Never give up!

Ruth López committed no crime: she has been imprisoned for an entire year for exposing corruption in El Salvador without any kind of legal process. Her friends at Cristosal ask that we ensure she is remembered -- that the Bukele regime cannot simply disappear this champion for justice. 

Pass it on: We continue demanding #FreedomForRuth and a #PublicTrialForRuth.  #FreeRuth

Like Western civilization, international law would be a very good idea (apologies to M Gandhi)

The most fascinating book I read in 2025 was Phillipe Sands' East West Street: On the Origins of "Genocide" and "Crimes Against Humanity". By way of his gripping, intimate story of some of the human flotsam thrown about in the violent chaos of Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century, Sands interrogates the development of our contemporary understandings of international law.

For my generation of Americans which came of age when Central Europe -- Ukraine, Hungary, what was then Czechoslovakia, what was then Yugoslavia, Austria, Poland, much of Germany -- were barely visible behind the Iron Curtain erected by Soviet Russia, it is not obvious that this region was once the heart of European civilization. But it was. And then, what we call World War I, (functionally 1914 through 1920 or so) tore up and rearranged the state entities that had ruled and organized this part of Europe. After that war, violence and chaos continued. The Austro-Hungarian empire disintegrated into unstable nationalist successor states; in Russia, the Soviets overthrew the tsar and fought a wide-ranging civil war that leached westward. Individuals were tossed about between city and country, between morphing national states and nationalities, and among competing intellectual and political influences. 

Much of this human upheaval Sands traces by chasing down evidence about the lives of four individuals whose ideas and fates continue to shape international law today. All lived in or passed through what is known today as Ukrainian Lviv, but which in this period was named Lemberg, Lvov, and then Lwow before the contemporary Ukrainian state took its current form. (Yes, Vladimir Putin is still seeking undo Ukraine's claim to national status which emerged in this period. )

Sands' characters are: 

• Hersch Lauterpacht, professor of international law, born in August 1897 in the small town of Zolkiew, a few miles from Lemberg, to which the family moved in 1911. ... In 1923, he married Rachel Steinberg in Vienna, and they had one son, Elihu, who was born in Cricklewood, London. 

• Hans Frank, a lawyer and [German Nazi] government minister, was born in Karlsruhe [Germany], in May 1900. ... In August 1942, he spent two days in Lemberg, where he delivered several speeches. [He was executed 1946 after being tried at Nuremberg for presiding over the Eastern European death camps.] 

• Rafael Lemkin, a prosecutor and lawyer, was born in Ozerisko near Bialystok, in June 1900. ... In 1921, he moved to Lwow. He never married and had no children.

• Leon Buchholz [grandfather of the author] was born in Lemberg in May 1904. ... He married Regine "Rita" Landes in Vienna in 1937, and a year later their daughter, Ruth, who is [Sands'] mother, was born there.

Sands knew little of the lives of these four when he began the project that became this book. All contributed through actions and their intellectual contributions to his professional career as one of the most distinguished international lawyers of our day.The book is the story of his investigations into their lives, of finding survivors from their families and associates who knew the men, and unraveling who lived and who died as the Nazis tore apart European civilization.

The book is a compendium of fascinating, very contingent stories. Luck played a huge role in who made it through war and tyranny and who was murdered amid the turbulent chaos.

• • • 

And, in the midst of Sands' tale of these main characters, he takes a charming detour to recount the exploits of one person otherwise lost to history: "Miss Tilney of Norwich."

Who was Miss Tilney?" I asked my mother. 

... she said, "I think she was the woman who brought me [as an infant] from Vienna to Paris in the summer of 1939," insisting there was no more information. ...

Sands was not content to leave the question of Miss Tilney there. He chased around Europe and beyond, finding additional stories of the mysterious English woman who somehow managed to hide or facilitate the escape of a few Jewish people and others at risk from the Germans in turbulent wartime Europe. He never completely uncovered her motivation for this dangerous project which could have easily cost her her life. Perhaps she adhered to a warped Christian theology about bringing on the apocalypse; perhaps she just knew it was the right thing to do. She died in 1974, still unrecognized publicly, in a Florida retirement community. Yet Sands owes his own life to her rescue of his infant Jewish mother.

• • •

Ultimately this book consists of Sands, one of the worlds' current most eminent human rights lawyers, trying to sort out the conflict between the legal "crimes against humanity" edifice that Hersch Lauterpacht brought to the British delegation at Nuremberg and the novel notion of "genocide' invented and advocated by Rafael Lemkin to the American legal delegation at that tribunal.

The most succinct description of this conflict between adjacent legal frameworks that I've seen comes, in our own moment, from M. Gessen, written in the context of reporting on the attempts by legal NGOs, humanitarian organizations and some nations to discern how Israel's murderous campaign against the people of Gaza should understood. She describes the competing legal notions like this:

... International law makes two key distinctions between genocide and the broader category of crimes against humanity. One difference involves intent: Crimes against humanity are crimes of disregard for human life, while genocide is a crime of hatred against a specific group. The other difference involves the way the world is obligated to respond: Under existing law, other countries need not prevent crimes against humanity from occurring, but the Genocide Convention does require other countries to prevent genocide. ...  

• • •

Sands affirms the value of both legal frames and describes a history of human rights advocates leaning in one direction or the other. 

 

At the Nuremberg trials which led to the execution of Hans Frank and other leading Nazis, "crimes against humanity" took center stage. But later Rafael Lemkin's coinage, "genocide," gained adherents, led by the founders of the United Nations, including especially Eleanor Roosevelt. 

Sand ponders deeply about the two ways of looking at the horrors people and nations inflict on each other. As a practitioner of international law, he tries to come to terms with their implications.

... An informal hierarchy has developed. In the years after the Nuremberg judgment, the word genocide gained traction in political circles and in public discussion as the "crime of crimes," elevating the protection of groups above that of individuals. Perhaps it was the power of Lemkin's word, but as Lauterpacht feared, there emerged a race between victims, one in which a crime against humanity came to be seen as a lesser evil. That was not the only unintended consequence of the parallel efforts of Lauterpacht and Lemkin. 

Proving the crime of genocide is difficult, and in litigating cases I have seen for myself how the need to prove the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part, as the Geneva Convention requires, can have unhappy psychological consequences. It reinforces the sense of solidarity among the members of the victim group while reinforcing negative feelings toward the perpetrator group. The term "genocide" with its focus on the group, tends to heighten a sense of "them" and "us," burnishes feeling of group identity, and may unwittingly give rise to the very conditions that it seeks to address: by pitting one group against another it makes reconciliation less likely. 

I fear that the crime of genocide has distorted the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity, because the desire to be labeled a victim of genocide brings pressure on prosecutors to indict for the crime. For some, to be labeled a victim of genocide becomes "an essential component of national identity' without contributing to the resolution of historical disputes or making mass killings less frequent. It is no surprise that an editorial in a leading newspaper, on the occasion of the centenary of Turkish crimes against Armenians, suggested that the word "genocide" may be unhelpful, because it "stirs up [defensive] national outrage rather than the sort of ruthless examination of the record the country needs."

Yet against these arguments. I am bound to accept the sense of group identity is a fact. ... "Our bloody nature," the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote ... "is ingrained because group-versus-group was a principal driving force that made us what we are." It seems that a basic element of human nature is that "people feel compelled to belong to groups and, having joined, consider them superior to competing groups." 

This poses a serious challenge for our system of international law confronted by a tangible tension: on the one hand, people are killed because they happen to be members of a certain group; on the other hand the recognition of that fact by the law tends to make more likely the possibility of conflict between groups, by reinforcing the sense of group identity. ...

Sands could not and does not resolve the tension in his own mind. He sought to understand the two men who represented the two approaches. That quest led him into his own history and how he understands his own career as a human rights litigator. But he arrived at no clean conclusion:

... I [have] wondered ... whether I was closer to the ideas of Lauterpacht or Lemkin, or stood equidistant between them or sat with them both. Lemkin would probably have been the more entertaining dinner companion, and Lauterpacht the more intellectually rigorous conversationalist. The two men shared an optimistic belief in the power of law to do good and protect people and the need to change the law to achieve that objective. Both agreed on the value of a single human life and on the importance of being part of a community. They disagreed fundamentally, however, on the most effective way to achieve the protection of those values, whether by focusing on the individual or the group.

Lauterpacht never embraced the idea of genocide. To the end of his life, he was dismissive, both of the subject and, perhaps more politely, of the man who concocted it, even as he recognized the aspirational quality. Lemkin feared the separate projects of protecting individual human rights, on the one hand, and protecting groups and preventing genocide, on the other, were in contradiction. It might be said the two men cancelled each other out. 

... I saw the merits of both arguments, oscillating between the two poles, caught in an intellectual limbo.

Nothing is easy about trying to envision an international legal order based in justice. Today we watch the Trump regime tear up American fealty to the long standing law of the sea by killing men already drowning, a legal dictate that predates both human rights and genocide law .

 

Bob Dylan sang: "to live outside the law you must be honest." This is not an honest time.

Keeping hope for better alive - from the Israeli ground

Erudite Partner and I have long traded the sardonic observation that being an Israeli citizen might be one of the few conditions in the world which are equally morally compromised with being an American citizen. If you care about peace and justice, your own home-place is the cause or, at best a great part, of the problem -- and what we do here, if only urging restraint, must also be part of the solution. Knowing this is to live in permanent pain. After our 9/11, our kind struggled to find our bearings. It is worth remembering that the cruel stupidity of our democratically elected rulers eventually enabled us to reclaim some ground against our invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Israeli peace movement, the Israeli left, has become a feeble thing. Once capable of gathering masses, the right wing strategy of imprisoning the Palestinian inhabitants of the land behind walls in Gaza and the West Bank has worked. Palestinians? What Palestinians? Only Hamas -- religiously-inflected terrorists -- and right wing Israeli settlers -- who aim to expel the remainder of the Palestinians -- occupy the public field.

But, since Israel is actually for many of its people a multifaceted fragment of a wider world of humanity, there remain more complex remnants trying to invent and sustain a vision of peace and justice between the river and the sea. 

Dana Mills is a former director of the Israeli movement Peace Now and a human rights activist. In the wake of the 10/7 massacres and the Israeli assault on Gaza, she provided an annotated catalogue of efforts within a very isolated -- and grieving -- Israeli context. Such efforts keep hope of a better future alive. I excerpt her October 18 post:

... there is an active witch hunt within Israel society against Israeli human rights defenders. I only write from my own perspective, and write about what I know, so I want to take a moment and write about defending human rights in the midst of something that can move between a war, genocide or self defense or ethnic cleansing, depending who you ask and where you're looking from.

... we are very lonely in here on the Israeli left, and as much as it can sometimes comfort hearing people abroad reiterating our messaging, at first point, we need our voice to be heard, as we are here, witnessing up close, and paying prices of various magnitude for that.

The oldest and biggest human rights organization is B'tselem. ... They have been doing extraordinary work since 7 October, noteworthy as their director, Yuli Novak, gave birth two weeks ago!! B'tselem employs Israelis and Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and one of their field researchers in Gaza lost 15 family members in Israeli bombardment on the Strip. ...

Breaking the Silence is an organization that gives a platform for soldiers to talk about the occupation. It acts as an educational organization, not specifically a human rights organization; but in its essence it documents war crimes. ... This is true of many of the orgs cited here; so you see, we have an optimism that motivates us, we gather information so that when things get better we'll have a record of the dark times. Anyway, it is an amazing organization as in a very militarized society it gives voice to those who are critical and at the same time gives platform to those soldiers carrying deep trauma committing crimes they didn't plan or want to execute. [You can find English and other language articles by former Israeli soldiers here.] Because you see, not all us Israelis are murder-hungry beasts; it takes time and privilege to be able to disengage the founding ethos of your society and to be able to fight it. So this organization is incredibly important in Israel.

Yesh Din is an organization that focuses on demanding accountability from Israel to crimes executed against Palestinians, especially settler violence. ... The director of Yes Din, Ziv Stahl, is a native of Kibbutz Kfar Azza. She was held at gunfire by Hamas terrorists and lost many family members and friends  in the 7 October attacks. You can read their report, in downloadable pdf form, Settler Violence Against Palestinians in the West Bank Under the Cover of War in Gaza.

Standing Together is a grassroots socialist Israeli-Palestinian organization that aims to organize on a local level Israelis and Palestinians against racism, the demise of the welfare state (Israel has been hurled into a neo-liberal privatization over the past two decades), and generally supply solidarity work on the ground. It has been doing invaluable work recently, especially as the Minister for Interior Security is a genocidal pyromaniac who is seeking to incite a civil war between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Jewish Israelis.

If you were to seek some light in this huge darkness, I can tell you of joint Israeli-Palestinian work to help people from the South who've been displaced (including, by the way, Bedouin who live in unrecognized villages), Jews and Palestinians who have organized a joint self-defense unit in Yaffa, ensuring they don't turn against each other, and more. ...

Mills' full archive of outrage, grieving and resistance is available here.

How others see us

Chatting with Vineyard friends the other night, we found ourselves wondering, "what ever happened to Kamala Harris?" (Well, some did; I've long questioned her political strengths.) Vice Presidents usually fade into the background; does anyone really remember what Joe Biden did during the Obama years? But, somehow, we ask more from Ms. Harris. We want her to establish herself as a figure in her own right and criticize her when she's a just another VP.

Today Heather Cox Richardson pointed to a notable speech Harris had delivered to a Los Angeles March for Reproductive Rights.

Let us center on where we are. ... A United States Supreme Court, the highest court in our land, that took a constitutional right that had been recognized from the people of America. 

We have seen attacks on voting rights; attacks on fundamental rights to love and marry the people that you love — (applause); attacks on the ability of people to be themselves and be proud of who they are.  (Applause.) 

... You know, I’ve been traveling around the world as your Vice President.  (Applause.)  And — thank you.  And here’s the thing, though.  Here’s the thing.  When we, as Americans, walk in those rooms around the world, we have traditionally walked in those rooms, shoulders back, chin up, having some authority to talk about the importance of rule of law, human rights.  

But here’s the thing we all know about what it means to be a role model: People watch what you do to see if it matches what you say.  (Applause.)

I'm sure she does find that we're being watched, usually anxiously, wherever she goes. When the people of the world pay attention to us, I imagine they feel whipsawed about by our political gyrations, our gun culture, our democratic backsliding, our wealth, our innovations, our pop culture -- as are most of us right here at home.

Via Economist Intelligence

The United States certainly doesn't command automatic leadership on questions of world war and peace -- as well we shouldn't given that we spent a couple of decades tearing up the Middle East and Central Asia for no discernible purpose.  

But Harris' pitch to a progressive audience does seem significant here. She's reaching for a jujitsu move that was vital to the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and early 60s: The Black internationalist tradition (think W.E.B. DuBois among others) equipped civil rights leaders to confront the dominant Cold Warrior anti-communists in power with the charge of hypocrisy. If their system was so superior, how come the South was allowed to exist as a neo-Confederate white supremacist autocracy? 

Harris is right to use her experience on the diplomoatic trips she's been shuffled off on to raise, once more, the contrast between what the U.S.  preaches and who the world can see that we are. 

There's a deep tradition there, and if we're to claw our way to an equitable democracy, we can draw on it.

A Biden victory could be a break for Central America

By way of the Central American human rights organization Cristosal comes an extraordinarily optimistic article from Devex,  which bills itself as "the media platform for the global development community." Journalist Teresa Welsh asks "Would Biden 'rebuild the old program' to reduce Northern Triangle migration?"

It seems ages ago now, but as recently as 2016 ,U.S. policy toward Central American migration was at least nominally to try to improve the quality of life in the sending countries so as to encourage desperate people to stay home. That's not to say that our governments haven't historically made life harder for the people of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. We've propped up a long string of dictators and oligarchs in those suffering countries. But in the middle of the last decade, the U.S. did commit funds to healthier development and to supporting domestic human rights movements.

All that disappeared under Trump. U.S. policy today is to indiscriminately deport migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees and pretend these corrupt governments will deal with the reality of hungry people.

Joe Biden promises that he

"will immediately do away with the Trump Administration’s draconian immigration policies and galvanize international action to address the poverty and insecurity driving migrants from the Northern Triangle to the United States. ... The people of the region understand that addressing these challenges in a sustainable way demands systemic change and reforms across many sectors of society in the Northern Triangle–and that sort of change requires a serious investment of political will and resources at every level."

More substantively, he calls for

    •    Developing a comprehensive four-year, $4 billion regional strategy to address factors driving migration from Central America;
    •    Mobilizing private investment in the region;
    •    Improving security and rule of law;
    •    Addressing endemic corruption;
    •    Prioritizing poverty reduction and economic development.

Just words? Maybe. It wouldn't be the first time in the U.S. relationship with these countries. But Central America needs the northern colossus to at the very least pretend to do the right thing.

And according to Welsh, Biden has a good history with Central America in his previous role.

"Biden met multiple times with the presidents of the three countries, traveling to Central America, chairing meetings, and using personal diplomacy to lobby for an agreement that included pledges to reduce the corruption that has long been endemic in the region.

 "The vice president’s personal engagement was key to getting El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras to agree to serious reforms, as well as to significant financial contributions of their own, according to Mark Feierstein, who served during the Obama administration as assistant administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at the U.S. Agency for International Development."

Fernando Cutz, who worked in the National Security Council under both Trump and Obama, thinks there's hope for a return to a sensible, even helpful, policy after Trump.

“But … in Central America, I do think that — more than almost any other foreign policy area that I can think of — we probably can, in many ways, just rebuild the old program.”

Central America could use some breaks.

Without grounding in human rights, there is no ground to rise from

Last week I had the chance to attend a talk by Noah Bullock, director of Cristosal, on his organization's work in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Cristosal works across the Northern Triangle of Central America to monitor forced displacement by physical and sexual extortion and violence, to create models for humanitarian, psychological, and legal assistance to victims of human rights violations, and to demonstrate effective strategies for sustainable, community-based victim protection and support.

What's that boilerplate mean? Cristosal is currently assisting litigation for recognition of and compensation to the survivors of the El Mozote massacre and other war crimes of decades past within the legal institutions of the Salvadoran state. This effort strengthens what should be foundations of reliable rule of law in that violent country. Today, all these countries suffer from oligarchic gangster governments which do not provide security to their people. Chronic violence and the nonexistence of effective state institutions that might protect people in their homes drive migration both within these countries and out of the countries. Cristosal has been instrumental in supporting local initiatives to recognize the rights of citizens to live in their home places in peace and without fear.

And, since these Central American countries come nowhere near providing their people the security they have a right to expect from law enforcement, Cristosal -- where it can -- provides immediate protection to move people out of danger. Moreover, they are attempting to show that people displaced by violence can be reintegrated into new communities where they'll be safe and can live in peace. This is not simple -- it's not as if anyone anywhere really wants an influx of traumatized newcomers; that sentiment is not unique to the U.S. Before Trump came along, the USAID funded some of these initiatives but nowadays the US government likes the gangster status quo. As in so many policy areas, our government acts as if it hopes all those annoying Spanish-speaking poor people would just die where they are.

Cristosal is well known in El Salvador and the rest of Central America for its work; the organization is demanding that governments and all of us take human rights as inviolable and worth defending.

I did not come up as a leftish activist in a time when human rights were at the top of our minds. In the decades of the struggle within the United States for African-American civil rights, during the heady rush of decolonization across the globe, and of the struggle against imperial resistance to national freedoms, we thought that some form of revolution was the way to justice. The suffering people would (and should) rise up and replace the bums in power. Unhappily, the track record of 20th century revolutions has not been that good. We thought "human rights" was something some First World liberals tried to impose on the world after they won their anti-fascist war in 1945 -- a good thing, but peripheral to the real conflict of classes and races.

Meanwhile, it was activists in what we then called the Third World -- developing countries as we'd probably call them now -- who occasionally reminded enthusiastic North Americans that international institutions like the the United Nations and the World Court should be guarantors of human rights, of human decency. They knew something about permanent struggle and the need for institutional bulwarks of freedom that we thought we could skip over.

On the Cristosal website, Noah Bullock explains how a nice young man from Montana who landed in El Salvador in 2005 (and stayed), understands the centrality of human rights law and concepts in the long arc toward justice and freedom.

“Human rights were taught to me as a historical process, and every generation has to be able to understand human rights and violations in their own time.

"Our moment has changed significantly from when these frameworks were established, so we are challenged now to find ways to apply these same principles in programming to address our moment’s greatest challenges of displacement by violence, poverty, and inequality.”

I am appending here a short film (10 minutes) that tells a story of Central American violence as lived by some of its victims. It has been shown more than 10 times on Salvadoran television -- and that legislature recently enacted a law purporting to guarantee that police should protect citizens. They neglected to append any funding though ... And so the struggle continues ...

On Tuesday, cast your vote for hope and against ignorance

A friend who works with the Central American human rights organization Cristosal writes about the scary "caravan" of the desperate:

In these final hours before Election Day, the Trump Administration and many Republican candidates will continue to flood the media with racist lies about people coming to our border seeking asylum. These lies make it all about danger to "us" and obscure what is going on in Central America that so many people would choose to flee their homes and undertake a dangerous journey to our increasingly hostile border.

These lies obscure the complex, historical reasons why people flee--reasons rooted in decades- and centuries-long issues of inequity and impunity now exacerbated by a multi-year drought in the region. These lies also obscure basic facts of international law and human rights recognized in the 1948 International Declaration of Human Rights: that all people have the right to migrate and to seek safety and asylum when their own government fails to protect them. 

Many even sensible people are buying into these lies, e.g., the lies that the Democrats and/or George Soros are paying people to join caravans to "destroy America." That the caravans are full of gang members and possibly even hidden ISIS or other Islamist terrorists coming here to kill us. That these are s*$#(!!% people from s*$#(!!% countries, unworthy to join us.

People are believing the lies that the caravans represent a dangerous new flood of people when in fact the numbers joining the caravans are on a par with those leaving the region monthly for the past several years, and there is great attrition along the way. The lies that a band of mostly extremely poor families, the majority women and children, with a few belongings in a plastic grocery bag or a school backpack, represent a national security risk that requires sending 15,000 U.S. troops to the border at the cost of millions of taxpayer dollars that could be much better spent on non-militaristic solutions.

By making it all about danger to "us," these politically motivated lies obscure the truth that the people joining the caravans are by and larger some of the poorest, most vulnerable people in our hemisphere ...

Are we really so frightened we can't see weak and vulnerable people for who they are? Apparently the GOP hopes so ...

A profound moral crisis

Erudite Partner and I are on our way to the border to pray and protest against the Trump/GOPer regime's cruel treatment of migrants. You are more likely to see photos than text here for the next couple of days.

But I thought some might appreciate some thoughtful reflection on this country's history of child snatching from Adam Serwer of The Atlantic.

... part of what horrifies Americans is not the novelty of Trump’s policy, but its familiarity. Americans are fighting a part of themselves that they naively thought they had vanquished. From chattel slavery to American Indian schools to convict leasing, child-snatching has been a tradition in America since before there was an America. If one is convinced that the parents are not truly human, then the children cannot truly be children, and what should be unthinkable becomes inevitable.

Few of the Trump administration’s policies better exemplify the Trump campaign’s commitment to restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race, religion, and gender, than family separation. That commitment—and Republicans’ muted opposition to or vigorous support of the administration’s actions —has plunged the United States into a profound moral crisis that will define the nation’s character for decades to come. To harden oneself against the cries of children is no simple task. It requires a coldness to suffering that will not be easily thawed. The scars it inflicts on American civic culture will not heal quickly, and they will never completely fade.

People who would do this to children would do anything to anyone. Before this is over, they will be called to do worse.

Serwer points out that the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin which gets some credit for spreading the anti-slavery gospel in the north in the 1850's revolves around child theft. Once again, when they revel in their villainy, we cannot be silent or passive.

Our worst demons come out when we're scared

In this moment of exaggerated panic about vague foreign threats, while the Donald bleats for a registry of Muslims in the USA, we should recall we've been here before -- and we're mostly ashamed about it.

On February 19, 1942, two months after the U.S. was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed an executive order that permitted military authorities to declare areas from which "any or all persons may be excluded." General John L. DeWitt used this authority to force almost all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast into internment camps. Two thirds of the approximately110,000 persons sent to the camps were born in the United States and therefore were citizens; 30,000 were children; the rest were legal residents.

The military internment unleashed unabashed nativism and racism. Japanese ethnicity was rapidly made into a race in the classic white pattern. One of those military authorities, Major Karl Bendetsen, explained his plans:

"I am determined that if they have one drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp."

This racializing of an ethnic group had broad consequences in the internment orders:

These edicts included persons of part-Japanese ancestry as well. Anyone with at least one-sixteenth (equivalent to having one great-great grandparent) Japanese ancestry was eligible. Korean-Americans and Taiwanese, classified as ethnically Japanese because both Korea and Taiwan were Japanese colonies, were also included.

And it is inadequate to think of the internment only as the mass imprisonment of families in hastily converted stables and remote tent camps; this was also about envious white neighbors seizing the property of the more prosperous Japanese-Americans. Many white residents of California and parts north had always resented their Japanese-American competitors. Austin E. Anson, managing secretary of the Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, spelled out his views to the Saturday Evening Post:

We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over... If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either.

Internees lost their businesses, their savings, and their even their personal property.

In Hawaii, which had suffered an actual attack and sat in the midst of the Pacific battlefield, only 2000 of 157,000 residents of Japanese ancestry were placed in camps. The military there needed Japanese American labor in the fields and ship repair yards!

On the mainland, although by end of the war many Japanese Americans had been released and even recruited into the military,

... the exclusion order was not rescinded until January 2, 1945 (postponed until after the November 1944 election, so as not to impede Roosevelt's reelection campaign).

Most Japanese Americans never got their property back, but they campaigned long and hard for legal vindication and even reparations. In the late 1980s, Congress ordered payments of $20,000 to surviving detainees.

Hardship and mistreatment aren't good for anyone, but many Japanese Americans of the generation consigned to the camps became tenacious fighters for human freedom including Fred Korematsu, Gordon Hirabayashi, Minoru Yasui and Yuri Kochiyama. The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) advocates for the civil and human rights of all people. They can be bold: JACL came out for legalizing same sex marriage in 1994 when most LGBT people had barely thought about this remote possibility. Today JACL is in the forefront of activities in support of the civil rights of Muslims and of calls for resettling Syrian escapees in the United States.

We should all be so generous.

The photo is a detail from a commemorative monument Japantown, San Francisco. I have used Wikipedia liberally here to check numbers and dates. The article on the internment is exceptionally good.

Warming Wednesdays: climate change puts humanity on the move

People have always been on the move to some extent. The fossil record tells us our species spread out from a small troupe of ancestors in the Rift Valley in Africa to cover the globe. Presumably people have always moved about for the same reasons we do today: better opportunity (more to eat, more water), to escape competing or hostile humans, or following some spirit of exploration.

Scientists predict the effects of climate change will put millions more on the move. Alex Randall of the UK Climate and Migration Coalition argues that we should avoid adopting simplistic pictures of "climate refugees."

...People facing the prospect of moving hope that they will have some choice in the timing and circumstances of their movement and that when they arrive they will find work and become active members of their new communities. Their hope is that they will move with dignity.

... Apart from people's own rejection of the "climate refugee" term there are also several other problems. It's clear that there are connections between climate change and the movement of people, but the connections are not as clear as the "climate refugee" narrative suggests. The phrase conjures images of large numbers of people moving en masse over long distances and crossing international borders and possibly continents. It seems unlikely that climate change will produce this kind of human movement.

What seems more likely is that climate change might reinforce existing trends in short-term, short distance migration. For example, as subsistence farmers find it increasingly difficult to make a living in rural areas they may move to nearby cities to find work. Whole towns or villages will not move together: in fact, families may not even move together. Far more likely is that one or two household members will move, find work elsewhere and send money home to their community.

That sounds more like the European movement that populated the Americas with white people than what we've seen of displacement in the contemporary wars of the Middle East -- or in the wholesale transfer of people in the European wars of the 20th century.

Many countries including Australia treat the advancing movement of people as a security threat. Latin Americans take a more nuanced view.

The Environmental Justice Foundation, a UK non-profit working internationally and the makers of the video that heads this post, think the world needs a United Nations special rapporteur on climate change and human rights -- somebody whose business it is look out for how nations are treating climate migrants.

International negotiations on climate change have so far failed to adequately address the humanitarian and human rights impacts of climate change.

It is now time for the Human Rights Council to take positive action to safeguard these rights under threat and support the governments of the first and worst affected countries.

“Climate change is related not only to environmental factors but also to poverty, discrimination and inequalities – this is why climate change is a human rights issue.” Kyung-wha Kang, UN Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights ...

The [special raporteur's] mandate should [be to] take stock of impacts of climate change, mitigation, adaptation on human rights and provide inputs to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process.

It could include identification and awareness raising awareness of best practices and make recommendations to governments and the international community about how we can best safeguard human rights in our changing world.

It seems a weak response, but until problems are named and described, they will not be acted on. Sign EJF's petition here.

This is an international Blog Action Day post, raising up issues of human rights for all.

Living within "ambient anxiety" in Hitler's Berlin

For members of my age cohort, people who grew into awareness of a big and dangerous world around us in the 1950s and early 60s, a gnawing question lurked at the back of consciousness: what if we'd been Germans (or Americans) during the rise of Hitler? Would we have recognized the expanding barbarism that led eventually to the killing of 30 million Europeans? What would we have done?

Erik Larson's In the Garden of the Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin is the story of one contemporary family that lived the question. William E. Dodd was not President Franklin Roosevelt's first choice to represent the U.S. in Berlin. In fact, the president had trouble finding anyone who wanted the job in 1933 just as Hitler took power. He finally settled on Dodd, an historian and a good New Deal Democrat, but not a conventional diplomat in a time when the State Department was still the bailiwick of men with propertied, inherited privilege. His tenure was never easy. The bureaucrats he reported to cared only about whether Germany might ever repay its World War I debts (it wouldn't). The Germans, rapidly being violently and only partially voluntarily Nazified, didn't have much truck with a mild small "d" democrat who had studied in their country in a more peaceful era. Dodd and his family never fit.

Larsen's book draws from the extensive record left in letters and other writings by Dodd himself and his flibbertigibbet daughter Martha. The other members of the family apparently left less record and remain vague presences in the narrative. Martha's life was a series of overlapping romantic encounters with attractive men; she did eventually figure out that the head of the Berlin Gestapo was not a nice beau. The Ambassador seems to have been befuddled by living inside fascism tightening its grip, though he comes across as a person of principle overwhelmed by his own powerlessness.

Shortly after the family arrived in Hitler's Germany, it's young members visited Nuremberg and encountered a sort of parade. The story is recounted though the memories of Quentin Reynolds, a reporter friend of Martha and her brother Bill.

From a distance they heard the coarse, intensifying clamor of a still larger and more raucous crowd approaching on the street. They heard distant music, a street band, all brass and noise. The crowd pressed inward in happy anticipation, Reynolds wrote. "We could hear the roar of the crowd three blocks away, a laughing roar that swelled toward us with the music." The noise grew, accompanied by a shimmery tangerine glow that fluttered on the facades of buildings.

Moments later the marchers came into view, a column of SA men in brown uniforms carrying torches and banners. "Storm Troopers," Reynolds noted. ... Immediately behind the host squad there followed two very large troopers, and between them a much smaller human captive, though Reynolds could not at first tell whether it was a man or a woman. The troopers were "half-supporting, half-dragging" the figure along the street. "Its head had been clipped bald," Reynolds wrote, "and face and head had been coated with white powder." Martha described the face as having "the color of diluted absinthe." They edged closer, as did the crowd around them, and now Reynolds and Martha saw that the figure was a young woman -- though Reynolds still was not completely certain. "Even though the figure wore a skirt, it might have been a man dressed as a clown," Reynolds wrote. "The crowd around me roared at the spectacle of this figure being dragged along."

The genial Nurembergers around them became transformed and taunted and insulted the woman. The troopers at her sides abruptly lifted her to her full height, revealing a placard hung around her neck. Coarse laughter rose from all around. Martha, Bill, and Reynolds deployed their halting German to ask other bystanders what was happening and learned in fragments that the girl had been associating with a Jewish man. As best Martha could gather, the placard said, "I HAVE OFFERED MYSELF TO A JEW."

Incredibly, this vicious display of racism and woman-hatred was not enough to disabuse Martha of her enthusiasm for the energy and apparent romance of the Nazi project of reviving Germany. She enjoyed collecting male admirers including the Gestapo boyfriend and a minor Russian diplomat who was also an NKVD agent assigned to attract her to Communism. But gradually the Dodds came to understand they had dropped into a society where suspicion and terror were omnipresent -- where everyone lived in a state of "ambient anxiety." They had no difficulty finding a magnificent house in Berlin to rent, because its Jewish owner had been forced to flee. They learned that if they wanted to be confident that no spy was listening they could only speak freely in the park, the Tiergarten, the "garden of the beasts" of the title. Dodd found that much of his work consisted of protesting attacks on U.S. citizens who had been inadequately enthusiastic about Hitler and were beaten by Storm Troopers.

Larson struggles to convey the incredible reversal of civilization that was the Nazi state. He draws on the understanding of a wise contemporary. Maintaining a state of constant fear of unspecified threats is a very effective means of controlling a people.

Even the language used by Hitler and party officials was weirdly inverted. The term "fanatical" became a positive trait. Suddenly it connoted what philologist Victor Klemperer, a Jewish resident of Berlin, described as a "happy mix of courage and fervent devotion." Nazi-controlled newspapers reported an endless succession of "fanatical vows" and "fanatical declarations" and "fanatical beliefs," all good things. Goring was described as a "fanatical animal lover." ….

Klemperer detected a certain "hysteria of language" in the new flood of decrees, alarms, and intimidation --"This perpetual threatening with the death penalty" -- and in strange, inexplicable episodes of paranoid excess … In all this Klemperer saw a deliberate effort to generate a kind of daily suspense, "copied from American cinema and thrillers," that helped keep people in line. He also gauged it to be a manifestation of insecurity among those in power. … Klemperer was struck by the fact that although Hitler was trying to convey omnipotence, he appeared to be in a wild, uncontrolled rage, which paradoxically had the effect of undermining his boasts that the new Reich would last a thousand years and that all his enemies would be annihilated.

It took "the Röhm purge" -- the convulsion in 1934 when Hitler's S.S. goons massacred the thugs who had served as muscle to put him in office and also some number of additional "enemies" -- to convince Ambassador Dodd that the Nazi regime was wholly evil.

For Dodd, diplomat by accident, not demeanor, the whole thing was utterly appalling. He was a scholar and Jeffersonian democrat, a farmer who loved history and the old Germany in which he had studied as a young man. Now there was official murder on a terrifying scale. Dodd's friends and acquaintances, people who had been to his house for dinner and tea, had been shot dead. Nothing in Dodd's past had prepared him for this. It brought to the fore with more acuity than ever his doubts about whether he could achieve anything as ambassador. If he could not, what then was the point of remaining in Berlin …

He didn't long remain; the mandarins in the State Department wanted a more conventional diplomat in the job -- someone with enough personal wealth to put on a display, someone willing to ignore the Nazi regime's horrors in the hope of mollifying the bankers. Dodd came home and broke his health touring the country, struggling to overcome the strong isolationist sentiment that the United States should ignore these faraway European upheavals. (I think that my mother, who greatly feared the rise of the Nazis, attended his speaking events in the late 1930s.)

In the Garden of the Beasts is a gripping tale, a successful effort to transport readers into a terrible time and place. My greatest quarrel with it is that that other histories of the period (for example, Shirer's) suggest that the U.S. simply didn't loom very large in Nazi calculations; Hitler thought us a decadent, racially-mixed society that couldn't matter much. Inevitably in telling the story through the eyes of a U.S. diplomat and his family, their doings in Berlin come to seem more significant than they may actually have been. But this is a haunting book, one that immerses the reader more deeply than most of us are likely to want in the impending horror; highly recommended.

9/11 remembrance weekend

Who has a more immediate sense of the lessons of 9/11 than New Yorkers?



What keeps New Yorkers together? Maybe "... being too busy to care about being closed minded ..."

"Being tolerant isn't always easy, but it is right ..."



It's going to be a long weekend of flag waving and posturing, but I prefer to listen to these people.

A stubborn man stepped out for justice

With the east coast under water and the dedication of the MLK memorial postponed, this is less timely than it might have been ... but here it is.

I won't really know until I see it, but I think I like the new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the National Mall in Washington.

There are a lot of people who say I ought not to like it. The right thinks it is an example of totalitarian communist iconography. Feeding that thought, the artist selected by the private U.S. memorial foundation that raised the money for the project is Lei Yixin, a 57-year-old master sculptor from Changsha in Hunan province. He's done admiring figures of Mao, among others. U.S. artists and some African Americans thought the commission should have gone to an African American artist. The stonemasons union was appropriately horrified to learn that the sculptor imported not only Chinese granite but also Chinese workers whose pay arrangements seem dicey. Apparently during the planning the younger members of the King family caused a stink by demanding to be paid for the use of King's words carved in stone.


But I saw a picture of this panorama and instantly thought -- "the arc of justice is long -- and a man stepped forward to speed things up on the way to freedom!" Apparently the official metaphor is that "hope came out of a mountain of despair" so I guess I wasn't far off.


I had feared that any memorial would dilute the strength of King, would "domesticate, disinfect, deodorize, sanitize, and make [him] safe" in the language of Cornel West. I guess not. This figure is stubborn, determined, uncompromising.

After all, Dr. King had to be one tough guy. He not only led the movement for legal civil rights and racial equality in the south, he took the movement north to confront racial hypocrisy. He also denounced the Democratic party's Vietnam War. He was killed while supporting striking garbage collectors and organizing a Poor People's Campaign. As Adam Server summarizes, King was

a man of the left certainly, but not a man of the Democratic Party ...

He wasn't widely popular with a lot of U.S. people when he died and he wouldn't be popular now if he were around.

I like it that he looks a little annoyed in the new statue. I'm sure he'd find a lot to be annoyed about these days. I'm amazed that such a figure ever got implanted on the Mall.

Historical travesty in Oak Bluffs

When you disembark from the ferry into the Martha's Vineyard Island town of Oak Bluffs, this watchful life-size Civil War soldier on a pedestal stands directly ahead on the grass. He doesn't seem out of place; after all town is famous for its quaint Victorian-era gingerbread cottages. It's not at all odd that it would have a Civil War monument. Massachusetts sent almost 150000 men to fight the secessionist states of the Confederacy; nearly ten percent of those never came home.

But the meaning of the statue becomes a lot more murky if you actually read the plaque on the monument:
"The chasm is closed"
In memory of the restored Union this tablet is dedicated by
Union veterans of the Civil War and patriotic citizens of Martha's Vineyard
in honor of the Confederate soldiers
Whaa? What's a monument to Confederate dead doing on the green in Oak Bluffs?

Apparently it is a relic of a conservative political movement in the late 19th century that sought to "look forward, not backward" -- to re-remember the Civil War as some kind of huge national mistake that killed heroic brothers, to erase the reality that the war was fought to end slavery. That is, when we see this monument and its inscription, it is as if we're meeting a kind of "Fox News" from the 1890s, distorting reality for the benefit of the powerful, all preserved in heroic cast iron.
*** The prominence of this monument in Oak Bluffs is particularly odd given that Oak Bluff is where comfortable Black people have vacationed in New England for generations.
*** I became aware of this monument when I glanced through a throwaway newsprint tabloid called "School's Out," written, published, and distributed each spring by the 7th grade students of the Island's West Tisbury School. It's an impressive class project, over 50 pages of student articles and ads boosting the tourist attractions and life of Martha's Vineyard. I can imagine that I would have loved working on it as a child.

But I was stunned to read this sentence as the lead in one article:

The Civil War started in 1861, when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation into law ...

Yikes -- where was this child's history teacher? Emancipation didn't come until two years into the Civil War, until 1863, by which time the murderous conflict had become a clear cut fight over whether the system of slave labor would survive or die. The story of our defining intramural war is emblematic of the country's lurching path toward broader human freedom. A child doesn't have to know or understand about all that, but it is up to her teachers to help her get the basic chronology right.

The student writer also enthused about the monument. Okay, I can imagine she needed a topic and a quick essay to finish a homework assignment. But some teacher ought to have offered some perspective on this very contentious subject. We do students no favor by glossing over our history, its shame as well as its accomplishments.

UPDATE: See the comment from Bruce Nevin below. Looks like I got this wrong.

Patriotism

I'm not good at patriotism -- at least I don't think I am.

Partly it's the word; somehow I just don't warm to the -ism of the fathers. I mean, I liked my father, but I sure didn't idolize him. He was just a guy, doing his best. I don't turn instinctively to fathers for enlightenment.

Partly it's the equation of "patriotism" with "nationalism." I really love the land in the country I was born in. But I'm more a "Song of Peace" (set to Sibelius' Finlandia in the United Methodist hymn) sort of person:

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Here, I'll say it: I just can't get my mind around the notion that we're so exceptional.

Oh yes, maybe we were once. Reading 19th and early 20th century European history, as I'm doing a lot these days, I'm reminded we sloughed off the divine right of kings as a governing philosophy well in advance of a lot of people. At the turn of the last century, only one hundred years ago, in much of the developed world, kings still mattered. What a thought! I've written recently about how Eric Foner's book on Lincoln and slavery helped me understand what a radical innovation the idea of constitutional, democratic government under law once seemed. This country was founded in blood and theft, but it was once also new, exciting, innovative, maybe even exceptional.

Thanks to Ian Reifowitz at History Network News, I recently became aware that President Obama has a written children's book exploring patriotism: Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters. Reifowitz compares this volume to America: A Patriotic Primer published in 2002 by Lynne Cheney. (Yes -- that's the Dick's wife. She's also a conservative activist in her own right and a former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.)

Reifowitz drew this conclusion:

Ultimately, Cheney wants to strengthen the bond between Americans and their country as an institution. Obama wants to do this as well, but he also seeks to strengthen the ties that bind Americans to one another. One emphasizes national greatness, the other national unity. This distinction reflects the essential difference between the conservative and liberal understanding of Americanness.

No surprise: I'm a liberal. What I like about this country is how many different people have, fractiously and imperfectly, struggled to make it better. Over time, we've advanced toward a more equal and more caring society that better balances individual fulfillment and collective well-being. The history of this country is mostly an "it gets better" story, at least so far.

Outside of that history of democratic struggle, I don't see much but an inflated military, mutilated mined hills, poisoned water, and too many strip malls and Walmarts. But heroic people have made that long struggle. I have to remember that.

The painting in the photo, "The Price of War," is hanging in a window on Valencia Street in San Francisco. Read artist Ruben Morancy's explanation here.

The making of saints

This woman displays a six year old paper poster honoring the Salvadoran bishop, Monsignor Oscar Romero, while walking in a Mission district procession highlighting the plight of immigrants yesterday. Obviously the figure of the bishop, martyred by right wing death squads in 1980, is very meaningful to her.***Yesterday we attended a bilingual, interfaith religious service held at Mission Dolores marking the killing of Bishop Romero thirty one years ago. The organizers were advocates for a just US immigration policy. As is the nature of such events, where many traditions must be given their moment, it was a little long, a little disjointed, and occasionally very moving. The most poignant moment was the lighting of candles to the memory of a litany of Central American and Mexican martyrs.

* Archbishop Oscar Romero, martyred in El Salvador, March 24, 1980
* Maryknoll Sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clark, Laywoman Jean Donovan, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, martyred in El Salvador, December 2, 1980
* Jesuit Fathers Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Bam, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno, and Amado Lopez, their housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her daughter, Celia Marisela Ramos, Martyred in El Salvador, November 16, 1989
* Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi Conedera, martyred in Guatemala, April 26, 1998
* Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, died in Mexico, January 24, 2011

¡PRESENTES!

When you think about it, this memorial is slightly incongruous. All these people (except Bishop Ruiz, but his long life was lived in the same hard terrain) were killed for their devotion to the needs and dignity of very poor people. Their choice to live for the poor put them in the crosshairs of rich oligarchs who lived off their oppressed populations. But all of them also, would have named the systematic greed, the structural exploitation, that emanates from us, from the hypocritical national colossus to the north, as the enforcer of their local elites' crimes.

During the martyrs' lives, the United States was feeding off the blood of peoples to the south. Yet today their memory and martyrdoms are invoked by people from Central America and Mexico in their quest to stay in the United States, in the belly of the beast, in the context of a stupid and heartless immigration system. Enabling people to move to the United States and become "Americans" was absolutely not what these martyrs were about.

And yet, their lives and deaths in devotion to unspeakable truths make them figures with power for people who need any hope they can get. The historical specificity of their witness becomes blurred amid the needs of today. For those who remember the history, this can be distressing. The United States still has its boot on the neck of poor Salvadorans, Guatemalans, Mexicans.

But the people are making the saints they need. Plasticity, the capacity to take many shapes, is perhaps a feature of sainthood. The Vatican sanctification process (which may have some difficulty digesting Archbishop Romero) is one avenue to sainthood. But in all times, people find their own figures to represent higher truths in a heartless landscape.

Neo-Slavery exposed

Don't take my word for it. The 2009 Pulitzer Prize committee gave its General Nonfiction award to Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. They called this work of history "precise and eloquent." I'd add "frightening and brave." There are truths we don't want to know and they don't make the messenger popular; Blackmon tells many of them.

Piling detail on detail, Blackmon has exposed a horrible reality: slavery in the United States thrived for nearly 80 years after the Civil War, defined by race (Southern whites enslaved African Americans) and disguised as debt peonage or criminal servitude. The record of what he calls "neo-slavery" was readily available in local records and musty Justice Department archives, but few had ever looked for it.

Hundreds of thousands of African Americans, mostly young men, labored involuntarily in mines, on farms, and in the forests to the great economic benefit of whites. They worked while shackled in chains, barely fed or clothed, under constant threat of whippings, water torture (yes, these slave drivers went in for Dick Cheney's favorite game) and outright murder.

Their condition was often worse than that of pre-Civil War slaves because they weren't the expensive, valuable, property of the mine or mill. Slave drivers -- whether industrial giants like United States Steel or local farmers -- simply rented these unfortunates from rural sheriffs for a small monthly fee, usually less than $20. If the private jailer worked or beat a laborer to death, they could just rent a new hand. Rural sheriffs and justices of the peace made good money by picking up Black men, fining them for "vagrancy" or some other unrecorded offense, and passing them on to paying slave drivers seeking workers.

Blackmon reports how this system was imposed by defeated Confederates after the Civil War to keep the freed laborers down and at work; how impotent to stop it were sporadic federal legal intrusions on the system; and how only national mobilization for war in World War II, a mobilization that perforce needed African Americans, helped bring the slave system down.***One of the most interesting facets of Blackmon's book is the reaction he records from whites and African Americans when he first published some of his research in the Wall Street Journal.

The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum slaves. Only a few expressed shock. ...

The reactions of African Americans were altogether different. Repeatedly, they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in some way--partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the nation's most conservative daily newspaper--supplied an answer or part of one to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority, what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S. society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogey men, even the horrifying still visuals of lynching, had never been a sufficient answer to these African Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants. How had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation.

Later in the book, he shares the story of an extended African American family coming to terms with each other about a history that had never been explicitly told. Several generations brought their different perspectives.

On a cool fall night, Pearline Danzey, the eighty-eight-year-old matriarch of the extended family of Martin Danzy, who died as a slave worker in a turpentine camp in 1916, welcomed me to her home. ...

"To kill a colored person then, it wasn't nothing," she says. "We was slaves too in a way." For most of the Danzeys gathered that night, this is the first time they have heard "Pearl," as Mrs. Danzey is known to them all, tell the harsh tales of her childhood. ..."Our daddy and momma never taught us to hate white people. . . . We just got taught who always got the job, who had authority, and we were supposed to address them with respect," explained Ida, one of Pearline's nieces. "Until the civil rights movement we didn't know life could be any other way," she said.

...The Danzeys live in a place where cotton has been grown for most of two centuries and where Mrs. Danzey's family traces its history back to 1832 and a slave, Frank, brought to the county by a local white farmer named John Danzey. Pearline remembered her uncle Martin mostly as a man who spelled his last name without an "e," as did one line of white Danzys who lived nearby. She said she no longer remembered his alleged crime.

"My granddaddy used to talk about him. He went off to prison and died there," she says. "They was real sad about it."

...It wasn't clear whether the elder Mrs. Danzey's recollection had failed or, as was the case in many black families in Alabama, the stigma of imprisonment makes her uncomfortable discussing the subject. One thing is certain: after his arrest, Uncle Martin never came back.

Reading this, I had to wonder how many Black children today, north and south, have a similar ghostly awareness that an uncle or a father "went away to prison and never came back." This is the contemporary truth that Michelle Alexander writes about in The New Jim Crow.

Mrs. Danzey's grandchildren had their own generational response to her stories.

The younger Danzeys aren't sure what to make of the story of Uncle Martin. "You can't go back and change the past. Just don't let it happen again," says Cynthia James.

Pearline's granddaughter, Melissa Craddock, disagrees. The companies that made money off the forced labor of Uncle Martin owe something, she says. "If there was something that came out of that, then there ought to be compensation," she says. "That was after slavery ended."

Cynthia's brother, James Danzey, a deeply religious forty-five-year-old, has listened intently as his great-aunt unspooled her stories. James Danzey brings up the talk of slave reparations he has heard recently and of other long-ago abuses of African Americans that have come to light in recent years.

"I believe it's God's hand," says James Danzey, who works as a counselor at a center for behaviorally disturbed children in a nearby town. "I believe there are some good true white people of God, who realize that their ancestors did bad, and they have to make right. ... Think about all the money those companies made on those people," he says later. "Those companies should be investigated for doing that. They should have to pay something."

We don't live in a world where it's likely anyone is going to have to "pay something" -- but at least we can all tell the truth about what was done.***I listened to Blackmon's history as an audiobook. As horror followed horror -- accounts of pointless humiliation and vicious "punishments" of the neo-slaves -- a concurrent debate rumbled in my head. Were the neo-slavers drivers so cruel because it was in their systemic economic interest -- or did they simply hate Black people? This is not a question Blackmon disentangles; there is evidence for both in the documentation he presents, intermixed without comment. And it is not a question with any meaning for the victims of the neo-slave system either; when someone is whipping you bloody, the torturer's motivation doesn't really matter.

But nonetheless I find it haunting. The economic interests involved are obvious; sheriffs, farmers and industrialists had a good deal going for themselves. But the unconstrained sadism takes the practice into some additional horrible cranny of human possibility


Many more pictures from the neo-slavery era are posted at the book's website.
***Slavery by Another Name will be the subject of a PBS documentary in 2012 (assuming House Republicans don't kill off PBS.)

Retirement options narrow for dictators

Maybe Egypt's 82-year old Hosni Mubarak is sticking around despite his people's protests because retirement for used-up dictators just isn't what it used to be.

Since Jimmy Carter made the major mistake of letting the deposed Shah of Iran into the US in 1979 for cancer treatment, the US has stopped taking in cast-off potentates.

Other countries usually just don't want the bother of taking in these guys. Deposed dictators often face legal assaults from the people they've wronged. What country wants to bring that down on themselves?

Besides the little problem about where to settle, there are sometimes problems about money. Dictators loot their countries and they used to be able to live in security and great comfort on their stolen wealth when they went into exile. But that's gotten more difficult. Mubarak is looking at a scary example. When Tunisia's Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled his country earlier this year, the new Tunisian government issued warrants against him and the European Union froze his bank accounts. I'm sure he had plenty squirreled away they haven't found yet, but the international banking system has become much more cooperative with international policing than in the past. London courts in particular have pioneered a global account freezing legal order with real teeth.

There's even the remote possibility that dictators who are human rights abusers (and which are not?) might find themselves before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. So far the relatively new court has been more apt to move against repulsive African monsters -- and Slobadan Milosevic of Serbia whose atrocities embarrassed Europe. But no dictator can be sure this international legal system might not someday catch him in its sights.

Rumors that Mubarak is trying to overcome these hurdles have leaked out. Der Spiegel reported that he was considering a dash to a Baden-Baden cancer treatment facility. Or maybe that's just a feint.

Meanwhile, the Guardian in London is looking for Mubarak's money.

According to a report last year in the Arabic newspaper Al Khabar, Mubarak has properties in Manhattan and exclusive Beverly Hills addresses on Rodeo Drive.

His sons, Gamal and Alaa, are also billionaires. A protest outside Gamal's ostentatious home at 28 Wilton Place in Belgravia, central London, highlighted the family's appetite for western trophy assets.

Amaney Jamal, a political science professor at Princeton University, said the estimate of $40bn-70bn was comparable with the vast wealth of leaders in other Gulf countries.

"The business ventures from his military and government service accumulated to his personal wealth," she told ABC news. "There was a lot of corruption in this regime and stifling of public resources for personal gain.

"This is the pattern of other Middle Eastern dictators so their wealth will not be taken during a transition. These leaders plan on this."

But, ever so slowly, an international regime of the rule of law is ensnaring these rulers who abuse internationally recognized human rights and their own countries. ***It was nice to see that the emerging international human rights regime apparently inconvenienced our own prominent war criminal over the weekend. Former President George W. Bush has admitted sanctioning what is unequivocally considered torture, a crime under the Convention Against Torture which the United States has signed. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) were prepared to present legal arguments for Bush's indictment in Switzerland when he arrived for a speaking gig. He skipped the event. The dude is going to have to be careful where he travels in the future.

There's a pattern in all of this. Bringing torturers to justice takes time. The project can feel futile. But there is more and more of an international framework within which they can be brought to some kind of justice. That's small consolation for their victims, but good for all of us going forward.

This post takes off from an article by human rights lawyer Scott Horton in Foreign Policy.