zenpundit.com

“CALLLING ALL CZARS”

Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan: November 16, 1581 by Il’ia Efimovich Repin . Probably not the kind of czar everyone has in mind.

The blogosphere is abuzz with the inability of the Bush administration to find an impressive figure to become “the War Czar” having suffered four rejections from high ranking retired military officers (this mirrors an inability to fill key posts in the intelligence community). There are strong reactions from Left, Right and Center, generally negative. I will ask a different question, however:

Why are Americans in love with the “Czar”metaphor?

First, we are a liberty-loving democracy without an autocratic tradition. We like inefficient government with lots of checks and balances, staggered electoral terms, judicial review and leaks to the media. Secondly, it is not as if the”Czars” ( henceforth spelled correctly as “Tsar”) have an impressive track record that we should be following, just read the Marquis de Custine sometime.

Tsar Paul was mad and several others were feebleminded; Catherine the Great was an usurper and poseur French intellectual-wannabe; Tsar Nicholas I and Alexander III were iron-fisted tyrants; and the last Tsar, Nicholas II ” the Unlucky” was a complete incompetent who ended up being slaughtered in a basement by third-rate Bolshevik revolutionaries who threw the body of Russia’s last Autocrat down a mineshaft. Because of Nicholas, Russians suffered seventy years of Communist totalitarianism, terror, famine and poverty. Hoo-boy! I want him running the war in Iraq! He did such a great job on the Eastern Front!

Even the “good Tsars” were no great shakes. Peter the Great was a far-seeing modernizer but his namesake capital, St. Petersburg rests upon unnumbered bones of the serfs who toiled in the swampy mire to build it. Russia’s equivalent to Abraham Lincoln, Alexander II “the Tsar-Liberator” freed the serfs but left them landless and impoverished, ended his life being blown up by an anarchist’s bomb. These two top the Tsar-list; it goes downhill from there.

And then of course, there is Ivan Grozny or “Ivan the Terrible”, the terrifying medieval Tsar whom Stalin idolized as a role model. It was Ivan who drove away the ferocious Tatar hordes, unleashed Russia’s first secret police, the Oprichnina, had his nobles torn apart by dogs and even killed his own son in a fit of blind rage. Tsar Ivan was feared by all of Russia’s neighbors and none dared stand against him.

Hmmm….maybe that’s exactly the kind of “czar” we need after all.

WAR AND STOICISM

James McCormick at Chicago Boyz has a tour de force post up “Sherman — Stoic Warriors“; an essay-review of Stoic Warriors: The Ancient Philosophy behind the Military Mind by Dr. Nancy Sherman of Georgetown University. An excerpt:

“For many months, I’ve been grabbing “Stoic Warriors” filled with resolve to finish it and write up a summary. Ethics professor Nancy Sherman reviews the principles of Greco-Roman Stoicism and discusses whether this ancient philosophical tradition can offer something to the modern American military. I’ve had a long-standing interest in military matters and Roman culture. I’ve read a recent academic attempt to resurrect Stoicism as a serious modern philosophy. So I ordered Stoic Warriors with great anticipation, moments after seeing its publication announcement on Amazon. This should be a compelling read, I thought. Yet within minutes of first picking up “Stoic Warriors,” my mind would wander and I inevitably found something more urgent to do. Such as write reviews of forty other books. The cycle of try-and-fail repeated many times, despite the book’s solid writing and apt anecdotes.

How she reached her conclusion and how I reached mine, is the subject of a very long blog post”

Indeed, I am still in mid-read. Pour yourself something strong and dive in.

A LITTLE HISTORY

I hope to have a number of posts of my own up later today but here are two on history and historians that caught my eye:

“When Archivists Deal with Power Players” by Dr. Maarja Krusten

I “know” Maarja from our interaction on H-Diplo and at HNN and she brings a wealth of knowledge to the table regarding the politics of the National Archives ( interestingly enough, she had, if I recall, doubts about Bush’s appointment of Cold War scholar Allen Weinstein to head the National Archives, something I strongly supported; I’m betting her opinion of Weinstein is more favorable today). The piece will also interest those readers, like Lexington Green, who have an interest in Richard Nixon.

“Training the Next Generation of Historians ” by Kevlvn

A great post at ProgressiveHistorians on the future of the historical profession and the relationship that universities and professional historians could have in improving the education of K-12 students in history and their own teaching of undergraduates (the quality level of which, to put it kindly, is uneven). A commendable post and one that touches on the larger question of the mission of the American university in the 21st century.

COURT HISTORIAN: ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. 1917-2007

Historian and public intellectual, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. passed away the other day at the age of 89. Dr. Schlesinger was an author of extensive scholarship, I myself recall reading his Age of Jackson as an undergraduate and I have a number of his Kennedy books, where Schlesinger veered into hagiography, on my shelf. It is difficult to separate the man from most of the subjects on which he wrote, the New Deal and the Kennedy administration seemed to be part and parcel of Schlesinger’s very identity.

Schlesinger used his vast knowledge of history as much to shape public debate as to inform the public about history. His “Vital Center“, published in 1949, helped separate American liberalism from its myopic indulgence of international Communism that was a de rigeur attitude among intellectuals in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Schlesinger’s career was one of defending liberalism, which he equated with the values of the New Deal and Camelot, and it’s icons, from the attacks of conservatives and leftist radicals alike. Schlesinger, like his contemporary and nemesis, Richard Nixon, stayed ” in the the arena” of the battle of ideas until his last breath.

I often disagreed with Schlesinger’s take on historical interpretation, moreso his politics, but one must acknowledge that as a historian, Schlesinger was a giant.

LINKS:

David Greenberg

Jonathan Zimmerman

Alonzo Hamby

IMPERIAL CONSPIRATORS

“Tsuji is the type of man who, given the chance, would start World War III without any misgivings.”
CIA file on Class A war criminal and G-2 agent Colonel Masanobu Tsuji

Declassified intelligence papers reveal that Japanese agents of SCAP’s G-2 military intelligence plotted a postwar coup to bring an ultranationist government to power in Japan. Key figures included the Yakuza boss Yoshio Kodama who had deep ties with the most pro-Nazi faction of wartime Naimusho bureaucrats, Colonel Takushiro Hattori, once Tojo’s private secretary and the infamous Colonel Masanobu Tsuji.

Deeply involved in pre-war Army political intrigue and known to his troops as ” the god of operations”, Tsuji was a fanatical ultranationalist with backing from members of Japan’s imperial family who did not shy from bullying senior generals. One of the authors of the Bataan Death March, Tsuji had also been implicated in the death of the King of Thailand in 1946 ( Tsuji had planned the invasion of that country during WWII) yet escaped prosecution as a war criminal, being elected to the Diet before disappearing mysteriously in Laos in 1961.

Evidently, the CIA regarded Tsuji, who had pulled the plug on the coup, as completely useless as an intelligence asset.