Memo to Trump Toadies: Watergate Says Everyone Goes Down

History often repeats itself, especially for those who fail or refuse to learn from past events.  Many of us who remember the Watergate era see many parallels between that era and the present day where Donald Trump's lies and corruption make Nixon's sins pale in comparison.  Then and now, far too many Republicans chose to ignore facts and remained in lock step with their lying and corrupt party leader.  Ultimately, many of those who sold their souls in support of or co-conspiracy with Nixon paid a high price, many going to prison and many more seeing their political careers ended. This reality is lost on those currently prostituting themselves to Donald Trump - think Lindsey Graham and AG William Barr - and setting the longer term stage of seeing their reputations destroyed and their place in the view of history something other than what honorable people would want.  A piece in Vanity Fair looks at the message that such individuals ought to remember for Watergate. Here are excerpts:

As the campaign to impeach and remove President Trump has intensified, so have the defenses from his most devoted underlings. Naturally, these have included individuals closest to him—his adult children, his attorneys, and White House officials.

More die-hard demagogues have taken fortified positions on Capitol Hill. As the impeachment inquiry kicks into gear, they are doing whatever they can to downplay the charges and delegitimize the process. In hearings, they demand evidence or dismiss it; in interviews, they dodge the problems and gum up the process. Throughout, they hope that the volume of their voices might overwhelm the volumes of evidence. These Trump loyalists have now lashed themselves to the presidential mast. And if Watergate is an American parable, most of them will go down too.

Richard Nixon avoided prison time thanks to a pardon, but all the president’s men weren’t so lucky. Four dozen were convicted of criminal charges, and about half did time—including Nixon’s chief of staff, White House counsel, top advisers, and attorney general. Some of Trump’s inner circle, including his lawyer and his campaign manager, are already locked up. Odds are, they won’t be the last.

Nixon’s congressional toadies avoided courts of law, but they couldn’t escape the court of public opinion. Republicans fared so badly in the 1974 elections that prominent conservatives pronounced the GOP DOA. The party’s name was “poisoned with negatives,” said strategist Richard Viguerie. It’d be easier to sell “Typhoid Mary, the Edsel, or tickets on the Titanic.” William Rusher, publisher of National Review, wanted to scrap it all and start fresh with a “Conservative Party,” led by Ronald Reagan or George Wallace.

Reagan’s fealty didn’t harm his long-term prospects, but only because his prospects were long-term. He didn’t face voters in 1974. When he challenged Gerald Ford for the nomination in 1976, the man who’d given excuses for Nixon looked fine compared with the man who’d given him a pardon. By 1980, his water-carrying over Watergate was a non-issue.

[T]wo columnists—liberal Marquis Childs and conservative James J. Kilpatrick—published excerpts from letters sent by “Nixon loyalists,” charging that the “rotten, slanted, and biased” media “brain-washed” voters against their “brilliant” president. They warned impeachment was a “political coup d’état” that would spark “chaos.”

Initially, House Republicans—especially those on the judiciary committee—weren’t reluctant at all. Representative Edward Hutchinson, the ranking Republican, said Nixon shouldn’t be held accountable “for every little impeachable offense.” A millionaire from Michigan, Hutchinson complained in early 1974 that impeachment had been drummed up by “some eastern newspapers.” Despite the damning evidence, Hutchinson remained “unconvinced” by the “grab bag of allegations.”

Others agreed. . . . These Republicans formed a wall around Nixon, but cracks soon appeared. The committee had some liberal Republicans—a group not yet an oxymoron—but a staunch conservative, Maryland’s Lawrence Hogan, was the first from either party to announce his vote to impeach. In late July, the longtime Nixon loyalist announced that “my President has lied repeatedly” and said he had no choice.

When the time came to vote on five proposed articles of impeachment at the end of July, Hogan voted yes on three; six other Republicans voted for one or two articles. All had been warned that breaking with the party would end their political legacies, but the opposite happened. All the Republicans who approved articles of impeachment, except Hogan, stood for reelection. Five of them won. Indeed, they were repeatedly reelected . . . . Ten other Republicans voted against every article of impeachment. Most immediately regretted it. They had spent months demanding a “smoking gun” that proved the president’s role in Watergate. To their embarrassment, the recording showing just that became public only days after their vote. . . . Only one of the six was reelected that fall.

Republicans lost 48 seats in the House that fall, with many of the president’s most vocal defenders among them. Take Indiana representative Earl Landgrebe. “Don’t confuse me with the facts: I’ve got a closed mind,” he announced. “I’m going to stick with my President even if he and I have to be taken out of this building and shot.” He wasn’t shot, but voters killed his political career with a humiliating loss that fall.

I remain dumbfounded by the willingness of so many to throw away honor and even basic morality to cling to someone as morally despicable as Trump.  One can only hope they face a very hard fall and are viewed by history as moral monsters.

Why the Republican Party Cannot Govern

The best news at the end of the first 100 days of the ill begotten regime of Der Trumpenführer is that other than some admittedly horrible executive orders and the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the Republicans in Washington, DC, have accomplished almost nothing.  Rather than proving himself to be another Hitler - he has too little self-discipline or core ideology - Trump has shown himself instead to be a version of Sargent Schultz from the old Hogan's Heroes TV show. (he even has a similar girth).  All of which is good news for America given that so much of what the Trump/GOP agenda has to offer is toxic to all but the extremely wealthy or large corporations.   Yes, there remain plenty of reasons to be fearful of what the narcissist-in-chief might do, but with luck his regime will remain a do nothing one and that his supporter's sole source of glee will be limited to no longer a black man in the White House.  A column in the Washington Post by a conservative columnist looks at the GOP dysfunction and incompetence at governing.  Here are excerpts: 

The markets are waking up to the reality that President Trump is not going to accomplish much of anything, as the Wall Street Journal reports:

Markets are signaling caution after investors greeted President Donald Trump’s election with enthusiasm.

Bets on higher economic growth, inflation and interest rates—which became known as the “reflation trade”—have eased since the election. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note is lower than it was when Mr. Trump took office, including a decline Wednesday after the White House unveiled its tax proposal. 

If one had any doubt, this week’s events — a half-baked tax proposal that would not pass one let alone two houses, another failed effort at Trumpcare, White House bluffs and retreats on the budget — should have disabused observers of the notion that Trump’s agenda would sail through Congress.

The Trumpcare effort was the quintessential “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” For every Freedom Caucus member who figured he’d jump on the bandwagon (the opt-out for states who could choose to do away with the list of essential benefits), there was a moderate who jumped off. What did Ryan and the rest expect would happen when they made a bad bill even less attractive to the great majority of Americans?

Trump cannot manage to devise attractive legislation or get down in the weeds of negotiation, while House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) seems willing to accommodate whatever group is currently rocking the boat, regardless of the likelihood of success. Neither Ryan nor Trump can lead a successful legislative effort. As a result, members of Congress figure there is little reason to stick their necks out for either one. 

To a large degree, the GOP’s angst is to the country’s benefit. The national and world economies are slowly recovering from the 2008 financial meltdown. Unemployment is way down in the United States. If “do no harm” (or, as President Barack Obama would say, “Don’t do stupid stuff”) is the watchword, then gridlock and inaction may not be the worst thing. Not exiting from NAFTA, not pulling the rug out from millions of people who got coverage under Obamacare and not building a wall or harassing cities (for refusing to do the feds’ work on immigration enforcement) are certainly preferable to Trump “succeeding” on these issues. A tax plan that exacerbates the gap between rich and poor and starves the federal government of revenue so that it cannot make worthwhile investments in worker training, education, science and infrastructure would arguably be worse than the current situation. If they fail on the big, ambitious items, then small improvements in Obamacare or the tax code may be possible.

[T]his president and this Congress have not a clue how to proceed. They would potentially do much more harm than good. They are prisoners of extreme ideology, unrealistic expectations and their own incompetence.

Perhaps under another president, the center-right and center-left can make progress on key issues. For the remainder of Trump’s term, however, the best-case scenario would be no new wars or new nuclear powers and the status quo at home.

Is This the West's Weimar Moment?

Reichstag Fire - the end of the Weimar Republic

As has been noted a number of times on this blog, there are frightening parallels between what happened in 1930's Germany - and in Italy during that time period as well - and what we see unfolding both here in America and parts of Europe.  Under the "conservative" label, would be fascists, right wing religious extremists and out right racists are rebelling against modernity and, most importantly, the rise of demographic groups they deem as "other" due to the targets' faith, skin color, and, in some cases, sexual orientation.  Jochen Bittner, the political editor for the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, has a timely op-ed in the New York Times on whether or not the West, including America, are at a point akin to Germany on the cusp of Hitler's rise to power.  Here are excerpts:

Germany’s slide into a popular embrace of authoritarianism in the 1930s offers a frame for understanding how liberal democracies can suddenly turn toward anti-liberalism.

Setting aside debate about whether the rise of Nazism was built into the German DNA, there were four trends that led the country to reject its post-World War I constitutional, parliamentary democracy, known as the Weimar Republic: economic depression, loss of trust in institutions, social humiliation and political blunder. To a certain degree, these trends can be found across the West today.

First, the history. The Black Friday stock-market collapse of 1929 set off a global depression. As bad as things were in America, they were even worse in Germany, where industrial production shrank by half in the following three years. Stocks lost two-thirds of their value. Inflation and unemployment skyrocketed. The Weimar government, already held in low esteem by many Germans, seemed to have no clue about what to do.

All this happened as traditional ways of life and values were being shaken by the modernization of the 1920s. Women suddenly went to work, to vote, to party and to sleep with whomever they wanted. This produced a widening cultural gap between the tradition-oriented working and middle classes and the cosmopolitan avant-garde — in politics, business and the arts — that reached a peak just when economic disaster struck. The elites were blamed for the resulting chaos, and the masses were ripe for a strongman to return order to society.

Some people today imagine that Hitler sneaked up on Germany, that too few people understood the threat. In fact, many mainstream politicians recognized the danger but they failed to stop him. Some didn’t want to: The conservative parties and the nobility believed the little hothead could serve as their useful idiot, that as chancellor he would be contained by a squad of reasonable ministers. Franz von Papen, a nobleman who was Hitler’s first vice chancellor, said of the new leader, “We’ve hired him.”

At the same time, even the imminent threat of a fascist dictatorship couldn’t persuade the left-wing parties to join forces. Instead of being conciliatory for the sake of the national interest, Ernst Thälmann, the head of the German Communist Party, branded the center-left Social Democrats the “moderate wing of fascism.” No wonder Hitler had an easy time uniting broad sections of the German public.

Are we at another Weimar moment now?

The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent global recession were nowhere nearly as painful as the Great Depression. But the effects are similar. The heady growth of the 2000s led Europeans and Americans to believe they were on firm economic ground; the shattering of banks, real estate markets and governments in the wake of the crash left tens of millions of people at sea, angry at the institutions that had failed them, above all the politicians who claimed to be in charge.

In America and Europe, the rise of anti-establishment movements is a symptom of a cultural shock against globalized postmodernity, similar to the 1930s’ rejection of modernity. The common accusation by the “masses” is that liberal democracy has somehow gone too far, that it has become an ideology for an elite at the expense of everyone else.

Mr. Trump is no Hitler, but that’s not the point. Today, as in the 1930s, we are seeing the failure of the liberal mainstream to respond to serious challenges, even those that threaten its very existence.

Americans Need to Know More History

As I have noted numerous times, I was a history major in college and believe that in order to have an informed population, far more Americans desperately need to know more history.  If more Americans were knowledgeable of American history, for example, they's know that America was not founded as a "Christian nation." Likewise, they'd better understand the futility of many of America's recent wars that have been waged with almost zero knowledge of the history of Indochina in the case of the Vietnam War disaster and most recently in the seemingly endless disasters in the Middle East.  They would also recognize the danger posed by Neo-fascists like Donald Trump and his hate and bigotry motivated followers.    An op-ed in the Los Angeles Times looks at why we need more history majors to counter the dangers we face due to Americans' ignorance of accurate history.  Here are highlights:

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, the history major has lost significant market share in academia, declining from 2.2% of all undergraduate degrees to 1.7%. The graduating class of 2014, the most recent for which there are national data, included 9% fewer history majors than the previous year’s cohort, compounding a 2.8% decrease the year before that. The drop is most pronounced at large research universities and prestigious liberal arts colleges.

This is unfortunate — not just for those colleges, but for our economy and polity. 

Conventional wisdom offers its usual facile answers for these trends: Students (sometimes pressured by parents paying the tuition) choose fields more likely to yield high-paying employment right after graduation — something “useful,” like business (19% of diplomas), or technology-oriented. History looks like a bad bet.

Politicians both draw on those simplicities and perpetuate them . . . . . Governors oppose public spending on “useless” college majors. History, like its humanistic brethren, might prepare our young people to be citizens, but it supposedly does not prepare workers — at least not well paid ones.

Over the long run, however, graduates in history and other humanities disciplines do well financially. Rubio would be surprised to learn that after 15 years, those philosophy majors have more lucrative careers than college graduates with business degrees. History majors’ mid-career salaries are on par with those holding business bachelor's degrees. Notably these salary findings exclude those who went on to attain a law or other graduate degree.

The utility of disciplines that prepare critical thinkers escapes personnel offices, pundits and  politicians (some of whom perhaps would prefer that colleges graduate more followers and fewer leaders). But it shouldn’t. Labor markets in the United States and other countries are unstable and unpredictable. In this environment — especially given the expectation of career changes — the most useful degrees are those that can open multiple doors, and those that prepare one to learn rather than do some specific thing.

History students, in particular, sift through substantial amounts of information, organize it, and make sense of it. In the process they learn how to infer what drives and motivates human behavior from elections to social movements to board rooms.

Employers interested in recruiting future managers should understand (and many do) that historical thinking prepares one for leadership because history is about change — envisioning it, planning for it, making it last. In an election season we are reminded regularly that success often goes to whoever can articulate the most compelling narrative. History majors learn to do that.

Everything has a history. To think historically is to recognize that all problems, all situations, all institutions exist in contexts that must be understood before informed decisions can be made. No entity — corporate, government, nonprofit — can afford not to have a historian at the table. We need more history majors, not fewer. 

Is It Hysterical to Prepare for War with Russia?

I have repeatedly voiced my sense of deja vu as I watch events in Ukraine and listen to the lies and hollow denials of Vladimir Putin.  The world has heard these story lines before, particularly in 1938 and 1939 when no one wanted to seriously the ravings of Adolph Hitler.  Like Hitler, Putin is a megalomaniac and seemingly suffers from delusions of grandeur, seeing himself as Russia's new tsar.  Just as frighteningly, he seems to be tacitly accepting some insane and terrifying statements by those who would unleash atomic war warfare in Eastern Europe.  A piece in Slate ask the question of whether it is naive to believe that Putin will not do something crazy that threatens world stability (such as it is).  Here are highlights:

WARSAW, Poland—Over and over again—throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels—I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people who attended that June wedding were soon dead or in exile. None of them ever returned to the house. 

In retrospect, all of them now look naive. Instead of celebrating weddings, they should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

I realize that this question sounds hysterical, and foolishly apocalyptic, to American or Western European readers. But hear me out, if only because this is a conversation many people in the eastern half of Europe are having right now. In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine.

The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkov and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova. Even if it starts out as an unrecognized rump state—Abkhazia and South Ossetia, “states” that Russia carved out of Georgia, are the models here—Novorossiya can grow larger over time.

Russian soldiers will have to create this state—how many of them depends upon how hard Ukraine fights, and who helps them—but eventually Russia will need more than soldiers to hold this territory. Novorossiya will not be stable as long as it is inhabited by Ukrainians who want it to stay Ukrainian. 

There is a familiar solution to this, too. A few days ago, Alexander Dugin, an extreme nationalist whose views have helped shape those of the Russian president, issued an extraordinary statement. “Ukraine must be cleansed of idiots,” he wrote—and then called for the “genocide” of the “race of bastards.”

Not long ago, Vladimir Zhirinovsky—the Russian member of parliament and court jester, who sometimes says things that those in power cannot—argued on television that Russia should use nuclear weapons to bomb Poland and the Baltic countries—“dwarf states,” he called them—and show the West who really holds power in Europe: “Nothing threatens America, it’s far away. But Eastern European countries will place themselves under the threat of total annihilation,” he declared. Vladimir Putin indulges these comments: Zhirinovsky’s statements are not official policy, the Russian president says, but he always “gets the party going.”

A far more serious person, the dissident Russian analyst Andrei Piontkovsky, has recently published an article arguing, along lines that echo Zhirinovsky’s threats, that Putin really is weighing the possibility of limited nuclear strikes—perhaps against one of the Baltic capitals, perhaps a Polish city—to prove that NATO is a hollow, meaningless entity that won’t dare strike back for fear of a greater catastrophe. Indeed, in military exercises in 2009 and 2013, the Russian army openly “practiced” a nuclear attack on Warsaw.

Is all of this nothing more than the raving of lunatics? Maybe. And maybe Putin is too weak to do any of this, and maybe it’s just scare tactics, and maybe his oligarchs will stop him. But Mein Kampf also seemed hysterical to Western and German audiences in 1933. Stalin’s orders to “liquidate” whole classes and social groups within the Soviet Union would have seemed equally insane to us at the time, if we had been able to hear them.

But Stalin kept to his word and carried out the threats, not because he was crazy but because he followed his own logic to its ultimate conclusions with such intense dedication—and because nobody stopped him. Right now, nobody is able to stop Putin, either. So is it hysterical to prepare for total war? Or is it naive not to do so?

It is dangerous to cling to the hope that dictators are sane and rational individuals.  Hitler and Stalin made that very clear.

The Middle East - What We Should Have Learned from Lawrence of Arabia

Lawrence's plans for the Middle East included separate areas for the predominately Kurdish and Arab areas in present-day Iraq.

As the violence and sectarian hatred in the Middle East continues, some are recognizing that much of today's problems trace back to disastrous decisions made in the wake of World War I when the victorious allies carved up the former Ottoman Empire based on their own needs and rivalries with little regard for the religious and ethic divisions that spread across the region.  It's not that they were not warned about the dangers of what they were doing.  Rather, hubris and colonial ambitions overrode what should have been common sense if one wanted long term stability in the absence of overwhelming outside forces such as the Ottoman Empire had provided or local dictators who could at least temporarily keep the lid on the sectarian and ethnic rivalries.  A piece in The Raw Story looks at the advice of T.E. Lawrence, a/k/a Lawrence of Arabia, that should have been followed.  Here are excerpts:

In America, if we reflect on World War I at all, we think mostly about the battlefields and trenches of Europe and tend to forget another front in that war — against the Ottoman Empire of the Turks that dominated the Middle East. A British Army officer named T.E. Lawrence became a hero in the Arab world when he led nomadic Bedouin tribes in battle against Turkish rule. Peter O’Toole immortalized him in the epic movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.”

At war’s end, Lawrence’s vision of Arab independence was shattered when the Versailles peace conference confirmed the carving of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine into British and French spheres of influence; arbitrary boundaries drawn in the sand to satisfy the appetites of empire – Britain’s Foreign Office even called the former Ottoman lands “The Great Loot.”

The hopeful Lawrence drew his own “peace map” of the region, one that paid closer heed to tribal allegiances and rivalries. The map could have saved the world a lot of time, trouble and treasure, one historian said, providing the region “with a far better starting point than the crude imperial carve up.” Lawrence wrote to a British major in Cairo: “I’m afraid you will be delayed a long time, cleaning up all the messes and oddments we have left behind us.”

[T]hen and now, Lawrence’s understanding of the ancient and potent jealousies of the people among whom he had lived and fought generally was ignored. In 1920, he wrote for the Times of London an unsettling and prophetic article about Iraq – then under the thumb of the British. He decried the money spent, the number of troops and loss of life, and warned that his countrymen had been led “into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It… may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Not for the last time in the Middle East would disaster come from the blundering ignorance and blinding arrogance of foreign intruders convinced by magical thinking of their own omnipotence and righteousness. How soon we forget. How often we repeat.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Sullivan on the Insanity of the Neocons and GOP

By any objective standard, the War in Iraq was an unmitigated disaster unless, of course, you were/are a Halliburton shareholder like Emperor Palpatine Cheney.  Hundreds of thousands of civilian dead, thousands of American service members dead and the U.S. budget blown through the unfunded war.  Moreover, the neocon fantasy that Iraq could become a stable democratic nation has proved to be just that: an utter fantasy.  Yet the neocons and many Republicans are rushing to blame the current fiasco on Barack Obama and utterly disregard the fact that the current Iraq disaster is the direct outcome of Bush/Cheney and GOP decision to lie to the American public and take America into war that lacked any valid justification.  Oh, and did I mention the fact that the geniuses in the Bush/Cheney regime totally ignored the sectarian powder keg that was going to be unleashed?  Andrew Sullivan takes to task the lunatics who got us into the Iraq War and who now want to repeat that disaster.  Here are the money quotes:

What do you do with near-clinical fanatics who, in their own minds, never make mistakes and whose worldview remains intact even after it has been empirically dismantled in front of their eyes? In real life, you try and get them to get professional help.

In the case of those who only recently sent thousands of American servicemembers to their deaths in a utopian scheme to foment a democracy in a sectarian dictatorship, we have to merely endure their gall in even appearing in front of the cameras. But the extent of their pathology is deeper than one might expect.

Most people are aware that relatively few of the architects of a war have fully acknowledged the extent of their error – let alone express remorse or even shame at the more than a hundred thousands civilian deaths their adventure incurred for a phony reason. No, all this time, they have been giving each other awards, lecturing congressmen and Senators, writing pieces in the Weekly Standard and the New Republic, being fellated by David Gregory, and sucking at the teet of the neocon welfare state, as if they had nothing to answer for, and nothing to explain.

it is shocking; it is, in fact, an outrage, a shameless, disgusting abdication of all responsibility for the past combined with a sickening argument to do exactly the same fricking thing all over again. And yes, I’m not imagining. This is what these true know-nothing/learn-nothing fanatics want the US to do.

 Last time, you could ascribe it to fathomless ignorance. This time, they have no excuse. ISIS is not al Qaeda; it’s far worse in ways that even al Qaeda has noted undermine its cause rather than strengthen it. It may be strategically way over its head already. And the idea that the US has to fight both ISIS and Iran simultaneously is so unhinged and so self-evidently impossible to contain or control that only these feckless fools would even begin to suggest it. Having empowered Iran by dismantling Iraq, Kristol actually wants the US now to enter a live war against ISIS and the Quds forces. You begin to see how every military catastrophe can be used to justify the next catastrophe. It’s a perfect circle for the neocons’ goal of the unending war.

The sooner that these people are driven completely from the halls of power - or even near access to power - the better off the nation will be.  What I find equally upsetting is that the neocons care nothing about civilian deaths since, in their minds, non-white, non-Christians do not even count as humans.

 

Far Right Demagoguery: The Dangers of Not Knowing History

One of the incessant agenda items of the far right is to dumb down Americans' knowledge of history because those who do not know history are much more easily duped.  A prime example, of course, is the Christofascist created myth that America was founded as a "Christian nation" even though the writings of the Founding Fathers underscore the lie to the claim.  They get away with it because increasingly, fewer and fewer Americans are being taught the nation's true history.  The reasons are many and include the current emphasis on math and science to the detriment of government and history courses.  Also relevant is the dire situation in our training of teachers that puts little emphasis on content knowledge.  Here in Virginia, a History PhD could not teach high school history given the many bull shit education courses that are required for licensing.  A column in the New York Times looks at the frightening ignorance of far too many Americans when it comes to history and the dangers this poses for demagogues.  Here are excerpts:

Ask a high school senior what the Great War was all about and you’re likely to get a shrug or a stab based on a recent episode of “Game of Thrones.” Hint: its 100th anniversary is this year. Hint: globe-straddling old empires collapsed and new horrors, from genocide to slaughter by poisonous gas, were ushered in. Hint: its repercussions are with us still, from Syria to Russia to the American role as international cop.

If you said “First World War,” you’re at the top of the class. The perception that we’re raising a nation of doofi about the past was generated, in part, by a 2010 report that only 12 percent of students in their last year of high school had a firm grasp of our nation’s history. Add to that a 2011 Pew study showing that nearly half of Americans think the main cause of the Civil War was a dispute over federal authority — not slavery — and you’ve got a serious national memory hole.

But before blaming the victims, look at the top. Opinion leaders, corporate titans, politicians, media personalities and educators — dunce caps for all. Even the History Channel now does very little history, with a menu heavy on swamp people, big rigs and pawn stars.

Of late, you had the venture capitalist Tom Perkins compare the call for higher taxes in the United States to Kristallnacht, the state-sanctioned, anti-Jewish riots in Nazi Germany of 1938. Anyone who is literate about history would never liken a rampage that burned or destroyed 267 synagogues, vandalized 7,500 businesses and killed at least 91 Jewish people to progressive taxation.

This was followed by a claim from Ken Langone, the Home Depot co-founder and big-time Republican Party donor, comparing the plight of our country’s very rich to the objects of Hitler’s wrath.

Nazis and slavery are the two big topics that consistently draw out the woefully ignorant, and prompt the most facile analogies. But more recent events can also produce conclusions based on a limited understanding of the past.

On the media-celebrity side, we can only hope nobody is getting their history from Sarah Palin, who famously had to be schooled on the origin of the Korean War, among other things, after being picked as the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008. She recently declared that torture is as American as Sunday school. “If I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists,” she said, to great applause at a convention of gun fanatics.

One doesn’t expect Palin to know that the Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” or that torture is banned by international treaties signed by the United States. But is it too much to ask for her to realize that Imperial Japan, our enemy in World War II, was prosecuted for waterboarding?

Educators, not just those in thrall to teaching to “the test,” share plenty of the blame for “raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate,” as David McCullough called the problem. For educational malfeasance this year, look to the assignment given eighth graders in the Rialto, Calif., school district. Students were asked to consider whether the Holocaust was created for political gain or didn’t happen at all — a bit of homework the Simon Wiesenthal Center called “grotesque.”

[M]any schools no longer stress “civics,” or some variation of it. Why? Students complain that it’s boring, or the standards are too demanding. Civics, said [Ken] Burns, is “the operating system” for citizenry; if you know how government is constructed, it’s no longer a complicated muddle, but a beautiful design.

[H]istory may hurt, but without proper understanding of it, you can’t understand contemporary American life and politics.

He also mentioned how immigrants may know more about history than fifth-generation natives. To pass a citizenship test, they are required to learn things about the glory and infamy, the power and abuses — the operating system — of this democracy. It’s not too onerous to ask the same thing of 18-year-olds across the land. You can’t fix stupid, as the comic line goes; but you don’t have to teach it.

As I said, if one doesn't know history, one cannot make informed decisions on issue of government or foreign policy, the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes being recent examples of what ignorance of history can set into motion and how a ignorant public can be easily duped with deliberate lies.

 

Putin's Eurasian Fantasy and Russia's Bizarre Love-Hate for the West

To understand the dynamics of what is happening in Russia under Vladimir Putin, a self-styled tsar in all but formal title, one needs to understand the bizarre love-hate relationship Russia and the Russian people have had towards the west and western ideas for literally a thousand years.   Much like American Christofascists who can only feel good about themselves when looking down on others, Russia and far too many Russians have long clung to a mindset that Russia and its Orthodox religion were superior to the west and western Europe in particular even when any rational objective standard would conclude the exact opposite.  Prior to Peter the Great's forced westernization of the aristocracy - e.g., mandatory shaving of beards, adoption of western style clothes and learning of western ways and languages - any visitor to Russia was typically shocked by the backwardness of Russia which liked to view itself as "the third Rome" and protector of true Christianity.  In many ways, even under the Soviets, this mindset remained unchanged and was in some ways intensified by the Soviet anti-west obsession.  A piece in Bloomberg looks at this mindset now being packaged under the term  "Eurasianism." Here are some excerpts:

Vladimir Putin’s aggressive foray into Eurasia, and the possibility of a new cold war with the West, has actually enhanced rather than lessened his popularity in Russia. The Economist despairs that “the chances of Russia’s becoming a modern, civilised country, open to the world and respectful of its citizens, are diminishing with every outburst of war hysteria on Russian television.” Last week in Germany, amid much discussion of Russia’s aims in Ukraine, an acquaintance of mine from Leipzig seemed equally pessimistic: “The Russians need another century,” she said, “before they are ready to join European civilization.”

[A] century doesn’t seem long enough. For Russia’s own journey to the West has not reached its destination since Peter the Great started it in the 18th century. 

The collapse of communism in 1989 seemed at first an opportunity to reset Russia’s direction. But any such move was pre-empted by the disasters of Boris Yeltsin’s rule and the consequent rise of Putin. Today, Russia’s political elites seem far from willing to undertake a makeover in the image of the West. Indeed, they appear to be engaged in a menacingly different geopolitical and cultural attempt at self-definition as they seek close alliances with China and other Asian countries. 

As Japan has shown, a superficial westernization, indicated by integration into the global economy, can easily conceal atavistic fantasies of national redemption and glory. Early in the 20th century, Japanese philosophers such as Kitaro Nishida and Tetsuro Watsuji sought to establish Japan’s radical spiritual and cultural difference from the West -- a project that eventually lent itself to Japan’s militarist Pan-Asianism in the 1930s and 1940s.

The advocates of a Greater Russia can claim to have an even longer intellectual and political pedigree, and a broader range of supporters: from Dostoevsky, who denounced the West almost as fervidly as the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, to Alexander Herzen, the radical critic of Russian autocracy who claimed that Istanbul was the true capital of the Russian Empire.

An intriguing variation on this Russia-centric outlook was Eurasianism -- the notion that Russia belonged to neither East nor West but was a state with Mongol roots, its society a synthesis of various ethnic communities supervised by Great Russian Nationalism. Its ideological and intellectual basis was established by anti-communist Russian emigres in the 1920s and '30s, who, though critical of the Bolsheviks, hailed the strong Russian state that the latter’s despotism had helped create.

The Eurasians foresaw “post-Bolshevik” Russia as retaining a monolithic economy and one-party rule. They also wrote incessantly about the necessity of a religious revival across Russia. In their vision, the cunning of history was to reveal Russians as Eurasians rather than westernized communists or liberals.

Eurasianism is presently articulated by the political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, the son of a KGB officer, who reportedly has many attentive listeners in the Kremlin and the Orthodox Church. Dugin and his acolytes acknowledge that centuries after Tamerlane’s conquests, which redrew the map of the world, Eurasia remains, as U.S. policy maker Zbigniew Brzezinski put it in 1997, “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy continues to be played.” Accordingly, Dugin has advocated a new anti-Western alliance between Russia and Asian countries.

This sense of injury and humiliation helps confirm the theory of one of the more eloquent and influential Eurasianists, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, a respected linguist, who argued in his essay “Europe and Man” that the very project of Europeanization was an ideological trick, designed to achieve permanent Western dominance over the non-West. . . . . the feelings of wounded pride, anger, frustration and inferiority he articulated remain crucial to understanding the ostensibly blithe anti-westernism in Russia today.

Putin himself rose to high office on a wave of support from the Russian masses, which had been exposed to some terrible suffering caused by Russia’s westernization through economic “shock therapy.” Bending Crimea to his will, or calling for a religious revival, Putin seems to be realizing the old Eurasian fantasy of a strong ideological state dedicated to restoring Russia’s distinctive national and civilizational “otherness.” 

Few commentators were more shocked on Sept. 11 than those who assumed that history had ended in 1989, and the universal dissemination of Western-style capitalism and democracy was the main geopolitical reality. They now confront the eruption of a long-repressed ideology -- an expansionist Neo-Eurasianism, which, incarnated by a nuclear-armed country, makes even Islamic fundamentalism seem toothless.

 Without understanding Russia's very different - and all too often tragic - history that has been beset by autocrats and rulers who have manipulated the Russian populace against its best interests, it is hard to understand what is happening currently in Russia and its goal in the Crimea.

The Gratuitous GOP Caused Recession

Failed GOP policies drove the nation to near economic collapse and more than four years latter the GOP obsession with budget and spending cuts is gratuitously keeping the country in recession.  Indeed, the same sort of voodoo economics that prolonged the Great Depression in the 1930's is being promoted by the Republican Party.  During Barack Obama's first term this was deliberately done in the hope that Obama would be a one term president.  Now, the GOP goal is to keep the country in economic malaise so as to deprive Obama credit for economic prosperity.  As for the millions of Americans harmed by this approach, the GOP doesn't give a damn.  Rather, it is all about partisan politics and pandering to extremists within the GOP.  Ironically, it is the Republicans who are always quick to label others as traitors or "un-American" yet it is they who are the ones betraying the country.  A piece in Raw Story looks at the gratuitous recession that comes compliments of the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, economics professor at Princeton University and Nobel prize winner talked to Bill Moyers on Jan. 11 about what he believes is the best path forward to a strong economic recovery.

When Moyers asked what the Treasury should do to help the economy, he said, “Campaign against this austerity obsession. We’re not going to get a big new stimulus package, much as I would like to see it. No, we’re not going to get it this year, anyway. But I’d like to see him saying when somebody says, ‘Well, we need to slash here, we need to slash there.’ And he would say ‘Why would we want to be doing that now? That’s actually going to hurt the economy.’”

“This is the same kind of animal that we confronted in the ’30s. This is depression economics. And the nature of the solution is not really very different now from what it was then,” he said later.

“Depression economics is when the normal things you do to boost the economy, have the Federal Reserve cut interest rates a little bit, are no longer available or effective. It’s a situation where the normal rules of what you– of economic policy, have to be put on hold, and you really need to do extraordinary stuff,” he explained.

He argued that “the core thing, the thing that we know works, the thing that all the evidence of history says works in a situation like this is the private sector won’t spend, government can step in and provide the spending that we need in order to keep this economy afloat.”

He went on to say that the poor economy was “gratuitous” because if Congress could be convinced that “deficit spending, for the time being, is okay” and that a major jobs programs should be created, “it would all be over. It would be no problem at all.”

As I said at the outset, the GOP doesn't want the recession over.  The saboteurs in the GOP want the economic malaise to last another four years.  The damage done to millions of Americans simply doesn't matter to this rabid dog political party.