9/11 and The Movie Analogy

Tom Engelhardt has written an intriguing article for The Nation entitled “9/11 in a Movie-Made World.” The thrust of the article is that it was through the lens of Hollywood movies that many Americans understood what was happening on that terrible day and during its immediate aftermath. I remember some of the things Engelhardt writes about – references to Independence Day, Godzilla movies, and The Towering Inferno. The Tennessean being my hometown paper, I also remember seeing The Day After headline that Engelhardt references. I remember thinking how strange all these references were, how terribly out-of-place they were. This wasn’t a movie, and the day's events could not be understood in Hollywood terms.

As Engelhardt suggests, these references have consequences. In the recent dust-up over Donald Rumsfeld’s use of the Munich Analogy in discussing critics of the Bush Administration’s policies in Iraq and in combating terror, most of Rumsfeld’s critics focused on the idea that comparing his and Bush’s critics to Nazi appeasers was inaccurate and unjustified. I myself made that complaint. But there’s another issue here, and that’s how that analogy shapes Rumsfeld’s own thinking.

The analogies we use to discuss historic events are not simple turns of phrase. As Engelhardt suggests, these analogies have real power. They frame those events in such a way as to suggest how we should respond to them, and further, to limit how we respond to them. If you argue, for example, that Islamic militants are like the fascists of World War II, then the only reasonable response is to annihilate them, as that was how we defeated fascism the first time around. Bush and Rumsfeld know this, of course – their use of such language is no accident.

Maybe I was bothered by the movie analogies used five years ago because I’m not much of a movie-goer. But I think it was more my historian’s training kicking in – movies are too simple to encapsulate 9/11. Note that Oliver Stone, in his recent 9/11 movie, chose to focus on the stories of just two men, men who spent much of that day trapped in the rubble. Even with all the resources of Hollywood magic, Stone, no stranger to ambitious movie making, decided that the big picture was much too large, much too complex to even dare to approach.

We need new analogies. September 11 was not December 7, and al Qaeda is not the German Nazi party. When I think of the violent house of mirrors that is terrorism and the war on terror, I think of something like The Usual Suspects: no one really knows what’s going on, the police are hampered by language and cultural barriers, people are sent to fight an enemy they don’t understand and wind up fighting someone else altogether, the people you like get killed by mysterious forces, the bad guy gets away, and the chief detective is befuddled and angry, wanting to lash out but not knowing where to strike. On second thought, anybody up for The Princess Bride?

Truth is Hard; Lies are Much Too Easy

I haven’t weighed in on the controversy over the ABC 9/11 film because I don’t have any new information – I can only repeat what is widely available at Eschaton, DailyKos, Firedoglake, and elsewhere. But the attitudes and obvious bias of ABC/Disney in this affair compels me to speak about this, wearing my historian’s hat.

I hate it when people lie about history.

I’m a professional historian. I have specialized training, a title, a paycheck, membership in various professional organizations and a few publications to my name. Because of this, I feel a strong personal and professional responsibility to historical truth. Now, “truth,” when talking about history, is complicated. We might all agree on certain facts – Custer and his men were wiped out at Little Bighorn – but what do those facts signify? And even getting the empirical facts straight can be tricky – did Richard III have the two princes in the Tower killed or not?

But some pieces of empirical information are easier to pin down than others. By their own admission, the film ABC/Disney plans to show contains improvised and “composite” scenes - read “fiction” – even though they are claiming the film is based on the 9/11 Commission Report. They are presenting this as “true,” as the real thing, when they openly admit that not all of it is. And the fictionalized parts are not trivial – some of them clearly depict the Clinton Administration as making a deliberate choice not to kill or capture bin Ladin when they had easy opportunities to do so. That’s a very serious charge, and needs serious evidence to back it up.

The truth is that we know that the people behind the film have Republican ties, and we must conclude that the anti-Clinton stance is deliberate, and deliberately timed. Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, bothered me because it perpetuated a version of history that is not supported in any way by the evidence. As Americans are not deeply historically-minded, I was concerned that his film would convince many people of a set of “facts” that were without basis. But I also believe that Stone genuinely believes that Kennedy was, or probably was, killed as the result of a conspiracy. If I recall correctly, the scenes in which the conspiracy was portrayed were presented as speculation, not unvarnished fact. I’d give him a low grade if he turned that film in as a term paper, but I probably wouldn’t flunk him. Bad historical analysis is not necessarily dishonest historical analysis.

ABD/Disney and the producers of the 9/11 film are up to something else. Even if you argue that the “facts are in dispute,” the principals are all alive and available for rebuttal. Stone couldn’t ask Jack Ruby for his perspective, but ABC/Disney is presenting a “j’accuse” against the Clinton Administration without any evidence to back them up and without any acknowledgement that the officials involved have vigorously disputed the claims the film makes. As I write this ABC is backpedaling, claiming the film is “unfinished.” (Funny – it wasn’t “unfinished” enough to prevent sending it to Rush Limbaugh.) Let us hope that their revisions lead to a more honest portrayal, one that at least recognizes that the version of events in the first draft have been hotly disputed by the players involved. We can not go back and change time itself, but we can rewrite history to make it something utterly alien to any honest version of the truth. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen this time.

Who Were Those People, Anyway?

People use history for all kinds of purposes, not a few of which are nefarious. I know next to nothing about Korean history, but I recognize what’s going on in this article about disputes between China and South Korea over the identity of early inhabitants of the Korean peninsula. Research recently published in China continues a very old assertion that what we call Korea was really just an extension of China from around 2000 BC to around 1000 AD. Korea, not surprisingly, rejects this notion. (Oh, and what’s up with being able to listen to the story read by either a female or a male announcer?)

Assertions about the identity of historical peoples almost always are linked to present-day claims about territorial rights or political power. In the Balkans, many people expend a great deal of energy trying to prove that this person or that person was a “Serb,” or a “Bulgarian,” or an “Albanian,” so as to claim rights to some scrap of land in the here and now. In the Middle East, you can find people who will tell you that there is no such thing as a “Palestinian,” and there never was. You can also find people who will tell you that there is no historical evidence whatsoever of any Jewish or Hebrew kingdoms in the ancient past. The motivations behind these claims are obvious.

The problem with claims like these is that quite often the terms we use today were unfamiliar or meaningless to people in the past. The term “Indian” (in the American, not South Asian sense) had no meaning whatsoever, indeed, did not exist, before the Europeans arrived in the Western Hemisphere. There were no substitute terms for it either. The peoples of the Americas had no word to distinguish themselves from Europeans, Africans, and Asians because they did not know those other people existed. The words they would have used to describe all the peoples of the Americas probably would have translated into English as “human,” because for them, the Americas were the entire world.

In our country, people today argue over whether the Founding Fathers were Christian. Well, define “Christian.” Were the ancient Egyptians black? Well, define “black.” People mix and mingle, cultures mix and mingle, and there are no pure strains, genetically nor culturally, that stretch back over the centuries. It’s a fools errand, but as long as people believe that whatever their great-great-grandfather did justifies whatever they are doing now, people will keep arguing about these things.

In Which I Revel in My Pretentiousness!

Hey great, Warner Todd Huston has taken me to task, and called me pretentious to boot! This is great – I get what, 30 hits a day, and he bothers with little old me – thanks Warner! WTH thinks my post criticizing his essay called "ABC -- Feteshizing 'Minority' History" was way off base, and ain’t shy to say why. Well, I guess the only thing to do is go through this point by point.

1. First, let’s get an important issue out of the way. My name is Theron Corse, and I teach at Tennessee State University – not exactly the ivory tower, but a decent job. Not hiding really – I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks and wanted to update my professional website before I linked to it – so there you go.

2. Now, let’s delve into the critique:

This blogger goes on and on with his assumptions ad nauseum, but never once contacted me to begin a dialog to see if his leftist, tripe would bear out.

“Ad naseum” implies a long, reptitive screed, but that’s in the eye of the beholder. And contact him – well, nobody reads this blog, but point taken. The next time I critique one of your essays, Warner, I’ll do you the courtesy of a notice, as you did for me.

2. About those assumptions – I made two main claims about WTH’s essay, one explicit, one implied. The first one was this:

What intrigues me though is the repeated claim that non-white history in the United States is a minor, superfluous topic (he even calls it “minutiae”), that merely distracts students from the important stories and adds little to our understanding of U.S. history.

That was based on certain quotes of his:

The United States of America was not founded by Blacks, Asians, or "Latinos", even though each added to the flavor of the stew. White, Anglo-Saxons where who won the battles to make the United States possible. [snip] For that matter, few Asians even lived outside California for many years in our early Republic. They just weren't a factor in our founding and growth, railroad-building aside. [snip] To waste time with all these "minority" views of history in our grade schools cheats our hildren out of learning the basics while they focus on the less important minutia. [snip] To people like Texeira, history should be about "diversity", not about presenting a program based on what is important and formative before presenting the minutia.

And there were others. Yes, WTH does say that there were non Anglo-Saxon’s in the stew, but he’s also very clear about that he considers these groups to be secondary, at best. Again, his word was “minutiae.”

The second claim I made, by implication, about WTH was that he held a certain narrow belief. I wrote:

The belief that only “Anglo-Saxons” made significant contributions to the history of this country is highly myopic.

Well, “only” perhaps was strong – he did allow that the Chinese helped build railroads, for example. But he was abundantly clear that Anglo-Saxons founded this country and “won the battles to make the United States possible.” WTH clearly disagrees, but I think that based on his essay, these two points stand.

3. I don’t think I claimed that WTH wanted non-Anglo-Saxon history eliminated, as he states in his rebuttal. I did say that he thought it “minor” and “superfluous,” based on this quote:

To waste time with all these "minority" views of history in our grade schools cheats our children out of learning the basics while they focus on the less important minutia.

I call ‘em like I see ‘em.

4. In his rebuttal, WTH demands to know why we need to know about the Chinese having a hard time and about “Latinos” on U.S. soil before 1776. Well, that’s simple. Spaniards, or Mexicans, or whatever you want to call them, founded Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, California, Arizona, and Nevada, and were in Utah before the Mormons. And those railroads would not have been built as quickly without the Chinese, slowing down the settlement of the West. Nor would Pacific Coast culture be what it is today without their presence. This would be a different country without them. Our political history would be different without the backlash against them. What country would we be if these people had not been here? I have no idea. And WTH doesn’t answer these questions I raised:

How would the economy and culture of the South have developed without African slaves - would there have been a Civil War without slavery and the plantation economy? Would the cotton economy have developed at all without those slaves?

We would be a different country, certainly.

5. WTH pounces on my mention of the food of these different groups. Food very much shapes history. Just one exanple: the Europeans who came over learned to eat corn, and thus sought out land to plant it in, and organized their economy and settlement patterns around it. If they had stuck to wheat only, or had emphasized potatoes instead, we would have developed differently, as those plants have other requirements. And we would have developed more slowly, because wheat can not grow productively everywhere that corn can. No corn, fewer people. Food matters. (And no corn, no corn-based alcohols!)

6. Oh, and he suggests I’m an ivory-tower Marxist. Partly this is because I use the term “teeming masses,” which he says is a Communist term. Maybe, I don't know, but it’s also a common English phrase. Just try Googling it – 72,000 hits, not all of which are socialist. Ivory Tower? Hey, I went to a lot of trouble to get an Ivory Tower job! I could have made a lot more money doing something else. It’s not my fault if other people chose 9-5, two-weeks-of-vacation-per-year jobs! But seriously – I’m not a Marxist. Marx was a terrible historian. I am influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about hegemony, but that’s more about how elites rule through propaganda than about socialism. And Ivory Tower or not, I still have to pay my mortgage! And my research is on religion in Communist Cuba - and while my book won't be out till next fall, it's hardly pro-Castro.

So thanks for the link Warner. I disagree with your analysis, as you’ve probably noticed, but like they say in Hollywood, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. And trust me – a good teacher can cover “minority” history and the Gettysburg Address. Really, we can - I do it all the time.

Making the Elephant Disappear

There's a new history curriculum for grade schools in China, and it has a few obvious omissions:

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao Zedong only once — in a chapter on etiquette.

The current regime has long since jettisoned most of Mao's ideology, though they are not ready to denounce his atrocities. So they've settled on an oldie but goody - they're going to ignore him. And if this policy remains in place, Mao will fade from Chinese consciousness. This may seem ludicrous. Mao's legacy is ubiquitous in China - how could he be forgotten? But it's easy enough - my students today, born on average in the mid-1980s, not only do not remember Ronald Reagan - many have never heard of him. History, besides the things I listed in the previous post, is what we choose to remember. Those on the right who complain about an overemphasis on minority history in grade school curriculum, or who say there's too much talk about slavery, Indian removal, or the struggles of the early industrial working class, think that these things are unimportant in large part because they don't know much about them. They have, through the choices of their teachers and their own choices in reading, been exposed to a version of history that marginalizes these issues. When they are confronted with a different version of U.S. history, they see it as being incorrect. It is not what they "know" to be correct. If the current curriculum changes remain in place in China long enough, in a generation or so we'll be faced with a nation that "knows" that the legacy of Mao - who? - is trivial.

It's really that simple to remake the past. If you control the conversation about the past, you can turn the past into anything you want. You can even make Mao disappear.

Rumsfeld and the Munich Analogy

Speaking to an audience at the American Legion’s annual convention yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld made a classic blunder:

Drawing parallels to efforts by some nations to appease Adolf Hitler before World War II, Rumsfeld said it would be "folly" for the United States to ignore the rising dangers posed by a new enemy that he called "serious, lethal and relentless."

There’s a term for this – it’s called the Munich Analogy. You remember those pictures of Neville Chamberlain, returning from his Munich meeting with Hitler, announcing that there was “peace in our time”? We all know what happened next.

Throughout the Cold War, when anyone suggested that we should negotiate with the Soviets, there was always someone who would assert that this was impossible. One can not negotiate with dictators! They see that only as a sign of weakness – give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. Dictators only understand force! Remember Munich!

The fundamental problem with historical analogy is that all historical events are contingent on a very high number of variables which can not be reproduced. Analogies can never give us hard and fast rules for predicting the future. The only certain lesson learned at Munich was that you can not negotiate with Hitler. This told us nothing about whether we could negotiate with the Soviets. Of course, there was always a fair amount of cognitive dissonance involved. The Munich Analogy was favored by anti-Communist “hawks” who were frequently very prepared to engage in “constructive engagement” with authoritarian regimes, so long as they were anti-Communist. So the Munich Analogy was never even fully accepted by the people who used it.

In Rumsfeld’s case, there’s a second problem. No one is in fact suggesting “appeasement” of the terrorists. Critics of Rumsfeld and the Bush Administration generally argue the problem is not that we are fighting terrorism, but that we are fighting it badly, first and formost by sapping our military strength in a country that, at least before the war began, was not an important player in world terrorism. So Rumsfeld’s use of the Munich Analogy is wrong on all counts. And then there’s this:

Rumsfeld obliquely acknowledged mistakes and setbacks in Iraq, quoting the French statesman Georges Clemenceau as calling all wars "a series of catastrophes that results in victory."

That’s right. The Secretary of Defense is taking solace in the words of the man who led France during World War I, a monumental disaster of a war that is the very definition of pointless slaughter. That’s one analogy he seems bent on fulfilling, one we can certainly do without.

Minority History is American History

As per my earlier criticism of this this ridiculous essay by Warner Todd Huston, there's a great diary over on DailyKos that is both an in-your-face smackdown of Sen. George Allen (R-VA), with his "macaca" and "welcome to America" comments, and a reminder of the important roles played in U.S. history by people whose ancestors came from somewhere other than Europe. Allen does not seem to understand that Americans come in many colors, and their history is important to all of us. RamR's diary tells it like it is.

The AP Version of History

OK, I've got morning classes, but I can't let this bit of nonsense from the Associated Press pass without comment:

On this date: In 1533, the last Incan King of Peru, Atahualpa, was murdered on orders of Spanish conqueror Francisco Pizarro.

Um, well, not exactly. First of all, he was the emperor of Tawantinsuyu, otherwise known as the Incan Empire, which included a whole lot more than modern Peru. Further, he wasn't the last person to hold the title of Sapa Inca (official title of the emperors) - that honor goes to Tupac Amaru (the one who died in 1572 - not Tupac Amuru II, or, for that matter, Tupac Amaru Shakur). It's all a little complicated, more than I can go into right now, but the Spanish alternately propped up and fought against a series of heirs to Atahualpa before finishing off Tupac Amaru. Atahualpa represents the end of a truly sovereign, powerful Incan Empire, but he wasn’t the final end. History tends to be messier than that - AP's error is just one more piece of evidence that a "names and dates" concept of history is deeply flawed.

Singapore, Dr. Sowell?

That Thomas Sowell is an embarrassment to academics everywhere is a given. I'm not even going to bother with his nonsensical rant about the left and crime. But this?

Within living memory, Britain was one of the most law-abiding nations on the face of the earth. When Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew visited London right after World War II, he was so impressed with the honesty of the British and their respect for law and order that he returned home determined to make Singapore the same way. Today it is Singapore that is one of the most law-abiding nations in the world while Britain's crime rate has risen to the point where, for the first time, it now exceeds the crime rate in the United States.

Singapore, Dr. Sowell? Human rights abusing Singapore? Migrant worker abusing Singapore? Singapore, which even Bush's State Department describes as a kind of authoritarianism light?

Read that State Department description of Singapore - this is Sowell's idea of paradise. If you pay attention to Bush and Alberto Gonzalez, you know it's their vision of paradise, too. Thomas Sowell - an authoritarian for all seasons.

History - Not Just a Bunch of Dates

I would not ordinarily write about Australian educational policy. What the heck do I know about Australian educational policy? Nothing. But I do know a thing or two about history. There’s a bit of a tug of war in Australia right now between people who want to teach history as a stand alone subject and those who want to teach it under the umbrella of "Studies of Society and its Environment," which I imagine is what Americans call “Social Studies.” The reasons for opposition to teaching history separately caught my eye. Here’s what Rod Welford, Education Minister for Queensland, and Ljiljanna Ravlich, West Australian Education Minister, had to say.

After the summit, Mr. Welford said it would be "educational vandalism" for the federal Government to force the separate study of history on the states. "To talk about history as a stand-alone subject, as a list of events, is an educational absurdity," he said. [snip]

Ms Ravlich dismissed the knowledge of key historical dates as unimportant and was reported yesterday as saying it was akin to not knowing "the internal workings of a computer". She said the advent of the internet and search engines, such as Google, meant students had those dates at their fingertips.

Oh dear. Ravlich and Welford are confusing history with antiquarianism. Antiquarianism is a bit of historical jargon – it means collecting bits of historical information like you would collect antiques, buffing them up and putting them on display like Grandmother’s silver. Most people who do genealogy are doing antiquarianism. Of course antiquarianism shouldn’t be taught to poor little Australian kids – that’s boring as all get out. But history is not antiquarianism. It’s much more than a bunch of dates. History is interpretation and analysis. It’s critical thinking applied to the pageant of the past. History asks the question, "Why?" What do these people think I do all day – sing little mnemonic songs about important dates? “Oh in 1066/William got his kicks/And in 1492, Chris sailed the ocean blue…” (So much for my songwriting career.)

This is why so many kids hate history. People like Ravlich and Welford think history is just memorizing a bunch of stuff, and that’s what they promote as “history” in classrooms. Ravelich apparently think it would be OK to teach “history” in grades 9 and 10, but if what she has in mind is rote memorization, I’d prefer she not bother. I’d rather get college students who’ve never had a day of that kind of “history.” Even if they didn’t know one single thing about the past, at least they wouldn’t walk in the room loathing the very idea of history.

Elitist History is Uninformed History

Skimming through the Internet, I stumbled upon this essay by Warner Todd Huston lamenting the “fetishizing” of minority history. It’s a typical example of the genre – a swipe at Charles Beard that distorts the man’s work, an assertion that White Anglo Saxons are responsible for all that is good and true in our history, and the claim that “PC revisionists” are just out to dethrone the white man, out of spite, apparently.

What intrigues me though is the repeated claim that non-white history in the United States is a minor, superfluous topic (he even call it “minutiae”), that merely distracts students from the important stories and adds little to our understanding of U.S. history. Well, Mr. Huston, this is exactly why textbooks and educators need to emphasize minority history – to insure that people don’t come to hold such narrow and uninformed perspectives as yours.

Indians, Africans, Hispanics, and Asians did much more than “add flavors to the stew” – they shaped this country in fundamental ways though their struggles, their labor, their cultures and language and food. How different the history of this country would have been had the Indians not been here – would there even have been a Revolution if the colonists hadn’t been so resentful of the Proclamation Act of 1763 banning them from moving into Indian territory? How would the economy and culture of the South have developed without African slaves - would there have been a Civil War without slavery and the plantation economy? Would the cotton economy have developed at all without those slaves? And what would I be eating if West African cuisine had never entered the South? What about the Southwest – what would it look like today if the Spanish had not founded San Francisco and Santa Fe?

The belief that only “Anglo-Saxons” made significant contributions to the history of this country is highly myopic. It’s also based on a very old-fashioned “kings and queens” kind of history, where only leading elites are discussed and the teeming masses are ignored. It fits of course with modern conservativism, which is extraordinarily elitist in its viewpoint, but it is wildly inaccurate.

And one last thing – believe it or not, Mr. Huston, it is in fact possible to mention the dates of the Civil War and discuss the role of black troops – it's amazing how many topics you can cover in a semester!

Historical Fantasy (part one of many)

One thing I want do on this blog is talk about the way people misuse history. I have nothing special to add to the discussion of Lieberman's defeat by Lamont, but I do want to chime in on this Lieberman quote that Mark Schmitt snagged.

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Nazism and probably more dangerous than the Soviet Communists we fought during the long Cold War,” Mr. Lieberman said.

Schmitt rightly calls him out on this, and I have nothing to add. But it's possible that Lieberman is not as unhinged as Schmitt suggests, for he may not be thinking of the real Soviets or real Nazis here. If I were generous, I'd say he's talking about them as abstract concepts, iconic representations of Evil and Danger. In this case, what he's really saying is:

“I’m worried that too many people, both in politics and out, don’t appreciate the seriousness of the threat to American security and the evil of the enemy that faces us — more evil, or as evil, as Evil and probably more dangerous than the Danger we fought during the long Cold War.”

Here, Nazis and Soviets are merely cardboard stand-ins, signs for something else, not meant to be taken literally. There is of course, another possibility, that what he had in mind was something else, altogether.



In which case, of course, he's completely right.

Watching a Man Drown

There was a time when I could say I liked Christopher Hitchens. My father gave me a copy of Letters to a Young Contrarian, which I enjoyed a great deal. I particularly admired his skewering of Mother Teresa. But as many have noted, the slide had already begun by then, and he continues to spiral downward. Slate, perhaps for the same mysterious reasons they employ Mickey Kaus, keeps handing him more rope. His latest is an analysis of what's happening in Cuba right now. Cuba is my research field, so with some trepidation I took a gander. It's not that his analysis is insane - in simplest form, he asserts that Raul's ascension to the top slot, be it temporary or not, signals the culmination of a long build up of the political power of the military in Cuba. All well and good. But this, this is nonsense:

If there had been a military coup in any other Latin American or Caribbean country, even a fairly small or obscure one, I think it safe to say that it would have made the front page of the newspapers. But the military coup in Cuba—a nation linked to ours in many vital and historic ways—has not been reported at all.

The reason it hasn't been reported is because, to the best of anyone's knowledge, it hasn't happened yet. Is Fidel dead? Nobody knows. Was he pushed aside in palace coup and his illness has been staged? Nobody knows. Is Raul right now in a mad scramble to take advantage of Fidel's illness so as to pull off a palace coup? Nobody knows.

All of these things are possible of course. But Hitchens takes it for granted that the U.S. press is refusing to accept the obvious, when nothing, in fact, is obvious at all. I suppose picking on Hitchens is far too easy. But most American know nothing about Cuba, and so his uninformed declarations can shape a lot of people's thinking, at a moment when we need to be better informed about Cuba, not less. I have long said we need to be more creative in how we deal with Cuba, but not to the point of writing fiction.