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OK so forget about “Sunday Morning” – Sputnik Mania was linked on Instapundit this morning!!!! OMG. This really is my proudest moment of all. The website for a movie that I personally worked on will crash as a result of the tons of traffic that Instapundit links inevitably bring. Even though there is no mention of me or the work I did anywhere on the website or the movie, I could not be happier. Yippee!
The big day is here – Sputnik is 50! Woo hoo! (And the movie is in the SF Chronicle! Alright!)
Only Dame Judi Dench could utter such a line with so much panache.
We’re watching the new James Bond movie, and it occurred to me that perhaps the Bond enterprise has somewhat surprisingly adjusted to today’s geopolitical reality better than our own government.
Even though Bond’s traditional nemeses lost their entire raison d’etre when the Soviet Union fell, the character has nonetheless continued undaunted. The bad guys are always so damn bad – except now they’re freedom fighters who use international banking to fund terrorism. And the girls are always so damn beautiful, and today they’re even allowed to be brainy. And evil to boot (except I think Vesper really does love him!)
James Bond doesn’t miss the Cold War. He has plenty of bad guys to fight, and beautiful girls to woo. He doesn’t need the black and white rubric of baddies and goodies to tell him what to do.
But in America, we do miss the Cold War. We have tried so hard to find new enemies to justify the military expenses of the end of the Cold War. It was so much easier just to have one enemy to fight, an enemy with a country that had boundaries and a national government and ambassadors. Not these days. We have new, amorphous enemies, ones who don’t play by the rules of the game.
Even in 1962, when we were the closest we ever got to armageddon, Kennedy and Khrushchev still wrote each other letters. Can you imagine George Bush doing that, or calling up Bin Laden on the special red telephone? I don’t think so.
It’s a very warm and confusing world out there. James may have adapted, with his clever use of cell phones and GPS, but in this case pop culture is well ahead of the game.
And Christ yes, we do miss the Cold War.
In reading an article about the legacy of the Khmer Rouge, both in Cambodia and abroad, I discovered a rather shocking statistic:
According to a survey by the Transcultural Psychosocial Organisation, three-quarters of the adult population [of Cambodia] are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Imagine – three out of every four people you meet has flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks… yet they cannot talk about what they have been through due to their own survivor’s guilt.
I cannot believe this. Or more precisely, I don’t want to believe this. It makes my own small issues seem miniscule when compared to the pain of an entire population. I was just going to post about the number of times death has touched my life over the past year, but then I read about one woman in the article who lost both her grandparents as well as seven brothers and sisters.
I am humbled.
I am also reminded of an earlier article from TCS Daily that I found on Instapundit back in May, regarding how few movies have been made about Communist atrocities. He draws on an earlier article by Lloyd Billingsley, written in 2000, which describes an imaginary movie set during the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 and concludes:
The simple but startling truth is that the major conflict of our time, democracy versus Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism–what The New York Times recently called “the holy war of the 20th century”–is almost entirely missing from American cinema.
Perhaps he’s right, that this hole in our record is due to Hollywood’s own experience with blacklisting and communism. But that’s no excuse for the filmmakers of today.
Three out of four people. Seventy-five out of one hundred. All traumatized. They cannot tell their own stories, but why isn’t anyone else trying? Perhaps it is still too soon. But as humans and as historians, we have an obligation to remember, and to repeat. By doing so, perhaps one day we can avenge.
While trawling the web with my cereal this morning, I discovered that the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, CA, has recently declassified documents online that had previously been withheld.
Now, if you ever want to see me have a truly hideous history geek moment, just mention the words “previously unreleased classified documents.” Music to my ears. Even reading that same standardized font that the government uses in all its memos and telcons makes me feel like I’m about to discover something earthshaking next time I turn the page. (It’s a relic of doing primary source research in the National Archives – besides the awesome salad bar, finding a good quote was just about the only excitement available.)
Anyway, I digress. This gem of a document (available in its full text here! how exciting) is an 11-page rant by Nixon about the lack of positive PR his peons, I mean administration, was disseminating. Referring to himself repeatedly in the third person, “RN” cited the following positive examples to correct the public image of himself as “an efficient, crafty, cold, machine:”
Nixon cited “warm items” (Page 3) such as “the calls that I make to people when they are sick, even though they no longer mean anything to anybody” (Page 4). “I called some mothers and wives of men that had been killed in Vietnam,” he added, helpfully.
And really, the public only went unaware of his good deeds because “The President does not brag about all … he does for people” (Page 4).
Wow! Now that really goes far to correct my negative image of RN. I mean, what a guy. Ha.
Actually, writing my thesis on Nixon did serve to open my eyes in certain regards. While RN’s legacy has become Watergate, in truth those events were at the end of an otherwise very busy and rather ambitious term as President. When Nixon took office, he was facing an uncertain world, one where the Soviets were making rapid gains and the U.S. was falling behind (or so they thought). Through a series of deft maneuvers, mostly engineered by Kissinger, the Nixon administration brought us very close to achieving true detente. Their brand of realpolitik, while often crass and even inhuman, served as a unique lens by which both men viewed the Cold War struggle.
Here I could go into the Cienfuegos submarine incident of 1970, on which I wrote my thesis, but that is a big and extremely geeky topic. I will save it for another day. Suffice it to say, Nixon was a strange man, and somehow managed to combine a great deal of realism in international affairs with an absolute self-obsessed paranoia in his personal and domestic life.
And there’s your history geek lesson for today.
Well, no wonder people don’t have a historical consciousness anymore: schools are now actively preventing it (via Instapundit, as always).
In an effort to refine secondary school curriculum, the new Labour government in Britain is stripping down the traditional curriculum to include more “contemporary” topics, such as debt management, the environment and healthy eating. Fine, great – we all need those, right?
However, these reforms are being made at the expense of a few topics that are, in my humble opinion, a great deal more important in the long run:
Even Winston Churchill no longer merits a mention … Along with Hitler, Gandhi, Stalin and Martin Luther King, the former prime minister has been dropped from a list of key figures to be mentioned in history teaching.
Excuse me – what? How could you possibly drop Churchill and Hitler from the history lessons? I would understand it in America… well, almost… but in Britain, it’s simply inexcusable. Look how pissed he is:
And really, I would be too. He saved their country, and now he gets this? Outrageous, I say.
Of course, the government has justified it by saying, “Teachers know that they need to mention these pivotal figures. They don’t need to be instructed by law to mention them in every history class.”
No, see, they do. This is how we forget. Perhaps now, less than 100 years after World War II, it is safe to believe that Churchill and Hitler are two figures so monumental to Britain’s history that they could not possibly be omitted from a history class. But what about 100 years from now (if we even make it that long)? If we stop including them now, each successive generation will continue to deemphasize their role as they focus on more “modern” issues, like weight control and debt management. And eventually, who’s left to tell the story of the enormous role these two men played in world history?
This is especially poignant when taken in combination with this story (also thanks to Instapundit). When Churchill himself was on the world stage, it was probably inconceivable to think of a time when there would be only a handful of World War I veterans left in Britain. Now there are three. When these men die, their stories, their experiences die with them.
So what of the time when there are only three remaining veterans of World War II? And when there are none? Who will be left to remember that Churchill and Hitler changed the shape of history, if we don’t continue to teach our children that they did?
I don’t really know what to make of this one, exactly… basically it’s hilarious at first glance, and then very, very telling. (Thanks to Siberian Light for the link.)
Looks like some Russian bloggers got pissed at the BBC for claiming that Russians are alcoholics, and more precisely for implying that their tastes reach beyond traditional forms of alcohol to well, Dran-o. The article ended with a poll that asked, “How often do you drink eau de cologne, antifreeze or cleaning agents? Regularly, Very rarely, Never, or I don’t drink.”
I simply can’t believe that a respected news source like the BBC would perpetrate such a worn-out stereotype as this. It’s like taking a poll of Bud Light drinkers to see how often they beat their wives – regularly, very rarely, never, or I don’t drink.
Apparently, a few Russians agreed with my sentiments and weren’t too fond of being profiled so blatantly. So the folks over at Livejournal.ru told their readers to play along with the poll’s assumptions: “Within hours, sometimes at a rate of two votes per second, more than 25,000 testified to being ‘regular’ consumers of antifreeze and the like.” The BBC, realizing what was going on, zeroed out the results the next morning, but still the votes continued to come in.
Ultimately, the results were that over 90% of those polled are all wasted, all the time. Go ahead, Russian cyber-warriors – way to dispel those negative stereotypes!
Probably a lot of people seeing those results taken out of context would fail to see their irony. And yet, the Russian bloggers’ point was made. No longer will they allow themselves to be portrayed in a negative light, because they are armed with a mighty weapon: the internet. The Russian people can now see what is being said about them, both in the outside world and within Russia itself, and they can respond in real time. And that is true power.
It kind of makes one wonder… what if the internet had come around 20 years earlier? What would the end of the Soviet Union have looked like? Would it have come sooner, or perhaps not at all? An interesting train of thought…
As a follow-on to the sentiments expressed at the end of the last post… I was (admittedly) just watching some extremely trashy celebrity television to relax at the end of a long day.
I also read People.com on my lunch break – it’s a wicked, wicked vice. Everyone has to have a few.
As usual, I could actually only stomach watching this drivel for all of 3 minutes before switching it from “Hottest Celebrity Feuds” to “Hottest Celebrity Couples.” And in those six minutes before I gave up and switched it to something that might hold my attention (The Bourne Identity, if you must know, or maybe it’s just Matt’s cute little cheeks), I heard not one but two blatant examples of the same kind of inexcusable ignorance discussed in my last post.
One: In discussing the feud between Christina Aguilera and Kelly Osborne, the commentator said the phrase, “There is no detente yet between these two.” Wow! What are the chances that the person saying that or 75% of the people watching it know what that word actually refers to? Even people in my own Master’s program thought detente was a boring topic, and we’re a bunch of history geeks. Now that’s saying something.
Two: The commentator on the other show said that Brad and Angelina’s baby (and I am about to quote here, people, I am not making this shit up) “put Namibia on the map.” No, sorry, I think you’ll find that it’s been on the map for quite some time. Perhaps not within the exact geographical lines in which it falls today, but something closely approximating that form.
OK, wait for it… yes, Namibia has in fact been inhabited by its current occupants since about oh, the fourteenth century. I don’t think Brangelina nor even their ridiculously genetically-blessed child had much to do with that. Nor with the fact that first Germany and then South Africa colonized Namibia and held onto it, even without international recognition, for the entire twentieth century.
Wow. The dumbness just doesn’t quit.
First of all, I heart Rachel Lucas. I just think her site is the funniest, most fabulously crass thing I have ever seen. But also, she manages to make it highly intelligent and insightful at the same time. (That is, when she’s not talking about dog poop and dead possums.)
Witness this entry about Cameron Diaz touring Peru while wearing a bag with a Chinese communist star on it and Mao Zedong’s famous slogan, “Serve the People.” Unbelievable.
R.L. is right – you really should have to have a degree to be famous. That’s just dumb. Not only because Ms. Diaz is completely unaware of the local history of that particular slogan, but more so because she thinks it’s cool to wear it at all. I don’t care if you’re in Wisconsin or Warsaw – people don’t just stroll down the street wearing a bag with a swastika on it (unless of course they are really trying to make that statement, which is a different matter entirely).
This pains me, in so many ways. Have we truly become so preoccupied with terrorists and Paris Hilton that we have already forgotten the lessons of the last century? Does no one remember how many people were killed by Communist parties all over the world? It reminds me of an article I read a few months ago saying that while there are plenty of movies dealing with the Nazis, there are relatively few about any of the various bloodthirsty Communist regimes.
Again, we need better history teachers. We must make sure our children do not forget these lessons. And to start with, we need to make those with a high public profile think twice before affronting an entire country by committing a major fashion blunder.
UPDATE: Well, she did apologize…
I just started reading The Feast of Roses, the second book by Indu Sundaresan. My father gave me these books a while ago, and given that his taste in literature usually runs toward obscure academic tomes about long-forgotten religions and empires, I was naturally somewhat dubious.
However, I started reading Sundaresan’s first book, The Twentieth Wife, last week, and got completely sucked in. In fact I am almost glad that I was sick this week, as it gave me an excuse to sit on the couch and single-mindedly devour this book. I am even more glad that there’s a second one, because there’s nothing like devouring a book when you know that you won’t have to say goodbye to your newfound world when you turn the last page.
These books are quite simply marvelous, and exactly how historical novels should be done. The detail of her descriptions of 17th century Moghul India are exquisite, and she has clearly done extensive, painstaking research into every aspect of her character’s surroundings.
What is most impressive about this feat, however, is that her main character is a woman. At this time, and for most of human history, the average women was completely invisible, and the historical record on her daily life almost nonexistent. Granted, Mehrunissa did become one of the most famous and powerful Empresses of India, so her later life was well-documented. But Twentieth tells the story of her early years, before she became Empress.
Sundaresan’s writing thus becomes a prime example of historical detective work. She has taken what material is available, and then read between the lines to discover how her main character would have lived, what her hobbies might have been, even what she wore and where she lived. Of course the author also supplements her research with a liberal dose of artistic license, but she does it so smoothly and seamlessly that one cannot help but be impressed by both her scholarly and storytelling abilities.
This is truly historical writing at its finest. It brings history alive, it teaches without being overly pedantic, and it sets one’s imagination ablaze. In fact, being one half Indian myself on my father’s side, the romantic little girl in me can’t help but wonder if perhaps I am descended from this great Empress, with her blue eyes and sharp cheekbones.
And in the end, what good are books if they don’t make us dream?
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