Friday, March 29, AD 2024 12:21am

Historical Rubbish

 

 

I used to belong to the Society for Military History.  I withdrew my membership yesterday when I was informed by the Society that it had signed on to the following resolution by the American Historical Association.  Below is that resolution with my commentary:

The American Historical Association strongly condemns the executive order issued by President Donald J. Trump on January 27 purportedly “protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States.” Historians look first to evidence: deaths from terrorism in the United States in the last fifteen years have come at the hands of native-born citizens and people from countries other than the seven singled out for exclusion in the order. Attention to evidence raises the question as to whether the order actually speaks to the dangers of foreign terrorism.

The resolution starts out with a sophistical piece of verbal sleight of hand.  Note the use of 15 years as the relevant time scale.  Why?  Why not 20 years or 25 years?  Because if a time scale longer than 15 years were used, 9-11 would be included, and the initial statement would be rendered false.  As an attorney, and familiar with weasel worded arguments, I have nothing but contempt for this type of lie of omission.

It is more clear that the order will have a significant and detrimental impact on thousands of innocent people, whether inhabitants of refugee camps across the world who have waited months or even years for interviews scheduled in the coming month (now canceled), travelers en route to the United States with valid visas or other documentation, or other categories of residents of the United States, including many of our students and colleagues.

Actually the Administration acted swiftly to fix the Executive Order for green card holders.  As for refugees, this was intended to be a temporary ban until proper vetting procedures could be put into place.  Last year the Director of the FBI testified before Congress that then current vetting procedures were inadequate.

The AHA urges the policy community to learn from our nation’s history. Formulating or analyzing policy by historical analogy admittedly can be dangerous; context matters. But the past does provide warnings, especially given advantages of hindsight. What we have seen before can help us understand possible implications of the executive order. The most striking example of American refusal to admit refugees was during the 1930s, when Jews and others fled Nazi Germany. A combination of hostility toward a particular religious group combined with suspicions of disloyalty and potential subversion by supposed radicals anxious to undermine our democracy contributed to exclusionist administrative procedures that slammed shut the doors on millions of refugees. Many were subsequently systematically murdered as part of the German “final solution to the Jewish question.” Ironically, President Trump issued his executive order on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

An organization that purports to represent American historians should do a better job with history.  As of 1939 the US had admitted 95,000 German Jewish refugees.  This was out of a total of 282,000 German Jewish refugees, and 117,000 Austrian Jewish refugees, who had emigrated from Nazi Germany, including Austria, up to 1939.

 

Conversely, when refugees have found their way to our shores, the United States has benefited from their talents and energy. Our own discipline has been enriched by individuals fleeing their homelands. The distinguished historian of Germany Hajo Holborn arrived in 1934 from Germany. Gerda Lerner, a major force in the rise of women’s history, fled Austria in 1939. Civil War historian Gabor Boritt found refuge in the United States after participating in the 1956 uprising in Hungary. More recently, immigration scholar Maria Cristina Garcia fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba with her parents in 1961. The list is long and could be replicated in nearly every discipline.

Immigrants have made a positive contribution to the life of the US.  This is correct and is also a complete red herring since the Executive Order was not a permanent ban on immigration from the seven nations involved.

We have good reason to fear that the executive order will harm historians and historical research both in the United States and abroad. The AHA represents teachers and researchers who study and teach history throughout the world. Essential to that endeavor are interactions with foreign colleagues and access to archives and conferences overseas. The executive order threatens global scholarly networks our members have built up over decades. It establishes a religious test for scholars, favoring Christians over Muslims from the affected countries; and it jeopardizes both travel and the exchange of ideas upon which all scholarship ultimately depends. It directly threatens individuals currently studying history in our universities and colleges, as well as our ability to attract international students in the future. It also raises the possibility that other countries may retaliate by imposing similar restrictions on American teachers and students. By banning these nations’ best and brightest from attending American universities, the executive order is likely to increase anti-Americanism among their next generation of leaders, with fearsome consequences for our future national security.

The nations involved are not democracies and already impose substantial restrictions on historical research.  The terrorist organizations operating in those nations, or funded by elements within those nations, of course already pose substantial dangers to Americans traveling throughout the Middle East.

Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, like many of his colleagues before and since, did think historically in ways that should inform consideration of President Trump’s executive order. In a 1989 dissent (Skinner v. Railway Executives Association), Justice Marshall observed: “History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in time of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure. The World War II Relocation–camp cases and the Red Scare and McCarthy-era internal subversion cases are only the most extreme reminders that when we allow fundamental freedoms to be sacrificed in the name of real or perceived exigency, we invariably come to regret it.”

I rather wish  someone had asked Justice Marshall to enumerate the restrictions on civil liberties during the Civil War by the Lincoln Administration that he believed should be regretted in historical hindsight.  The truth of course is that such restrictions have to be looked at in their historical context, something that this resolution sadly fails to do.

 

 

 

 

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Phillip
Phillip
Thursday, February 23, AD 2017 7:02am

“An organization that purports to represent American historians should do a better job with history. As of 1939 the US had admitted 95,000 German Jewish refugees. This was out of a total of 282,000 German Jewish refugees who had emigrated from Nazi Germany up to 1939.”

Do you have a source? I have a friend who would benefit from that info.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, February 23, AD 2017 7:18am

See KC Johnson (a mainline Democrat out in the world but hard right in History departments today). The race-class-gender narrative has pretty much consumed American history and people seeking the latest in conventional topics therein sometimes have to consult work published 35 years ago. What he doesn’t say is what’s happened to American history is what happened to sociology and anthropology earlier – it’s an apologetical discipline that works to defend contentious propositions favored by the academic clerisy as a subcuture. See Johnson’s discussion of Prof. Sarah Deutch of Duke, who has no business in a classroom.

bill bannon
bill bannon
Thursday, February 23, AD 2017 7:44am

I just cancelled the NY Times which I liked at the data reporting level in non political pieces but their data is way biased once it’s Trump related….half the daily initial articles are about Trump….negatively.

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Thursday, February 23, AD 2017 10:44am

The sad state of historical study in the US. There was an excellent piece in the WSJ about dismissing the West altogether, but I don’t have a subscription. I saw the whole before I lost it and when I tried to pull it back up, it hit me with the subscription bit. But it shows what Ross Douthat said a couple weeks back. We are really a clash between two sides that see America (and to a greater extent the Christian West) as either good or evil. And it appears more and more the academics are joining with the evil assessment. Which makes you wonder. If history is written by the winners (and therefore able to be dismissed), and since it’s clear that the Left has won most of the academic world over to itself, does that mean the Left is the winner? And does that therefore mean we can take its approach to history with the same grain of salt?

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, February 23, AD 2017 1:47pm

I keep a HS AP American History text which I reference whenever I need to.

The post-modern History texts mostly are agit-prop (agitation and propaganda). Plus, the current crop of students and teachers can’t handle the material as we could in the mid-1960’s.

The leftists long since took over education. It’s not their faults that they’re functional illiterates. They represent generations of American “students” that have been corrupted with so-called American Studies classes that solely taught left-wing propaganda, PC victim groups, calumnies, and the trashing of uber-evil America.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, February 23, AD 2017 1:53pm

We are really a clash between two sides that see America (and to a greater extent the Christian West) as either good or evil. And it appears more and more the academics are joining with the evil assessment. Which makes you wonder. If history is written by the winners (and therefore able to be dismissed), and since it’s clear that the Left has won most of the academic world over to itself, does that mean the Left is the winner?

1. What is the function of intellectuals, but to tell us things are not as ordinary people see them and experience them?

2. Trashing your ancestors can be a means for a clerisy to allocate to itself the authority over value scales.

History isn’t written by the winners, but by the intelligentsia of the day, some of whom may have integrity. See the Spanish Civil War historiography.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Thursday, February 23, AD 2017 2:03pm

Back to Sarah Deutch. Students in her classes at Duke got treated to a mess of topical blather about how the assault on Crystal Gail Mangum was a manifestation of a repeated pattern in American history and all too common today. We later learned that Crystal Gail Mangum concocted it out of whole cloth in an improvisation meant to avert a civil commitment. We also know (if we examine the statistical reports of the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics) that multi-assailant rapes of black women by white men are so rare they cannot be enumerated with ordinary survey research. (In fact, white-on-black rape of any description is unusual. There might be one or two a year in an ordinary metropolitan settlement the size of Durham). So, here you have Prof. Deutch, well paid by Duke and with a mess of professional accolades, spouting sociological fantasies to her students (and what are certainly known by the quants in the sociology department there to be fantasies). A year or so later, she crosses paths with Ralph Luker at an AHA conference. Luker discovers to his astonishment that Prof. Deutch was unable to digest the reality that the complaint against the three Duke students was a fabrication and proven as such by the state Attorney-General. “You mean about the charges being dropped…” she tells Luker. Not many people have minds which work that way, but Duke University under William Chafe’s regime was pleased to hire them.

The original Mr. X
The original Mr. X
Thursday, February 23, AD 2017 2:26pm

The most striking example of American refusal to admit refugees was during the 1930s, when Jews and others fled Nazi Germany.

And I wonder what the person writing this press release would have said at the time. “No, we can’t prioritise Jews fleeing from persecution, that would be setting a religious test!”?

Dr Peter Williams
Dr Peter Williams
Friday, February 24, AD 2017 4:24am

Well done Donald. Glad to hear that members of SMH in the USA (I am in Australia) have resigned their
membership, as I have done, because SMH signed on to the resolution of the American Historical Association.

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