Historian Tony Judt essay in NYRB "What have we learned, if anything?" (from the 20th century)
April 13, 2008 12:25 PM   Subscribe

"What Have We Learned, If Anything?" Historian Tony Judt in the NYRB wonders if we have forgotten the lessons of the 20th century.
posted by stbalbach (82 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
You borked yr link.
posted by dobbs at 12:30 PM on April 13, 2008


You may want to fix your url...
posted by Popular Ethics at 12:30 PM on April 13, 2008


the main link error is genius. what have we learned indeed
posted by matteo at 12:30 PM on April 13, 2008


Unborked
posted by Adam_S at 12:31 PM on April 13, 2008


But 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.
posted by grouse at 1:01 PM on April 13, 2008 [3 favorites]


A quick look at these examples tells me that these are se[parate groups because tghey identify with separate nations or would-be state, mostly. And that means there is no reason to lump them as the same. But Muslim terrorists? They dislike the West, secularism, and come from various Muslim nations or are Muslims living unhappily in non-muslim nations
posted by Postroad at 1:17 PM on April 13, 2008


Tony Judt on Jewish Anti Zionism.
posted by By The Grace of God at 1:21 PM on April 13, 2008 [2 favorites]


MY strawman is made of STRAW, dammit!
posted by Artw at 1:26 PM on April 13, 2008


grouse--regarding Judt's point as quoted by you: the real problem is that this was a conscious and Orwellian rhetorical choice, not a semantic oversight, on the part of the neocon complex who have given us the phrase "war on terror." We often fail to realize the degree to which we are at the mercy of the Pentagon PR machine and Bush flaks in even discerning the most basic information about this supposed enemy. That they have consistently played the fear card for political gain can hardly be overstated.

So the question becomes, where does the PR lie about the "terrorists" we are at "war" with end, and the truth begin?

It is without historical precedence that a global war of this scope and duration could be waged (at least rhetoriclaly) against what remains a wholly invisible enemy. Even during the height of the Cold War, one could get State Department clearance to, you know, actually visit the USSR. Now we are witness to the ultimate military complex wet dream: a "enemy" that conisists solely of shadows, ciphers and shady intelligence. Even the specialists and journalists who think they have at least some modicum of understanding about the nature of this enemy are, in my opinion, fooling themselves about we can actually count on as fact.
posted by ornate insect at 1:28 PM on April 13, 2008


defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms of our time, with their contrasting and sometimes conflicting objectives, by their actions alone

Nonsense. We're still firmly committed to defining terrorism by the actor, not the action.
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 1:29 PM on April 13, 2008 [1 favorite]


20th Century? We haven't even learned the lessons of the 1st-19th.
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:32 PM on April 13, 2008 [3 favorites]


This article states a case so basic, so realistic, so clear-eyed, that the only response can be, Yes, but of course... and yet nothing said here, for some reason, was part of public discourse in the run up to war. You couldn't say that the US is quick to engage in war only because it hasn't suffered by it the way other countries have. That it has no memory of invasion. That it acted, in the wake of September 11th, as if it was the only country to ever experience terrorism; as if the average person in the UK-- for one example-- didn't know what it was like to have explosions in the streets. that nothing like it had ever happened before, despite an earlier (foiled) plot that year to fly an airliner into the Eiffel Tower. None of these things could be said, and those who tried were shouted down and vilified. And yet, all these things are the truth. Why wasn't the information in the article, part of general discussion in 2001 and 2002? It is to weep, really.
posted by jokeefe at 1:44 PM on April 13, 2008 [4 favorites]


And this:
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.

Postroad, you prove his point-- the "Islamic terrorists" aren't one monolithic group. They're scattered and divided and have internal conflicts and aims. You can't just say "they are all Muslim"; that's like taking the example Judt gives of European terrorist groups and saying, Well, they're all European, qed.
posted by jokeefe at 1:50 PM on April 13, 2008


20th Century? We haven't even learned the lessons of the 1st-19th.

Uh..no. Just a few examples of lessons learned: Absolute Monarchy, Serfdom, "Feudalism" (manorialism and its more traditional sense), legal slavery.

This is not to say things are better and thus have "progressed" (although many see it that way), rather, things unarguable have changed, one way or another. That is what historians do, examine how things change. Judt is making a case that the 20th century is still happening, that the so-called "short 20th century" which Eric Hobsbawm argued ended in 1991 did not really. The so-called "End of History" was an illusion and the same forces and actions are happening in the 21st century as the 20th. I guess if we make it to 2014 (100 years after the end of the "long 19th century"), it won't be a "short" 20th century anymore.
posted by stbalbach at 3:09 PM on April 13, 2008


We rush to war in the 21st century because we have romanticized the 20th. Americans want to believe that they still have "the Right Stuff", the potential to be the "Greatest Generation." Like a timid Hollywood studio, we haven't the creativity to imagine a hopeful future, so we attempt to re-make the past and claim it as a new work. Hence, we invent the terror of "Islamo-fascism" in order to exploit the reliable Nazi "brand".

What we most need to learn from the past is to let go of old failures and old victories and focus on the future.
posted by SPrintF at 3:17 PM on April 13, 2008


"What Have We Learned, If Anything?"

Our politicians have learned better marketing techniques for the same shitty ideas.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 4:09 PM on April 13, 2008 [1 favorite]


Tony Judt on the death of liberal America (London Review of Books).
posted by 15 step at 4:14 PM on April 13, 2008


At book length, taking on the whole sweep of the 20th century, to make a partisan political point, would've utterly cramped lesser men, but doesn't give the fearless Mr. Judt pause for a moment. Typical, for a guy who loves his publicity, and NYT column inches, as much as Judt. And why shouldn't he footnote himself, when he is his own best reference? He often does it in public speaking, too, as he did in a December 19, 2006 talk he gave at NYU's School of Law, as recounted by Ralph Seigler, a questioner in the audience that evening:
"... 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.

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. ..."
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.
posted by paulsc at 5:48 PM on April 13, 2008 [1 favorite]


Terror and Consent by Philip Bobbitt in today's Book Review of the New York Times --

Niall Ferguson: "This is quite simply the most profound book to have been written on the subject of American foreign policy since the attacks of 9/11 — indeed, since the end of the cold war."

-- makes a nice companion to Judt.
posted by psyche7 at 7:22 PM on April 13, 2008


I don't know much about Judt but these complaints seem like: "Public intellectual talks a lot in public" and "public intellectual references his work in public".
posted by stbalbach at 7:24 PM on April 13, 2008 [2 favorites]


oops "these complaints" in reference to paulsc's post above.
posted by stbalbach at 7:25 PM on April 13, 2008


paulsc, you can be a "tireless self-promoter" and still be right, you know.
posted by jokeefe at 8:28 PM on April 13, 2008 [1 favorite]


"I don't know much about Judt but these complaints seem like: "Public intellectual talks a lot in public" and "public intellectual references his work in public".
posted by stbalbach at 10:24 PM on April 13

To start, I don't know what a "public intellectual" is. I'm tempted to ask, is that anything like a certified public accountant? Would a "public intellectual" do other people's thinking for them, for hire? And, is there a busy season for a "public intellectual," or is the work steady, year 'round?

All kidding aside, stbalbach, what I'm saying is that footnoting yourself, and referencing your own newspaper articles archly in public, is one step down the ladder of venial self-interest from astroturfing in terms of shameless self-promotion. It's not the methodology a sober historian employs. It's not conducive to being a participant in genuine policy debate. Judt is published in the Times and the NYRB because he sells copies; he sells papers not because what he says is irrefutably true, or even particularly original, but precisely because it is arguable, and even, in some circles, incendiary.

It's clear to me that Judt is news to you. But he's not news to many people, and they wouldn't read the article you FPP'd with unjaundiced eyes, because of the reputation he's built for himself, outside the academic arena.

His Wikipedia page summarizes the background of the incident I referenced as follows:
"... 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.

In October, 2006 an invitation he had to speak at the Polish Consulate was canceled by the Polish Ambassador. Judt's reaction was to immediately accuse the Jewish Defense League and the American Jewish Committee of conspiracy to deprive him of his First Amendment rights, by exerting undue pressure on the Polish Ambassador, and to have an inflammatory letter, signed by 114 of his "academic colleagues" published in, of all places ... wait for it ... wait ... The New York Review of Books!

While that brouhaha was still playing out in the NY papers, a later appearance by Judt on October 17, 2006 at the Holocaust Research Center of Manhattan College was canceled by Judt when event organizers wanted to preface his talk with a disclaimer of their implied support for his views. They were willing to let him speak, to provide him a podium, to give him his First Amendment rights. But if they weren't in solidarity with his viewpoints, that wasn't good enough for Judt. So, it really put grease under Judt's 114 colleague's signatures, and he could care less. He'd gotten his column inches. The money quote from the New York Sun on that cancellation?
"... 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!

But when you have that reputation, and write things like this (from the FPP) [all emphasis added]:
"... 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.

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."
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.

So what have we learned, indeed? That historical reflection, this isn't?
posted by paulsc at 9:58 PM on April 13, 2008


Thank you for posting this. It sums up what I've been struggling to explain (to myself) for a long time in a manner that is coherent and articulate. I grew up in Germany during the the Bader-Meinhoff/Red Army Fraction era and remember Basque seperatism, IRA bombings in London and the general state of fucked-upness that resulted in every day life as a result. I remember being a scared-shitless 10 year old when a couple of pimply faced cops shoved their automatic weapons through the window of my mom's car, looking for terrorists, not once or twice, but routinely over the course of a couple of years. But even back then people stood up to what they recognized as an over-reaction by the state. All teachers I ever had warned us not to take things at face value, all adults I knew back then were sceptical of what was going on. I've always been astounded by the way the great unwashed masses of American society just keeps on taking it, day after day, endlessly rationalizing away the constant erosion of not just other peoples civil liberties but also their own. Maybe these are lessons you have to learn not by proxy, but the hard way, in your own backyard.
posted by tighttrousers at 10:18 PM on April 13, 2008


paulsc,

I think what stbalbach was saying is that your complaints all seem to be about the style of Judt's work and not the substance. You clearly know far more about this person and his reputation than I, so I'll grant your assertion that he enjoys fomenting controversy to keep himself in the spotlight, and that his writing style leans more towards the popular than the scholarly.

But you really haven't addressed at all the content of what he's written here. Do you disagree with the points in the piece? Do you find his conclusions or reasoning incorrect beyond the use of what you feel to be unnecessarily emotional rhetoric? You said, "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." I didn't get that at all from reading the piece, and the missing element seems to be that you really, really dislike Judt due to his style and this past incident involving his Israel article. Just sticking to the passage you quoted, how exactly is it "flaying open wounds"? The point he was making seems cogent; I'm not sure how you arrived at that statement at all.
posted by Sangermaine at 11:07 PM on April 13, 2008 [1 favorite]


"... Just sticking to the passage you quoted, how exactly is it "flaying open wounds"? The point he was making seems cogent; I'm not sure how you arrived at that statement at all. ..."
posted by Sangermaine at 2:07 AM on April 14

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.

What, I ask you, was the point of his silly quote marks? Here's my theory: he's making the two-hand, two-finger air quote in his head, as he's writing it, and can't resist throwing in the extra irony, because there's no punctuation for an arch smile. It reads, logically, the same, with or without the quote marks. The punctuation is there, just to be pejorative.

Just to dig at people who think trivializing the horror of Auschwitz by stuffing it in air quotes, as a "way station" of history, so that you can criticize, archly, how they choose to hold it in their memory, is worse than crass. It's being inflammatory, just to be a dick. It's telling people how to feel, and criticizing them on the thin proposition, that only Judt and people who agree with his view of things can truly understand the events of the 20th century. Moreover, it's directly insulting to people who've lost much, but accepted remembrances and memorials such as Judt criticizes, as all the tangible recompense they'll ever get, in this life.

To stoop to his level for a moment: I bet, within the month, he'll be making those air-quote fingers for real, quoting himself being post-ironic.

Let's continue.

"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."

I've been to Auschwitz, and Dachau, and to Bergen-Belsen, and the Peace Park at Hiroshima, and to the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, and I can tell you, first hand, that this is utter bullshit. People do not cry crocodile tears standing in the small, clean gas chamber of Dachau. Their hands do not quiver because they are cold when they touch the rusting fence posts that remain, on July afternoons at Auschwitz. They are ever surprised to see for themselves that the Arizona still bleeds, leaking oil slowly, a few drops constantly, every day for more than 66 years now, as she rusts away.

When groups of school kids get off the tram that takes you out from Munich to Dachau, they are quiet, but by the time they walk the two blocks from the stop, to the main gate of the camp, they are often stone silent. They know, but they don't know about the place, until they make that walk, and go through the gate.

But worse than just being bullshit, Judt is again pejorative, as if his position and sensibility is morally superior to those lesser beings he criticizes. That's why he calls these places a "surrogate" for some deeper version of history, that he'll tell us about, shortly. I'd like to see him make this argument cogently, at sunset, any day, to the last boatload of people coming back from paying their respects at the Arizona Memorial, while the flowers they took are still floating away on the oil sheened waters.

But, really, this is just a couple paragraphs of Judt's poor attempt at sophistry. He does go on, doesn't he? And that's to the detriment of any moral force he'd like his argument to have. He just can't help himself.

As when he concludes his piece:

"... So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?"


I'm left to wonder, in all his time in France and Europe, did no one take him by the hand and walk him through Dachau? I guess not, because he would know, if they had, that there is a fundamental difference between Dachau and Guantanamo:

No one is going up a smokestack in smoke at Guantanamo.
posted by paulsc at 12:06 AM on April 14, 2008


paulsc: … what I'm saying is that footnoting yourself, and referencing your own newspaper articles archly in public, is one step down the ladder of venial self-interest from astroturfing in terms of shameless self-promotion.

Except that it clearly isn't: it's a way of outlining in passing the arguments you've made elsewhere in more detail.

As for the claim "No one is going up a smokestack in smoke at Guantanamo", it – along with the crass paragraph-break for emphasis – is much too much like a punchline. You offer this observation as a response to Judt's desire that we, inhabiting the 21st century, learn how "how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike". It seems to me that seeking to undermine Judt's argument about the brutalisation of current warfare in Guantanámo by comparing it positively to Dachau, you are constructing an opposition by which the degradation of current warfare is always set aside from the past by this "fundamental difference".

If Judt is, as you say, "flaying open wounds", has it occured to you that there might be other imperatives in his mind than to get invited to the next cocktail party? If they are actually "open wounds", it suggests they cannot be laid to rest.

Elsewhere, you criticise Judt both for "cross[ing] over into polemic", and, pervasively, for a kind of emotional insensitivity to the suffering of others (and to the feelings of those who have visited camps and memorials). You say: "I'd like to see him make this argument cogently, at sunset, any day, to the last boatload of people coming back from paying their respects at the Arizona Memorial, while the flowers they took are still floating away on the oil sheened waters." What I believe you miss here is the fact that a direct emotional response to (say) the Arizona Memorial is, however deeply and sincerely felt, not the task of the historian nor even in any way parallel.

You tend to see this as an element of Judt's personal and stylistic crassness, but it is an important methodological point. Leaving aside the contentious issue of whether visiting a camp would allow one any access to the experiences embodied in that camp, to access how an individual is feeling is not the historian's job. That doesn't mean s/he doesn't care how an individual was feeling – it simply means that that consideration is external to her/his role as historian.
posted by 15 step at 3:29 AM on April 14, 2008 [3 favorites]


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.

Some people say it's not possible to write history of something less than 80 years old (about the length of a long-lived person). For example decent (interpretive) histories of WWI are only now appearing. Judt, as a 20th century historian, is going to obviously have a hard time of it because he will run up against current events and raw feelings of events just happened (Israel, Dachau) and that makes him seem more like a political pundit or rash and unfeeling. But we need people like this to create the first historiography from which future historians will draw from, accept, reject, revise - it's an on-going conversation.
posted by stbalbach at 6:12 AM on April 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


"Except that it clearly isn't: it's a way of outlining in passing the arguments you've made elsewhere in more detail."

Then he's a terrible rhetorician, and a worse speaker, because it doesn't come off that way; it comes off smug and arch, again and again, not because I say so, but because, time and again, people like Ralph Seigler observe that, independently. It comes off like a man who would use a phrase like "our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials" at the end of a polemic such as he's just offered, apparently unironically. It comes off, like a man who would suggest that Jacques Derrida was a silent apologist, along with other intellectuals, for Vichy, in a 1995 NYT Op-Ed piece, knowing full well that Derrida was only 15 years old at the time the war ended, and lived in Algeria.

"It seems to me that seeking to undermine Judt's argument about the brutalisation of current warfare in Guantanámo by comparing it positively to Dachau, you are constructing an opposition by which the degradation of current warfare is always set aside from the past by this "fundamental difference"."

Damn straight, I am. It is, after all, a difference of 6 million innocents dead on the one hand, and bastards like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Walid Muhammad Salih Mubarek Bin ‘Attash, Ramzi Binalshibh, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed Adam al Hawsawi, and Mohamed al Kahtani discomfited on the other. A difference between gassing and burning children without provocation, and detaining and trying defiant, murdering terrorists. It is, as I say, a fundamental difference. Not one of degree, either, but of an attempt to debase an entire race by genocide on the one hand, against the willingness of a great nation to investigate, and try criminals, in an accounting where they, at least, will be afforded their rights, and offered chairs.

And, come to think of it, that's another difference Judt overlooks: at Auschwitz, the children that were gassed stood, like all the others. No chairs, and no trials of any kind, for anyone there.

"... That doesn't mean s/he doesn't care how an individual was feeling – it simply means that that consideration is external to her/his role as historian."
posted by 15 step at 6:29 AM on April 14

Oh, for cryin' all days, 15 step, the man ends his piece "... Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?" My central point is that the man is nowhere in that screed a historian, and that, from the get-go, he may not care how others feel, but that doesn't stop him from twisting the knife, for column inches.

But, you go with Judt, if you like. Not me. And no point in winding me up, further.
posted by paulsc at 7:05 AM on April 14, 2008


I don't get what's so provocative about Tony Judt reminding the audience of what provoked Ralph Seigler's question. It seems more like courtsey to the audience - who might not all be up to speed on what the questioner is asking about - than the act of an insane self-promoter. In fact, it's fairly normal thing to at these kinds of panels.
posted by Mocata at 7:07 AM on April 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


Also, I don't think his falling out with the New Republic had much to do with his standing as a historian. I imagine it had more to do with Marty Peretz being keen on the Israeli right.
posted by Mocata at 7:14 AM on April 14, 2008 [2 favorites]


"... But we need people like this to create the first historiography from which future historians will draw from, accept, reject, revise - it's an on-going conversation."
posted by stbalbach at 9:12 AM on April 14

Oh, I don't know. In its review of Judt's book Postwar, The Economist, in its November 17, 2005 edition, said
"... 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. ..."


Or as Judt himself is quoted in the July 1, 2006 issue of Quadrant magazine, which reviewed the book, too:
" 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."

--Tony Judt "
Oh, that Judt! What a self-deprecating card he is.
posted by paulsc at 7:40 AM on April 14, 2008


Also (sorry to nitpick), Derrida isn't mentioned in the editorial paulsc links to. And his age during the war wouldn't be relevant even he were, because Judt is talking about a failure to question postwar Gaullist myths rather than intellectuals' behaviour under Vichy.
posted by Mocata at 7:51 AM on April 14, 2008


"Also (sorry to nitpick), Derrida isn't mentioned in the editorial paulsc links to. And his age during the war wouldn't be relevant even he were, because Judt is talking about a failure to question postwar Gaullist myths rather than intellectuals' behaviour under Vichy."
posted by Mocata at 10:51 AM on April 14

Yes, he is, in that troublesome 10th paragraph, Mocata. You know, the one where he works in that jab about very few French intellectuals having had a "good" war :
"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.
posted by paulsc at 8:03 AM on April 14, 2008


My mistake. But Derrida's age still has nothing to with what Judt is saying here. He's saying that these people were exercised by political crises in other countries rather than by the French past and the national myths of that past. There's a jab there, for sure, but it's aimed at soixante-huitards for being fuzzy-thinking political idealists. There's no suggestion that Derrida behaved badly during the war. You might as well say that he's accusing Derrida of not doing enough during the Dreyfus affair.
posted by Mocata at 8:12 AM on April 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


I'm somewhat baffled by your reading of that paragraph, paulsc. To me it does not imply that Derrida ought to have decried the Vichy regime during World War II, but that he ought to have later.
posted by grouse at 8:16 AM on April 14, 2008


I don't think I'm stretching at all when I read
"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.

But it doesn't really matter how I read it, that's how Derrida, himself, took it. Again from Judt's Wikipedia page:
"... 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:

"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]"
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.
posted by paulsc at 8:32 AM on April 14, 2008


paulsc: I think a part of your critique is very well-stated, and a part of it extends from a misreading of Judt. Yes, Judt's public lectures tend to be breezy and superficial, and yes they tend to invoke serious historical events and contemporary concerns in a way that trivializes them. However, this is largely Judt's point: the gravity and severity of the past has a way of producing a present that is grave, severe, and justificatory for a tragic present. In specific, every nationalism takes its heading from certain elective or chosen traumas of the past, affirming or denying that this or that event, always the ones in quotation marks, defines an 'us.' Judt is one of many historians who decry the exceptionalism of the Shoah, and I can't fault him for that, even as I do recognize that he's mostly an op-editorialist, not quite a historian, especially since his best work, Postwar, is very much a first-and-a-half draft, equal parts journalism and scholarship.

That said, parts of your critique seem to extend from ideological differences: about the role of events in 1940's Nazi Germany or 2001 NYC for legitimating activities in contemporary Israel or American-occupied Cuba or a prison in Iraq. Of course there is wide-spread disagreement on these issues, and so of course breezy opining looks bad in this context, but I think it only looks so bad to you because you disgree so much. Is Judt a self-promoter? It seems so. Does he deserve such a vehement and vitriolic response? I'm not convinced.
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:44 AM on April 14, 2008


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.

A far better point, thanks.
posted by grouse at 8:44 AM on April 14, 2008


sorry, a typo that slightly changes my point: "has a way of producing a present that is grave, severe, and justificatory for a tragic future."
posted by anotherpanacea at 8:45 AM on April 14, 2008


So Judt's sin was not mentioning a 1992 petition while making a broad-brush point about postwar French intellectuals? That's not quite the same as claiming that Derrida was a 15-year-old Vichy apologist.
posted by Mocata at 9:09 AM on April 14, 2008


"... However, this is largely Judt's point: the gravity and severity of the past has a way of producing a present that is grave, severe, and justificatory for a tragic present future. ..."
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:44 & 11:45 AM on April 14

Perhaps, then, he should spend some time, this coming Memorial Day, in one of those memorial sites he so decries in this piece. I'd recommend a walk among the sure-to-be-freshly flowered fields of white crosses at Arlington National Cemetery. There's a reason we make such places, and visit them, again and again, that seems to escape the facile Mr. Judt, best stated by Lincoln at Gettysburg:
"... 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.
posted by paulsc at 9:27 AM on April 14, 2008


"So Judt's sin was not mentioning a 1992 petition while making a broad-brush point about postwar French intellectuals? That's not quite the same as claiming that Derrida was a 15-year-old Vichy apologist."
posted by Mocata at 12:09 PM on April 14

I don't need to find Judt innocent of one bad act, to find him guilty of another, too. The man can dissemble in concurrent layers; I'll give him that.
posted by paulsc at 9:46 AM on April 14, 2008


Does one mound of skulls justify another? yes/no?
posted by Artw at 9:49 AM on April 14, 2008


I'm starting to get the impression that paulsc really doesn't like Tony Judt.
posted by grouse at 9:50 AM on April 14, 2008 [5 favorites]


grouse - thanks for the summary, saves a lot of reading.
posted by Artw at 9:55 AM on April 14, 2008


paulsc--putting Judt aside for a moment, and turning instead to the question of comparing genocides, does the genocide America has committed in Iraq (where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been slaughtered and a million displaced) weigh on you at all? Just curious, b/c you seem quick to want to compare Guantanamo to Auschwitz, but seem to have entirely negelected to mention the monumental and very real suffering the United States has brought upon the Iraqi people.
posted by ornate insect at 10:14 AM on April 14, 2008


"Does one mound of skulls justify another? yes/no?"
posted by Artw at 12:49 PM on April 14

Tony Judt says our American mound of skulls isn't nearly big enough to suit him:
"... 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.

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."
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.

But to return to your question, if offered only your bleak dichotomy, Artw, I reject Judt's complaint as ludicrous, and take General George S. Patton's view:
"“No poor bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making other bastards die for their country.”
posted by paulsc at 10:44 AM on April 14, 2008


So your answer is yes?
posted by Artw at 10:49 AM on April 14, 2008


"... the genocide America has committed in Iraq ..."
posted by ornate insect at 1:14 PM on April 14

That's an assertion that demands proof. Are you holding secret Pentagon plans that detail how we were going to systemically eradicate every last Iraqi, over the course of more than 5 years, at a cost approaching a trillion dollars?

Because, you know, it's not really "genocide" if you don't plan and act to kill a whole race. The fact that a million or more Iraqis voluntarily left the country to live in exile (as you claim), without us stopping them, as if we would, hoists you by your own petard.
posted by paulsc at 10:57 AM on April 14, 2008


"So your answer is yes?"
posted by Artw at 1:49 PM on April 14

Not really. And it wasn't Patton's, either. Presented with false dichotomies, he liked to recast the situation on his own terms, entirely. Shall I, this?
posted by paulsc at 11:07 AM on April 14, 2008


So your answer is "sometimes"?

How do we tell the piles of skulls that have been justified by another pile of skulls from the piles of skull that have either not been justified or falsly justified by another pile of skulls?
posted by Artw at 11:12 AM on April 14, 2008


"... How do we tell the piles of skulls that have been justified by another pile of skulls from the piles of skull that have either not been justified or falsly justified by another pile of skulls?"
posted by Artw at 2:12 PM on April 14

Why pile skulls at all, if we don't have to?

We stood toe to toe in a Cold War, for decades, and piled very few, considering the stakes, by Judt's reckoning. We still conduct "cool" war, as low intensity, long running conflict, in other parts of the world. It represents another option, as do diplomacy, trade, and cultural interchange, not dreamed of in your boneyard, or Horatio's philosophy, Artw. It's also possible that within a few years, we'll see a greater commitment of machines and stand off weapons to combat situations. Eventually, if the fanatics want to keep shooting, they might be piling skulls on their side, while we stack and recycle robot parts on ours.

I think we might see the Iraqi situation settle down, eventually, to a long, slow simmer, where we maintain uncontested air superiority in the region, and act to maintain short parity between factions, at as great a remove to our forces as possible. But that's just a guess on my part, and I'm no strategist. And neither is Judt.
posted by paulsc at 11:39 AM on April 14, 2008


Your answer now appears to be "yes! stack them high! Our robots will help!".
posted by Artw at 12:01 PM on April 14, 2008


paulsc--your total lack of expressed concern for the plight of the Iraqis, for the untold hundreds of thousands (by one estimate, a million) of civilian casualties that have occurred since we invaded, and your predictable semantic parsing of the word "genocide," reveal an implictly selective view of what constitutes an act of mass murder: where is your lamentation that we fail to grasp the tragedy that America has inflicted on the Iraqi people? You assert at length your view that Judt relativizes history and fails to fully appreciate the depth of the horror that was the holocaust. Yet you glibly and rather pedantically suggest that what has happened in Iraq is a mere bump in the road--for you, Iraq has been strategically necessary for American imperial ends ("uncontested air superiority in the region, and act to maintain short parity between factions"). You reveal as much by what you leave as as what you include. I don't really care to argue about Judt, but it's clear to me you are just using Judt to grind some larger axe here.
posted by ornate insect at 12:04 PM on April 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


paulsc--your total lack of expressed concern for the plight of the Iraqis, for the untold hundreds of thousands (by one estimate, a million) of civilian casualties that have occurred since we invaded, and your predictable semantic parsing of the word "genocide," reveal an implictly selective view of what constitutes an act of mass murder: where is your lamentation that we fail to grasp the tragedy that America has inflicted on the Iraqi people? You assert at length your view that Judt relativizes history and fails to fully appreciate the depth of the horror that was the holocaust. Yet you glibly and rather pedantically suggest that what has happened in Iraq is a mere bump in the road--for you, Iraq has been strategically necessary for American imperial ends ("uncontested air superiority in the region, and act to maintain short parity between factions"). You reveal as much by what you leave as as what you include. I don't really care to argue about Judt, but it's clear to me you are just using Judt to grind some larger axe here.
posted by ornate insect at 12:04 PM on April 14, 2008


Indeed. "My mound of skulls is special - how dare he argue that revering mounds of skulls is a recipe for self-repeating faliure?"
posted by Artw at 12:11 PM on April 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


"Your answer now appears to be "yes! stack them high! Our robots will help!".
posted by Artw at 3:01 PM on April 14

Not really. I don't think stacking skulls need be the measure of future conflict. You do, Artw.

My answer might be to sell nothing but infantry robots to the Israelis, and nothing but robot refueling tankers to the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, and let them sort it out, with a strong suggestion from us that they do so. We'll watch from Predator drones above. Maybe we stop killing fanatics generally, and get a lot better at selectively wounding them, so that we stop creating martyrs, and saddle them with the moral decision of taking out their own casualties, or keeping them alive. Maybe we do some of all that, and start new trade and diplomacy initiatives, too. Maybe we start flying in illegal Mexican immigrants by the plane load, as contractors, thereby reducing illegal immigration in our Southwest, and introducing a new population group into the Iraq situation.

Now, put down those skulls, and think of some new gambit, Artw. Something not as moldy as this old chestnut of yours. This must be the fourth or fifth discussion I've seen you trot this out in, and it never really comes to any point, does it?

So, if we're done discussing Judt, let's be done, then, shall we? At least, until you get some new material...
posted by paulsc at 12:38 PM on April 14, 2008


I think we might see the Iraqi situation settle down, eventually, to a long, slow simmer, where we maintain uncontested air superiority in the region

Now, the way I read the linked Judt essay, what he was saying was that Americans are unique among the Western democracies in the ease with which they reduce the real and horrific suffering of their battlefield enemies to glib abstraction, in part because as a civilian population they've seen next to nothing of war and its aftermath. I'd suggest that equating the utter debasement of a bloodied and traumatized nation to "a long, slow simmer" is precisely the sort of national historiographic blind spot he's referring to.

The reference to "uncontested air superiority," meanwhile, is exactly what Judt meant by the tendency toward militarist triumphalism in American public discourse. Which, among other snippets of your protracted harangue herein, paulsc, leads me to suspect that you don't like Judt because his argument is a direct assault on your own worldview.
posted by gompa at 12:43 PM on April 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


"... I don't really care to argue about Judt, ..."
posted by ornate insect at 3:04 PM on April 14

May I suggest you find another thread, then?
posted by paulsc at 12:44 PM on April 14, 2008


Skull stacking works best when you can maintain a happy ignorance as to what you are doing, I guess.
posted by Artw at 12:47 PM on April 14, 2008


I've got to admit that to start with I thought paulsc merely had over the top views on Tony Judt. I had no idea that I was arguing with one of the 'send in the robot infantry' brigade. (A brigade I hadn't previously been aware of.)
posted by Mocata at 12:56 PM on April 14, 2008


"... The reference to "uncontested air superiority," meanwhile, is exactly what Judt meant by the tendency toward militarist triumphalism in American public discourse. ..."
posted by gompa at 3:43 PM on April 14

Or maybe it was just me pulling loose ends of Artw's false dichotomy.

Or, perhaps it's just the literal description of Iraqi airspace, since Saddam Hussein sent his planes to Iran, to keep them from being torched, in 1991. Because it's been 17 years now, almost, that we have maintained exactly that, over Iraq, much to the satisfaction of the Saudis, the Kuwatis, the Emirates, Qatar, Jordan, Israel and even, yes, Iran and Syria. I wish, sincerely, it had worked out better for the Iraqis, but that's not why we started flying there. Maybe, it will (work out for the Iraqis), in the future.

As airspace goes, the Middle East's has been remarkably civilized in that period, except for Israel's actions in Lebanon, and especially so, compared to its ground.
posted by paulsc at 1:02 PM on April 14, 2008


What's false about it? It was a fairly simpkle and direct question. Not my fault your answer makes you look like an armchair genocide enthusiast.
posted by Artw at 1:05 PM on April 14, 2008


"What's false about it?"
posted by Artw at 4:05 PM on April 14

The same thing that's always false about it, Artw: That it describes anything real, or that it contains all the possible outcomes of conflict. It's just a canard you seem to dump in threads, frequently, for lack of something else to say.
posted by paulsc at 1:14 PM on April 14, 2008


Pile of skulls = the untimely death of a large number of people.

Surely it's not all that vague? Indeed weht you seem to be argueing for is all kinds of allowances to be made, so the deaths can be less concrete, and sort of abstracted away.
posted by Artw at 1:17 PM on April 14, 2008


paulsc--you want to have it both ways: you want to continue to act as if you are arguing about Judt, all the while bringing into this discussion sweeping suggestions about, among other things, mideast politics and how we must, in your view, view history (every tragedy it seems to you must be compared against the holocaust, and failure to follow this comparison strictly is to you morally bankrupt). You don't just have a bone to pick with Judt, you appear to have a much bigger bone to pick: that of making the holocaust the measure of all historical tragedy, past and present. You are making an implicit case here about moral calculus and the hermeneutics of historical remembering, but you are dogmatically rejecting any alternative views. The result is a flattening of history, and a remarkable tendency to read the past in a very idiosyncratic and selective way.
posted by ornate insect at 1:27 PM on April 14, 2008 [3 favorites]


"... Surely it's not all that vague? ... "
posted by Artw at 4:17 PM on April 14

Yes, actually it is.

"Pile of skulls" ≠ "the untimely death of a large number of people"

"Pile of skulls" is a metaphor, you like to use, I think, because you think it carries a mental image to readers that is gruesome. Else, why not simply say "the untimely death of a large number of people?"

Because "piling" is pejorative, when applied to human skulls. In our time, civilized people don't do that. To suggest that your opponent is ready to "pile skulls" is to suggest he is sub-human. Moreover, it's a little rhetorical trick you use to try to demonize those you don't agree with, Artw, by suggesting that they might be ready to not only pile skulls, but to measure the piles.

But if you really mean "the untimely deaths of a large number of people" just say so.

And then, let's go back and discuss low intensity conflict, which Judt doesn't seem to recognize as shaping history in large parts of the world, but which is how we've been managing the Western Hemisphere for most of the 20th century, although Judt conveniently ignores that.
posted by paulsc at 1:37 PM on April 14, 2008


paulsc--"low intensity conflict" as a "management" strategy of American foreign policy is a technocratic and misleading euphamism along the lines of "pacification" or "cleansing." To me it's a potentially all too easy way of wiping away some of the more brutal historical realities of America's actions throught the last century.
posted by ornate insect at 1:51 PM on April 14, 2008


Well, yes, I use stark imagery when describing the deaths of hundreds, thousands or millions of people. Who wouldn't? It's not like you don't know exactly what I'm talking about. It's not like you're above involking the stark imagery of Auschwitz yourself.

Your answer now sounds a lot like "Yes, piles of skulls CAN be justified by other piles of skulls, but really we should describe them as something else."
posted by Artw at 1:59 PM on April 14, 2008


"... You are making an implicit case here about moral calculus and the hermeneutics of historical remembering, but you are dogmatically rejecting any alternative views. The result is a flattening of history, and a remarkable tendency to read the past in a very idiosyncratic and selective way."
posted by ornate insect at 4:27 PM on April 14

That's rich, coming from someone whose first comment in the thread reached for connotations from 1984 within the first 20 words.

But your earlier point about sweeping generalizations regarding Middle East strategy is well taken. I'll stick to Judt, if you'll similarly refrain from unsubstantiated accusations of genocide on the part of the U.S.

And it will be a better discussion, all around.
posted by paulsc at 2:01 PM on April 14, 2008


Or we could all just go watch Terminator 2.
posted by Artw at 2:04 PM on April 14, 2008


"Well, yes, I use stark imagery when describing the deaths of hundreds, thousands or millions of people. Who wouldn't? It's not like you don't know exactly what I'm talking about. It's not like you're above involking the stark imagery of Auschwitz yourself. ..."

It's not "imagery," when I mention Auschwitz, Artw, it's personal experience, and observation. I went there. My hand trembled too, touching those iron posts. I've walked down Dachau's graveled yard, too, back beyond the grove of trees, where the crematorium compound still stood, and I went in, against my better judgement, and have wished since, I hadn't. So, there's that.

But how 'bout you? How many skulls do you usually pile, in one heap, when you personally pile real skulls? Because I don't think you have piled "hundreds, thousands or millions," yourself, in any real pile. It's just, I think, for you empty rhetoric. A trick, and not a clever one. And for what? For imagery?
posted by paulsc at 2:16 PM on April 14, 2008


Perhaps, then, he should spend some time, this coming Memorial Day, in one of those memorial sites he so decries in this piece. [...] 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.

One of Judt's strongest points is his criticism of the role of public memorialization in producing national identities. I think you're missing the power of that criticism if you associate it with 'get mine'ism. As I understand it, memorialization tends to overwhelm reason, accuracy, and historical balance in favor of creating national narratives of shared tragedy, victimhood, and renewed strength. Your point is exactly his: walking through a graveyard on Memorial Day changes minds, it makes arguments, it persuades. It substitutes passion for arguments, feelings for evidence, exultation and horror for decision and choice. Memorialization of 9/11 fuels an unjust war, memorialization of the Shoah fuels an unjust occupation, etc. Public memory tends towards ideology and away from history. These are the arguments, they're popular, in many cases justified, and not particularly unique to Judt. Certainly when it comes to Iraq and Israel they're simplistic, but so is much of the discourse in these areas because we can't get past the outrage over the past, the renewed sense of trauma and tragedy enforced by our public procedures of memorialization. Perhaps now is the time to admit that I FPP'd one of Judt's other pieces from the NYRB.

As you say, the past binds us, but it can blind us, too.
posted by anotherpanacea at 2:22 PM on April 14, 2008 [2 favorites]


paulsc--what's the matter, slow day at the AEI?

You've heard of the Trail of Tears, Sand Creek and My Lai, presumably?

I don't see you sticking to Judt anymore. Do you see anyone here downplaying or performing apologetics for the holocaust? No.

Do you see anyone here being remarkably silent regarding American acts of aggression, narrowly and unconvincingly parsing the definition of genocide, implicitly insisting that American-sponsored mass murder is part of the price for maintaining its power? I do, and I'm guessing I'm not alone.
posted by ornate insect at 2:26 PM on April 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


"... To me it's a potentially all too easy way of wiping away some of the more brutal historical realities of America's actions throught the last century."
posted by ornate insect at 4:51 PM on April 14

Hard as it is to discuss, I think there is a moral relativity to the scale of death, and I think Judt tries to suggest that there is, too, so on that, at least, we agree. I think I'm a lot less flip about that, than Judt is, but I claim no priesthood for my insight on the subject.

That said, I'm much gladder to be a citizen of the Western Hemisphere, than the Eastern one. I think the fact that we've acted, often, if not always correctly, throughout the 20th century, to keep order in this half of the world has some bearing on that. For every crime committed in the name of United Fruit, we dug a shovel of earth for the Panama Canal. And in the end, we paid off Colombia for slights they felt, we paid out our lease after building the Canal, and we handed it over to the Panamanians. We could have done more to stop Pinochet. I don't know that we should have left people on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. We got Noriega. We finally got Escobar. We stood by, bemused, as Peron was Peron, and Eva became a legend. We stood by, and shouldn't have, while El Salvador went into madness. We've failed to be as good a partner to our neighbor to the South, as to our neighbor to the North.

For the purposes of this discussion, all that is notable about this, is that Judt doesn't mention any of it, in his piece. The body count, apparently isn't great enough to be included in his tabulation.

And that's a shame. Because when he goes so far as to say
"... 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.

We have been our own Hemisphere's policeman, since the Monroe Doctrine. And that has shaped us, as much or more than 20th century experiences in the horrors of Europe's trenches, or Asia's jungles. We've learned that, like a policeman, it's often useful to carry a stick, and hope you don't need to use it, but that sometime you have to. That, and loans, and jawing, and trade agreements, and more jawing, and training all our neighbors armies, and more jawing, has kept this hemisphere from blowing up, despite Communist provocateurs, and economic disparities. That's a pretty good record, for what I mean by low intensity conflict management.

In the end, we've learned, slowly, with our hemispheric neighbors, that we can, in the main, get along, behind undefended borders. I think we ought to get a little credit for that.
posted by paulsc at 3:16 PM on April 14, 2008


"... walking through a graveyard on Memorial Day changes minds, it makes arguments, it persuades. It substitutes passion for arguments, feelings for evidence, exultation and horror for decision and choice. ..."

I don't believe people leave their minds in the car, when they walk through fields of white crosses. I see no problem with having a lump in my throat, and remembering that the people lying under each of those markers, individually, didn't want to. But did. On that point, I differ 180 degrees from Judt, as do, I believe, many. And I do find his simplistic imagination of the minds of others on this point paternalistic, and insulting.

The fact is, Americans do, as individuals and as a nation, get past the passions that inflame our past. After WWII, we rebuilt Japan and we rebuilt most of Europe, and defended South Korea, too. We stumbled badly in Vietnam, but we kept Berlin going. We went to the moon, in peace. We agreed to keep Antarctica a continent undivided by national claims. Right or wrong, we've made the U.N. work, to whatever degree it has. We made NATO some real thing, that has helped shape Europe. And we talked to China, when that was so painful to many of us, that it was nearly unthinkable publicly.

These are not the acts of vengeful, jingoistic people. I think Judt is powerfully wrong about this, and he doesn't make his case by ignoring all this.

And I stayed out of the other Judt thread you linked, purposefully.
posted by paulsc at 3:54 PM on April 14, 2008


These are not the acts of vengeful, jingoistic people.

That generation was able to overcome vengeance and jingoism. Is this one? I suspect that leadership matters in this, and that we have been more poorly served by Bush than we would have been by Roosevelt or Eisenhower. And it has a lot to do with the difference between the World Trade Center and Guam.
posted by anotherpanacea at 4:34 PM on April 14, 2008


It's a very interesting argument, and I agree whole-heartedly that the US experience of war - along with the Dominions (Can, Aus, NZ) - has been much more distanced from civilian life than Europe, Asia, Africa or Central and South America.

But then the argument hits a snag. This distance from the brutal realities of war may be part of the American attitudes towards the military and war, but the US is far from the only pro-military country. Many countries which have known brutal, horrific war in the twentieth century nonetheless have strong militaristic or jingoistic cultures. Russia, China, North Korea -- all of these places have had occupations, mass civilian deaths.

So I don't think he has a reasonable explanation for pro-military cultures - his model just doesn't fit.
posted by jb at 10:41 PM on April 14, 2008


but he didn't say it was a universal model or that it was the only reason.
posted by stbalbach at 5:43 AM on April 15, 2008


BTW, those robot hordes? We've deployed bomb robots and intelligence robots in Iraq since 2003. The Army started armed robot test deployments in Iraq in 2007, and what has been learned has already resulted in improvements. We're a long way from truly autonomous armed robot brigades, but already, it costs less to build and deploy a SWORDS robot than a similarly equipped infantryman. Add remote operation electronics, and one or two robot operators could run 8 to 10 SWORDS style robots, from a long, safe ways away.

Consider what this does to the morale of a fanatic, or a suicide bomber. It's one thing to kill yourself taking your enemy along, but quite another to consider dying to disable some robot. But techological innovation doesn't really work for Judt's models of conflict either, so he probably doesn't approve of us making asymmetrical conflicts still more asymmetrical. But I do.
posted by paulsc at 1:05 PM on April 15, 2008


but he didn't say it was a universal model or that it was the only reason.
posted by stbalbach more than 12 hours ago [+]


But since it clearly doesn't fit with the other examples, you would think that he would take it as one possible factor and start thinking about others that do fit. It just seems like sloppy thinking, of a kind that historians (and I say this as one in training) are often prone to. I think it's because we are trained in argumentation, but not in model building, but then we presume to go around trying to explain how the world works without really the basic skills to start doing that.

Like noticing that even that factor doesn't bear out in other cases: Canadian society has exactly the same distanced relationship to the history of war, perhaps even more so (as white Canada has not experiences a major domestic conflict since c1775, 1812, whereas the US had a devastating civil war in the 1860s), but a very different relationship to the military both as a part of the state and as a part of the culture.

Of course, the whole article read a lot like most American exceptionalist arguments, most of which fall apart when you start to look at the world beyond the US and Western Europe.

There are many other factors which may be more significant, such the use of war/threats to boltster gov't power, and the lack of freedom or the lack of willingness of the press to call anyone on fear mongering. Obviously, in the US it's the latter -- the press is free, but unwilling to be strongly critical those in power, or really critical at all. It is actually quite alien to people from other Anglo countries how very, well, soft the American press is, and how unwilling they are to do more than report on what people say, rather than get out and investigate the truth behind political claims. News here seems to be a "they said, they said" story, rather than a "they said, but research has shown" story.
posted by jb at 3:13 AM on April 16, 2008


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