Tag: history

On Suddenly

I had a dual major in Uni: history and theoretical physics. My “history mentor” was someone who studied under Howard Zinn, so my knowledge tends towards a somewhat alternative version of history. And his thesis was on slavery — so many of the Project 1619 ideas were hardly new to me. Listening to Trump say VP Harris turned Black — beyond sounding racist weird — shows a remarkable lack of historical perspective and a stunning US-centric view of the world.

Harris’s father is Jamaican. To say she isn’t Black is to say Jamaicans aren’t Black. The University of the West Indies has some 76% of the Jamaican population being of African descent.

Does he think the entirety of the slave trade was built around the USA?!? Over 90% of enslaved Africans were sent to South American and the Caribbean. Jamaica, specifically, was a British colony — and somewhere between half a million and a million enslaved people were sent there. Why? Sugar production! There were about 400,000 enslaved Africans sent to the USA. So, based on historic records? More Africans were kidnapped and forced into slavery in Jamaica than the USA.

https://www.slavevoyages.org/

On Patriotic History

History is written by the victor. They can tell us how nice they were (or at least how necessary their not-niceness was). But the fact those who win get to write history in their favor doesn’t negate the value of ensuring people have a more robust view of what actually transpired. The good and the bad. Which makes Trump’s idea of a more patriotic history quite frightening.
 
In software development, we have “retrospectives” — a meeting where everyone chats about how the last project went. What worked well. What didn’t work well. It’s not meant to be subversive, negative, or blamey — it’s meant to get people thinking about how we could improve the things that didn’t work well. And to feel proud about the things that did go well. I’d love to see this approach taken to teaching history.
 
By focusing only on the good aspects, you lose important information. A tangentially related example: my daughter’s social studies book attempts to cover the concept of savings and loans. They talked about saving money to buy something bigger later and about the bank giving you money to buy something bigger *now* and you you give the money back later. And omitted the entire concept of interest. Elementary schools are telling kids that the bank will give you a couple hundred k to buy a house, you pay them back over time, and it’s all beautiful. I pulled up my credit card statement and showed her how the grand we spent last month could be paid back immediately — the bank gave me a grand, I paid them a grand back, and they gave me 30$ in bonus cash back for using their service — but that’s not a sustainable business model. How does the bank pay for the building downtown? The people who work there? The advertising? The computer systems? I showed her the “if you pay the minimum” and “if you pay more than the minimum, look how much you ‘save'” box where that grand could cost me three grand. Or I could ‘save’ 1500 by paying more than the minimum due.

Renaming Military Bases

If we’re not renaming military bases because Confederate generals are a part of our history (although it will be interesting to see if Trump gets countermanded again) … can we start applying the same “it’s part of history, so we need to remember it” logic when naming new bases (or ships)? The generally abysmal lack of historic knowledge probably requires very specific locations for the names to be meaningful if we go with Revolutionary War figures — Fort Burgoyne in the Satatoga area, maybe rename a naval base with Arbuthnot. And of course we’d need a Fort Arnold. But why ignore the last 150 years? Have a Fort Wilhelm II. Fort Minh. Fort Sandino. Or combine base renaming with current-day diplomacy. I’m sure Kim Jong-un will be honored when we unveil Fort Kim Il-sung. It’s all part of our history, right?

On a tangentially related note … how many people have actually stopped to look at a statue? Read the name on the statue? Read the blurb about the person? Gone home and spent an hour researching the individual? Does the fact a statue exists at Gettysburg mean the general population remembers Francis Channing Barlow? Are we really in danger of forgetting who Robert E Lee was if statues aren’t standing in our parks?

On Greenland

Trump wants to buy Greenland … which, yeah, it’s been suggested before. Way before, like 1946. And it wasn’t well received by the Danes at the time, so not exactly a stellar argument there. But Greenland isn’t a colony in the 1800’s style. A decade ago, the Act on Greenland Self-Government was granted. Which made Greenland’s parliament on par with the Danish parliament. Now, foreign policy and international agreements are still under Danish control, and there have been some power struggles in the intervening decade. But I don’t think anyone could buy Greenland from Denmark.

The History Of War And Peace

As Plato says for Clinias of Scambonidae — “For (as he would say) ‘peace,’ as the term is commonly employed, is nothing more than a name, the truth being that every State is, by a law of nature, engaged perpetually in an informal war with every other State.”, I have seen peace not as the normative state but as a temporary interlude in an ongoing war. What first drew me to study history was observing the chain of treaties to ‘end’ European conflict that extorted and humiliated the defeated parties. The Peace of Westphalia established the supremacy of the nation-state over religious states, but it also begat machinations to maintain a “balance of power” whereby ‘balance’ more or less meant your nation maintained some level of control throughout the continent. The Treaty of Frankfurt, with the indemnity France was forced to pay and territory it was forced to cede, did nothing to establish good will on the Continent. The Anglo-Ottoman Convention allowed British dominance in the Middle East, and the borders created largely ignored ethnic division. The Treaty of Versailles punishment of Germany undermined the Weimar Republic. European nations learned, my professor asserted, and sought to ensure the treaty ending World War II wouldn’t follow the long chain of humiliating, punitive treaties. An assertion ridiculous on its face – border adjustments in the Balkans under the Paris Peace Treaties begat revolution and conflict decades later as ethnically different peoples lumped into the same country broke apart.

Punishing and embarrassing a nation, or lumping people with a long history of conflict into the same country are hardly conducive to lasting peace. I oft wonder if that was the point — see: Eisenhower’s military industrial complex speech. Demanding four billion dollars from King Salman may not be an insurmountable financial burden to the Saudis, but such payment would certainly be seen as a national embarrassment. Violating the US out of the Iranian nuclear deal — and an extrapolation of what the US will ask from North Korea — is just another event in a centuries long chain of “we win, FU” so-called diplomacy.

Viewing North Korea’s summit in light of Iran – either a set of conditions are acceptable in North Korea but not Iran or North Korea will be told to completely eliminate their nuclear capabilities. It’s one thing for Korea to offer to dismantle their testing facilities — frankly, nuclear testing is frightening, and once you’ve got a bomb there’s not much point in repeatedly exploding a nuclear device — but denuclearizing and permitting frequent, invasive inspections to ensure the program is not renewed … that’s a big ask.

Those Who Do Not Know History … Are Doomed To Revolution

A facet of world history that stood out to me as a high school student was the difference a robust middle class made in the stability of a country. Lots of destitute people (aka people who don’t have much to lose) and you have lots of civil unrest, lawlessness, and insurrection. Lots of middle class people (people who aren’t rich beyond all telling, but have enough that they want to protect ‘their’ stuff), both the upper and ruling classes retain their power and resources for decades if not centuries.

I thought of this whilst reading an article about rebranding “entitlements” as “insurance” — Medicaid as insurance in case you yourself become disabled in the future. Social Security against you yourself getting old someday.

But taxes for entitlements are social stability insurance. The entire point of redistributing income is to ensure a sufficient portion of the population is happy enough that they work to preserve existing social structures.

History of South East Asia

Alternative Fact: “I felt pretty strongly that they (China) had a tremendous power over North Korea. But it’s not what you would think.” (Donald Trump in the Wall Street Journal)

Real Fact: No, it is exactly what I thought. I had a dual major in University: history and theoretical physics. So, yeah, I may have more knowledge of South East Asian history than the average American. I’ve specifically studied the history of the region as it relates to the war in Vietnam. I don’t believe Korea had quite the animosity toward China that fomented over hundreds of years in Việt Nam — a country whose name means Southern Bách Việt (an area of Southern China) … but that’s not saying much. There’s economic dependency, but coupling economic dependency with pre-existing resentment is not a recipe for harmonious relations.

My concern is not that a firm grasp of international history is not the norm world-wide (that sucks too, but probably been the way of things since language was developed). My concern is not that Trump has changed is opinion as new facts come to light — shocked, but quite heartened that the man eventually figured out that China was propping up its currency for a couple of years now. What concerns me is that the leader of China has to convey this history lesson to the US President. Because the dude refuses to let anyone else clue him into reality. None of his campaign advisers (both the currency manipulation & they can sort North Korea claims were made prior to him becoming president), none of the guys from State, no military adviser (including those who report directly to Trump) could bring real facts into this administration. In *this* instance, the leader of another country managed to hold Trump’s attention long enough to convey his version of reality (dangerous since our president is now operating under a view that doesn’t skew our country’s way … do we support Chinese expansion into the South China Sea now? I’m sure the Chinese president has a decent rational for that move as well).

But what happens when a situation arrives where the other country’s highest ranking individuals are not on hand to brief the US president??

Learning From History

It is not yet hurricane season, but there are other sorts of natural disasters that aren’t so predictable. And there is not a director of FEMA. Some directors have a great deal of experience in disaster management, and some (GW’s guy who couldn’t manage to run the Arabian Horse Association) are sweet jobs given to friends or political supporters. After FEMA’s performance during Katrina, I expected the office to become the exclusive domain of people with disaster management experience. Folks from the Red Cross, or National Guards, or disaster response agencies from states prone to disasters. For some time, that expectation was realized.

Then came Trump. Like many facets of government where Republicans think government is just wasting money or causing problems … well, he hasn’t even managed to nominate a political hack to serve as the agency head. There’s no one. I have a lot of experience in M&A – any time your department doesn’t get a manager in the new org, update your resume. Your functionality is not going to be around much longer. Because, like we don’t actually ‘need’ the DOE (an agency that keeps track of nuclear materials and intercepts it on the black market) … evidently we don’t need FEMA??