Holocaust - History 1c

UCLA's History 1c, in dealing with modern history has to deal with the Holocaust among others, which is a subject big enough to spend an entire lecture series on. I have seen other general history courses struggle with this. The holocaust cannot be set aside or even briefly mentioned, yet when one begins, in the end, never enough has been said. Professor Lynn Hunt, however, in the one designated lecture (the May 19th lecture), has done an impressive job in capturing all dimensions of the holocaust.

She kicks of with John Cage's piece 4'33" indicating how words fall short and by the end, after a full wordy lecture she makes full circle with John Cage. By then she has described the cultural impact, the philosophical impact (Hannah Arendt!) as well as the historic impact including the statistics. It was the best lecture about the Shoah as part of a general course I have ever heard.

On the subject of the statistics one detail stuck out for me: she presented as a fact that 60% of Dutch Jewry did not survive the Shoah. It is a figure that I have always learned to be much higher (up to 80%). I have mailed her a question about this and hope to be able to report back with an answer.

More History 1c:
Nietzsche in a nutshell,
Industrialization and Italian unification,
History since 1715.

Gelogen over zijn leeftijd - veertien achttien recensie

Aan het eind van de laatste aflevering van Veertien Achttien weet je het niet meer. Ligt in het besproken graf in Poelcappelle nu werkelijk John Condon, of iemand anders? Het zou best iemand anders kunnen zijn, maar feit blijft dat Condon in de oorlog gebleven is. Op de prille leeftijd van 14 jaar.

Natuurlijk werden er geen veertienjarigen geronseld in Kitchener's Army, maar toen er om vrijwilligers werd gevraagd, waren er vele jongens wie de oorlog trok. En zij die te jong waren, probeerden over hun leeftijd te liegen. Verteller Tom Tacken geeft een aantal redenen waarom de jonge Ier Condon in de Grote Oorlog wilde dienen. Het is een verhaal over de Ierse onafhankelijkheidswording. Maar wie de geschiedenis een beetje kent, weet dat niet alleen Ierse jongens met een leugen aan het front kwamen. Het is ook het verhaal hoe de oorlog trekt.

Condon was wel erg jong. De jongste naar verluid. De leugen kon hem wel in de oorlog krijgen, maar wanneer werd dat eindelijk doorzien? Geen leugen kon hem meer uit de oorlog krijgen en getuige zijn grafzerk (of hij er nu in ligt of niet) toen hij eenmaal dood was, wist men wel heel precies dat hij nog maar veertien was. Zo was deze oorlog, makkelijk begonnen, maar schier onmogelijk om uit te komen.

Meer Veertien Achttien:
Koning George V,
Colmar von der Goltz,
Sir Ian Hamilton,
H.H. Asquith,
Anton Kröller.

Climate change will make us pay - LSE

On the podcast of the London School of Economics (LSE public lectures and events) was a lecture by Professor Geoffrey Heal held on May 6th: Controversies in the Economics of Climate Change. In this lecture Heal goes over the economic cost climate change will cause.

His starting point is that the scientific question about Climate Change has largely been decided. There is wide consensus the climate is changing. Heal's subject is to take these established facts and evaluate, as well as possible, what the cost of these changes are. He emphasizes that these issues are still widely debated, hence the controversies of climate change, but the way he deals with them is by suggesting that only the size of the cost is debatable. There will be costs and they are enormous.

His analysis range from rather accurate like his esteem that the costs of the rising sea level will go over 1% of GDP, to completely unknown. The damages to the ocean, the warming of the climate are factors that he thinks are hard to enumerate. natural disasters and the disappearance of a multitude of species are impossible to range. On all accounts the costs are gigantic. It is not a happy lecture for the worried. Yet one, I feel, you must have heard.

On a side note. LSE also had a lecture called Urban Nomads which pays attention to the enormous stream of migration within China. The audio of this lecture is rather poor, the content is secondary (we listen in on a tape that is being played) and the subject is handled in a very anecdotal fashion. I cannot recommend this particular issue of LSE's podcast.

More LSE Events:
Nudge: decision architecture,
The EU and the Middle East,
The British Mandate in Palestine,
Iran Today,
Science and Religion.

Whale evolution - In Our Time

BBC's In Our Time deserves a review nearly every week. Not always I manage in the same week and as you all know by now: at the end of the week, the podcast has already disappeared from the feed and can only be heard in stream. Such is already the fate of last week's program about The Siege of Vienna. This week's program had me interested immediately and I managed to listen to it this weekend and so here is the review in time.

Melvyn Bragg and his guests addressed The Whale: a History. The whale had long been rather an anomaly in the animal kingdom, a creature that was not easy to fit into any of the categories in the tree of species. New finds and new technologies have helped establish new insights that reveal the evolution of the whale and in a very accessible, concise and interesting way the program orders this for us. At the beginning it is promised, in a way, that we will see how the whale is a kind of champion of evolution and by the end we come full circle and this is summarized completely.

This champion of evolution shows what evolution is capable of. It evolves all the sorts of adaptations it needs in its exceptional environment, the ocean, whereby its appearance takes it far away from its origins and its kin and only series of fossil finds and microbiology and retrace this. And so we learn how the whale is actually part of the strain of hoofed animals, just like horses and deer. In the show it is likened to seals, otters, beavers and eventually we learn what is its closest living relative: the hippopotamus. Very exciting and very well done.

More In Our Time:
Magna Carta,
BBC's In Our Time - always recommended,
Brave New World,
Rafael's School of Athens and the depiction of Plato and Aristotle,
The Boxer Rebellion.

James Mann about Ronald Reagan - UChannel

The fascinating thing about the 1980's for me is that I vividly remembered them, was a fanatic newspaper reader at the time and that the 1980's are becoming part of history. And then, when historians speak of events in the 1980's I relive the era and also receive new perspectives on my own perception. A case in point is when James Mann speaks about his book The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War.

James Mann was a guest speaker at Princeton University in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in April 2009 where he spoke of his new book (UChannel Podcast). Even if he is not the most engaging speaker - he retells some of the parts of his book en research in a seemingly random fashion - the experience is still very exciting. At least for me. At the time, I never felt Reagan was worried about the Cold War and happily seizing the opportunity to make deals with Gorbachev. Mann shows in many entertaining anecdotes that this is so.

If you like this lecture by James Mann, you will enjoy all the more the interview he gave to Marshall Poe on New Books in History. In both podcasts you will learn the backstory, among others, of Reagan's famous line in Berlin: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! I keep hearing this with Pink Floyd in the backdrop (I told you I am from the eighties), but if aything was torn down that day, it was Erich Honecker - listen and find out.

More UChannel Podcast:
Disasters and Peace,
Enclosing the commons of the mind,
Middle East challenges,
Good climate for everyone (global warming),
Robots and War.

The Sunni-Shia divide and the future of Islam

APM's Speaking of Faith frequently airs reruns of old shows and then republish them in the podcast feed also. This week the interview Krista Tippett had with Vali Nasr was published again. Last year I wrote about this issue and here is the review once more:

In the latest edition of Speaking of Faith, Krista Tippett speaks with Vali Nasr, Islam expert in the US or Iranian descent. (The Sunni-Shia divide and the future of Islam) Nasr and Tippett delve into the divide between Sunni and Shia that make up a 90 and respectively 10% of Muslims in the world. However, this division is not evenly dispersed. In Iran 90% are Shia and in Iraq 60%. Elsewhere Shia are a minority by far, if existent at all. (transcript, full interview)

Little attention is awarded to what makes up the divide and what are the cultural and historical differences. What Nasr has come to speak of is the effect on the world that the regime change in Iraq has. Iraq had been ruled by the Sunni minority, but American intervention has brought a fledgling democracy a majority rule. Not only does this mean for Iraq, the Shia suddenly find themselves in power, it also enhances the power of Iran, the previously only Shia ruled state. It also brings the Shia influence into the Middle-East, into the Arab world and has put Shia power on the map for the whole world, Muslim or not. Where Shia was formerly unknown or ignored, it has become a power to reckon with. And where Shia people accepted their submissive position, the idea is rising that political power is an availability for them.

The change in Iraq was triggered by force, because the Americans, as Nasr with tangible disappointment continues to point out, thought they could fast-track Iraq to western society. However, as impossible as it is to fast track any development in whole countries, let alone cultures, the power change has only revealed and unleashed old fashioned tribalism. In spite of that, no more and no less, Islam on the whole is struggling with modernity. In Nasr's mind, modernity will eventually find its way in to Islam, but not for another 60 or 100 years.

More Speaking of Faith:
Wangari Maathai,
Rumi,
The story and God,
The Buddha in the world,
Doubt.