia’s Ideology: There Is No Truth – NYTimes.com

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Peter Pomerantsev wrote in The New York Times: “’Everything is P.R.,’ my Moscow peers would tell me. This cynicism is useful to the state: When people stopped trusting any institutions or having any values, they could easily be spun into a conspiratorial vision of the world. Thus the paradox: the gullible cynic.” This is a problem everywhere, but Putin has taken it to a new level.

Russia’s Ideology: There Is No Truth – NYTimes.com.

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