Tag: politics

Good Riddance to All That

I first encountered Tony Judt’s writing in the NYRB back in the early 00s. He caused a stir with an article fiercely critical of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate and called for a single-state solution with equal rights for Jewish and Arab inhabitants. For a decade plus I read him regularly in the NYRB and in a few other outlets. Along with fellow historians Timothy Snyder and Timothy Garton Ash I came to appreciate Judt’s appraisals of events from the USA to Europe and the Middle East. He was diagnosed with ALS but continued writing for a while, and published several memoir essays before his passing.

Timothy Snyder is one of the sharpest critics of what is happening now in the USA, as that nation is stripped of parts and looted by a cabal of immoral tech tychoons, petroleum overlords, big pharma pushers, agrobiz schemers, war profiteers, and barely literate pedophilic opportunist/real estate conmen/human trafficking specialists. This series of conversations was quite enlightening and entertaining. I had planned to read Judt’s Postwar first, but chose Thinking the Twentieth Century instead–perhaps I wanted to get a sense of Judt’s methodology and concerns before reading his magnum opus?

My fave bits of the book involve Judt demonstrating his intellectual and ethical evolutions over an academic lifetime devoted to history and its analysis. He grew up in a firmly Marxist family with Marxist sympathies but eventually came to disavow communism. He developed an enthusiasm for Zionism at one point (in part because of time spent on a socialist kibbutz) and spent two years in the IDF, serving in the occupied Golan Heights. But the Zionist enterprise became distasteful to him as the moral rot at its core (colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and increasing apartheid violence) became increasingly apparent and insupportable. His historical interests moved from a focus on France to Europe more generally and then to Eastern Europe in particular as that part of the world became open to western academics and scholars. It is in part his gift as a historian to write history about events and movements in which he was an active participant. This is key to understanding the 20th century.

Along the way there are delicious bits of memoir, as two rather important figures of the last two decades discuss the role of history and historians, and how history should be taught and to what purposes. Judt also was highly concerned with “hyphenated history” focused primarily on specific historically marginalized groups, and thought that this teaching and focus should come AFTER a serious grounding in some sort of narrative history. Students in his view should all be taught the same or similar history and then given means of digging deep into critiques of that history.

Judt discusses at several points the concerning rise of the far right in Europe but thought the US was impervious to this because of the strength of its institutions, its enormous size and incredible diversity. LOL. Only a few years after his death that all proved untrue. There are some surprising bits at the end of the Afterward about the “victory of liberalism” despite the darkness and violence of the previous century. A decade after Judt and Snyder’s appraisals of the 20th century parts of it seem as silly as Fukuyama’s The End of History (though Judt does posit that the two decades after the fall of the Soviet Untion were wasted and ruined by Clinton and particularly by Bush 2).

As this book shows, history and its underpinnings are complex. Predicting the future using the past and present is a fool’s errand. A few things are got wrong in retrospect but the book is quite valuable and belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in history or the humanities.

Human Smoke

Human Smoke is by the novelist Nicholson Baker, who has written some very touching and outrageously silly books which I’ve enjoyed tremendously. But Human Smoke is not a novel, it’s a sort of experiment in collage, cobbling together diary entries, letters, news reports, and speeches from dozens of sources leading up to and during World War II and the Holocaust. Unlike his novels this work is not touching or silly. It is deeply troubling.

I’m familiar with only two comparable works. One is Baker’s other non-fiction experminet, called Baseless, which focused on the Korean War. In that book Baker investigated the possibility that the US had covertly employed biological weapons against civilians and soldiers during the conflict, and kept a sort of personal journal of his process, his reactions to government secrecy, what it was still possible to find out, and what was likely down the memory hole. Another work similar to Human Smoke is Charles Reznikoff’s Holocaust, a work of poetry created through the artful rearrangement of fragments from witness testimony at the trials of Nazis. I used Reznikoff’s text when I taught Hitler’s rise to power and the Holocaust to public school students.

I’ve read a few dozen books about the second World War, and about Nazi Germany, and about Hitler and the Nazis, about Churchill and FDR, and probably also a few hundred articles along the way. On top of that are the countless documentaries, television shows, news reports, literary works, memoirs, and feature films, etc. Human Smoke is troubling because I learned new things which made me uncomfortable. I had to question my own assumptions that I had the narrative straight, that I knew that story pretty deeply for an amateur who was not a trained historian and yet who had the heavy responsibility to teach it to young people and guide them as they explored the topic. Of course I like when I have to challenge my assumptions–that’s the entire point of the reading life.

I’d long questioned and critiqued what I was taught in high school about US involvement in the war. I was taught that the US intervened to stop the Holocaust and save Jews, and that the US military won the war. Previously I’d known that this was not true and was largely propaganda instead of history. The Soviets defeated the Nazis in Europe, with help from the US. 4 out of 5 Nazis killed by the Allies were killed by the Soviets, and overwhelmingly the Soviets did the heavy lifting and endured the heaviest losses. The US of course did the hard work in Africa and in Italy, and paid a huge cost in Normandy. They did all the ghastly work in the Pacific as well. I don’t minimize the losses or the sacrifice of the United States in the war. But we were outright lied to about why the US intervened when I was a teenager. We were also misinformed about the USSR and its role.

Human Smoke reveals things about Roosevelt and Churchill and their schemes and their tactics which are extremely distasteful. Some of them I knew before, others were grotesque revelations. At a time when heroes are needed badly in the West, you won’t find them here. Again we are confronted with the problem long presented in the western democracies–there are no good guys in power, only somewhat less bad guys. The pacifists are the only worthy ones in this book.