Corey Robin's Blog, page 67

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

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?

 

 

Kristin Ross on The Paris Commune

In 2002, I was slogging through a fellowship at NYU and feeling depressed. It was the aftermath of 9/11, and all the world was Paul Wolfowitz and Paul Berman. At our fellowship seminar, we were asked to read a book called May ’68 and Its Afterlives. I think we read it in proofs. I had never heard of it or its author, Kristin Ross. I fell in love with both after the second or third page. Kristin is one of those writers who seizes on an image and never lets you forget it. Now she’s got a book coming out on the Paris Commune; it’s called Communal Luxury.

Here’s just a taste:

In the decade following the massacre [of the Communards]…traces of the Commune could be detected everywhere, it seems, except within the city of Paris proper. Thus William Morris…could perceive the traces of Parisian barricades hidden in the lava fields of Iceland. The filter through which he views the Icelandic terrain, the unconscious superimposition of ancient, petrified lava and recent urban conflagration, gives us—along with the apricot orchard in what had once been Trafalgar Square—another presiding image through which to try to refract the practices and thought of a number of militants in the wake of the Commune, for whom the experience of what had transpired in those few weeks in Paris, whether lived directly or not, had become a turning point.

Of all our contemporary writers on politics and culture, I can’t think of anyone who has such an eye for transposition and juxtaposition, particularly of the pastoral and the political, of natural rhythm and epic interruption: the barricades of Paris in the lava fields of Iceland, the apricot orchard in Trafalgar Square.

I cannot wait to read this book.

How Will It End?

Three Muslim students killed in North Carolina. Jewish hostages killed at a kosher market in Paris. The Charlie Hebdo massacres. The NAACP firebombed in Colorado. And it’s just February.

How will it end, how it will end?

…

this bleak year, year of blind rats,

this bleak year of rage and rancor,

you ask, you ask me, how will it end?

—Pablo  Neruda, Chronicle of 1948 (America)

When Conservatives Didn’t Get Tough on Crime: National Review on the Eichmann Trial

Elizabeth Kolbert has a chilling and heartbreaking article in this week’s The New Yorker about the attempt to bring the surviving apparatchiks of the Holocaust to justice, seven decades after the Second World War’s ending.

She writes of three generations of effort to prosecute and try these men and women. In the second phase, many—most of them mid-level perpetrators—got off.

In 1974, an Auschwitz commander named Willi Sawatzki was put on trial for having participated in the murder of four hundred Hungarian Jewish children, who were pushed into a pit and burned alive. (The camp’s supply of Zyklon B had run short.) Sawatzki was acquitted after the prosecution’s key witness was deemed unfit to testify.

Approximately a million Jews were killed at Auschwitz, and along with them at least a hundred thousand Polish, Roma, and Soviet prisoners. According to Andreas Eichmüller, a German historian in Munich, sixty-five hundred S.S. members who served at the camp survived the war. Of these, fewer than a hundred were ever tried for their crimes in German courts, and only fifty were convicted.

But now we’re into the third generation, where there is less forgiveness, more of a desire to see justice done. The problem, of course, is that almost all of these murderers and their accomplices are dead or dying.

In response to the verdict [of John Demjanjuk, at his second trial, in 2011], Germany’s central office for investigating Nazi crimes announced that it was looking to build cases against fifty former Auschwitz guards. “In view of the monstrosity of these crimes, one owes it to the survivors and the victims not to simply say ‘a certain time has passed,’ ” the head of the office, Kurt Schrimm, said.

But, of course, time had passed—from an actuarial point of view, way too much time. In September, 2013, the office announced that nine of the fifty guards on the roster had, in the intervening months, died. Others simply could not be located. The list of possible defendants was whittled down to thirty. In February, 2014, investigators presented twelve of the suspects with search warrants; the youngest was eighty-eight, the oldest a hundred. Three were taken into custody, then quickly released. One former Auschwitz guard, Johann Breyer, was living in Philadelphia. A judge ordered his extradition, only to be informed that Breyer had died the night before the extradition order was signed. Meanwhile, Demjanjuk, too, had died, in a nursing home outside Munich, while awaiting his case’s appeal.

In principle, the Demjanjuk verdict opened up “hundreds of thousands” to prosecution; as a practical matter, hardly any were left. And this makes it difficult to know how to feel about the latest wave of investigations. Is it a final reckoning with German guilt, or just the opposite? What does it say about the law’s capacity for self-correction that the correction came only when it no longer really matters?

Martin Luther King is eloquent on the long arc of justice and also on the short time available for action: “In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.”

I recommend the whole article.

The piece also made me think, though, about the initial reaction to Israel’s decision to try Adolf Eichmann.

The response to that decision, as historians like Peter Novick and Deborah Lipstadt have shown, was rife with anti-Semitism. The Wall Street Journal warned darkly of “an atmosphere of Old Testament retribution.” A Unitarian minister, according to Novick, claimed “he could see little ethical difference between ‘the Jew-pursuing Nazi and the Nazi-pursuing Jew.'” Those unitarian universalists.

The worst offender, though, was National Review. Combining all the elements of anticommunism, Christian homiletics, and ancient Jew-hatred, William F. Buckley’s magazine castigated the Israelis—really, the Jews, those Shylocks of vengeance and memory—for their inability to let bygones be bygones.

In one editorial, the magazine wrote:

We are in for a great deal of Eichmann in the weeks ahead….We predict the country will tire of it all, and for perfectly healthy reasons. The Christian Church focuses hard on the crucifixion of Jesus Christ for only one week out of the year. Three months—that is the minimum estimate made by the Israeli Government for the duration of the trial—is too long….Everyone knows the facts, and has known them for years. There is no more drama or suspense in store for us. …Beyond that there are the luridities….The counting of corpses, and gas ovens, and kilos of gold wrenched out of dead men’s teeth….There is under way a studied attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany….it is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims.

From the magazine that asks us to get tough on crime.

Update (2 pm)

On Twitter, Michael Moynihan, who’s a columnist at The Daily Beast, tweeted at me several times about that National Review editorial:

 It’s a terrible editorial. And Novick’s book is good. But those ellipses make it worse than it is.

“advancement of communist aims” is a response to something in the New Statesman, not trial in general

Again, terrible piece. But it changes some of the context, like the “advancement of communist aims” line

At first, we parried over his “worse than it is.” The implication being that restoring the context of the lengthy National Review quote, eliminating those ellipses, would make the editorial seem better than it is. Which I, focusing more on the anti-Semitism, found hard to believe.

Then Moynihan tweeted this—

What I meant: bowdlerized quote makes it sound like the idea of prosecuting Eichmann was a victory for communism.

—and kindly sent me a pdf of the entire editorial, which I’ve uploaded and you can read here.

In the editorial, National Review asks, “What are some of the political and legal ramifications of the Eichmann trial?” It proceeds to answer that “there is under way a studied attempt to cast suspicion on Germany” and then offers a lengthy quote—also with many ellipses—from a letter to the New Statesman and Nation, a left-wing magazine in Britain. The letter that the National Review cites makes some rather unremarkable claims about the continuity in government personnel between Nazi and postwar Germany (a well known fact) but dresses that up with some overblown, albeit qualified, rhetoric about the Germans under Adenauer sharing the same aims as the Germans under Hitler.

At the conclusion of the quote from that letter, the National Review editorial says this:

That—let us hope—is an extreme statement of the spirit that will be promoted by the trial. But it is all there: bitterness, distrust, the refusal to forgive, the advancement of Communist aims, the cultivation of pacifism . . .

So that’s the quote that Moynihan thinks, when read in context, is not as bad as the quote that Novick cites from his book.

I disagree. When read in context, it’s clear that the editorial is making two claims: first, that the letter writer and the perpetrators of the Eichmann trial share the same spirit; second, that the best one can hope for is that the letter writer is only exhibiting a more extreme version of the spirit that animates the perpetrators of the trial. In other words, the anti-German spirit and anticommunist contribution of the trial may well wind up being as extreme as that of the letter writer.

Long story, short: National Review is in fact saying that the advancement of Communist aims is among the elements of the Eichmann trial.

But there’s a little bonus in that editorial, if you read through to the end:

And finally, who will undertake to give as much publicity to those wretched persons, Jews and non-Jews, who are alive today, but will be dead before this trial is over—the continuing victims of Communist persecution, in China and Russia and Laos and Indonesia and Tibet and Hungary?

Got that?

In response to Israel’s decision to capture and try Eichmann in a court of law, National Review replied, “What about Tibet?” Sound familiar? Why are you singling out Eichmann?

How to Fight for Human Rights in the 21st Century

My department has an MA program in international affairs, which has attached to it the Human Rights in Iran unit. On Tuesday, February 24, at 6 pm, the human rights professionals who are part of the Unit will be hosting an exciting mini-clinic on how to run a human rights campaign. Faculty from our MA program will also be there to answer questions about our department and masters program. You have to register in advance; seating is limited. Check out this announcement below.

* * * * * 

Mini-Clinic with the Human Rights in Iran Unit:  Twenty-First Century Tricks of the Trade for Running a Human Rights Campaign

Almost everyone these days seems to be behind the idea of human rights.  But how can advocates move human rights issues to the front and center of policy debates?  How can advocates get states and international organizations to promote and enforce rights?

This three-hour mini-clinic—by human rights professionals with years of experience working for the United Nations, governments, and top human rights NGOs—is a practicum on how advocates can set their goals, frame their messages, and spread the word, especially through online campaigning using diaspora communities.  At the practicum, you will help craft and translate policy ideas for different target audiences, from journalists to lawmakers to the general public. And then you will walk through the process of structuring a human rights campaign.

By the end of the clinic, you will be able to:

   Formulate a policy objective for any human rights issue
   Locate stakeholders and points of influence
   Choose your advocacy strategy and activities to further your objectives
   Use media and social media to amplify your message

This practicum will provide you with the practical aspects of human rights work that major human rights and international organizations value.  If you are studying international affairs or are planning a career that promotes human rights, this clinic is for you.

The event will be conducted by the Human Rights in Iran unit, which provides research support for the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in Iran.  The unit is affiliated with the International Affairs Masters Program at the Department of Political Science at Brooklyn College.

Here is the date/time/place of the event:

Tuesday, February 24, 6-9 pm

City University of New York, 25 Broadway, 7th Floor Auditorium

Subways: 2/3 Wall Street and 4/5 Bowling Green

The clinic is open to advanced undergraduates, MA, and PhD students or professionals at any NYC-metro areas institutions or organization. Registration is required by February 23 by emailing your name to politicalscience@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

For information about Brooklyn College’s MA in International Affairs, see http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/schools/socialsciences/graduate/polisci.php.  Deadline for applications is April 1 for Fall 2015.

Arendt LOL

Hannah Arendt, 1964:

I read the transcript of his [Eichmann] police investigation, thirty-six hundred pages, read it, and read it very carefully, and I do not know how many times I laughed—laughed out loud!

Reading the NYT, I Begin to Sympathize with Clarence Thomas

Twenty-five years ago, Barack Obama was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. He was the first African American ever to head the journal. It was a big deal. The New York Times ran a story. Here’s an excerpt:

Mr. Obama was elected after a meeting of the review’s 80 editors that convened Sunday and lasted until early this morning, a participant said.

Until the 1970’s the editors were picked on the basis of grades, and the president of the Law Review was the student with the highest academic rank. Among these were Elliot L. Richardson, the former Attorney General, and Irwin Griswold, a dean of the Harvard Law School and Solicitor General under Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.

That system came under attack in the 1970’s and was replaced by a program in which about half the editors are chosen for their grades and the other half are chosen by fellow students after a special writing competition. The new system, disputed when it began, was meant to help insure that minority students became editors of The Law Review.

Harvard, like a number of other top law schools, no longer ranks its law students for any purpose including a guide to recruiters.

…

Mr. Obama succeeds Peter Yu, a first-generation Chinese-American, as president of The Law Review. After graduation, Mr. Yu plans to serve as a clerk for Chief Judge Patricia Wald on the of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

Mr. Yu said Mr. Obama’s election ”was a choice on the merits, but others may read something into it.”

Notice how the Times takes up and then dances with, and with, and with, the question of Obama’s qualifications. It devotes six whole paragraphs to the topic. It just can’t let go of it. Not unlike how conservatives will later deal with Obama’s qualifications to be president of the United States. Much to the tut-tutting of the New York Times.

Reading this little dance of suggestion and innuendo, I begin to sympathize with how Clarence Thomas came to see affirmative action as little more than a game of liberal paternalism, of Lucy pulling away the football.

Blog Redesign

I’m pleased to announce that after years of frustration with the current design of the blog, I’ll be launching today a redesigned blog. Remeike Forbes, the aesthetic visionary behind Jacobin—he’s given the magazine its distinctive look, a look that captures the magazine’s original animating spirit, both intellectual and political, as no one article quite can—has been working on the redesign, off and on, for a long time. The new design is simpler, it’s more adaptable to various platforms, the text is a lot more legible (something many of you complained about over the years), and it’s got some cool features like a nifty timeline where you can scroll easily to find posts. All the links will remain the same, and if you’re a subscriber, you’ll get posts as you do now. Nothing in that regard will change. One word of caution: the site may be facing some technical difficulties over the coming weeks as we work through various issues we didn’t anticipate. So please be patient.

Update (11:30 am)

The blog just informed me that this is my 666th post.

The Epic Bureaucrat

Hannah Arendt often seems to counterpoise the epic nature of political action, the glorious and distinctive deeds of ancient heroes, to the anonymous and impersonal processes of modern life. Where is the Achilles of bureaucracy, the Pericles of the corporation? Nowhere, she appears to say: we live in an age where everyone behaves, no one rules.

Patchen Markell has an excellent article, “Anonymous Glory,” in the latest issue of the European Journal of Political Theory showing how subtly and carefully Arendt helps to undermine that distinction. The opposition she appears to draw between ancient action and modern behavior, between glorious deeds and impersonal processes, is not nearly as stark as we might imagine on a first—or second or third—read of her work.

There’s actually a wonderfully illustrative moment for Markell’s argument in the history of the New Deal. Hallie Flanagan—immortalized by Cherrie Jones in The Cradle Will Rock—was the head of the Federal Theater Project, which was an agency of the WPA, hiring actors, directors, stagehands, writers, and more, to, well, put on a show. In an article in 1939, in The Virginia Quarterly Review, she captures what Markell is talking about, turning the statistics of unemployment and poverty—and the Federal Theater Project’s efforts—into a glorious and heroic epic. “The bare statistics of Federal Theater,” she writes, “are in themselves a drama.”

So the government of the United States, upon the recommendation of Congress, gave papa a job. The result was an unprecedented outpouring of music, painting, writing, acting, some of it brilliant, some of it indifferent, but all of it together, while probably impossible for us to evaluate at present, significant in the pattern of contemporary American culture. For these actors, directors, designers, writers, dancers, musicians, receiving only the small security wage set by Congress, with no stellar billings and with a press and public at first hostile or skeptical, leaped to meet their chance, becoming, almost overnight, performers in a drama more exciting than any which has yet reached our stage. The bare statistics of Federal Theater are in themselves a drama [my emphasis]: some nine thousand theater workers employed in forty theaters in twenty states, playing within three years before audiences totaling twenty-five million. It is not only the drama of theater successes in what is probably the world’s most critical theater center, plays such as ” . . one-third of a nation . . .”’ “Prologue to Glory,” “Haiti,” and “Big Blow,” together with earlier New York successes: “Murder in the Cathedral,” “Dr. Faustus,” “Macbeth,” “Chalk Dust,” “Battle Hymn,” “Triple-A Plowed Under,” “Power,” “Class of ‘29,” “The Sun and I,” “Emperor’s New Clothes,” “Processional,” “Professor Mamlock.” It is also the drama of the Caravan Theaters in city parks, Shakespeare on a hillside, Gilbert and Sullivan on a lagoon, the circus under canvas, opera on a truck. It is the drama of a theater for the children of the steel mills in Gary, and for other children in Cleveland, New York, New Orleans, Newark, Los Angeles. It is the drama of a theater for the blind in Oklahoma; of a repertory theater, presenting Shaw, Shakespeare, O’Neill, Fitch, and Toller, on Long Island. It is the drama of “Created Equal” in Boston, of “Let Freedom Ring” in Detroit, of “Altars of Steel” in Atlanta, of “The Man in the Tree” in Miami, of “The Lonely Man” in Chicago, of the “International Cycle” in Los Angeles, the “Northwest Cycle” in Portland, Seattle, Denver, and San Francisco.

But I’ve been mostly thinking about Markell’s argument as I write about Eichmann in Jerusalem. Particularly, how his argument might be applied in contexts less heroic and glorious than the situation described by Flanagan or some of the situations described by Markell. (To be clear, Markell doesn’t suggest that Arendt’s intertwining of process and action is meant to be entirely salutary or redemptive; it can pose, he insists, as many risks as it does opportunities). I won’t give the game away here, but this quote from a review essay Arendt wrote in 1952, eleven years before Eichmann, gives us a hint of how she thinks the realms of action and behavior, the desire for glory and the reality of red tape, can be brought together in the most malignant ways.

The truth is, as I think Mr. Poliakov’s book helps make clear, that the secrets of the Nazi regime were not so well kept by the Nazis themselves. They behaved according to a basic tenet of our time, which may be remembered in the future as the Age of the Paper. Today no man in an official position can take the slightest action without immediately starting a stream of files, memos, reports, and publicity releases. The Nazis left behind them mountains of records that make it unnecessary to confide the slaking of our thirst for knowledge to the memories of people who were in the main untrustworthy to begin with. Nor could it have been otherwise. Hitler’s great ambition was to found a millennial empire and his great fear, in case of defeat, was lest he and his fellows go unremembered for centuries to come. Red tape was not simply a necessity forced on the Nazis by the organizational methods of our time; it was also something they enthusiastically welcomed and multiplied, and so they left to history, and for history, typewritten records of each and every one of their crimes in at least ten copies.

Ever since Weber, probably Tocqueville, we’ve tended to think of the soulless bureaucrat as the very opposite of the impassioned political actor. In her sharpest and darkest moments, Arendt saw otherwise: not only would the political aspirant have to work with and in a bureaucracy, but in his desire to be remembered for all time, to do something that no future could ever forget, he would happily find himself basking in paper, festooned in red tape.

A Tale of Two Snowballs

I grew up in Chappaqua, New York, which is 20 miles northwest of New Rochelle. Both towns are in Westchester County, but they’re different.

Chappaqua’s population is 81% white, 12% Asian, and 2% black. Its median household income is $100,000. Its poverty rate is less than 4%. New Rochelle’s population is 47% white, 19% black, and 28% Latino/a. Its poverty rate is more than 12%. Its median household income is $67,000.

But here’s how I really know the difference between the two towns.

When I was growing up, my friend Mario, who’s no longer alive, came over to play. It was a snowy day. We decided to throw snowballs at cars. Our position protected by a tall hedge, we packed the snowballs tight and started hurling them onto the street. We did it for a while, till we heard a car screech and stop. And then we ran like hell.

About five or ten minutes later, my dad called out for us. The police were in the driveway. We got a stern talking-to, my parents yelled at us, and that was that.

Last Wednesday, a group of kids (it’s hard to say for sure, but they seem to be black; they’re definitely not white) were having a snowball fight in New Rochelle, somewhere near Lincoln Avenue and Hemingway Avenue. A snowball fight with each other.

A cop showed up, the kids dropped to their knees, and as this video shows, the cop drew his gun, shouting, “Don’t fucking move, guys.” He proceeded to frisk one of them, while keeping his gun on him, and then another.

There’s a report that the cops were responding to a call about a gun, but no one has confirmed it. The person taking the video, a woman, says, “They were having a snowball fight. This group of guys was having a snowball fight and now a cop has a gun on them.”

Update (8:30 pm)

I just found a Daily News report on the incident, which came out after I posted this. According to the News, the cops are claiming they responded to a 911 call about a teenager pointing a gun, in a group of teenagers, at someone else. They also claim that they have a transcript confirming the call, which they may release. As soon as the cops arrived, they claim, the kid with the gun took off. That is the point, they say, where the video begins. They also say there was no snowball fight going on prior to their arrival. I have no idea what the basis of that claim is.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/westchester-pulls-gun-teens-snowball-fight-article-1.2099426