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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).

  Justice

    Finished reading Victoria Amelina, Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary (St. Martin’s Press, 2025). The author was killed before she could complete it, but it is still an important little book. It provides insights into Ukrainian cultural and psychological responses to the war, links between past and present generations of Ukrainian cultural producers, and efforts to record war crimes for future accountability. It offers ruminations not only on legal accountability but also on the relationship among memory, narrative, and justice. In this way, her thoughts are about Ukraine, but also about people more generally.

    Local clergy and faith leaders posted A Call to Justice, Mercy, and Peace (PDF) in our local newspaper yesterday. Its themes have been prominent in the sermons at my mother’s church this year.

    This is the kind of messaging that I, an otherwise nonobservant, unbelieving Christian can get behind. I sometimes think that I should get over my own church issues and seek out community there. We certainly share many of the same values and concerns.

    Timothy Snyder and the Existential Significance of History

    Timothy Snyder posits an important nexus between our current political moment and how we as a society understand history.1 When communist states proved unable to achieve their Marxist-Leninist ambitions, we did not feel the need to look too closely for an explanation in the histories of these states and their peoples. The communist project didn’t succeed because it was wrongheaded. Its failure lay in its problematic view of human development, that is, in its false, teleological philosophy of history.2

    We didn’t see a problem with teleological thinking as such, despite historians' emphasis on provable historical causality over imagined directions that history is somehow destined to take. Instead, we assumed that the failure of their philosophy of history proved that our own was right. The world was on an inexorable path toward mutually reinforcing free trade and free societies. Why sweat the details?

    Writing at the beginning of the first Trump administration, Snyder argued the need for a genuine historicization of our world.

    The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.…

    The acceptance of inevitability stilted the way we talked about politics in the twenty-first century. It stifled policy debate and tended to generate party systems where one political party defended the status quo, while the other proposed total negation. We learned to say that there was “no alternative” to the basic order of things…3

    Our tunnel vision, our focus on everything supposedly going the way it was supposed to, left us complacent. Trump’s 2016 election blindsided us, and the contingency of history continues to punch us in the face.

    The enemies of democracy are guided by an equally ahistorical or “antihistorical” notion of human development. Snyder uses “eternity” to describe their image of history and politics.

    Like the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity performs a masquerade of history, though a different one. It is concerned with the past, but in a self-absorbed way, free of any real concern with facts. Its mood is a longing for past moments that never really happened during epochs that were, in fact, disastrous.…4

    Of course, this view includes enemies and grievances, which can make nostalgia and an antihistorical worldview of unending merit dangerously aggressive. Consider the Lost Cause interpretation of the American Civil War, the poisonous stab-in-the-back myth in Weimar Germany, or the giant chip on Putin’s shoulder left by the USSR’s dissolution.

    In the politics of eternity, the seduction by a mythicized past prevents us from thinking about possible futures. The habit of dwelling on victimhood dulls the impulse of self-correction. Since the nation is defined by its inherent virtue rather than by its future potential, politics becomes a discussion of good and evil rather than a discussion of possible solutions to real problems. Since the crisis is permanent, the sense of emergency is always present; planning for the future seems impossible or even disloyal. How can we even think of reform when the enemy is always at the gate?

    The stakes of such a worldview for our culture and our development are existential.

    If the politics of inevitability is like a coma, the politics of eternity is like hypnosis: We stare at the spinning vortex of cyclical myth until we fall into a trance—and then we do something shocking at someone else’s orders.5

    What we need, argues Snyder, is to be better grounded in history so that we can understand what was and what is. In resisting the coma and the trance, we might imagine other futures and look for opportunities to shape the way history develops.

    Historicizing our world includes applying historical analysis to our immediate past. Snyder’s 2018 The Road to Unfreedom considers a period less than a decade old at the time.

    As we emerge from inevitability and contend with eternity, a history of disintegration can be a guide to repair.…6

    The project of this contemporary historian is as urgent as it is ambitious.

    1. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (Tim Duggan Books, 2017), chap. 20; Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), prologue. ↩︎

    2. Marxism is nothing if not a philosophy of history itself, a scientific description of how and why human societies develop as they do. It also propagates worker consciousness, worker knowledge of their historical role. See, for example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848). Lenin, impatient to move things along, developed the notion of a cadre of professional revolutionaries. Revolution and communism wouldn’t just happen. They had to be wrought from above. See V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? (1902). ↩︎

    3. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    4. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    5. Snyder, On Tyranny, chap. 20. ↩︎

    6. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, prologue. ↩︎

    Blog categories again: One overarching theme seems to be justice, although I haven’t made it explicit. Maybe it’s time to change that. Merely adding the word as a category won’t work, but perhaps I could start by reflecting on the theme and how it manifests in a number of past posts.

    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!" ↩︎

    A black man's left forearm and fist and a white man's left forearm and fist shown striking a big swaztika. The black man has a broken chain dangling from his wrist. The text reads, 'Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!'

    Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis, not bondage!

    World War Two poster – The word "bonds" can work three ways here: the bonds or chains pictured here as broken, the bonds that unite us, and U.S. war bonds. The second of these offers the most powerful contrast to "bondage."

    Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_065.

    Eighteen Points toward Strength and Solidarity in a Time of Fear and Despair

    I wrote these to steady myself, but maybe they will be of interest and possible use to others.

    1. More people have lived under despots of some kind than have not. Life still finds a way. So do freedom and justice.
    2. Despotism has played a large role in this country’s history, too, and the oppressed didn’t quit, even sharing their light. Recall the histories of Black Americans and of other othered groups.
    3. Hate the hubristic orange oaf and rocket oligarch for their abuses, if you want, but look for ways to leverage your emotions. Don’t let an understandable sense of powerlessness control you. Don’t allow the president and his helpmates to continue their assault unopposed.
    4. Start with the basics: Stay informed, but use your attention mindfully; protect your loved ones; rediscover the power of community.
    5. Remind yourself that this administration is no monolith. Neither are the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate, never mind the states.
    6. Every action the administration undertakes will challenge the unity that the GOP enjoys among its own. Overreach will make the coalition that is intent on destroying our government more vulnerable to fracture.
    7. Bide your time, if need be, but look for opportunities to raise awareness of specific problems. Look for ways to push back. Trust that your representatives are doing the same, but also verify.
    8. Get over your disgust at all people who elected this president. Most of these people share many of your values. Some are potential allies. Saying, “Told you so!” might feel good, but there’s no more time for that.
    9. Even the president’s supporters can be persuaded to protest against specific policies, including by calling their representatives. Look for the issues that people care about. With time, you might help them to see connections to other issues, but take baby steps, show humility.
    10. The corruptibility of people will favor the current presidency in parts of the government and in civil society, but the presidency’s actions in this regard will make it vulnerable to infighting.
    11. Find strength in how weak the administration’s actions reveal it to be. It does not trust normal legislative processes, not even when its party controls both houses of Congress.
    12. These people do not trust the FBI, the military, the government they head, or the people who elected them, but they trust in their own ability to purge and to lead the first three against as many of the people as they think necessary. They are wrong. Reliance on force without justice and public support on their side makes them weak.
    13. They think inciting the mob through social media posts is an effective mode of governance. While dangerous, this behavior is another sign of their weakness.
    14. They think threats of primaries are a viable long-term alternative to cooperation with members of their own party in Congress. The rich doners who make these threats viable strengthen neither their party nor the administration over the long term. Skilled cabals might exact high prices, but they do not last.
    15. They know that their rhetoric about trans and other queer people is favored by only a minority, and then largely in the abstract. The same goes for the racist, anti-DEIA cover they employ to discriminate while pretending that they are all about merit.
    16. Having only terrible arguments in their quiver, they rely on epistemic violence and memory erasure—lies, disinformation, public attacks on those who call them out, bullying teachers, strong-arming universities and schools, crying “censorship” in spaces they haven’t managed to dominate, deleting vital data from government websites, and more.
    17. Their attack against us and our government has been expanded to include our allies, too. Don’t get indignant when people in theses countries call all of us out on our tariffs and worse. Look for ways to show solidarity instead.
    18. We’re feeling exhausted by the assault on all fronts, but this assault takes people, and they are consuming their own at an alarming rate.

    “Review and Evaluation—Tulsa Race Massacre,” by the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, January 10, 2025.

    In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps. Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa. This report breaks that silence by rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.

    – Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, quoted in press release, “Justice Department Announces Results of Review and Evaluation of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” January 10, 2025.

    My mother has been watching her church service online so she can hear it. That means I hear parts too. And I can see what’s happening on the desktop I’m streaming to the TV with. Different vibe today. Pastor began by inviting people to settle, to be present, to allow themselves to have their feelings. I also saw more people in attendance than is often the case. The service emphasized themes such as inclusion, compassion, and justice, the last term describing something very different from the hypocritical, moralizing, vengeful God that I despised and rejected in my youth. If I had a religious bone left in my body, this place could be one point of connection with the local community.

    Sometimes I wonder how the former reality television star’s malevolence, laziness, and insatiable hunger for praise would play out in a second term. What would his version of fascism look like? Anne Applebaum’s depiction of Autocracy, Inc. is informative. I also picture competing ideologues, opportunists, and grifters vying for influence and ill-gotten gains.

    What I can’t imagine is a coherent mass movement to support whatever the orange one’s authoritarian instincts manifest. But politicized justice, state violence, mob rule in places, unnecessary suffering by lots of people… Yes, that is easy to imagine. Incremental, inconsistent, and arbitrary abuses. Loud curfew notices on phones in areas of mass protest. Piss-poor morale in the military… Ima stop thinking now.

    Reading about Israel's Inequitable Application of Military Conscription

    In Thursday’s Hareetz, Ofer Aderet offers some useful background on the exemption of yeshiva students from military service. In 1948, there were only some 400 yeshiva students. Preserving their schools seemed a priority in the wake of the destruction of so much Jewish learning. The exemption was supposed to be temporary, but it still exists. Nowadays, there are more than 60,000 yeshiva students, and the religious and cultural situation of 1948 improved decades ago. Given Israel’s current security situation, there is enormous societal pressure to make the burden of mandatory military service equitable. The current government, which includes ultra-Orthodox Jews, has avoided doing so, but the High Court of Justice ruled it has to. John Strawson talks about what this means for Netanyahu in a question-and-answer piece in The Conversation. This second piece assumes less background knowledge on the part of the reader, while also going a bit deeper into the current political context.

    Links to developments closer to home: Conscription, what Americans call “the draft,” is a powerful tool for war, but it requires a broad political consensus about the justness of the war and a sense that conscription’s implementation is fair. The U.S. Army and its political masters learned this lesson the hard way during the Vietnam War, after which the country moved to a volunteer force. By contrast, the Federal Republic of Germany held onto conscription until 2011 because its political leadership valued the link between military service and citizenship, a liberal tradition with roots in nineteenth-century political, military, and constitutional developments. Conscription is still in the country’s Basic Law, but the number of people being called up made conscription inequitable and therefore untenable, at least during a time when a major war in Europe no longer seemed likely.

    Reading Aryeh Neier on Israel, International Humanitarian Law, and Justice

      Aryeh Neier, “Is Israel Committing Genocide?”, The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2024.

    The author, who has seen much as one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, has long been “sparing” in his application of the term “genocide” to state-committed atrocities over the past several decades. Initially he did not think of Israel’s indiscriminate, even criminal violence against civilians as genocide, because Israel had a clear right to defend itself against the barbarous acts of Hamas.

    I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory."

    What makes this specific article a good read is that he embeds his brief account of the current war into a broad framework of (1) violent conflicts outside of this one, (2) international discourses and agreements about humanity and law in war, and (3) the development of international humanitarian law. Of the last, he writes,

    These efforts, which reflected the growing strength and capacity of the human rights movement, created public awareness of IHL and helped to establish the context in which a conflict such as the war in Gaza is being judged by concerned members of the public worldwide.

    Neier ends the piece with the establishment of courts to prosecute war crimes and crimes against international humanitarian law. He very briefly considers their relevance to the war in Gaza. Of course, Netanyahu cares little about international opinion or rules. The prime minister invokes “antisemitism” because it suits his current objectives.

    Working against his methods is another fact that world leaders ignore at their own peril, it seems to me. As Neier writes,

    I have been engaged in efforts to protect human rights for more than six decades, often in circumstances with exceedingly high stakes. I cannot recall any dispute over rights that aroused greater passions and more debate than that involving the war in Gaza since October 7.

     Articles behind paywalls can often be found cached on archive.today.

    Justitia Again

    The following cartoon and comment, which I posted on February 5, 2017, did not age well.

    Justice, a blindfolded woman, holds the scales of justice in one hand and holds back Trump with the other. Trump is trying to attack Lady Liberty, but Justice says to her sister, “I’ve got this.

    After the latest Spiegel cover and all the news it embodies, this cartoon by Sam Machado feels really good, particularly with its use of gender against the U.S. chauvinist-in-chief.

    In case you missed it, this report from July 5, 2022, sums up all the damage: “The U.S. Supreme Court term in review.”

    Riots

    Minnesota Governor Walz’s assertion that ongoing riots are no longer about George Floyd ring true in a way. But were they ever about one man? Floyd’s death was certainly no one-off. The protests—and the participation of so many young people—should give pause to those leaders who would gloss over this society’s brutal injustices and disparities.

    Justitia

    Justice, a blindfolded woman, holds the scales of justice in one hand and holds back Trump with the other. Trump is trying to attack Lady Liberty, but Justice says to her sister, 'I've got this.'

    After the latest Spiegel cover and all the news it embodies, this cartoon by Sam Machado feels really good, particularly with its use of gender against the U.S. chauvinist-in-chief.

    ACLU’s Open Letter to Mr. Trump

    Published in the New York Times on Nov. 11, 2016:

    Continue reading →

    The Most Famous Closed Trial with Secret Evidence

    Sometimes history just leaps off the pages and proclaims its relevance for our own times. On December 24, 1894, The Times of London published a long editorial about the first trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for alleged treason.

    "We must point out that, the more odious and unpopular a crime is, the more necessary is it that its proof and its punishment should be surrounded by all the safeguards of public justice. Of these, the most indispensable is publicity. . . . It may be important for the French people to preserve the secrets of their War Department, but it is of infinitely greater importance for them to guard their public justice against even the suspicion of unfairness or of subjection to the gusts of popular opinion."

    The Times correspondent wrote these words when there was still little doubt of Dreyfus' guilt in the public at large. There were no Drefusards yet, that is, members of a movement to see the wrongfully convicted man exonerated. It was three years before Emile Zola wrote "J'accuse." The point wasn't about guilt or innocence. It was about the rule of law, which meant due process out in the open even for grave matters of national security. The later establishment of Dreyfus' innocence reminded observers why.

    Tomorrow my class is discussing Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999). Burns tells this dramatic tale with his own gripping prose interspersed with documents from the period. And he extends the tale as far as 1998, in order to help readers understand the affair's legacy. For those with more time on their hands I also recommend Jean Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: George Braziller, 1986), a big history book that reads like a good political thriller.

    Received Rights versus Human Rights in the 'Declaration of Independence'

    Featured image: The famous "Declaration of Independence" painting by John Trumbull

    Today citizens of the United States celebrate Independence Day. On this day, 232 years ago, thirteen American colonies proclaimed their independence from Great Britain in a famous document that Thomas Jefferson wrote, the Declaration of Independence. As a history teacher, I find this document fascinating, because it fuses together two different political traditions. On one hand, it recalls seventeenth-century English constitutionalism and its arguments about what had supposedly always been the rights of Englishmen. On the other hand, it advances the kind of powerful and universalizing claims about natural law and human rights spawned in the Enlightenment and given their most dramatic expression during the French Revolution. These connections make the document an interesting object lesson for the history classroom. They also can act as a healthy reminder to Americans that our Declaration of Independence displays not only differences from European political traditions, but also powerful affinities for them.

    Continue reading →

    Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Generational Differences

    Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.

    What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.

    Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.

    Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race was keenly aware of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rBarack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Generational Differences

    Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.

    What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.

    Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.

    Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race was keenly aware of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rhetoric.hetoric.

    When Google Gets it Wrong

    My wife is reading a crime story I got for Christmas and read over the holidays, Christian von Ditfurth, Mann ohne Makel. It's sleuth, Josef Maria Stachelmann, is a historian of the Third Reich. Wonderful read, if you know German. Anyway, my wife asked me about the Hossbach Protocol that Stachelmann is supposed to give a talk about. My memory failed me, so I took the easy way out with Google. Bad idea.

    HossbachProtocol

    The first two hits on Google led to web sites that seek to appear legitimate, but which are in fact sites that deny the Holocaust and consider the Nuremberg Trial a travesty of justice. How did Google mess this up? Have some Nazi would-be academics learned search engine optimization (SEO)? Or was this blind luck? I'm not sure how Google's search engine works, but the results here certainly point to the limitations of algorithms that rely on the syntactic relevance of a site. Also, while no one is linking to the articles about the Hossbach Protocol directly, there are many links to the main sites on which the articles appear. (You can determine who is linking to a site by typing link:www.name-of-site.com into the Google search box, unless the site is using the nofollow attribute in its links.) In other words, the sites appear to be popular and therefore relevant in Google's eyes. In fact, Google has blessed both sites with respectable, if not overwhelming page ranks (PR). The first one Historical Revisionism, comes in at a PR 4, and the second one, Institute for Historical Review, at PR 5 on a scale of 0 to 10.

    Now I could stop with this warning about the limitations of Google search results, but perhaps there is more to be learned here. Perhaps I should also issue a plea to historians to both learn SEO and write for general audiences on the web. Like it or not, Google is the first place many people turn for answers, and anyone seeking one on the Hossbach Protocol can be easily led astray. Actually, historians might not even need to learn SEO. Wikipedia already has a high page rank and its pages turn up regularly at or near the top of Google search results. Perhaps all that is needed is more and better Wikipedia articles. The Hossbach Protocol doesn't show up in Wikipedia. If it had, the search results would have been different.

    Wikipedia brings up another twist. Typically, when one uses one term in Wikipedia that is more commonly known by another, Wikipedia will at least offer alternative results. (It's better than Google that way. Google can only offer spelling alternatives.) In this case, though, the more typical American name for this document did not show up in the search results. Only after I typed Hossbach Memorandum did I find what I was looking for. I then typed this term into Google and came up with much more satisfactory results. Only one of the right-wing links came up on the first page, and this time near the bottom.

    HossbachMemorandum

    This final result brings me back to Wikipedia and SEO. We need to enter all possible variations of terms in Wikipedia articles so that they show up in search results. (Sure, I should have entered "Hossbach Memorandum" right from the start, but I translated directly and that was that. As the first set of search results shows, others have done so too.) We also need to do the same thing with web articles and blog posts. It won't do to leave the field open to the bad guys, simply because the world of SEO isn't part of our training and does not make or break historical careers. I don't know if Deborah Lipstadt does any SEO, but her three-year-old blog combats holocaust denial and has a PR 6. More established historians need to follow her example in their respective fields.

    Outsourcing Military Tasks

    Originally posted on Clio and Me on this date.

    There has been much scrutiny in the press recently about the U.S. outsourcing military missions to private companies like Blackwater. P. W. Singer pointed out many problems with this trend in yesterday's Washington Post. The most important from my point of view is the weak link between the American people and warmaking:

    Since the end of the Vietnam War, the United States has sought to ensure that there's a link between the public and the costs of war, so that good decisions will be made and an ethos of responsibility fostered. With about half our operation in Iraq in private hands, that link has been jeopardized.

    Perhaps we live in a new world that I do not understand, but it seems to me that the past several hundred years of Western history have shown that a people at war can create a far more powerful political and military force than anything a cabinet can muster on its own. If the war in Iraq is so important, this country's citizens should be more directly involved, for they are the real basis of American power. But they are also a brake on the reckless use of military force. They will only mobilize for compelling reasons. One of President Bush's mistakes was to go to war with only enough public support to begin it. There is no such thing as war on the cheap. Private contractors are expensive in mere dollars, but they have helped the administration to avoid seeking a more solid domestic political foundation for the war—or accepting the consequences if it is unable to do so.

    Framing his piece as an open memorandum to the secretaries of defense and state, Singer devotes most of his attention to how counterproductive private military forces are on the ground. This line of thought is more likely to gain an audience than the more immediate focus in the media on the accountability of men working for outfits like Blackwater. Yes, Congress needs to implement a legal framework for these men who stand outside both Iraqi law and the United States' own Uniform Code of Military Justice, but a strong concern for the rule of law and human rights has not been this administrations' strong suit.

    We also need to hear more about the organizational culture of Blackwater. Since it hires men with prior military experience, this requirement includes learning more about the military cultures whence they came, especially since Blackwater hires people of diverse national backgrounds, including people with experience in outfits with less than stellar human rights records. The question of military culture brings me back to the initial point about the weak link between the American people and the violence being done in its name in Iraq. The U.S. Army and Marines have their own organizational cultures, but these include a strong link to values in American civilian society. Can we say the same thing about our hired guns?

    Of course, the abuses at Abu Ghraib show that our own military culture has some problems, though I suspect that the atrocities committed there had much to do with the inexperience of National Guard troops, a different culture in the CIA, the use of civilian defense contractors, and some troubling signals being sent from the highest levels of our civilian government, not to mention unclear lines of command and accountability.

    Six Years Ago

    Georgetown University in Washington, DC, did not cancel classes on September 12th, so I went into a class packed with mainly freshman at 9:15 a.m. By that point teaching early modern European history was out of the question, so we talked. After I got home, I sent the following message to everyone.

    Date: Wednesday, September 12, 2001 12:56
    Subject: reflections

    Hi everyone,

    Frankly, I was surprised by the rather large turnout in class this morning. Yesterday's news was disturbing, and many of us feel worse as the details and reality of the terrorist attacks sink in. The class discussion was heartening for me, because I saw a large group of curious, thinking, politically astute and morally aware students, who will one day help to lead this country. There is still much to learn (for your professors too), but your remarks show that you want to learn. This desire to learn about and engage in the world might help give a little meaning to the tragedy.

    Those of you who did not come to class leave me worried. Was it because of the general sad and bewildered atmosphere that has enveloped this city? Or have you lost family members or friends? I do not expect an answer to these questions, but I do want to point out two things to all students. First, those of you who feel despondent, in shock, depressed, angry, or confused should know that this is normal. You should also know that such feelings can be extremely debilitating if you cannot address them in some way. Make sure you seek out counselors, chaplains, advisors, professors, friends or family members for assistance. Some of you will find your academic work a good diversion--or way of understanding what happened. If, however, your personal situation makes such work impossible, because of depression or family obligations, please also visit your dean, who can run interference for you with your instructors.

    Student reactions in class covered a wide spectrum of opinion and emotions, which I would like to summarize. Some of you appeared numbed or angered by the attack and could not yet put it into some sort of abstract moral or political framework. Others were outraged at the apparent insensitivity some people showed towards this great loss. These are normal reactions, and I imagine most of you have felt or will feel similarly, at least for a time. Many of you pondered what the U.S. reaction should be. While some expressed concerns about the morality and justice of retribution, others worried about what application of force might actually work. Who was behind these atrocities and what would be the most efficacious manner of dealing with them? One of you pointed out that any political or military reactions must consider the mindset of the terrorists, their cultural assumptions and psychological make-up. We cannot assume that they think as we do. Some of you talked about what yesterday's event meant for your sense of security in the U.S. This concern appeared to waver between two poles: our own physical security and the impact that this violence will have on our own humanity. I underscored the latter concern. Finally, Anton [my TA that semester] pointed out that coming to terms with many of the big conflicts in our day entails learning how to ask the right questions. Besides learning about what happened in the past, our course provides an opportunity for you to learn how to ask trenchant questions.

    Finally, some personal notes: A friend of ours in Augsburg, Germany (north of Munich) called this morning to find out how we are doing. She says no one in Augsburg is talking about anything else. They are horrified. My mother-in-law in Munich spoke of a minute of silence being observed today in the textile industry (probably elsewhere too). As far as my friends in New York go, well, it is impossible to get through on the phone. One can only hope and, if one is so inclined, pray.

    I encourage you to participate in the university's various forums for dialog today, and to listen to or read some quality news, such as NPR radio, The Washington Post, and so on. Some of you might also read the foreign press online. Participating in the country's and world's dialog is good not only for your intellectual development, but also for your mental health.

    Take care of yourselves.

    Best wishes,

    Mark Stoneman