Guilty by Association

Fanny Kemble felt accused from the moment she arrived at her husband’s Georgia plantation in December of 1838. On the faces of his slaves, she saw the same sad and fearful expression, conveying “a sense of incalculable past loss and injury and a dread of incalculable future loss and injury.” Deep down, she must have known that, for all her pity, and despite her small acts of kindness toward “these wretched people,” as she called them, she was complicit in their oppression.

Kemble, a famous actress in England before she married Pierce Butler, gave up earning her own living to be kept by a wealthy husband whose family had lived off the unpaid labor of slaves for two generations. From the comfort of her Philadelphia mansion, she could entertain abolitionists. She could even write against slavery, but this did not change the fact that, as Butler bluntly put it, “the act of marrying a slave owner made her also a slave owner...”

At moments in her Journal, Kemble admits as much to herself:

I am getting perfectly savage over all these doings, and really think I should consider my own throat and those of my children well cut if some night the people were to take it into their heads to clear off scores in that fashion.

She cannot pretend to be pure, cannot stand above the ugly reality she witnesses. Sad and fearful, and guilty, she fled the Georgia plantation after four months.

A century later, white outsiders who, like Kemble, became insiders in the South—the Jim Crow South—felt the same complicated emotions as they contemplated the situation of the blacks. Refugee Jewish scholars from Hitler’s Germany who came to the United States and wound up teaching in black colleges in the segregated South, were dismayed to find themselves transformed overnight from victims to oppressors, owing to their white skin. Their response was quietly to circumvent the Jim Crow Laws, inviting their students into their homes while holding them to the same high standards they had expected of their students back in their German universities, replicating as best they could in their impoverished circumstances the vibrant academic community they had lost. Tellingly enough, few returned to Germany after the war.

Lisa Lieberman's translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Paris Under the Occupation" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads, Barnes and Noble Nook Books, Kobo and Google Books.  Her current project, Lost Belongings, explores the moral and political choices of exiled Holocaust survivors after the war.

A continually expanding concept of national security is not viable for America's future

by John Prados


The following is excerpted from John Prados' 11,000 word essay Rethinking National Security available for e-Readers through Now and Then Reader.

America today stands at a crossroads. Beset by economic woes, driven to attempt reform that might enable the nation to regain a sense of honor and purpose, and seeking desperately to identify what actions are needed, Americans are searching for a way forward. But there is an elephant in the room that blocks the way: what we call “national security.” Few observers have paid much attention to national security. Citizens have long deferred to government and allowed it full sway in the defense of the land. But our present crisis is too great, and our resources too strained, to continue with business as usual. America’s myriad difficulties cannot be overcome without dealing with the issue of national security.

As presently conceived, national security is a trap. Left untouched, pursuit of it will continue to cripple our country. In the essay that follows I try to show how national security evolved, why in its present form it ensnares the nation, what would be the consequences of failure to correct the situation, and what a new approach might look like. I also argue that a solution to this problem is urgent: escaping the national security trap may be the critical issue of our era.

During his presidential campaign Barack Obama made many promises, some of them concerning foreign policy and defense. His ideas resonated with Americans. Candidate Obama promised to end the war in Iraq; close the notorious detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; stop torture and renditions; move away from the nuclear standoff that still exists with Russia; ratify the comprehensive test-ban treaty; end regulations that oppress gay Americans serving in the military; strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency; and place U.S. diplomacy on a broader foundation. Mr. Obama foresaw a global fair deal in which the United States would multiply assistance to the Third World, forgive the debts of underdeveloped countries, and reduce foreign hostility by means of transparent policies and frank answers to critics of America. Candidate Obama believed in strengthening common security by investing in the common humanity of all peoples.

Four years on, much of this agenda remains unfulfilled. Case in point: the day after his inauguration, President Obama issued an executive order providing that the Guantanamo prison be closed within a year. He was not able to enforce that directive. Objections from politicians, officials, and citizens over the relocation or release of detainees comprised a mounting wave of resistance that stalled the program. The administration’s initiative to move the trial of admitted terrorist Khalid Sheik Mohammed, one of the architects of the attacks of September 11, 2001, to a civilian court—and thus end the gravely flawed military tribunals created by the Bush administration—then failed. The collapse of this effort effectively ended the president’s entire program for detainees.

Obama had also advocated a variety of steps to reset U.S. relations with Russia and eradicate the vestiges of the nuclear balance of terror, disturbingly persistent even after the end of the Cold War. Final ratification of a comprehensive nuclear test-ban treaty, making new designs for nuclear weapons more difficult, and reaching a fresh agreement with Moscow on further reductions in existing weapons stockpiles were among these initiatives. But Senate fears of weakening the nation’s defenses put the final nails in the coffin of ratification. When Obama went ahead and canceled design of a new generation of weapons, senators made the program’s continuation a condition for their ratification of the arms-reduction agreement.

To reduce the danger of accidental nuclear war, the Obama administration suggested that both the United States and Russia modify the command control of their long-range missiles so that targets in the other nation would not be preset into the rockets’ guidance systems. Meanwhile a different initiative held over from the Bush administration called for an anti-ballistic-missile defense system that requires placing early-detection radars on the territory of nations contiguous to Russia. Moscow considers this an aggressive action aimed at Russia, but Obama officials continued the program. The Russians responded with actions of their own, including the rejection of the measure to reduce the danger of accidental war.

One campaign promise that President Obama fulfilled was his commitment to end the oppressive treatment of gay Americans by the military in the form of its “don’t ask, don’t tell” regulations, under which admitted homosexuals were dismissed from the armed forces. When the White House mandated cancellation of this regimen, a procession of generals and admirals—and powerful politicians—resisted by arguing that permitting gays to serve openly in the military would reduce the effectiveness of U.S. forces. Obama won through, and legislation ending the obsolete regulations was enacted into law.

In each of these situations involving foreign policy and defense, a common thread may be found in behind-the-scenes maneuvering and policy debates: the single concept of “national security.” Unremarked by nearly everyone, the idea of national security has expanded to the point where today it has acquired a quasi-mystical meaning. Almost anything that relates remotely to the nation’s well-being is declared within the realm of national security. As a candidate Barack Obama subscribed to many forward-thinking ideas. As president many of his campaign commitments remain in limbo precisely because of the demands of national security. But the president is not merely a prisoner of aggressive national security stalwarts. In important ways he himself believes in its precepts.

The central problem is not an individual—even a president—and not a cohort of advocates. America’s crisis today hinges in large part on an overweening and outmoded concept of national security. Left over from Cold War days, it has ballooned far beyond its original meaning. And this has happened without serious consideration by American citizens. If it is not curbed, national security will drive the decline of the very state it aims to preserve. Traditional national security is a trap.

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John Prados is a senior fellow of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He is the author of more than twenty books in the field, including 'Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA;' 'Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975;' 'Combined Fleet Decoded: The Secret History of U.S. Intelligence and the Japanese Navy in World War II;' and 'Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush.' He lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.


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The complete essay 'Rethinking National Security' is available to purchase for $2.99 Kindle and iPad through Amazon and iTunes.

Happy Birthday, Charles Fourier

Picture yourself in a commune near Boston

With lions as butlers and lemonade seas

Everyone’s willing to share their possessions

And work for the community

Happy small children collect all the trash

Riding on Shetland ponies

Free education, free love

Total equality

The magnificent failure known as Brook Farm, a utopian commune set up in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was more fantastic than anything dreamed up by John Lennon. Founded by free-thinking New Englanders in 1841—the hippies of their generation—its ambitious program gave ownership of the community to anyone who lived and worked there, one share distributed for each day a member worked, and provided a high-quality education from preschool through college for all of the colony’s children. Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the original shareholders; Ralph Waldo Emerson, the poet and Transcendentalist, along with feminist author Margaret Fuller, and the fathers of Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe were all enthusiastic about the enterprise.

The experiment was based on the socialist ideals of the French reformer Charles Fourier. Like other late-18th-century rationalists, including Ben Franklin, Fourier believed you could solve all the problems of the world if you just put your mind to it. Putting his mind to the problems of urban and industrial society, he came up with the “back-to-the-land” philosophy that inspired not only Brook Farm, but numerous communes throughout the United States, not to mention the Kibbutz model in Israel.

But Fourier didn’t stop at social engineering. He predicted that a new planetary alignment would change the earth. The North Pole would melt and the seas would lose their saltiness and turn to lemonade. Wild animals would become the servants of humankind. So maybe he went off the deep end, but his ideas were incredibly influential. Karl Marx “borrowed” his criticism of capitalism, the exploitation of workers for the benefit of factory owners, and his understanding of the way that factory work alienated workers. Others picked up on his support of women’s rights—Fourier coined the word “feminism”— his critique of the institution of marriage and advocacy of sexual freedom, including same-sex unions.

All in all, he was a pretty radical guy, not only for his time, but for ours as well. “The first right of men is the right to work and the right to a minimum wage,” he said. “This is precisely what has gone unrecognized in all the constitutions. Their primary concern is with favored individuals who are not in need of work.”

Charles Fourier was born on April 7, 1772, and died on October 10, 1837.

Lisa Lieberman's translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Paris Under the Occupation" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads, Barnes and Noble Nook Books and Google Books.

Higher Ed Commoditization

Joshua Kim reviewed Now and Then Reader's 'Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future' by Richard J. Tofel in today's edition of Inside Higher Ed.  In his review, Kim looks at what higher education can learn from the mistakes that the newspaper industry made as they adapted to the offerings of the digital world.

In the news world, newspapers neglected to make investments in the reporters and editors that were the traditional comparative advantage of print media, and could have provided the service (in-depth reporting) that could have motivated readers to keep paying for content. In higher ed, we should be sure to invest in our greatest resource - our faculty - as we depend on the teaching and research that they produce to bring in students and research dollars. 

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/4-higher-ed-lessons-why-american-newspapers-gave-away-future#ixzz1qcVbGhaX
Inside Higher Ed 

The questions Kim asks are particularly resonant with yesterday's news that Santa Monica College plans to implement a tiered-pricing plan for their classes. Students trying to get in to the most popular classes, will pay more to gain access to the courses they need.    The changes are proposed in response to over-enrollment in the College at a time when budget cuts have reduced faculty and thus capacity. David Blaine of the American Association of Community Colleges is quoted in yesterday's New York Times article on the plan:

But the impetus behind it, he said, is clear. “In many cases, and California most prominently, amid the recession there was a huge spike in enrollment concurrent with budget cuts,” Mr. Baime said. “The colleges have just maxed out in terms of how many students they can serve.”

The fact that this new structure, the first of its kind, is being implemented at a community college level as opposed to a private university is particularly concerning and raises the questions of the responsibility of community colleges, in general.  It seems  logical conclusion that the two-tiered pricing system will exclude students who cannot afford to pay for the higher classes. Just as it is with the rest of the commodities we're offered in all aspects of daily life, choices will have to be made by those on tighter budgets; and, in most cases, the lower cost, and subsequently lower-value option will be chosen.

Clearly, if Santa Monica College's new system gets approved by state regulators, it be replicated in other schools, both private and public.   Since demand raises prices across all realm of products, be it nanny services or haircuts, the cost of higher education will continue to rise.

But what if Santa Monica College's pricing system has the reverse effect?  Could an ad hoc pricing structure further commoditize education services driving students to look for alternate learning resources and subsequently bring the prices down.  As Kim points out, just as the newspaper industry faced competition from websites in the early 2000s, today's traditional higher ed institutions are already facing growing "competition" from places like Udacity, Khan Academy and others.   Despite the anger voiced by protesters at Santa Monica College, there are more and more learning opportunities available everyday. Widespread acceptance of a tiered pricing structure could potentially fuel further competition and with that, improve the quality of the product. Not necessarily in the form of a new gym or student union, which  Richard B. Schwartz points out in "Is a College Education Still Worth the Price?" has become a troubling priority for many institutions, but in the form of a better education. For all.

Hilton Kramer

Hilton Kramer, the onetime chief art critic of the New York Times and in recent years the publisher of The New Criterion, died on March 26 near his home in Maine.  He had been ill for some time.

I had the privilege (I use the word carefully) of publishing two of his books, The Twilight of the Intellectuals and The Triumph of Modernism, and had the greatest admiration for his work.

I often told Hilton that I had never learned more about art and art history than I did when reading one of his essays.  He wrote his most important criticism at a time when the art world was balanced on shifting sands, and he was courageous in his defense of its higher forms.

His obit in the Times may be seen at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/arts/design/hilton-kramer-critic-who-championed-modernism-dies-at-84.html

Review of the Movie "Free Men"

I know this will date me, but watching “Free Men” sent me back to a black-and-white TV program of the 1960s, The Outer Limits. Each episode opened with a test pattern and some eerie music. “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture,” a menacing voice would announce.

“Free Men” is an effort to adjust our picture of the French Resistance during the Second World War to include the activities of North African Muslims who resisted the Nazis and rescued Jews. This is no small matter. Until fairly recently, the standard picture was completely FRENCH. Foreigners were left out, although early Resistance groups in occupied Paris and the Vichy zone contained large numbers of persecuted refugees from other parts of Europe, including Communists and Jews.

As for the many Arab and Berber migrants from France’s North African colonies who had come to the mainland seeking work in the 1920s and 30s, they might as well have been invisible. Yet they had their own mosque, the Great Mosque of Paris, built to commemorate the 100,000 Muslim soldiers who died defending France in World War I. Si Kaddour Ben Ghabrit, the Great Mosque’s rector, is known to have saved the lives of a number of Jews, among them the Algerian-Jewish singer Salim Halali, by issuing them certificates of Muslim identity, which enabled them to escape deportation.

The story deserves to be told, and the Moroccan-French director Ismaël Ferroukhi tells it well. Younes, the young Algerian drifter who joins the Resistance somewhat against his will, is a hero by the end of the film. He helps save Halali, among others. We see him making his way through the crowd on Liberation Day, a battered hero, sadder and wiser. Unfortunately, that’s where the film ends.

Despite their sacrifices for France and the promises of independence given by Charles de Gaulle in recognition of their loyalty, Algerians did not attain their independence until 1962, after a long and bloody war. Younes and the film’s other idealistic North African characters would become casualties of this war. Some would be arrested by the French as potential terrorists, or massacred in the streets of Paris when they attempted to stage a peaceful demonstration on October 17, 1961. Others would be seen as too moderate by radical Algerian nationalists and killed by their own side.

“Free Men” makes a place for North Africans in the heroic pantheon, but the picture it presents is still in black-and-white and out of focus. The real story of the role Algerians and Algeria played in French history, including the Second World War, was not about heroism. It was about betrayal. Sadly, not much has changed.

Lisa Lieberman's translation of Jean-Paul Sartre's essay, "Paris Under the Occupation" can be purchased for $1.99 through Amazon Kindle Books, Apple Bookstore Quick Reads, Barnes and NobleNook Books and Google Books. Lost Belongings, her current nonfiction project, tells how Holocaust survivors coped with irretrievable loss.

Of Historians, Umpires and Generals

Merle Miller leads off this month's list with Firing the General, Harry Truman's candid account of why he'd had enough of General Douglas MacArthur. Excerpted from Miller's oral history of President Truman, Plain Speaking, Firing the General is available exclusively through Kindle Books and for free for Amazon Prime Members.  Historiographers can indulge or dispute the reality of J.H. Hexter's The Historian and His Day with an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb.  Then, with baseball season just around the corner, we're happy to have Peter Morris' fascinating look at the history of violence in baseball, Don't Kill The Umpire: How Baseball Escaped Its Violent Past to put things in perspective.

Don't Kill The Umpire

by Peter Morris

Violence plays a peculiar, sublimated role in the sport of baseball. In stark contrast to the play of football and other widely appreciated American games like basketball and ice hockey, baseball players are schooled to take their aggressions out on the ball, not on other players. Yet the game was not always one of quiet courage played by gentlemen, as Peter Morris shows in this fascinating historical profile of the rise and fall of violence as a part of our national pastime.

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Firing the General

by Merle Miller

No episode during the administration of President Harry Truman caused a greater uproar than his firing of General Douglas MacArthur. After continuing friction between his military aims in the Korean War and the administration’s policy of avoiding a larger conflict, MacArthur began to state publicly his complaints about being handcuffed. Truman’s patience wore thin and finally ran out. In this excerpt from Merle Miller’s Plain Speaking, the always candid former president explains what happened.

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The Historian and His Day

by J.H. Hexter with an introduction by Gertrude Himmelfarb

Deceptively mild and modest in tone, J. H. Hexter's "The Historian and His Day" is bold in conception and execution. Hexter was venturing upon a subject—the nature of the historical enterprise—that has engaged the most eminent historians, raising the perennially vexing question of past- and present-mindedness in the writing of history. It is also memorable because it addresses that issue in a notably down-to-earth, commonsensible, personal manner. .

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Free eBook of the Month

This month's Free eBook will be The Quintessential American featuring selections from Benjamin Franklin's autobiography.  Check for it later this week.

The Quintessential American: Selections from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

In his famous Autobiography, Franklin displays the iconic American virtues of thrift, ambition, hard work, self-improvement, and common sense.  But, like many of the Founders, aspects of Franklin’s character remain something of a puzzle. In these selections from his Autobiography, Franklin reflects upon his rise in the world and the self-taught lessons that brought his success.