ms55896, Author at Not Even Past

Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain, By Nancy van Deusen (2015)

The conquest of the Americas first gained notoriety through the words of a penitent priest by the name of Bartolomé de las Casas, a compatriot of the Spanish conquerors. As a moral counterpoint to the conquistadors’ lawless expropriation, Las Casas would figure prominently in most textbook histories of the “New World.” From Boston to Buenos Aires, schoolchildren still learn of the Dominican friar’s crusade against the enslavement of indigenous peoples in the Americas. For some, Las Casas’ accolades are well-deserved. Historian Lewis Hanke, for instance, saw in Las Casas the first glimmer of modern humanitarianism, suggestive of a new multicultural awareness in the modern era. Others, such as Daniel Castro, have questioned the motivations of this early ideologue of “ecclesiastical imperialism.” Regardless of one’s opinions of the man, this preoccupation with Las Casas’ role as “advocate” for the indigenous peoples has obscured an important insight into post-conquest society: Native peoples from central Mexico to modern-day Venezuela pursued their own self-interest through legal action, even during times of personal distress and communal hardship following European encroachment.

Depiction of Spanish atrocities committed in the conquest of Cuba in Las Casas’s “Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias”. The rendering was by Joos van Winghe and the Flemish Protestant artist Theodor de Bry. Via Wikipedia

In Global Indios, Nancy Van Deusen questions many such received notions of the conquest. By following the case histories of particular indigenous slaves across the Atlantic, the author takes the reader to a less familiar venue: the courtrooms of sixteenth-century Castile. There, in the administrative heart of the Spanish Empire, the colonized peoples of the Americas would at times resist, at times accommodate, and at all times struggle over the legal parameters that shaped their everyday existence.

From the outset, the Spanish Crown had distinguished “cannibals” from “creatures of reason,” and “barbarous” from “civilized” nations. These formal distinctions, however, did not prevent slavers from abducting all sorts of people across the Americas to sell in the port cities of Spain and Portugal. Imperial laws permitted such transactions, provided that the indigenous captives hailed from the uncooperative “war zones” of the periphery. Individual slaves lucky enough to escape captivity in these port cities quickly sought protection under the auspices of the law. Catalina de Velasco, for example (an acquaintance of Las Casas), asserted her legal exemption from servitude by claiming the ethnic status of a native “Mexican” while her mistress staked a counter-claim that this young domestic servant hailed from Portuguese Brazil, a jurisdiction where no such legal safeguards applied for indigenous peoples. Global Indios focuses on similar trial proceedings, taking note of the various stakeholders, expert witnesses, and legal strategies that shaped conceptions of “indio-ness” (that is, Indian-ness or indigeneity) across the early Atlantic World.

Approaching a new set of questions, Global Indios has many surprises in store for the contemporary reader. The most prominent is the author’s concept of an “indioscape,” a cognitive mapping of the New World and its peoples. By the mid-sixteenth century, Europeans had realized that an entire landmass separated western Eurasia from East Asia. However, the mapping of this supercontinent was far from complete by that time. Relying upon the expert testimony of missionaries and those who had travelled to the New World, the courts pieced together a series of cultural habits and physical traits that roughly differentiated certain environments, regions, and peoples of the New World. In the courtrooms, judicial officials and third-party experts would interrogate litigants, while taking into account their physiognomy and entering it into the legal record.

The debate around racial status reveals just how fuzzy these distinctions were, especially during the early phases of colonialism. Establishing the identity of an “indio” often revolved around a series of guided questions and prejudicial observations that informed the European eye toward an ambiguous legal subject. This assessment may imply limited input on the part of indigenous petitioners. However, as the author shows, these litigants were not passive subjects before a foreign legal process. In spite of these hurdles, indigenous litigants formed a successful strategy over the decades. The vast majority won their cases (even if they continued to face adversity outside of the courtroom — in the back alleys, the inn rooms, or the roadways of Spain). Van Deusen’s book analyzes the forced dialogue between colonizer and colonized in the administrative heart of Europe’s first modern empire, where the plaintiffs shaped the line of inquiry. The author infers that these slaves exploited the ambiguities of indio-ness to secure legal protections for themselves and their families.

Nancy van Deusen’s study of indio-ness in the courtroom makes a substantial contribution to the ethno-historical study of slavery. More specifically, her book marks the beginning of a more ambitious perspective that pokes holes in the alleged parochialism of indigenous historical actors. One of the first studies to explore the trans-imperial construction of racial categories in the sixteenth century, Global Indios perhaps raises more questions than answers. That being said, the speculative turn in the author’s reasoning — while problematic in certain instances — also showcases the indispensable role of the imagination in re-envisioning the moral history of our own times. For this reason alone, Van Deusen’s is required reading for everyone interested in the history of racial thought.

Nancy van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Duke University Press, 2015)

Digital Teaching: Behind the Scenes – Students Serving Students

By Marla Gilliland

Jeremi Suri’s HIS 315L course is one of the newest additions to the growing list of online courses that have roots in the Liberal Arts Development Studio. Since its inception, Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services (LAITS) has employed video, audio and graphic design Student Technology Assistants (STAs) as a key part of its organizational model, which continues to be the cornerstone to cost-effective delivery of online courses as well as other digital learning projects.

STAs are involved in every part of the broadcast production; behind cameras, video signal switchers, graphics computers, stage managing, lighting, audio and tech support, according to Daniel Garza, LAITS’ Manager of Media Production Services. “Our students ensure that each class will have a consistent presentation of the expectations of the professor’s class experience, while the students working on these courses also gain invaluable practical experience.”

Video STA Bryce Seifert greatly appreciates the enthusiasm Dr. Suri brings to the course. “The class takes place at 8:00 in the morning, so (we) are there early, setting up the studio. As soon as Dr. Suri enters the room he is always ready to go, has a smile on his face, greets everyone by name and is excited about teaching history. I think this enthusiasm resonates not only with the crew, but as he teaches in front of the camera.”

Video STA A.J. Ahmad wears many hats. Ahmad acts as the floor manager for Dr. Suri’s course, where he makes sure that everything is set up and ready prior to going live at 8 a.m. and ensures that the class runs on schedule. “I (also) technical direct an Economics class, I help edit classes and complete walk-in jobs, including off-site shoots LAITS is hired to do, and I help to maintain, build out, or readjust the production studios for LAITS.” Says Ahmad about the STA position, “I came in simply wanting to help edit some classes or operate the cameras, but I’ve come away with an understanding of how to run a small, but growing, production studio. I feel like I’m part of a small TV station,” says Ahmad. “I’ve learned far more than I ever thought I would.”

Video STA Peter Northrup is the technical director for Suri’s class and also serves as camera operator, floor manager, graphics operator and editor on other courses, but his favorite title is that of self-proclaimed “Lord Vacuumer of the studio.” Northrup says he has “gained a much better understanding of a “broadcast” environment and of the importance of procedure when many people work on a project.”

“Suri makes history more enjoyable for me that than it ever was (in class), and I like history.” Northrup enjoys the team production environment at LAITS and believes this camaraderie carries over to the on-air style of Dr. Suri. His favorite moments in HIS 315L are when “Suri pokes fun at the TAs. It’s great to see the TAs’ laughter and reactions.”

Samantha Skinner, recent UT graduate and former audio STA, is currently acting as audio engineer for Dr. Suri’s live online broadcast. She handles “everything-audio”, from playlists to in-class audio stings to mixing the professor/TA banter, while making sure the students receive high quality audio for every class.

Skinner credits her time as a STA for providing her with a real world production experience. “I learned to perform multi-channel mixes in a fast-paced environment and to deliver quality work to a high volume of students. I pushed myself to learn and do my best work every day; a sentiment I believe the professors and fellow co-workers in LAITS all share.“ Samantha appreciates the enthusiasm of the HIS 315L teaching assistants and Dr. Suri. “His sincere excitement to teach is definitely infectious to the production crew, not to mention very helpful for our 7 a.m. call times.”

STAs also play a central role in the post-production process. STA Bryce Seifert is the editor for Suri’s HIS 315L video-on-demand, which means that after each live broadcast he puts together the final video for students to review. The timeframe for this turnaround is very demanding so he must work quickly and accurately to ensure that students have what they need to review for the next class or exam. He also acts as a technical director, camera operator and editor for other online courses. Seifert notes that his work on HIS 315L and others will serve him well as he pursues opportunities after graduation this year. “I have gained many hours of real-world production experience that has allowed me to better understand the technical aspects behind the video production of a live event.”

Media Manager Mike Heidenreich has recruited, trained and worked with many student assistants during his tenure with LAITS. According to Heidenreich, the students play a critical role in the online courses, because their talents are called upon during all portions of production. “Whenever we need a light adjusted, a new graphic logo created, a video edited, or a multi-channel audio recording mixed and mastered, you will likely find a student handling the job.”

But Heidenreich stresses that it is not just the work of the students that helps make LAITS successful, as he feels that the energy they bring to projects inspires the full-time staff. “We are only able to accomplish our large volume of work due to the professionalism of our student assistants. We depend on them and they consistently deliver work that far exceeds their years. Because they view each project as a new opportunity to improve their skills, working alongside them reminds us of why we do what we do and why it is so critical to deliver the best work possible.”

Dr. Suri will be teaching an on-demand version of the course in the first Summer session in order to accommodate students both in and outside of Austin. For more information about this and other upcoming UT Summer and Fall online courses, please visit http://www.laits.utexas.edu/tower/online/courses/.

Marla Gilliland is a Senior Project Manager in Liberal Arts ITS, working with LAITS’ professional and student staff, UT faculty and graduate students to assist in the delivery of courses online. In addition to having a background in systems support, service and project management, she is an educator and a parent of two college students.

All images courtesy of the author.

A New Fascist Revolution?

By Susan George Schorn

The Fascist Revolution: Toward a Theory of General Fascism, is a collection of essays written over a 35-year period and published in 1999 (the year of author George L. Mosse’s death). It offers not a comprehensive vision of fascist ideology, but a succession of views, each through a different lens: aesthetics, fascism, racism, nationalism, intellectualism, and so on. The resulting analytical kaleidoscope is particularly thought provoking to read against the current upheaval in American politics, especially the rage that has fed the Tea Party and Bundy Ranch supporters and is now buoying up the presidential campaign of populist billionaire Donald Trump.

Today’s political dialogue shares some obvious attributes with Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, such as the celebration of national identity and an embrace of violence, sacrifice, and brutality. The rhetoric of this year’s Republican primary debates has resounded with such themes. But Mosse identifies two other fundamental tenets of fascism—irrationality and revolutionary activism—that are commonly overlooked, and which have suggestive echoes in the current zeitgeist.

Tea Party protesters walk towards the United States Capitol during the Taxpayer March on Washington, September 12, 2009. Via Wikipedia.

Fascism was inherently irrational, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals, and profoundly anti-intellectual. This irrationality (which Mosse connects, in the case of German National Socialism, to Europe’s late-nineteenth-century embrace of Romanticism), was long ignored by historians as “too outré to be taken seriously.” Yet as Mosse shows, irrationality served an important function in the workings of the party and the ideology. It provided a means for followers to resolve “a very real dilemma: after 1918 the society in which they lived did not seem to function well or even to function at all.” Fascism made an idealist promise to somehow transcend the social instability of the time. The details were purposely left vague, conveniently discouraging adherents from looking too closely at the movement’s methods.

It is intriguing to consider fascism’s use of irrationality in light of modern calls to “Take back America” by processes that range from the improbable (repealing a broadly popular national healthcare policy) to the ludicrous (forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall). A sizeable percentage of America’s electorate, aware that today’s globalized economy does not function well—at least not for them—seems quite willing to suspend rationality and believe such promises. Fortunately, there is scant evidence that today’s promise-makers have either the means or the aptitude to make anything more than symbolic gestures toward fulfilling their promises.

Trump speaks at an Arizona rally in March 2016. Via wikipedia.

Fascism was also, Mosse notes, explicitly revolutionary; an activist doctrine that focused its energy on destroying the existing order and replacing it with something new (though in Germany’s case, the future would be informed by the past). In this way, fascism stood in opposition to conservatism, an arrangement that also resonates strongly with today’s headlines. Witness the consternation of today’s GOP officials, who have lost control of their nomination process and seem to no longer even understand the anger of their own base. But while twentieth-century fascists made devastating use of the revolutionary energy they generated, modern conservative politicians appear caught off guard by voters’ revolutionary zeal, their willingness to destroy institutions in order to bring about the change they perceive as vital to national survival. It is somehow comforting to realize that our politicians are markedly less competent than the fascists in this regard.

And there are other important differences between our era and that, which gave rise to European fascism. Though economic uncertainty is again a factor in our politics, the intense anxiety over “respectability” Mosse identifies as a breeding ground for fascism’s moral code is largely absent today; we are, perhaps, simply more relaxed now. The mistrust of cultural pluralism undergirding today’s pro-nationalist arguments is partly a response to demographic trends that make it all but impossible for those concerns to become mainstream. Our understanding of “nation” has shifted, becoming more diverse. And while the fascist obsession with sexuality, and control of it, has its echoes now, recent attempts to criminalize abortion, birth control, and gender non-conformity have failed at the national level and are likely to be rolled back in the states where they have found purchase. Supporters of such policies are part of a smaller, and shrinking, population.

Still, there are enough eerie similarities in Mosse’s essays to make them rewarding reading for anyone curious about the growth and spread of destructive ideologies—including those presently in circulation.

George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a Theory of General Fascism (Howard Fertig, 1999)

A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence, by John E. Mack (1976)

David Lean’s magisterial film epic, Lawrence of Arabia (1962) gave us a mythic hero struggling against impossible odds. The film’s theatrical merits—breathtaking cinematography, nuanced performances, riveting score—cemented Western audiences’ enduring interest in the title character, but offered little factual substance about the life of a compelling and controversial historical figure, and supported a lopsided view of the 20^th century Middle East. The film best serves as a gateway to understanding the real Lawrence and the legacy of British Colonialism in a still-tumultuous region.

Peter O'Toole as T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Via Wikipedia — Peter O’Toole as T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia. Via Wikipedia.

If the nearly four-hour movie is an introduction, T.E. Lawrence’s own memoir, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, is a 600-page next step. Lawrence aficionados bear the badge of completing the windswept tome with great pride: the author records labyrinthine tribal relationships and the minutiae of desert battles in its densely detailed pages to many readers’ great exhaustion. Yet Seven Pillars continues to capture the imagination of readers interested in Britain and the Middle East during World War I with its arresting poetry. Some might initially balk at the book’s bulk, but by the time Lawrence describes a night of feasting under the stars with Auda ibu Tayi and the Howeitat Bedouins, the spell has been cast. Yet, however seductive his prose and the great sweep of his narrative, Lawrence’s autobiography remains unbalanced. Lawrence himself admits a degree of unreliability. “All men dream: but not equally,” he writes, “Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their mind wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes.” As a dreamer of the day, Lawrence’s account of his own life falls far short of objectivity. His tendency to flicker between excess and asceticism foreshadows the ferocity of the historical and moral debate about his role—and Britain’s—in the Arab Revolt.

Lawrence was an eccentric, divisive figure during his life, and he remains divisive more than eighty years after his death. In July of 1915, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, initiated a correspondence with Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, on the subject of lands under Ottoman administration. McMahon and his counterparts in London saw growing Arab nationalism within the Ottoman empire as a potentially useful wartime tool. Cultivating Arab national aspirations would undermine Ottoman sovereignty, particularly desirable for Britain at the beginning of World War I. The McMahon-Hussein correspondence suggested to the Sharif that Britain would support an Arab kingdom under the Sharif’s suzerainty, carved out from Ottoman lands—including Jerusalem and the Holy Lands. Many scholars point to the correspondence as impetus for the Revolt, and something Lawrence vocally encouraged. When the later Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Letter came to light, indicating British colonial aspirations and promises to create a Jewish homeland in the same parcel of land, McMahon’s commitments to Arab self-rule suddenly rang hollow. The question of how much Lawrence knew about McMahon’s apparent duplicity—and of course the subject of Arab or Israeli control of the area—remains bitterly contentious.

Those seeking a more balanced assessment of Lawrence would do well to turn to a third source: John Mack’s psychological biography of Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder. Mack’s Pulitzer Prize winning volume sharpens the reality of Lawrence as an individual in history and thus casts a clearer distinction between man and myth. For example, in Seven Pillars, the Damascus Campaign of 1916-1918 quietly blooms into an eternity; Mack neatly folds those desert months back into the context of Lawrence’s life, devoting roughly 50 out of 600 pages to the same two years. A historicized and humanized Lawrence distills for the reader the extraordinary leadership qualities and the fortuitous convergence of circumstance that enabled him to crest, alongside his guerillas, the wave of the Arab Revolt. The mythological Lawrence, now discernible in contrast, tells the reader much about the way that wave broke, contextualizing both the subsequent criticism and adulation of Lawrence. Mack’s work stands as a sensitive, fully contextualized portrait of an historical figure, with family secrets, literary predilections, and intensely emotional qualities that both malformed him and made him “of a higher quality.” A Prince of Our Disorder grounds and enriches Seven Pillars and Lawrence of Arabia. It reminds the reader of Lawrence’s limitations.

“The wash of that wave,” writes Lawrence of the Arab Revolt, “…will provide the matter of the following wave, when in the fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more.” Lawrence’s continuing attraction lies in what Mack describes as the man’s tendency to offer “his extraordinary abilities, his essential self, and even his conflicts to others for them to use according to their own need.” The present conflicts of the Middle East can appear hopelessly intractable, with many countries locked in bloody conflict or bound to an unjust status quo. Moments of change are moments of hope. So Lawrence survives, as we watch for another wave.

Mack, John E. A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976).

Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London: Penguin, Doubleday, 1925).

Diasporic Charity and Salonica’s Jewish Community after the Fire of 1917

By Joseph Leidy

The minutes of a 1922 meeting of the Council of the Jewish Community of Salonica, today’s Thessaloniki in Greece, recorded a cordial but contentious discussion. Two guests joined the councilmen: Frank Rosenblatt and Walter Montesor, both representatives of the Joint Distribution Committee, an American Jewish charity established to provide relief for Jewish victims of the First World War. Two days earlier, the Council had submitted a report to the JDC representatives requesting five loans for different charitable projects totaling to just under a half million dollars. Rosenblatt and Montesor were to examine these proposals before forwarding their recommendations to the organization’s authorities. That thousands of Jewish families in Salonica were in great need was clear. Nonetheless, whether and how the JDC should intervene remained uncertain.

Jewish Family in Salonika in 1917. Via Wikipedia.

A massive fire had rampaged through the city in August of 1917, destroying the Jewish quarter and leaving tens of thousands homeless. Were these “fire-sufferers” also “war sufferers,” the target recipients of JDC relief? The Chief Rabbi of Salonica had earlier stressed to Rosenblatt that “the calamity which befell the Jewish Community in 1917 was a direct result of the war,” even though Salonica had long suffered from catastrophic fires. In the meeting, Rosenblatt emphasized that the JDC was “prepared to render aid to the war orphans in the true sense of the word, and not those orphans whose fathers died during the course of the war.” The war did not directly cause the fire, and therefore the JDC representatives seemed to have felt that direct relief should be limited.

The Great Fire of Thessaloniki in 1917. Via Wikipedia.

In 1921, however, the JDC had begun to focus on reconstruction rather than direct relief, particularly devoting themselves to the tasks of increasing employment opportunities and improving sanitary conditions. Wartime restrictions on movement to and from Salonica’s port had hindered various efforts to reconstruct after the fire. Thus loan requests for reconstruction projects in Salonica, as opposed to direct relief, better fit the JDC’s mission to help Jewish communities’ general post-war recovery. Along these lines, the Council in Salonica requested funding to re-build trade schools destroyed by the fire. They also proposed the construction a new communal living quarter to relieve congestion and disease in neighborhoods of Jewish “fire-sufferers.” In both cases, the loan requests appealed to their American visitors’ social visions of enlightened charity by emphasizing economic self-reliance and proper urban hygiene. Rosenblatt and Montesor, with some minor caveats, responded positively during the meeting and indicated their willingness to recommend the loans to their superiors.

Low-lying districts, where a majority of Jews lived, were seriously affected by the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917. Via Wikipedia.

Despite these points of harmony, Rosenblatt declared that “there must have been an error in translation” with regard to one item on the evening’s agenda: a $300,000 loan for “the construction of profit yielding buildings for the Community, the revenues from which will help to increase the resources of the communal institutions.” The fire had wiped out all but a handful of previously lucrative communal properties. Rent from these properties, accumulated under Ottoman structures of communal ownership, had traditionally financed the bulk of Jewish medical, educational, cultural, and charitable organizations in the city. The Greek government’s plan to appropriate and re-design Salonica’s urban center after the fire prevented the full recovery of these assets. The community had, however, been able to purchase new plots of land at some distance from the port and city center, relatively cheap due to their proximity to malarial swamps. This loan would bankroll profitable construction on these and other plots.

Rosenblatt was skeptical. The following conversation between Rosenblatt and two council members reveals the misunderstanding at work:

Mr. Rosenblatt The principal aim of the Joint Distribution Committee is to render economic help to those communities which have suffered directly from the war […]

Mr. Cazes If the community which has suffered through the war is not helped, how will it in turn be able to help its poor people? Have not all its institutions been created to help these same people?

Mr. Benveniste In asking for this money we have the aim in view of helping our institutions who already own their profit yielding buildings, but which have disappeared on account of the war.

Mr. Rosenblatt Our desire is to help the community to rehabilitate its population, but you ask to be helped in order that you can rehabilitate the community itself in the truest sense of the world. This is quite different from our point of view.

Rosenblatt saw the JDC’s duty as being towards the individuals and families of a population. The community “in the truest sense of the world,” its legal and political governing institution, was the responsibility of its members to maintain, its wealthy ones in particular. Yet the Council’s report to Rosenblatt had already noted that “most of those who formed the rich class of Jews have emigrated, either after the fire of 1917 or on account of the economic conditions in the city.” The Council, representing the remaining Jewish elite, could not solicit enough voluntary donations during such tough times. Instead, they hoped the JDC would subsidize “profit yielding buildings” constructed on cheap land to rescue the viability of communal institutions.

These meeting minutes depict Salonica’s Jewish community at a critical juncture in its incorporation into the Greek nation-state, which annexed the city from the Ottoman Empire in 1912. The document highlights the environmental forces and understandings of nature that shaped the city’s Jewish communal life and its interactions with an American Jewish charity in the interwar period. Fire decimated much of the property that formerly sustained the organs of the community; disease then shaped the spatial arrangement of the Jewish population throughout the city by making cheap plots of land available for purchase and re-settlement of its poor. The Jewish Council sought the JDC’s help in rebuilding communal self-sufficiency on their own terms, but the JDC’s concern for sanitary conditions and their focus on combat as opposed to natural damage influenced what kinds of charitable work they would sponsor in Salonica. For Salonica’s Jews, then, the transition from Ottoman communal autonomy to Greek national citizenship was not only a question of changing identities, but also of changing relationships between local and transnational societies and the environment.

JDC Archives, Record of the New York Office of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1921 – 1932, Folder # 209: “Minutes of the Meeting […],” 7 Sep 1922, “Report on the Needs of the Jewish Community […],” 8 Sep 1922, “Minutes of the Meeting […],” 9 Sep 1922, “Letter from Dr. Frank F. Rosenblatt to European Executive Council of the J.D.C. Vienna, Subject: Report on Saloniki,” 26 Sep 1922.

Historical Perspectives on Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)

By Emily Whalen

“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” Lawrence Walsh growls to Jake Gittes in the final moments of Chinatown, Roman Polanski’s iconic film noir about corruption and betrayal in Los Angeles. Walsh’s now-classic line reflects Jake’s utter disenchantment by the end of the film—he has has lost faith in the status quo, in honor, and even in love by the time he winds up in the lawless Chinese part of town. It’s a sentiment echoed again and again in Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Throughout the movie, through explosions and dust and sweat, John Krasinski’s Jack Silva hears by way of explanation: “It’s Benghazi.” The message couldn’t be clearer: the rules don’t matter here.

Reactions to Michael Bay’s latest venture have so far cropped up along predictable lines. Some, looking to the film’s scrupulously non-political focus and standout performances by Krasinski and James Badge Dale, applaud the comparatively restrained, fact-driven story. Others challenge the film’s simplistic take on a complex geopolitical event, lacking historical context and rife with cultural assumptions. Michael Bay isn’t an auteur and nuance isn’t his strength—nor is it what most of his audience wants from a movie. But considering the tidal shifts in our current culture over war, over government, and over America’s place in the world, 13 Hours offers a provocative starting point for Bay’s applauders and scoffers to talk across the aisle.

The narrative follows a group of six ex-military contractors, hired to run security for a CIA annex in bullet-pocked Benghazi in 2012. Jack joins Dale’s Tyrone “Rone” Woods, on “one last job” because he needs the money—the economy at home is faltering. The contractors comprising the Global Response Staff (GRS) sweat away in a grubby CIA compound. The compound abuts “Zombieland,” the eerie village slaughter yard that seems to enjoy an abundance of ethereal breezes. Jack, Rone, and their crew of uniformly tall, rugged, and muscular contractors immediately clash with the pudgy CIA Station Chief, who sneers metaphorically and literally at the hired protection any chance he gets. This is one of the film’s major leitmotifs: the effete, bloated bureaucrat gets into the way of the seasoned, decisive GRS team at every turn of the plot, preventing them at best from doing good, at worst from doing their jobs.

Screenshot from 13 Hours.

When news of Ambassador Chris Stephens’s visit to Benghazi comes, the GRS team stops by the State Department’s diplomatic outpost, a well-appointed pleasure garden compared to Zombieland, to offer the Diplomatic Security (DS) team a gratis security assessment. The outpost is hopelessly vulnerable, another indication of bureaucratic—and departmental—incompetence. DS depends on a deeply unreliable local militia, the February 17th Martyrs’ Brigade, for the majority of their protection. Jack and his fellow mercenaries make a congenial offer to help in case a crisis crops up during the visit. Of course, a crisis develops.

The climax of the film comes on September 11, 2012. Crowds of armed, organized militants storm the diplomatic outpost, and the DS team issues a desperate call to the GRS guys: “If you guys don’t come now, we are going to fucking die.” Geared up and ready, the GRS team turns to the CIA Station Chief for an official go-ahead. But, concerned about chain of command and protecting his own agents, the Chief instead issues a “stand down” order to the GRS team. A tense twenty minutes passes. Finally, Rone bests the Chief in a contest of will, and the heavily armored contractors swing into action. Piling tragedy upon insult, the Chief’s delay means the GRS team loses the opportunity to save the life of Ambassador Chris Stephens, who perishes from smoke inhalation after the attacking militants and the Mediterranean wind turn the outpost into a hellish inferno.

Survivors of the real Benghazi GRS team—who collaborated with Bay’s scriptwriters—have been vocal with journalists like David Kirkpatrick about the “stand down” order. The film suggests the order virtually eliminated any chance of saving Stephens from an avoidable death. The film abstains from directly criticizing initial, inaccurate State Department and White House reports of the attack on Benghazi, which called the attack a spontaneous act of riot violence. It also mercifully avoids the political morass of Secretary Clinton’s email servers. The movie does, however, contradict 2014 reports to the House Armed Services Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, which quite clearly state that the CIA issued no such “stand down” order. The CIA itself has denied that the chief, who is still undercover, prevented the GRS team from rescuing their DS counterparts. It’s difficult for a secret agency to respond to such a public lashing, and viewers would do well to consider the order less a fact than an illustration of endemic problems in the way American government departments interact in foreign countries. Lack of coordination and competition for legitimacy, especially in conflict zones, carry real dangers.

Screen shot from 13 Hours.

The world of Benghazi is a bewildering, hostile world. Bay’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour long film effectively conjures up the fatigue and bafflement with which most Americans regard the Middle East. Friends look like—and can quickly become—dangerous foes. By its end, the viewer, like Silva and his comrades, longs for treehouses, neat lawns, and McDonald’s drive-throughs. More sensitive viewers might decry the movie’s failure to offer real context for the embassy attack, or to portray ordinary Libyans as more than potentially malevolent scenery in a movie about Americans in peril. Gaddafi ruled Libya with an iron fist for 34 years – yet the failures of the revolution look through Bay’s lens like moral failures of a people unready for self-rule. The film opens with a shaky montage depicting Gaddafi’s murder, but it delves no deeper into decades of Libyan history that might help a viewer understand why the 17 Feb Brigade melted away from the embassy doors on September 11, 2012.

Conscientious viewers might consider why the movie doesn’t move beyond standard tropes about the Middle East. Why do audiences still accept Arabs in Adidas sweatpants and battered AK-47s as an existential threat to five skilled warriors in head to toe body armor? Critics will decry the movie’s hyper masculine, anti-intellectual bent, but perhaps it is more useful to question how Jack, Rone, and their muscular friends became so cynical and battle-ready in the first place. The GRS and DS teams face a bleak and bloody night virtually alone: the contractors and agents rail against their isolation in between bouts of heavy shelling. In the end, the GRS team—and the audience—never receive a satisfactory explanation for the mighty American military’s absence. What policies and decisions placed the GRS team in Zombieland, beyond the protective reach of American military power?

It’s easy to dismiss 13 Hours as a superficial tribute to the kind of aggressive nationalism that undermines American credibility in the world. It’s also easy to praise the film’s veneration of military contractors who risked their lives and their careers to do the right thing. But discussion of 13 Hours should not stop there—it captures a moment in American culture, warts and all, that is worth interrogating from both sides of the aisle.

The Sword and the Camera: Becoming ISIS

By Yoav Di-Capua

In 2013 Belgian musician Paul Van Haver (AKA Stromae) released a powerful music video called Papaoutai (Where Are You Dad?), which by now has been seen more than 300,000,000 times on You Tube alone. The lyrics go:

Where is your dad?
Tell me where is your dad?
Without even having to talk to him
He knows it’s not going well

Oh my dear father
Tell me where are you hiding?
I must’ve counted my fingers at least a thousand times

Where are you dad?

Stromae has nothing to do with ISIS or with Muslim migrant communities in European suburban ghettoes. He is originally from Rwanda and having lost his father to the genocide wrote a painful song about the absence of the father. However, the “death of the father” and the otherwise absence of living fathers who are psychologically broken is such a common reality in migrant communities that it immediately captured the attention of youngsters whose parents were struggling to make a positive impact on their lives. Capturing the pain associated with the dysfunctional family unit, the humiliation of the father-figure and the absence of positive role models of authority, Stromae unintentionally accounted for the social reality that pushes migrant kids to the hands of ISIS and fuel their desire for violent revenge.

When it comes to Islamic fundamentalism and inter-Arab politics, the influential Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, has seen it all. Since the 1980s he carefully documented the slow metamorphosis of a young Arab generation that came to believe that it had nothing to lose at home and everything to gain from a festival of death and glory in the distant mountains of Afghanistan. They had their rationale, of course, but as Atwan concluded already back then, rationality was not the name of the new game. Yes, along the way, there was the famous 1996 interview with Ussama bin Laden when, after a night in a cave with the tall man, and two years before anybody in America cared to know what al-Qaida was, he realized that much more was to come. He kept with it ever since.

But the strength of Atwan’s reporting is not predicated on his remarkable ability to get a high-profile interview. It’s his intimate attention to the rank and file members of the fundamentalist organizations. The small stories, the casual chit-chat with an ISIS fighter on transit from Europe to Syria and Iraq, the arcane Arabic language manuals that call for a new type of shock and awe violence, his ear for gossip and inside information and, ultimately, the ability to reconfigure all of this seemingly unrelated data into a more or less coherent picture. His Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate is not a perfect book. It was brought to the market in haste and suffers from dubious editorial decisions, gaps in narrative, redundant political pontification, and bad copy editing. Yet, if you are willing to forgive all of these, you will be treated to a fascinating tour of ISIS’s crooked world.

Ces6JEgWEAAncXX — Cover of recent issue of Charlie Hebdo featuring Stromae’s video “Where Are You Dad?”

The story of ISIS calls for a long view. The history of the organization, its genocidal culture, its obsession with sexual violence, and its overall rise to prominence makes absolutely no sense without considering the traumatic history of Iraq since the early 1980s. A sustained legacy of state torture, daily violence, international sanctions, starvation, and profound existential insecurity left thousands of Iraqis dead and millions in a state of loss and constant fear. Numbers such as 1.7 million Iraqi dead, among them 500,000 children during the Western sanctions of 1990s alone, cannot even begin to account for the horrors of this place. Under Sadam Hussein’s reign of terror, families were broken up and almost every citizen experienced some level of abuse and exposure to physical or psychological violence. Compounding the impact of the horrendous Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), Iraq’s population was on the verge of total collapse. This dramatic situation reached its apex in the wake of the 2003 American invasion. In between these two extremes of history, Sadam’s accession to power and the American invasion that removed him, one can find the circumstances that are responsible for the pathology of ISIS.

The year of the US invasion, 2003, was especially destructive. The sudden disappearance of an oppressive and centralized bureaucratic and military apparatus supported by Sunni tribes left thousands of able and now embittered men in the cold. More than 50,000 of them automatically joined a Sunni-oriented insurgency against the Americans and what seemed to be their Shi`i allies. The so-called “surge” of 2007 largely demolished this front. With its affiliate members dead, incarcerated or scattered, a new cycle of violence was ready to begin and a host of al-Qaida compatible organizations were there to exploit the mayhem. They promised revenge, redemption, and rebirth through extreme violence and radical self-fashioning. They could reason with both tribes and former regime members. They spoke the language of Sunni triumphalism and promised to address the unjust politics of Iraq and the victimization of its once powerful political majority. ISIS is of this environment and, given the weakness of the Iraqi state, its rise into a significant force is neither surprising nor particularly new. It’s simply a continuation of Iraq’s impossible reality by different means.

And the means do matter. Tracing the story of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi can tell us why. In 1989 al-Zarqawi left his hometown in Jordan and joined al-Qaida in Afghanistan. The prospects of organized Jihad in Jordan were always grim given this country’s efficient security services. After 9/11 when the Americans decimated al-Qaida’s Afghan operations, al-Zarqawi and a few hundred warriors slowly made their way westward through the mountains, rivers, and plains of Afghanistan and Iran toward the new opportunity that Iraq had to offer. Though he endured prison and abuse in Iran, al-Zarqawi did eventually make it to Iraq where, just as in Afghanistan, he set up a Jihadi training camp, forged relationships with Sunni tribal leaders, and joined the anti-American insurgency as an al-Qaida affiliate. So far there was nothing unique about this trajectory.

But al-Zarqawi was not in Iraq in order to establish another mainstream front. He was there to make a bigger impact. And so, during the particularly bloody year of 2005-6 al-Zarqawi branded a signature style of violence that was so gruesome and so counter-intuitive that it shocked even his allies in al-Qaida, who dismissed him from their ranks. Under his leadership, violence turned death into finely produced media spectacles for mass consumption. Captured on video and edited with a new kind of Jihadi sound-track, or nashid, ritualistic beheadings, mass-suicide bombing against innocent shi`is, and multiple other acts including the unbelievable bombing of a Palestinian wedding in Jordan, became hip-clips for mass consumption. Al-Zarqawi was the first to conscript female suicide bombers, the first to marry Jihad with snuff culture and the first to initiate a violent modus operandi that had absolutely no operational logic behind it. Confusing the means and the ends, violence for its own sake perpetuated itself with no need for justification, no concrete plan, and no end in sight. In 2006 an American drone finally got al-Zarqawi. The man died on the spot but, in a land of trauma, his legacy was destined to have a life of its own.

As Atwan shows, at about the same time, this new radical practice of violence found its theological justification in the form of two new Jihadi texts, The Management of Savagery (2004) and The Global Islamic Resistance Call (2004). Both texts were a response to the bravado of America’s Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq. These counter-texts proposed a simple and cheap strategy to horrify the West without the need for any sophisticated weapons. A sword, a camera and a You Tube account would suffice. In their long mediation on the subject, both authors used an ad-hoc manufactured Islamic jargon that provided the false impression of Islamic authenticity, high-mindedness, and scholarly legitimacy thus hiding the made-up and superficial nature of this form of Jihad. Both texts laid out a vision of an apocalyptic violence, after which peace would rule the lands captured by the Islamists. Time and again, mainstream jurists and key religious figures who vehemently oppose such manipulation of the religious heritage proved too weak or slow to react effectively. It is obvious that public religion was in crisis and that these developments constituted a revolution within Islam more than a revolution of Islam against an outside force. Indeed, most victims of the “new violence” were Muslims themselves.

Al-Zarqawi’s legacy and the proliferation of savagery for its own sake was amplified and systematized by the 2006 establishment of an umbrella organization of several smaller Islamic insurgency groups under the banner of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). In the wake of the Surge, the Sunnis who used to run the civic and military institutions of the Iraqi state as well as a collation of Sunni tribes felt increasingly marginalized and under attack by the majority Shi`i leadership and its tight control of the state’s security services. The leaders of this coalition, almost without exception, had experienced abuse, incarceration, and torture, some of it at the hands of the Americans. To add insult to injury, in the aftermath of the Surge, the Iraq’s Shi`i President, Nuri al-Maliki, decided to disassemble the 54,000 strong-man Sunni militia that the Americans put together in order to fight the Sunni-Islamist insurgency. This disastrous move betrayed the sectarian agenda of those ruling Iraq thus automatically providing ISI with a major infusion of personnel and material. ISI was now ready to take on the Sunni areas of Iraq. The 2011 American withdrawal from Iraq and the beginning of the civil war in Syria provided a rare opportunity to connect the two fronts and envision a historic caliphate.

In the annals of the region, the border that separated Iraq from Syria was always seen as an artificial imposition of French and British colonialism. Over the decades there were several attempts to undo such borders. ISI had an opportunity to do something about it that was not only of huge symbolic value but also operationally smart. Beginning in the summer of 2013, they expanded inside Iraq and westward toward Syria where they absorbed and coerced several Islamic oppositional groups to join them or face the choice of annihilation. This gang politics made their Syrian operation successful. A capital was established in Syria’s provincial center of Raqqa and the letter “S” was added to its acronym. The ISI became ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) as the infrastructure of two broken states was up for grabs. In a matter of months ISIS was in control of banks, hospitals, police stations, military installations, schools, power plants, dams, canals, bridges, oil fields, refineries and even a chemical weapon program to name a few of their most famous spoils. The amount of military material that they now owned made them a considerable force to reckon with, more mobile, agile, and vicious than the American-trained Iraqi forces who shamefully retreated at the outset of any significant engagement.

Equipped with state infrastructure and the euphoria of expansion, the idea of the Islamic state as a purist religious community and alternative to the failed ethnic nation-state, gained traction. They called it the caliphate, thus reviving an institution that was abolished by the Turkish government in 1924 and left the Islamic world without a symbol of sovereignty. They also found a caliph: a mediocre religious scholar, a former US prisoner, a brilliant organizer, and a charismatic leader. In July 2014, Ibrahim Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was sworn in as the new Caliph in the newly captured city of Mosul. He now presided over a huge organization that had strong inter-tribal backing as its backbone, a skeleton of a state, and a murderous fighting machine.

Though Atwan does not dwell on the internal organization of the Islamic State, recently captured ISIS documents reveal that an exceptional amount of energy is invested in streamlining the daily operation of the state. These include highly detailed and specific procedures for running hospitals, food distribution networks, and newly established education, justice and fiscal systems. Multiple social policies that aim to facilitate the marriage of ISIS members and the well being of their young families were put to work as well. Establishing a utopian community that is predicated on a metaphysical escape from the present, or a “return” to the unadulterated grandeur of classical Islam in the seventh century, is a powerful form of mass dissociation. It was also an effective tool of recruitment. ISIS created a magical community of teenagers that is the subject of generous divine benevolence, in which everybody is a “brother” and a “sister.” In a decades-long social environment of broken families and compromised father figures, ISIS is functioning as an alternative family that bestows on its members a false sense of authenticity, historical continuity, a measure of sovereignty, self-reliance and, most importantly, faux dignity and self-worth. In offering such an ephemeral identity, it delivers much of what post-colonial Arab societies failed to deliver. And it does so not only for the inhabitants of the Middle East but also for Europeans.

So powerful is the allure of this new community that second and third-generation Muslims in Europe, whose North African parents were destroyed by colonialism, immigration, poverty, and cultural marginalization, flocked to its ranks. Thirsty for acknowledgment, belonging, action, and a sense of control over their destiny, French, Belgium and British Muslims, to name a few, joined ISIS by the thousands. Indeed, the phenomenon of ISIS cannot be understood without delving into the parallel ghetto experience of many Muslim communities in Europe. Six decades after it officially ended, the residues of European colonialism are still at play. Atwan tells the story of several key activists and Jihad-tourists, one of whom is an American, who left their loving families behind and took managerial positions in the caliphate. The overwhelming majority who had no special skill to offer besides their bare life, were enlisted as Jihadists.

As the book’s subtitle suggests, a major theme that sets ISIS apart from the analog and insulated leadership of al-Qaida, is the instantaneous electronic nature of this so-called cyber caliphate. In contrast with al-Qaida and similar 20^th century organizations, ISIS has a sophisticated media and digital arm that generates twitter storms, maintains an ongoing presence in chat-rooms, and uses a variety of coded means to communicate with its young audience outside Iraq and Syria. Employing programmers and code specialists, ISIS generates hundreds of hacking attacks against a long list of personal and institutional enemies, most of which are in Europe. A short distance, Atwan skillfully shows, separated Junaid Hussein, the British hacker of former British premier Tony Blair’s personal email account, from enlisting in ISIS as chief technological officer. It’s a small world.

Above all, ISIS in a community of organized violence, much of which takes place under the influence of the amphetamine Captagon, which is not new to the region and is cheap and easy to manufacture. Besides the systematic and exhibitionist destruction of universal heritage from Ancient Nineveh to Roman Palmira, ISIS’s most ubiquitous mode of operation is rape. Sexual violence is a feature of many wars. Remember, for example, the Soviet takeover of Berlin in WW II and its aftermath. Yet, in contrast with armies that commit such human rights violations separate from their military mission, ISIS’ obsession with sex is constitutive to its core mission. War and rape, rape and war collapse into each other to the degree that the military mission and the theologically justified spoils of war (unbridled access to women), become one and the same. The ownership of slave girls and their repeated rape is encouraged, desired, and legally justified. The promise of unrestrained sex is a further tool of recruitment.

Taken as a whole, Atwan’s ISIS differs from the portrait drawn by most Western writers. Whereas most foreign observers approach ISIS through the prism of Islamic fundamentalism and see religion as its main element, for Atwan ISIS is nothing but a gang whose gang culture is superficially justified by resorting to a distorted form of Islam. It’s a fundamental difference that allows the Palestinian journalist to take account of the broken history and severe circumstances that made the theater of ISIS possible while seeing in religion a mere prop rather than a the play’s script. Whether one agrees with this take on ISIS or not, one thing is clear. Though ISIS’ days as a unified political and military machine might be numbered, the fallout from its inevitable collapse is going to be prolonged, global and violent.

Abdel Bari Atwan, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate (University of California Press, 2015)

Charlie Hebdo image: here
All other images: Public Domain

Digital Teaching: Worth Getting Out of Bed For

Every year thousands of students take introductory courses in U.S. History at UT Austin. This spring Prof Jeremi Suri is experimenting with an online version of the U.S. History since 1865 survey course. He and his students will blog about the experience of digital teaching for readers of Not Even Past.

By Asаad Lutfi

It’s not easy to wake up at eight in the morning especially with a cozy blanket over you and a comfy pillow under your head – I’m sure we all put up quite a fight. What astonishes me every time I wake up for my history class with Dr. Suri, is that unlike my previous morning classes, the web based class promotes interaction at a time when only birds can be heard chirping.

Having lived the greater part of my life getting spoiled in private schools in Pakistan, I have had the privilege of experiencing a variety of teaching and learning methods. The subcontinent, India and Pakistan, having been under the British rule for hundreds of years, is unfortunately still very dependent on the British when it comes to education. Though at the grassroots we are forming our own curriculum, higher education is still totally dependent on British Educational Boards. Pakistani education is characterized by private tutoring and personalized attention leading to a system of teacher-dependent learning. I came to America two years ago and I still have a lot to learn before I get accustomed to the teacher-independent learning system, as I will call it, that is prevalent in universities here.

One may argue for and against both, but what amuses me as I wake up every morning for my history class, is this new form of online education that never fails to captivate me. We are fortunate enough to be part of a generation that has seen the rise of technology that has transformed the world within the past 20 years. Not only do we not use paper maps anymore, we have gone so far as to replace human interaction with text and emails. But can we go far enough to say that online classes will revolutionize the learning experience by providing instant, low cost education designed for convenience? Attending a class in bed is something we would all love to do but what about the distractions at home? Do we actually learn as much as when we go to class? YES.

The class chat between the students and the teaching assistants leads to many fruitful discussions that are uncommon in a normal class setting. Not only that, it also helps people who are intimidated by the thought of speaking out in front of 300 other students. I believe that asking questions is the key to learning. The online class platform not only promotes discussion between the students, it also allows the teaching assistants and the teacher to have a better idea of the mentality and direction the students are heading.

The self-based learning system not only captivates its audience, it also promotes independent learning and research. Being only a click away, students can look up any event and topic they want to learn about within minutes without the fear of the professor’s disapproval. My former history teacher did not let us use any electronic devices in class. In contrast, the online platform, in my experience, promotes web surfing and research. This makes the online class a whole new experience for me. It alters my learning strategies and makes me focus on something I would like to do much more than I do in my classes — research.

I think the online learning platform can help raise the literacy rates and promote education through online means in third world countries like Pakistan. I would also note that, it could be the key to promoting learning for girls in Pakistan who are from families that are against sending their daughters to school. I believe that with affordable electronic devices or even a library that lends out laptops or tablets in the rural areas of Pakistan, we can solve the huge problem of education for women in the rural areas of Pakistan. I think a more educated Pakistan along with other third world countries would resolve a lot of broader problems.

It is certainly a big step to move away from the classroom but with the online classes at our disposal, I think it is about time that we should acknowledge the beginning of a new era of education and give it a try.

Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, by David Milne (2015)

By Mark Battjes

With the 2016 presidential campaign in full swing, voters might wonder where the varied, and conflicting, foreign policy ideas advanced by the candidates originate. David Milne’s excellent new book offers a great place to begin. Milne surveys the history of U.S. foreign policy from the turn of the twentieth century to Barack Obama’s presidency and considers how ideas conceived at distinct historical moments influenced, and continue to influence, America’s interaction with the world.

Historians who attempt such weighty and wide-ranging surveys often produce ponderously argued works composed with tedious prose. Fortunately for interested readers, Milne avoids this trap. He presents his subject through nine linked biographical sketches of thinkers, journalists, policymakers, and presidents. He introduces readers to lesser-known figures, like historian and political scientist Charles Beard, and reacquaints them with familiar faces, such as Woodrow Wilson, George Kennan, and Henry Kissinger.

Each of Milne’s portraits provides enough detail about the life, work, and contribution of each person to pique and sustain the interest of the reader without succumbing to the desire to deliver a cradle-to-grave biography. Although Milne crafts each sketch as a self-contained chapter that can be read on its own, he does not so confine the people he profiles. They pop-up in other chapters to support or confront the other personalities and the ideas they advance. By linking the biographies in this way, Milne creates the illusion of a continuous narrative and reinforces his assertion that the ideas he presents retained relevance beyond their emergence.

Milne also offers readers a new way to think about U.S. foreign policy. Traditional analyses by historians or political scientists generally seek to locate U.S. policymakers along a realist-idealist spectrum. In such analyses, Kissinger becomes the realist par excellence while Wilson anchors the idealist end of the spectrum. Milne challenges the usefulness of such characterizations and offers instead an evaluation of each figure’s place along an artist-scientist axis. Although the book would benefit from a more explicit description of exactly what the author believes constitutes an artist or scientist, Milne does suggest a central difference between the two. The artists tend to view the world as chaotic and resistant to large-scale efforts to order it; the scientists believe that theories applied to a patterned world enable the United States to “make” the world for its benefit, as the book’s title hints.

Henry Kissinger and Chairman Mao, with Zhou Enlai behind them in Beijing, early 70s. Via Wikipedia.

Henry Kissinger and Chairman Mao, with Zhou Enlai behind them in Beijing, in the early 1970s. Via Wikipedia.

Other than George Kennan and his successor as director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, Paul Nitze, Milne deliberately avoids describing the figures as artist or scientist in the chapter devoted to them. Moreover, he does not belabor the artist-scientist dichotomy in the body of the book. Instead, he practices a deliberate ambiguity that provides readers the space and time to draw their own conclusions. Only by looking back to the introduction or forward to the epilogue will readers know precisely where Milne locates each person on the spectrum. Milne’s light argumentation contributes to the book’s readability.

April 11, 2015 “The culmination of years of talks resulted in this handshake between the President and Cuban President Raúl Castro during the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama.” (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza). Via Wikipedia.

Milne treats each of his subjects with considerable deference and offers nuanced judgments of their contributions. This may put off some readers who would like a full-throated excoriation of Paul Wolfowitz or an impassioned defense of President Obama, the subjects of Milne’s final two chapters. Yet readers should embrace Milne’s approach because it proceeds from the premise that understanding how politicians and policymakers understand the way the world works can help voters understand how they will practice diplomacy and employ U.S. military power. Is Hillary Clinton a scientist or an artist? What about Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz? David Milne does not answer these questions, but he gives his readers a means to do so for themselves.

David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (Macmillan, 2015)

You may also like our collection of articles on Presidents Past.

Digital Teaching: From the Other Side of the Screen: A Student’s View Part II

By Ashlie Martinez

I enrolled in Professor Suri’s online history class because it fit nicely into my schedule. I was expecting something similar to the last two online classes I had taken which, though they required some amount of work, did not really require much effort overall to maintain a good grade in. Professor Suri’s online history class is definitely not your run of the mill online class. Of the three online classes I have taken thus far at UT, it is by far the most educational, rigorous, and the one that most closely resembles traditional courses at UT in terms of workload and expectations.

After attending Professor Suri’s online class for half a semester, I’ve come to realize that the factors that determine the quality of online classes are very similar to the factors that determine the quality of traditional classes. It is still definitely the case that a student will get as much out of the class as they are willing to put in. However, it is also true that the quality of the class is highly dependent upon the amount of effort that the professor is willing to put into the course (I do not mean to imply that professors do not put effort into teaching, only that some professors seem to put more time into making engaging lectures and helping students than others). Despite the early hour, Professor Suri’s energetic and humorous lectures coupled with high expectations make this a fun and interesting class to attend. Professor Suri’s humor often helps keep my attention and helps me remember points he discusses. For example, while explaining some of the causes of WWI, I remember him commanding everyone to point to Austria-Hungary on a World War I map of Europe despite the fact that he can’t see most of his students during lecture. Professor Suri’s higher expectations sometimes manifest themselves in the images he puts up during lecture. The professor asks the class to look at and comment on the image in the class chat. For me, this is a great exercise because it allows me to give my thoughts on the image in a fashion that the professor will notice but still allows me to see what other people think. Understanding history requires people to think about and incorporate multiple views of an event into their conclusions. The class chat is the perfect place to start discussions, exchange views, and develop a better understanding and broadened perspective about topics.

For me, taking an online class also has the advantage of allowing me to attend from anywhere that I have an internet connection. This is great because it means that I can schedule back to back classes without having to worry about running across campus in order to reach my next class in time (my first semester at UT taught me to pay closer attention to class locations when scheduling back to back classes). Furthermore, being able to attend class from almost anywhere means that I can arrange my workspace how I want. I’ve had several large classes in lecture halls with writing desks about half the height of the notebook I was taking notes in. In light of those experiences, having the ability to choose where I work is definitely a plus. Though my workspace setup is generally fairly simple, a laptop with headphones, a notebook, and a cup of tea, having the ability to pick a table that is big enough to comfortably fit everything is an amazing benefit of taking online classes.

Online classes are definitely becoming more the norm than the exception. However, I think the effectiveness of online classes varies a lot by discipline. As a computer science major, I have taken a lot of classes that are quite technical. In some of the classes I have taken the professor has covered the board many times over with diagrams representing data structures in a program or system. Though online classes may not be as effective in a situation where diagrams are used to explain relationships between data, they are certainly a good medium of communication for classes like the one Professor Suri is teaching. I think online classes with expectations similar to that of Professor Suri’s will have a set place in the future and will help more students access courses that not only count towards graduation requirements but also actually teach them something meaningful.

Ashlie Martinez is a third-year double major in the Turing Scholars Honors Computer Science and Electrical Engineering programs. She was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico where her family still lives. She has a wide range of interests including pottery, reading, soccer, and origami. In the future she plans to work in industry but is interested in volunteering to teach people about computers and programming.

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