Fragmenti

[DarkAttraktor]

ha ! i pehar je madjarska rec, pokradosmo ceo im vokabular, nevjerojatno.

[Turnbull]

[Turnbull]

R.I.P.

Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013)

Ronald Dworkin, Martha’s Vineyard, August 2005

John Earle

Ronald Dworkin, who died on February 14 at the age of eighty-one, published over one hundred articles, reviews, and letters on legal and philosophical issues in The New York Review, from his 1968 defense of conscientious objectors to the draft during the Vietnam War to his 2012 argument against color-blind college admissions policies. Over more than four decades he took up some of the most important controversies in American public life, including affirmative action, abortion, assisted suicide, pornography, health care, civil liberties and the war on terror, and what he called the “embarrassingly bad decisions” of the Supreme Court’s “right-wing phalanx.” Throughout his career he worked to elaborate what he called “the moral reading of the Constitution”: the idea that “we all—judges, lawyers, citizens—interpret and apply [its] clauses on the understanding that they invoke moral principles about political decency and justice.”As we mourn the loss of a long-standing contributor and friend, we present the following selection of his writings from The New York Review.

[kim_philby]

Nisam znao da je umro :(

[Turnbull]

Juče.

[ultra plasticni]

rip

[transcending]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOdMBDOj4ec&feature=plcp

sve u svemu, nije bila loša rasprava. pored igltonovog pomalo usiljenog "šaljenja", prečesto mu je (inače, ne konkretno u ovom slučaju) glavni problem uopštavanje ("postmodernisti ovo, dekonstruktivisti ono, mi marksisti ovamo, vi tamo" - hoću reći, minucioznost mu nije baš najjača strana). nije marksizam ono čime iglton ume da iritira, nasuprot njegovom uverenju. a skrotuma, naprasno izlečenog right-wing homofoba, prekalkulisanog zbog vruće podloge na kojoj se šeta, bolje da ne komentarišem. indijka koja mu je postavila pitanje vezano za clash "visokih" kultura i onaj odgovor kako, eto, kolonijalizam u indiji nije samo došao sa idejom asimilovanja i nametanja zapadne kulture, nego im se tamo ponešto i svidelo je bio za veliki facepalm. bilo je podosta tih gimme a fuckin' break momenata. Edited February 16, 2013 by transcending

[Turnbull]

sve u svemu, nije bila loša rasprava. pored igltonovog pomalo usiljenog "šaljenja", prečesto mu je (inače, ne konkretno u ovom slučaju) glavni problem uopštavanje ("postmodernisti ovo, dekonstruktivisti ono, mi marksisti ovamo, vi tamo" - hoću reći, minucioznost mu nije baš najjača strana). nije marksizam ono čime iglton ume da iritira, nasuprot njegovom uverenju. a skrotuma, naprasno izlečenog right-wing homofoba, prekalkulisanog zbog vruće podloge na kojoj se šeta, bolje da ne komentarišem. indijka koja mu je postavila pitanje vezano za clash "visokih" kultura i onaj odgovor kako, eto, kolonijalizam u indiji nije samo došao sa idejom asimilovanja i nametanja zapadne kulture, nego im se tamo ponešto i svidelo je bio za veliki facepalm. bilo je podosta tih gimme a fuckin' break momenata.

Jeste, jeste. Ja inače volim Skrotuma ( ), uprkos njegovom konzervativizmu. Ume lepo da piše o arhitekturi, književnosti i tako tim stvarima. A i o filozofiji, dok se ne približi politički nabijenim temama.Meni je ustvari najzanimljivije bilo kako se njih dvojica slažu oko nekih stvari u definiciji kulture, kao i oko opasnosti koje joj prete, a onda kad se dođe do lenjinovskog pitanja - šta da se radi? - vidiš koliko je prazna ali i dvolična Skrutonova pozicija. Zapravo, njegov odgovor je - ništa. Kultura propada, sve ide u đavola, ali ne treba ništa menjati, nego samo naplakivati. Tu ga je Iglton lepo dočekao - pa to što danas uništava kulturu je taj tvoj kapitalizam, i šta ćeš da učiniš tim povodom? Pa neće ništa, samo će da ponavlja ove svoje jeremijade. Edited February 16, 2013 by Syme

[Prospero]

Alfred W. McCoy: Review of Nick Turse's "Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam" (Metropolitan Books, 2013)Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (University of Wisconsin, 2012) and editor of Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline (University of Wisconsin, 2012).On the same day in March 1968 that Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the Americal Division, massacred 500 women and children in the village of My Lai on orders to “kill everything that moves,” a different U.S. Army unit, Bravo Company, entered the nearby hamlet of My Khe. Although they met no resistance and found only women and children in the village, Bravo Company’s commander, Lieutenant Thomas Willingham, gave orders to destroy it. One soldier shot a Vietnamese baby in the head point blank with a .45 caliber pistol. Others gunned down women and children, “like being in a shooting gallery.” When their work was done, 155 Vietnamese villagers were dead. Even though a U.S. Army investigation found “no reliable evidence to support the claim that the persons killed were VC [Viet Cong],” nobody was punished for these murders at My Khe. (141-42)As Nick Turse explains in his depressingly important new book, Kill Anything That Moves, the Pentagon’s public relations strategy for dealing with the issue of U.S. atrocities in South Vietnam “centered on portraying My Lai as a one-off aberration, rather than part of a consistent pattern of criminality resulting from policies set at the top” of the U.S. military command. So when reporters later asked about this second massacre at My Khe, Pentagon briefers, not wanting to admit that two different U.S. Army units had slaughtered civilians in two separate villages on the same day, simply lied and blamed My Khe on South Vietnamese troops. The Pentagon then buried the evidence about the My Khe massacre by classifying the documentation as “top secret.” (230)But these events, as Turse shows with his careful research and judicious description of other atrocities, were not aberrant. In the Song Ve Valley, not far from My Lai, an elite detachment of the famed 101st Airborne Division called Tiger Force was unleashed to terrorize villagers for a six-month period, May to November 1967, killing scores of non-combatants -- often scalping the victims, kicking in their faces to extract gold teeth, cutting off their ears. (135-36) That August, a U.S. military newspaper reported that the 2nd Battalion, 320th Artillery had fired its 250,000th artillery shell from a hilltop firebase into this same Song Ve Valley, filling rice paddies with craters and destroying homes. (137) Flying over that same area in mid-1967, reporter Jonathan Schell saw that the Song Ve Valley had been ravaged -- defoliants withering vegetation, artillery reducing almost every home to ruins. Through careful study of two separate districts in Quang Ngai Province, Schell reported that 80 percent of all homes had been destroyed. (136-37)Elsewhere in Quang Ngai Province, the 25th Infantry Division fired 42,000 artillery shells randomly into two populated districts during three months, May to July 1967, oblivious to civilian casualties. The year before, South Korean troops reportedly committed at least fourteen massacres of villagers in this same small province, in one case pushing twenty-nine unarmed youth into a bomb crater and then slaughtering them with rifle fire. (132-33) A Defense Department analyst estimated the civilian casualties in Quang Ngai Province at 33,000 every year. Other sources said 50,000 civilians were killed and wounded in Quang Ngai every year. (138)As shown in this mind-numbing array of atrocities inflicted upon the villagers of Quang Ngai Province, Turse has developed an innovative method for retrieval of painful truths from a buried past. First, through a decade of painstaking research into “veterans’ testimonies, contemporaneous press coverage, Vietnamese eyewitness accounts, long-classified official studies, and the military’s own formal investigations,” he has recovered a staggering record of brutality and stored these seemingly random incidents in his own ad hoc atrocity archive -- perhaps the best that one can do in the aftermath of systemic suppression of official evidence. (258) Then, by clustering these disparate factual fragments according to time and place, Turse assembles a blood-red mosaic of the otherwise incomprehensible, unimaginable firestorm of death and destruction that the U.S. military rained down on the villages of South Vietnam, from Quang Ngai Province in the north to the Mekong Delta in the South.Finally, as social historians often do, Turse double checks the dismal assessment that arises from potentially unrepresentative case studies by juxtaposing the anecdotal against the statistical, which, in fact, provides strong confirmation by showing extraordinarily high casualties among South Vietnamese civilians. A 1975 U.S. Senate investigation estimated that, in South Vietnam’s population of 19 million, there were 1.4 million civilian casualties, including 415,000 killed. A joint 2008 study by Harvard Medical School and University of Washington calculated that there were 3.8 million violent war deaths during the Vietnam War, both soldiers and civilians. Through his own calculations learned from doctoral studies in socio-medical sciences at Columbia, Turse places these casualties even higher still, at some 7.3 million Vietnamese civilians dead and wounded -- a figure he justifies by noting that over half the wounded admitted to South Vietnam’s hospitals during the war were women or children under the age of thirteen (12-13)In the forty years since U.S. combat operation operations in Indochina ended back in 1973, America has produced hundreds of feature films and 30,000 non-fiction books all somehow asking the same question: Was the Vietnam War an atrocity, an anomaly, or, as President Reagan called it, “a noble cause”? Through his unblinking immersion in these forgotten incidents, Turse reaches an uncompromising conclusion: The Vietnam War was, in its planning by the generals and its execution by the soldiers, nothing less than a systematic atrocity, with every single major U.S. military unit that served in Vietnam, according to Pentagon records, guilty of war crimes. (21)In presenting this painfully important information, Turse abjures the usual historical narrative and instead builds to this sober conclusion with topical chapters that read like points in a prosecutor’s brief for a war crimes trial that will, of course, never happen. In the book’s first three chapters, Turse describes the strategy and tactics for visiting such death and destruction upon the civilians of South Vietnam. Flailing about for a viable strategy at the start of major combat operations in 1965, General William Westmoreland defaulted to the venerable U.S. military doctrine of “attrition” requiring, in the peculiar circumstance of this pacification, that the number of enemy killed in combat reach a “cross over point” by exceeding their possible replacement, either by local recruitment or infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh trail. (42, 50-51) As a metric of progress toward this goal of “cross over,” Westmoreland’s data-obsessed headquarters pressed subordinates for high “body count,” which could be achieved either by direct muzzle-to-muzzle combat or by using U.S. troops as “bait” to “find and fix” the enemy for mass destruction by artillery or airpower.Westmoreland’s inept strategy preordained the U.S. military to regular, recurring atrocities. By mid-1967, U.S. infantry were spending nearly 90 percent of their time in ceaseless patrols to flush out the enemy for putative strikes by airpower or artillery. (51) With U.S. troops scattered across the countryside in small detachments as “bait” to draw enemy fire, the communist forces initiated nearly 80 percent of all engagements, subjecting American ground forces to constant casualties from a faceless, often invisible enemy that hit fast and then disappeared before the firepower rained down. (52)To deliver the lethal firepower that would produce body count sufficient for “cross over,” Westmoreland’s command drew upon the awesome arsenal of U.S. conventional weaponry to build a vast apparatus for killing that it clamped down over the length and breadth of South Vietnam. In 1965 the U.S. military declared 40 percent of South Vietnam’s heavily populated countryside “free fire zones” where its artillery and airpower could strike at will. In 1966, 91 percent of U.S. Army artillery was being shot off indiscriminately in random “harassment and interdiction” (H&I) fire against these zones. (91) By 1969, U.S. airstrikes were being conducted on or near villages with 3.3 million inhabitants. (62) Many of these airstrikes dropped anti-personnel “guava” bombs, each one spraying 200,000 steel fragments in all directions. During the war, the U.S. military purchased 285 million of these guava bombs, sufficient to rain a daily cloudburst of lethal steel across much of South Vietnam. (85) At peak of combat operations, moreover, the U.S. military had 4,000 helicopters in country that flew 36 million missions during the war, often patrols with machine gunners who could and did fire at any Vietnamese civilian whose gait or movements were deemed somehow suspicious. (88).With the killing machine in place, Turse moves on to two grisly chapters that show the application of this body-count strategy in the northern provinces of South Vietnam and in the southern Mekong Delta. In “a series of snapshots culled from a vast album of horrors” in northern Quang Nam and Quang Ngai provinces, Turse shows that “year after year ... in unit after unit, the atrocities were of the same type, the horrors of a similar magnitude, the miseries of the same degree.” (109)In addition to the many atrocities in Quang Ngai recounted above, Turse cites the memoir of Marine squad leader John Merson, who, in April 1967, “sprang an ambush on sampans traveling on a river Dai Loc District [in Quang Nam], killing about twenty civilians -- all of whom turned out to be women, children, and old men.” (120) Though Turse treats this anecdote as just another in his catalogue of U.S. atrocities, it merits closer consideration to complicate this one-dimensional treatment, something we will return to at end of this essay.In a penultimate chapter, elaborating upon a prize-winning exposé that he published in The Nation back in 2008, Turse explores the case of the 9th Division’s controversial “Operation Speedy Express.” The division commander, Major General Julian Ewell, known in the Army as the “butcher of the Delta,” declared much of the densely populated Mekong Delta “free fire zones” and then deployed helicopter gunships, artillery, and infantry to inflict high body count in what was supposed to be an aggressive pursuit of the enemy.From December 1968 to May 1969, the Division’s “Operation Speedy Express” reported 10,889 killed with a suspiciously high kill ratio of 272:1 (i.e. 272 enemy killed for every American dead) -- far exceeding the usual 10:1 ratio and indicating indiscriminate fire against civilians. In May 1970, a decorated veteran of that operation, Sergeant George Lewis, sent a ten-page letter to General Westmoreland, by then back in Washington as Army chief of staff, charging that these operations were "a My Lay each month for over a year." He complained of “helicopter gunships mowing down noncombatants, of airstrikes on villages, of farmers gunned down in their fields while commanders pressed relentlessly for high body counts.” (214-19)A U.S. adviser who witnessed the operation, Jeffrey Record, recalled, in a 1971 article for the Washington Monthly, watching as the division’s helicopter gunships strafed a herd of water buffalo and the six or seven children tending them, transforming the rice paddy “into a bloody ooze littered with bits of mangled flesh.” He added: “The dead boys and the water buffalo were added to the official body count of the Viet Cong.” (211)Despite a Pentagon investigation that found these charges credible, Westmoreland quashed the inquiry and General Ewell was later assigned to write an official Army account of his operations as a combat manual for future U.S. officers. The brilliant war correspondent Kevin Buckley, assisted by his Vietnamese-speaking staffer Alexander Shimkin, wrote a searing 5,000 word exposé of Operation Speedy Express for Newsweek. But the magazine’s New York editors sat on the story for six months and then published an eviscerated 1,800 word version devoid of the convincing details its reporters had worked for months to assemble. (254)By 1971, after five years of such atrocities, the “floodgates were about to burst” with Lieutenant Calley’s conviction for war crimes at My Lai and well-documented media reports of similar incidents elsewhere in South Vietnam. Speaking out publicly, the former U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, General Telford Taylor (ret.), said bluntly that American commanders in Vietnam could face war crimes charges for the shelling of civilians and their failure to protect villagers from atrocities. Shaken, Westmoreland, using his authority as Army chief of staff, ordered an official inquiry that found atrocities were “neither wide-spread nor extensive.” (233) Simultaneously, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division set out to systematically “intimidate potential witnesses and whistle-blowers, …entreated them to lie, and carried out overt surveillance to bully them into silence.” (243)After finishing this fast-paced book in a single sitting, I paused, wondering what to make of its relentless succession of beatings, burnings, capricious killings, carpet bombing, random artillery shelling, systemic torture, and gang rapes visited upon the villagers of Vietnam. Clearly, Westmoreland’s cover-up has worked for nearly forty years: Most American still believe that My Lai was an aberrant, isolated incident. Clearly, if this book is widely read, Americans will have to reflect on the impact of their overwhelming superiority of firepower and airpower upon the civilians who suffer its collateral damage, whether in South Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. That alone is a substantial accomplishment for this book or any book.But that anecdote about Marine John Merson and his ambush of sampans on page 120 raises some questions that neither Turse nor any of the authors of America’s 30,000 non-fiction books about the Vietnam War have yet to consider. The seriousness of his subject compels us to ask: Might not there be some larger, unexplored significance to all this violence that Turse catalogues so carefully?Back in 2007, John Merson, whom I knew in high school, sent me the manuscript for a memoir that he later published as War Lessons -- the book that Turse now cites. I read casually until I reached the description of that night on the river. Acting on detailed intelligence that a heavily armed Viet Cong unit would be coming down that river in sampans, Merson ordered his squad of Marines to set an ambush on a river bank in Dai Loc District, Quang Nam Province. So when the sampans appeared in the darkness that night, just as the intelligence had predicted, Merson’s squad opened up with automatic weapons, blasting away into the dark. Once the firing was done, they found the sampans filled with twenty corpses -- all unarmed women, children, and old men. When I read that passage, I could feel John’s horror and understand why he has gone back to Vietnam eight times to work with villagers on development projects and why he still speaks out for peace in schools, synagogues, and churches.Since I was reading John Merson’s memoir over Christmas break, I shared the story of the ambush with his fellow Marine veteran, my stepfather, whose thirty-year career in the Corps had taken him to Saigon as a staff officer in Westmoreland’s headquarters. When I got to the part where John's squad sees the women and children dead in the sampans, my stepfather interrupted: “Good counter-intelligence by the enemy.” What do you mean, I asked? “Marines demoralized. Villagers hate Americans. Hate our Saigon allies. Effective,” this retired Marine colonel replied, cutting off the conversation.A few years later, I recalled those incisive words when I was reading Merle Pribbenow’s retrospective analysis, on the CIA’s website, of the famed case of the captured communist counter-intelligence operative, Nguyen Tai . As many will recall, CIA operative Frank Snepp began his best-selling memoir of Saigon’s fall, Decent Interval , with recollections of the Agency’s years of torturing Tai that end during South Vietnam’s last days when he was dumped into the South China Sea. Except he wasn’t, Pribbenow now tell us. Though beaten almost to death by South Vietnamese interrogators and subjected to years of brutal psychological torture by their CIA counterparts, this “sophisticated, intelligent” communist, “who had run intelligence and terrorist operations in Saigon for more than five years,” still manipulated everyone, withholding the names of his Saigon assets and surviving the war to win medals, serve in the National Assembly, and write his memoirs. In Pribbenow’s summary of these memoirs, Tai started his career in communist intelligence at age eighteen and served, at only twenty-one in 1947, as Chief of Public Security during the French occupation of Hanoi. To survive under the Argus-eyed French colonial Sûreté, the Vietnamese Communist Party had, from its foundation in the 1920s, created a skillful intelligence apparatus, forging another of those communist counter-intelligence services that defeated the CIA on every Cold War battleground -- Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Cuba -- and which remains, even today, a bastion of communist state power in Vietnam.Juxtaposing these two memoirs, by John Merson and Nguyen Tai, indicates that there might be a significant facet to the U.S. defeat in South Vietnam that the many accounts of this war have yet to explore. Wrapped in imperial hubris of U.S. power, no American analyst has canvassed the possibility that communist counter-intelligence in a poor Third World nation could have manipulated all this awesome U.S. violence, flipping the Phoenix apparatus to clog the CIA’s killing machine with neutralists or anti-communists, eliminating enemies in advance of their inevitable victory; directing the combat violence, through mis-information, to punish villages of insufficient loyalty; or using American atrocities for propaganda to discredit the Saigon regime.Turse does take some important steps in this direction, telling us that the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which was responsible for over 20,000 extra-judicial killings, was a “corrupt, informant-driven enterprise in which a significant number of non-combatants were captured, interrogated or assassinated…merely to meet quotas, win bounties, or settle grudges.” (190)American conservatives might revel in the awesome application of U.S. firepower in Vietnam and critics like Turse have documented its propensity for atrocity. But neither side of this political divide has engaged the possibility that dedicated communist cadre could have somehow flipped all that awe-inspiring strength, using America’s withering firepower and willful ruthlessness to somehow hasten a U.S. defeat in Vietnam. But all that is a topic for another book so counter-intuitive, so humbling for America, and so sensitive for Hanoi’s current regime that it will probably never be written.Source: Special to HNNDate: 2-22-13

[Dr Arslanagić]

[Dr Arslanagić]

http://youtu.be/1Y3QE22ZsWE I was born on a Dublin street where the Royal drums do beatAnd the loving English feet they walked all over us,And every single night when me da would come home tightHe'd invite the neighbors out with this chorus:Come out you black and tans,Come out and fight me like a manShow your wife how you won medals down in FlandersTell her how the IRAMade you run like hell away,From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.Come let us hear you tellHow you slandered great pernellWhen you thought him well and truly persecutedWhere are the sneers and jeersthat you loudly let us hearWhen our leaders of sixteen were executedCome out you black and tans,Come out and fight me like a manShow your wife how you won medals down in FlandersTell her how the IRAMade you run like hell away,From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.Come tell us how you slewThose old arabs two by twoLike the zulu's they had spears and bow and arrowsHow bravely you faced oneWith you're sixteen pounder gunAnd you frightened them damn natives to the marrowCome out you black and tans,Come out and fight me like a manShow your wife how you won medals down in FlandersTell her how the IRAMade you run like hell away,From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra.Now the time is coming fastAnd I think them days are hereWhen each english yeoman he will run before us,And if there'll be a needThen our kids will say god speedWith a verse or two of singing this fine chorusCome out you black and tans,Come out and fight me like a manShow your wife how you won medals down in FlandersTell her how the IRAMade you run like hell away,From the green and lovely lanes of Killashandra. Edited March 21, 2013 by Arbeitmann

[Prospero]

achtung: samo za dokone i ljubitelje istoriografije i teorije :)

The State of International HistoryBy Marc Trachtenberg on March 9, 2013This article is a slightly abridged version of a presentation given on August 23, 2010, at a conference on “International Organizations and Institutions: Past and Future Prospects,” held at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo.In this article, I will deal with two important issues. First, I want to talk about how our field—“diplomatic history,” or the history of international relations, or even just plain “international history”—has changed over the last thirty or forty years. And then I want to move on to what many might find a more interesting, although not unrelated, topic, and that’s the question of how this field should develop in the years to come.But let me start by talking neither about the past nor about the future of the discipline, but about the present. Where do we stand now? What are we to make of the kind of work that is being done today? This is not an easy question to answer in any simple way. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the sentence that Charles Dickens used at the start of A Tale of Two Cities—“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”—but I couldn’t get that sentence out of my mind when I was trying to decide what to say here today. In some ways, we’re living in a golden age: the best works today—I think, for example, of Adam Tooze’s history of the “making and breaking of the Nazi economy,” his book The Wages of Destruction—are quite extraordinary, better than anything that had been produced in the past.[1] Just compare that book with another book on the same topic that came out in 1959, Germany’s Economic Preparations for War by Burton Klein.[2] Tooze’s analysis is just much deeper and more penetrating: what is impressive is not simply the mass of evidence that he presents, although that’s extraordinary in itself, but the way that evidence is marshalled into an argument—and even more the way that argument forces you to rethink, in a very fundamental way, your whole understanding of the origins of the Second World War.Or compare Paul Kennedy’s Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism (which came out in 1980) with Raymond Sontag’s Germany and England: Background of Conflict (published in 1938)[3]. The Sontag book was a superb work of history—exceptionally perceptive, beautifully crafted—but Kennedy was able to go into the issue in much greater depth. His book, after all, was based on a massive amount of primary source material, found in British, German, and Austrian archives—not just the official material, but also over 233 collections of private papers, found in 54 different repositories. And I haven’t even mentioned the very large number of historical works that he cited in the book—he spent 32 pages just listing them all.Or let me refer to a less massive work, Mary Sarotte’s new book 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe, a study (which, as she points out) was based “on research in archives, private papers, and sound and video recordings” from “Moscow, Warsaw, Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Hamburg, Koblenz, Bonn, Paris, London, Cambridge, Princeton, Washington, College Station and Simi Valley”—again, not to mention all the published material she was able to draw on.[4] And that’s just one of a number of books that have come out just within the past year that are really very impressive, not just in terms of source material, but also in analytical terms. I’m thinking here, for example, of Jochen Laufer’s Pax Sovietica and Fraser Harbutt’s new book Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads.[5] In fact, I’ve read a number of works recently that I’ve really liked—Frédéric Bozo’s book on Mitterrand and the end of the Cold War; Benedikt Schoenborn’s book on de Gaulle and the Germans; and Stefan Schmidt’s study of French foreign policy in the July Crisis of 1914, to give just a few examples—and when I think of works like that, I come away feeling that the standard is remarkably high—that in intellectual terms, the field is remarkably healthy.[6]But let me pause here briefly to consider a very simple question: why is it that this sort of work can be done now? Couldn’t that kind of work have been done in the past? I know this is something that people might disagree with, but I don’t think that scholars are able to do that kind of work today essentially because our perspective has changed—that in the past people had a very narrow view of what diplomatic history was, that they tended to think of it as simply the study (to use a famous phrase) of what “one clerk said to another,” but that now we take a much broader view of what the field is about. That’s a view that many people have, but I just don’t think it’s accurate. There certainly was a lot of utterly boring, utterly mindless, historical work of the “what one clerk said to another genre” that was published decades ago, but the best work—and this field, like any other, should be judged mainly by the best work it produces—was never cut from that cloth. Think, for example, of the Sontag book I referred to before, or of R.W. Seton-Watson’s Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question (which came out in 1935) — or for that matter think of Thucydides.[7]The change, to my mind at least, has a more mundane taproot. It has to do with the material conditions within which work can be done—the vast increase in the amount of primary source material that is available to researchers today, and also—and this is of increasing importance when we think about the future of the field—the remarkable technological changes that have taken places in recent decades. When I came over to Paris in 1971 to do the research for my dissertation, I couldn’t even get access to the foreign ministry materials for the immediate post-World War I—that is, to material that had been produced half a century earlier. And as for the material I was able to get access to, I had to either summarize or paraphrase or transcribe by hand whatever I found in a document that seemed to me worth noting. Photocopying was much too expensive to use freely. Cheap xeroxing came on the scene in the 1980’s, and today the use of digital cameras makes copying even easier and less expensive.And today—and this is in many ways a very recent development—it’s possible to do archival-type work without even having to go to archives, and this will become increasingly true as archives proceed to “digitize” their collections. This process is proceeding quite rapidly—in part, in the United States, as the by-product of new computer-based methods that are being put in place to increase the efficiency of the declassification process, in themselves spurred by the need to review absolutely massive amounts of material—but even what has happened so far is really remarkable. Today I can sit in my office at UCLA and download and print out, very cheaply and easily, a great mass of material—and by that I mean essentially archive-type material—that I have access to over the internet: material from the Declassified Documents Reference Service, from the Digital National Security Archive, British Cabinet records, German cabinet minutes, the U.S. State Department electronic telegrams collection, the electronic supplements to the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series, the “electronic reading rooms” containing documents released under the Freedom of Information Act by various U.S. government agencies, and so on. I can then mark up those printouts, and when it’s time to write something up, I can work from those marked up documents. I can go through material maybe ten times as quickly as I was able to forty years ago, and still get as much out of them. And since it’s hard to travel, especially when you have to teach or if you have a family, I can spend a lot more time doing archival-type research than I would have been able to if things had not changed so dramatically. Putting those two things together, what all this means is that in the course of a lifetime one can do a lot more in terms of primary source analysis than was possible a generation ago. And it’s not just a question of learning a lot of facts—the real payoff is that it is now possible to develop a much deeper understanding of the general subject—deeper insight, that is, into the question of what makes for war and what makes for a stable international system.So you might be tempted to look at all this and say that things are going pretty well—that the field is in pretty good shape. And yet when you talk with people who do this kind of work, especially in the United States, you sense a certain malaise. There’s a certain sense that the field is not what it should be—that the field, perhaps, does not have a clear sense for what it’s about, for what it should be trying to accomplish. The work that’s being produced, especially in recent years, is all over the map: the field seems fractured, Balkanized—there doesn’t seem to be any overarching sense of purpose.In America especially, the field, especially in its more or less traditional form, is very much under attack. (In Europe, you see some signs of the sort of thing I’ll be talking about, but the problems I’ll be outlining are much milder over here.) But in America the situation is quite serious. Many historians doubt whether our field has much legitimacy at all. Military history is in even worse shape. I remember attending a seminar at the Davis Center at Princeton University at which Russell Weigley, one of America’s leading military historians, had given a talk. During the question period, a social historian asked Weigley a question: “Isn’t it true,” he said, “that military historians really like war?” That kind of attitude is very common, and it’s in fact very hard to get a decent academic job if you do military history of any sort. Diplomatic history, on the other hand, has not been entirely drummed out of the profession, but it has been pushed to the margins. People in other fields have very little respect for it as an intellectual enterprise. At my own university, the history department is enormous—something like 80 standing faculty members—but not one who does international politics or foreign policy or anything like that as his or her main field. The jobs go instead to people who work in fields that are considered more “politically correct”—that is, who work on topics having to do with the “holy trinity” of Race, Class and Gender, especially Gender.Diplomatic history is considered to be the carrier of a set of distasteful social values, and is also opposed because it is considered too old-fashioned in methodological terms—people in this field are viewed, with some justification, as methodologically conservative, and in particular as opposed to the idea that historical work can serve as a bludgeon for advancing a “progressive” political agenda.Some diplomatic historians have attempted to adapt to those new trends and have tried, for example, to study U.S. foreign policy from a “gendered” or “postmodern” point of view. But those attempts have not been entirely successful, even in terms of academic politics: they have not enabled the field to re-establish a foothold in departments that have turned away from it. In the meantime, the marginalization of mainstream diplomatic history has had far-reaching effects on the field as a whole. The best graduate students see which way the wind is blowing; they tend to shy away from doing anything that can be thought of as traditional diplomatic history.This is not to say one cannot get a decent job if one is interested in the international scene. But your chances of getting a job are much greater if you can market yourself as a national historian—as an Americanist, for example, it would be acceptable to teach a course on the history of American foreign relations. But that sort of thing simply perpetuates the parochialism of a lot of the work that’s done in this area: most people working in this field in the United States are historians of American foreign policy, not historians of international politics. Even the one professional organization in the United States in this area calls itself the “Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.”The national approach, however—and this is a point that applies to many countries, and not just the United States, although the American example is particularly extreme—the national approach is at odds with what the field should be about. The key to understanding international politics is to see it as an interactive process—to understand that what one state does is very heavily influenced by what other states do, that foreign policy is not something that just wells up from deep within a society, but rather is to be understood in terms of the environment in which a country finds itself. And that means also that in trying to understand how international political life runs its course, you have to try to see things through the eyes of the different actors involved in the story. None of this is possible if you’re focusing just on the foreign policy of a particular country. And yet that’s the prevailing approach—and it’s prevalent, to a certain extent, because of the way academia is structured.Let me make just one last point about the place this field has in American academic life. Because it’s been marginalized within the U.S. historical profession, a number of people who were trained in this area have migrated to—or maybe I should say taken refuge in—political science departments, schools of government, and the like. Mary Sarotte, who I mentioned before, is in an international relations department at the University of Southern California, even though that school has a history department. Frank Gavin, who also does very impressive work—and I think some of you may know him, since he spent some time here—is at the LBJ School at the University of Texas. And I, of course, after teaching for 26 years in the history department at the University of Pennsylvania, am now in the Political Science Department at UCLA.Now, this kind of migration away from history departments is bound to have somewhat mixed effects. On the one hand, the kind of training graduate students get in political science departments, for example, is very different from the kind of training people like me got when we were in graduate school. The great emphasis on what political scientists call “method”—and by that they mean statistical method (above all regression analysis) and game theory—means that graduate students in that discipline really don’t have the time to do things that most of us consider essential, like learn foreign languages. How one can presume to study international politics without knowing at least one foreign language is utterly beyond me—it’s not simply a question of access to the sources, what’s more important is that learning a foreign language is the only way to break out of the provincialism of your own culture, and American culture especially is in many ways quite provincial.On the other hand, the sort of migration I’ve been talking about is not an altogether unhealthy thing. First of all, it might have a certain impact on the way history departments conduct their business. If people like me teach courses outside history departments that attract a lot of students that might put a certain pressure on those departments to take this field more seriously. But the more important effect, it seems to me, is intellective in nature—that is, it might actually have a positive effect on the kind of work that is done. I know, for example, that interacting with political scientists has had a very positive effect on the kind of work I do.I’ll give just a couple of examples here, and both of them have to do with the “preventive war” issue. The dynamic here—the idea that states worry about shifts in the structure of power, and often feel a certain pressure to act before the balance shifts against them—is taken quite seriously by political scientists, whereas historians traditionally have paid little attention to this kind of thing. When the George W. Bush administration, for example, put forward a doctrine of this sort, saying how the United States had to nip problems in the bud before they became completely unmanageable, historians like Arthur Schlesinger took the line that this marked a total break with American tradition—that earlier U.S. governments had never pursued policies based on that kind of thinking. More generally, historians tended to associate the preventive war philosophy with the lunatic fringe.It turns out, however, that this kind of thinking did play an important role in shaping U.S. policy at key points in the twentieth century—it certainly played a more important role than most historians have been prepared to admit. Take the case, for example, of U.S. policy in 1941, in the months right before Pearl Harbor. There’s one key document from that period, the so-called “Victory Program” of September 11, 1941, signed by Army Chief of Staff Marshall and Admiral Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations. The basic point of that widely-cited document, if you read the standard historical accounts, was that if the United States entered the Second World War, it should give top priority to the war against Germany; the war with Japan would be of secondary importance. But if you read the document itself, the real point was that if the United States waited too long to get into the war, the problem with Germany would become unmanageable: if the Germans had a free hand to consolidate their position in Europe—to bring order out of chaos in the areas they occupied in Russia—there would be no way to defeat them, certainly not at acceptable cost. So America needed to enter the war as soon as she could, even before she herself was attacked. This was thus not a military argument about how the war should be fought if the United States entered it; it was a political argument about why the United States had to go to war with Germany before it was too late.Now this I think is very important, and the basic point here has major implications about how the events of 1941 are to be understood. But why was it that scholars were unable to see what the military authorities were saying? And why was I able to see it when other scholars, who in fact were specialists in this area, were just blind to it? It’s not that they’re stupid or anything like that. What this example shows is how important it is to have a prepared mind. You pick things up when you kind of know what to look for—when your radar screen is activated, when your antennae are turned on. The evidence becomes salient only when you’re asking the right questions. And that’s what exposure to “theory”—that is, to the sort of thing that international relations theorists talk about—gives you. Not answers, but a sense for what the right questions are.The second example relates to another important document from this period, the Atlantic Charter signed by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in August 1941. This document is commonly treated as just a standard statement of standard liberal principles; it certainly is not treated as a charter for a permanent strategy of preventive war. And yet Point Eight of the Charter called for the disarmament of countries which might threaten aggression—not just when they actually committed acts of aggression, but when the “policemen” who dominated the system saw a threat on the horizon. And Roosevelt took that provision quite seriously. The “whole point” of that provision, he said, “was to make clear what the objective would be if the war was won.”[8]As he saw it, only four states—America, Britain, Russia and China, the “Four Policemen,” as he called them—would remain armed; everyone else, including even countries like France, would be disarmed, by force if necessary. “The four major nations,” he told the Soviets a year later, “would maintain sufficient armed forces to impose peace.” “If any nation menaced the peace,” he said, “it could be blockaded and then if still recalcitrant, bombed.”[9] Or as Vice President Wallace put the point the following year: the way to maintain peace and security in the postwar world was to “bomb the aggressor nations mercilessly”[10]—and I think it’s important to understand that we’re talking here about the bombing of civilian populations, the sort of bombing campaign that was conducted against Germany and Japan in World War II, in part with an eye to influencing their behavior in the post-war period. And yet all of this has been simply filtered out of our historical consciousness: it doesn’t register because our minds are not prepared to pick it up. But if you interact with political scientists, if you try to see the world through their eyes, if you grapple with the ideas and arguments they’re concerned with, you’re much more likely to see these things.All of which brings me to the second issue I wanted to talk about, the whole question of “where do we go from here”—the question of how the field ought to develop in the years to come. Let me begin by trying to summarize what I’ve been saying about the problems with the field as I see them; the question of how to proceed will naturally take that diagnosis as its point of departure. So to reiterate: the field, as I see it, has two basic problems. There is first the intellective problem, the substantive problem—the absence of any sense of overarching purpose, the fact that the field does not quite know what it is about, the fact that people go off in all kinds of different directions, and that there is not much that pulls them together and gives them the sense that they’re involved in a common intellectual enterprise. And, second, there’s the political problem, which is particularly acute in the United States, although some aspects of it can be detected in Europe as well—and this is the problem of the marginalization of the field within the historical profession, and the shrivelling up of an adequate institutional base for the field. And of course the two problems are related in all kinds of ways: if, for example, the intellective problem could be dealt with, that might have a certain effect on how the field fared in the academic world.So how can the intellective problem—and above all the fracturing, of the field—be dealt with? The first step here, it seems to me, is that we need to think hard, and think collectively, about what it is exactly that we’re trying to do—that we need to develop a kind of philosophy, a sort of theory, of the field. And it seems to me that this is the kind of thing that we’re going to have to do, if not collectively perhaps then at least as individuals, simply in order to get a handle on the great mass of evidentiary material that we now have access to, and (for the reasons I talked about before) can go through much more efficiently than was the case in the past. We can’t approach our material any more the way I, for one, was taught to in graduate school. It’s not enough to say that you need to just “look at the sources.” You have to figure out which sources to look at, and in more or less what order. You have to figure out how to tackle that huge mass of material, and that means you need a strategy—that is, you have to think hard about the structure of the problem you’re dealing with, how the different questions you’re concerned with relate to each other, how big issues turn on, or can be made to turn on, more specific, and therefore more studiable questions. But that means you first have to have some sense for what the big issues are, and for the sorts of debates that revolve around them.And here I think a lot of the work that’s been done by international relations theorists, especially in recent years, might be of real interest to us. I’m thinking especially of James Fearon’s extremely influential 1995 article, “Rationalist Explanations for War.” What was important about that article, I think, was not so much the particular argument he put forth about how war could be rationally explained, but the core aspiration that his whole approach was based on. This was the idea that to get at the issue of war and peace, it didn’t make sense to just come up with a long laundry list of factors that seemed to have some explanatory power. Instead, what you needed to do was (in Fearon’s words) to “take apart and reassemble those diverse arguments into a coherent theory fit for guiding empirical research.”[11]When explaining war, you had to frame the question in such a way that you could see why the answer had to do, necessarily, with a certain type of factor. His argument was that war was never the optimal way of resolving conflicts; there was always a solution that was better for both parties than armed conflict; the central question, the whole focus of analysis, therefore had to be: what was it exactly that prevented a negotiated solution from being reached? One can quarrel with the way he answered that question, but that whole approach was enormously productive because it gave focus to the analysis. In principle, it enabled people who normally simply talked past each other to engage each other intellectually—to engage, that is, in productive debate.Can we draw on that kind of theory when we’re trying to figure out how we’d like work in our own field to be structured? To a certain extent, I think the answer is yes—but only to a certain extent. The international relations theorists are concerned ultimately with the same kinds of issues as we are, and if our goal is to make our own field more coherent intellectually, we can profit by paying attention to what they’re trying to do. But our goals are somewhat different from theirs. We’re certainly not interested in theory-building as a kind of end in itself. And although political science ideas and arguments can often help us decide which empirical questions we want to focus on—and this, I should say in passing, is certainly true of my own work over the last twenty-five years—I think we should have enough intellectual self-confidence to set our own scholarly agendas.Should we then try to set an agenda in a rather direct and self-conscious way? We tend to be rather individualistic in terms of how we do our work—how we choose the particular projects we work on. Is this perhaps a mistake? Maybe we should think a bit more in terms of developing collective scholarly programs. This sort of thing, after all, is not unheard of in our world. Pierre Renouvin, the dean of French diplomatic historians, had very strong views about how work in this field should be done; I remember being struck in particular by a programmatic article that he published in 1961.[12] Of course, this sort of thing cannot be pushed too far—no one would want to be straitjacketed by programs established by other people—but I do think it makes sense to give some thought to what exactly we should be trying to do, and how as a community we could achieve those goals. I do think it would make sense to talk about those issues explicitly, and not just say “let a hundred flowers bloom” and hope for the best. Even if we never arrive at a consensus, the whole process of grappling with questions of that sort might be of value in its own right.And I think we could begin that process by looking at the kind of work we ourselves are doing, and the others around us are doing, and just asking, as honestly as we can, what the point of it is. “Does this work really matter? Does anyone really care about what we come up with?” I don’t mean to suggest that the answers are bound to be negative. It’s just that this is the way to start thinking about the kinds of goals we should set for ourselves as a community.I have to admit that when I think about these issues, I take what I’m sure will strike many of you as a fairly narrow view. For me, the fundamental question, the question that practically defines the field, is the question of war and peace. What makes for war? Or to look at the same question from the other side what makes for a stable international system? And related to that, there are fundamental questions about policy—about whether there is anything that can be said, of a general nature, about the principles that should guide foreign policy. And this, to be sure, means that questions relating to the origins of specific wars, and especially of conflicts like the two world wars, are of particular interest. But those, of course, are not the only questions that are of interest. War is the product of a political process, and all kinds of things affect the way that process runs its course. The whole question of the reform of the international monetary system, for example, especially in the 1970s, had a certain political importance in this connection—the monetary policies the major industrial countries adopted helped determine the sort of political relationship they had, and that relationship in turn had a certain effect on east-west relations—that is, on the stability of the larger international political system. So all sorts of things are relevant. But the point is that from this perspective—from the perspective that takes the question of war and peace as paramount—those things are of interest only to the extent that they bear on that fundamental question. What we want to focus on—if you accept that way of looking at things—is how they fit into the larger scheme of things, how they bear on the question of war and peace.And this, I should note, is not simply a way of limiting the sorts of things we’re interested in. It’s a way of defining questions so that we can dig deeper into the issues we’re concerned with. We might be tempted, for example, to simply assume that the unification of Europe is a source of stability. French president Mitterrand, for example, certainly took it for granted that by “building Europe” the international system could be made more stable. What was the logic here? The basic idea (as Bozo showed in his book on Mitterrand and the end of the Cold War) was that Germany remained a problem; the assumption was that German power could be “contained” within strengthened European structures.[13] The idea that those structures would have that kind of effect is accepted, more or less uncritically, especially in Europe. It’s taken, that is, more or less as an article of faith. But when you approach the problem with that one basic question in mind—the question about what makes for war or for a stable international system—you can hardly help asking whether it’s in fact true that those European structures would work as advertized. When you approach it from that point of view, you have to ask how exactly would those European structures contain German power? If the unified Germany basically accepted the new status quo, that Germany would have no problem working with her neighbors, no matter what European structures were in place. But if that Germany wanted to pursue any sort of revisionist policy, it is hard to see how those European structures would prevent her from doing so. The point here is simply that approaching the issue in this “narrower” and more focused way leads you to ask certain questions you might not otherwise ask. You are less likely to just take the conventional wisdom at face value; you’re more likely to try to go into the issue more deeply.Now, that’s my view of what the fundamental issues are, the issues that should define what the field is about, and I’m sure that other people—and indeed perhaps most of you here in this room—would take a very different view. And I’d never say that you should change your mind and agree with me just because I’m making that argument. What I am saying is that if you do disagree, you should try to figure out for yourself how you would answer those basic questions about what the point of what we’re doing is—about what the thinking is that lies at the bottom of the whole scholarly effort we’re engaged in. This, to my mind, is the kind of issue that should be discussed and debated, and who knows what will come out of those discussions? At the very least, we’ll all get a clearer sense for what other people are trying to do, and indeed for how it relates to what we’re trying to do.And why do I think it’s important to ask these kinds of questions? I’d break the answer down into three parts. First, as individuals, we only go around once in life, and we want our life to have a certain meaning. I think, in fact, that most of us go into the academic world, even though we could probably make a better living on the outside, because we feel the kind of work we do is meaningful. We therefore owe it to ourselves, as individuals, to ask ourselves, as we do our academic work, what the point of it is. We owe it to ourselves, as individuals, to design our research projects in a way that guarantees that they will be meaningful—that we can answer the “who cares?” question, at least to our own satisfaction.And second, we want to do work that is not just satisfying to us as individuals. We don’t want to live in a totally atomized scholarly world. We don’t want to live in a world where the whole is less than the sum of its parts. We want to live instead in a scholarly community, where people actually listen to each other, where they argue with each other, where those arguments are conducted in a way that enables people to see beyond their own preconceptions. We want to live in a community where people engage each other intellectually, where a body of thought which we can all contribute to develops, as issues are argued out seriously, and with reference to the evidence. That’s one of the main reasons we need to stand up for the norm that questions should be framed in such a way that the answers turn on what the evidence shows. And by thinking hard about what the point of what we’re doing is, about what the field as a whole should be trying to accomplish, we might be able to develop a common frame of reference—we might be able to pull the field together and make it less fractured, and more of a community.And third by asking these questions we’re implicitly assuming that the field should have a purpose—and in large part I mean that the field should have a social purpose. I’m not a very religious person, and this is a little hard for me to say, but I think there’s something almost sacred about what we do. You study these issues and you really do develop certain general conclusions—about what makes for war, what makes for a stable international system, and, related to that, conclusions also about how, in a very general way, policy should be conducted. Those conclusions matter, because they’re at variance with common assumptions that you draw from the general culture as you grow up; and historical work is the laboratory for hammering out answers to those fundamental questions—in the nuclear age quite obviously the most important questions that the human race has to deal with.What I’m saying is that in social terms we have a very important role to play, and we play it by doing our job the way it should be done—and that means making sure that we think hard about what it is exactly that we should be trying to do—how we can do historical work that in some sense matters, work that can pass the “who cares?” test. And we owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our profession, and we owe it to the world as a whole, to do work of that sort.—Marc Trachtenberg studies national security strategy, diplomatic history, and international relations. He has been Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, and the SSRC/MaCarthur Foundation. He is currently a Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. His award winning book, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton University Press, 1999), explores the profound impact of nuclear weapons on the conduct of international relations during the Cold War.________________________________________[1] Tooze, Adam (2007) The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London. Penguin.[2] Klein Burton (1959) Germany’s Economic Preparations for War. Cambridge MA. Harvard University Press.[3] Kennedy, Paul (1980) The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914. London. Allen and Unwin. Sontag, Raymond (1938) Germany and England: Background of Conflict. New York. D. Appleton-Century Co.[4] Sarotte, Mary (2011) 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. Princeton. Princeton University Press.[5] Laufer, Jochen (2009) Pax Sovietica. Bohlau Verlag Koln Weimar. Koln. And Harbutt, Fraser (2010) Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.[6] Bozo, Frédéric (2009) Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War and German Unification. New York. Berghahn Books. Schoenborn, Benedikt (2007) Les Mesentente Apprivoisee: De Gaulle et les Allemands, 1963-1969. Paris. Presses Universitaires de France. Schmidt, Stefan (2009) Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914. Munchen. Oldenbourg Wissench. Vlg.[7] Seton-Watson, RW Disraeli, Gladstone, and the Eastern Question. London. Frank Cass.[8] Wells Memo, August 11th, 1941, FRUS 1941, Vol.1, p.366; see also Wilson, Theodore (1991) The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941. Lawrence. Kansas University Press. p.173-175, 192, 197-199.[9] Roosevelt-Molotov Meetings, 29th May and 1st June 1942, FRUS 1942, 3, p.568-569, 573, 580.; Roosevelt-Stalin Meeting November 29th, 1943, FRUS: Conferences at Cairo and Tehran. P.530-531.[10] Hilderbrand, Robert (1990) Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security. Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. P.142.[11] Fearon, James (1995) ‘Rationalist Theories of War’ pp.379-414 in International Organization Vol.49, No.3. p.382.[12] Renouvin, Pierre (1961) ‘Les relations franco-allemandes de 1871 à 1914: Esquisse d’un programme de recherches’ in A.O. Sarkissian (ed) Studies in Diplomatic History and Historiography in Honour of G. P. Gooch. London. Longmans.[13] Bozo, Frédéric (2009) Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War and German Unification. New York. Berghahn Books. p. 99; see also pp. 65-66 and 22.

[DarkAttraktor]

skoro se pojavilo na Wiki, pa reko da podelim (rec je o ovome, naravno):

[Dr Arslanagić]

Овај летак је заробила патрола среског граничног одреда среза Посавског (Умка) 10. маја 1943. Прослеђен је Команди Српске граничне страже, а командант Људевит Погачар га је даље проследио шефу Српске државне безбедности Драгом Јовановићу. Пронађено у Војном архиву. ВЕСТИ СА БОЈИШТА: Радио Берлин јавља: Фон Паулус оста кус, Сву му војску поби Рус, Њега води за синџир, Хитлер тајно тражи мир, Савезници не дају, По Берлину грувају. Грме бомбе сваки час, Герингу се смрзо глас! Хитлер шаље медаље, А Рус гура све даље. И последњи биће чин, Черчил с Русом у Берлин! Радио Тунис јавља: Пуче брука у Ромела Вука, Дан-ноћ струже и од зеца брже, Преко мора и преко мрамора, Без мундира и без гренадира. Све оставља и Хитлеру јавља: ''Чуј, мазало, све нам је пропало! Из Африке носим чемерике, Рузвелт бије од грома страшније. Не остаде ни пола бригаде, Што не паде одмах се предаде. Чуј, мазало, велика будало, Сва Европа види да смо тропа.'' Из Главног стана вође Рајха Врховна команда оружане силе јавља: За Хитлера град Харково, Већи пораз но Косово. Све му трупе зване ''Ес'' Поиграше смртни плес. Сад војника нема више, Па и бабе мобилише. А Немачка у очај Њеном бесу дође крај! Радио Каиро јавља: Славни Ромел шумски вук, Снуждио се као ћук, Претрчао као зец, Сву Африку за месец. Рузвелтови орлови, Заробише, побише, Ромелове хвалише! Радио Рим јавља: Шенлук чини луди Мусолини, Царство губи, а народу труби: ''Кад сам Ћана збацио с дивана, Мишљах знати боље управљати, Лагат боље, чим дођу невоље.'' Нашто лажи, будалино, кажи, Ка' да није широм Италије, Града, села све хрпа пепела, Од поплава ваздушних тврђава! Радио Равна Гора јавља: ''Чича''-Дража поручује, Свом народу из Србије: Савезници свуда туку, А батине Швабе вуку, Зато страшно запомажу, Грозно прете грдно лажу, Те их теше издајице, Недић, Љотић и комшије. Срби моји јуначки, Крај је близу немачки, Буд'те спремни, Час ће доћи, На душмана ваља поћи, Са нама је Америка, И Енглеска и Русија, Сложно с'њима барабар, Победиће наша ствар. па онда:Pesmica pronadjena u Arhivu Jugoslavije, koju je Hans Helm poslao centrali u Berlin 20. marta 1941. Pesma je delo izvesnog Dusana Juricica za koga Helm tvrdi da je komunista; Ој девојко јараницеДошао Хитлер до границе на граници Србин стоји да му пушком ребра бројиШумадинац пали топаДа убије РибентропаА ономе грофу ЋануЈебат ћемо милу нануУшо Черчил у ЛибијуДа направи КомендијуЗаробљен је БерганцолиА Хитлера курац болиНа сред Српског КумановаУбиот ћемо ДумановаА на врху нашег ЦераВешаћемо и ХитлераСа Авале кличе вилаОј Србијо мајко милаШаљи војску на границуЕнглези ће морнарицуРузвелт шаље авионе А ми ћемо батаљонеД.Б:Б. јавља из берлинаХитлер јебо МусолинаА гроф Ћано РибентропаПа се тресе сва ЕвропаКобалдију пали брци Јер га сада јебу грциМечка ћути кажу дремаНико незна шта ком спрема

[Prospero]

vaš i naš dr najl briljira: In Niall Ferguson's world, only Niall Ferguson cares about the future Posted By Joshua Keating Monday, May 6, 2013 - 10:10 AM ShareHistorian Niall Ferguson's entry into the world of U.S. political punditry during the last presidential election was a little bit rocky. But he seems in no hurry to retreat to the ivory tower. Ferguson came under fire this weekend for analysis he offered at a recent investors' conference which comes off a bit more Family Research Council than Harvard:

Speaking at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., in front of a group of more than 500 financial advisors and investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes' famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of "poetry" rather than procreated. The audience went quiet at the remark. Some attendees later said they found the remarks offensive.It gets worse.Ferguson, who is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, and author of

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die,

says it's only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an "effete" member of society. Apparently, in Ferguson's world, if you are gay or childless, you cannot care about future generations nor society.

Ferguson has offered an "unqualified apology" for his remarks, writing "My disagreements with Keynes’s economic philosophy have never had anything to do with his sexual orientation" and "As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise."Apparently, though, this isn't the first time Ferguson has taken a gratuitous shot at Keynes' sexuality. According to economist Michael Kitson, he made similar remarks at a seminar at Cambridge 20 years ago. In his 1998 book The Pity of War, Ferguson wrote of the economist's anti-war stance that the "war itself made Keynes deeply unhappy. Even his sex life went into decline, perhaps because the boys he liked to pick up in London all joined up."First of all, Ferguson's reading of Keynes' biography seems to be a little off. A Judith Mackrell, a biographer of Keynes wife Lydia Lopokova writes, "Like many men of his generation whose early experiences were homosexual, he didn't discount the idea of marriage and children." According to several accounts, Keynes and Lopokova did have a sexual relationship and the reasons they didn't have children were probably medical rather than a matter of preference.And as Ezra Klein points out, gay couples actually tend to save more than their straigh counterparts:

Brighita Negrusa and Sonia Oreffice, for instance,

analyzed

census data and found that even after controlling for age, education and other socioeconomic factors, “gay and lesbian couples own significantly more retirement income than heterosexuals.” Part of the difference, of course, is that gay couples are much less likely to have children than straight couples, which means they have more household income left over to save.

Sexuality aside, Ferguson's statement is a variation on an argument he elaborates on in greater depth in his new book The Great Degeneration, that "excessive public debts are a symptom of the breakdown of the social contract between the generations." That's a defensible position, but it's a bit undermined by his habit of searching out dubious reasons why those who disagree with him don't understand what's good for them.In the book, he writes:

I want to suggest that the biggest challenge facing mature democracies is how to restore the social contract between the generations. But I recognize that the obstacles to doing so are daunting. Not the least of these is that the young find it quite hard to compute their own long-term economic interests. It's surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies that would ultimately make matters even worse for them, like maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees. If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be fans of Paul Ryan.

But what's worse, the problem isn't just young people (or gay people), we learn on the next page that old people can't be trusted with the nation's economic future either:

It is perhaps not surprising that a majority of current voters should support policies of inter-generational inequity, especially when older voters are so much more likely to vote than younger voters.

I'm not quite sure I follow this. It's apparently a problem that young people aren't supporting Paul Ryan but also a problem that too many old people are voting, even though six out of 10 of them supported Ryan's ticket in the last election. I also wonder if Ferguson would have been making the case that young people are inherently unable to calculate their longterm interests in 1984 and 1988 when Republicans took the youth vote, and analysts were writing things like "It is said that the future belongs to the young, which gives the Republican Party a lot to look forward to."(The review copy of the book I have goes on to cite Reinhart and Rogoff's 90 percent of GDP equals negative growth finding. I'm curious to see if that will be revised before the final edition comes out this summer.)Again, Ferguson's arguments about longterm debt are worthy of debate, but it's a little hard to have that conversation when he seems to take the view that only straight, middle-aged people with children (people like Niall Ferguson) are able to make informed longterm decisions about the economy.