Spaanse Successie Oorlog - Hoor Geschiedenis

Ik kan onmogelijk elke dag over Hoor! Geschiedenis schrijven, maar ik luister wel trouw naar deze dagelijkse podcast. Maker Feico Houweling verzorgt consequent op elke werkdag vijf minuten met vaderlandse geschiedenis, langzaam maar zeker opstomend naar het heden.

Vaderlandse geschiedenis was een vak op de lagere school dat altijd doortrokken was van nationale trots en ook verteller Houweling is in deze serie voelbaar ingenomen met de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden. Dat wil zeggen, daar waar het goed gaat en iets bijzonders op te merken valt, zoals bijvoorbeeld zijn perspecitief van Het Plakkaat van Verlating, waarmee de Nederlanders in zijn ogen de tijd ver vooruit zijn. Daar waar de stadhouder of de raadspensionaris niet in staat zijn om van de Republiek een wereldmacht te maken is zijn spijt voelbaar.

Inmiddels is de podcast aangekomen bij het begin van de achttiende eeuw. De Engelsen en de Nederlanders zullen betrokken raken in de Spaanse Successieoorlog (mp3). Dat was tot voor kort een episode uit de geschiedenis waar ik hoegenaamd niets van wist, maar voordat Houweling bij dit conflict aankwam was ik al een luisteraar van Jim Mowatt's podcast Historyzine, die de Spaanse Successieoorlog als centraal onderwerp heeft. Nu zullen we zien wat Houweling er van maakt en of Houweling net als Jim Mowatt de moderne tijd in dit tijdsgewricht laat beginnen.

Meer Hoor! Geschiedenis:
Plakkaat van Verlating,
Willem van Oranje als Bijbelfiguur,
Dagelijks genoegen: hoor! geschiedenis,
Hoor! Geschiedenis - historische podcast recensie.

Historyzine:
The lines of Brabant,
Historyzine at its best,
The battle of Blenheim,
Reliving the War of Spanish Succession,
The year 1703.

The bioethics concern - Third Reith Lecture

Michael Sandel's third of BBC's Reith Lectures 2009 had me thoroughly excited. Those who have followed this blog over a long period may recall my search into the field of bioethics, looking for a way to bring together the need for cures and for scientific research with the intuitive qualms with us meddling with the building blocks of nature. It never got beyond that dilemma.

Sandel, however, succeeded in his third lecture, Genetics and Morality, to analyze the ethical qualm, this nagging intuition, into its rational components. I was so excited while listening, trains of thought kept springing up, making things clear in my age old search (I have been troubled since 1989 with this), yet making me lose track of the podcast. I have listened to it three times now and still not covered it all. Fortunately there is a transcript (Genetics and Morality - in rtf).

Sandel's method is to strip the intuition from its fears and see if there is something left. So, suppose meddling with genetics is not dangerous for our health, suppose allowing a free market force to be at work does not lead to reduced genetic diversity, suppose the benefits are available for all and elevate the weak and the poor, suppose we can handle the greater responsibility that comes with having greater influence on life, what still seems to be the problem? Applied to having children it looks like we reduce children to commodities. We can design them, order them as we like, we can fully repair whatever looks to be imperfection. This is a loveless meritocracy. We will have lost the quality to work with what we get, to appreciate the contingencies of nature. We will have submitted to a morality in which human being is not good enough unless it meets an ever rising set of standards.

We will abort the child with legs of uneven length, because we wanted a football star. And we will kill Garrincha, a man with several birth defects to become one of the best players next to Pele.

More Reith:
Morality in Politics,
Morality and the Market,
Michael Sandel - Philosophy Bites.

More Bioethics:
Regenerative Medicine - Stanford,
Straight Talk about Stem Cell Research,
The Ethics of Stem Cell Research,
Human rights and the body,
Life and bio-engineering - podcast review,
Bioethics without Christ, please,
A useful map into Bio-Ethics,
Stem Cell Research: Science, Ethics, and Prospects,
Stem Cells - Biology and Politics.

Two old and one New Books In History

It works out well to review three episodes of New Books In History at a time. It keeps me up with the latest and also allows me to slowly catch up with the fascinating backlog.

The oldest edition I picked out of the feed was an interview with Donald Worster about his biography of John Muir, founder of several national parks in the US. Apart from being introduced in the fascinating life of Muir, the Scottish Calvinist with a passion for nature who was ahead of his time with ideas about nature preservation, we also meet Donald Worster who is one of the leading names in Environmental History. As such we have heard him also on the Environmental History Podcast.

Carl Bon Tempo is Marshall Poe's guest to talk about his research on the reception of refugees into the US during the Cold War. The point to take from here is, that no matter how the sentiment in the US was towards specific refugees, the sluggish bureaucracy set the pace.

Giles MacDonogh was the latest guest on the show and he has done research into the atrocities committed by the allies during the occupation of Germany. For me this was only half new. Ever since I read In Europa by Geert Mak, I knew many details of the rapes by Red Army soldiers, but I was not aware of similar occurrences in the British, French and American Zones.

More NBIH:
The latest in New Books in History,
Three recommendations,
American Exceptionalism,
The Great War in short,
How Rome Fell.

Antisemitism in France in the 1930's - USHMM podcast

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is also on iTunes, with a veritable multitude of content. The audio that can be subscribed to over there are among others the scholarly lectures about Antisemitism (feed in iTunes, url to iTunes). Also the papers that go with the lectures are available.

The one I listened in on was by Professor Vicky Caron about the antisemitism in France in the 1930's, which turn out to be a prelude to the racial laws of the Vichy regime. (Caron's paper) Caron describes the connection between the mentality of the Dreyfus trial and the exclusion of the Jews by Vichy in the 1940's. In general the antisemitic sentiments in France go up and down, but there is a persistent stream coming from a public that is most of all upset with the French Third Republic and somehow vent their anger on modernity, that is internationalism, that is foreigners and especially the Jews among them.

But then, Jew becomes similar to foreign and untrustworthy for the French cause. This sentiment is widely held and even affects the French prime minister Leon Blum. Blum is pushed to such an extent he feels he must reply and he does so on the front page of one the French papers. The sheer fact he addresses the issue goes to show how severe the distrust of Jews is. Eventually Blum has to relinquish his political career. And so many Jews had to relinquish their French citizenship. Antisemitism appears with all its faces, the suspicion of foreigners, of internationalism albeit capitalist or socialist, the suspicion about Jewish loyalties and the plethora of methods of exclusion.

More Vichy:
La Resistance,
Heesters, Leopold en Petain achteraf (Dutch).

More antisemitism:
Moses Hess according to Isaiah Berlin,
Antisemitism in Germany before 1919,
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History about Adolf Hitler,
Only in America.

Revenge Tragedy - IOT podcast review

BBC's In Our Time last week contained a discussion about Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth and King James I (1558 - 1625) the motif of revenge was very common in the theater and very popular as well.

The program discusses a number of plays, the most famous among them of course Shakespeare's Hamlet. I was struck however by another one, I think it was The Spanish Tragedy in which the revenge is played out in a play. The revenging character devises a scene in which the object of his revenge is an actor that needs to be stabbed. He replaces the stage dagger with a real one. But of course that real one is a stage dagger in The Spanish Tragedy.

The irony seems to be that revenge as a social phenomenon fits more in the Middle Ages and here, in this era, the State of England is being built and is furnished with a legal system and revenge is worked out of society. It is as if the stage plays represent the public mourning over a way of compensation they have to give up. Later on, revenge continues to be a motif in the theater, but not the only one and not as drawn out and central is in this time.

More In Our Time:
The Augustan Age,
The trial of king Charles I,
St. Paul,
Whale evolution,
Magna Carta.

Walther Rathenau - veertien achttien recensie

In de laatste aflevering van Veertien Achttien gaat het over de Duitse industrieel en politicus Walther Rathenau. Natuurlijk wordt bij hem in de eerste plaats gedacht aan de Weimar Republiek waar hij minister van buitenlandse zaken was. En waar hij het slachtoffer werd van een politieke moord.

Rathenau was tijdens de oorlog aangesteld om de Duitse economie aan te passen aan de oorlogstoestand. Podcaster Tom Tacken doet uit de doeken hoe Rathenau op doeltreffende wijze de boel rationaliseert. Daardoor kan er nog jaren doorgevochten worden, terwijl zonder Rathenau Duitsland misschien in 1914 al verslagen was.

Behalve patriot was Rathenau ook joods. Maar net als de Franse premier Leon Blum (over wie ik later vandaag nog meer zal schrijven) speelde zijn joodse identiteit hem toch parten. Hoe verlicht Frankrijk en de Weimar Republiek waren, het antisemitisme achtervolgde en achterhaalde hen. In zekere zin zou je kunnen zeggen dat met de moord op Rathenau de eerste wereldoorlog is afgelopen en de tweede begint.

Meer Veertien Achttien:
Komitas Vardapet,
John Condon,
Koning George V,
Colmar von der Goltz,
Sir Ian Hamilton.

Walther Rathenau in OVT:
1922 - In Europa.