Tag: history

Magnets for Militants on the Move

~ Michael A. Innes

A review in The New Republic of Cambridge historian Tim Harper’s Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire. The book looks fascinating. A couple of bits caught my eye.

This one:

The locales that interest him are cosmopolitan ports that were at least partly incorporated into Western empires—cities such as Canton, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Saigon, which were magnets for militants on the move. In these places, exiles from “lost countries”—a term Harper borrows from an activist of the time to refer to colonized lands—could evade arrest by the police by lying low in hard-to-patrol dockland districts.

… and this:

In subdivided cities like Shanghai, which had a British-dominated International Settlement beside a separate French Concession, they had another option: Base themselves in alleyway apartments in the jurisdiction of an empire other than the one they opposed, and take advantage of imperial rivalries that limited cooperation between the law enforcement arms of different powers.

Sounds familiar.

The Arc of Presidential Libraries

~ Michael A. Innes

Paul Musgrave, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, has published an op-ed on problems with the Presidential library system in the US, and how the current (outgoing) President could exploit it to his usual ends. The essay is a fine complement to Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece on the transition politics of official records.

Musgrave, scene-setting:

President Trump has reportedly spent little time thinking about his post-presidential life. (“You can’t broach it with him,” an anonymous friend told the New Yorker in recent days. “He’d be furious at the suggestion that he could lose.”) But he will surely avail himself of the same consolation prize his predecessors did: a presidential library. What will it look like?

The federal presidential library system traces its origins to Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 establishment of a library to make his records more accessible in the interests of transparency. But lack of funding and weak oversight by the National Archives and Records Administration mean that, without significant changes in the law, Trump will have a perfect pedestal where he can erect a shrine to himself. His records won’t be available in full until after he dies; he’ll be able to raise millions to award sinecures to his aides as they tout his supposed successes at “making America great again”; there is no mandate to pursue historical accuracy; he can whitewash his legacy. This will be the headquarters for Trump’s permanent post-presidential campaign.

And while Trump’s presidency was distinguished by constant departures from norms, the library is one place where all presidents are consistent. Following a trail blazed most successfully by Richard Nixon, turning his presidential library into an image-making prop will be among the most normal things Trump ever does.

This line is especially pithy:

The arc of presidential libraries bends toward loyalty, not truth.

Good tie-in to larger points about the seemingly never-ending, self-perpetuating character of American political campaigns:

With a big war chest, the hallowed “permanent campaign” of the modern presidency could achieve its final form in a foundation dedicated to burnishing Trump’s record. Such a foundation could easily generate enough revenue to support endless functions at Trump resorts, hotels and Mar-a-Lago. It could even prove a launchpad for political careers for the next generation of Trumps — or, given that the president would still be in his 70s, for Trump to pull a Grover Cleveland-esque comeback himself.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you

~ Michael A. Innes

Context is everything. As Maya Jasanoff, the Harvard historian, asks, in lyrical terms: “If a writer harbored bias, shall we never speak his name? Or when he wrote with insight, might we read him all the same?” The questions appear in her review in The New Republic, of Christopher Benfey‘s If:  The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. Benfey, a literary scholar, has sought to explain Kipling and “If” in the context of his decade-long American sojourn between 1889 and 1899.  Kipling’s famous poem is worth this kind of study because of its contemporary prominence. As Benfey’s back cover blurb frames it, in slightly limp terms:

… in recent decades Kipling’s reputation has suffered a strange eclipse. Though his body of work still looms large, and his monumental poem “If—” is quoted and referenced by politicians, athletes, and ordinary readers alike, his unabashed imperialist views have come under increased scrutiny.

That’s putting it mildly.  Jasanoff’s review caught my eye because I happen to teach (and completed a PhD) at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London – a storied institution with its own colonial roots where today the intellectual activism surrounding Britain’s imperial past is a recurring and prominent (if not necessarily consistent or constant) feature of campus life. I also study the use of history and language in political decisions and processes, especially among foreign policy and national security elites, where the lessons of Munich, Korea and Vietnam are routinely invoked to help shape public discourse.

Jasanoff opens with a description of the University of Manchester’s tin-eared attempt in 2018 to publicly celebrate Kipling’s poem, and the student population’s delightfully creative rebuff of the move. Figures like Kipling, and their works, had their day; their contributions, even presented in context,  are now powerfully symbolic political devices, especially at a time when public discussion of decolonizing academia plays such an important part in debates around the content of higher education and equitable acccess to it.

For Benfey and Jasanoff, Kipling’s exposure to crass and brash American ways add a layer of meaning to how Kipling and his imperialism should be understood in their own context.  Benfey’s book, Jasanoff’s review of it, and my comments here, point to context as something that can be eliptically frustrating, a mobius strip of a tautology, endlessly looping back on itself to remind us of  historical details made newly relevant. Benfey, the literary scholar, stalking Kipling. Historian Jasanoff, stalking Benfey. Me, the student of politics, stalking all three.

It’s almost impossible to read any of this, today, without thinking in presentist terms of the unapologetic expressions of bloated (and possibly symbiotic) boorishness that have been emanating from Westminster and Washington.  Benfey’s book includes a listing of Vietnam-era references to “If”. Meanwhile, I’m reminded of the niche interest in Kipling that flared up only a decade ago, as policymakers and soldiers tried to make sense of what they were doing in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2010, for example, one new war veteran framed his memoir of military life and deadly battles in terms of  “the unforgiving minute“, a phrase lifted straight out of “If“. Others talked and wrote about “arithmetic on the frontier” – another Kipling poem – as they tried to come up with “metrics of success” in Afghanistan – another shade of Vietnam. Maybe context isn’t everything. But it is everywhere.

 

 

An area, call it what you will, of safety

~ Michael A. Innes

Colleagues at Arab Digest have just published an interesting commentary on “Boundaries in the Arab world and their remarkable durability.” It’s not publicly available, but I do hope they’ll release it as a sample for general readers. The piece, authored by Chatham House’s Greg Shapland, ex of the Foreign Office, alludes to one of those issue-areas that bridges the grounded, practical, concrete world of international law, and the often fuzzy realm of historical understanding, collective identity and memory, and  perception and misperception in international politics. My own research looks closely at the political uses of terminology in framing diplomatic disputes and armed conflicts around international and sub-state boundaries, so Greg’s piece resonates quite closely. I don’t have anything substantive to add to it, except to flag a related New York Times commentary, published in the immediate aftermath of the first Gulf War. Not long after the conclusion of US and Allied combat operations, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater commented on the plight of Kurdish refugees in Iraq, displaced as a direct consequence of the fighting and long-standing patterns of ethnic persecution. The Washington officialese surrounding territorial management of the issue was typical of such efforts. It was sufficiently surreal and vaporous to attract the attention of the late, inimitable William Safire. He had this to say on the official “dancetalk” surrounding “enclavery zones”, in the 21 April 1991 entry of On Language, his widely-read New York Times column:

FIRST OF ALL, IT’S pronounced EN-clave in English, not ON-clave; if you insist on pronouncing the first syllable in the French way, you should go with a French final syllable, CLAHV. I’d stick to ENclave, just as I lick an ENvelope; only when we use whole French words should we adopt ennui ‘s on-WEE or en route ‘s on ROUTE. The word, most often applied in diplomacy in recent years to suggestions for Palestinian Arab areas within the disputed territories of the West Bank, was thrust upon the world by the need to protect Kurdish refugees from the vengeance of Saddam Hussein. The British Prime Minister, John Major, was the first to call for enclaves within Iraq for the fearful Kurds. But the Bush spokesmen resisted the word: “The Administration backed away from the idea of setting up a Kurdish ‘enclave,’ ” wrote Patrick E. Tyler in The New York Times, “that might later be used as a claim to statehood by Iraq’s Kurdish minority.” Promptly, European leaders started talking more fuzzily about protection zone and safety zone. President Bush’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, said, “The problem was that nobody wants a demarcation that says this is a permanent area or new country… We need an area, call it what you will, of safety.” With no official using a term to describe the place, reporters used “informal safe haven” in their stories; “safe haven” was part of the headline in The Times. Although safe haven is redundant, the words have been linked so long as to become an idiom. Subsequently, sanctuary was evoked, as well as buffer zone. Nobody used mandate, applied by John Maynard Keynes in 1919 to territory assigned to the League of Nations, because that would be too “official.” And nobody (except the Kurds, a distinct people with a thousand-year-old culture) would use Kurdistan because that would imply a separate state. What, then, was this area – inside Iraq, on the Turkish and Iranian borders above the 36th parallel – to be called? Not yet decided. For the time being, it’s “the area” or the “safe-haven territory,” the name kept fuzzy because the nations protecting the refugees do not want to clarify (or complicate) matters by giving an area an identity and national life of its own with a name. The synonymy: enclave is moving toward a meaning of “permanent, delimited area” from its origin in the French verb enclaver, “to enclose.” Sanctuary implies inviolability due to sacredness; when applied to a place rather than an idea, it now often pertains to wildlife, not human beings. Asylum is a state of shelter from persecution, but not a particular area. Haven, from the Old English “harbor,” with a connotation of “refuge” dating to 1200, has the advantage of meaning both a place and a status of protection, with a diplomatically useful overlay of impermanence. Refuge is a 14th-century noun from the Latin refugere, “to flee from,” and the 1908 buffer zone comes from buff, “to sound like a soft body when struck.” Zone is an area usually characterized as a band or a strip. Broadest of all: area, leading to “area, call it what you will, of safety.”

Reference: William Safire, “Dancetalk; Enclavery Zone,” New York Times (28 April 1991). URL: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/28/magazine/on-language-dancetalk.html

Left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane

~ Michael A. Innes

Trawl industry news or employment classifieds (pick your preferred sector) using keywords like “research” and “information”, and you might find yourself thinking that the sum total of reality is digital, too big for mere human minds to process, and that making sense of it is best left to machines and software. It’s a world in which understanding is less contingent on a cognitive capacity for critical engagement and creative insight than it is on the accessibility of information. Access is all. It trumps (sorry) the value that large volumes of data imply. It trumps (where is William Safire when you need to pick apart a travesty of a word and find a pallatable substitute for it?) the value that fast data processing speed implies.

Access can be about a lot of different things.  It can be about decryption of safeguarded secrets, conversion to a usable medium, or translation of foreign language script into one that’s comprehensible.  At its most basic, it can be about the ability to directly observe information or physically possess it, on a drive, on paper, in a photograph, on a stone tablet. Sometimes it’s about finding a keeper of the secrets, and a place where the secrets are kept. Secrecy is a relative thing. It correlates directly with notions of access, and one of my favorite archetypal keepers, the archivist, is also the one I most frequently invoke when I’m talking to  colleagues, clients and friends about research specialties like  data science, e-discovery and open source intelligence.

According to this piece in the Village Voice on archivists, one of their number may well be  – with apologies for repeating a brutalized meme  – the most interesting man in the world. The “paradox of being an archivist,” it tells us, is that while archivists should know things so that they can help others know those things, “it’s not really the archivist’s place to impose his knowledge on anyone else… [i]ndeed, if the field could be said to have a creed, it’s that archivists aren’t there to tell you what’s important.” It’s a view that misses one of the most fundamental aspects of archival work, in that archivists routinely select what to preserve and what not to preserve, and so by definition impose their knowledge on others. It’s a point that the author explores and explains well. Ideal types are fine in isolation, and archival work is nothing if not isolating, but relegating keepers of secrets to the role of neutral, disinterested arbiters of knowledge strikes me as more than a little self-indulgent.

Archivists and archival investigators have a role to play as activists, especially if there’s a forensic element to the materials buried amid unprocessed and uncatalogued holdings. I can sympathize with the romantic view that “Historically momentous documents are to be left in folders next to the trivial and the mundane — because who’s to say what’s actually mundane or not?” But that’s about preservation, not discovery, and once discovered, one would hope that the discovering archivist would do more than just stare wanly at the information in question and then file it dutifully away, with nary a word of imposition about its singificance to anyone.

Archival investigation undertaken by living, breathing human beings unfolds at a comparatively soporific pace, and for investigators and researchers used to fast search engines and aggregate query results, it’s a practice that’s surely too musty and staid and boring  to be taken seriously or ascribed much worth. But plodding historical gumshoes poking about the stacks and sifting yellowed documents, for all their retrograde pathos, embody a particular spirit of discovery. Tech-savvy number crunchers and online seekers of insight surely experience their own versions of this. Smoking guns appear in all shapes and forms. But there’s a tactile, sensory difference between the two. “The need to pore through boxes forces you to connect with them,” writes our Village Voice author. It may well be, he notes, “one of the few kinds of formal research left. You can’t google — you have to think about what you want. You have to talk to an archivist, and find the right box, and go through that box.”