History

Oh dear oh dear. The last person who ought to be educating the world on the Internationale is Jane Galt who gives “a rather literal translation of the French words over at Asymmetrical Information”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005684.html . The first time I sang the Internationale was on Mayday 1978 in Paris when I joined the UNEF contingent on the traditional march. The last time I heard it was when a colleague’s mobile phone rang. She told me, embarrassed, that she’d spent hours programming the tune in and that it had then gone off during a meeting with top university administrators, none of whom would have recognized it but for a BBC documentary about the end of the Soviet Union on the box the night before.

One important thing to get across to an Anglophone audience is that the British and American words are different (what do Australians and Canadians sing, btw?). “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationale has a reasonably accurate version of the British words but starts:

bq. Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.

The version I learnt had “starvelings” for “workers”, “criminals” for “prisoners” (though I remember that being controversial) and, later in the verse, “conditions” for “tradition”.

Having picked up the the anthem by listening to my comrades, I also misunderstood the next two lines for my first year or so of singing it in English. These are are:

bq. For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!

Yes, you’ve guessed it … I imagined this was a reference to the supersession of Kantianism by the Hegelian dialectic. “… at last ends the age of Kant!” Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Following the publication of a “BBC list of the 10 worst Britons of all time”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4560716.stm , there’s now a meme going round “listing nominations for the 10 worst Americans of all time”:http://www.allthingsbeautiful.com/all_things_beautiful/2005/12/a_challenge_to_.html . The propensity of “conservative” blog commenters to include Jane Fonda, MLK, or Paul Robeson on their lists is somewhat worrying … Still, nominations for either Britons or Americans are welcome in comments below. My own personal nomination for the worst American of all time would be the person most responsible for the TV series Friends. There should be a special place in hell reserved for that individual. (via “Lawyers, Guns and Money”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2005/12/10-worst-americans.html , where Robert Farley has a sensible list ).

Does the United States have an empire? That question seems to generate a certain amount of serious and not-so serious debate in the blogosphere and media. Blogger Adloyada, for example, “gets seriously upset”:http://adloyada.typepad.com/adloyada/2005/12/today_programme_1.html with historian Linda Colley, writing huffily of Colley:

bq. For example, she represents the USA as self-evidently an imperial and imperialist power.

But the terms of the argument that Adloyada and Colley both accept seem to me to be seriously misleading since they centre on such questions as whether an informal network of client and subordinate states constitutes an empire or not. But there’s an obvious and much more straightforward way of answering in the affirmative, and that’s to hold the United States to the same standards that people (including Colley) use when dealing with other countries. And here I’m thinking of Russia and China.

Just to take the latter for a start, here’s Colley, “in the course of her article”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1669433,00.html :

bq. Some variants and examples of empire have proved powerful and durable. China, for example, is essentially a land-based empire, forged over the centuries by conquest and migration, which has managed to reposition itself as a nation state.

And how about Russia? The boundaries of Imperial Russia in, say, 1904 were rather larger than they were under Peter the Great at the end of the 17th century due to a progressive expansion, subjugation of native peoples, colonization of new territories by ethnic Russians, and so forth.

I guess readers will see where I’m going with this: if the expansion of China and Russia via a process of subjugation of native peoples and colonial settlement is a bona fide instance of empire and imperialism then so must be the expansion of the United States across the North American continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. It too involved the subjugation of native peoples and the projection of settlers and the eventual incorporation of the newly colonized territory within the expanding state. Of course, a little bit of selective amnesia and pretence can avoid the acknowledgement that, just like Britain and France, American too was a classically imperial power, just one that, in the end, was more successful.

This doesn’t sit well with a certain American self-image: one that sees the United States as somehow different from other powers, as not, historically, imperialist or colonialist at all. And that isn’t an image that is restricted to the right, it also occupies the thoughts of American liberals who believe that there is a danger of the US becoming something that, historically, it wasn’t and thereby somehow betraying its original ideals. But like their opponents, those liberals have bought into a myth. If China and Russia both were and are imperial powers, then, by exactly the same token, so was and is the US.

I’ve just finished reading Neil Gordon’s “The Company You Keep”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0142004529/junius-20 which I’ve enjoyed and been stimulated by as much as any work of fiction I’ve read in the past year (I’ve barely put it down in the last two days). I won’t post plot spoilers here, but the central drama revolves around a former member of the “Weather Underground”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weathermen whose elaborate new identity comes apart in 1996, thereby risking both prison and the loss of his seven-year-old daughter. There are plenty of implausible coincidences in the plot, but Gordon manages to make the whole believable. The central literary conceit of the book is that it is presented as a series of emails from the main protagonists to the seventeen-year-old daughter ten years later. And those emails so do not read like any email anyone has ever written! The main theme of the book is about how trust in friends is more important than abstract principle. Questionable, perhaps, but Gordon puts the case persuasively. There’s also a lot of the spy thriller about the book, and plenty of revolutionary tradecraft that took me back to reading Victor Serge’s “What Every Revolutionary Should Know About State Repression”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1926/repression/index.htm and to the whole mystique of the “professional revolutionary” as once cultivated by the groupuscules. (Though it isn’t mentioned in the book, Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” seemed to play in my head as the appropriate sountrack as I read, together with a few others from Blood on the Tracks.)

I’d love to give every Crooked Timber contributor and reader a copy of this book for Christmas, but I’m afraid you’ll have to buy your own.

I went to see a production of Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons”:http://www.cooper.edu/humanities/classes/coreclasses/hss2/library/man_for_all_seasons.html in Bath last night. Martin Shaw was marvellous as More. I was surprised that I already knew much of the dialogue (certainly from “the Fred Zinnemann film”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0060665/ ). And there are many great moments such as the confrontation between More and Roper in Act 1 concerning the conflict between conscience, God’s law and the laws of England. I wondered, watching the play, whether anything had been mucked about with to make the performance more “topical”, and I was sure it must have been when the “Common Man” declaimed at the start of Act 2:

bq. Only an unhappy few were found to set themselves against the current of their times, and in so doing to court disaster. For we are dealing with an age less fastidious than our own. Imprisonment without trial, and even examination under torture, were common practice.

But no. Those lines are there in Bolt’s original.

Over at Normblog, “Sophie Masson has been defending the French model against its detractors”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/11/riots_in_france.html , pointing out the France has successfully assimilated generations of Portuguese and Italian immigrants and turned them into French men and women. The funny thing is, that, leaving aside a bit of Napoleonic rambling around Italy in the 1790s, France never colonized Italy and Portugal. Nor did it fight a bitter war in Italy and Portugal as recently as the 1960s. Nor did it employ methods including massacre and torture against Italians and Portuguese in the recent past. Moreover those recent events have, as far as possible, been brushed under the carpet and France recently passed a law making schools teach the allegedly positive aspects of its colonial regimes in North Africa. Whilst the Algerian War was the subject of one of the greatest films ever made, French cinema (to mention just one popular cultural medium) has not faced up to the Algerian war in the way the Hollywood has addressed the American experience in Vietnam. I don’t assert that there is some direct causal connection between the Algerian war and the recent riots, but one cannot think seriously about the situation of the banlieue without noticing the unmentionable facts and silences. There has been no Truth and Reconciliation Commission for France, but until these wounds are acknowledged and examined, those of North African origin cannot be treated as just another immigrant group — like the Italians and Portuguese — they are not.

A friend alerts me by email that a new Rousseau biography is out in the US. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau: An Unruly Mind”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0618446966/junius-20 by Leo Damrosch is “reviewed in the books section of the NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/06schiff.html today. It is hard to see how this will better Cranston, although Cranston unfortunately died before he completed his final volume (it was finished by someone else and is the thinnest of the three). I’m off to the US tomorrow, and will get myself a copy of Damrosch’s book asap.

Go nominate some deserving soul, or souls, for best history blogging in various categories.

I went to see “Sophie Scholl – Die letzten Tage”:http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0426578/ (film website “here”:http://www.sophiescholl-derfilm.de/ ) last night, and came away with ambivalent feelings about it. On the one hand, it is good to see this extraordinary moment of heroism get a cinematic treatment, but on the other, it didn’t work especially well as a film. The film is supposedly based on Gestapo transcripts — but can it be true that Scholl and her interrogator engaged in lengthy speechifying against (and in defence of) the Nazi regime? These were the sort of exchanges that might work well in a stage play, but seemed stilted and artificial on the screen. There was also the matter of the film’s focus on Sophie as an individual rather than on her brother Hans when, from the point of view of their heroism, there seems little to choose between them. That seemed to exploit a tacit assumption that there was something specially noble about a woman resisting rather than a man. The film was good in bringing out their religious convictions, and the importance they had in motivating their acts. Certainly a film very much worth seeing for its moral and political qualities, but perhaps not for its aesthetic ones.

This bit from the “New York Daily News”:http://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/356814p-304125c.html

bq. Cheney and Libby spend hours together in the course of a day, which causes sources who know both men very well to assert that any attempts to discredit Wilson would almost certainly have been known to the vice president. “Scooter wouldn’t be freelancing on this without Cheney’s knowledge,” a source told the Daily News. “It was probably some off-the-cuff thing: ‘This guy [Wilson] could be a problem.'”

has a rather obvious “historical analogy”:http://www.kensmen.com/catholic/customschristmasx.html, although the language of “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” has a better ring to it than the sub-mafioso “this guy could be a problem.” Still, I don’t imagine we’re going to see a public ceremony of repentance and ritual scourging any time soon.

Via “Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_10_16.php#006771.

Today sees “yet”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/4312110.stm “another”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16825259%255E2703,00.html “round”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/arts/unmasked-the-real-shakespeare/2005/10/05/1128191785837.html of stories about a claim to have discovered the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Today’s candidate is Sir Henry Neville. A book claiming he is the author is about to be released by Brenda James and William Rubinstein.

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Henry pointed me to this Financial Times report of an interview (over lunch) with rightwing Australian historian Keith Windschuttle, which begins with Windschuttle saying he regrets his involvement in the dispute over Australia’s Aboriginal history, seeing as a distraction from his ambition to write a polemical defence of Western civilisation, aimed at the US market, and make heaps of money in the process.

”If you have a reasonably big hit in America you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars,” he says. “That’s my aim – to have a couple of big sellers and have a leisurely life.”

It is unclear how much of this is intended as tongue-in-cheek affectation, but it’s certainly consistent with notable elements of Windschuttle’s past career, which has been marked by repeated political and methodological somersaults.

Although a lot of attention has been focused on Windschuttle’s political jump from Marxist left to Christian right, I’ve always been more interested in his shift in methodological stance. Having made his name as a defender of objective truth against politicised history in both left-wing and right-wing varieties, Windschuttle has become a practitioner of an extreme form of politicised history, and now looks ready to abandon any remaining links to the world of fact.

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Jennifer Howard has an interesting “article”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i03/03a01101.htm in the _Chronicle_ this week about a classic slave narrative which may not be what it seems.

bq. _The Interesting Narrative_ is a swashbuckling tale that takes its hero from an idyllic boyhood in Africa through the travails of slavery and a series of maritime adventures to spiritual, legal, and economic rebirth as a free man in England in the last decades of the 18th century. An immediate best seller in Britain, The Interesting Narrative had nine editions in its author’s lifetime. … Mr. Carretta[‘s] …. doubts about Equiano’s origins began only when he undertook a labor of love: a new Penguin edition of The Interesting Narrative. Mr. Carretta combed British records for traces of Equiano or Vassa, which was the name given him as a slave. “No one who had written on Equiano or cited him, even those who had reproduced versions of his text, had ever bothered to check. And I, having a mind of concrete, said, ‘He gives me a date, he gives me a place, he gives me a name, it should be verifiable.'” What the Maryland professor unearthed among public British documents — including a 1759 parish baptismal record and a 1773 ship’s muster, both of which list Equiano’s place of birth as South Carolina — came as a shock. “I was surprised. I was resistant, in fact,” Mr. Carretta says. “The naval record was the real problem to me, because at that point he’s free, he’s an adult. The pursers went and simply asked, ‘What’s your name? Where are you from?”

It’s not entirely certain that Equiano _wasn’t_ born in Africa; there’s a lively-sounding debate among historians on the topic. But the article still raises some quite interesting issues about the relationship between authenticity and identity. It seems to me that Equiano is an even more interesting and complicated figure if he invented part of his past than if he didn’t. Timothy Burke has an interesting “new post”:http://weblogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/?p=94 up on the Jared Diamond debates, suggesting, if I understand him rightly, that ‘authenticity’ can be quite as much of a trap as more overt forms of condescension. I’ll have more to say on this later.

Update: the Chronicle is hosting a “colloquy”:http://chronicle.com/colloquy/ with Carretta on the topic at 1pm today.

Ralph Luker writes to tell me that 15 other US presidential historians “have joined”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/13998.html Rick Shenkman’s blog, to form a presidential history conglomerate. A nice addition to the academic blogosphere.