Displaying posts categorized under

HISTORY

HISTORY Comments turned off

Chanukah Guide for the Perplexed 2022 Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

By on December 17th, 2022

https://bit.ly/3huvOyQ 

1. NBC news, December 13, 2022: “An ancient treasure trove of silver coins dating back 2,200 years, found in a desert cave in Israel, could add crucial new evidence to support a story of Jewish rebellion…. The 15 silver coins were hidden [during] the Maccabean revolt from 167-160 B.C., when Jewish warriors rebelled against the Seleucid [Syrian] Empire….” 

2. The US relevance. In 1777, Chanukah was celebrated during the most critical battle at Valley Forge, which solidified the victory of George Washington’s Continental Army over the British monarchy.

Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a player in the ratification of the US Constitution, paved the road to the Boston Tea Party, 1773: “What shining examples of patriotism do we behold in Joshua, Samuel, the Maccabees and the illustrious princes and prophets among the Jews…” 

Chanukah according to US Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, December 1915: “Chanukah, the Feast of the Maccabees…celebrates a victory of the spirit over things material… a victory also over [external, but also] more dangerous internal enemies, the Sadducees [the upper social and economic echelon]; a victory over the ease-loving, safety-playing, privileged, powerful few, who in their pliancy would have betrayed the best interests of the people; a victory of democracy over aristocracy…. The struggle of the Maccabees is of eternal worldwide interest…. It is a struggle in which all Americans, non-Jews as well as Jews… are vitally affected…”

3. Jewish national liberation holiday.  Chanukah (evening of December 18 – December 26, 2022) is the only Jewish holiday that commemorates an ancient national liberation struggle in the Land of Israel, unlike the national liberation holidays – Passover, Sukkot/Tabernacles, and Shavou’ot/Pentecost – which commemorate the Exodus from slavery in Egypt to liberation in the land of Israel, and unlike Purim, which commemorates liberation from a Persian attempt to annihilate the Jewish people.  

Continue reading →
HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Bill of Rights:This Grand Security Of The Rights Of The People Gary M. Galles

By on December 16th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/15/this-grand-security-of-the-rights-of-the-people/

In is a not-uncommon observation that Americans take far too much for granted. But it is too little recognized that near the top of the list of blessings we take too much for granted is our Bill of Rights, whose 231st anniversary is December 15th.

Not just the Bill of Rights, which Justice Hugo Black called “the Thou Shalt Nots,” but the debate over them is worth more attention than most Americans give it. One reason is that our Constitution’s framers initially opposed a Bill of Rights. The reversal came from Anti-Federalist objections that without adding certain critical Thou Shalt Nots to limit the federal government, it would have far too much power, to citizens’ detriment. Another reason is that we have a record of the positions taken by the Federalists in Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 84, and the positions taken by the Anti-Federalists in the works of the writer who called himself Brutus. Since that debate still informs the basis for upholding our rights against threatened federal assaults on them, which are currently accelerating, it remains at least as important today as it was in 1791.

Hamilton’s opposition to an added Bill of Rights in Federalist 84 began with the argument that the Constitution effectively already had one, in its “provisions in favor of particular privileges and rights [e.g., habeas corpus], which, in substance amount to the same thing.” Further, “bills of rights are … stipulations between kings and their subjects … they have no application to constitutions professedly founded upon the power of the people … Here, in strictness, the people surrender nothing; and as they retain everything they have no need of particular reservations.”

Hamilton’s main argument, however, was that “bills of rights … would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed … it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible premise for claiming that power.”

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM, HISTORY Comments turned off

Why Let Anti-Semites Define Jewishness? Hanukkah reminds us how important it is to maintain our cultural and religious vitality. By Daniella Greenbaum Davis

By on December 16th, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-let-anti-semites-define-jewishness-hanukkah-maccabean-revolt-greeks-minority-community-culture-11671139089?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

“The Maccabees first made this case more than two millennia ago. When their physical war was over, they fought and won on the battlefield of ideas, re-educating their fellow Jews about what it means to be Jewish. Their success brought about a resurgence of Jewish national, religious and cultural strength. Their example can light our path today.”

For Hallmark consumers, Hanukkah is a familiar and uplifting story: A subjugated people (the Jews) rise up against their tyrannical oppressors (the Seleucid Greeks) and prevail against all odds with grit and God’s help. It’s a made-for-TV narrative. But it’s also incomplete.

Contrary to popular scripts, the war was primarily one between Jews and other Jews. The conflict saw a small group, the Maccabees, fighting to preserve their heritage and uniquely Jewish way of life against a much larger majority that had assimilated into the Hellenistic culture of the time. Recalling this more complete story offers a valuable lesson for American Jews celebrating Hanukkah next week.

Continue reading →
BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

Weimar: Intoxication and Calamity: Wolfgang Kasper

By on December 14th, 2022

Professor Harald Jähner, a German cultural historian, became well known in the English-speaking world as the author of a best-seller about post-war Germany, Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955 (2021). Now he has published another remarkable book, Höhenrausch. This book, so far available only in German, deals with the hedonistic, turbulent years of the Weimar Republic. Given the success of his first book, I expect it to be published before long in English.

The history of the short-lived Weimar Republic (1918 to 1933), Jähner justifiably complains, is always described from the hindsight standpoint of the Nazi takeover, as if that outcome had been inevitable. In this book, through quotes from diarists, letter-writers, film-makers, journalists, song-writers, cabaret performers and novelists, the facts and feelings are retold as they appeared to observers at the time. The name Hitler thus appears in a substantial context for the first time only after 74 per cent of the text, namely when we read about the growing brutality of the storm-troopers during the incipient Depression.

The Great War ended with the signature of the armistice on November 11, 1918, at Compiègne near Paris by a new, non-imperial government in Berlin. Most German soldiers were still entrenched outside the territory of the Reich. Now, many returned home convinced that they had been betrayed. The defeat was a sudden, abstract event, the result of a short negotiation in a faraway place. Many returned servicemen resented not only the social-democratic “peace mongers”, but also the wartime emancipation of women. Many among them detested the new republic, whose democratic constitution had been negotiated in a theatre at Weimar, as “Red Berlin” was deemed too dangerous. Some 400,000 of these humiliated soldiers remained in more-or-less organised units (Freikorps), while the communists were certain that the momentum of the Russian revolution would now sweep westward. They preached and practised violence to promote their cause.

The new republic’s social-democratic (SPD) government sought help from returned servicemen to fight the communist threat. And fight they did. The communist leaders Karl Liebknecht and the effervescent Rosa Luxemburg (originally Rozalia Luksenburg) were among the more than 1200 people murdered by the Freikorps. The communists of course engaged in the same sort of extreme cancel culture.

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

Holocaust Justice By Alex Grobman, PhD

By on December 2nd, 2022

https://jewishlink.news/features/55212-holocaust-justice

“Holocaust and Justice: Representation and Historiography of the Holocaust in Post-War Trials,” by David Bankier and Dan Michman, Eds. Yad Vashem Publications. 2010. ISBN:
978-965-308-353-0.

A popular misconception about the 13 trials conducted by the International Military Tribunal in Germany between 1945 and 1949 is that the Holocaust was a primary subject of the prosecution. The Nuremberg Trials were the “first time in history, political and military leaders of a country were tried and indicted for crimes they had committed during wartime,” Israeli historians David Bankier and Dan Michman note. As Lawrence Douglas, an American law professor, points out in this volume, the idea that those who commit mass atrocities must be held accountable in criminal courts—whether domestic, international or in some combination of the two—is now universally accepted.

For the unprecedented events, an international tribunal was convened. The creation of these unique legal proceedings raises a number of questions: What was the background that enabled this development, and what impact did these trials have on the postwar world—on international law, on the prosecution of war crimes, on historiography and collective memory, on coping with the past, on media coverage of the trials, on the cinematic image of World War II and the Holocaust? Significantly, the German attempt to annihilate European Jews was not the central focus of the trials, although the “very facts of the persecution of the Jews and their wholesale murder were explicitly mentioned in several instances and implicitly in many,” Bankier and Michman conclude.

To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the first Nuremberg Trials, the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Research held an international conference focusing on the issues the trials raised and selected a number of papers presented at the conference by scholars from Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Belgium, Israel, the U.S. and Canada for this extremely important volume.

The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with Nuremberg Trials—their background, the environment in which they transpired, their judicial character and their long-range influence in the immediate years after the war. The second section focuses on the trials of German war criminals conducted by German courts, and how they were covered by the media and the way in which the Holocaust was portrayed by them.The last section examines the trials in countries Germany occupied during the war: Belgium, France, the Soviet Union, Poland and Italy, in an effort to understand the historical and legal background and the long-term influence on memory of the and how the Holocaust is being represented.

Continue reading →
HISTORY Comments turned off

Martha Gellhorn Loved Hemingway and Israel (MAY 1921)by Rachel Shteir

By on November 2nd, 2022

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/considering-martha-gellhorn

In 1959, Martha Gellhorn wrote that her first marriage, to Ernest Hemingway, which lasted from 1940 until 1945, was “a distant dream, not very true, and curiously embarrassing.” More than 60 years later, you would think that she deserves more than to be cast as Hemingway’s third wife. But that is exactly what the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary Hemingway does.

Born in St. Louis in 1908, Martha bore witness to most of the wars of the 20th century, with her insights captured in 21 books. She believed that writing was in the service of fighting injustice, and her work demonstrated bracing honesty, unfathomable courage, and a strict code of right and wrong. Yet her old-fashioned virtues make her difficult to approach. Add this to her fierce, late-in-life defense of Israel and the fact that she killed herself in 1998 rather than lose her eyesight, and she becomes, as my students would say, less relatable. Never mind that she continued to travel and file stories into her 80s, defying the common wisdom that war correspondent is a job reserved for young people. Or that her lean, arresting style can make you weep. Too often written off as adjunct to Hemingway, she once said that she wanted her journalism to “eliminate the sound of me screaming.”

Meanwhile, Burns and Novick’s Hemingway is the queer victim of toxic masculinity (he liked to dress as a woman in bed with his fourth wife). B & N are too smart to paint Gellhorn as the “bitch” that some of Papa’s friends viewed her as, but they do introduce her as a writer who “had a crush” on him; Meryl Streep reads her letters in mid-Atlantic tones. Their Gellhorn, while sympathetic, shows too little of the brave, charming, bullying, vain, daring, mythmaking female writer and too much of a #MeToo heroine chafing at her husband’s tyranny.

Unlike Hemingway, Gellhorn loved her mother, Edna, a beautiful suffragist who married George Gellhorn, a gynecologist. Both were half Jewish. Martha, their third child, grew up assimilated. In her largely excellent biography, Carolyn Moorhead only reports one incident of antisemitism in Gellhorn’s childhood, when her friend, Johnny Stix, was not invited to a dance because she was Jewish and Gellhorn also refused to go in solidarity.

If the Gellhorns—especially the impressive George—worshipped anything in the Jewish tradition, it was education. After Gellhorn came home from school with female genitalia missing from the drawings in her biology textbook, her parents started their own progressive school. Gellhorn attended, and there she began to cultivate friendships with men and women she admired. It was this need that may have resulted in her marriage to Hemingway, which the documentary series does not explore. She needed heroes to model herself after, and she understood early on that there would be a cost. As she later wrote, she needed “my desperate faith in the human spirit … revived and rewarded.” She did not find that at Bryn Mawr, where she went in 1926 and where she read Knut Hamsun and edited the college newspaper.

Continue reading →
HISTORY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

MARTHA GELLHORN ON THE ARABS OF PALESTINE OCTOBER 1961

By on November 2nd, 2022

MARTHA GELLHORN, novelist, journalist, and former war correspondent, has recently returned from a journey to the Middle East, where she went to see the “Palestinian Refugee Problem” in terms of real life, real people. Here she reports how the Arab refugees and the Arab Israelis live, and what they say about themselves, their past and their future.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1961/10/the-arabs-of-palestine/304203/

The Palestinian refugees are unfortunate victims of a brief moment in history. It is forgotten that Jews are also victims in the same manner, of the same moment. The Arab-Israel war and its continuous aftermath produced a two-way flight of peoples. Nearly half a million Jews, leaving behind everything they owned, escaped from the Arab countries where they lived to start life again as refugees in Israel. Within one generation, if civilization lasts, Palestinian refugees will merge into the Arab nations, because the young will insist on real lives instead of endless waiting. If we can keep the peace, however troubled, the children of Palestinian refugees will make themselves at home among their own kind, in their ancestral lands. For the Jews there is no other ancestral land than Israel.

Continue reading →
FOREIGN POLICY, HISTORY Comments turned off

In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud Biden, Putin, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Robin Ashenden

By on October 28th, 2022

https://quillette.com/2022/10/25/in-the-shadow-of-the-mushroom-cloud/

The threat of a nuclear war, absent from our headlines for decades, is in the news again. Putin threatens Ukraine with an atomic strike and Biden tells us we’re closer to Armageddon than any time in the last 60 years. Meanwhile, British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace flies to the US to discuss the danger of Russia detonating a nuclear bomb over the Black Sea as a show of destructive strength. A bumper crop of articles have appeared in the world press announcing that this time the nuclear threat could be in earnest. British MP Robert Seely, a long-time Russia expert, reminds us of the country’s first-use policy and warns that “saying Putin is bluffing is no longer serious.”

In the Spectator, historian Mark Galeotti tries to calm nerves by walking us through all the complicated steps the Kremlin would have to take in order to release a nuclear device. But in April, Galeotti was writing about Putin’s RS-28 Sarmat missile—a new super-weapon with a range of 11,000 miles and a maximum load-capacity of 50 megatons (over 2,500 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb), which carries 15 nuclear warheads dispersible to multiple locations. Reportedly, it is due to be operational in December. Meanwhile, in the US, bunker sales are soaring, with one company reporting that, following the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine in February, enquiries regarding shelters had risen from less than 100 a month to over 3,000. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, indolently at grass since the end of the Cold War, are apparently cantering over the horizon towards us once again.

Biden’s reference point for nuclear danger was the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the comparison was apt. Go back exactly 60 years this week and we find a crisis with at least superficial similarities to the one we are experiencing today—two rival camps stonily contemplating one another, one of which had a smaller, less powerful country in its gunsights; a nation led by a charismatic leader in combat fatigues desperately calling for help from the other side. In 1962, however, the war was cold not hot, and the small country was Cuba, a Caribbean island just 90 miles from the United States.

That Cuba was menaced by the US is not in doubt. Since Fidel Castro’s communist revolution in 1958, it had been near the top of America’s “to do” list. The doomed and disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961—in which 1,400 anti-Castro Cubans were encouraged to storm the island, insufficiently supported by the White House, and duly captured and imprisoned by Castro—was only a temporary setback. It was followed by a US economic blockade and the infamous Operation Mongoose, a series of botched US assassination plots against Castro. A communist takeover on America’s doorstep was anathema to the White House. What if other Latin American nations followed suit?

Continue reading →
BOOKS, HISTORY Comments turned off

39 Years after Marine Barracks Bombing in Beirut And the killers have still not been brought to justice. by Kenneth R. Timmerman

By on October 21st, 2022

https://www.frontpagemag.com/39-years-after-marine-barracks-bombing-in-beirut/

Ken Timmerman’s 12th book of non-fiction, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, was recently released by Post Hill Press. Timmerman was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 and has covered the Middle East for 40 years.

This Sunday is the 39th anniversary of the Iranian attack on the US Marines barracks in Beirut, which took the life of 241 US Marines. It was the single largest loss of life in the history of the US Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima.

Every year on this date families gather for memorial services around the country to commemorate the lives of these first American victims of Islamic Iran’s vicious, relentless, and still unending war on America.

The attack on the US Marines followed on the heels of the April 18, 1983, attack on the US Embassy in Beirut. In my new book, And the Rest is History: Tales of Hostages, Arms Dealers, Dirty Tricks, and Spies, I call these attacks the “first blood” in Iran’s unending war on America.

For years we have known the names of the main perpetrators. Until now, only one has been brought to justice: Imad Fayez Mughniyeh.

Prior to 9/11, he was the terrorist with the most U.S. blood on his hands. A Lebanese-born Shiite Muslim who worked in Yasser Arafat’s elite Force 17, he was hired by Iran as their chief overseas terrorist once Arafat was forced out of Beirut in September 1982.

Mughniyeh was quick to prove his worth to his new masters with a series of massive car bombs in Lebanon. The first, on Nov. 11, 1982, took down the seven-story Israeli military headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon, killing 67 IDF personnel and Border Guards.

Next was the April 18, 1983, bombing of the U.S. embassy on the Beirut corniche, which I witnessed first-hand. Sixty-three people perished in that blast, including seventeen Americans. Among them were Kenneth Haas and Robert Ames, the CIA’s top spies in the Middle East. Indeed. Mugniyeh’s target was a top secret meeting of CIA station chiefs from around the region. In a single blow, Iran decapitated the Agency’s intelligence apparatus in the region.

Continue reading →
ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, HISTORY Comments turned off

The West Mimics Mao, Takes a Green Leap Forward The green scramble to transform energy is reminiscent of China’s forced industrialization. By Helen Raleigh

By on September 22nd, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-west-mimics-mao-takes-a-green-leap-forward-clean-energy-china-communism-farming-industrialization-quota-11663767101?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

The green movement’s rush to transform the energy economy while ignoring the laws of nature and economics calls to mind China’s ruinous Great Leap Forward. By 1957, Mao Zedong had grown impatient with his country’s slow industrial development relative to the West. He sought to transform China quickly from an agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse through forced industrialization and agricultural collectivization.

Steel production was a priority of the Great Leap Forward. Mao wanted China to surpass the U.K. in steel output within 15 years. Across the country, including in the village where my father lived, people tried to contribute to this goal by building small backyard furnaces. Each village had a production quota to meet, so everyone—including children and the elderly—pitched in. Using everything they could find to keep the furnaces burning, villagers melted down farming tools and cooking pots. These efforts yielded only pig iron, which had to be decarbonized to make steel. That was a process a backyard furnace couldn’t handle. The effort and resources were wasted.

The steel campaign diverted manpower from farming, even as the government ordered farmers to meet unrealistic quotas. Local party officials initially compelled farmers to experiment with ineffective and sometimes harmful techniques, such as deep plowing and sowing seeds much closer than usual. When these radical methods failed to increase yield and depleted the soil, local leaders had no choice but to lie to their political superiors about how much had been produced (a practice referred to as “launching a Sputnik”). Based on these false production figures, the state demanded villages sell more grain than they could spare. In a vicious circle, the more the local officials lied about their output, the higher the central government set the quotas. Farmers were forced to hand over every bit of grain they had, including the following year’s seeds, to meet the quotas. Resistance was violently suppressed.

The combination of lies, failed experiments, absence of labor and violent requisition practices led to famine. From 1959 through 1961, an estimated 30 million to 40 million Chinese people died from hunger. The Chinese government continues to refer to the famine as a natural disaster, pretending forces beyond their control were to blame for this man-made calamity.

Continue reading →