Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing

by William H. Benson

April 7, 2016

     On August 22, 1939, Nazi Germany’s troops, tanks, and aircraft stood poised and prepared to attack Poland, its neighbor to the east, and on that day the Nazi’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, spoke.

     “Our strength,” he said, “consists in our speed and in our brutality.” Already he had instructed his generals “to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language.” And the reason for his assault upon the Polish people? “Only then,” he said, “shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need.”

     Tyrants will excuse their brutality because of their citizen’s supposed need for more territory. There is some truth in that excuse, but then there is the tyrant’s overpowering internal drive to vanquish and crush other people, those whom he considers weak and inferior, who stand in his way, who dare to oppose him, or who refuse to follow his lead. In a word, his “victims.”

     Hitler ended his Obersalzberg speech with an oft-quoted remark, actually a rhetorical question. He asked, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

     On April 24, 1915, 101 years ago, leaders of the failing Ottoman Empire launched a vicious attack upon the Armenian people, mainly Christian people who lived within the Empire’s borders, in the eastern third of modern-day Turkey. In the National Geographic this month, the reporter Paul Salopek described the awful events.

     “Some Ottoman leaders decide to resolve this ‘Armenian problem’ through extermination and deportation. Soldiers and local Kurdish militias shoot Armenian men. There are mass rapes of women. Armenian villages and city neighborhoods are looted, appropriated. The dead clog the rivers and wells. Cities stink of rot.”

     The result: the Armenian population drops from two million to 500,000, and now, “Today just three million Armenians live in Armenia; eight to ten million are scattered in a diaspora.” Historians now call this “the modern world’s first true genocide.”

     Henry Morgenthau, Sr., the U.S. Ambassador to Constantinople at the time, said, “The great massacres and persecutions of the past seem almost insignificant when compared with the sufferings of the Armenian race in 1915.”

     The pattern was set early in the twentieth century, and the world’s tyrants since then have copied it. After the Nazi war machine crossed into Poland on September 10,1939, World War II began, and it was then that Hitler turned upon Europe’s Jewish population. The Nazis murdered six million innocent people, an incredible statistic that dwarfs even the Armenian genocide.

      Then, there was the Soviet Union’s tyrant Joseph Stalin, and also Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and the genocide in Rwanda twenty-two years ago, when the Hutus decided upon “a final solution to the Tutsi problem.” Beginning on April 6, 1994, they set up road blocks and barricades and then with machetes, they began to exterminate the Tutsis.

     Many fled to neighboring countries, some hid in homes and waited for the frenzy to pass, and by July it did, but by then an estimated 800,000 people lay in their graves.

     It is a fact of human behavior that certain people, when pushed and prodded, will sign up for a campaign to rid the world of other people. William Shakespeare recognized this phenomenon in his play, Julius Caesar. His character Marc Anthony shouts, “Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.”

     Often, it is one demented person who incites the attacks, but then it is thousands of servile minions who complete his ghastly deeds, because the tyrant compels and bullies.

     On April 27, 1945, American soldiers liberated a Nazi prison camp near Dachau, and Viktor Frankl experienced sudden freedom. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl described the scene.

     “With tired steps we prisoners dragged ourselves to the camp gates. We looked around and glanced at each other. Then we ventured a few steps out of camp. This time no orders were shouted at us, nor was there any need to duck to avoid a blow or kick. Oh no! This time the guards offered us cigarettes! We hardly recognized them at first; they had changed into civilian clothes.”

     From oppressor to friend the guards transformed themselves in an instant. They took off their uniforms. The frenzy subsided. Peace and order and sanity returned. The dogs of war were restrained. Prisoners walked through the prison gates, free at last.

     Genocide, ethnic cleansing, or mass murder. No matter the name, it is an ugly and horrific business, a blot upon the human species. Let each of us find and swallow that pill that would restrain within us forever those snarling dogs of war.

March Madness

by William H. Benson

March 24, 2016

     The NCAA basketball games are upon us, and March Madness has arrived. The team to watch in recent years has been the University of Connecticut, where basketball is king. The men won their last national championship, their fourth, in 2014, but the women point with pride to their ten national championships, the most recent one last year, in 2015.

     In first round play this year, the Uconn women decimated the Robert Morris Colonials 101 to 49, and played Duquesne on Sunday, March 21. Uconn’s men defeated Colorado University’s Buffaloes 74-67, in first round play, a heartbreak to CU fans, but then the Kansas Jayhawks defeated Uconn’s men in the second game.

     Sports writer, Nick Kosmider, at the Denver Post, said, “For all the sheer excitement the NCAA Tournament provides, it also dishes out the hurt of cold, abrupt endings in equal measure.” Both Uconn and CU men’s teams saw their seasons end near the tournament’s beginning, not what they wanted.

     Is it ironic, or just random coincidence, that James Naismith, the father of basketball, invented the game at Springfield, Massachusetts, less than fifty miles from University of Connecticut’s campus?

     In December of 1891, the Canadian James Naismith found himself in a job where he was expected to teach physical education to a class of rowdy students at the local YMCA. The students griped about the endless calisthenics, the gymnastics, and the routine exercises in the gym, and that it was too cold to play tennis outside. Two previous instructors had tried to tame the students, and both resigned.

     Naismith said, “These boys would not play ‘Drop the handkerchief.’”

     Naismith’s supervisor suggested that he make up an indoor game that did not require much room, help the students get into shape, and “make it fair for all players, and not too rough.”

     Jim nailed a peach basket on the wall, ten feet high, at both ends of the gym, and asked the students to try to put a soccer ball into the basket. He wrote thirteen rules, and the last was, “The side making the most points in that time is declared the winner.” To say the game caught on is an understatement.

     The game’s purpose still remains the same: give the students a game to play indoors during the winter. Basketball equals winter; both begin in November and end in March. It occupies young people’s time, diverts their thoughts away from misbehavior or crime, provides them great exercise, and the spectators are thrilled to watch and cheer.

     Too many young people, with too much time on their hands, with too little freedoms, create conditions ripe for a revolution. In ages past, the more perceptive kings would round them up on occasion, and march them off to fight and die in a foreign war, or the tyrants would expect them to devote countless hours training for the next attack upon their country.

     In 1497, King James II banned golf because he considered it an unwelcome distraction to archery, a more useful military skill. I say it is far better to shoot baskets, rather than bows and arrows or guns.

     After Naismith earned a medical degree in Denver, he accepted a job at the University of Kansas as the physical education instructor, and there he coached basketball, the first coach ever for the Jayhawks, and the University’s only basketball coach with a losing record, 55 and 60.

     During World War II, Naismith served as an army chaplain, and he introduced basketball to the soldiers under his command, because, he believed, it “controls their excess energy, increases morale, and even lowers the rate of disciplinary actions among soldiers.”

     America has exported basketball to the world. Although only eight million people reside in Israel, it boasts of a professional basketball league. In the New York Times sports section, two weeks ago, there was a full article on Karam Mashour, a native of Nazareth, who now plays for the Israeli team, the Bnei Herzilya. “In a league full of Israeli Jews, top Europeans, and talented Americans, Mashour is the only player of Arab heritage.”

     This is unusual in the Middle East, where winter temperatures are mild, and there is little reason to play inside. “Everyone here plays football,” Mashour said, referring to soccer. “When my brother and I told people we wanted to play basketball, they said, ‘Why?’”

     Long ago the world decided that Western Civilization created the best opportunities for common individuals. Along with the arts and humanities, the Judeo-Christian faith, and the rule of law in a democratic society, Western Civilization has also enjoyed a long association with professional sports.

     The ancient Greeks formed city leagues and held championship games at the first Olympics, and the ancient Romans competed in coliseums. Hollywood is now remaking the movie Ben-Hur, and it promises a chariot race, as did the 1959 movie starring Charleton Heston as Prince Judah Ben-Hur.

     Tomorrow is Good Friday, Sunday is Easter. Enjoy the weekend.

     March Madness will end in April, and the champions, the last team to win, will receive trophies. 

Thoughts on Campaign 2016

by William H. Benson

March 10, 2016

     The United States has had two father-son presidencies. The first was John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, and the second was George Bush and his son, George W. Bush. Because Jeb Bush withdrew from the current race three weeks ago, we will not have a third, anytime soon. The Bush dynasty has ended, at least for the next four years.

     “The man responsible for Jeb’s demise” is Donald Trump. A journalist said, “From the moment he entered the race, the real estate mogul made Jeb his primary target, gleefully dismissing the youngest Bush scion as ‘low energy,’ mocking his polling numbers, and relentlessly trolling him on Twitter.” Trump, “the playground bully, viciously pummeled him and his elitist family again and again.”

     Yes, Trump crushed Jeb, but, according to The Washington Post, Jeb was “never, ever going to win in a year like this one.” He was, according to another journalist, “a lousy candidate, bland, dull. There was no juice, no fire.” He fumbled the most predictable of questions: “Do you think your brother’s Iraq War was a mistake?”

     The United States has never had a husband-wife presidency. The closest was Woodrow Wilson’s second wife, Edith Bolling Galt Wilson. After Wilson suffered a stroke in October 1919, he lay in his bed incapacitated for months while she ran interference for him. She determined who would see him, if anyone, and it is possible she may have signed his name on public documents. She ran the executive branch until he left the White House in March of 1921.

     A week ago a writer in The Economist wrote, “Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee; the man most likely to face her in November on the Republican ticket is Donald Trump. The prospect of Trump vs. Clinton is grim,” as in a fearful future.

     As for the Democrats, the voters in the United States are not ready to elect an avowed socialist, such as Bernie Sanders and his “voodoo” economics, for their president, but I would think they are ready to elect a woman president. I just wonder if it is Hillary.

     As for the Republicans, one must wonder about the voters who have voted for Donald Trump. The previous forty-four presidents brought to the office at least a modicum of governing experience, either as a Senator, a Congressman, a vice-president, a governor, or a war-time general, but Trump has never held public office. His learning curve would have to ascend sharply to the right.

     But then he acts as if no one should teach him anything or that he wants to learn anything.

     The New York Times commentator, Nicholas Kristof, said that to understand Trump, “a starting point is Trump’s remarkable ignorance about international affairs.” Kristof then asked an important question, “Why, at a moment when the country desperately needs our A-team, would we send in the clowns?” 

     Another New York Times commentator, Ross Douthat, said it best, “Trump is a reality TV demagogue leading a populist, nationalist revolt.” Douthat also said that Trump “is showing us something different, something that less fortunate countries know all too well: how authoritarianism works, how it seduces, and how it wins.”

     Juan Linz, a Yale political scientist, said the same in his remarkable 1990 essay, “The Perils of Presidentialism.” He pointed out that in certain Latin American countries who have tried to elect a president, a struggle erupts between Congress and the president. Both sides say that they alone represent the people’s will, but then both sides commit humanitarian abuses against the other.

     “A coup or civil war can ensue, with democracy giving way to Latin American authoritarianism,” in order to re-establish the peace. William Falk, The Week‘s editor, said, “We are not yet Argentina or Chile, but our democracy is headed toward a dangerous place.”

     It is important to remember that there is no limit to what people will do to seize power, and what they will do to retain it, once they possess it.

     One wonders about the Republican party’s future? Only a few party officials have stepped forward to endorse Donald Trump: one lone Senator, Jeff Sessions of Alabama; a few Congressman; New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie; Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin; and Arizona’s former governor, Jan Brewer. The party’s officials are feeling frantic, as they fear their power may slip away.

     If Trump wins the nomination, it is not preposterous to imagine the Republican party splitting apart. Nebraska’s Senator, Ben Sasse, said he will not vote for Trump, but when a Political Action Committee asked Sasse to run as a third-party candidate against Clinton and Trump, he vetoed the idea.       

     Interesting times we live in. There are no easy solutions. In November, we will know the end of this year’s business.

“Feelings in History”

by William H. Benson

February 25, 2016

     Scientists want to quantify. First, they observe a phenomenon, record their observations, arrive at a set of numbers, and then build a hypothesis. This procedure—the scientific method—works well in the sciences, such as in chemistry, biology, and physics, but is less certain in the arts, such as in history.

     A writer who wishes to quantify events from the past calls herself or himself a “social scientist,” rather than a historian. This type of scientist observes a population’s demographics, or he or she counts immigration numbers, casualties in a battle, dollars spent, racial percentages, rates of inflation, a disease’s victims, land prices, or effects of a cold winter upon food production. The social scientist feels a frantic desire to number, discover a pattern, and reach a conclusion.

     Ramsay McMullen, a Yale historian, observed this wish to quantify in his remarkable book, “Feelings in History.” He pointed out, “Even matters quite of the spirit can be counted at least indirectly: religiosity, through bequests to pay for remembrance in masses.”

     Ramsay argues that history built around the scientific procedure excludes the more essential elements in history: the human interest stories, the motivations behind people’s choices, and the force of people’s feelings when they experienced them.

      How does one measure another person’s feelings? How does one build a scale to weigh grief, curiosity, anger, envy, ambition, boredom, love, disgust, contentment, loyalty, appreciation, religious devotion, pain, competitiveness, or inspiration? The answer is, “By only by the most general of terms.” People say, “That person has some anger issues,” or “she is jealous,” or “he has very little ambition.”

     McMullen said that we fail to quantify the emotions because often we do not know. “The cause lies in the very thing that confronts us in our daily lives: the difficulty, not to call it impossibility, of knowing what goes on in the recesses of another person’s mind, or even of our own.”

     For an example, Marc Bloch, wrote. “Accustomed to danger, the knight found in war yet another attraction: it offered a remedy for boredom. [E]veryday life [had] easily slipped into a grey monotony. Thus was born an appetite for diversions, . . . [and they] sought satisfaction in distant lands.”

     McMullen points out that Bloch’s “interpretation sounds perfectly acceptable. It helps to explain things. But just how does the writer know what he tells us? In arriving at what may be judged a valuable insight, he uses no science, only imagination.”

     One wonders, “what were that knight’s true feelings and motivation?” Perhaps the knight may have fought in a foreign war because he was drafted, or he was promised land or money, or he was starving and was given food. Boredom many not have motivated him at all, but how would anyone know?

     Human beings can act in rational and reasonable ways, but they can act in irrational and unreasonable ways, in ways that the social scientists cannot measure or predict.

      It is convenient to separate the mind from the feelings and to focus only upon the mind, and yet to be a human is to experience both the intellect and the emotions together, at the same time. The heart and the head are co-joined, and they work in tandem. This is especially true in the young. Remember our junior high days, when our emotions were raw and exposed, and easily bruised.

     McMullen says, “The materials of mind, intellect, [and] reason are wrapped in . . . feelings; and necessarily so, for the survival of the species.”

     What motivated the French citizens to act with as much unregulated passion as they did during the French Revolution, when both men and women marched in Paris’s streets carrying pitchforks and shovels, and when they soaked the guillotine in their victims’ blood? One historian stated, “The history of the [French] Revolution cannot be understood without an adequate theory of emotions.”

     In our own country’s history, we can read John C. Calhoun’s reasonable and intellectual words, his formidable defense of slavery, but when we see and feel the enflamed passion that the abolitionists exhibited, we feel shocked. Someone asked the abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, “Why are you all on fire?” He replied, “I have need to be all on fire, for I have mountains of ice about me to melt.”

     Such human interest stories cause people to stop and think, and then act, for they are a fundamental engine of motivation. Ever since humanity began in a remote corner in Africa, stories, rumors, and even gossip have propelled people forward, to act in irrational and unpredictable ways. Today’s readers will read those historians who can disentangle people’s emotions from their actions.

     Ramsay McMullen said, “History is feeling. It is feelings that make us do what we do; and feelings can in fact be read. But the reading of them requires writers and readers to join their minds in ways that have long been out of fashion among students of history.” 

Presidents Day

by William H. Benson

 February 11, 2016 

     In September of 1796, President George Washington published a remarkable document, his Farewell Address “to the People of the United States on his declining of the Presidency.”

     After two terms as president, he was exhausted, tired of public service, and eager to return to his beloved Virginia plantation at Mount Vernon. When asked to serve a third term, he refused, and six months later he would retire and turn over the president’s duties to John Adams.

     In his Farewell Address, Washington listed six concerns about the United States’s future.

     First, he pled for unity rather than sectionalism. The people, he said, in the “Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western” sections could discover their unity in their “love of liberty with every ligament of their hearts,” and in their devotion and obedience to the Constitution.

     “With slight shades of difference, you have the same Religion, Manners, Habits and Political Principles. The economies of North and South, the eastern seaboard and the western interior, far from dividing the nation, are complementary.”

     The Constitution, he said, “is sacredly obligatory on all.” It is the law, and it is “the duty of every individual to obey it.” Because the people possessed “the power and right to establish Government,” it was “the duty of every individual to obey it.”

     The historian Paul Johnson explained Washington’s thoughts this way. “America was a country under the rule of law. With the law, it was everything; without the law, it was nothing.”

     Second, Washington feared political factions, those that he called “combinations or associations,” that may “become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust domination.”

     He especially feared a faction that would use the amendment process to alter the Constitution to benefit themselves, to push through their own slate of disastrous policies, or to acquire power.

     Third, Washington hated political parties, even though he belonged to a party, the Federalists, headed by Alexander Hamilton, that opposed Thomas Jefferson’s Democrat-Republican party.

     Washington said, I must “warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally,” and that in those governments “of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.” “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension . . . is itself a frightful despotism.”

     Fourth, Washington urged the people to live exemplary lives. He said, “It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.” In addition, he urged the people to retain a firm commitment to religion. “[R]eason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

     Fifth, he encouraged education. “[O]f primary importance,” he said, are those “institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.”

     His sixth and final point is the one that historians most remember. He denounced forming alliances with other countries. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.”

     It is astonishing that the first president saw deep into our country’s future and identified those issues that might harm the people’s liberty and put the government’s very existence at risk. He was right.

     Sectionalism, his first point above, did rupture the union. Seventy years later President Abraham Lincoln pointed out that the founding fathers had failed to include in their Constitution a process for a state to secede from the Union. He too saw love of liberty and obedience to the Union as co-joined.

     The temperance movement in the early twentieth century was an example of a political faction that pushed into law, through the amendment process, a disastrous policy, Prohibition.

     Party affiliations—Whigs, Democrats, Republican, Know-Nothing, or Independent—have remained a constant in the political process, and their machinery has determined most elections’ outcome.

     Was Washington correct about “entangling alliances?” Today NATO is demanding more commitment from the U.S., and our current President agrees, and has beefed up our commitment there.

     In his Farewell Address, George Washington warned Americans, cautioned them, laid bare his fears, pled for unity, and insisted that people obey the Constitution. What is missing from his document?

     He fails to reveal any empathy for the disenfranchised. At Mount Vernon his slaves still worked the fields, and upon his passing, his will liberated his household slaves but not his field hands. He chose “willful blindness,” rather than full liberty to all people, and that failing would rip the nation apart.

     Still, his document is remarkable and visionary. Monday is Presidents Day. Enjoy the day.

“We Are the World” and Benghazi

by William H. Benson

January 28, 2016

     Late in 1984, the calypso singer Harry Belafonte decided to raise funds for the famine-starved Ethiopians in Africa. First, he approached Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie and asked them to write a song. Then, he asked several dozen of the biggest musical artists in the country to assemble in a studio one night and sing Jackson and Richie’s song.

     The resulting album and video’s sales Belafonte would turn over to United Support of Artists for Africa, or USA for Africa, a non-profit foundation. The artists would give their time and talent.

     According to Jackson’s sister, La Toya, it was Michael who wrote the lyrics and the music to “We Are the World,” with limited help from Lionel Richie. Jackson said, “I couldn’t wait. I went in and came out the same night with song completed: drums, piano, strings, and words to the chorus.” Quincy Jones agreed to conduct, and Stevie Wonder joined them to sing. So far all were African-Americans.

     Invitations went out, and on the night of January 28, 1985, after the American Music Awards in Los Angeles had concluded, forty-four musicians arrived at the studio. Each read a note on the door that Quincy Jones had tacked there, “Check your egos at the door.” Recording began at 10:30 p.m.

     You can watch the video on YouTube. There you can see Lionel Richie, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Kenny Rogers, James Ingram, Tina Turner, and Billy Joel each sing a line from the first verse:

     “There comes a time / When we heed a certain call / When the world must come together as one.  / There are people dying / And it’s time to lend a hand to life / The greatest gift of all. / We can’t go on pretending day by day / That someone, somehow can soon make a change. / We’re all a part of God’s great big family / And the truth, you know, love is all we need.”

     Then, Michael Jackson and Diana Ross sing the chorus:

     “We are the world. / We are the children. / We are the ones who make a brighter day. / So let’s start giving. / There is a choice we’re making. / We’re saving our own lives. / It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me.”

     Dionne Warwick, Willie Nelson, and Al Jarreau sing the second verse, and then Bruce Springsteen, Kenny Loggins, Steve Parry, and Darryl Hall repeat the chorus. Then, Michael Jackson, Huey Lewis, Cyndi Lauper, and Kim Carnes sing the third and final verse, and Bob Dylan and Ray Charles repeat the chorus. The structure is said to “create a sense of continuous surprise and emotional buildup.”

     Other stars sang behind the soloists that night: Harry Belafonte, Dan Akroyd, Michael Jackson’s siblings, Waylon Jennings, Bette Midler, John Oates, the Pointer Sisters, and Smokey Robinson.

     Released on March 8, 1985, the song became the “fastest-selling American pop single in history,” and after thirty-one years, total sales for the album and video now exceed “$63 million.”

     One critic said it was a “distasteful element of self-indulgence.” Then, another said, that because of the phrase, “We’re saving our own lives,” the artists were proclaiming “their own salvation for singing about an issue they will never experience on behalf of a people most of them will never encounter.”

     The movie “Thirteen Hours,” opened in America’s theaters two weeks ago. It is a haunting re-enactment of the attack on Benghazi, in Libya, on the anniversary of 9-11 in 2012. At 9:40 p.m. Islamic militants attacked the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, overran it, and set it on fire.

     The Americans took refuge at a CIA annex a mile away, and there, in the early morning hours, six brave CIA agents, former Navy seals, stood on the annex’s rooftops and withstood a series of vicious ground assaults, plus several rounds of mortar fire, in order to defend the American men and women trapped inside the compound from a most certain annihilation. Those six men were heroes that night.

     The militants killed four Americans, injured two: Mark “Oz” Geist, and also David Ubben.

     It is ironic that in 1985, American musicians, both black and white, raised money for the starving Africans in Ethiopia, but that in 2011, Islamic militants in Africa killed four Americans stationed in Benghazi, Libya, and injured David Ubben, an African-American.

     It is easy for American performers in the free and safe confines of California to sing, “We are the world. We are the children. We are the ones who make a brighter day.” Yet, the world is a far more dangerous and dark place than their words would suggest. Once an American steps onto another’s land, walks into their world, anything can happen. “Whom do you trust?” becomes the key question.

     Differences have divided people throughout the ages—gender, race, culture, theology, and religion—and they still divide people today. It is foolish not to recognize that fact and prepare for more than “Love is all we need.” Men and women, both black and white, have bled for America throughout its history. Many have died, and more will die. Yet, Americans are still free.

     Bruce Springsteen said it best, “Born in the USA.”