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Stalin’s Genocides by Norman Naimark (2011)

by Travis Gray

Stalin’s Genocides provides an in-depth analysis of the horrendous atrocities — forced deportations, collectivization, the Ukrainian famine, and the Great Terror — perpetrated by Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical regime. Norman Naimark argues that these crimes should be considered genocide and that Joseph Stalin should therefore be labeled a “genocidaire.” He presents four major arguments to support this claim. First, the previous United Nations definition of genocide has recently been expanded to include murder on a social and political basis. Second, dekulakization—the arrest, deportation, and execution of kulaks or allegedly well-off peasants—was a form of genocide that dehumanized and eliminated an imagined social enemy. Third, during the Ukrainian famine in 1932-1933, victims were deliberately starved by the Soviet state. Fourth, The Great Terror was designed to eliminate potential enemies of the Soviet Union. Overall, Naimark’s arguments are persuasive, presenting a chilling portrait of Joseph Stalin as a sociopath bent on destroying his own people.

Naimark begins with a brief consideration of “genocide” as a legal term in international law. Although the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide does not apply to political or social groups, he shows—rather successfully—that the original UN definition of genocide had included these groups, but that the Soviet delegation had prevented this language from being adopted. This definition, however, has been challenged since the fall of the Soviet Union. Indeed, there have been recent cases in the Baltic states where individuals have been convicted of genocidal crimes for deporting and murdering social and political groups. Because these cases are bound by the precedents of international law, they provide historians with an opportunity to analyze Stalin’s crimes within a broadened definition of genocide that includes political and social groups.

Using this broader definition of genocide, Naimark proceeds to analyze instances of mass killing in the Soviet Union. His chapter on dekulakization is particularly persuasive as an instance of genocidal extermination both planned and implemented by the state to control its rural population. He makes the important distinction that although “the kulaks” were not a conventional social group, they “became an imagined social enemy” whose members experienced the same forms of violence and dehumanization faced by other ethnic and national groups (56). In this regard, dekulakization was similar in both form and function to internationally recognized instances of genocide in Germany, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia.

Naimark’s last two arguments regarding the Ukrainian famine and the Great Terror are less convincing. Although there is a lot of evidence to indicate that Stalin and his lieutenants were directly responsible for generating both the famine and the terror, neither of these events seems to have been intentionally designed to eliminate a particular group. Repression during the Great Terror, for example, was often applied randomly throughout the Soviet Union with little consideration given to the victim’s political, social, national, or ethnic identity. Likewise, it can be argued that the famine was used as a weapon against Ukrainian nationalism, but Naimark offers no convincing evidence to suggest that Stalin used the famine as a way to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry.

In sum, this book provides the reader with deep insight into the nature of Stalin’s crimes. It helps characterize one of history’s greatest mass murderers in a new light—as a genocidaire whose crimes should be condemned in the harshest terms. Even though the term genocide may not be appropriate in all the examples cited by Naimark, the book prompts historians to discuss the issue of genocide outside the confines of the Holocaust—a topic that many scholars have been eager to avoid.

Photo Credits:

Ukrainians in Kharkiv pass by a starving man during Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine, 1932 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Mug shot of Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold after being arrested in 1939 amidst Stalin’s Great Purge of artists and intellectuals (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Joseph Stalin at the Congress of the Young Communist League with two “famous” collective farmers: Praskovya Angelina (left), founder of a female tractor team and Maria Demchenko (right), an innovative beet grower (Image courtesy of Russian International News Agency (RIA Novosti) / RIA Novosti archive, image #377427 / Shagin / CC-BY-SA 3.0)

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George Orwell: A Life in Letters (2013)

by Benjamin Griffin

Peter Davison’s careful selection and annotation of George Orwell’s personal correspondence in provides an engrossing autobiography of a man whose work continues to resonate globally in significant ways. A Life in Letters covers the breadth of Orwell’s life and provides an intimate and detailed look at his personality, influences, and beliefs. Davison is enormously successful in allowing the letters to improve our understanding of a broadly misunderstood man and to tell the story of a truly remarkable life.

Orwell’s letters are of particular value in depicting the changing way the world defined communism and socialism. Orwell’s dispatches from Spain show his personal, if accidental, involvement in the battle between Stalin and Trotsky. The ideological purge of the International Brigade forced him to depart Spain or face execution by Soviet proxies. Upon return, his letters demonstrate frustration with the refusal of traditional socialist journals to publish his works due to this perceived ideological taint. Later, Orwell finds he is unable to publish Animal Farm during World War II in part due to the British desire to maintain the positive image of Stalin and the Soviet Union, who were allies against Hitler. Despite finding success with Animal Farm and 1984, his letters also reveal a frustration with those who feel he is defending the status quo of western life, which is a perception of his work that still exists. Orwell claims that these people are “pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.” Elements of Orwell’s alternative democratic socialism are scattered throughout his correspondence, and the reader comes away from A Life in Letters with a good sense of how Orwell defined the responsibilities of government. Orwell’s letters reinforce his other writings that advocate political reform to eliminate class-based inequalities, such as access to education and medical care, while still guaranteeing individual freedoms.

Throughout the letters the mundane sits in close proximity to the profound. A notable example comes in a letter to working-class novelist Jack Common, in which Orwell first advises him on the proper thickness of toilet paper for use at Orwell’s country home before delving into a withering criticism of the “utter ignorance” of left wing intellectuals who believed they could use the upcoming Second World War to start a violent revolution in Britain. It is the mundane details that reveal Orwell’s personality. He was generous to friends and strangers alike, but was generally pessimistic about himself, his writing, and the future, and his chauvinism destroyed several friendships. Contrasts like these serve to humanize Orwell, and separate the man from the prophet.

Davison works diligently throughout A Life in Letters to ensure that the reader never loses track of the context in which Orwell wrote. Many of Orwell’s letters are indecipherable without Davison’s frequent and detailed footnotes identifying literary references, personal connections, and world events. Likewise, the inclusion of brief biographies of recipients in the bibliographical summary illuminates the broad variety of people with whom Orwell corresponded. The division of Orwell’s life into eight eras, and inclusion of a brief overview ahead of each part also helps shape the readers focus and makes finding specific letters easy. The main flaw in A Life of Letters is one of repetition. Davison often includes multiple letters from a brief period which contain the same content. There is also little correspondence from Orwell’s time in Burma, a key period in the development of his anti-imperialism. Whether this is due to a lack of available content or editorial decision is unclear.

Orwell’s writing in letters is as thoughtful and enjoyable as his prose. They show Orwell as unwilling to merely comment on the injustice he sees and his focus on tangible actions keeps the readers’ interest as easily as any thriller. The result is a detailed and intimate account that touches on the defining issues of international relations in the twentieth century and questions on the role of the state which remain topics of intense debate.

Photo Credits:

1950s dustcover for George Orwell’s 1945 novel, Animal Farm (Image courtesy of Michael Sporn Animation)

Orwell at his typewriter (Image courtesy of Getty Images)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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William Wilson’s review of Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s 1938 memoir of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War

Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (1991)

by Kevin Baker

At the Battle of Stalingrad in January 1943, the German Wehrmacht looked hopeless. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers had died, many were suffering from frostbite, and the Red Army had captured thousands more. Yet in the soldiers’ private correspondence, many ordinary troops expressed an undying loyalty and belief in Adolf Hitler. They still believed that he would somehow save them from complete annihilation. In Hitler’s Army, Omer Bartov examined how ordinary soldiers endured the Second World War. Even in the end, according to Bartov, the army remained intact, with limited mutinies compared to the First World War. In the face of complete annihilation at the hands of the Red Army, the Wehrmacht continued fighting in a “war of ideologies:” German cultural survival vs. “Judeo” Bolshevism. By focusing on the Wehrmacht’s clash with the Soviet Union, Bartov illustrates the soldiers’ greatest triumphs and horrific defeats while still maintaining their ideological ethos. Bartov concentrates on the Nazi indoctrination that happened long before the war, but, argues that, “it was during the war, and most importantly on the Eastern Front, that the Wehrmacht finally became Hitler’s army” (12). The lynchpin that kept the soldiers fighting in unspeakable circumstances was Adolf Hitler. Even when ideology and propaganda proved less effective late in the war, the soldiers believed that Hitler would still lead them to victory.

Bartov explains how the Nazis gradually eradicated many traditional army practices and transformed the Wehrmacht into Hitler’s army. Historically, until 1933, the German army remained a depoliticized separate entity from the state. He centers first on the traditional “primary groups” (soldiers that all came to the unit together) that bolstered unit cohesion and morale. Next, Bartov explains the importance of primary groups in the German army as expressions of esprit de corps and maintaining strong morale. After massive casualties during 1941’s Operation Barbarossa, replacements were too heterogeneous to form new groups and the Wehrmacht slowly lost its traditional formation. By emphasizing that primary groups only lasted a short while and most officers died, Bartov shows that these traditional roles did not play a significant part in maintaining cohesion and loyalty.

Bartov further argues that Hitler’s army endured the war through a perversion of discipline. The Wehrmacht leaders used draconian punishments and martial law to maintain order, which were new forms of discipline created by the Third Reich. The smallest infractions led to harsh penalties and any semblance of shirking or purposefully escaping death led to the death penalty. The harsh discipline resulted in a brutalization of the German army on the Eastern Front whereas the soldiers had carte blanche to terrorize the local populations with impunity. These two brutal aspects of war held the army together.

Finally, Bartov examines the role Nazi ideology played in distorting the soldiers’ perceptions of reality. Through memoirs, diaries and private correspondence by ordinary soldiers and generals, he shows that late in the war the soldiers “preferred to view the reality they knew best through the ideological factors of the regime” (8). During and after the Third Reich an inversion of reality took place. Soldiers concentrated on the physical hardships they endured while repressing and “normalizing” its inherent criminality.

Bartov posits that the army became an integral, not separate, entity of the Nazi regime. His study places emphasis on the Wehrmacht as the people’s army and a reflection of the civilian regime with its motivations, propaganda, and ideology. It became a tool of the regime and no matter the social or religious background of its members, Wehrmacht soldiers committed atrocities against those they perceived as “subhumans.” Even to the bitter end, their belief in Hitler’s “salvation,” held units together.

Photo Credits:

Adolf Hitler meeting with generals Friedrich Paulus and Fedor von Bock in Poltawa, German-occupied Ukraine, June 1942 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B24543 / CC-BY-SA)

Wehrmacht infantrymen in the Soviet Union, 1941 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1989-030-27 / CC-BY-SA)

Wehrmacht infantrymen marching across the Russian steppes, 1942 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-217-0465-32A / Klintzsch / CC-BY-SA)

Pipelines along Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Standard Oil in Louisiana

This is part of an occasional series of articles highlighting the fascinating collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

by Henry Wiencek

The January 1919 edition of The Lamp, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey’s nationally circulated trade publication, marvels at the firm’s gleaming new refinery in Baton Rouge. After being spun off from John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, the newly independent company was eager to grow its business in the Bayou State. And the Baton Rouge plant had done just that, becoming an enormous industrial concern refining over 40,000 barrels of crude each day.

This issue of The Lamp, which Standard Oil-NJ sent to its employees, stockholders, and outside subscribers, tries to assuage contemporary anxieties over big business by celebrating the economic development and social uplift occurring in Louisiana. Thanks to company investment, a productive and modern industry is replacing fallow cotton fields and the primitive, old ways they represent. The Lamp even presents Baton Rouge’s new refinery as an agent of Post-Reconstruction reconciliation, a harmonious project of regional collaboration between northern expertise and southern natural resources. Oil refining represents nothing less than societal transformation: a “New South” of productivity, sectional reconciliation and affluence, all brought to Louisianans by the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey.

Company photographs depict Louisiana as a landscape in transition—a space where farming is slowly giving way to modern industry. Under the title, “The Transformation of the ‘New South’ Under the Magic Wand of Industry,” two large horizontal photographs spread parallel across the page. The top image depicts a 1909 cotton plantation of overgrown weeds and ramshackle fencing set against a winding dirt road. The photograph directly below displays the same patch of land ten years later, where an enormous refinery dominates the horizon and bears no mark of any agricultural predecessor. This striking visual comparison offers a clear and proud juxtaposition: the old giving way to the new.

By working towards a future of economic modernity, Louisiana was also escaping a legacy of north-south antipathy. The Lamp depicts the refinery as a national project in which northern industry and southern land work in concert towards a productive future. “A Southern Business Home,” which discusses the company’s Baton Rouge headquarters, inscribes this language of regional partnership into the building’s very architecture. Elegant colonial windows look upon orderly refining processes and converging railway lines, creating a dynamic interplay between old world repose and modern productivity. Standard Oil-NJ’s headquarters physically embodies peaceful collaboration: the industry and expertise of the north working alongside the abundant lands and bucolic lifestyle of the south. Even as pipelines and factories consume more and more Louisiana bayou, the form and style of Standard Oil-NJ’s development promotes an image of peaceful coexistence with the southern landscape.

Yet despite all the enthusiasm for the company’s role in Louisiana, The Lamp also conveys a quiet anxiety as it ponders the bucolic, pre-modern past that industry is steadily replacing. Photographs and articles simultaneously celebrate industrial change and commemorate the people and lifestyles that are vanishing as refineries engulf plantations. In “Pipe Lines in the South,” C.K. Clarke, manager of the company’s Pipe Line and Producing Department, describes the intersection of industrial expansion and romantic traditions in Louisiana, whimsically imagining Standard Oil’s pipelines stretching within sight of Uncle Tom’s cabin. Although Clarke concedes that Louisiana’s old ways are incompatible with the modern world, he strikes a nostalgic tone as he considers the lamentable, if necessary, end to a romantic, pre-modern time.

For just a moment, The Lamp‘s narrative of progress and optimism pauses to consider the consequences of industrialization. The company publication creates a wistful historical record of the wild landscapes and wild characters of the “Old South” before they disappear—a kind of strange recompense for its own role in their destruction. Changes in land use represent progress, but also the end of an era. To be sure, this is a “history” told entirely on company terms, reinforcing the backwards and fundamentally un-modern character of old Louisiana. But it does suggest that Standard Oil-NJ officials were, at very least, conscious of their public—and historical—image. The Lamp accordingly presents company men not as mindless capitalists, but as thoughtful stewards of the past, rightly or not.

Amidst a national climate of anti-monopolism and trust busting, The Lamp unapologetically promotes the benefits of big business in Louisiana. Articles and photographs celebrate rapid changes to the state’s landscape as symbols of progress and betterment. Pipelines and refineries engulfing cotton fields augur a “New South” of industry, profitability and sectional reconciliation.

But for all the confidence its narrative exudes, The Lamp cannot help but consider what is being lost in the march to modernity. Company officials remain deeply fascinated by the vanishing “Old South” and the nostalgia it conjures. At certain moments, The Lamp reads like a romantic history book, chronicling the quaint ways of the old bayou before it becomes just another factory. While the employees of Standard Oil-NJ are undoubtedly proud of their work in Louisiana, they remain highly attuned to contemporary fears over industrialization and its potentially corrosive impact on American society. The Lamp is ultimately both confident and defensive: optimistic about the future Standard Oil-NJ is creating and nostalgic for the past it is destroying.

Photo Credits:

Selected pages from the January 1919 edition of The Lamp

The ExxonMobil Historical Collection

di-09040, di_09041, di_09042

The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin

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Stephen F. Austin’s 1835 bookstore receipt

Braided History

by Joan Neuberger

This braided watch chain comes from a private archive. Similar family archives often end up in the collections of local historical museums or even national repositories like the Library of Congress. This archive is housed in a box in my closet.

My archive contains documents my father collected about our family history, old photo albums going back to the early 20th century, a daguerreotype from even earlier, and some very odd objects, including this watch chain, which is made out of human hair.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, men and women in the US, following the Victorian British fad, wore watch chains, earrings, and brooches made out of hair, often as mementos of loved ones who had died or gone off to war. Unlike a memento mori, or a reminder that death is inevitable, relics such a loved one’s hair suggested the persistence of life even after death.

There is something of the religious relic in the hair ornament: a piece of the body that endures after death that can be both venerated and consoling. But we keep precious religious relics like the bones of saints in houses of worship. Hair jewelry was worn on our own bodies.

Now it seems creepy to weave adornments out of something so carnal. What changed?

Major cultural shifts are notoriously difficult to explain, but a few of the possibilities for explaining our modern distaste include the arrival of inexpensive Kodak cameras that allowed people to keep evocative reminders of loved ones that were free of actual body parts.

The popularization of psychoanalysis and the sanitation of death practices made our desire for proximity to other people’s dead bodies seem a little neurotic. And the carnage of World War I may have diluted our interest in the elaborate mourning rituals so popular in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American world.

My mother kept this hair chain in a leather glove box. We don’t know whose head provided the hair or who made it. But it was an object of fascination for her as a child, as it was for us: a mysterious but intimate link to the people in our past.

Stephen F. Austin’s bookstore receipt

This is the first in an occasional series of articles highlighting the fascinating collection of historical documents in the Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin.

by Brenda Gunn

In July 1835, after two years in Mexico, part of that time confined to a jail cell, Stephen F. Austin received a passport issued by the Mexican government. Austin had gone to Mexico on a diplomatic mission, when Texas was still under Mexican rule, but set off to return home to Texas, where the political climate had shifted and tolerance for Mexican rule had deteriorated. On his way back, he spent time in New Orleans, purchasing several books that might provide clues to his state of mind.

Austin’s passport and the receipt for his book purchases are part of a collection held at The Briscoe Center for American History at UT Austin. The passport confirms that Austin boarded the Wanderer and set sail from Veracruz bound for the United States. The exact date of Austin’s landing in New Orleans is unclear, but the New Orleans Bee mentions Austin’s stay on Aug. 12, 1835.

Stephen F. Austin’s 1835 receipt for Hotchkiss & Co. Booksellers and Stationers in New Orleans (Image courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History)

While in New Orleans, Austin visited Hotchkiss & Co. Booksellers and Stationers on Chartres Street, where he spent $27 on books. It is clear that Austin was interested in conflicts. Listed on the receipt were two recent publications: A History of the Fall of the Roman Empire by J-C-L Sismondi and History of the Revolution in England 1688 by Sir James Mackintosh (both published in 1834). Austin also purchased Washington Irving’s military history, Spanish Conquest of Granada.

These choices suggest a shift from Austin’s long-held moderate outlook regarding Texas’ relationship with Mexico toward resignation that conflict was inevitable.

Other purchases listed on the receipt, however, reflect very different preoccupations.

19th century depiction of Stephen F. Austin (Image courtesy of the Briscoe Center for American History)

An issue of the monthly literary magazine, Atkinson’s Casket: or Gems of Literature, Wit, and Sentiment and a copy of Penny Magazine, which focused on British culture, exhibit the cultural interests of the future revolutionary. Since Austin wrote often and at length, it also seems fitting that the receipt includes a copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

Austin also bought the Young Man’s Own Book: A Manual of Politeness, Intellectual Improvement, and Moral Deportment and Sacred Classics, or Cabinet Library of Divinity, featuring sermons on a variety of topics. Most of the books Austin bought that day are works of nonfiction and convey a serious frame of mind in August 1835.

He did leave room for a novel: Pelham: Or the Adventures of a Gentleman, a tale of a young man with political aspirations — a topic that may not have been far from Austin’s heart.

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The Hadamar Trial: Inadequacies of Postwar Justice

By Madeline Schlesinger

Download “The Hadamar Trial”

The UT history department has announced that Madeline Schlesinger is the winner of this year’s Claudio Segre Prize, which recognizes each year’s best History Honors Thesis. For her award-winning project, Madeline researched the infamous Hadamar Institution, a German hospital in which Nazi officials undertook a mass sterilization and euthanasia program against “undesirable” elements of society. Madeline’s project specifically focuses on the legal proceedings that took place after Allied Forces discovered the facility and placed its personnel on trial for crimes against humanity. You can read her project’s abstract below or download the entire paper in the link above.

Abstract:

Throughout the Second World War, the Third Reich used facilities at the Hadamar institution to carry out the Nazi euthanasia program—an operation that targeted German citizens suffering from mental illness and physical disabilities. Just months after Allied victory and the American liberation of Hadamar, a United States Military Commission led by the young Leon Jaworski tried personnel from Hadamar for violation of international law in the murder of 476 Soviet and Polish forced laborers. The Hadamar War Crimes Case, formally known as United States of America v. Alfons Klein et al., commenced in early October of 1945 and figured as the first postwar mass atrocity trial prosecuted in the American-occupied zone of Germany.

Smoke rising from the crematoria at Hadamar, probably 1941 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Hadamar Institute personnel socializing, sometime between 1940 and 1942 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Although often overlooked in the shadow of the subsequent events at Nuremberg, the Hadamar Trial set precedent for war crimes trials and the rewriting of international law to include the charge of crimes against humanity. In its historical context, the Hadamar trial tells a story much larger than the conviction of seven German citizens. It tells the story of the Third Reich’s murderous euthanasia program, one of the United States’ first confrontations with the crimes of the Holocaust, the inadequacies of international law in the immediate postwar period, the impossibility of true retribution in the aftermath of Nazi atrocities, and the slow erosion of justice in the years following the war.

Three inmates of the Hadamar Institute soon after the U.S. military discovered the facility, April 5, 1945 (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Irmgard Huber, chief nurse at Hadamar Institute, after American soldiers liberated the facility (Image courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

My thesis aims to accurately depict the crimes committed at Hadamar, present the collision of German and international law during the proceedings, and prove the inadequacy of contemporary legal infrastructure to prosecute the crimes against humanity committed during World War II.

The Prisoner of Events in Vietnam

by Mark Atwood Lawrence

In the months following his resounding electoral triumph over Barry Goldwater in November 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson made momentous decisions to escalate U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Most consequentially, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam: first retaliatory strikes following a National Liberation Front attack on the U.S. base at Pleiku and then a sustained bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder. Critics of the administration’s decision-making feared that these steps would commit the United States to a difficult and unnecessary war and appealed urgently for a change of course. One such appeal came from Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who focused not just on geostrategic dangers but also, more unusually, on the domestic political risks. In a memorandum to the president ten days after the Pleiku attack, Humphrey warned that the American public had little enthusiasm for a major war and that escalation might damage the administration and the Democratic Party more generally. Although there is no definitive evidence that Johnson read the memo, one of Johnson’s aides, Bill Moyers, later stated that he had given it to the president.

I would like to share with you my views on the political consequences of certain courses of action that have been proposed in regard to U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. I refer both to the domestic political consequences here in the United States and to the international political consequences.

A. Domestic Political Consequences.

1. 1964 Campaign.

Although the question of U.S. involvement in Vietnam is and should be a non-partisan question, there have always been significant differences in approach to the Asian question between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. These came out in the 1964 campaign. The Republicans represented both by Goldwater, and the top Republican leaders in Congress, favored a quick, total military solution in Vietnam, to be achieved through military escalation of the war.

The Democratic position emphasized the complexity of a Vietnam situation involving both political, social and military factors; the necessity of staying in Vietnam as long as necessary; recognition that the war will be won or lost chiefly in South Vietnam.

In Vietnam, as in Korea, the Republicans have attacked the Democrats either for failure to use our military power to “win” a total victory, or alternatively for losing the country to the Communists. The Democratic position has always been one of firmness in the face of Communist pressure but restraint in the use of military force; it has sought to obtain the best possible settlement without provoking a nuclear World War III; it has sought to leave open face-saving options to an opponent when necessary to avoid a nuclear show-down. When grave risks have been necessary, as in the case of Cuba, they have been taken. But here again a face-saving option was permitted the opponent. In all instances the Democratic position has included a balancing of both political and military factors.

Today the Administration is being charged by some of its critics with adopting the Goldwater position on Vietnam. While this is not true of the Administration’s position as defined by the President, it is true that many key advisors in the Government are advocating a policy markedly similar to the Republican policy as defined by Goldwater.

2. Consequences for other policies advocated by a Democratic Administration.

The Johnson Administration is associated both at home and abroad with a policy of progress toward detente with the Soviet bloc, a policy of limited arms control, and a policy of new initiatives for peace. A full-scale military attack on North Vietnam – with the attendant risk of an open military clash with Communist China – would risk gravely undermining other U.S. policies. It would eliminate for the time being any possible exchange between the President and Soviet leaders; it would postpone any progress on arms control; it would encourage the Soviet Union and China to end their rift; it would seriously hamper our efforts to strengthen relations with our European allies; it would weaken our position in the United Nations; it might require a call-up of reservists if we were to get involved in a large-scale land war–and a consequent increase in defense expenditures; it would tend to shift the Administration’s emphasis from its Great Society oriented programs to further military outlays; finally and most important it would damage the image of the President of the United States – and that of the United States itself.

3. Involvement in a full scale war with North Vietnam would not make sense to the majority of the American people.

American wars have to be politically understandable by the American public. There has to be a cogent, convincing case if we are to have sustained public support. In World Wars I and II we had this. In Korea we were moving under UN auspices to defend South Korea against dramatic, across-the-border conventional aggression. Yet even with those advantages, we could not sustain American political support for fighting the Chinese in Korea in 1952.

Today in Vietnam we lack the very advantages we had in Korea. The public is worried and confused. Our rationale for action has shifted away now even from the notion that we are there as advisors on request of a free government – to the simple argument of our “national interest.” We have not succeeded in making this “national interest” interesting enough at home or abroad to generate support.

4. From a political viewpoint, the American people find it hard to understand why we risk World War III by enlarging a war under terms we found unacceptable 12 years ago in Korea, particularly since the chances of success are slimmer….

5. Absence of confidence in the Government of South Vietnam.

Politically, people can’t understand why we would run grave risks to support a country which is totally unable to put its own house in order. The chronic instability in Saigon directly undermines American political support for our policy.

6. Politically, it is hard to justify over a long period of time sustained, large-scale U.S. air bombardments across a border as a response to camouflaged, often non-sensational, elusive, small-scale terror which has been going on for 10 years in what looks like a civil war in the South.

7. Politically, in Washington and across the country, the opposition is more Democratic than Republican.

8. Politically, it is always hard to cut losses. But the Johnson Administration is in a stronger position to do so than any Administration in this century. 1965 is the year of minimum political risk for the Johnson Administration. Indeed it is the first year when we can face the Vietnam problem without being preoccupied with the political repercussions from the Republican right. As indicated earlier, the political problems are likely to come from new and different sources if we pursue an enlarged military policy very long (Democratic liberals, Independents, Labor, Church groups).

9. Politically, we now risk creating the impression that we are the prisoner of events in Vietnam. This blurs the Administration’s leadership role and has spill-over effects across the board. It also helps erode confidence and credibility in our policies.

10. The President is personally identified with, and admired for, political ingenuity. He will be expected to put all his great political sense to work now for international political solutions. People will be counting upon him to use on the world scene his unrivalled talents as a political leader.

They will be watching to see how he makes this transition. The best possible outcome a year from now would be a Vietnam settlement which turns out to be better than was in the cards because the President’s political talents for the first time came to grips with a fateful world crisis and so successfully. It goes without saying that the subsequent domestic political benefits of such an outcome, and such a new dimension for the President, would be enormous.

11. If on the other hand, we find ourselves leading from frustration to escalation, and end up short of a war with China but embroiled deeper in fighting with Vietnam over the next few months, political opposition will steadily mount. It will underwrite all the negativism and disillusionment which we already have about foreign involvement generally – with direct spill-over effects politically for all the Democratic internationalist programs to which we are committed – AID, UN, disarmament, and activist world policies generally.

B. International Political Implications of Vietnam.

1. What is our goal, our ultimate objective in Vietnam? Is our goal to restore a military balance between North and South Vietnam so as to go to the conference table later to negotiate a settlement? I believe it is the latter. If so, what is the optimum time for achieving the most favorable combination of factors to achieve this goal?

If ultimately a negotiated settlement is our aim, when do we start developing a political track, in addition to the military one, that might lead us to the conference table? I believe we should develop the political track earlier rather than later. We should take the initiative on the political side and not end up being dragged to a conference as an unwilling participant. This does not mean we should cease all programs of military pressure. But we should distinguish carefully between those military actions necessary to reach our political goal of a negotiated settlement, and those likely to provoke open Chinese military intervention.

We should not underestimate the likelihood of Chinese intervention and repeat the mistake of the Korean War. If we begin to bomb further north in Vietnam, the likelihood is great of an encounter with the Chinese Air Force operating from sanctuary bases across the border. Once the Chinese Air Force is involved, Peking’s full prestige will be involved as she cannot afford to permit her Air Force to be destroyed. To do so would undermine, if not end, her role as a great power in Asia.

Confrontation with the Chinese Air Force can easily lead to massive retaliation by the Chinese in South Vietnam. What is our response to this? Do we bomb Chinese air bases and nuclear installations? If so, will not the Soviet Union honor its treaty of friendship and come to China’s assistance? I believe there is a good chance that it would–thereby involving us in a war with both China and the Soviet Union. Here again, we must remember the consequences for the Soviet Union of not intervening if China’s military power is destroyed by the U.S.

Photo Credits:

Lyndon Johnson examining a model of the Khe Sanh region of Vietnam in the White House Situation Room, 1968 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Federal Government)

President Johnson meets U.S. troops in Vietnam, 1966 (Image courtesy of the U.S. Department of State)

Man surveying the damage from a Viet Cong bomb attack against a multi-story U.S. officers billet in Saigon, 1966 (Image courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration)

Members of the 101st Airborn Division aboard a USAF C-130 at Pham Thiet Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, for airlift to Phi Troung Air Base (Image courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration)

U.S. pilots bomb a military target over North Vietnam, 1966 (Image courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration)

Counterfactual History in a New Video Game

By Robert Whitaker

BioShock Infinite
Irrational Games

I have spent most of the last year applying for jobs, which means that I have spent most of the last year analyzing, constructing, rewriting, and generally just staring at my résumé. Writing a résumé is similar to creating a historical narrative – there is a protagonist (you), a cast of characters (employers and recommenders), a beginning, an end, a series of events in the middle, and a whole set of details that can be added or removed to suit particular audiences. Given the economy right now, there is pressure to make this narrative as broadly appealing as possible. Some career advisors have even encouraged me to engage in “creative truth-telling” to help me land a position. This practice, they tell me, isn’t lying, per se, but rather a gentle embellishment of the facts.

As an historian, however, this practice gives me the heebie jeebies. It reminds me too much of the push by some to make a selective reading of American history the standard for teaching the subject. American History, in many ways, represents the nation’s résumé. It is a catalog of achievements and events – some good, some regrettable – that are used to encourage citizens and outsiders to buy into the nation. As with my own personal narrative, the stakes for this résumé are high. There is the same pressure to embellish this history – both through addition and omission. But we must ask if it is really beneficial to avoid all the nasty bits when studying the past? When we consider our own personal failures, we often say that we learn from our mistakes. How can we learn from the nation’s mistakes if we remove them from our history?

BioShock Infinite is a game that uses a counterfactual history of the United States to force players to consider some of these mistakes. Set in 1912, the game takes place in Columbia, a floating city hovering over the United States. You play as Booker DeWitt, a veteran of the 7th Cavalry Regiment and a former member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who is sent to Columbia to retrieve a girl named Elizabeth in order to absolve his debt. Booker is racked by guilt for his participation in the Wounded Knee Massacre and for his role in putting down worker strikes as a Pinkerton agent. His personal remorse has driven him to drinking and gambling. Booker embodies several Progressive Era sensibilities, including the awareness of past wrongs, and the desire for redemption and reform.

In Columbia, however, Booker faces an unrepentant Gilded Age society led by firebrand preacher Zachary Comstock – a man who shares much of Booker’s personal history, but none of his remorse. Styling himself as a modern day Noah, Comstock sees Columbia as “another ark, for another time,” a place where he can preserve his vision of America while planning the destruction of “the Sodom below.” Comstock’s America is built upon a perverse worship of the Founding Fathers and rejection of the political and social developments in American society since the Civil War. Columbian society is committed to racial purity, religious zealotry, and unfettered capitalism, and promotes these philosophies through a set of distorted Sears Roebuck advertisements plastered around the city. Museums in the city present John Wilkes Booth as a hero and the Wounded Knee Massacre as a national triumph. The personal histories of DeWitt and Comstock reminds players not only of particular historical events, but also how the memories of those events can be perverted to attain political goals.

This sort of stylistic use of history is familiar territory for Irrational Games and its creative director, Ken Levine. The original BioShock, published in 2007, used Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy as the basis for a story set in the underwater city of Rapture. Levine’s BioShock games share many similarities in terms of plot and theme. Both games feature an antagonist bent on creating a utopian society based on warped notions of exceptionalism and capitalism. These antagonists are opposed in both instances by a group made up of dissatisfied, working class civilians, led by Frank Fontaine in BioShock and Daisy Fitzroy in Infinite. Thematically, the BioShock series grapples with the age old question of free will versus destiny, and stresses the potential role of the state in determining the answer.

Both BioShock games offer easy parallels with the present division between neoliberal capitalists and the Occupy Movement, yet these parallels become murky as both games progress. While the capitalist appears as the initial antagonist in both games, the player comes to learn that the opposition is capable of just as much destruction and violence. Levine’s message, then, is not a simple liberal critique of current politics, but rather a general warning about extremism in politics, whether that extremism comes from the left or the right. Writing as an historian of the 20th century, this is a warning that cannot be repeated too many times.

In addition to the plot and themes, BioShock Infinite encourages historicism through its music and gameplay. For reasons that become clear through the story, Infinite contains a jukebox musical score that features ragtime versions of popular twentieth-century hits, including songs by the Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Cyndi Lauper, Lead Belly, Soft Cell, and Tears for Fears. Additionally, Infinite’s gameplay often encourages the player to take on the role of historian. Major elements of the game’s narrative are left unexplained in cut scenes, but can be found by the player in voice recordings and kinetoscopes scattered throughout the city. These recordings and logs are not always easy to find, meaning that each player can come away with a different sense of the storyline depending on which, or how many, recordings they discovered. One of the game’s major side quests, then, is an oral history scavenger hunt.

This sort of detailed work would be lost on most players without exciting gameplay to draw them in. Infinite, however, builds upon traditional first-person action in interesting ways. In particular, it takes advantage of the game’s setting in the clouds, allowing players to move around the environment using skylines and zeppelins. This freedom of movement gives the combat sequences a frenetic feel and prevents them from becoming predictable. Unfortunately, this novelty is diminished by the rote nature of the game’s violence. The current debate on graphic content in video games is all too applicable here. Infinite’s storyline, including the player’s interactions with their companion Elizabeth, are best experienced by the reader themselves. The plot is a bit more precocious than profound, but it is well paced, matching the action of the game.

The BioShock series has become something of a bellwether for the video game industry and the release of Infinite has led to several “state of the medium” pieces online (listed below). What, then, does BioShock Infinite indicate about the future course of video games? On the one hand, we see a familiar reliance on violence and the first-person perspective, but on the other hand, we see a game that engages with complex, historically laced themes. Certainly, Infinite presents these themes in an exaggerated manner, but the fact that the game deals with them at all is encouraging. This further maturation of video games can only be seen as a good thing, for historians and players alike.

Photo Credits:

Promotional Photos of Bioshock Infinite (Images courtesy of Irrational Games and 2K Games)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

If you’d like to read more about Bioshock Infinite:

Leigh Alexander writes that Infinite represents “a crucial moment in

canon,” but not one without flaws.

Giantbomb.com editor Alex Navarro collects and discusses the major threads of criticism that Infinite has encouraged in the gaming press.

Gamespot.com interview with Ken Levine on the development of Infinite and the current state of the video game industry.

Lady Bird Johnson, In Her Own Words

by Michael L. Gillette

Between 1977 and 1991, Michael L. Gillette, executive director of Humanities Texas and former director of the LBJ Library Oral History Program, sat down with Lady Bird Johnson to discuss her childhood, family life and experiences as First Lady. For the first time anywhere, Not Even Past is publishing audio segments from these incredible conversations.

Lady Bird, 1915 (Image courtesy of the LBJ Library)

What happened when a young Lady Bird and a friend traveled to New York City in June 1934? Hear her impressions of Chinatown, Depression era poverty and a “museum for fish” she visited.

How did Lady Bird and LBJ meet? In this segment, she describes their very, very brief courtship and Lyndon’s almost immediate proposal.

After LBJ’s proposal, Lady Bird went out to San Marcos to meet Lyndon’s parents. Here she talks about first meeting Mr. and Mrs. Johnson and her impressions of the old Texas family.

“You’ve brought a lot of boys home, and this time you’ve brought a man.” These were the words of Lady Bird’s father after meeting Lyndon for the first time. Hear more about that initial encounter and life at the “Brick House,” Lady Bird’s family home in Karnack, TX.

Credits:

Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson Oral History Interviews, by Michael L. Gillette, LBJ Library

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