Mark Stoneman Profile Photo

Mark R. Stoneman

Historian, editor, and translator for hire (German to English). Longtime resident of Washington, DC, now in Conway, NH, as a caregiver (he/him).

  Honor & Dignity

    ∞

    “U.S. military removes words ‘history,’ ‘respect,’ ‘dignity’ from digital presence as part of DEI review” by Gabriella Alcorta-Solorio, Texas Public Radio, February 28, 2025, www.tpr.org…. #NotTheOnion #MoscovianCandidate #FuckTrump

    ∞

    World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front

    Poster. The women described in the detailed caption below are separated into different quadrants with the help of a big 'V', which itself is underlined by the text 'for victory'.

    The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.

    Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.

    Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.

    1. See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎

    ∞

    Color photo of three women installing things in a shiny metal round structure. The front part (image foreground) has a wider circumference than the rear part (image background). The bodies of the women, one standing and doing something overhead, framed by the other two working on something closer to the floor, seem almost choreographed, embodying the dignity and high purpose of their labor.

    Women installing assemblies and fixtures in the tail fuselage of a B-17F bomber (Flying Fortress) under construction at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October 1942. The bodies of the women seem almost choreographed, embodying the dignity and high purpose of their labor. Photo by Alfred T. Palmer for the U.S. Office of War Information.

    Source: Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Color Photographs, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2017878924/.

    ∞

    We Need a New Political Translation Dictionary (English–English)

    In 1936, Dorothy Thompson observed in her newspaper column that “dictatorships often have quite different interpretations of words from liberal democracies. . . . In the dictionary of democracies,” for example, “peace is a desirably permanent condition of amicable relations with other nations. In the dictionary of dictatorships peace means: a quiet undisturbed period in which to prepare for war . . ."1

    The phrase “between nations” excluded asymmetric colonial conflicts, so the difference Thompson painted was quite real. In fact, it was the entire argument of Erich Ludendorff’s 1935 screed Der totale Krieg (Total War). In that book, Ludendorff flipped Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum on its head. Instead of understanding war as the pursuit of political aims by other means, states had to understand war as the driving force behind all politics.2

    Regarding “nonaggression” in international relations, Thompson wrote,

    liberal democracies mean . . . simply the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. Both Russian and German dictatorships mean by it the substitution of revolution for other weapons. Neither Russia nor Germany considers the fomenting of internal strife in countries which they want to bring under their influence to be aggression.

    In our own time, Russia, now a different creature, is playing a similar game inside NATO countries. Observers in these democracies refer to Russia’s current suite of activities as “hybrid warfare,” although their governments often play down these activities. Thompson’s discussion of “war” itself can help to explain why, provided we keep the “between nations” qualification in mind. “For the democracies war is armed conflict between nations, to be avoided as an unmitigated catastrophe. Above all, war is regarded as an abnormal condition. In the Russian dictionary,” on the other hand, “war is either an inevitable byproduct of the struggle of capitalist countries for markets, or the permanent, unremitting and inevitable struggle between classes for power.” The first theory of war came from Lenin’s interpretation of imperialism and the World War (1914–18). The second was the basic dialectical understanding of history as class conflict posited by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century.

    In contrast to the USSR’s take on war, “in the Fascist dictionary it is the necessary and normal condition in which heroic nations and personalities reach their highest potential. . . .” Such thinking could be found in the democracies, too, especially in the two decades or so before the First World War. After all, the educated learned Latin everywhere in the west, including the Roman poet Horace’s phrase, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.) During that war, Winfred Own referred to that sentiment as “the old Lie." And many politicians did everything they could to avoid the next war, leading to the catastrophic extreme of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler, while the United States pursued an isolationist foreign policy.

    Two related terms for Thompson were “honor” and “dishonor.” We do not consciously use them much in twenty-first-century international relations, but Thompson’s explanation is not hard to understand.3

    Honor in England means allegiance to accepted standards of conduct. Honor in Germany and Italy means prestige. Dishonor in the Anglo-Saxon dictionary is a crime which one commits against oneself; in the Fascist dictionary it means a crime which is committed against one.

    Following this logic, the U.S. dishonored itself when it turned to torture in Iraq. Similarly, our former and next president dishonored our country, our military, and his office by pardoning American war criminals. In the process, he didn’t honor international treaty obligations either. That is because his understanding of honor is more like that of the fascists of the 1930s. Anyone who takes him down a peg has injured him and faces retribution, much like a gang member who can’t afford to lose face. Looking weak is unbearable to this man, whereas conventional rules and fair play are for suckers. The current Russian president follows a similar gangland code, restoring his injured honor by having opponents poisoned or fall out of windows. There might well be a sense of injured honor involved in his attempt to destroy Ukraine.

    Thompson’s column underlined something with which we are all too familiar these days. We speak the same language as our enemies. We use the same words. But our common language both obscures and fosters different perceptions of reality that leave us at cross purposes. The Russians talk about “information war."4 And Alex Jones spread disinformation in the United States with a profitable website called InfoWars. Perhaps the problem goes even deeper, and individual words themselves have become players in our fight for the soul and honor of this nation. Maybe we need a comparative political dictionary to bridge the gap or at least bring the conflict into sharper focus.

    1. This and all other quotes by Dorothy Thompson: “Political Dictionary” (March 19, 1936), in Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), 17–20. ↩︎

    2. Erich Ludendorff, Der totaler Krieg (Ludendorffs Verlag, 1935). ↩︎

    3. Good historical background: Geoffrey Best, Honour among Men and Nations: Transformations of an Idea (University of Toronto Press, 1981). ↩︎

    4. Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). ↩︎

    ∞

    Winslow Homer, 'Bell-Time' (1868)

    I used to occasionally run across Winslow Homer’s wood engravings of the American Civil War, which were widely circulated in Harper’s Weekly, but this is the first work of his I’ve seen that deals with immigrant factory workers in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Note the mix of genders and ages, including the presence of young children. This was not work that could feed a whole family. No matter the difficult pecuniary circumstances of his subjects, however, Homer portrayed them with dignity.

    Brick factory buildings in the background, on the opposite side of the building. Workers walking home, empty lunch pails and baskets in hand.

    Credit: “Bell-Time” by Winslow Homer, Harper’s Weekly, July 25,1868, via Smithsonian American Art Museum.

    ∞

    Workplace Safety Posters, ca. 1936–40

    I am enjoying Depression-era workplace safety posters from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). They evoke a time when the power of government was effectively leveraged for good. If you live in the United States, there is a good chance you’ve encountered WPA building and infrastructure projects. One WPA program was the Federal Arts Project, which put artists to work. To get a feel for the diversity of programs this art supported, see the Library of Congress’s online collection.

    Unfortunately, the WPA also built and helped staff internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. This part of the story underlines the negative potential of government power when racism shapes policy.

    Besides the four posters that follow this text, I include a photograph of an alley behind a row of houses with tiny back yards in Baltimore. If you look closely at this image from the Farm Security Administration, you can see a WPA poster attached to an open door in the bottom left-hand corner. It is captioned “Stop accidents before they stop you.” The building itself appears to be part of a factory of some kind because only a door and a single big wall with windows is visible, visually distinct from the opposite side of the alley, where all the little houses are.

    These posters remind me of the ongoing importance of government for writing, publicizing, and enforcing workplace safety regulations. They connect past concerns about workplace conditions to countless reports of workplace injuries and sickness in our own time. They also link to family stories past and present, whether handed down or forgotten, whether taught or ignored in schools, workplaces, and union gatherings.

    My grandmother’s father was killed in an avoidable industrial accident in 1917 when she was six years old. The lathe he operated in a Cleveland factory had no safety guard, and then his luck ran out. He left behind six children and their mother, the oldest of them able to work. The sudden loss of this man represented a trauma that no one talked about in my childhood, and I only learned the barebones details from my mother this past year.

    I often wonder if and how such trauma is passed down in other families, and why its causes are silenced or not. My mind goes there because I imagine that millions of Americans—from across the political spectrum—come from families with such experiences, even if these were not handed down from the past. And I wonder what, if anything, knowledge about these many pasts might do to change their attitudes today.

    This thought ties in with the employers and politicians who fight government regulations and workers' collective bargaining. They strive to steal workers' freedom and dignity, all in the name of their own freedom. Part of this effort benefits from or fosters processes of families and communities forgetting or diminishing the significance of the workplace struggles and traumas in their own pasts.

    Fortunately, good governance and organized labor seem to be making a comeback.

    WPA poster showing two hands holding a rod or pipe of some kind. The caption reads: 'Protect your hands! You work with them.' A man in work cloths and cap facing the viewer, behind him a big contraption of some kind with interconneted belts, wheels, and other steel parts. His admonishment: 'Be careful near machinery'
    WPA poster showing a stylized man pushing into a pneumatic jackhammer against a wall. Big industrial wheels connected by belts. Caption: 'Work with care.' Poster with a giant steel beam hanging from a hook and pully in the air. The caption: 'Failure here may mean death below.'
    The description to this black and white photograph is in the third paragraph of this blog post.
    1. "Protect your hands! You work with them," poster (silkscreen) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518513/.
    2. "Be careful near machinery," poster (woodblock) by Robert Lachenmann for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, ca. 1936–1940. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518717/.
    3. "Work with care," poster (woodcut) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92517365/.
    4. "Failure here may mean death below – safety first," poster (woodcut) by Allan Nase for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518429/.
    5. "Backyards, Baltimore, Maryland," black and white photograph by Dick Sheldon for the Farm Security Administration, July 1938. Repository: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ba309cea-94b2-4288-e040-e00a18066c61
    ∞

    Fairness and Dignity

    Lawrence O’Donnell had some tough words for his media colleagues yesterday on MSNBC. Journalists pretended to ask questions at a supposed news conference, broadcast live, while Trump pretended he was answering them. Throughout the charade, they gave him and his torrent of semi-coherent lies a pass, like they always do, most fatefully in 2016. Then O’Donnell showed a longer segment by the one candidate who actually had something to say yesterday, but whose talk had not been deemed worthy of a live broadcast on any network: Kamala Harris.

    The vice president spoke to the United Auto Workers in Detroit. Her message was not a simple repeat of her Philadelphia speech the day before. In this smaller, more focused setting, she talked about the importance of collective bargaining for achieving a fair result. What’s more, she tied the term “collective” as used in an organized labour context to the community theme that figured so prominently in her Philadelphia speech. She linked the hard work of collective bargaining and of organizing politically to love of country, and she spoke of the dignity of labor.

    Fairness and dignity. That’s a message Americans need to hear about. What they got, instead, was an impotent rehash of the same old resentments, lies, and insecurities. I’m not much for television news and opinion, but this 25-minute video (available on YouTube) is important. Broadcast and print media, take note. Your country deserves better.

    ∞

    More than a Euphemism

    Perhaps Putin’s phrase “special military operation” should be seen as something more insidious than a euphemism for war. At the very least, it is consistent with Russia’s genocidal aims and practices in Ukraine.

    If we take the Clausewitzian metaphor of war as a duel somewhat literally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine becomes a struggle between two equals, two entities with the same dignity, the same right to exist. After all, duels have traditionally been fought between two parties capable of giving satisfaction for a perceived injury by one to the other’s honor. An officer could duel another officer, but not a sergeant, a lowly conscript, or a civilian occupying a more modest social position.

    By calling its invasion a “special military operation,” Russia denies Ukraine’s worthiness and sovereignty. It casts Ukraine and Ukrainians as other, fundamentally inferior, or devoid of honor, so to speak. Rejecting Ukrainian statehood outright, the term “special military operation” facilitates what the talking heads in Russia discuss openly on state TV: genocide, the elimination of Ukrainian culture, ethnicity, and language.

    At the same time, the term “special military operation” renders Ukrainian resistance illegitimate in Russian eyes. Thus, Russia brands the soldiers who defended Mariupol to the end “terrorists.” And its leaders become apoplectic when Ukraine dares to fire on targets inside Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea.

    Given the logic of Russia’s rhetoric and violence, the problem with “special military operation” becomes one not only of euphemism hiding war from Russians. The euphemism also creates space for, even favors, genocidal rhetoric and policy.

    ∞

    Values

    American national leaders gain their legitimacy by competing in compliance with not merely the outward forms but the clear values of our Constitution—equal dignity, religious freedom and tolerance, open deliberation, and the rule of law. These values don’t bind Donald Trump; norms of decency do not apply; he shrugs off the very burden of fact itself.

    – Garrett Epps, “Donald Trump has broken the Constitution,” The Atlantic, November 9, 2016.

    ∞

    Why Study Atrocities?

    I study European history, so why did I post about Sand Creek earlier today? And why excerpt seemingly gratuitous violence? I have no expertise in U.S. history, but I am interested in the history of violence per se, which can reveal a lot about peoples and cultures at a given point in history. Further, the U.S. Civil War has some important structural similarities to the Franco-Prussian War, and perhaps to other European wars in the mid nineteenth century.1 Given the causal relationship between the U.S. Civil War and the expansion of violence against Native Americans out west, there might be a case, for example, to include France’s nineteenth-century colonial conflicts in such a comparison. However, my main interest relates to cultural taboos---or lack thereof---about specific kinds of violence against specific categories of people, assuming those people have not been perceived to violate any important taboos themselves.

    In this particular case, the willingness to kill women and children indiscriminately underlines how little value these people’s lives had in the eyes of their butchers. Further, it suggests how utterly alien these Indians were in the eyes of their attackers, how far outside the attackers’ own ethnos or kin-culture community.2 Indeed, in Michael Fellman's account of the guerrilla conflict in Missouri during the Civil War, white fighting men broke more cultural taboos in their fight against Indians than they did when committing violence against free and enslaved black people.3

    At the same time, Congressional testimony points to other attitudes towards the slaughtered Native Americans. We hear of white men with native partners and sons, for instance, although the latter were called “half breed.” The paternalistic congressmen investigating the atrocity were also humane, in a certain sense, but a question about how long the witness-cum-translator had lived with the Indians suggests how different that congressman perceived him to be. At the same time, commentators who sided with the Colorado troops responsible for the massacre portrayed their opponents as brave. Of course, it was safer to make the women and children seem like incidental casualties of a battle, but the self-respect of fighting men also requires a worthy opponent. Without one, the act of killing brings no honor and---we are learning in recent conflicts---can leave deep scars in the soldier who pulls the trigger.4

    Given the tiny source base behind this post, it only represents an approach to such violence, nothing more, especially since such an approach must also consider the specific historical context of this awful American story.

    1. See Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (Washington, DC: Cambridge Universtiy Press, 1997). ↩
    2. On kin-culture communities, see Azar Gat with Alexsander Yakobson, Nations: The Long and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). ↩
    3. Michael Fellman, Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). ↩
    4. See Sharon E. French, "The Code of the Warrior," The Harmon Memorial Lectures in Military History 47 (United States Airforce Academy: Colorado, 2004). French has published a book by the same title. ↩
    ∞

    Honor and Violence

    America’s heartless terrorism
    Killing people like insects
    But honor doesn’t fear power.

    These sobering lines making the rounds in some parts of Pakistan raise troubling questions about our use of drones to bomb extremists in that country’s tribal regions. (See Mark Mazzetti’s “The Downside of Letting Robots Do the Bombing” in today’s New York Times.) While I am not sure how to interpret them, I am reminded of how effective the rhetoric of honor was for the insurgency in Iraq, until the U.S. developed a more hands-on approach under General Petraeus. I’m not trying to make a policy suggestion, mind you. Iraq and Afghanistan are two very different places. I am simply struck by the powerful role that an injured sense of honor can play among populations that might feel like David in the face of Goliath.