Corey Robin's Blog, page 66

What do Hannah Arendt and Mel Brooks Have in Common?

Mel Brooks, interview with Mike Wallace:

How do you get even with Adolf Hitler? How do you get even with him? There’s only one way to get even. You have to bring him down with ridicule….If you can make people laugh at him, then you’re one up on him…One of my lifelong jobs has been to make the world laugh at Adolf Hitler.

Hannah Arendt, interview with Joachim Fest:

In my opinion people shouldn’t adopt an emotional tone to talk about these things [the Eichmann trial], since that’s a way of playing them down….I also think you must be able to laugh, since that’s a form of sovereignty.

Darkness at Noon: The Musical

John Judis alerted me to this PBS show on the Jewish origins of the Broadway musical. Among other things I learned from it:

Ethel Merman, born Ethel Zimmerman, was German, but so terrified she’d be outed as a Jew was she that people would think she was Jewish that whenever she said she had been praying for the success of a show, she would quickly add, “In church!” She was also so scared she’d have nothing to eat at Jule Styne’s seder—he promised her she wouldn’t have to eat any Christian babies—that she brought a ham sandwich with her. In her purse. [This paragraph was revised from the original version of this post.]
The original last line of “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes” in Cabaret—a song about a man’s love for a gorilla—was “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.” It was meant to be a satire of anti-Semitism, but Jewish audiences were scandalized. Harold Prince, the director and producer of the original Broadway production, insisted on changing it. A few years later, in the film version, the line was restored.
The composer of saccharine songs like “Put On a Happy Face” from Bye, Bye, Birdie and “Tomorrow” from Annie was, as a boy, tied to a tree by a group of anti-Semites and had a fire lit under him while his brother was beaten up. They were working on a farm or something. He was saved at the last minute by the foreman who told everyone that lunchtime was over, time to get back to work.

This is just some of the darkness behind the sunshine of American musical theater.

Human Rights, Blah Blah Blah

Of the war on terror, Christopher Hitchens once said:

I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.

Now comes Bernard-Henri Lévy, who, when asked by Jon Lee Anderson why he supported the intervention in Libya, says:

Why? I don’t know! Of course, it was human rights, for a massacre to be prevented, and blah blah blah…

Never underestimate the murder men will commit, the mayhem they will make, just to escape their boredom. But every enthusiasm has a shelf life. Even imperialism.

We Won! UMass Backs Down!

UMass issued the following announcement today:

The University of Massachusetts Amherst today announced that it will accept Iranian students into science and engineering programs, developing individualized study plans to meet the requirements of federal sanctions law and address the impact on students. The decision to revise the university’s approach follows consultation with the State Department and outside counsel.

“This approach reflects the university’s longstanding commitment to wide access to educational opportunities,” said Michael Malone, vice chancellor for research and engagement. “We have always believed that excluding students from admission conflicts with our institutional values and principles. It is now clear, after further consultation and deliberation, that we can adopt a less restrictive policy.”

Federal law, the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012, requires that the U.S. Department of State deny visas to Iranian students wishing to engage in certain fields of study related to the energy sector, nuclear science, nuclear engineering or a related field at U.S. colleges and universities. To comply with the law and its impacts, UMass Amherst will develop individualized study plans as appropriate based on a student’s projected coursework and research in conjunction with an offer of admission. The plan will be updated as required during a student’s course of study.

NBC News has more on the story.

Thanks to everyone who wrote to the university to express their opposition to the university’s policy of prohibiting Iranian nationals from applying to select departments in engineering and the natural sciences. This was a story, I’m proud to say, that we broke here at this blog (thanks to a tip from a professor in Colorado), and which rapidly got picked up in the national  media. Well done, everyone!

These are the Terrorists Whom UMass Will No Longer Allow to Apply

These are just some of the kinds of students that the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has decided will no longer be allowed to apply (h/t Ali Gharib):

They were teenagers living in Tehran when the Twin Tower’s fell at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, but what they saw haunted them even 6,000 miles away.

Now as doctoral students at the University of Massachusetts, Soroush Farzinmoghadam with the help of Nariman Mostafavi and others have designed a tribute to that day – an installation that will be on display in the Campus Center through Feb. 27.

Farzinmoghadam created “UMass 9/11 Intervention” for his master’s thesis in architecture. He is also a doctoral student in regional planning.

The installation’s dimensions of 9 by 14 are drawn from the month of the attack and the sum of all of the figures in the date 9/11/2001. The sculpture features seven columns – one for each of the four flights, one for the Twin Towers and one each for the Pentagon and the field in which the fourth plane crashed. Their shapes and placement relate to certain moments in time that morning.

Each victim is represented by a glowing strand of fiber optic cable hanging from the structure’s ceiling, with its position and length determined by factoring in the age, year and birthplace of the individual who died. The shorter strands represent children.

“We didn’t do this as Iranians,” said Mostafavi, a doctoral student in building and construction technology. “We are human beings.”

“You don’t have to be American,” to be affected by the tragedy. “You just have to be a human being.”

He said he wants to “address the similarities” between people. Farzinmoghadam, 30, said he is hoping “to use the arts as a tool that helps the conversation.”

The program in building and construction technology is in the department of environmental conservation, which is in the College of Natural Sciences, to which Iranian students will no longer be allowed to apply.

The Real Mad Men of History

From The Washington Post (h/t Marilyn Young):

“It’s a childish story that keeps repeating in the West,” smiled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in an interview with the BBC last week. He was dismissing allegations that his regime is attacking Syrian civilians with barrel bombs, crude devices packed with fuel and shrapnel that inflict brutal, indiscriminate damage.

“I haven’t heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots,” Assad said, and then repeated when pressed again: “They’re called bombs. We have bombs, missiles and bullets. There [are] no barrel bombs, we don’t have barrels.”

If you think Assad doth protest too much, you’re probably right.

The Post not only cites evidence supporting the claim of the Syrian regime’s “frequent use of barrel bombs in densely packed urban areas” but also cites other instances of regimes using barrel bombs, including the US in Vietnam.

But I was more struck by the civilizational machismo of Assad’s claim that “we have bombs, missiles and bullets. There [are] no barrel bombs, we don’t have barrels.”

Like so many of the West’s defenders of just war, restrained war, and humanitarian war, Assad takes great—albeit unearned—pride in his precision weaponry. Implicit is a contempt for those pathetic, perhaps even feminized, warriors (the “cooking pot” reference), who would rely on such primitive crudities as barrel bombs.

As the Post explains, the US has its own history with such methods:

Look a bit further into the past, and you’ll find that barrel bombs were featured in an American military campaign, too.

A smart post on the War Is Boring blog details when the United States dropped barrels packed with fuel in an attempt to burn foliage in the dense forests of Vietnam and smoke out Viet Cong guerrillas:

Army crews kicked the incendiary drums out of Chinook helicopters onto suspected enemy camps. They strapped white phosphorus smoke grenades to the cylinders to set them alight.

The Air Force took the concept one step further and tried to start raging forest fires in Viet Cong base areas. The flying branch used fire barrels as well as normal incendiary bombs.

In April 1968, the United States carried out “Operation Inferno,” in which 14 C-130 cargo planes dropped dozens of 55-gallon incendiary barrels filled with fuel over southern Vietnam’s U Minh forest. The sorties sparked raging fires, but they had limited effect, as they all tended to die down once the fuel burned out. The United States also dropped barrels full of a chemical equivalent of tear gas, aimed at flushing insurgent fighters out of their bunkered hideaways.

But throughout the war, you had figures like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy (though McNamara left the Johnson Administration in February 1968 and Bundy in 1966), stressing the reason and rationality, the precision and pride, of the American war effort. And, not infrequently, wrapping it all up in a bow of unrestrained masculinity.

Assad, McNamara, Bundy: these are the real Mad Men of history.

 

I am a Communist, not an Idiot

1. “The trouble with intellectuals is that what starts as feelings ends in a hangover.”

—Bertold Brecht to Edwin Piscator

2. When Walter Benjamin asked Brecht, who was fleeing the Nazis, if he’d take refuge in Moscow, Brecht is supposed to have replied: “I am a Communist, not an idiot.”

3. In 1945, just after he had retired from UCLA with a meager pension, Arnold Schoenberg applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. He was rejected.

H/t this essay by George Steiner.

State Department Expresses Surprise Over UMass policy

My sister Melissa just sent me a piece from today’s Boston Globe on the UMass Iranian student situation. The big blockbuster in the piece is this:

The college’s new policy, which appears to be rare if not unique among US universities, appeared to catch the US State Department by surprise…

The State Department had no idea that this policy was in the offing, and more important, seems to believe or suggest that the policy may be unnecessary.

A US State Department official said that the department was aware of news reports about the UMass decision but that there had been no changes in federal policy regarding Iranian students and he could not say why UMass would change its policy. The department will contact UMass to discuss the decision and will answer any questions from other academic institutions about the law, the official said.

“All visa applications are reviewed individually in accordance with the requirements of the US Immigration and Nationality Act and other relevant laws that establish detailed standards for determining eligibility for visas and admission to the United States,” the official, who declined to be quoted by name, said in an e-mail.

“US law does not prohibit qualified Iranian nationals coming to the United States for education in science and engineering,” the official continued. “Each application is reviewed on a case-by-case basis.”

Got that? It is not US law that prohibits Iranian nationals from applying and enrolling in UMass’s engineering and natural sciences graduate programs; it is UMass itself that is doing that.

In one graf, the UMass Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement, Mike Malone, claims that the policy was developed in consultation with faculty and students (though every student and faculty member I’ve talked to at UMass claimed they only learned of the policy from my blog).

But in a later graf Malone gives a different story:

Malone said that after discussing the issue with outside legal counsel and with faculty at other institutions, administrators believe UMass is in the mainstream of American institutions in having such a policy, though it is rare to publish it.

The moment this story broke and I began talking with sanctions experts, one of whom works for a law firm that specializes in these questions (see update here), I got nervous. Forgive me a historical tangent.

Back during the McCarthy years, institutions like UMass—and outside academe as well; in Hollywood and other parts of the culture industry; and throughout the economy as a whole—were run by nervous administrators and managers and CEOs who wanted to be in compliance with the government. I’m not talking about the true believer anticommunists; just run of the mill, apolitical or even liberal, apparatchiks whose first duty, they felt, was to their job and their institution.

Uncertain about the law and the rules, fearful that if they broke them their institutions would suffer, these administrators turned to outside consultants—often, lawyers—for “advice.” Except that the advice industry was itself stacked with two types: either true-believing anticommunists, who had a vested interest in purging the country of reds and leftists and liberals and more, or bottom-liners (and bottom-feeders) whose livelihood depended upon institutions like UMass needing their “advice.”

The combination of this advice industry and nervous administrators was lethal: through some elaborate dance of advice and consent, repressive policies were propounded. Not by force, not by threat, but voluntarily, consensually. It wasn’t simply the state that was the problem; it was the relay system of coercion that private actors in civil society set up, that radiated that power far beyond what it was capable of, that made the whole system of repression as widespread as it was. This, incidentally, was precisely the kind of society Hobbes envisioned in Leviathan: not simply an all-powerful singleton sovereign, but an army of preachers and teachers, working in churches and—wait for it: universities—who would extend the power of the sovereign far beyond what it could muster.

I don’t want to over-read the UMass story. But that mention of seeking “outside legal counsel” and my conversation yesterday with one representative—perfectly well meaning and well intentioned, from what I can gather—of that advice industry makes me worried that the policy at UMass, and other institutions as well, is being driven by a similar dynamic. Particularly when you throw in the State Department’s surprise and clear statement that this policy is not actually required by US government policy.

In other news, after yesterday’s announcement on my blog that UMass had taken down the policy from its website, it now seems to be back up.

I, the Holocaust, Am Your God

It’s long been remarked that the Holocaust and Israel have replaced God and halakha as the touchstones of Jewish experience and identity. The Holocaust is our deity, Israel our daily practice.

You get a sense of this in a New York Times oped Elie Wiesel wrote on the day that NBC first aired its mini-series Holocaust. That was in April 1978.

All Jewish families, mine included, watched it. One Jewish magazine even said that watching it “has about it the quality of a religious obligation” for Jews. Like the Six-Day War, it was a founding moment of contemporary Jewish identity.

I remember it vividly. I watched all nine and a half hours of it. I developed a mad crush on one of the characters, a beautiful, dark-eyed Jewish partisan in the forests of Poland or Soviet Russia (played, I realized much later in life, by a much younger Tovah Feldshuh). During one scene, of a synagogue packed with Jews being set ablaze by the Nazis, I ran out of my parents’ room, sobbing uncontrollably.

It was terrible TV; I tried to watch it years later and couldn’t make it past the first half-hour.

But Wiesel didn’t complain about the aesthetic quality of the show; it was the desacralization of the Holocaust he objected to. As quoted by Peter Novick in The Holocaust in American Life:

It transforms an ontological event into soap-opera…..We see long, endless processions of Jews marching toward Babi Yar….We see the naked bodies covered with “blood”—and it is all make-believe….People will tell me that…similar techniques are being used for war movies and historical re-creations. But the Holocaust is unique; not just another event. This series treats the Holocaust as if it were just another event….Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized….The Holocaust transcends history…..The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of nor capable of recovering…..The Holocaust [is] the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who were there know what it was; the others will never know.

It’s all there. The Holocaust not as an event in secular history but as a leap into transcendence; it cannot be explained, it can only be circled, like a holy fire. Auschwitz is our Sinai, the ovens our burning bush. Like the Jews receiving God’s commandments, the Jews of the camps experienced a sacred mystery, received a secret message, which we can only approach at a distance, with awe and trembling. I, the Holocaust, am your God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Just in case the overtones weren’t clear, Molly Haskell, writing about the show in New York Magazine, threw in an explicit reference to the Third Commandment for good measure:

How can actors, how dare actors, presume to imagine and tell us what it felt like! The attempt becomes a desecration against, among others, the Hebraic injunction banning graven images.

No graven images of the Holocaust. I, the Holocaust, am your God.

I also hated Schindler’s List—What was it Stanley Kubrick said? “The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. ‘Schindler’s List’ is about 600 who don’t.”—and much of the discussion around it. But faced with this kind of dreck from Wiesel and Haskell, this pseudo-religion of pyres and purgation, give me the bubblegum uplift of Oprah Winfrey any day: “I’m a better person as a result of seeing Schindler’s List.”

U. Mass. Will Not Admit Iranian Students to Schools of Engineering and Natural Sciences (Updated)

This announcement was recently posted on the website of the graduate school of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst:

The University has determined that recent governmental sanctions pose a significant challenge to its ability to provide a full program of education and research for Iranian students in certain disciplines and programs. Because we must ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations, the University has determined that it will no longer admit Iranian national students to specific programs in the College of Engineering (i.e., Chemical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering) and in the College of Natural Sciences (i.e., Physics, Chemistry, Microbiology, and Polymer Science & Engineering) effective February 1, 2015.

The full announcement and reasoning (US sanctions on Iran) behind this new policy can be found here.

During the fight over the American Studies Association’s vote for an academic boycott of Israel, putative defenders of academic freedom made a lot of noise about the threat that the boycott posed to academic exchange and international conversation.

But as many of us pointed out the time, nothing in the ASA vote precluded the exchange of individual scholars or students between the United States and Israel.

Now we have a public university, claiming to act in accordance with US policy, officially banning Iranian national students from entire graduate schools.

Will those putative defenders of academic freedom from the BDS fight speak out against this policy—and speak out far more forcefully than they did then, since this policy really does threaten academic freedom in the way they imagined the academic boycott did?

Or will they defend the university’s decision on the grounds of national security or the need for universities to act in accordance with US law? If they take that path, of course, they’re merely admitting the point most of suspected they believed in anyway: that academic freedom really is not their highest value at all.

So what will those defenders of academic freedom say—and, more important, do—now?

Updated (February 13, 12 pm)

So I’ve spoken with a few experts on the US sanctions regime to see whether U. Mass’s policy is necessitated by it. More on that in a minute. First, some other updates.

1. Turns out that Kaplan, which is a US-based educational company, is implementing an even more draconian version of the policy over in Britain. For similar reasons as U. Mass. And it’s caused some problems.

Kaplan, a US-owned education provider in the UK, is refusing students who are residents of Iran enrolment in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) subjects as well as any of its post-graduate courses, citing US sanctions.

Applications for more than a dozen Iranians students have been withdrawn since autumn 2013 because the company felt it had to comply with the US regulations and sanctions policy regarding the country.

Critics say sanctions were put in place to punish Iranian authorities, not ordinary people, and that such interpretations were based on a misreading of the policy.

Iranian students studying in Britain’s public universities can generally take such courses.

2. The Washington Institute on Near East Policy, which generally takes a strong pro-Israel line, has a paper on the larger issue of Iranian nationals seeking an education in the US. On pp. 34-38, they explicitly take up the questions addressed by the U. Mass. policy. Amazingly, they come down in favor of a policy of more open access and against collective punishment. Though the specific issue they consider is that of the US government’s multiple-entry visa policies versus single-entry visa policies, the basic point of their conclusion is that the government’s visa regime is already strict enough without requiring further and more general forms of discrimination against all Iranian nationals.

The broad denial of multiple-entry visas to Iranian students in the STEM disciplines—who constitute not only the majority of Iranian students in the United States but the highest percentage of STEM students from any country—reflects a disproportionate response to a geopolitical situation in which most Iranian students have little involvement. More than any other challenge Iranian students face, the denial of multiple-entry visas—especially after announcement of the initiative to issue them—causes significant hardship, in addition to hurting Iranian goodwill toward the United States.

Another apparent incongruity involves the overlap between U.S. law and visa-issuance policy. For instance, Section 306 of EBSVRA affirms that no individual from a state sponsor of international terrorism can receive a nonimmigrant visa to the United States, except if it can be guaranteed that such an individual does “not pose a threat to the safety or national security of the United States.” Moreover, Section 501 of the 2012 Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act affirms that a visa must be denied to any Iranian citizen who “seeks to enter the United States to participate in coursework at an institution of higher education…for a career in the energy sector of Iran or in nuclear science or nuclear engineering or a related field in Iran.”

The text of these laws makes clear that no student deemed a threat for technology transfer can be issued a visa in the first place, a measure that starting in 2012 was even extended to students studying petroleum engineering.

3. Last night, after my post went up, the National Iranian American Council issued a strong statement against the U. Mass policy.

The University’s actions constitute an overly broad interpretation its obligations under sanctions….

4. Which leads me to the experts.

One expert on the sanctions regime I spoke with is Tyler Cullis, a legal fellow and policy associate at the National Iranian American Council. I asked him whether and to what extent U. Mass’s policy was necessitated by the government’s sanctions regime. This is what he wrote back to me:

If you look at the provision at issue (Section 501 of the Iran Threat Reduction Act), it doesn’t obligate universities at all:

SEC. 501. EXCLUSION OF CITIZENS OF IRAN SEEKING EDUCATION RELATING TO THE NUCLEAR AND ENERGY SECTORS OF IRAN.

(a) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary of State shall deny a visa to, and the Secretary of Homeland Security shall exclude from the United States, any alien who is a citizen of Iran that the Secretary of State determines seeks to enter the United States to participate in coursework at an institution of higher education (as defined in section 101(a) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1001(a))) to prepare the alien for a career in the energy sector of Iran or in nuclear science or nuclear engineering or a related field in Iran.

(b) APPLICABILITY.—Subsection (a) applies with respect to visa applications filed on or after the date of the enactment of this Act.

It obligates the State Dept. to deny visas to “aliens who are citizens from Iran” and who participate in coursework to prepare the “alien for” certain careers in Iran. If a visa is issued for an Iranian national to study at a US university, then the State Dept. has made the determination at issue.

The only issue I see arising is one that UMass cites: Iranian students being denied reentry after traveling abroad. If that’s the case and students are being denied reentry for taking coursework in the fields UMass cites, then the problem is the State Dept.

In a second email, he clarified further:

(I want to be clear, however, that I believe this was a misreading of the statutory provision. I haven’t seen the State Dept. read Sec. 501 as broadly as UMass suggests.)

FYI: Here’s a proper reading:
http://global.upenn.edu/isss/news/2012/09/05/iran

The University of Pennsylvania’s policy is consistent with what Tullis says: there is no need for additional measures by a university. If there is a problem with reentry, that ought to be tackled through the government, not through blanket bans by a university.


I got a much different response from Sam Cutler, who is a policy advisor, not a lawyer, at Ferrari and Associates, a law firm whose sole focus is sanctions policy. I had asked him if “this policy is indeed truly necessitated by the sanctions program or not.” The following exchange ensued (I am reproducing it with Cutler’s permission).

Cutler:

Thanks for the inquiry. The answer is probably – Iranian students in the United States are authorized to perform the activities for which their visa has been granted and U.S. persons are authorized to provide services to Iranian students consistent with those visas. Pursuant to Section 501 of the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012, the State Department is prohibited from granting visas to Iranian students seeking access to higher education in order to “to prepare the alien for a career in the energy sector of Iran or in nuclear science or nuclear engineering or a related field in Iran.” UMass likely concluded that they were therefore prohibited from teaching i.e. providing a service, to Iranian students for courses that are directly relevant to these prohibited industries.

Additionally, my understanding is that for certain advanced classes or research, certain technology and/or software is used that would require a license from the Commerce Department to provide to an Iranian, which would require specific authorization.

I’m actually a bit surprised it took UMass this long, I’ve heard a number of schools cut off Iranian students from these types of classes a while ago.

 Me:

When you say “the answer is probably”: do you mean that it probably is truly necessitated by the sanctions program?

Cutler:

I believe that there is a chance it could be interpreted by OFAC as a violation and since that is the case, most institutions will do whatever they can do comply.

Me:

So I’ve been checking around and it seems like most institutions, particularly the top ones, have no such policy. Folks at MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, Michigan: no one can find anything remotely like this. In fact, this is the only university where we can even identify something like this. If it’s such a rational response of universities to the sanctions regime, why is no one doing it (assuming I’ve got that right)?

Cutler:

I can’t speak for those universities but I can tell you we’ve advised universities on this specific issue before. Some schools may not have official or publicized policies but I can tell you that it is happening.

Regarding timing, it’s possible that they are worried that if there is no nuclear deal that Treasury is going to be looking for scalps.

Me:

Do you mean that you’ve advised universities to adopt these policies?

Any sense of which universities have adopted these policies? Or how many?

Cutler:

We’ve advised on the requirements of the law and potential risks in the event OFAC determines that there is a violation of the law.

I obviously can’t disclose past clients and couldn’t give you a number on universities that have policies specifically related to this issue. However, every university has an export controls and sanctions policy.

And Cutler again:

Just to clarify, we have not been formally retained by any universities to advise on this issue, but we’ve provided informal guidance to compliance personnel at universities.

So that’s it.


Hard to know how to read all this. Cutler’s part of a firm that advises universities on compliance, and can’t give me a list of other universities that have implemented a policy like U. Mass’s. Thus far, I haven’t been able to find any written policy like U. Mass’s.


Oh, wait, there’s one more thing:


As of 12 pm, Friday, 2/13, there is no longer any mention of the Iranian national student policy on the U. Mass. website.


And when you go to the link where the full policy was stated previously, you see the following:







Will keep you posted.