Tag: history

Drezner Picks on Historians

~ Michael A. Innes ~ 6 Comments

Thanks to Dan Drezner for exposing Tom Coburn’s ridiculous initiative to cut National Science Foundation money to political science… except in Drezner’s nightmare vision of a world without political science funding, historians would be one of the few remaining sources, along with (parodying Coburn) “CNN, pollsters, pundits…candidates, and political parties”, of knowledge about political behavior.

Horrors.

As an academic discipline, history is sometimes considered an art, sometimes a “science”, which says more about the intended readability of the discipline’s output than anything else. In terms of philosophies and practice of history, there’s a disciplinary truism, wie es eigentlich gewesen – telling it like it is – that many would argue is more “empirical” (not quantitative, which is something else) in its reading of evidence and “scientific” in its rigorous adherence to scholarly method, than a lot of the political “science” that gets pushed out. Lumping historians in with the media and punditocracy  is just as silly as Coburn’s argument that knowledge of political behavior should be limited to those fields.

Human Rights Watch & Nazi Memorabilia

~ Michael A. Innes ~ 1 Comment

Sharon Weinberger’s got an interesting post up at Danger Room on Mark Garlasco, “a former Pentagon official” who “rose to prominence as a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, looking at, among other things, Israel’s use of white phosphorous during Operation Cast Lead.” Weinberger writes that Garlasco, who “has also worked on reports looking at civilian casualties in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia, among others,” has just been suspended from Human Rights Watch after being outed on the web as an alleged Nazi paraphernalia fetishist.

Weinberger makes some good points about the case, and notes the cultural and legal implications, at least in Germany, of collecting Nazi relics and artifacts.  I thought that was interesting. When I was based in Sarajevo a few years ago, I’d come across old Nazi paraphernalia all the time.  Unit patches from the 1992-1995 Yugoslav wars were commonly available, including a range of mujahedin unit insignia and even one of the Black Swans, an Iranian sponsored and trained paramilitary. But there’s also a market among dealers in the former Yugoslav states for the older, WWII Nazi stuff, sourced out of Croatia – the Independent State of Croatia was a Nazi puppet state, and where the Nazis first trialed a lot of the death camp technologies used later in the war.