SubscribeBut the most serious mistake consists of taking the form for the content: defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms of our time, with their contrasting and sometimes conflicting objectives, by their actions alone. It would be rather as though one were to lump together the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang, the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA, Switzerland's Jura Separatists, and the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica; dismiss their differences as insignificant; label the resulting amalgam of ideological kneecappers, bomb throwers, and political murderers "European Extremism" (or "Christo-fascism," perhaps?)...and then declare uncompromising, open-ended armed warfare against it.Well said.
But it was precisely that claim, that "it's torture, and therefore it's no good," which until very recently distinguished democracies from dictatorships. We pride ourselves on having defeated the "evil empire" of the Soviets. Indeed so. But perhaps we should read again the memoirs of those who suffered at the hands of that empire— the memoirs of Eugen Loebl, Artur London, Jo Langer, Lena Constante, and countless others—and then compare the degrading abuses they suffered with the treatments approved and authorized by President Bush and the US Congress. Are they so very different?Yes, exactly.
"... I asked if Prof. Judt still held with his view that "an ethnic state" in this day and age was "an anachronism," prefacing this by pointing out that the proposed European constitution had been defeated by popular referenda and that there were other examples of the Europeans shying away from further consolidation in the European Union.This doesn't read so much as a respected historian's balanced distillation of the 20th century experience of armed conflict, as it does a tireless self-promoter keeping his name in public view, while the last invitations for the best early summer parties in the Hamptons are being sent.
Judt flashed a knowing smile and reminded the audience of his article in the New York Review of Books ("Israel: The Alternative," Oct. 23, 2003) [emphasis added] in which he described Israel as an "ethno-religious" state that’s "an anachronism" and argued for a one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In his response, he mentioned the extreme-right Flemish nationalist movement in Belgium – which he gratuitously mentioned won many Jewish votes despite its antisemitic roots. But somehow (I doubt that his reasoning was strong here because it went totally by me), he wound up reiterating his notion that Israel's Law of Return, privileging Jews, is unique and unjust. ..."
"... In 2003, an article for the New York Review of Books [emphasis added] in which Judt argued that Israel was on its way to becoming a "belligerently intolerant, faith-driven ethno state" and called for the conversion of "Israel from a Jewish state to a binational one" with equal rights for all Jews and Arabs living in Israel and the Palestinian territories,[11] drew strong criticism from those who saw such a plan as tantamount to dismantling the Jewish state.[12][13] The NYRB [emphasis added] was inundated with over a thousand letters within a week of the article's publication, and the article led to Judt's removal from the editorial board of The New Republic.[14]"You don't get sacked from the editorial board of The New Republic for sober advancement of historical fact.
"... This is not the first time Mr. Judt and Rabbi Weiss have clashed in Riverdale. When the Fieldston School in Riverdale held an event last May featuring Mr. Judt and Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi, Rabbi Weiss and other local rabbis objected to what they said was the unbalanced presentation of anti-Zionist viewpoints. ..."Are you starting to see a pattern here? I do. Follow Judt around, and you'll be ducking rocks meant for him. But, somehow, they never seem to actually hit him, although they do make good newspaper copy. That Judt!
"... The twentieth century is thus on the path to becoming a moral memory palace: a pedagogically serviceable Chamber of Historical Horrors whose way stations are labeled "Munich" or "Pearl Harbor," "Auschwitz" or "Gulag," "Armenia" or "Bosnia" or "Rwanda"; with "9/11" as a sort of supererogatory coda, a bloody postscript for those who would forget the lessons of the century or who failed to learn them. The problem with this lapidary representation of the last century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now, thankfully, emerged is not the description—it was in many ways a truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we may now advance—unencumbered by past errors—into a different and better era.you are flaying open wounds, perhaps for the fun of it, and possibly for the column inches that get you invited as a colorful character to cocktail parties. Moreover, you're no longer speaking in a historian's voice, you've crossed over into polemic.
But such official commemoration does not enhance our appreciation and awareness of the past. It serves as a substitute, a surrogate. Instead of teaching history we walk children through museums and memorials. Worse still, we encourage them to see the past— and its lessons—through the vector of their ancestors' suffering. Today, the "common" interpretation of the recent past is thus composed of the manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them (Jewish, Polish, Serb, Armenian, German, Asian-American, Palestinian, Irish, homosexual...) marked by its own distinctive and assertive victimhood."
The emphasis I added in that passage was intentionally scaled way, way back, from what I thought about posting, just because, to my mind, it is so jaw-droppingly arrogant to see someone like Judt use a phrase like "pedagogically serviceable Chamber of Historical Horrors" to introduce his bad metaphor, and continue it, by saying that the "way stations" of that metaphorical chamber are, get this, "Munich" or "Pearl Harbor," "Auschwitz" or "Gulag," "Armenia" or "Bosnia" or "Rwanda", that I didn't think anyone could miss that. Perhaps I was wrong.I can see how you arrive at that conclusion. I read this differently. Rather, Judt is a professional historian - he writes history. He's really talking to and about other history writers. Judt, in the FPP article, touches on a lot of "philosophy of history" concepts below the radar for most people but makes sense to a professional historian, the language is somewhat coded. In particular, as a historian of the 20th century, its his job to come up with a "story" (ie. narrative). That might upset some people concerned about objective truth issues, but that is what historians do. He is speaking almost as a fiction writer on how to present the pieces of the plot in a unified story, to go beyond the raw feelings of the moment. He's looking at how other historians have presented it already, which is why the quotes (not to denigrate the events themselves). History shelves groan under the weight of books about the horrors of the 20th century - but where is the synthesis, what does it all mean, how does it fit in the bigger picture? That's what Judt is asking.
"... Mr. Judt deals with grand and important themes. But, after announcing them in a powerful introduction, he proceeds to tell us at great length mainly what we know already. ..."
" A listener calls up Armenian Radio with a question: "Is it possible to foretell the future?" Answer: "Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. The problem is with the past: that keeps changing."Oh, that Judt! What a self-deprecating card he is.
--Tony Judt "
"Vichy was dismissed as the work of a few senile Fascists. No one looked closely at what had happened during the Occupation, perhaps because very few intellectuals of any political stripe could claim to have had a "good" war, as Albert Camus did. No one stood up to cry "J'accuse!" at high functionaries, as Emile Zola did during the Dreyfus affair. When Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida entered the public arena, it usually involved a crisis far away -- in Madagascar, Vietnam or Cambodia. Even today, politically engaged writers call for action in Bosnia but intervene only sporadically in debates about the French past."As I say, I don't whether Derrida had a "good" war, or not. He was 15 when it ended, living in Algeria. But I do know that Judt knew Derrida's age and lack of direct Vichy involvement, in 1995, when he wrote that 10th paragraph.
"No one looked closely at what had happened during the Occupation, perhaps because very few intellectuals of any political stripe could claim to have had a "good" war, "as suggesting that French intellectuals, like Derrida, were unwilling to come to grips with Vichy, to stand in condemnation of each other for failing to rail at French collaborators, because of their own fear of being examined.
"... Beside Foucault's clear distanciation from Marxism, underlined by Derrida in a text called Histoire du Mensonge. Prolégomènes (History of Lie. Prolegomenas [5]), and involvement of leftist intellectuals against the use of torture during the Algerian War, this statement has been qualified by Derrida has a contre-vérité (counter-truth)[5]. Indeed, Derrida recalls another op-ed, also published by The New York Times, four days later, and written by Kevin Anderson, Associate Professor of Sociology at Northern Illinois University, which recalled that:Judt was certainly aware, in 1995, of Derrida's involvement in the 1992 petition. Judt just, for the sake of his own rhetoric, chose to overlook it for his 1995 Op-Ed piece.
"On June 15, 1992, a petition signed by more than 200 mainly leftist intellectuals, including Mr. Derrida, Regis Debray, Cornelius Castoriadis, Mr. Lacouture and Nathalie Sarraute, noted that the French occupation government in 1942 acted "on its own authority, and without being asked to do so by the German occupier." It called on Mr. Mitterrand to "recognize and proclaim that the French state of Vichy was reponsible for persecutions and crimes against the Jews of France." [6]"
"... It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. ..."The past does bind us, and should, as we bind our progeny's future. That's part of being human, and of having an intellectual capability for history, a moral commitment to truth, and a sense of responsibility to the future. Otherwise, the long struggle recorded as history is all for naught, and we should just "get ours" as individuals, in this life, while we can. Let those to come "get theirs" too, if they can. So, I don't so much disagree with you, I think, as see Judt as a crude apologist for that self-centered cynicism.
"... Americans, perhaps alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full consequences of defeat.[4] Despite their ambivalence toward its recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian casualties.Of course, he's technically wrong to claim the U.S. wasn't invaded in the 20th century, as the Japanese did occupy American soil in Kiska, in the Aleutian Islands, early in 1942, and held it for more than a year. And, of course they came to Guam, not bearing roses. But we've already established, I guess, that if it comes to a choice of facts or rhetoric, Judt will take rhetoric.
This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4 million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940. In the US Army's costliest engagement of the century—the Ardennes offensive of December 1944–January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge")—19,300 American soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the Wehrmacht almost as many.
With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead."
"“No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country.”
"... I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. ..."he goes wrong, in leaving out any reckoning of our sense that peace can be maintained, growing out of our imperfect experience in our own hemisphere.
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posted by dobbs at 12:30 PM on April 13, 2008