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.
Tag Archives: history
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.
Whitewater
Politico says Trump plans to dredge up the Whitewater scandal that dogged the Bill Clinton White House in the 1990s. The Whitewater scandal is just tiresome – you can read about it here. Basically it was a failed deal to develop some vacation homes in the hills of Arkansas. The actual scandal had something to do with the Clintons maybe twisting some arms to get loans to the developers. It was investigated throughout the 90s, a few people actually went to jail for short periods of time related to the loans or obstruction of justice, but there really was nothing even close to a case made against either Clinton.
Compare this to the plots to murder Fidel Castro, the U.S.-backed military coups against elected governments in Central and South America and all over Asia, the secret and illegal wars in Laos and Cambodia, Watergate, the Iran-Contra scandal, the invasion of Iraq, and this little “scandal” looks really silly. I hope the 90s are not starting up again, but you can see the beginnings of that with the “email scandal” and the “Bengazi scandal”. It has been refreshing that there has really been no whiff of scandal in relation to Obama, unless you count “Obama is a Muslim” or the birth certificate thing, but those are beyond silly, just childish. The drone strikes and special forces activity around the world are questionable of course, but then political “scandals” don’t usually involve these matters of actual life and death, do they?
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm
I’d like to share a passage from The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm by Lewis Dartnell. This is a clever book, because it is basically a book on the history of technology. That could be a dry and boring book that appeals only to a few history nerds, obviously, but what Mr. Dartnell has done is put a clever spin on that and write the book as though it were giving us instructions on how to “reboot” civilization after some disaster like a plague or catastrophic war. This is about two alternative designs for refrigeration.
If history is just one damn thing after another, then the history of technology is just one damn invention after another: a succession of gadgets each beating off inferior rivals. Or is it? Reality is rarely that simple, and we must remember that the history of technology is written by the victors: successful innovations give the illusion of a linear sequence of stepping stones, while the losers fade into obscurity and are forgotten. But what determines the success of an invention is not always necessarily superiority of function.
In our history both compressor and absorption designs for refrigeration were being developed around the same time, but it is the compressor variety that achieved commercial success and now dominates. This is largely due to encouragement by nascent electricity companies keen to ensure growth in demand for their product. Thus the widespread absence of absorber refrigerators today (except for gas-fueled designs for recreation vehicles, where the ability to run without an electrical supply is paramount), is not due to any intrinsic inferiority of the design itself , but far more due to contingencies of social or economic factors. The only products that become available are those the manufacturer believes can be sold at the highest profit margin, and much of that depends on the infrastructure that already happens to be in place. So the reason that the fridge in your kitchen hums – uses an electric compressor rather than a silent absorption design – has less to do with the technological superiority of that mechanism than with the quirks of the socioeconomic environment in the early 1900s, when the solution became “locked in.” A recovering post-apocalyptic society may well take a different trajectory in its development.
Most Dangerous
Here’s a new book on the Vietnam War…for kids ages 10 and up?
a trailer full of corpses, its floor “streaked with blood and brains.” Arms and legs were falling off the rotting trunks, which made it difficult to count how many bodies were in the trailer. The stench was unbearable. So the bodies were hosed down and the trailer tipped to its side, letting, as one witness put it, a “rivulet of blood-colored water” flow outside. A delegation of American military officers passed by, stepping over the blood “to avoid ruining the shine on their boots.”
Age 10, really? I think everyone at some point does need to know that this stuff happened. Not just know it intellectually, but internalize it, try to come to terms with it, and realize it can’t happen again. I remember being shown a movie of piles of Holocaust victims being moved by bulldozer around 7th grade. I don’t remember my emotions at the time but I remember the image vividly 25+ years later. Still, age 10? I’m not sure, maybe high school would be soon enough.
Anyway, should we assume this stuff only happened in the past? In Afghanistan we are hearing about “military age males” and “enemy killed in action”. Maybe not on the enormous scale of the Vietnam era, but it is the same rhetoric nonetheless. And I don’t think most of us are internalizing it, struggling to come to terms with it, or asking what we should be doing to stop it from happening.
the best and the brightest
The U.S. is sending “advisors” into Syria. This reminds me of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, where he describes the gradual escalation of the Vietnam war. A small force is sent. Then more are sent to protect the perimeter of that force. Then more are sent to patrol out from the perimeter. And so on until you have a president (Kennedy started it, Nixon ended it, but this book takes aim squarely at Lyndon Johnson) with an enormous amount of blood on his hands. Johnson has been judged kindly by history for his domestic programs and civil rights, but anybody who has read The Best and the Brightest might question that. Obama must have read The Best and the Brightest.
guns, germs, and porcines
At last, here is a grand unified pork-centric theory of history.
Many people, for many different reasons, rejected pork in the ancient Near East. Largely arid, it was a land of sheep, goats, and cattle. Nomads didn’t keep pigs because they couldn’t herd them through the desert. Villages in very dry areas didn’t keep pigs because the animals needed a reliable source of water. Priests, rulers, and bureaucrats didn’t eat pork because they had access to sheep and goats from the state-focused central distributing system and considered pigs filthy. Pigs remained important in only one place: nonelite areas of cities, where they ate waste and served as a subsistence food supply for people living on the margins.
Later the Greeks and Romans were both huge fans of pork, which I didn’t know.
Inca Roads
NPR has an interesting article about Inca roads. It’s a reminder that there were some very advanced, densely populated civilizations in the Americas before the European arrival.
The Inca road began at the center of the Inca universe: Cusco, a city in the Peruvian Andes, said to be built in the shape of a crouching puma. It actually was not a single road but a network of royal roads, an instrument of power designed for military transport, religious pilgrimages and to move supplies…
Schoolchildren around the world learn about the ancient Roman roads and the Great Wall of China — but most people have heard little about the great Inca Road. Kevin Gover, the director of the National Museum of the American Indian, says the road is largely forgotten because it just doesn’t fit into a typical Western narrative.
“Indians play one of two roles in that narrative,” he says. “They are either the opponents of civilization or they are literally part of the nature that was there to be settled and conquered. We’re not taught that some of these were very advanced civilizations, because that means this wasn’t a wilderness. And that means somebody had to be displaced. And it wasn’t necessarily a noble endeavor.”
1,000 year drought in southwestern U.S.
From the Earth Institute, this drought in the Southwest U.S. is likely to be worse than the one that destroyed an entire advanced civilization in the same spot.
During the second half of the 21st century, the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains will face persistent drought worse than anything seen in times ancient or modern, with the drying conditions “driven primarily” by human-induced global warming, a new study predicts.
The research says the drying would surpass in severity any of the decades-long “megadroughts” that occurred much earlier during the past 1,000 years—one of which has been tied by some researchers to the decline of the Anasazi or Ancient Pueblo Peoples in the Colorado Plateau in the late 13th century. Many studies have already predicted that the Southwest could dry due to global warming, but this is the first to say that such drying could exceed the worst conditions of the distant past. The impacts today would be devastating, given the region’s much larger population and use of resources…
“The results … are extremely unfavorable for the continuation of agricultural and water resource management as they are currently practiced in the Great Plains and southwestern United States,” said David Stahle, professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas and director of the Tree-Ring Laboratory there.
Discarding the theories about alien abduction, the Anasazi most likely just walked away from their urban lifestyles, which the surrounding ecosystem could no longer support, spread out, and resumed earlier, lower-impact ways of life. Although there was probably significant suffering and loss of life, that entire group of people did not “vanish” – their descendants can still be found in the same general region. Drawing parallels to the modern world, the southwest U.S. is obviously part of an interconnected national and global system, and people, water, materials, and food can be moved around a lot easier than in the 13th century. On the other hand, the world is crowded and there isn’t much space left to spread out in. We can’t have billions of people just walking out of their cities, into the surrounding woods, and resuming a hunting and gathering lifestyle.
USGS Historical Map Browser
USGS has put together a neat website that lets you overlay current and historical maps for any location with any degree of transparency.