Photograph from the main eastern theater of war, the Army of the James, June 1864-April 1865. Shows forty African American soldiers sitting and standing on a slight hill.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/I?cwar:1:./temp/~ammem_OAeo::displayType=1:m856sd=cwpb:m856sf=02031:@@@
This is from a great online collection by the Library of Congress of around 1000 Civil War photographs.
Here is one that I like, showing General Ulysses S. Grant leaning over Gen. Meade to look at a map.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/I?cwar:3:./temp/~ammem_XOlj::displayType=1:m856sd=cwpb:m856sf=01191:@@@
Just by web surfing one can find accurate and factual depictions of what happened and what it looked like, even so far back as the Civil War.
Here is the main page for this Civil War collection of photographs.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/cwphtml/cwphome.html
Friday, January 23, 2009
Bible Reading: Esther A:4-10
This was his dream. There was noise and tumult, thunder and earthquake-confusion upon the earth. Two great dragons came on, both poised for combat. They uttered a mighty cry, and at their cry every nation prepared for war, to fight against the race of the just. It as a dark and gloomy day. Tribulation and distress, evil and great confusion, lay upon the earth. The whole race of the just were dismayed with fear of the evils to come upon them, and were at the point of destruction. Then they cried out to God, and as they cried, there appeared to come forth a great river, a flood of water from a little spring.
The light of the sun broke forth; the lowly were exalted and they devoured the nobles.
Another thought on the race meditation
When I was growing up in the radical 1960's, there was one aspect of the most radical of the black power views that disturbed and saddened me. This was their lack of respect for the armed forces of America based on their feeling disenfranchised, which they were indeed, due to racism.
So their feeling of alienation from the American armed forces was quite understandable and not what bothered me (though I felt it to be counterproductive at the time, though that too was some of the Vietnam era zeitgeist).
What bothered me is that there is no heritage among Afro-Americans of honoring the Union war dead.
Here are the casualties of Union soldiers who fought to eliminate slavery:
364,511 Dead
281,881 Wounded
646,392 Total
I was always saddened that Afro-Americans did not, to my knowledge, develop a custom of honoring the Union dead, even if they were doing so to make a pointed commentary toward contemporary Armed forces who were discriminatory.
Honestly, if over three hundred thousand people died freeing my ancestors from slavery, I think I'd visit a few graves and lay a few wreaths, if for no other reason than to teach my children the sacrifice that was made for them by people over a hundred years ago AND as a counterpoint to modern day racism and indifference.
If, for example, someone provoked me with displaying the Confederate flag (as a provocative and not a cultural act) I'd go and lay more wreaths and flowers on the Union graves, forgotten and overgrown, in response. I think that, by the way, resonates with Afro-Americans whose own cemeteries have a sad history of neglect and disrespect by white communities. Likewise I often feel that Afro-Americans have forgotten the Union dead.
It's a subject that is near to my heart because, as I said, not only do I find slavery to be abhorrent, but also my father's family had a Civil War veteran reside with them in their family country hotel in the latter years of his life, so it is not a matter of abstract history to me. I like to think that my grandmother cooked him some great meals and that his beer was free.
When there were over six hundred thousand casualties (wounds were no light matter then, as they are not today in Iraq, for example), it is not giving one's children a full and accurate picture to make it like no one cared about slaves "back then." Over six hundred thousand (again, compare that to our Iraq conflict) showed how much they cared by dying or being dreadfully wounded. I'd like to see their memory and sacrifice recalled by more people today, if you know what I mean.
So their feeling of alienation from the American armed forces was quite understandable and not what bothered me (though I felt it to be counterproductive at the time, though that too was some of the Vietnam era zeitgeist).
What bothered me is that there is no heritage among Afro-Americans of honoring the Union war dead.
Here are the casualties of Union soldiers who fought to eliminate slavery:
364,511 Dead
281,881 Wounded
646,392 Total
I was always saddened that Afro-Americans did not, to my knowledge, develop a custom of honoring the Union dead, even if they were doing so to make a pointed commentary toward contemporary Armed forces who were discriminatory.
Honestly, if over three hundred thousand people died freeing my ancestors from slavery, I think I'd visit a few graves and lay a few wreaths, if for no other reason than to teach my children the sacrifice that was made for them by people over a hundred years ago AND as a counterpoint to modern day racism and indifference.
If, for example, someone provoked me with displaying the Confederate flag (as a provocative and not a cultural act) I'd go and lay more wreaths and flowers on the Union graves, forgotten and overgrown, in response. I think that, by the way, resonates with Afro-Americans whose own cemeteries have a sad history of neglect and disrespect by white communities. Likewise I often feel that Afro-Americans have forgotten the Union dead.
It's a subject that is near to my heart because, as I said, not only do I find slavery to be abhorrent, but also my father's family had a Civil War veteran reside with them in their family country hotel in the latter years of his life, so it is not a matter of abstract history to me. I like to think that my grandmother cooked him some great meals and that his beer was free.
When there were over six hundred thousand casualties (wounds were no light matter then, as they are not today in Iraq, for example), it is not giving one's children a full and accurate picture to make it like no one cared about slaves "back then." Over six hundred thousand (again, compare that to our Iraq conflict) showed how much they cared by dying or being dreadfully wounded. I'd like to see their memory and sacrifice recalled by more people today, if you know what I mean.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
A photographic meditation on race
I went to a bookstore this evening just to get out of the apartment and do some browsing. I noticed a book about Abraham Lincoln and picked it up to flip through it. I don't want to mention the book nor did I buy it, not because it's not a great book, but because I don't want to distract from the core of what I am going to describe to you.
I flipped to the pictures section and was totally moved and stopped in my tracks by a black and white pair of photographs from the Civil War. One is well known and I had seen before, and the other I did not know had left a photographic record.
On the left side was a photograph of the carnage of the Battle of Gettysburg, showing the bodies of Union soldiers two days after the battle, lying densely through a field. That is the picture that I had seen before, among others, recording the terrible sights of the battle dead. The caption explained that eventually people could be found to bury the dead in the battlefield where their bodies lay.
On the right side was a photograph of the bodies being dug up again so they could be moved and interred into the national cemeteries that Lincoln designated. Who was doing the work of digging up the Union soldiers who had died battling slavery? Freed slaves.
I could not easily stop gazing with wonder on that picture. Would you not have liked to have been able to ask the freed slaves how they felt, unearthing the Union soldiers who had died to free them, putting their bodies on the carts, and moving them to honorable cemeteries?
Much has been made of how the White House and the Capitol were built with slave labor, and that is important to realize and to never forget.
But I have also blogged that one must never forget the dignity of the slaves themselves and how they lived and dealt with those times. They were not unaware children who were being exploited and fought over; they were adults with educations and awareness of the nuance of what was occurring. And so less than one hundred years after slave labor built Washington, newly freed slaves dug up the mortal remains of the Union soldiers who had died to free them, and respectfully moved them, as best as could be done in those times, to the cemeteries of honor that Lincoln had designated.
I mention this so that in particular Afro-Americans have an understanding that the contemporaries of their time, the slaves who witnessed the Civil War, worked to honor in their time those who had paid the ultimate price, the fallen Union soldiers. I think that this is something to be very proud of, and so I thought to mention it as a meditation tonight on race relationships. Many today think, understandably, that there is a notion of reparations and atonement for slavery and I'm not here to argue that one way or the other. However, one must have an understanding that slaves knew that Union soldiers were fighting for them, and freed slaves honored the fallen Union soldiers by doing what is admittedly one of the most difficult of charities, which is to unearth their decomposing bodies and transport them to respectful national cemeteries. That is a profound dignity that I think most people do not realize took place at that very time, and I'm so glad that I saw the photograph tonight to share it with you and my thoughts.
It also is an example of what I was speaking about before, which is how does one capture a past historic experience in the view of the contemporaries, those actual participants alive at the time? What a value a single photograph can provide in that regard!
I flipped to the pictures section and was totally moved and stopped in my tracks by a black and white pair of photographs from the Civil War. One is well known and I had seen before, and the other I did not know had left a photographic record.
On the left side was a photograph of the carnage of the Battle of Gettysburg, showing the bodies of Union soldiers two days after the battle, lying densely through a field. That is the picture that I had seen before, among others, recording the terrible sights of the battle dead. The caption explained that eventually people could be found to bury the dead in the battlefield where their bodies lay.
On the right side was a photograph of the bodies being dug up again so they could be moved and interred into the national cemeteries that Lincoln designated. Who was doing the work of digging up the Union soldiers who had died battling slavery? Freed slaves.
I could not easily stop gazing with wonder on that picture. Would you not have liked to have been able to ask the freed slaves how they felt, unearthing the Union soldiers who had died to free them, putting their bodies on the carts, and moving them to honorable cemeteries?
Much has been made of how the White House and the Capitol were built with slave labor, and that is important to realize and to never forget.
But I have also blogged that one must never forget the dignity of the slaves themselves and how they lived and dealt with those times. They were not unaware children who were being exploited and fought over; they were adults with educations and awareness of the nuance of what was occurring. And so less than one hundred years after slave labor built Washington, newly freed slaves dug up the mortal remains of the Union soldiers who had died to free them, and respectfully moved them, as best as could be done in those times, to the cemeteries of honor that Lincoln had designated.
I mention this so that in particular Afro-Americans have an understanding that the contemporaries of their time, the slaves who witnessed the Civil War, worked to honor in their time those who had paid the ultimate price, the fallen Union soldiers. I think that this is something to be very proud of, and so I thought to mention it as a meditation tonight on race relationships. Many today think, understandably, that there is a notion of reparations and atonement for slavery and I'm not here to argue that one way or the other. However, one must have an understanding that slaves knew that Union soldiers were fighting for them, and freed slaves honored the fallen Union soldiers by doing what is admittedly one of the most difficult of charities, which is to unearth their decomposing bodies and transport them to respectful national cemeteries. That is a profound dignity that I think most people do not realize took place at that very time, and I'm so glad that I saw the photograph tonight to share it with you and my thoughts.
It also is an example of what I was speaking about before, which is how does one capture a past historic experience in the view of the contemporaries, those actual participants alive at the time? What a value a single photograph can provide in that regard!
Capitalism/financial crisis rule of thumb
I've written much on this subject but tonight want to just give you a rule of thumb as a basis for discussion of where we should go and what we should do to fix the incredible mess.
If you read in my previous post the excerpts from FDR's inaugural address, it will be helpful for you to understand the point I am about to make.
Somewhere between FDR's time and today, modern society has, to their error and peril, redefined citizens of this country as "consumers."
In other words, the entire national psyche has stopped thinking of people as individuals (and communities) who "have lives" and replaced them with an image of "consumers."
In fact, this view of people as being only consumers has been codified into every business structure, particularly large businesses and corporations, by government laws and regulations, by the tax code, and by the coarse culture at large (e.g. news, entertainment and advertising).
The concept of "jobs" is one of the battlelines drawn in the sand regarding the question of whether people are living human beings or consumers. Those who tend to think that people are living human beings tend to, like FDR, focus on the vital importance for everyone who wants and needs a meaningful job to have one. That is because jobs are the activity that human beings engage in, in order to continue to live.
Those who oppose emphasis on jobs claim they do so because "job creation programs do not work," but they are actually revealing their almost robotic programming that people are not people but "consumers." That is why they parrot over and over "let the market decide," and "the government is not good at fixing problems" and "we must have 'free markets.'" They believe, some of them sincerely, that they advocate the "American dream," but instead they are part of the American nightmare.
Young people in particular, do read almost any literature from the time of the 1930's and 1940's, from FDR's time, and keep what I said in mind and you will be struck by the difference. FDR sniffed that very bad change in the wind, which is why he was so harsh in criticizing immoral business practices, such as exploitive banking. Yet even he who was so visionary would not have foreseen a time such as today where American society and each other so often think people as simply being "consumers," no longer concerned with the dignity of day to day life, including a job.
This country will die a miserable death if we do not regain an awareness of people as individuals with needs for living, not needs for spending. People need the basics, what I have called sustenance portion of capitalism, and that includes good and lasting jobs. It is then the excess, the surplus of their labor where they can engage in the activity of consumerism. That is totally different from the current situation where people self manipulate and manipulate each other as beings that are only open maws of consumers. I do not understand how any scholarly or thoughtful "free market" advocates do not understand that the reduction of humans and their lives to the definition of "consumers" is just as bad as if the government and each other viewed humans as potential military draftees and that was their sole identity.
Work with me on that analogy. To better understand how human beings and their lives have been enslaved and chained into the identity of "consumers," think about what our country would be like if we did not have an active military draft, but that every human was viewed as having value only as a potential military draftee. We would have physical education programs for our kids that emphasized combat skills and readiness. We would rewrite the curriculum of our schools to produce good potential soldiers. We would have recruiters everywhere extolling the virtue of service, perhaps one located in every classroom in every school. The recruiters would point out during studies those skills and world events that are the most interest to potential soldiers and the best role models. What would entertainment be like? Movies that pine for the draft and glorify it. Fashion? Clothes that reminded the wearer that they could be called to service at any time. What would the job pecking order be like? Jobs that would support a draft would be highly esteemed, while those that had nothing to do with the draft would be viewed as low status. Cars could be designed like small tanks so that civilian drivers could "get used to" the feel of a tank, or another war machine or vessel, "just in case."
So do you see how the mindset of the people when they surrender the idea that they are citizens and human beings and are instead "a verb" has totally dire consequences? In my analogy the humans in that scenario are no longer people-citizens-but a verb (actually an adverb), "ones who might be drafted." Today we are no longer humans but we are a verb, an adverb, a noun and an identity based on one manic activity, which is to "consume."
President Obama is entirely correct to focus on jobs as the cornerstone of recovery. Yes, jobs programs can be messed up, but the identity of the human beings is correct and sound, unlike in this nightmare of a consumer driven economy and worse, as self identity as consumers. Even faith has become far too consumer oriented, where "product" is packaged and consumed. This is a disaster, one that is based on a total misunderstanding of genuine capitalism (as I've explained in many previous posts; if you are new just follow the capitalism and financial crisis labels for more of what I've previously written).
I cannot overemphasize and just repeat my draftee analogy the problem with human beings and their lives being viewed as simply variations of consumers. This is not semantics because as I show in my analogy, an erroneous view of humanity cascades and infects all aspects of individual life, curtails freedom and demeans the individual and their local communities. That, by the way, is another byproduct of the trend away from supposedly "inefficient" local business to multi corporation "centralized" banks and other service providers or product producers. When locally owned business dries up and vanishes you have people who view multiple states, the entire country, and even globally humans as being "current consumers" and "potential consumers." They are no longer people living lives and living in communities. They are only consumers of your products. So any genuine job revitalization must be understood as a local resource that enables local residents to have good ongoing lives, not fill the coffers of people who are far away and again, just view job creation as a way to stimulate consumption for their own benefit. That is a complicated topic that needs its own post. My point remains to you, however, that jobs are not just "the way that those consumer-robots can start spending money again."
I hope you have found this helpful. Before it is too late would be nice.
If you read in my previous post the excerpts from FDR's inaugural address, it will be helpful for you to understand the point I am about to make.
Somewhere between FDR's time and today, modern society has, to their error and peril, redefined citizens of this country as "consumers."
In other words, the entire national psyche has stopped thinking of people as individuals (and communities) who "have lives" and replaced them with an image of "consumers."
In fact, this view of people as being only consumers has been codified into every business structure, particularly large businesses and corporations, by government laws and regulations, by the tax code, and by the coarse culture at large (e.g. news, entertainment and advertising).
The concept of "jobs" is one of the battlelines drawn in the sand regarding the question of whether people are living human beings or consumers. Those who tend to think that people are living human beings tend to, like FDR, focus on the vital importance for everyone who wants and needs a meaningful job to have one. That is because jobs are the activity that human beings engage in, in order to continue to live.
Those who oppose emphasis on jobs claim they do so because "job creation programs do not work," but they are actually revealing their almost robotic programming that people are not people but "consumers." That is why they parrot over and over "let the market decide," and "the government is not good at fixing problems" and "we must have 'free markets.'" They believe, some of them sincerely, that they advocate the "American dream," but instead they are part of the American nightmare.
Young people in particular, do read almost any literature from the time of the 1930's and 1940's, from FDR's time, and keep what I said in mind and you will be struck by the difference. FDR sniffed that very bad change in the wind, which is why he was so harsh in criticizing immoral business practices, such as exploitive banking. Yet even he who was so visionary would not have foreseen a time such as today where American society and each other so often think people as simply being "consumers," no longer concerned with the dignity of day to day life, including a job.
This country will die a miserable death if we do not regain an awareness of people as individuals with needs for living, not needs for spending. People need the basics, what I have called sustenance portion of capitalism, and that includes good and lasting jobs. It is then the excess, the surplus of their labor where they can engage in the activity of consumerism. That is totally different from the current situation where people self manipulate and manipulate each other as beings that are only open maws of consumers. I do not understand how any scholarly or thoughtful "free market" advocates do not understand that the reduction of humans and their lives to the definition of "consumers" is just as bad as if the government and each other viewed humans as potential military draftees and that was their sole identity.
Work with me on that analogy. To better understand how human beings and their lives have been enslaved and chained into the identity of "consumers," think about what our country would be like if we did not have an active military draft, but that every human was viewed as having value only as a potential military draftee. We would have physical education programs for our kids that emphasized combat skills and readiness. We would rewrite the curriculum of our schools to produce good potential soldiers. We would have recruiters everywhere extolling the virtue of service, perhaps one located in every classroom in every school. The recruiters would point out during studies those skills and world events that are the most interest to potential soldiers and the best role models. What would entertainment be like? Movies that pine for the draft and glorify it. Fashion? Clothes that reminded the wearer that they could be called to service at any time. What would the job pecking order be like? Jobs that would support a draft would be highly esteemed, while those that had nothing to do with the draft would be viewed as low status. Cars could be designed like small tanks so that civilian drivers could "get used to" the feel of a tank, or another war machine or vessel, "just in case."
So do you see how the mindset of the people when they surrender the idea that they are citizens and human beings and are instead "a verb" has totally dire consequences? In my analogy the humans in that scenario are no longer people-citizens-but a verb (actually an adverb), "ones who might be drafted." Today we are no longer humans but we are a verb, an adverb, a noun and an identity based on one manic activity, which is to "consume."
President Obama is entirely correct to focus on jobs as the cornerstone of recovery. Yes, jobs programs can be messed up, but the identity of the human beings is correct and sound, unlike in this nightmare of a consumer driven economy and worse, as self identity as consumers. Even faith has become far too consumer oriented, where "product" is packaged and consumed. This is a disaster, one that is based on a total misunderstanding of genuine capitalism (as I've explained in many previous posts; if you are new just follow the capitalism and financial crisis labels for more of what I've previously written).
I cannot overemphasize and just repeat my draftee analogy the problem with human beings and their lives being viewed as simply variations of consumers. This is not semantics because as I show in my analogy, an erroneous view of humanity cascades and infects all aspects of individual life, curtails freedom and demeans the individual and their local communities. That, by the way, is another byproduct of the trend away from supposedly "inefficient" local business to multi corporation "centralized" banks and other service providers or product producers. When locally owned business dries up and vanishes you have people who view multiple states, the entire country, and even globally humans as being "current consumers" and "potential consumers." They are no longer people living lives and living in communities. They are only consumers of your products. So any genuine job revitalization must be understood as a local resource that enables local residents to have good ongoing lives, not fill the coffers of people who are far away and again, just view job creation as a way to stimulate consumption for their own benefit. That is a complicated topic that needs its own post. My point remains to you, however, that jobs are not just "the way that those consumer-robots can start spending money again."
I hope you have found this helpful. Before it is too late would be nice.
American Presidency case study: FDR
I have a small case study for you about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In this I want to demonstrate how accurate understanding of history must be personal but not personalized. Here is the difference.
One cannot really understand a period in history without having been there, or spoken to someone who was there. People who were on the scene in a historical period are called “contemporaries.” Sure, you will find a difference of opinion among contemporaries, but very rarely will you find a difference of opinion about the essential facts and zeitgeist (spirit of the times). Thus it is essential to obtain and preserve the personal experience of contemporaries during any historic period.
However, it is a mistake to “personalize” a historic period. By that I mean to impose a theory or belief of one’s own back in time onto a previous period. That is one of the greatest and most common intellectual mistakes of the past forty years. I saw the beginning of it in college in the early 1970’s. Another word for this phenomenon is “revisionist” history but there is a difference. Genuine revisionist history is an attempt by the current state and intellectuals to rewrite or reshape history in a way that is less embarrassing and more supportive of the current regimes, and there is a long history of that. However, that is not as serious a problem as what I am speaking of in the “personalizing” of history. Governments and their toady intellectuals may produce “revisionist” history, but scholars always maintain the facts of contemporary accounts and thus when the zeal for revisionism passes, people can pick up again with studying the actual facts of the previous times.
Personalizing of history is a far murkier, sloppier and dangerous endeavor and habit because it results from a genuine misunderstanding of how people used to live and think. People who personalize history think that the way they think now is the way people used to think and thus motivated their behavior. Here is a silly example as an analogy.
Suppose that years from now scholars try to understand why the IPOD was so popular, because it has gone out of existence. Perhaps society has changed so that everyone likes the same music and so no one has personal players and custom play lists anymore. So scholars are trying to understand why IPODS were so popular. They study the historical information and learn that there was a wide variety of tastes in music, that everyone had their own favorites, and that also the IPOD allowed the listening of one’s own music in a variety of settings. So these scholars understand by reading contemporary accounts why IPOD was so popular and how it was used even though they no longer “relate” since in that theoretical time in the future everyone likes the same songs.
Now, here is how revisionist history would work. Suppose the government has just spent millions of dollars installing public address systems that play the songs that everyone likes. They are genuinely worried about an individualistic “retro” movement whereby people are interested in marginal types of music again and thus would oppose the shared investment in the public music systems. Revisionists would not hide that people used to have IPODS but would “explain” via “spin” that people were “forced” to spend their own hard earned money on individual systems because the government did not provide public shared music systems. So one still had access to the facts and contemporary accounts, but revisionist history “explains” the facts in terms that put a more positive light on current agendas.
A personalized view of history would honestly misunderstand even the contemporary accounts that are right in front of their eyes since those moderns are no longer capable of understanding people who used to have individual taste in music. Thus they would make up totally bogus interpretations of the past usage of IPODS that are “natural” and “obvious” to how they are living at that time. They might say, for example, that “IPODS were so popular because the government at that time sent out subliminal secret messages that kept the IPOD users ensnared in IPOD use.” So they would read the playlist of someone who lived a hundred years before them and go “Yeah, sure, I bet” as the long deceased author wrote about how much he liked his own mixed playlist of rap and jazz. You could show them a thousand playlists, each different and each reflecting an individual love of music, and these people would sneer and say, “Oh, sure, the hypnosis worked really well.”
Even if they are not conspiracy theory oriented (that being one of the great fuels of erroneous personalized views of history) lack of intellectual rigor and empathy for earlier times in history can also cause erroneous personalized view of history. For example, suppose the people are all miserable and kind of bleak souls in the future (even with their shared liking of the same music, LOL). They assume that people have always been miserable and bleak. So they would figure that IPOD usage was popular because people were trying to escape that period’s “misery and bleakness.” It would never occur to them that people were not always the miserable sad sacks that they are, and thus they interpret history by imposing current feelings on the past and thus totally distorting and warping history.
By looking at FDR and what he did during the two great crises, the Recession and World War II, one can see an example of a current personalizing of his era. So I want to tell you a small story that illustrates the importance of not doing that, and instead embracing contemporary zeitgeist of the actual time as it truly was.
In the middle 1970’s I visited FDR’s home at Hyde Park.
http://www.nps.gov/hofr
It is a beautiful house in New York State on the Hudson River. There was a warmth and humanity about the house that I was able to directly compare to the other mansion we toured that day, which was the Vanderbilt mansion that was grander but colder.
FDR died April 12, 1945 so we visited his house almost thirty years after he had died and, therefore, there were many people alive who remember those times. In other words, there were many contemporaries walking around who lived during FDR’s term in office from March 4, 1933 for the twelve years until his death. His house was a popular touring spot and so we ran into many people who were there, and there is no other way to describe it, to pay homage to his memory and express their gratitude for what he had done.
As we chatted with the various others touring the house and the grounds, time after time we were told that they were there because they loved FDR and were grateful for what he had done to combat the Recession. These tourists would tell us specific stories about jobs he created that they benefited from, or other activities that helped them to keep body and soul together and survive those terrible long years of the Recession. In particular in his office, looking at his very desk, there would be a hush and often people’s eyes would tear up.
Political commentators today like to cast aspersion on how much FDR “really did” and they have a cold and clinical view of those times. They are not being scholarly because they are totally dismissive of contemporary accounts of not only the facts but the zeitgeist. Thus it would be easy for one of them to be on a talk show or to talk to an individual young person and tell their audience that FDR “really didn’t do all that much” and that “much of what he did was harmful.” That simply is not true.
I cannot emphasis enough that you cannot have an accurate view of history by looking only at a “catalog of mistakes.” Modern commentators totally dismiss zeitgeist and the reality of the ordinary people in favor of only listing “mistakes” and “overreaching” that completely misses the genius of what FDR did accomplish. This is true not only of FDR but of all historical eras and personages. Modern people think they are being all clever and skeptical by looking for warts and listing mistakes and then drawing conclusions about the goodness or effectiveness of a person or a historical era. Yet reality is the sum total of all that was being done and not just a list of what people think were shortcomings.
To use the IPOD example, suppose that future historians only reported how many people did not have IPODS. So if you looked up “IPOD” in the future Wikipedia, you would read only one entry: “One hundred million people did not have an IPOD.” That is it. There is no information about what an IPOD is, how many people had one, what they used it for, and how much they valued having one. All that you found in the Wikipedia entry is the bleak and repressive statement that implies elitism and some sort of wrong done, “One hundred million people did not have an IPOD.”
That is what modern pundits and would be historians have become, in both secular and most egregiously in faith history. All they report is the “problems” and the “errors” and ignore the ninety nine percent of normal life that is good and in times of crisis maintained through either secular or faith deeds. FDR is becoming the poster child for this erroneous and even sinister personalizing of history. There is no way one can truly transmit the look in the eyes of the people I saw, humble and ordinary people, who had come to Hyde Park to see the desk and the home of the President who they said “saved the country.”
I was and am still today remarkably moved by the encounters with those who loved FDR so much, those who were the “real people,” the average people, who were certain because they lived it that through his jobs creation and other programs they were able to survive. By the way, during that time I was married into a very astute family of professional historians, so this was not schmaltz. Even when they knew he had done “bad things” like “pack the Supreme Court” they knew the facts of the overall context of all the positive and essential that he had achieved. So there is no substitute for historians who have a comprehensive view of the full context of the time, both the facts and the actual experiences and perceptions of the people who lived in those times.
So to summarize, be aware that there are two problems in modern interpretations of historical times. One is deliberate and quite customary, called “revisionist history.” The other is an unconscious and thus pernicious and dangerous imposing of the cloud of emotion and distortion of the present by some onto their view of history, casting it into a mold that it simply did not occupy at all. The best cure for this is to read contemporary literature of the time as much as possible, including textbooks that were written soon after and not years later when they themselves tend to be very agenda and revisionist driven. I see this, for example, in writings about George Washington. Even if there is a glow around the older works they are more accurate factually, because in the effort to “stamp out the glow” moderns also stamp out their understanding of the times and thus a lot of the context and the facts too.
Readings from FDR’s inaugural addresses:
…Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only the by standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honestly, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.
Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.
Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the value of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities. It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relieve activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly…
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt
First Inaugural Address
Saturday, March 4, 1933
When four years ago we met to inaugurate a President, the Republic, single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We dedicated ourselves to the fulfillment of a vision-to speed the time when there would be for all people that security and peace essential to the pursuit of happiness. We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless, and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day. We did those first things first.
Our covenant with ourselves did not stop there. Instinctively we recognized a deeper need-the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men...
Second Inaugural Address
Wednesday, January 20, 1937
One cannot really understand a period in history without having been there, or spoken to someone who was there. People who were on the scene in a historical period are called “contemporaries.” Sure, you will find a difference of opinion among contemporaries, but very rarely will you find a difference of opinion about the essential facts and zeitgeist (spirit of the times). Thus it is essential to obtain and preserve the personal experience of contemporaries during any historic period.
However, it is a mistake to “personalize” a historic period. By that I mean to impose a theory or belief of one’s own back in time onto a previous period. That is one of the greatest and most common intellectual mistakes of the past forty years. I saw the beginning of it in college in the early 1970’s. Another word for this phenomenon is “revisionist” history but there is a difference. Genuine revisionist history is an attempt by the current state and intellectuals to rewrite or reshape history in a way that is less embarrassing and more supportive of the current regimes, and there is a long history of that. However, that is not as serious a problem as what I am speaking of in the “personalizing” of history. Governments and their toady intellectuals may produce “revisionist” history, but scholars always maintain the facts of contemporary accounts and thus when the zeal for revisionism passes, people can pick up again with studying the actual facts of the previous times.
Personalizing of history is a far murkier, sloppier and dangerous endeavor and habit because it results from a genuine misunderstanding of how people used to live and think. People who personalize history think that the way they think now is the way people used to think and thus motivated their behavior. Here is a silly example as an analogy.
Suppose that years from now scholars try to understand why the IPOD was so popular, because it has gone out of existence. Perhaps society has changed so that everyone likes the same music and so no one has personal players and custom play lists anymore. So scholars are trying to understand why IPODS were so popular. They study the historical information and learn that there was a wide variety of tastes in music, that everyone had their own favorites, and that also the IPOD allowed the listening of one’s own music in a variety of settings. So these scholars understand by reading contemporary accounts why IPOD was so popular and how it was used even though they no longer “relate” since in that theoretical time in the future everyone likes the same songs.
Now, here is how revisionist history would work. Suppose the government has just spent millions of dollars installing public address systems that play the songs that everyone likes. They are genuinely worried about an individualistic “retro” movement whereby people are interested in marginal types of music again and thus would oppose the shared investment in the public music systems. Revisionists would not hide that people used to have IPODS but would “explain” via “spin” that people were “forced” to spend their own hard earned money on individual systems because the government did not provide public shared music systems. So one still had access to the facts and contemporary accounts, but revisionist history “explains” the facts in terms that put a more positive light on current agendas.
A personalized view of history would honestly misunderstand even the contemporary accounts that are right in front of their eyes since those moderns are no longer capable of understanding people who used to have individual taste in music. Thus they would make up totally bogus interpretations of the past usage of IPODS that are “natural” and “obvious” to how they are living at that time. They might say, for example, that “IPODS were so popular because the government at that time sent out subliminal secret messages that kept the IPOD users ensnared in IPOD use.” So they would read the playlist of someone who lived a hundred years before them and go “Yeah, sure, I bet” as the long deceased author wrote about how much he liked his own mixed playlist of rap and jazz. You could show them a thousand playlists, each different and each reflecting an individual love of music, and these people would sneer and say, “Oh, sure, the hypnosis worked really well.”
Even if they are not conspiracy theory oriented (that being one of the great fuels of erroneous personalized views of history) lack of intellectual rigor and empathy for earlier times in history can also cause erroneous personalized view of history. For example, suppose the people are all miserable and kind of bleak souls in the future (even with their shared liking of the same music, LOL). They assume that people have always been miserable and bleak. So they would figure that IPOD usage was popular because people were trying to escape that period’s “misery and bleakness.” It would never occur to them that people were not always the miserable sad sacks that they are, and thus they interpret history by imposing current feelings on the past and thus totally distorting and warping history.
By looking at FDR and what he did during the two great crises, the Recession and World War II, one can see an example of a current personalizing of his era. So I want to tell you a small story that illustrates the importance of not doing that, and instead embracing contemporary zeitgeist of the actual time as it truly was.
In the middle 1970’s I visited FDR’s home at Hyde Park.
http://www.nps.gov/hofr
It is a beautiful house in New York State on the Hudson River. There was a warmth and humanity about the house that I was able to directly compare to the other mansion we toured that day, which was the Vanderbilt mansion that was grander but colder.
FDR died April 12, 1945 so we visited his house almost thirty years after he had died and, therefore, there were many people alive who remember those times. In other words, there were many contemporaries walking around who lived during FDR’s term in office from March 4, 1933 for the twelve years until his death. His house was a popular touring spot and so we ran into many people who were there, and there is no other way to describe it, to pay homage to his memory and express their gratitude for what he had done.
As we chatted with the various others touring the house and the grounds, time after time we were told that they were there because they loved FDR and were grateful for what he had done to combat the Recession. These tourists would tell us specific stories about jobs he created that they benefited from, or other activities that helped them to keep body and soul together and survive those terrible long years of the Recession. In particular in his office, looking at his very desk, there would be a hush and often people’s eyes would tear up.
Political commentators today like to cast aspersion on how much FDR “really did” and they have a cold and clinical view of those times. They are not being scholarly because they are totally dismissive of contemporary accounts of not only the facts but the zeitgeist. Thus it would be easy for one of them to be on a talk show or to talk to an individual young person and tell their audience that FDR “really didn’t do all that much” and that “much of what he did was harmful.” That simply is not true.
I cannot emphasis enough that you cannot have an accurate view of history by looking only at a “catalog of mistakes.” Modern commentators totally dismiss zeitgeist and the reality of the ordinary people in favor of only listing “mistakes” and “overreaching” that completely misses the genius of what FDR did accomplish. This is true not only of FDR but of all historical eras and personages. Modern people think they are being all clever and skeptical by looking for warts and listing mistakes and then drawing conclusions about the goodness or effectiveness of a person or a historical era. Yet reality is the sum total of all that was being done and not just a list of what people think were shortcomings.
To use the IPOD example, suppose that future historians only reported how many people did not have IPODS. So if you looked up “IPOD” in the future Wikipedia, you would read only one entry: “One hundred million people did not have an IPOD.” That is it. There is no information about what an IPOD is, how many people had one, what they used it for, and how much they valued having one. All that you found in the Wikipedia entry is the bleak and repressive statement that implies elitism and some sort of wrong done, “One hundred million people did not have an IPOD.”
That is what modern pundits and would be historians have become, in both secular and most egregiously in faith history. All they report is the “problems” and the “errors” and ignore the ninety nine percent of normal life that is good and in times of crisis maintained through either secular or faith deeds. FDR is becoming the poster child for this erroneous and even sinister personalizing of history. There is no way one can truly transmit the look in the eyes of the people I saw, humble and ordinary people, who had come to Hyde Park to see the desk and the home of the President who they said “saved the country.”
I was and am still today remarkably moved by the encounters with those who loved FDR so much, those who were the “real people,” the average people, who were certain because they lived it that through his jobs creation and other programs they were able to survive. By the way, during that time I was married into a very astute family of professional historians, so this was not schmaltz. Even when they knew he had done “bad things” like “pack the Supreme Court” they knew the facts of the overall context of all the positive and essential that he had achieved. So there is no substitute for historians who have a comprehensive view of the full context of the time, both the facts and the actual experiences and perceptions of the people who lived in those times.
So to summarize, be aware that there are two problems in modern interpretations of historical times. One is deliberate and quite customary, called “revisionist history.” The other is an unconscious and thus pernicious and dangerous imposing of the cloud of emotion and distortion of the present by some onto their view of history, casting it into a mold that it simply did not occupy at all. The best cure for this is to read contemporary literature of the time as much as possible, including textbooks that were written soon after and not years later when they themselves tend to be very agenda and revisionist driven. I see this, for example, in writings about George Washington. Even if there is a glow around the older works they are more accurate factually, because in the effort to “stamp out the glow” moderns also stamp out their understanding of the times and thus a lot of the context and the facts too.
Readings from FDR’s inaugural addresses:
…Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only the by standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honestly, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.
Restoration calls, however, not for changes in ethics alone. This Nation asks for action, and action now.
Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously. It can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the Government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources.
Hand in hand with this we must frankly recognize the overbalance of population in our industrial centers and, by engaging on a national scale in a redistribution, endeavor to provide a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land. The task can be helped by definite efforts to raise the value of agricultural products and with this the power to purchase the output of our cities. It can be helped by preventing realistically the tragedy of the growing loss through foreclosure of our small homes and our farms. It can be helped by insistence that the Federal, State, and local governments act forthwith on the demand that their cost be drastically reduced. It can be helped by the unifying of relieve activities which today are often scattered, uneconomical, and unequal. It can be helped by national planning for and supervision of all forms of transportation and of communications and other utilities which have a definitely public character. There are many ways in which it can be helped, but it can never be helped merely by talking about it. We must act and act quickly…
-Franklin Delano Roosevelt
First Inaugural Address
Saturday, March 4, 1933
When four years ago we met to inaugurate a President, the Republic, single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We dedicated ourselves to the fulfillment of a vision-to speed the time when there would be for all people that security and peace essential to the pursuit of happiness. We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by action, tireless, and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day. We did those first things first.
Our covenant with ourselves did not stop there. Instinctively we recognized a deeper need-the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic forces and blindly selfish men...
Second Inaugural Address
Wednesday, January 20, 1937
Well, if you think about it, it is not too difficult to see many parallels between what FDR said and the great financial crisis and damage to the economy and self esteem of the workers and the homeowner (to say nothing of the homeless and the jobless) today.
Diplomacy case study: political parties
I want to use the occasion of President Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (congratulations by the way!) meeting with career diplomats at the State Department to offer another, hopefully helpful, case study. This case study, I think, is essential to speedy and fruitful progress in the Middle East, especially regarding Israel and Palestine, but also the Taliban in Afghanistan and all the groups, including Al Qaida, in Pakistan.
By the way, I remember watching George Mitchell’s great work as diplomatic envoy during The Troubles in Ireland and am glad to see him, and Richard Holbrook, back in the saddle again!
This case study is to help you to have clearer and more productive vision, and thus dialogue, with civilian populations who support radical organizations who regularly or occasionally engage in terrorism.
When an organization, such as Hamas, engages in terrorist activities, such as shooting rockets into civilian parts of Israel, it is natural that a certain skewing of viewpoint takes place by even the most seasoned diplomats. However, this skewing has become entirely too unconscious and routine and thus brings an error into the logical and the feelings that are brought to the diplomatic table. This case study is to help you to eliminate the skewing in perception that takes place when one contemplates or dialogues with an organization that is civilian based but conducts some or many terrorist activities. When you eliminate that skewing of perception, which is based on error, you can make greater progress in your objectives, including the halting of the terroristic component of their activities.
Let’s use some silly examples first. Suppose you are speaking to someone who is just wonderful but has bad breath. Doesn’t the bad breath totally mess up your encounter with them, and doesn’t it ruin your appreciation of their finer qualities? The person with the bad breath could be a beauty queen, or a young Einstein, or the holiest person you know, but you can’t appreciate any of those qualities so long as you are suffering from their bad breath!
This is what a civilian population who supports an organization with a terroristic component is like. Just because they have bad breath in their encounter, this does not mean they are not worthy and wonderful people. Thus, the people of Gaza, by having elected Hamas, are being treated as if they are nothing but gas bags of bad breath. That is unjust, incorrect and unfair.
Let us return to the bad breath example. Coffee, a wonderful beverage, is the cause of much bad breath. So there is an example of a great gift to humanity-coffee-having an unfortunate and often unconscious side effect in many, bad breath. I could not stand the breath of my ex- after he had drunk coffee; it was actually worse than how he smelled after smoking cigarettes. But that does not mean that he was no longer an intelligent person, or one who could look nice, or one that could be kind. He was all of those things, but with bad breath after drinking coffee. So coffee, a genuine gift to humanity and a beneficial thing, can, if not monitored, have an unpleasant side effect that masks all the other good, for those moments, in the person. We can also list other foods like this, such as onions and garlic, feta cheese and so forth.
However, bad breath can also be a warning sign of a health problem. Every mindful and caring parent of a small child knows this. When your child suddenly has bad breath, they are not doing it to annoy you or to be “dirty.” A child with bad breath usually has a nasal drip or an allergy, thus a respiratory health matter. Bad breath is a sign that is supposed to be helpful, to alert someone to a problematic health condition. So you don’t want to be angry at the small infant with bad breath, or just “cover it up,” but look as to why they have the bad breath so that the health matter can be attended to.
Thus the Gaza people with Hamas can be viewed as being like a person with bad breath, and one must see if it is an unconscious side effect of a good thing (coffee) or the sign of a health problem (respiratory distress). By the way, I am not saying Hamas is the bad breath, LOL! I am saying their terroristic actions are the bad breath. Separate from the terroristic acts Hamas members are the same as Gaza civilians, the good that is being masked by the bad breath.
So the first job of the diplomat is to recognize that the terroristic acts that one observes, whether by Hamas or any other group, is like “bad breath.” It has a disproportionate effect of masking the vast majority of normalcy and goodness, with common aspirations, of the people “underneath” the bad breath. Too often diplomats, to say nothing of the reactionary governments, not only just focus on the bad breath but they seem to have entire conversations (mostly threats) with the bad breath (the acts of terrorism) rather than the lips, mouths, brains and hearts of the people behind the terrorism bad breath. I’m faintly amazed that I have to explain this to so many people who think they are otherwise so intelligent.
This is one of the things that the diplomats of, in particular the British Empire, for all their faults well understood. These foreign servants lived among the local people so much that many were accused of “going native” or “going bush,” which is that they embrace the local culture. Thus they were not reactionary when there were “bad breath” incidents, because they maintained their 80 percent to 20 percent understanding of the people who are behind the bad breath and the bad breath acts itself. This was one of the great attributes of the golden age of diplomacy, this ability to maintain vision on not only the “bad breath,” but keep the majority of one’s understanding on the people and the underlying reasons for the bad breath acts.
Now, here is another analogy to help you to understand. There are certain things that the Republican party tends to do that makes me just vomit in disgust, just as there are certain things that the Democrat party does that also makes me vomit. But I do not reduce all the millions of people who agree in each party with those particular positions into thinking of them as just barf making sub-humans, LOL. I know that behind the party platforms and individual heinous viewpoints are, in general, a bunch of individual people who share aspirations and are trying to do the best that they can.
Here is a related analogy. Let’s look at the political party affiliation of the ten Presidents after our first, George Washington.
John Adams: Federalist
Thomas Jefferson: Democratic-Republican
James Madison: Democratic-Republican
James Monroe: Democratic-Republican
John Quincy Adams: Federalist until 1808, Democratic-Republican until 1825, National Republican (Whig) thereafter
Andrew Jackson: Democratic
Martin Van Buren: Democratic (during Presidency); Free Soil (from 1848)
William Henry Harrison: Whig
John Tyler: Whig
James Knox Polk: Democratic
Now, from this list you can observe without reading a “too long” dissertation that political parties came into being and evolved at a rapid rate. Democratic-Republican used to be one party, and they evolved and split. Federalists were the party of our country’s founding, yet even though they were the “original” they did not maintain a mandate once the country was well established. Other parties such as “Free Soil” sprang up in response to current conditions, yet they are forgotten today. Political parties and affiliations are a living and vibrant thing. Likewise people like the Palestinians have an evolving attempt to organize around “parties,” for lack of a better word, that reflect their aspirations and their current reality. Yet countries such as the United States and Israel act like they should be frozen in time.
It is a diplomatic error to think that, “Well, the Palestinians had the PLO, which we denounced since they were terrorists, but they gave up terrorism to become Fatah and thus they are ‘OK’ and we will ‘allow’ the Palestinians to ‘have’ Fatah and Fatah alone.” Huh? What if the United States was forced to only have the Federalist party, one party, the “first and only” alone? After all, the USA was formed by the Federalists. Shouldn’t the USA be forced to have only one party, the Federalists? Are not the Democratic and Republican parties invalid?
When Gaza people voted Hamas into power they were doing so because they were frustrated with the shortcomings, including financial corruption, of Fatah. Yet to this day western diplomats are mouthing off that Hamas is not “legitimate?” Well, I don’t think that any USA political party since the Federalists is valid. I’m not joking. If you are going to tell me that people halfway around the world do not live like the rest of us, having evolving needs and evolving responses in affiliation (and yes, some of them have some bad breath) then I think we should live by the same “rules,” else we are shameless hypocrites. So I am quite serious that I believe that all political parties since the Federalist Party are invalid.
If a diplomat cannot look at a people, such as the Palestinians in Gaza, and have the most fundamental understanding that despite the terroristic actions that are the bad breath of the party in power that this is part of normal democracy and the urges of the people, then one can neither achieve peace nor even have correct vision of the problems, challenges and opportunities. You are punishing the Gaza people for trying to self correct what they thought was a problem with the ruling party, Fatah. You are enabling Israel, by focusing only on the bad breath terrorism, to bomb the hell out of people to punish them for trying to “kick the bums out of office and elect new people,” which was just what they did. It is one of the democratic hypocrisies of the century, in my opinion.
So to wrap up this case study, the point I am trying to make is that politicians, most especially diplomats, must learn to recognize normal democratic process in the natural form that it takes place in other countries and cultures, such as the forming and electing of new parties. Second one must recognize if the bad breath of terrorism of those parties are due to systemic health problems which must be addressed, rather than punching the teeth and gums of innocent men, women and children out of their mouths to “cure the bad breath” and then blame them for it to boot. Third, one must look at the diplomatic challenge and see the parallels in our own history (the British thought we were terrorists, by the way) and respond with a resonance and firm guidance in more fruitful channels rather than denial. Fourth, we need to invest in people’s political interest and participation, not discourage it when we don’t like the results. Fifth we must not have dialogue with the bad breath acts and, instead, go back to having dialogue with the people, friend and foe alike. Sixth, just as the USA would resent being told we must go back to Federalist party alone, so too we must not expect people to have “one size fit all” political parties that meet our (or Israel’s) approval.
I hope that you have found this helpful. I have a lot more to say about how to get going in productive diplomacy but I don't want to make this "tl/dr" (too long; didn't read).
By the way, I remember watching George Mitchell’s great work as diplomatic envoy during The Troubles in Ireland and am glad to see him, and Richard Holbrook, back in the saddle again!
This case study is to help you to have clearer and more productive vision, and thus dialogue, with civilian populations who support radical organizations who regularly or occasionally engage in terrorism.
When an organization, such as Hamas, engages in terrorist activities, such as shooting rockets into civilian parts of Israel, it is natural that a certain skewing of viewpoint takes place by even the most seasoned diplomats. However, this skewing has become entirely too unconscious and routine and thus brings an error into the logical and the feelings that are brought to the diplomatic table. This case study is to help you to eliminate the skewing in perception that takes place when one contemplates or dialogues with an organization that is civilian based but conducts some or many terrorist activities. When you eliminate that skewing of perception, which is based on error, you can make greater progress in your objectives, including the halting of the terroristic component of their activities.
Let’s use some silly examples first. Suppose you are speaking to someone who is just wonderful but has bad breath. Doesn’t the bad breath totally mess up your encounter with them, and doesn’t it ruin your appreciation of their finer qualities? The person with the bad breath could be a beauty queen, or a young Einstein, or the holiest person you know, but you can’t appreciate any of those qualities so long as you are suffering from their bad breath!
This is what a civilian population who supports an organization with a terroristic component is like. Just because they have bad breath in their encounter, this does not mean they are not worthy and wonderful people. Thus, the people of Gaza, by having elected Hamas, are being treated as if they are nothing but gas bags of bad breath. That is unjust, incorrect and unfair.
Let us return to the bad breath example. Coffee, a wonderful beverage, is the cause of much bad breath. So there is an example of a great gift to humanity-coffee-having an unfortunate and often unconscious side effect in many, bad breath. I could not stand the breath of my ex- after he had drunk coffee; it was actually worse than how he smelled after smoking cigarettes. But that does not mean that he was no longer an intelligent person, or one who could look nice, or one that could be kind. He was all of those things, but with bad breath after drinking coffee. So coffee, a genuine gift to humanity and a beneficial thing, can, if not monitored, have an unpleasant side effect that masks all the other good, for those moments, in the person. We can also list other foods like this, such as onions and garlic, feta cheese and so forth.
However, bad breath can also be a warning sign of a health problem. Every mindful and caring parent of a small child knows this. When your child suddenly has bad breath, they are not doing it to annoy you or to be “dirty.” A child with bad breath usually has a nasal drip or an allergy, thus a respiratory health matter. Bad breath is a sign that is supposed to be helpful, to alert someone to a problematic health condition. So you don’t want to be angry at the small infant with bad breath, or just “cover it up,” but look as to why they have the bad breath so that the health matter can be attended to.
Thus the Gaza people with Hamas can be viewed as being like a person with bad breath, and one must see if it is an unconscious side effect of a good thing (coffee) or the sign of a health problem (respiratory distress). By the way, I am not saying Hamas is the bad breath, LOL! I am saying their terroristic actions are the bad breath. Separate from the terroristic acts Hamas members are the same as Gaza civilians, the good that is being masked by the bad breath.
So the first job of the diplomat is to recognize that the terroristic acts that one observes, whether by Hamas or any other group, is like “bad breath.” It has a disproportionate effect of masking the vast majority of normalcy and goodness, with common aspirations, of the people “underneath” the bad breath. Too often diplomats, to say nothing of the reactionary governments, not only just focus on the bad breath but they seem to have entire conversations (mostly threats) with the bad breath (the acts of terrorism) rather than the lips, mouths, brains and hearts of the people behind the terrorism bad breath. I’m faintly amazed that I have to explain this to so many people who think they are otherwise so intelligent.
This is one of the things that the diplomats of, in particular the British Empire, for all their faults well understood. These foreign servants lived among the local people so much that many were accused of “going native” or “going bush,” which is that they embrace the local culture. Thus they were not reactionary when there were “bad breath” incidents, because they maintained their 80 percent to 20 percent understanding of the people who are behind the bad breath and the bad breath acts itself. This was one of the great attributes of the golden age of diplomacy, this ability to maintain vision on not only the “bad breath,” but keep the majority of one’s understanding on the people and the underlying reasons for the bad breath acts.
Now, here is another analogy to help you to understand. There are certain things that the Republican party tends to do that makes me just vomit in disgust, just as there are certain things that the Democrat party does that also makes me vomit. But I do not reduce all the millions of people who agree in each party with those particular positions into thinking of them as just barf making sub-humans, LOL. I know that behind the party platforms and individual heinous viewpoints are, in general, a bunch of individual people who share aspirations and are trying to do the best that they can.
Here is a related analogy. Let’s look at the political party affiliation of the ten Presidents after our first, George Washington.
John Adams: Federalist
Thomas Jefferson: Democratic-Republican
James Madison: Democratic-Republican
James Monroe: Democratic-Republican
John Quincy Adams: Federalist until 1808, Democratic-Republican until 1825, National Republican (Whig) thereafter
Andrew Jackson: Democratic
Martin Van Buren: Democratic (during Presidency); Free Soil (from 1848)
William Henry Harrison: Whig
John Tyler: Whig
James Knox Polk: Democratic
Now, from this list you can observe without reading a “too long” dissertation that political parties came into being and evolved at a rapid rate. Democratic-Republican used to be one party, and they evolved and split. Federalists were the party of our country’s founding, yet even though they were the “original” they did not maintain a mandate once the country was well established. Other parties such as “Free Soil” sprang up in response to current conditions, yet they are forgotten today. Political parties and affiliations are a living and vibrant thing. Likewise people like the Palestinians have an evolving attempt to organize around “parties,” for lack of a better word, that reflect their aspirations and their current reality. Yet countries such as the United States and Israel act like they should be frozen in time.
It is a diplomatic error to think that, “Well, the Palestinians had the PLO, which we denounced since they were terrorists, but they gave up terrorism to become Fatah and thus they are ‘OK’ and we will ‘allow’ the Palestinians to ‘have’ Fatah and Fatah alone.” Huh? What if the United States was forced to only have the Federalist party, one party, the “first and only” alone? After all, the USA was formed by the Federalists. Shouldn’t the USA be forced to have only one party, the Federalists? Are not the Democratic and Republican parties invalid?
When Gaza people voted Hamas into power they were doing so because they were frustrated with the shortcomings, including financial corruption, of Fatah. Yet to this day western diplomats are mouthing off that Hamas is not “legitimate?” Well, I don’t think that any USA political party since the Federalists is valid. I’m not joking. If you are going to tell me that people halfway around the world do not live like the rest of us, having evolving needs and evolving responses in affiliation (and yes, some of them have some bad breath) then I think we should live by the same “rules,” else we are shameless hypocrites. So I am quite serious that I believe that all political parties since the Federalist Party are invalid.
If a diplomat cannot look at a people, such as the Palestinians in Gaza, and have the most fundamental understanding that despite the terroristic actions that are the bad breath of the party in power that this is part of normal democracy and the urges of the people, then one can neither achieve peace nor even have correct vision of the problems, challenges and opportunities. You are punishing the Gaza people for trying to self correct what they thought was a problem with the ruling party, Fatah. You are enabling Israel, by focusing only on the bad breath terrorism, to bomb the hell out of people to punish them for trying to “kick the bums out of office and elect new people,” which was just what they did. It is one of the democratic hypocrisies of the century, in my opinion.
So to wrap up this case study, the point I am trying to make is that politicians, most especially diplomats, must learn to recognize normal democratic process in the natural form that it takes place in other countries and cultures, such as the forming and electing of new parties. Second one must recognize if the bad breath of terrorism of those parties are due to systemic health problems which must be addressed, rather than punching the teeth and gums of innocent men, women and children out of their mouths to “cure the bad breath” and then blame them for it to boot. Third, one must look at the diplomatic challenge and see the parallels in our own history (the British thought we were terrorists, by the way) and respond with a resonance and firm guidance in more fruitful channels rather than denial. Fourth, we need to invest in people’s political interest and participation, not discourage it when we don’t like the results. Fifth we must not have dialogue with the bad breath acts and, instead, go back to having dialogue with the people, friend and foe alike. Sixth, just as the USA would resent being told we must go back to Federalist party alone, so too we must not expect people to have “one size fit all” political parties that meet our (or Israel’s) approval.
I hope that you have found this helpful. I have a lot more to say about how to get going in productive diplomacy but I don't want to make this "tl/dr" (too long; didn't read).
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