James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

An interesting and often hilarious book about fringe groups, including some out-there conspiracy theorists, is "Them: Adventures with Extremists" by Jon Ronson (he also wrote "The Men Who Stare at Goats" about the U.S. military's ventures into the paranormal.)

Maus is devastatingly powerful. The subtitle of one of the volumes captures some of the feel - "my father bleeds history."

I like alternate hx because so many events with huge consequences have hinged on factors that could so easily have gone a different way - sometimes the things that actually happened are so far-fetched that they'd never fly as fiction. It's true that things did happen the way they did (at least in this universe, although a lot of physicists theorize the existence of an almost infinite number of alternate universes, with every possible outcome having taken place in one of them - kind of like the infinity of Shadow worlds in Roger Zelazny's Amber novel series) but I find it fascinating to think about how our world might be different.

Humans are the only species that voluntarily submit ourselves to humiliation at the hands of psychotic/sadistic fashion designers, too... and neckties, absolutely the most useless article of clothing in existence.

And can you imagine any intelligent species choosing to wear a pastel leisure suit with white contrast stitching?

Another brilliant alternate history is The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson. Its starting "what if" has the plague of the 14th century killing off nearly 100% of the population of Europe, instead of a third, leaving a world to develop with essentially no input from European cultures. He looks at cultures unfolding in several places including China, India, the Middle East, and the Americas, and follows events from the 14th century to the 21st.

He's a superb writer - he also wrote the trilogy Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars, which follow the colonization and terraforming of Mars over several generations, as well as the evolving relationship of the human culture on Mars with that back on Earth.

No, in Dick's novel, the Axis had beaten the Allies, and part of the plot revolved around a mysterious author who had written an alternate history in which the Allies had won; the Axis occupiers considered it laughable but seditious. That was classic Philip K. Dick, like being lost in a house of mirrors. He also wrote the stories that were adapted to make the films Blade Runner, Minority Report, and Total Recall. Dick suffered from schizophrenia and had also experimented with hallucinogens, so he considered reality a lot more tenuous than most of us do, and his writing reflected that. Just the guy to write alternate history.

The books I'm most actively reading right now are
1. The Beast Reawakens, which is about the resurgence of fascist and neofascist movements since World War II - written in 1997, meticulously researched and documented and quite disturbing; and
2. A Time to Fight, by Senator Jim Webb, about his perspective on America's present and future priorities and how to address them. Senator Webb is one of my heroes. He served with skill and courage as a Marine officer in Vietnam and was wounded in combat, is a critically acclaimed novelist, served for four years in the Reagan administration, then concluded that the Republicans had lost their way and successfully ran for the Senate as a Democrat from Virginia in 2006; throughout the campaign, he wore a pair of combat boots belonging to his son, who was then serving in Iraq as a Marine. As he puts it, he's probably the only person ever elected to the Senate with a union card, two Purple Hearts, and three tattoos.

Thanks, Shirley! To answer your question, I planned on a second career as a teacher after retiring from the military, and finished a master's in education, but then decided I'd rather work with the kids who needed more intensive attention, went back for another master's in psychology, and ended up as a psychotherapist instead. I grew up around teaching, as my mom was a teacher, and I did do a lot of instructing in the Marines and also as a program manager for a while with the state health department here, teaching systems theory and CQI to county and tribal health councils working on various projects in their communities.

Interesting that you bring up ritual behavior, Barbarossa - that appears to be connected to the most primitive part of the brain, what is often called the lizard brain. That's what is getting stimulated when people engage in ritual behavior. Many animals have rituals for courtship and mating, clashes over turf, etc. - we could argue that the rituals of animals aren't rational, but is the human love of ritual rational?

Some of the most intelligent of the other species also appear to mourn and honor their dead - elephants, for example.

Perhaps one area in which we are different is in our lifelong awareness of our own mortality. Our pet dogs and cats appear self-aware, but they don't appear to know that their days are numbered. They also don't appear to go as far as we do into trying to find explanations for the world around them. I think that those two things, awareness (and for most people, dread) of mortality and nonexistence, and the desire to explain the universe, account for every religion ever invented.

The idea that a corporation can be a 'person' in legal terms is ridiculous; can a corporation be incarcerated when a person who committed the same offense would be? A corporation is a transparent legal shield allowing the people who control a business to escape accountability for the consequences of the actions they use that corporation to carry out.

Yes, we can't demand that others think and feel as we wish, but we absolutely have the right to demand that they refrain from hurting others because of what they believe or feel. My freedom to swing my arms ends where your nose begins.

Some animals make art, too, though! Take a look at this story: http://www.livescience.com/animals/08... Some of them do seem to have a certain aesthetic sense.

As for soul, whatever definition we create for that, the only way it will include humans and exclude other beings is if we deliberately make it a circular definition based on being human.

In the realm of alternative history, who do you like?
Harry Turtledove has written a bunch of good stuff, including a whole series of novels starting with the premise of the South winning the Civil War and following the consequences up through the late 20th century.

Philip K. Dick wrote a novel called The Man in the High Castle, which depicts a post-WW2 USA occupied by the victorious Axis powers, in which someone writes a wacko alternate history novel with the Allies beating the Axis.

There are some other interesting collections of short stories and essays, too, mainly with military themes.

So what do you folks like?

Well, that last guy earns a mite of recognition for his self-awareness, if nothing else. At least he wasn't blaming his deeds on others.

I had to laugh, mulling over this, when I thought about some chats with our five-year-old grandson Matt during the last few days. He's fascinated with imaginary superheroes, super-villains, and monsters, and can't quite get his brain around the idea that they're just made up, since he's seen them himself in movies I wish my daughter wouldn't expose him to. So he routinely starts conversations with comments like "Venom is a bad guy, huh, grampa?", and just rolls his eyes if I say something like "Well, he would be if he was real, but he's just made up in a story."

Thanks, Elizabeth! I just added it to my 'to read' list.
If you haven't seen the film 'The Corporation', you might be interested in it, too. The filmmakers started by looking at the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (aka sociopathy and/or psychopathy), which in an individual is considered deeply pathological and indicative of the lack of conscience or empathy. They compared the actions typical of corporations to those criteria, and found that what is normal for a corporation is a standard of behavior that would be considered antisocial, criminal, and deeply pathological in an individual.
The solution would appear to be to radically change the legal structure allowing corporations to exist and controlling what they are allowed to do. Of course, those changes would have to be made by legislators whose elections are financed mainly by those same corporations, so it won't happen until we change the way we allow political campaigns to be financed.

It does keep getting harder to draw lines between homo sapiens and other species, other than the simple fact that we are homo sapiens and they aren't... Gorillas, chimps, and even some birds have been seen using tools, both as weapons and to get at food (chimps take twigs and use them to fish termites out of nests, and some birds will respond almost immediately to the building of a new paved road by flying over and dropping food objects with hard shells, like mussels and clams, then flying down and eating them when the shells are shattered on the concrete.) Chimps have also been seen doing two more things that are even more crucial as far as tool use goes: modifying objects instead of just using them in the form they find (stripping bark, leaves, and side branches from a twig so they can poke it farther into the termite mound) and systematically teaching others in their group how to use the tools. There are some chimp tribes that know how to do certain things and others that don't, which could be called a simple form of cultural variation.

As for conscience - excellent point, Shirley; it's hard to define exactly what it is, and some humans lack it, but they are correctly seen as pathological. It seems to be based mostly on empathy - but some animals appear to behave empathically. For instance, on a couple of recent documentaries on ancient predators, some scientists were pointing out cases of both sabertooth cats and dire wolves who had survived for extended periods after injuries that had to have immobilized them, as proven by the bone damage having healed to a great degree. The only way they could have avoided starving was for others in their groups to have brought them food. Today, we see strong evidence of cooperation and empathy in apes, large herbivores like elephants and Cape buffalo, and apex predators like lions.

One captive gorilla is famous for having learned a form of sign language and developed a vocabulary equivalent to about a 3- or 4-year-old human. She had a pet kitten. When the kitten died, the gorilla used sign language to tell the humans working with her that her heart hurt.

To further complicate the question, NatGeo just ran a documentary on scientists studying the genetic differences between homo sapiens and Neanderthal humans, and finding a growing amount of evidence of at least some interbreeding, and the possibility that one trait we think of as distinctly human, our greater capacity for speech and other symbolic thinking and communication, may be something we acquired from Neanderthal ancestors rather than from the homo sapiens that were their contemporaries (they base that on the view that the main driver for the development of sophisticated communication was cooperative hunting of dangerous animals, and the Neanderthal's hunting weapons and techniques required close cooperation whereas homo sapiens' weapons and techniques were suitable for either group or solo use.) Neanderthal brains were about 10% bigger than modern human brains, too.

Maybe it's not so important to look for ways to set ourselves apart from the rest of our world's inhabitants - it might be better for all concerned if we spent more time on what we have in common.

Aw, shucks, I'm blushing.

I think Adams really was an idealist, but fell victim to the seduction of being so sure of his own rightness that he thought he was justified in trying to crush opposition - a lot like Wilson in that way. Except when he was in power, he seemed to be able to see more clearly. He and Jefferson ended up being friends for the rest of their lives, after both their presidencies, and both died on the same day, on July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the Declaration of Independence.

I do respect Adams' courage and integrity in upholding the rule of law even when it was unpopular and dangerous; I just wish he had done the same when he was President instead of succumbing to the temptation to try to impose his own views forcibly. There, he fell far short of Washington's example of voluntarily limiting his own power.

Churchill was gifted in a way that made him an exact fit for his country's needs in 1940, but deeply flawed, no doubt about it. As a military planner he was mostly a disaster - in World War I he came up with the idea for the Gallipoli campaign, as Manuel notes, and in Word War II he was the one who kept calling Italy the "soft underbelly" of the Axis and predicting that invading central Europe via Italy would be, as today's great minds would call it, a cakewalk. It turned out to more like Stalingrad in the mountains.

He did help create the idea of the tank, which has enjoyed modest success as a weapons system.

And Churchill was definitely a racist and imperialist. It never occurred to him that maybe the Indians and other subject peoples had the same right and capacity as his own people to govern themselves in the system of their own choice.

Napoleon's case is interesting. Now that it's been a couple of centuries and no one living remembers those times, he's seen as colorful, a hero to some. In his own time he was nearly as feared and loathed as Hitler in the 20th century.

I would differ about the Huns, though; they were one of several tribes forced into migration and jostling for territory, but they weren't the monsters often associated with their name.

The Mongols, now... they did some truly evil things, engaging in systematic terrorism and atrocities and wiping out whole populations as a deliberate psychological strategy. Although in that historic climate, the Crusaders did similar things with the Church's blessing.

If anything, the US is slipping closer to fascist totalitarianism. During the last 8 years, of all the increase in income in the U.S., 75% of it has gone to the richest 0.1% - whatever that is, it's definitely not communism.

There's a quote, widely but mistakenly attributed to Mussolini, saying that fascism is the merger of government with big business. Although Mussolini didn't actually say it, he should have, because it does accurately describe fascism. And when we see our government using the tax revenues we pay into the system as individuals, most of it from the middle class, to rescue big business and the individuals whose income is derived from business rather than wages, while they let middle class families everywhere be foreclosed and made homeless, that's fascism, not communism.

Abraham Lincoln foresaw and feared an age when corporations would use the power of their wealth to dominate government and subvert democracy. He was right. They started getting the upper hand during the Civil War, and their power and the corruption it bred grew like weeds for the rest of the 19th century. The steady drift toward corporate control of America has suffered two significant setbacks, basically - the administrations of two Roosevelts, one Republican and the other Democrat. Teddy was famous for attacking corporate trusts, monopolistic practices, and price-fixing, as well as pushing federal regulation of food purity and so on. FDR addressed the Great Depression (which was triggered by unregulated speculation, much like our current woes) by regulating big business, creating the New Deal which enforced protections of ordinary Americans from big business, and pushing through tax reforms that made the tax system much more favorable to middle class and working class Americans instead of the very wealthy and big business. The gains of his administration have been slowly eroding under corporate-funded assaults since then, and we're almost back to where we were in the 1920s.

In 1933, a group of the wealthiest American families and corporate heads organized a conspiracy to head off FDR's tax reforms by overthrowing the U.S. government in a coup and installing a puppet head of state in a fascist government.

Luckily for America, the person they picked for their figurehead, retired Marine major general Smedley Butler, blew the whistle to Congress and FDR and stopped them. It was investigated by Congress and well publicized at the time, but was somehow or other left out of most history books written later (by the corporations that publish history books.) This would sound like a whacko conspiracy theory, but it's too well documented for that (see Jules Archer's book The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking True Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR, or the History Channel documentary In Search of History: The Plot to Overthrow FDR.)

If they had succeeded, the U.S. would probably have allied with the Axis instead of Britain and the USSR in World War II. Henry Ford and others greatly admired Hitler at the time. Some of those folks, including the Bush family, kept doing business with the Nazis via third parties during the war. I've wondered sometimes how George H.W. Bush felt about his family doing business with the people who he was fighting as a Navy pilot in the Pacific, especially after they shot him down.

The things communism and fascism have in common are the enthronement of an ideology as almost a state religion, widespread corruption without much accountability, the suppressing of dissent, the habit of using scapegoating to distract people from the failings of government, and militarism. We can see all those processes working in America since Reagan.

The far left and far right forms of government do look like evil twins in a lot of ways. They have more in common with each other than either has with open and representative government.

The Swastika was around for centuries or millennia before the Nazis took it and perverted it - there's a very old movie theater here in Albuquerque, built well before World War II, with Navajo-themed decor, and the interior is startling the first time you see it because after a moment you notice that there are swastikas everywhere. Absolutely nothing to do with the Nazis and in fact representative of a culture antithetical to their whole ideology. One difference: the Navajo looked at the Nazis' swastika and shook their heads, said the Germans had the arms pointed the wrong way and had turned it into a bad luck symbol.

However, for someone today to fly a swastika flag at their house and, when people were offended, protest that they were celebrating older cultures and not the Nazis, would be either very naive or not very honest. Fairly or not, the swastika has been co-opted to represent fascism and genocide. In the same way, the design used for the Confederate flag, regardless of other connotations, now stands first and foremost for white supremacist racism and the defense of slavery.

I've had to work on that myself, and three things that I have found hugely helpful in making my own thinking, writing, and speaking more clear and organized have been a logic course I took at a community college in California, a speech course at another college, and a course on technical writing and presentations in a management degree program at Southern Illinois U. - a lot of places offer classes in philosophy, logic, and speech that people can take as stand-alone classes without being in any particular degree program, and they can be a lot of fun as well as useful (one of the best parts of that technical writing course was a section in which we worked on resumes and practiced job interviews as interviewees and interviewers; that's been handy every time I've applied for any job since then.)

Toastmasters might be helpful too, though I've never tried them.

Finally, there's a company called The Great Courses that offers classes on video on all sorts of subjects. My wife and I got their course titled Argumentation and have recently started it, and so far it's great, very interesting and watchable and at the same time turning on more light bulbs with each episode; I can be watching it, listening to the presentation, and be reminded of half a dozen things I'm hearing in the current presidential campaign, for instance. I strongly recommend that course.