Hoover Institution and History: when are documents not historical documents?

The Hoover publications can be found on the web at Stanford; the Hoover Institute is at hoover.org.

I want to look at one publication, "War Through Children's Eyes" which bears the sub-title
The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939-1941

This is no simple matter: the crimes of the Soviets following their invasion of Poland rank among the most dastardly of the 20th Century as war-crimes and crimes against humanity.  Few instances of more gross and murderous disregard for the then Geneva Convention are on record for the past century.

So what could be the issue?  Only a few days ago I was challenging Marburg bloggers to address the documents concerning Marburg/Lahn which are here at the U. of Minnesota.

These Hoover 'documents' in this volume are presented by a foreward by Bruno Bettelheim in which he chooses to relativize the expectations of the arriving Soviets and the expectations of the Poles.  Bettelheim reminds me of the famous film by the deveopmental psychologist Gesell in which a naked boy is shown but during the course of his remarks and observations the boy's perverse penile erection is passed over without comment.  At the time of this publication, Bettelheim was not yet fully appreciated for the nature of his camp survivor claims (he was released in 1939 and NOT in 1945) and a defender of Arendt's distortions (she was only briefly interned in France before escaping.)

The book is composed of selected essays by children - compositions written once they had escaped to British-controlled Iran.  These are not letters home collected from camp survivors or witnesses to an event.  A composition written for school is not a diary and is not even a protocol of an interview for an on-going investigation.  Of particular interest would be to learn where and how and why so many children had heard and then repeated that "Jews and Communists" collaborated with the Soviets and not "Communists - some of whom were Jews - " and how it is that so many of the children had such clear recall that collaborators were Jews.  The reader who is not advised concerning hearsay, rumor and bias will be ill-prepared for this jarring "testimony".

As valuable as these essays by the children are, they are not historical documents. Many of the essays contain stereotypic hearsay in addition to their eye-witness accounts. Notably missing are children recounting what they did themselves to survive - whether to siblings or the less fortunate - or what their parents did - candid veracity often missing in survivor testimony - and confessed only in assured privacy and years later.

The association of this book with Bettelheim is regrettable as the essays contain stereotypic antisemitic reports with the children often repeating what they had heard about the Jews and the Soviets. These essays were written on demand and do not constitute historic documents but merely more eye-witness testimony and irretrievably muddled with hearsay - horrific and heart-wrenching - but not suitable for "selected" book form unedited and without a critical assessment.  The reader is left without a simple facsimile in which one might note erasures or corrections - although the book has many photographs.

These essays were deserving of being preserved - but not all that we preserve as research materials constitute historical documents nor does their collection constitute an "archival documentary".

The title of this book should have reflected that these were compositions by survivors - compositions written after the events.  The very distortions which were the mainstay of Molotov-era propaganda otherwise risk being repeated as if fro the mouths of child witnesses.  Stanford University would do a service to readers by making available on the web the compositions which were not selected and any document reflecting the instructions to the students by the teachers involved and whether the compositions were written in one sitting in a room or benefited from hearsay correction by parents.

What we know of human behavior in situations were many will perish is not reflected in these accounts.  In particular, no details of bullying in the traincars by victims against victims are reported although such matters are commonplace in these circumstances.  Photographs of boys in boots do not indicate the fate of the weaker boy from whom the boots had been stolen.  These are the sad realities and some of the many reasons that testimonials and photographs are not themselves part of an historical account no matter how much we me be tempted to use them as illustrations.

What occurred is so horrendous that a finer memorial to all victims is deserved and their memory was not well-served by Hoover Institute no matter how well-intentioned and even if ignorant of the personality and life of Bettelheim.

Having myself taught from Bettelheim's writings in college courses prior to 1981, I can only feel more anger than shame.  He ranks as a more serious fraud than Harry Stack Sullivan or Margaret Mead and his name mars any memorial to suffering inflicted upon children.

The reality of war, ethnic cleansing and genocide is too important for casual "history" to pass without objection.  To say nothing in opposition to this book is to countenance falsification of the past - a falsification however unintended in a story of a series of events which itself began with an immense lie.

At the very least, Stanford should release an edition with facsimilies, without selection and with a critical assessment to address both the issues raised here and elsewhere.

The attacks on the Enlightment and "modernity": notes

I have posted a page over at modernity.aule-browser.com as part of an exploration of the requirements and desiderata for a useful research browser for the humanities. The APSA paper is available as a PDF.

The paper is made available at allacademic.com but was not the paper which first caught my attention: that paper was A Critique of Modernity: On Positivism, and Phenomenology and, like the paper posted, was presented at a recent Political Science convention in the USA. [I have since located that paper in PDF and posted a text version for analysis.

When I was staying in Marburg some years ago, I was struck by the pro-Palestinian sentiments of students studying in a German univeristy town where Heidegger had made his academic reputation and where there was as yet no sign for the many tourists of where one of the great synagogues of Europe had stood.  I was from leftist universities myself (U. Regina and L'UQAM) but at least at the former there was no shortage of left-wing New Yorkers who were at least raised as ethnic Jews and often presented themselves as such.  Montreal was a more complex case, with some French-speaking Moroccan Jews attending all the universities  but with deeply engrained anti-Semitism in the guise of "anti-English" and "anti-Westmount" or "anti-West Island" - all of which signified areas notably Jewish - as compared to Ukrainian Rosemount or Italian St. Léonard.  Montrealers are not at ease with their anit-semitic past and present or their language mania (banning the use of the French word "hangar" for exterior coal sheds which were a feature of Montreal's miles of old cold-water flats, the French word "stopper" from "Stop" signs, etc, etc.)  Montreal is also notable as the home of one of the most virulent attacks on the scientific worldview of the western world, that being the political philosophy and cultural history of Charles Taylor at McGill University.

There are other hotbeds of leftist rhetoric in smaller Canadian universities or some campuses of urban universities or province-wide universities and some small colleges - rather like Macalister College here in Minneapolis-St. Paul or the home campus of "philosopher" Angela Davis in California.  The usual rhetoric stems from sources such as Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Habermas and to a lesser extent, Gadamer and Derrida.  Simple irrationalism is always a ready import from Paris and invited speakers make for a real challenge to the comprehension of any English-speaking audience as I can attest when hearing some of the "Greats" of Paris at U de Mtl during my first year "in French" while already conversant with Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Habermas, Dilthey, Heideger and Taylor in English.

Taylor is a special case: I now see that his attack on "modernity" must be clearly distinguised from MacIntyre's defense of the Thomistic tradition.

First MacIntyre.  A.M. would have his reader believe that an entire tradition fell into neglect.  It remains for an historian to refute this: it was not in neglect among Jesuits teaching high school in Regina or Catholic philosphers teaching at the religious colleges affiliated with our two Saskatchewan universities.  There is no basis for the claim with regard to the school in Quebec City where the political luminaries of late 20th Century all studied or at Laval University.

Taylor's lines of argument comes out of a different background than those of MacIntyre and I am sure Taylor would not want this hermeneutical asoect to be over-looked. [...]

Many of us look at behaviorism and operationalism in social science and now think that the answer was to wait for the wave to pass: no head-long attack would be effective.  But this may not be the case in political commentary, where insight can pass for research.  This appears to be the case with the lasting adoration of Adorno if addresses to Political Science conferences as preserved at allacademic.com are any indication.

In the past, unpublished papers tended to vanish at retirement of the author (not the case with at least one of Taylor's own "grey" articles).  While conference papers are sometimes said to be "peer-reviewed" what is more often meant if "accepted for reading by a peer" or "reader invited by a peer".  Nothing else, presumably, could explain the papers which I am now reading.

In the on Rappa paper, the most distressly line might be

because it is the very nature of capitalism to deny the fullness of any aesthetic
that cannot be exploited to the Jewish for its pie-making possibilities.

but there is no way of knowing if he read that line to the audience at that conference.

Curl and the future of the starter kit

With the passing of Ralph Griswold, an author of SNOBOL and the ICON language, I became much more aware of the importance of archiving the history of the evolution of computing. Some of this work is actual library archive tasks (boxes of paper) and some is digital.

It is my hope that the Curl4 (which means Curl 3.0) Starter Kit will find a place first in opensource and then in a proper archive as part of the evolution of the Curl language.

In general I found that the the 3.0 Curl Starter Kit (CSK) ported easily to Curl6 (Curl 5.0) except for actually using the IPC (inter-process communication) from applet to subapplet. The biggest change between the CSK and the current Curl opensource projects is probably in the XML parsing toolset. Curl has now moved to the XML Document Model (XDM) so the code is out-dated but not uninteresting to anyone interested in programming language change. At the moment I am watching the emergence of 2 languages and a major transition in a language rather like Curl, that being REBOL which is now moving from 2.0 to 3.0. REBOL has just come through the pain of moving to UNICODE (which I think should have been what the UNICON version of the ICON language should both have meant and have accomplished) but Curl has been UNICODE since its commercial release in 2001. In the case of REBOL, we should have access eventually to the message exchanges among the key players and the language community as critical choices were made. I do not know what will be made available eventually for archive for Curl.

Every project has its challenges and perhaps Curl 4.0 was such a problem child for the Curl team. That transition deserves to have its documents preserved. The evolution to Curl 7.0 and the on-going discussion of what the Curl developer community might want to see in Curl 8.0 is part of the history of a programming language: some of its virtual documents will be preserved by the very nature of the web as was the case with internet news.

The unexpected death of the chair of CS at MIT early in the life of Curl no doubt had some impact at the time. David Kranz, the chief architect of Curl, may already have his account of the early days of the language. But in history, such reporting only constitutes another document. The Curl initiative was spun-off as a commercial enterprise at a time when opensource was just emerging. And it had been the early authors of SNOBOL at Bell Labs who may have inadvertently started the process when they placed SNOBOL in the hands of their listeners in an early public talk (at least that is the legend as I know it ...)

Yesterday I had a moment to comment to some young artists that the looms in their school had a connection with the computers in their media lab. And there, too, is a connection with the last days of Ralph Griswold: weaving and computing.