Nina Paley’s “This Land Is Mine”

I first posted this more than 11 years ago.  Sadly, it is still relevant.  

Click on A Guide to Who’s Killing Who for an explanation.

US defeat in Ukraine and the coming world order

THE UKRAINE WAR AND THE EURASIAN WORLD ORDER by Glenn Diesen (2024)

I’ve long felt that I’m living at a turning point in history, comparable to the eve of the French Revolution or the First World War.  There are so many things that can’t go on as they are, although what will or should replace them is not clear.

Glenn Diesen is a Norwegian political scientist whom I watch frequently on podcasts on The Duran web site, such as the one above.  His new book is a history of relations among nations, the reasons for the imminent end of the U.S.-backed “rules-based international order,” and how the Ukraine conflict fits into this.

The first printing of the book seems to be sold out.  Rather than wait for a second printing, I ordered a PDF version of the book, which is something I rarely do.

Diesen says there are two basic frameworks for relations among states.  One is hegemony, when the most powerful state imposes order on all the rest.  The other is a balance of power, with no one state allowed to dominate all the rest.

After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the aspirational goal of Western European Christians was unity under the rule of the Pope and a reconstituted Holy Roman Empire.  The Pope crowned Charlemagne as successor to the Caesars in the year 800 CE.  His empire broke apart after his death, but was reconstituted in 962 CE by Otto I and continued as Europe’s dominant power for centuries.

In theory, all the other kings and nobles were vassals of the Emperor and subject to the rule of the Pope.  Conflicts between Pope and Emperor lessened the prestige and power of both, and the goal of European unity faded and was sometimes resisted in practice, but did not entirely disappear.

A turning point came with the Thirty Years War in 1618-1648.  It began as a religious war in which Catholic Austria sought to suppress rebel Protestant German princes.  Catholic France and Protestant Sweden joined the conflict, and it became the bloodiest conflict in European history prior to the 20th century.

The war ended with the Treaty of Westphalia, in which it was agreed that the rulers of each principality has the right to determine their subjects’ religion without outside interference.  This was the origin of what is called the Westphalian system.  In this system, each ruler agrees to respect the others’ sovereignty and right to exist.

Garry Trudeau on teaching Civil War history

Protestantism and the decline of capitalism

The United States is in decline and is taking the other Western (that is, NATO) nations down with it. If you want evidence for this, look around you.

Emmanuel Todd

A French sociologist and historical named Emmanuel Todd has written a provocative book, entitled The Defeat of the West, analyzing the reasons for the decline. 

One reason he gives is the decline of Protestantism, historically the core of the identity of the USA and the most progressive parts of Europe. He gives additional reasons, but this is the most interesting one.

Todd has a track record that makes him worthy of attention. In 1976, when he was 26, he wrote The Final Fall: the Decomposition of the Soviet Union, predicting the fall of the USSR. In 2001, he wrote After the Empire: the Breakdown of American Order, predicting the failure of the U.S. bid for world power.

His latest book hasn’t yet been published in English, but I get his basic ideas from interviews and reviews.  Here’s part of what he said in an interview with Le Figaro.

My assessment of the West’s defeat is based on three factors.

First, the industrial deficiency of the United States with the revelation of the fictitious nature of the American GDP.  In my book, I deflate this GDP and show the deep-rooted causes of industrial decline: the inadequacy of engineering training and, more generally the decline of the level of education, which began in 1965 in the United States.

More profoundly, the disappearance of American Protestantism is the second factor in the fall of the West.  My book is basically a sequel to The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Max Weber.  He rightly thought, on the eve of the 1914 war, that the rise of the West was at its heart that of the Protestant world – England, the United States, Germany unified by Prussia, Scandinavia.

France’s good fortune was to be geographically close to the leading pack.  Protestantism had produced a high educational level, unprecedented in human history, universal literacy, because it required that every faithful be able to read the Holy Scriptures themselves.  In addition, the fear of damnation and the need to feel chosen by God induced a work ethic, a strong individual and collective morality. … … Educational advances and the work ethic have produced a considerable economic and industrial advance.

Today, symmetrically, the recent collapse of Protestantism has triggered an intellectual decline, a disappearance of the work ethic and mass greed (official name: neoliberalism): ascendency turning into the fall of the West.

This analysis of the religious element does not denote any nostalgia or moralizing lament in me: it is a historical observation. Moreover, the racism associated with Protestantism is also disappearing and the United States had its first black president, Obama. We can only congratulate ourselves on this.

General Grant on the Civil War

Ulysses S. Grant, after serving two terms as President, took a world tour.  One of the people he met was Otto von Bismarck, chancellor of the newly unified German Empire.

Grant was one of the best Presidents on civil rights, second only to Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson.

Hat tip to Lambert Strether.

A Palestinian history of Zionism and its wars

THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR ON PALESTINE: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi (2020)

Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi, a member of the faculty of Columbia University, has written a history of Zionism from the point of view of the Palestinians, a view that we in the USA rarely if ever hear.  

He is a member of an old Palestinian family, with roots going back into the Ottoman Empire, and his history is, in part, a history of his own family.  I emphasize the personal history in this post, although he himself mentions it only in passing. 

We in the USA are told that Israel’s history is a story of a heroic struggle by Zionists against Arab terrorists to establish a safe haven for Jews from Nazis and other antisemites. Alternatively, we are told it is a history of a tragic unavoidable conflict between two peoples, Jews and Palestinians, with equal claims to the same territory.

Rashid Khalidi said neither story is true.  He said the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an ongoing colonial war waged by an indigenous people against conquerors from afar.  In his story, the Jewish settlers of Israel are equivalent to the Dutch and English settlers in South Africa and the French settlers in Algeria.

Zionists were never underdogs, he wrote.  They had the backing of the British Empire and then of the United States, as well as a powerful global network of supporters and donors.  

Palestinian Arabs never had anything equivalent, he wrote.  Even Arab governments that gave them lip service always had their own agendas.

His book is organized around six specific historical episodes, which he called “declarations of war” against the Palestinian people.     

Must Hamas be destroyed? Can it be?

Hamas is the face of the Palestinian war with Zionism.  The eyes of the world are on that war, in which tens of thousands, mainly on the Palestinian side, have already been killed, with no end in sight.

Israel’s government says it will continue the war until Hamas is totally destroyed, while the U.S. government defines Hamas as a terrorist organization.  In the U.S., you can be criminally prosecuted for contributing to a Hamas-related charity.

But just what is Hamas?  Where did it come from?  How did it come to rule Gaza?  Why did it launch the Oct. 7 attack on Israel?  What are its ultimate aims?

What follows is my effort to answer these questions as accurately and as impartially as I can.   In order to be impartial, I refer to territory of the former Palestine Mandate, the land “between the river and the sea,” as the Holy Land rather than as Israel or Palestine.

Hamas was founded in 1987 in a refugee camp in Gaza.  It arose in opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization’s willingness to negotiate a “two-state” solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

That was a concession on the part of the PLO.  The PLO’s original demand was a “right of return” of all Palestinians to land from which they’s been driven off, followed by creation of a unified secular democratic state with equal rights for all.  

Such a “one-state” solution was unacceptable to Israel.  It would have meant Palestinians would be in the majority and Israel would not longer be a Jewish state.

Commentators said Israel was offering “land for peace,” but the reality was that this was what the PLO was doing.  The PLO was offering to allow 7 million Palestinians to be restricted to 22 percent of the Holy Land and leave 78 percent to 7 million Israelis, in return for self-government in that 22 percent.

Hamas said this was equivalent to surrender.  Its 1988 manifesto called for the Holy Land to be an Arab Muslim land, with its capital in Jerusalem, under Islamic law (although with tolerance for all religions).

 The PLO had defined the conflict as ethnic Arabs (including Arab Christians) vs. ethnic Jews. The 1988 Hamas manifesto defined the conflict as Muslims fighting infidels and unbelievers.  Hamas’s manifesto expressed respect for the PLO, but rejected its secularism.

The Israeli government actually looked with favor on Hamas in the early stages.  It was seen a fringe movement that undermined Palestinian unity and weakened the PLO’s negotiating position.

All this was taking place during what Palestinians call the First Intifada, or Uprising.  It was sparked when an Israeli driver in Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp crashed his vehicle, causing the death of four Palestinians.  Rioting broke out and spread.

Palestinians took nonviolent actions like mass boycotts and refusing to work jobs in Israel, but also attacked Israelis with rocks, Molotov cocktails, and occasionally firearms. Police struck back and Palestinian fatalities dramatically outpaced Israeli ones.

The rebellion lasted until PLO-Israel negotiations produced the Oslo Accords of 1993.  The PLO recognized the government of Israel as legitimate and here to stay, and Israel recognized the PLO as the sole representative of the Palestinian people.   PLO leader Yassir Arafat was put in charge of a new Palestinian Authority, with the understanding it would transition into an independent Palestinian state.

What if the Jewish state was in Europe?

JUDENSTAAT: The novel of the Jewish state in Germany by Simone Zelitch (2016)

Palestinians frequently say that they sympathize with victims of the Holocaust and their desire for a Jewish state, but they see no reason why it should be erected in their land, while the Germans, the perpetrators of the Holocaust, enjoyed 75 years of unbroken prosperity.

Judenstaat is an alternate-history novel in which there was no Balfour declaration and a Jewish state was founded not in the Holy Land, but on German soil.  It is a literary curiosity, not for everyone, but I found it interesting.

The novel is not a parallel or counterpoint to the history of the actual Israel.  Rather it is a meditation on Jewish destiny and European history. It also is a murder mystery.

The founder and first president of Judenstaat is one Leopold Stein, a representative of the Socialist Labor Bund, a real-life revolutionary Jewish organization founded in 1897 and primarily based in Poland, Lithuania and Russia.

Bundists fought persecution of Jews, but they also fought for the rights of all working people and not in a utopian future, but in the here and now.  Its motto was, “We are here.”

Stein somehow makes his way to Yalta in 1945 and gets permission from Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin to agree to establish a Jewish state on German territory, as retaliation and reparations for the crimes of Nazism.

Stalin sees a nonaligned but friendly Jewish state as a potentially useful window to the West, like the Hong Kong Autonomous Zone in China.

The Judenstaat is not religious and does not claim continuity with ancient Israel. It claims to be the nation of the Ashkenazi, descendants of Jews invited by Charlemagne in the Rhineland.  

Judenstaat claims the heritage of the great German-speaking Jews’ contribution to European culture, starting with Moses Mendelssohn and including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, and interprets the Holocaust as a repudiation of that liberal culture.

The official language of Judenstaat is German, not Yiddish or Hebrew.  The flag of Judenstadt is a yellow star upon a field of blue-and-white stripes, like the uniform of an Auschwitz prisoner.

The protagonist of the novel is Judit Klemmer, a documentary film-maker assigned to make a film commemorating the 40th anniversary of the founding of Judenstaat in 1948.  

In the process of gathering information, she learns that the official version of Judenstaat’s history covers up inconvenient facts.  She also picks up clues to the unsolved murder of her husband, a member of  Judenstaat’s despised Saxon minority.

The Saxons are the previous inhabitants of the land on which Judenstaat is established.  Most of them have left, as part of the ethnic cleansing of German populations which, in actual history, took place in East Prussia, Silesia and the Sudetenland. 

There was no life-and-death struggle with the Saxons and no legacy of decades of conflict and threat.  So, unlike the real Israel, it is not militaristic.  Its people don’t feel under threat.

The history and lessons of the Ukraine war

Retired  Ambassador Charles W. Freeman Jr. recently gave an excellent, impartial presentation on the Ukraine situation. Here are some highlights and a link to his full presentation.

Every government that is a party to the Ukraine War — Kiev, Moscow, Washington and other NATO capitals — has been guilty of various degrees of self-deception and blundering misfeasance.  The consequences for all have been dire.  For Ukraine, they have been catastrophic.  A radical rethinking of policy by all concerned is long overdue. 

[snip]

Ukrainian troops 2016

At no point has the United States government or NATO declared that the protection of Ukraine or Ukrainians, as opposed to exploiting their bravery to take down Russia, is the central American objective.  

In April 2022, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin reiterated that U.S. aid to Ukraine was intended to weaken and isolate Russia and thereby deprive it of any credible capacity to make war in future.  

Quite a few American politicians and pundits have extolled the benefits to having Ukrainians rather than Americans sacrifice their lives for this purpose.  Some have gone further and advocated the breakup of the Russian Federation as a war aim.  

If you are Russian, you don’t have to be paranoid to see such threats as existential.  Putin assesses U.S. war aims as directed at humbling the Russian Federation strategically and, if possible, overthrowing its government, and dismembering it.  The United States has not disputed this assessment.

[snip]

In mid-March 2022, the government of Turkey and Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett mediated between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, who tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement.  The agreement provided that Russia would withdraw to its position on Feb.23, when it controlled part of the Donbass region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.  

A meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Voldodymyr Zelensky was in the process of being arranged to finalize this agreement, which the negotiators had initialed ad referendum — meaning subject to the approval of their superiors.

Johnson & Zelensky 2022

On March 28, 2022. President Zelensky publicly affirmed that Ukraine was ready for neutrality combined with security guarantees as part of a peace agreement with Russia.  But on April 9 British Prime Minister Boris Johnson made a surprise visit to Kiev.  During this visit, he reportedly urged Zelensky not to meet Putin because (1) Putin was a war criminal and weaker than he seemed.  He should and could be crushed rather than accommodated; and (2) even if Ukraine was ready to end the war, NATO was not.

Zelensky’s proposed meeting with Putin was then called off.  Putin declared that talks with Ukraine had come to a dead end.  

He campaigned, served in office, while in jail

James Michael Curley

James Michael Curley was a key figure in Massachusetts politics during the first half of the 20th century.

He served four terms as mayor of Boston, two terms in the U.S. Congress and one term as governor of Massachusetts, as well as a number of other offices.

He was known as “the mayor of the poor.”  He was a champion of poor Irish Catholic working people in Boston and an enemy of the Yankee “Boston Brahmin” elite.

He was convicted of crimes twice during his political career.  He served two jail terms, one while running for office and the other while serving as mayor.  None of this mattered to his hard-core followers.

He was born in 1874 to a poor Irish immigrant family.  His father, a day laborer, died when he was 10.  His mother supported the family as a scrubwoman.  

Curley worked full-time from the age of 12 and dropped out of school at 15 to work as a grocery deliveryman.  He was politically ambitious and found time to be active in civil affairs and politics and gain a reputation.

Active in the Democratic Party, he was elected to the Boston Common Council in 1901 and the Massachusetts state legislature in 1903.

He took a civil service examination for a constituent who wanted to qualify to be a mail carrier, and was arrested and charged with fraud in 1903.  He was sentenced to serve 60 days in jail and began his sentence Nov. 7, 1904.

While in jail, he won the Democratic primary for alderman by 1,200 votes out of 3,200 cast, and served until 1909.  His campaign rallying cry was, “He did it for a friend.”  Hundreds demonstrated in the streets to show their support for him.

Later he served in Congress (1911-1914), as Mayor of Boston (1914–1918, 1922–1926 and 1930–1934) and as Governor of Massachusetts (1935-1937).  After some defeats, he made a comeback, serving in Congress again (1943-47) and as mayor again (1947–1950).

When he was first elected major,  he began a vast construction program.  Streets were ripped up, transit lines extended, beaches and playgrounds laid out, hospitals built, and services expanded, without regard for cost.  There was a job for virtually every jobless man in the city.

Tax assessments were kept low for homeowners and raised for downtown businesses.  When the city treasury ran low, he borrowed money.  If a banker was reluctant to lend, Curley would threaten to start a rumor the bank was insolvent and create a run on the bank “a mile long.”

Unlike his predecessor and rival, John F. Fitzgerald (“Honey Fitz”), the maternal grandfather of John F. Kennedy, and unlike other machine politicians, Curley never took kickbacks from city employees, but only from contractors and others who did business with the city.

One of his first actions reportedly was to order long-handled mops so that scrubwomen who worked for the city would not have to get down on their hands and knees to wash floors.

He received anyone who wanted to see him about jobs, favors, or assistance, without appointment.  Decisions were made on the spot.  If a request could not be granted, Curley said so and why.  He talked to an average of 200 persons a day, 50,000 in a year.

While helping the poor, Curley also helped himself.  He had a huge mansion built, with custom-made shamrock-shaped shutters.  Critics asked how he could afford to build a $60,000 house on a $15,000 lot on a salary of $10,000 a year.  None of this affected his popularity.

How the jubilee idea inspired the oppressed

Peter Linebaugh

George Rosso, a reader of this blog, sent me a link to an article called Jubilating–Or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, with Some Success  by a radical writer named Peter Linebaugh.  It was published in Radical History Review 50 (1991).  

This article is a much fuller account of the Jubilee concept – the periodic cancelling of debts, freeing of slaves and returning of land to its original owners – than does Michael Hudson’s book, which was mainly about the Jubilee as practiced in ancient Near Eastern history.  

It tells how the Jubilee idea in the Christian Old Testament inspired slaves, the dispossessed and other oppressed people in modern history.  It continues to inspire the Latin American liberation theologians and Palestinians (many of.whom are Christians) trying to reclaim their land.

Linebaugh went into the Jubilee idea and its connection with liberation movements more deeply than Hudson did and of course more deeply than I am doing here.  If you care about this topic, you should read it in full and not be content with my summary.  But I’ll try to hit a few highlights.  

I’ll start with the Jubilee song of Thomas Spence, who wrote it in 1782 (sung to the tune of “America” or “God Save the King”).

I

Hark! how the Trumpet’s sound,

Proclaims the Land around

The Jubilee!

Tells all the Poor oppress’d,

No more shall they be cess’d;

Nor Landlords more molest

Their Property.

II

Rents t’ourselves now we pay,

Dreading no Quarter-day,

Fraught with Distress

Welcome that day draws near,

For then our rents we share,

Earth’s rightful Lords we are,

Ordain’d for this.

And all the World releas’d 

from Misery.

The Fir-trees all rejoice,

And Cedars lift their voice,

Ceas’d now the Feller’s noise

Long rais’d by thee!

IV

The Sceptre now is broke,

Which with continual Stroke

The Nations smote!.

Hell from beneath doth rise,

To meet thus Lofty Eyes,

From the most pompous size,

How brought to nought!

And all the World releas’d

from Misery.

The Fir-trees all rejoice,

And Cedars lift their voice,

Ceas’d now the Feller’s noise

Long rais’d by thee!

V

Since then this Jubilee

Sets all at Liberty

Let us be glad,

Behold each one return

To their Right, and their own,,

No more like Doves to mourn,

By Landlords sad!

Do we need a 21st century debt jubilee?

“AND FORGIVE THEM THEIR DEBTS”: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year by Michael Hudson (2018)

Michael Hudson is an economist who says that the chief economic problem in the world today is that individuals and nations owe more debt than they ever can repay.  And “debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be repaid.”

He has written in many books and articles that, unless there is a writedown of debt, lenders will grow richer and richer and the indebted public will grow poorer and poorer until there is an economic collapse.

In this 2018 book, he argues that debt write-downs actually were economic policy in the ancient Near East, and are supported by the Hebrew Bible and the teachings of Jesus.

The saying on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land,” is a quote from Leviticus 25: 10.   According to Hudson, this refers forgiveness of debts and freeing of slaves (who are enslaved because they can’t pay their bills) in the periodic Jubilee year.

Such language is now interpreted as an aspirational goal, but Hudson maintains it was intended as policy.

There is reason why, in the Ten Commandments, there are separate commandments for “thou shalt not commit adultery” and “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.”

It meant it was a sin to try to acquire one’s neighbor’s wife as a bondservant in return for payment of debt, along with his ox, his ass, his manservant or maidservant or anything else that is one’s neighbor’s.

When the Lord’s Prayer said, “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” Hudson says, it meant literal debt forgiveness as well as forgiveness of sins.   The word for “debt” in many European and Near Eastern languages is the same as the word for “sin.”

This goes against the grain of present-day thinking, in which debt repayment is regarded as an absolute moral obligation.   True, bankrupts normally don’t have to fear debtors’ prison, as was the law in early 19th century England, let alone be sold into slavery, as was the case in ancient Greece and Rome.

But student debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy and debtors’ prisons are coming back in the form of sentences for contempt of court.  Debt slavery still exists for individuals in some parts of the world, and the international banking system does not show mercy for indebted poor nations.

If an obligation is absolute and unlimited, it is equivalent to a religion.  Debt repayment is regarded as an absolute obligation, and compound interest makes it a potentially unlimited one.  It really is a kind of religion, the service of Mammon.   And the Bible teaches that one cannot serve God and Mammon.

What it was like when the Nazis came to power

THE OPPERMANNS by Lion Feuchtwanger (1933) translated from the German by James Cleugh (1934) with an introduction by Ruth Gruber (2001)

The Oppermanns is about a wealthy, emancipated German Jewish family and their blindness to the rising threat of Nazism until it was nearly too late.

Lion Feuchtwanger, a famous German Jewish author, wrote it as a warning to the world and especially to the world’s Jewish community.  I read it as part of a reading group that wondered whether it has a warning for us today.  I think it does.

The Oppermanns are the third generation of a Jewish family that owns a well-known chain of furniture stores.  They consist of four siblings, Martin, an honest businessman; Edgar, a distinguished physician; Gustav, an intellectual dilettante; and Klara, married to a cynical East European Jew named Jacques Lavendal.

There also is a younger generation – Martin’s son Berthold, who embodies the best of Germany’s cultural heritage; Edgar’s daughter, Ruth, a Zionist; and Jacques’ son Heinrich, who is interested mainly in football.

There also is a minor character, an Oppermann furniture salesman named Herr Wolfsohn, whose apartment is coveted by a Nazi neighbor.

At the outset of the novel, all of them, except brother-in-law Jacques, regard themselves as secure, both as German citizens and as members of their social class.  Jacques compares them in their blindness to French aristocrats on the eve of the French Revolution.

Two of the characters – Berthold and Gustav – stand up to the Nazis and both are crushed.  The other Oppermanns escape, with enough of their wealth to reestablish themselves in other lands.  

They are sad that their beloved Germany is no more, but they are still better off than the vast majority of people, Jewish or not, left behind in Germany.  They are good people as the world goes, but they don’t appreciate how (relatively) fortunate they are.

I have more sympathy with meek, semi-comical Herr Wolfsohn, who gets a chance to immigrate to Palestine and accepts the challenge of learning Hebrew and reinventing himself as a farm laborer.

The central moral question of the novel, asked a number of times in different ways, is whether Berthold and Gustav were heroes or victims.  Or, as young Heinrich puts it, is it better to be “decent” or to be “sensible”?

Berthold and Gustav defied the Nazis in the name of truth and justice, and paid a terrible price.  But, as Heinrich noted, their courage, integrity and self-sacrifice changed nothing.

He resolves that he will not risk his life for the sake of any principle unless, and only then, taking the risk will achieve something that will justify the risk.

Lion Feuchtwanger himself tried to be an effective opponent of the Nazis, while keeping himself out of their hands.  He was in fact interned by French collaborators with the Nazis after the fall of France in 1940, but managed to escape and live to write another day.

The gathering momentum for reparations

This timeline shows the gathering momentum for reparations to black Americans for slavery, Jim Crow and racial discrimination.  It ends in early 2023.

The listings are pulled from Reparations in the United States compiled by Allen J. Davis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  I have not included Indian land claims or any reparations other than to black people.

1863: Over four days In July mobs of white New Yorkers terrorized Black people by roaming the streets from City Hall to Gramercy Park to past 40th Street, setting fire to buildings and killing people. The overall death toll is estimated at between over 100 and over 1,000. Immediately after the riots, the white merchants of New York combined forces to raise money to care for the injured, repair the damaged property, and support the legal and employment needs of the community’s Black people. The shopkeepers raised over $40,000, equivalent to $825,000 today.

1865: On January 12, in the midst of the Civil War, General William T. Sherman and U.S. secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton met with 20 Black leaders in Savannah Georgia. Four days later, General Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 stating that Black people would receive an army mule and not more than forty acres on coastal plains of South Carolina and Georgia. By June, roughly 40,000 Blacks had settled on four hundred thousand acres of land before Confederate landowners, aided by the new Johnson administration, started taking back “their” land.

1866: Southern Homestead Act: “Ex-slaves were given 6 months to purchase land at reasonable rates without competition from white southerners and northern investors. But, owing to their destitution, few ex-slaves were able to take advantage of the program. The largest number that did were located in Florida, numbering little more than 3,000… The program failed.” (Wikipedia)

1878: In 1853, Henrietta Wood was a free black woman living and laboring as a domestic worker in Cincinnati when she was lured across the Ohio River and into the slave state of Kentucky by a white man named Zebulon Ward. Ward sold her to slave traders, who took her to Texas, where she remained enslaved through the Civil War. Wood eventually returned to Cincinnati, and in 1870 sued Ward for $20,000 in damages and lost wages. In 1878, an all-white jury decided in Wood’s favor, with Ward ordered to pay $2,500, perhaps the largest sum ever awarded by a court in the United States in restitution for slavery.

1969: The Black Manifesto was launched in Detroit as one of the first calls for reparations in the modern era. Penned by James Forman, former SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) organizer, and released at the National Black Economic Development Conference, the manifesto demanded $500 million in reparations from predominantly White religious institutions for their role in perpetuating slavery. About $215,000 (other sources say $500,000) was raised from the Episcopalian and Methodist churches through rancorous deliberations that ultimately tore the coalition apart. The money was used to establish organizations such as a black-owned band, television networks, and the Black Economic Research Center.

.

1974: A $10 million out-of-court settlement was reached between the U.S. government and Tuskegee victims, black men who had been unwitting subjects of a study of untreated syphilis, and who did not receive available treatments.

.

1989: Congressman John Conyers, D-Michigan, introduced bill H.R. 3745, which aimed to create the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act. The bill was introduced “[to] address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.” (Preamble)

.

1994: The state of Florida approved $2.1 million for the living survivors of a 1923 racial pogrom that resulted in multiple deaths and the decimation of the Black community in the town of Rosewood.

The rise of Vladimir Putin

PUTIN by Philip Short (2022)

Vladimir Putin is, in my opinion, the most impressive and significant statesman of our age—impressive in his ability, and significant in his impact on the world. 

That does not mean I find him admirable.  He is an autocrat and personally corrupt.   He fits the Machiavellian ideal, and I do not mean this as a slur.

When Putin came to power, Russia was falling apart.  A group of oligarchs called the Seven Bankers dominated Russia’s economy.  The mass of Russians were even poorer than they had been under Communism.  The death rate exceeded the birth rate.  

Under Putin, the Russian economy has been transformed.  The government is solvent.  Foreign debt has been paid, and foreign ownership of important Russia assets has been pushed back.  Demographic decline has been reversed.  Russia has re-emerged as an economic power and a military power to be reckoned with.

Not all these things are because of things Putin did himself, but the leader of a country deserves credit (and blame) for things they allow to happen as well as things they make happen.

In order to understand Russia’s rise, I looked for a good biography of Putin.  Philip Short’s 676-page book is the best I could find.  It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.

Philip Short is a workmanlike British  journalist who has written biographies of Mao Zedong, Pol Pot and François Mitterrand.  

He is not a Russia expert and doesn’t have inside information.  Much of Putin’s life is a mystery to him.  But he has assembled the important known facts of Putin’s life in granular detail.  

While mostly agreeing with the USA-UK consensus view of events, Short made a good faith effort to understand how things look from Putin’s point of view, which few if any other biographers have done.

I think this is the best that can be expected for now.

Book note: Sapphira and the Slave Girl

SAPPHIRA AND THE SLAVE GIRL by Willa Cather (1940)

Sapphira and the Slave Girl is set in Appalachian Virginia in the 1850s and is inspired by stories Willa Cather heard about her great-grandmother.

Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert is the matriarch not only of her own household, but of the backwoods community of Back Creek in Frederick County, Va.

Yet she feels threatened by Nancy, a timid and powerless young slave woman.  The main theme of the novel is the terrible consequences that flow from that.

In Sapphira’s world, an aristocrat such as herself is entitled to deference and obedience, which she in fact receives, not just from black slaves but lower-class whites.  By the same standard, she is obligated to maintain a standard of conduct that manifests her superiority to common people.  

She is gracious, benevolent and forgiving to everyone, black or white, provided they know and accept their place in society. 

She suffers from a crippling, painful and fatal disease called then called dropsy and now called edema—an accumulation of water in the legs due to congestive heart failure.  Formerly a great horsewoman, she now can barely even walk.  Yet she makes few concessions to weakness.  She maintains her routine and exercises authority from her wheelchair.

Her husband, Henry Colbert, is not an aristocrat.  His marriage to Sapphira is based on mutual respect, not passion.

He spends most days and many nights at the flour mill that provides his family with their income.  Sapphira tells him that a real Southern aristocrat would assign a slave or hire someone to do the dirty work.  That’s why a real Southern aristocrat would go broke, Henry replies.

Part of his routine is to have 19-year-old Nancy bring him a cup of coffee at the mill a couple of hours before he goes up to the house for breakfast with his wife.  Nancy feels affection for Henry and wants to please him.  He is like the father she never had.

She takes to plucking a wildflower and bringing it with the coffee.  Henry likes this and comes to feel fatherly affection for Nancy.   Sapphira notices this and doesn’t like it

The reason for Sapphira’s feeling is not clear to me.  Nancy is chaste and naive.  Henry is a completely faithful husband.  As Cather writes, he is committed to observing the terms of his marriage contract, as he would any other contract.

Does Sapphira suspect an erotic relationship? a potential erotic relationship? the appearance of an erotic relationship?  Or was it that she thinks Nancy and Henry have forgotten their “place”?

In any case, she sets out to break up the relationship.  She has a different slave bring Henry his coffee.  Henry objects.  She proposes to sell Nancy.  Henry objects again.

Then she does something truly evil.  She invites Henry’s brother, Martin Colbert, for a long visit.  

Martin Colbert, unlike his brother, is the model of a Virginia gentleman.  He is handsome, well-mannered, charming and a good horseman.  He always pays his gambling debts and, most importantly, never backs down from a fight.  

But in his heart, Martin is as cruel and arrogant as Simon Legree.   He inwardly vows vengeance on Old Sampson, the Colberts’ trusted black foreman, for looking him in the eye without subservience.   He regards black women, and also lower-class white women, as his lawful prey.

Turning points: Vietnam 1965, Ukraine 2023

History doesn’t repeat and historical analogies, in and of themselves, don’t prove anything. But history can provide food for thought.

The USA and its allies are at a turning point in the Ukraine conflict. We’re being told by Ukraine’s leaders that, yes, they’re still on the verge of victory, but nevertheless they may lose unless they get a major infusion of arms and money.

I’m reminded of General Westmoreland’s report on Vietnam in 1965.  He said the South Vietnamese government was not winning, as had been previously reported.  Instead it was on the verge of collapse, unless the USA sent 125,000 troops immediately.

Lyndon Johnson, a strong man who was unwilling to admit defeat, agreed.  In the end 500,000 Americans were sent to Vietnam to fight.  In the end, the USA lost anyway.

Ukraine has been a sinkhole for U.S.-supplied armaments.  They’ve burned through years of production of Javelin missiles and other weapons in a matter of months.  

The choice for the USA is to admit failure now, and give in.  Or to send American troops.  The decision is up to Joe Biden, a weak man who will find it hard to admit defeat.

Back in the 1960s, the United States was at the height of its power as a military and industrial power.  Now both military and industrial strength have been hollowed out.  It is not likely that the U.S. can do to Russia what it failed to do to North Vietnam.

Ukrainian forces have been trying to escalate the war in order to provoke a direct Russia-USA conflict.  This includes attacks on Russian territory, including a drone attack on a Russian Air Force base where nuclear weapons have been stored.  It includes assassination of a Russian media personality, Darya Dugina.  It includes bombardment of a nuclear power plant under Russian control, with risk of another Chernobyl disaster.

I do not blame Ukrainian leaders for seeking a larger war.  Their brave soldiers are being decimated.  Ursula van der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, recently said Ukraine’s armed forces have suffered 100,000 fatal casualties.

They have no obligation to the U.S. government, which led them to believe they could safely join the anti-Russian alliance and suppress the Russian-speaking minority.  Their only hope of victory is to cover their losses by raising the stakes.

But that’s no reason for me, as an American citizen, to support a war that is harming my own country, bringing disaster to Europe and devastating Ukraine.

There is little hope of a compromise peace.  The Russian government perceives the Ukrainian conflict, along with the global sanctions war, as a struggle for national survival.  It does not trust the U.S. government to keep agreements.  It intends to impose its peace terms by force.

I don’t think anybody in the U.S. government perceives it as a war for American national survival, but it is a war to maintain U.S. power.  Defeat in Ukraine will lead to a breakup of the NATO alliance.  The governments that signed up for NATO believed that it was a shield for them against Russian aggression.  They are finding they are the tip of a spear aimed at breaking up Russian power.

The misunderstood legacies of the New Deal

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal had two legacies – a welfare state and a warfare state.

Admirers of FDR focus on the legacy of the 1930s – the creation of Social Security and strengthening of the social safety net, the massive public works programs and job programs, the guarantee of the right to collective bargaining and the growth of a powerful administrative and regulatory state.

But just as important – maybe even more important – is the legacy of the 1940s. The New Deal programs mitigated the Great Depression, but they did not end it.  That only happened with the coming of World War Two and an economic boom based on war production.

The war economy made possible the re-industrialization of the United States.  Wartime investment in manufacturing capacity produced seeming miracles in production that carried over into peacetime for decades.

The New Dealers established military bases in Europe and Asia, the beginning of the empire of bases that exists to this day.  They built the Pentagon.  They created the OSS and then the CIA.  They created the atomic bomb and incorporated the A-bomb into American military strategy.

If not for FDR and the New Deal, the atomic bomb would not have come into existence when it did.

It is not just that Roosevelt personally authorized the research program that produced the atomic bomb.  Without the New Deal’s great hydroelectric projects on the Tennessee and Colombia rivers, the U.S. would not have had the industrial capacity to create a uranium bomb (at Oak Ridge, TN) and a plutonium bomb (at Hanford, WA).

Under Harry Truman, FDR’s chosen successor, the U.S. government chose to continue its wartime alliances, maintain its overseas bases, incorporate atomic weapons into the nation’s war strategy and maintain full employment through war spending.

Two important positive things about the wartime New Deal, from the progressive standpoint, are that it gave the labor union leadership a place at the table in war planning, and that it at least gave lip service to the need for civil rights and equal employment opportunity for African Americans.  Both these things were needed for full war mobilization, and also for Democratic electoral victory.

I don’t deny the idealistic and reforming impulses behind the New Deal.  They were an important part of its legacy, but they weren’t the only part.  Idealism seldom wins without being allied to someone’s interests. 

Why Uncle Tom was not an uncle tom

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, or Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a best-selling novel that did more to arouse public opinion against American slavery than any other written work. Yet today educated Americans, if they think of it at all, think of it as racist.

The lead character, Uncle Tom, is regarded as a symbol of a black man who is subservient to white people.  One of the worst things an African-American can call another African-American is an “uncle tom.”

But Mrs. Stowe depicted him as a hero, a Christ-like Christian martyr who was true to himself unto death.

Uncle Tom followed the hard teachings of Jesus – the ones that said to love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. 

He reminds me of characters in Quo Vadis., a novel about Christians in pagan Rome.

Mrs. Stowe, in creating Uncle Tom, showed that, under slavery, the most humble and faithful servant could be sold down the river away from his family, beaten for manifesting self-respect and compassion and finally killed for refusing to turn informer against his own people.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, surprisingly to me, a novel of ideas.  Through thought experiments and debates between the characters, she sets up arguments excusing slavery, and then refutes them.

It also is a documentation of the evils of slavery.  Her claim is that every incident in the novel had a counterpart in real life.

A mother of six herself, she emphasized how slavery broke the bond between mothers and children.  She described mothers and children being separated by slave traders; a woman forced to be a wet nurse for her owner’s children while her own child died of malnutrition; another women being forced to be caregiver for her owner’s children while neglecting her own.

But in her view, as a believing Christian, the worst evil of slavery was that it endangered the souls of both masters and slaves.  The slave owners were corrupted morally by their absolute and unaccountable power.  Enslaved people were driven to despair and atheism by their unjust suffering

The two distinctive principles of Protestant Christianity are salvation by faith and the priesthood of all believers. 

In Protestantism, anybody who leads people to Christ – a black slave, a little girl or an obscure Quaker farmer – can perform a priestly function.   

Protestant faith doesn’t mean just assent to a set of doctrines; it means a personal and continuing relationship with Christ, a real being.  But without faith, your good deeds are meaningless.  Salvation requires faith. 

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, first and foremost, a story of religious faith and martyrdom.

Uncle Tom’s heroism consists of how the example of his faithfulness saved other characters from hellfire and damnation.  There are few people today for whom these concepts are meaningful on a gut level, and that is the main reason Uncle Town’s Cabin has gone out of favor.

Diana Johnstone on the decline of Europe

CIRCLE IN THE DARKNESS: Memoir of a World-Watcher by Diana Johnstone (2020)

Diana Johnstone is an American journalist, a year or two older than me, who has spent most of her adult life reporting from Europe.

This memoir is a rich account of the past half-century of European history.  Its over-arching themes are the erosion of the sovereignty of European nations and of the European left as fighters for peace and defenders of working people.  Another is reality is rarely what the official sources say it is.

It also touches on her personal struggles and family life.  She decided at an early stage in her career to choose freedom to write as she saw things over middle-class security.

I won’t try to summarize her work, which touches on many important events, but I’ll mention a few highlights.

∞∞∞

>> Johnstone was not a supporter of the European Union.  It had been promoted as a way for European nations to unite and make Europe an independent power, setting standards for human rights, social welfare and the environment, which other nations would have to respect in order to engage with Europe or belong to it.

Maybe it was that way in the beginning, at least to a certain extent.  But she pointed out that the proposed European Constitution of 2005, if you read the fine print of its more than 500 pages., committed its signers to supporting neoliberal economics and the NATO alliance.

It the principal objective of the Union was “a highly competitive market economy,” with business competition “undistorted” by state policy.  Public services “of general economic interest” had to be open to competition, including international competition.

The Constitution specified a “common security and defense policy” in which”commitments and cooperation in this area shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”  It also stressed the need to defend against “terrorist attacks.”

It was put to a public vote in France and the Netherlands and rejected both times.  It was revised in the form of the 2008 Lisbon Treaty, which was accepted by all the member governments except Ireland.  The Irish put it up to a referendum, which was rejected in 2008.

After some minor concessions, the Irish were called on to vote again, and on Dec. 1, 2009, the new treaty became law.  The principle is: Keep voting until you get it right.

I doubt if many of those who voted “yes” understood they were locking themselves into economic austerity and undeclared wars.

> Johnstone didn’t know what to make of the 1968 student uprising in Paris.  It was inspired by privileged students’ desire to overthrow restraints on personal behavior (“it is forbidden to forbid”) and not by any program for improving the welfare of society.

The life and afterlife of Stepan Bandera

STEPAN BANDERA: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist – Fascism, Genocide and Cult by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe (2014)

Stepan Bandera is the national hero of Ukraine.  He also was a fascist who collaborated with the Nazis..   

The founders of the Organization of Ukrainian nationalists, which Bandera led, was modeled on the Fascist and Nazi parties.  Bandera sought Hitler’s permission to set up a Ukrainian puppet fascist state during World War Two.  His followers conducted massacres of Jews and Poles.

I read this book in order to better understand why Ukrainians, who were marked by the Nazis for extermination and enslavement, could admire him.

Grzegorz Rossolinki-Liebe is a German-Polish historian affiliated with the Free University of Berlin.  His long and exhaustive book answers the question.

The short answer is that most Ukrainians don’t know, and don’t want to know, the truth about Bandera.  They see him as a patriot who bravely fought both Hitler and Stalin, did nothing against Jews and cared only for the welfare of his people.

Unfortunately, there also is a small but strong faction in Ukraine that admires Bandera for what he really was and wants to put his fascist ideas into practice.

This is has become a moot point, because Ukraine’s current plight does not originate from within Ukraine, but from the fact that Ukraine is a bone of contention between the USA and its allies on the one hand and Russia on the other.

What I did get from the book was a better understanding of the history central and eastern Europe, the widespread appeal of fascism and the nature of historical trauma.

   ∞∞∞ 

Rossolinki-Liebe spent many pages wrestling with the definition of fascism and the distinction between fascism and other right-wing authoritarian nationalist ideologies that flourished in the period between the two world wars. 

I need not dwell on this.  The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was fascist under any definition of the term. 

It arose after World War One in the province of Galicia, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that became part of the newly-independent Polish Republic.

Poland was ruled by nationalists who tried to impose national unity by suppressing non-Polish cultures and the use of languages other than Polish.  The OUN was formed in struggle against the Polish, not the Soviet, government, although they also were anti-Russian and anti-Communist.

Ironically, Ukrainians suffered the kind of oppression Poles themselves had suffered under the Russia Empire, and the kind of oppression the Ukrainian government imposed on Ukraine’s Russian-speaking minority after 2014.

Its founders admired Mussolini and Hitler and took the Italian Fascist and German Nazi movements as role models.  Like the followers of Mussolini and Hitler, the OUN believed in absolute loyalty to the nation, to the nationalist movement and to the leader of the movement.

OUN ideology combined ultranationalism with racism, mysticism, antisemitism, anticommunism, authoritarianism and a cult of war and violence. Its followers hated Poles and Russians as oppressor nations, and Jews as supposed agents of the oppressor.

But its leaders had a grudging respect for the methods, although not the goals, of Polish nationalists, Bolsheviks and Russian nihilists in 19th century Russia.  

Stepan Bandera was born in Galicia in 1909.  He was raised by a Ukrainian Eastern Rite Catholic priest who was dedicated to Ukrainian national independence.  Ukrainian nationalism was the young Bandera’s religion.  

He was brave, self-sacrificial, and uninterested in personal financial gain.  As a young student, he trained himself to endure pain by burning himself with matches and like means, so that he would not break under torture.  He joined the OUN in 1929 and rose rapidly in the ranks because of his zeal and organizational ability.

Book note: Regeneration by Pat Barker

REGENERATION by Pat Barker (1991)

I picked up this novel by chance at a neighborhood free book exchange.  It is a fascinating story, mostly true.

It is about the real-life encounter during World War One between Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, an Army psychologist, and Siegfried Sassoon, a poet and war hero turned war protester.

Sassoon had written a protest letter against continuation of the war.  He was not a pacifist.  He believed that the war had become a war of aggression and conquest, and that its original aims could be achieved through negotiation.

The letter was published in the London Times and read in the House of Commons.  Sassoon faced court-martial, but his friend Robert Graves, a fellow officer and fellow poet, arranged for his commitment to Craiglockhart war hospital to save him.

At the hospital, Sassoon met and mentored the war poet Wilfred Owen, another real-life patient of Rivers.  

Craiglockhart was for the treatment of shell shock (now known at PTSD).  Dr. Rivers before the war had been an expert on psychosomatic illness.  

His method of treatment, innovative at the time, began with convincing the patient that every man, no matter how brave, has a breaking point and the PTSD was not evidence of cowardice.  Then he helped the patient understand the cause of the trauma and so break its hold.

This was similar to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis except that Rivers believed the fundamental repressed human drive was not sex, but self-preservation.  He perceived that the basic loyalty of most soldiers was not to king and country, but to their comrades on the battlefield. 

Rivers treated officers.  In the novel, he met the real-life character, Dr. Lewis Yealland, who treated enlisted men.  His method of treating PTSD was very different.  It consisted of subjecting the patient to a worse trauma than the trauma that caused the symptoms.  

Yealland put his patients into a locked room and subjected them to extremely powerful and painful electric shocks, which ceased only when, step by step, their symptoms went away.  He claimed to cure his patients with just one treatment and to have a 100 percent success rate.

Rivers was shaken by Yealland’s apparent effectiveness, but he couldn’t bring himself to torture his patients.

The main fictional characters are Billy Prior, an officer of working-class origins, and Sarah Lamb, a factory girl with whom he has a love affair.  Prior suffered from “mutism,” the inability to speak, which was commonly found among enlisted men but almost never among officers.

The moral problem for Rivers was that his mission as a healer was to restore men to mental health so they could return to the battlefield and get themselves killed.  The average life expectancy of a British officer on the front lines in France was three months.

Sassoon and Graves hated the war, but they deeply resented civilians, including pacifists.  All things considered, they preferred being at the front with their doomed comrades to being safe at home.

1971 – the year the USA started going downhill

I’ve posted versions of the chart above several times before.  It shows how American wages once grew along with growth in productivity, and how, around 1971 or so, wage-earners stopped benefitting from being more productive.  This fact about the U.S. economy explains a lot.

I saw an Internet post yesterday consisting of charts showing how many more kinds of things changed for the worse in 1971.  Economic inequality, the cost of living, inflation-adjusted wages—all got worse.

There are too many for me to copy and re-post, but here is a sample.

What happened in 1971?  The only major event I can think of is the Nixon administration’s decision to go off the gold standard.  From then, the U.S. dollar was redeemable not for gold or some other precious metal, but for U.S. Treasury bonds – in other words, IOUs.

Economist Michael Hudson has written books about how this decision allowed financiers and bankers to flourish and the U.S. military to finance its wars while the U.S. manufacturing economy faded away and living standards declined.

As much as I respect Hudson, it’s hard for me to believe that this one thing could have caused changes in so many different things so quickly.  Maybe it’s a tipping point caused by a lot of different things coming together at once.

Book note: Tolstoy’s War and Peace

WAR AND PEACE by Leo Tolstoy (1865-1869) translated by Almayer and Louise Maude (1923) edited and with an introduction by Henry Gifford (1983)

War and Peace is the best novel I have ever read.  Each time I read it, it seems new to me, and I notice things it it that I missed before.

It is the story of two very different friends, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov, and the woman they both love, Natasha Rostov.  It is also a war novel, a historical novel and a comedy of manners, full of subplots, great descriptive writing and interesting, believable characters.

Andrei is the ideal Russian nobleman and military officer.  He is dashing, handsome, and rich, and occupies a high social rank.  He is a respected commander and staff officer, well able to cope with enemies on the battlefield and intrigues at headquarters.  Everything he does, he does competently.  His manners are impeccable, although some find him arrogant. 

His friend  Pierre is the opposite.  He is fat and clumsy, naive and foolish.  He is the bastard son of a nobleman, a marginal person in society until he unexpectedly inherits great wealth from his father, and then is taken advantage of by all.

What binds these two unlikely friends together?  Both question whether life has meaning.  Both want something deeper than the conventional values of society.  Andrei’s answer is to play the social game by its meaningless rules as best he can; Pierre’s is to search for meaning, in his blundering way, in freemasonry and other schools of thought.

The two friends differ in their opinions, and have interesting arguments.  Pierre is a would-be humanitarian reformer.  Andrei is a cynical conservative.

Both lack emotional intelligence.  Pierre is easily exploited, especially by his new, gold-digging wife, Helene.  Andrei is unable to form close relationships.  He enlists in the military partly to avoid his wife, who loves him deeply but whom Andrei cannot love in return.

Neither had a loving father and mother to set an example.  Pierre’s father apparently disowned him, until the very end; Andrei’s father was a harsh and distant widower, who didn’t like women.

Andrei does have a spiritual awakening of sorts when he is wounded in the Battle of Austerlitz and near death.  He comes to realize the futility of the quest for military glory, but otherwise is not permanently changed.

He spends years in isolation after the death of his wife in childbirth.  His capacity for affection is awakened by an encounter with the sweet, charming 16-year-old Natasha Rostov.

The Rostovs are everything that the Bolkonskys are not.  Natasha’s father is an irresponsible spendthrift; her mother is a foolish society lady.  But they are a loving couple, and their children, including brothers Nicholas and Petya, are affectionate and joyful, and have good values.

Andrei and Natasha are each fulfillments of the other’s ideal fantasy.  Andrei is a handsome, dashing prince; Natasha is a lovely, pure young maiden.  When they dance at a ball, they are smitten with each other, and soon decide to marry.

But the elder Bolkonsky intervenes.  He tells Andrei that he will give his consent to the marriage only if he and Natasha separate for a year and still want to marry at the end.

The flags they fought for

Hat tip to Mary Fahl: Going Home on Abagond.

Memorial Day originally was a holiday in honor of soldiers who gave their lives fighting for the Union in the U.S. Civil War.  Some of the former Confederate states had their own separate Confederate Memorial Days.  Now Memorial Day honors all who gave their lives while serving in uniform.

The video consists of the opening credits of the Civil War movie “Gods and Generals.”  It shows the flags beneath which men (some of them only boys) on both sides fought and died.