Tag Archives: history

Curtis LeMay

This article in The Daily Beast has some terrifying quotes from Curtis LeMay, who massacred hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Japanese civilians in World War II and almost started World War III in 1969.

  • “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”
  • “When the Russians had acquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb and yet didn’t have any stockpile—that was when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.”
  • “My solution would be to tell the North Vietnamese that they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we’re going to bomb them into the Stone Age.”

horizontal history

I like this post called “Horizontal History” on Wait But Why. The author takes a number of famous people from all over the world and plots their life spans side by side. It sounds simple, but it makes a point about things that were going on in parallel at various times that we tend to think of in isolation because that is how we studied them. I always thought it would be an interesting way to teach history to take a particular year or decade and look at who was alive and what was going on not just in one country or part of the world, but everywhere. You could take it one step further by picking places and times at random, and asking who was around and what they were doing, not just famous people but ordinary people. What were their lives like? What sources of information did that have about what was going on nearby and far away, and what did they think of these events? What did they eat and where did their food come from, what technologies did they use in their daily lives and what technologies were they aware of, what diseases did they have, what holidays did they celebrate, what work or other economic transactions did they engage in, what natural ecosystems did they interact with, what was their climate and weather like? You could ask the latter two questions even in the absence of humans. Start piecing this together for enough places and times, and we might start to have a more holistic understanding of history. We might understand how the past was different from the present, and that might in turn help inform our imagination about how the future will be different from the present.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Andrew Bacevich on BillMoyers.com shows how decisions that happen on a President’s watch, even an almost universally respected and even revered one like Eisenhower, can have consequences decades later.

As for Eisenhower, although there is much in his presidency to admire, his errors of omission and commission were legion. During his two terms, from Guatemala to Iran, the CIA overthrew governments, plotted assassinations and embraced unsavory right-wing dictators — in effect, planting a series of IEDs destined eventually to blow up in the face of Ike’s various successors. Meanwhile, binging on nuclear weapons, the Pentagon accumulated an arsenal far beyond what even Eisenhower as commander-in-chief considered prudent or necessary.

In addition, during his tenure in office, the military-industrial complex became a rapacious juggernaut, an entity unto itself as Ike himself belatedly acknowledged. By no means least of all, Eisenhower fecklessly committed the United States to an ill-fated project of nation building in a country that just about no American had heard of at the time: South Vietnam. Ike did give the nation eight years of relative peace and prosperity, but at a high price — most of the bills coming due long after he left office.

This caught my eye during a week when events during the Iranian Revolution (1979) are influencing the 2016 election. And the revolution was in turn caused CIA participation in destabilization of a democratically elected Iranian government in 1953. And the destabilization of Iran had begun far earlier under the British, who openly sought to control the natural resources of the region.

Bill Clinton’s decisions in the 1990s on trade, drugs, and financial deregulation are also being discussed in this election. I think we are already suspecting that George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and even Afghanistan in the early 2000s will go down as our country’s greatest blunders of modern times. I wonder how some of Obama’s decisions on intervention in the Middle East, relations with Russia and China, and financial regulation (or lack thereof) will turn out in the long run.

modeling the Maya collapse

This interesting study included a computer model of how drought and agricultural practices could have combined to destroy the ancient Mayan civilization.

Conceptualizing sociohydrological drought processes: The case of the Maya collapse

With population growth, increasing water demands and climate change the need to understand the current and future pathways to water security is becoming more pressing. To contribute to addressing this challenge, we examine the link between water stress and society through socio-hydrological modeling. We conceptualize the interactions between an agricultural society with its environment in a stylized way. We apply the model to the case of the ancient Maya, a population that experienced a peak during the Classic Period (AD 600-830) and then declined during the ninth century. The hypothesis that modest drought periods played a major role in the society’s collapse is explored. Simulating plausible feedbacks between water and society we show that a modest reduction in rainfall may lead to an 80% population collapse.Population density and crop sensitivity to droughts, however, may play an equally important role. The simulations indicate that construction of reservoirs results in less frequent drought impacts, but if the reservoirs run dry, drought impact may be more severe and the population drop may be larger.

Dick, Bush, and Johnson

Ronald Feinman proposes a scenario where Gary Johnson, the libertarian candidate, could be become U.S. President in the fall, with Mike Pence as his Vice President.

in theory, if neither major party candidate wins 270 electoral votes, the election would be thrown to the House of Representatives for the first time since 1824. In a Republican controlled House, Gary Johnson, in theory, could be elected President with the lowest percentage of popular votes in American history, far less than John Quincy Adams’ 30.9 percent in 1824 or Abraham Lincoln’s 39.8 percent of the vote in 1860…

So at least, there is a long range possibility that on January 20, 2017, we could have our third President Johnson, after Andrew Johnson in 1865 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1963. And we would have a Libertarian President, the first third party candidate in history to be elected President, albeit by the House of Representatives.

But at the same time, under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, either Mike Pence or Tim Kaine would become Vice President, as only the top two candidates for the Vice Presidency can be considered by the Senate, although the top three candidates can be considered by the House of Representatives for President. Since the Senate is majority Republican, that would likely make Mike Pence Vice President to serve with Libertarian Gary Johnson as President, which would make for a very interesting and weird situation, never having occurred before in American history.

And this does not even account for the popular theory that voters are subconsciously attracted to candidates named Bush, Dick, or Johnson.

Time Magazine’s 100 Best Non-Fiction Books

Yes, Time Magazine has a list of what it thinks are the 100 best all-time nonfiction books. There is a fair amount here that documents the history of the 20th century as it was unfolding, which would be interesting to read. It is a fairly politically left-leaning (e.g., Howard Zinn), pro-science (E.O. Wilson) list, although they do throw in Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater for good measure. It appeals to that small part of me that wants to retire, abandon my family, and just read from now on.

the fall of the U.S. republic?

This article on History News Network compares the current state of the United States to the Roman Republic a few decades before it fell.

By the second century B.C., the Romans believed they had achieved the ideal state: a republic with strong checks and balances that provided a voice for the common people while limiting the dangers of direct democracy. By the mid 140s B.C., victories in foreign wars had led to a massive expansion of Roman power. It seemed the Republic — stable, powerful, and immensely wealthy — would last forever.

But things changed. The economy transformed as Roman power expanded across the Mediterranean. As Rome began to import cheap grain from North Africa in quantities previously unimagined in the ancient world, grain prices plunged. Domestic small farmers were squeezed out of the market and off their lands. Rich landowners snapped up land from these struggling farmers, incorporating these plots into giant plantations worked by slaves from newly conquered territories. Many of these land acquisitions were illegal — but the plebeians were powerless to stop them. Forced to compete against slave labor and facing a nascent form of corporatization that favored the wealthy, the plebeians felt that they were cast aside as Rome ascended to greatness.

In response to these changes, the plebeians voted a slew of populist politicians to power. These politicians were called Populares. While some Populares genuinely sought to uplift the plebeian class, others learned to harness the power of the people in a cynical ploy for power.

– See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/163207#sthash.FccCVUPn.dpuf

Could the U.S. form of government really fall? I am not predicting that but I can envision a scenario where it is plausible. Let’s say a completely incompetent leader gets elected by the people (I’m not naming any names) and orders the military to do something so egregious it refuses to carry out the order. At that point, the Constitution would no longer be functioning, so what then? Congress could act quickly to impeach the President to maintain the appearance of order, while the military could temporarily maintain order until the Vice President or another civilian leader could be installed according to the letter of the Constitution. But if that sort of thing kept happening, the Constitution would be weakened each time until one day the civilian government might cease to exist. Sound far-fetched? Maybe, but within the realm of plausibility. Throw in some serious natural or industrial disasters, terrorist attacks, or major geopolitical conflicts and it could put even more strain on our system.

the recession and the right

This editorial on History News Network links the rise of the right in Europe to the 2008 financial crisis and recession caused by American banks.

What many Americans fail to admit is that the 2008 bank-induced economic downturn was of global proportions. It triggered an international depression which caused tremendous financial pain to the industrialized West. New Right parties throughout all of Europe (National Front in France; UKIP in the UK; New Right in the Netherlands; and the New Right in Germany, for example) viewed the West’s financial-sector breakdown as an opportunity to ramp up their message. First, international agreements such as the European Union is undemocratic; and second, that immigrants are displacing ethnically pure nationals from jobs, university acceptances, what have you. “Austerity” measures passed by many European governments, at the bequest of the EU, didn’t help but only deepened the insult. To many in Europe, the 2008 depression triggered social cutbacks aimed squarely at the poor and middling ranks of society while giving a pass to the wealthy financiers who created the problem in the first place.

This dual rhetorical message, poured on thick and heavy since 2008, should give considerable pause to all those citizens that fought in, or still remember, the horrors of the Second World War. The Great Depression (1929-1937) aided Adolph Hitler’s rise. One then wonders whether our current depression (2008-??) will create another?

The saddest thing to me is that Western Europe seemed until a few years ago like the part of the world that had done the most to solve the problems of war and peace, economic and social integration. The rest of the world just needed to catch up. Now that seems somewhat in doubt. Still, war between European nation states seems all but unthinkable, and it is hard to imagine that changing anytime soon.

divide and conquer

This article on History News Network goes through a long account of “divide and conquer” strategies of the white elite in the U.S., which led poor and working class white people to support the rich elite rather than unite with poor and working class black people. It goes all the way from slavery and civil war through to the Nixon and Reagan years and on to Trump. But he suggests that it won’t work for Trump because the white working class itself is shrinking and divided.

What is the U.S. up to in Japan?

Well, Marines and sailors on Okinawa are raping and killing women, as usual. And President Obama is visiting Hiroshima and sort of mentioning but not really apologizing for dropping nuclear weapons on it.

I think it’s nice that Obama visited Hiroshima. I thought it would have been a nice place to announce a major nuclear stockpile reduction effort early in his second term. Here’s what he had to say about that:

among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.

We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and secure deadly materials from fanatics.

That’s a bit disappointing to me. We could drastically scale them back, creating good will around the world and giving us some moral high ground to work with other countries to scale them back. We could tackle the emerging and possibly far scarier biological weapons threat. We could scale back our footprints in Japan and Korea and leave those rich, modern, democratic nations to provide for their own defense while staying engaged with them through trade and diplomacy.

I am an Obama fan though. He is someone who chose to do as much good as he could within the constraints of the system. It is possible that if he had pushed the system harder he might have gotten more done, but it is also possible it would have been counterproductive. We will never know. I like his last minute attempts to begin the process of putting some thorny historical issues to bed with Cuba, Iran, Japan, and Vietnam. In Vietnam in particular I am struck by how little ill will the public seems to bear us, when they might have the most reason to of all those countries. These efforts build some good will internationally and provide a better starting point for future leaders to build on than the same old stale Cold War positions we’ve had for the last 50 years.