Category Archives: Social Studies

LESSON AIM: Should the U.S. occupation of Iraq continue?

Here’s a lesson developed by Alan Singer, Hofstra U.

LESSON AIM: Should the U.S. occupation of Iraq continue?

Introduction: On September 12, 2007, President Bush spoke to the American people about the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and its efforts to create a modern, democratic, nation. In the speech President Bush promised a gradual, but slight, reduction, in the number of American troops stationed in Iraq during the next year. President Bush’s speech followed testimony to the U.S. Congress by General George Petraeus, who is in-charge of U.S. military operations in Iraq. General Petraeus argued that the escalation of U.S. forces in Iraq during the past year had helped to stabilize the country and made eventual U.S. success more likely.

There is tremendous disagreement in the U.S. about the success of U.S. policy in Iraq. There is also sharp debate about the broader issues of whether U.S. military power can ever resolve deep-seated local divisions and whether is possible to impose democracy on another nation.

Assignment: Read the excerpts from the statement by President Bush and some of the supporters and critics of U.S. policy. President Bush makes a number of assertions in this speech that have been questioned by critics. As you read the speech, underline points that might be disputed and discuss them with team members. Working individually, answer the questions that follow the sections of this document package and complete the activity that follows all of the quotes.

A. Statement by President George W. Bush on the U.S. Occupation of Iraq (Source: The New York Times, September 14, 2007, p. A8)
“In Iraq, an ally of the United States is fighting for its survival. Terrorists and extremists who are at war with us around the world are seeking to topple Iraq’s government, dominate the region and attack us here at home. If Iraq’s young democracy can turn back these enemies, it will mean a more hopeful Middle East and a more secure America.
This ally has placed its trust in the United States, and tonight our moral and strategic imperatives are one. We must help Iraq defeat those who threaten its future and also threaten ours. Eight months ago, we adopted a new strategy to meet that objective, including a surge in U.S. forces that reached full strength in June. This week General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker testified before Congress about how that strategy is progressing. In their testimony, these men made clear that our challenge in Iraq is formidable. Yet they concluded that conditions in Iraq are improving, that we are seizing the initiative from the enemy, and that the troop surge is working.
The premise of our strategy is that securing the Iraqi population is the foundation for all other progress . . . The goal of the surge is to provide that security and to help prepare Iraqi forces to maintain it . . . Our troops in Iraq are performing brilliantly. Along with the Iraqi forces, they have captured or killed an average of more than 1,500 enemy fighters per month since January. Yet ultimately, the way forward depends on the ability of Iraqis to maintain security gains. According to General Petraeus and a panel chaired by retired General Jim Jones, the Iraqi army is becoming more capable, although there is still a great deal of work to be done to improve the national police. Iraqi forces are receiving increased cooperation from local populations, and this is improving their ability to hold areas that have been cleared. Because of this success, General Petraeus believes we have now reached the point where we can maintain our security gains with fewer American forces . . . General Petraeus also recommends that in December we begin transitioning to the next phase of our strategy in Iraq. As terrorists are defeated, civil society takes root and the Iraqis assume more control over their own security, our mission in Iraq will evolve. Over time, our troops will shift from leading operations, to partnering with Iraqi forces, and eventually to overwatching those forces. As this transition in our mission takes place, our troops will focus on a more limited set of tasks, including counterterrorism operations and training, equipping, and supporting Iraqi forces . . .
The success of a free Iraq is critical to the security of the United States. A free Iraq will deny al Qaeda a safe haven. A free Iraq will counter the destructive ambitions of Iran. A free Iraq will marginalize extremists, unleash the talent of its people and be an anchor of stability in the region. A free Iraq will set an example for people across the Middle East. A free Iraq will be our partner in the fight against terror, and that will make us safer here at home. Realizing this vision will be difficult, but it is achievable. Our military commanders believe we can succeed. Our diplomats believe we can succeed. And for the safety of future generations of Americans, we must succeed.”

Questions
1. Why does President Bush believe it is vital that American troops continue to fight in Iraq?
2. What was the strategy that President Bush chose to increase the chance of success?
3. How does President Bush evaluate that strategy in this speech?

B. Comments by 2008 Presidential Candidates on the Report by General Petraeus to Congress (Source: The New York Times, September 14, 2007, p. A16)

Rudolph Giuliani (Republican): “General Petraeus provided the first look at a strategy that is getting results and an Iraq that is making progress.”

Senator Hilary Rodham Clinton (Democrat): “I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief.”

Senator John McCain (Republican): “General Petraeus and his troops ask just two things of us: the time to continue this strategy, and the support they need to carry out their mission. They must have both.”

John Edwards (Democrat): “General Petraeus may propose the withdrawal of a single brigade by the end of the year in exchange for keeping the failed surge going another six months. This is not the withdrawal the American people voted for.”

Fred Thompson (Republican): “General Petraeus’s report strengthens my conviction that we can achieve our objectives in Iraq and we must not withdraw precipitously.

Senator Barack Obama (Democrat): “This continues to be a disastrous foreign policy mistake. At what point do we say, ‘Enough’?”

Questions
1. What pattern emerges when you read these statements?
2. Which candidate’s views come closest to your own? Why?
3. In your opinion, why are political leaders so sharply divided?

C. An opinion essay published in The New York Times written by seven U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq. None of the seven were officers (Source: “The War As We Saw It” by Buddhika Jayamaha, Wesley D. Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Omar Mora, Edward Sandmeier, Yance T. Gray and Jeremy A. Murphy, New York Times, August 19, 2007).

To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere . . . This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense . . . We operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear . . . Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks . . . We need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Questions
1. According to the authors, what problems face American troops stationed in Iraq?
3. What do they believe will be the eventual outcome of the U.S. occupation of Iraq?
3. In your opinion, is it significant that the authors of this essay are regular soldiers and not officers? Explain.

Final Activity: Based on these quotes, your responses to the questions, and your knowledge about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, write a letter to either your congressional representative or one of your U.S. Senators explaining your view on what is taking place there and what the United States should do now and in the future. Your letter should be a minimum of two hundred and fifty words. It will be shared with your classmates and discussed in class. It will be your decision whether you want to send it to your representatives.

Robert Fisk: Even I question the ‘truth’ about 9/11

The Independent (UK): Robert Fisk: Even I question the ‘truth’ about 9/11

Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the “raver”. Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the “raver” is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a “raver”.His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you’re a free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don’t you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don’t you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what “all the world knows” (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the “raver” is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.

Usually, I have tried to tell the “truth”; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?

Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.

Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.

But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.

I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the “raver” bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.

Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard “explosions” in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.

But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.

Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now – we create our own reality”. True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.

How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?

RIP Elvis Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977)

In an op-ed published a few days ago in The New York Times, Peter Guralnick examines how Elvis got turned into a racist and why that myth persists despite the lack of evidence to support it.

Guralnick wrote a two volume bio of Presley as few years ago, which I high recommend. The first volume, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994) is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read, some how he manages to make the biography a story of not only Elvis but US culture in the 1950s.

The New York Times
August 11, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?
By PETER GURALNICK

ONE of the songs Elvis Presley liked to perform in the ’70s was Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” its message clearly spelled out in the title.

Sometimes he would preface it with the 1951 Hank Williams recitation “Men With Broken Hearts,” which may well have been South’s original inspiration. “You’ve never walked in that man’s shoes/Or saw things through his eyes/Or stood and watched with helpless hands/While the heart inside you dies.” For Elvis these two songs were as much about social justice as empathy and understanding: “Help your brother along the road,” the Hank Williams number concluded, “No matter where you start/For the God that made you made them, too/These men with broken hearts.”

In Elvis’s case, this simple lesson was not just a matter of paying lip service to an abstract principle.

It was what he believed, it was what his music had stood for from the start: the breakdown of barriers, both musical and racial. This is not, unfortunately, how it is always perceived 30 years after his death, the anniversary of which is on Thursday. When the singer Mary J. Blige expressed her reservations about performing one of his signature songs, she only gave voice to a view common in the African-American community. “I prayed about it,” she said, “because I know Elvis was a racist.”

And yet, as the legendary Billboard editor Paul Ackerman, a devotee of English Romantic poetry as well as rock ’n’ roll, never tired of pointing out, the music represented not just an amalgam of America’s folk traditions (blues, gospel, country) but a bold restatement of an egalitarian ideal. “In one aspect of America’s cultural life,” Ackerman wrote in 1958, “integration has already taken place.”It was due to rock ’n’ roll, he emphasized, that groundbreaking artists like Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who would only recently have been confined to the “race” market, had acquired a broad-based pop following, while the music itself blossomed neither as a regional nor a racial phenomenon but as a joyful new synthesis “rich with Negro and hillbilly lore.”

No one could have embraced Paul Ackerman’s formulation more forcefully (or more fully) than Elvis Presley.

Asked to characterize his singing style when he first presented himself for an audition at the Sun recording studio in Memphis, Elvis said that he sang all kinds of music — “I don’t sound like nobody.” This, as it turned out, was far more than the bravado of an 18-year-old who had never sung in public before. It was in fact as succinct a definition as one might get of the democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category, that embraced every kind of music equally, from the highest up to the lowest down.

It was, of course, in his embrace of black music that Elvis came in for his fiercest criticism. On one day alone, Ackerman wrote, he received calls from two Nashville music executives demanding in the strongest possible terms that Billboard stop listing Elvis’s records on the best-selling country chart because he played black music. He was simply seen as too low class, or perhaps just too no-class, in his refusal to deny recognition to a segment of society that had been rendered invisible by the cultural mainstream.

“Down in Tupelo, Mississippi,” Elvis told a white reporter for The Charlotte Observer in 1956, he used to listen to Arthur Crudup, the blues singer who originated “That’s All Right,” Elvis’s first record. Crudup, he said, used to “bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”

It was statements like these that caused Elvis to be seen as something of a hero in the black community in those early years. In Memphis the two African-American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed him as a “race man” — not just for his music but also for his indifference to the usual social distinctions. In the summer of 1956, The World reported, “the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”

That same year, Elvis also attended the otherwise segregated WDIA Goodwill Revue, an annual charity show put on by the radio station that called itself the “Mother Station of the Negroes.” In the aftermath of the event, a number of Negro newspapers printed photographs of Elvis with both Rufus Thomas and B.B. King (“Thanks, man, for all the early lessons you gave me,” were the words The Tri-State Defender reported he said to Mr. King).

When he returned to the revue the following December, a stylish shot of him “talking shop” with Little Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland appeared in Memphis’s mainstream afternoon paper, The Press-Scimitar, accompanied by a short feature that made Elvis’s feelings abundantly clear. “It was the real thing,” he said, summing up both performance and audience response. “Right from the heart.”

Just how committed he was to a view that insisted not just on musical accomplishment but fundamental humanity can be deduced from his reaction to the earliest appearance of an ugly rumor that has persisted in one form or another to this day. Elvis Presley, it was said increasingly within the African-American community, had declared, either at a personal appearance in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person” television program, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”

That he had never appeared in Boston or on Murrow’s program did nothing to abate the rumor, and so in June 1957, long after he had stopped talking to the mainstream press, he addressed the issue — and an audience that scarcely figured in his sales demographic — in an interview for the black weekly Jet.

Anyone who knew him, he told reporter Louie Robinson, would immediately recognize that he could never have uttered those words. Amid testimonials from black people who did know him, he described his attendance as a teenager at the church of celebrated black gospel composer, the Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, whose songs had been recorded by Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward and whose stand on civil rights was well known in the community. (Elvis’s version of “Peace in the Valley,” said Dr. Brewster later, was “one of the best gospel recordings I’ve ever heard.”)

The interview’s underlying point was the same as the underlying point of his music: far from asserting any superiority, he was merely doing his best to find a place in a musical continuum that included breathtaking talents like Ray Charles, Roy Hamilton, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and Howlin’ Wolf on the one hand, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and the Statesmen Quartet on the other. “Let’s face it,” he said of his rhythm and blues influences, “nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that.”

And as for prejudice, the article concluded, quoting an unnamed source, “To Elvis people are people, regardless of race, color or creed.”

So why didn’t the rumor die? Why did it continue to find common acceptance up to, and past, the point that Chuck D of Public Enemy could declare in 1990, “Elvis was a hero to most… straight-up racist that sucker was, simple and plain”?

Chuck D has long since repudiated that view for a more nuanced one of cultural history, but the reason for the rumor’s durability, the unassailable logic behind its common acceptance within the black community rests quite simply on the social inequities that have persisted to this day, the fact that we live in a society that is no more perfectly democratic today than it was 50 years ago. As Chuck D perceptively observes, what does it mean, within this context, for Elvis to be hailed as “king,” if Elvis’s enthronement obscures the striving, the aspirations and achievements of so many others who provided him with inspiration?

Elvis would have been the first to agree. When a reporter referred to him as the “king of rock ’n’ roll” at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, “one of my influences from way back.” The larger point, of course, was that no one should be called king; surely the music, the American musical tradition that Elvis so strongly embraced, could stand on its own by now, after crossing all borders of race, class and even nationality.

“The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley,” said Sam Phillips, the Sun Records founder who discovered him, “had to be one of the biggest things that ever happened. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music, but we hit things a little bit, don’t you think?”

Or, as Jake Hess, the incomparable lead singer for the Statesmen Quartet and one of Elvis’s lifelong influences, pointed out: “Elvis was one of those artists, when he sang a song, he just seemed to live every word of it. There’s other people that have a voice that’s maybe as great or greater than Presley’s, but he had that certain something that everybody searches for all during their lifetime.”

To do justice to that gift, to do justice to the spirit of the music, we have to extend ourselves sometimes beyond the narrow confines of our own experience, we have to challenge ourselves to embrace the democratic principle of the music itself, which may in the end be its most precious gift.

Peter Guralnick is the author of “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.”

New Manuals Push A Putin’s-Eye View In Russian Schools

Washington Post: New Manuals Push A Putin’s-Eye View In Russian Schools

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 20, 2007; A01

MOSCOW — With two new manuals for high school history and social studies teachers, written in part by Kremlin political consultants, Russian authorities are attempting to imbue classroom debate with a nationalist outlook.

The history guide contains a laudatory review of President Vladimir Putin’s years in power. “We see that practically every significant deed is connected with the name and activity of President V.V. Putin,” declares its last chapter. The social studies guide is marked by intense hostility to the United States.

Both books reflect the themes dominating official political discourse here: that Putin restored Russian strength and built what the Kremlin calls a “sovereign democracy” despite American efforts to isolate the country.

The principal author of the history manual — “The Newest History of Russia, 1945-2006” — is Alexander Fillipov, deputy head of the National Laboratory of Foreign Policy, a research institute affiliated with the Kremlin.

Putin, who succeeded the ailing Boris Yeltsin in 2000, demonstrated that “when a healthy and energetic person got this position it became obvious how vast presidential power is,” the manual states.

“Sovereign Democracy” is the title of one of the history manual’s chapters. The term was coined by Kremlin strategist Vladislav Surkov, who attended the launch of the two books at a teachers’ conference in Moscow last month. Supporters of the president use the phrase to describe the centralization of power under Putin as essential to the building of a stable Russian state, free from outside interference.

But critics say the term is a self-serving veil for unchecked executive power, which has led to the disempowerment of parliament, the judiciary and many media voices in Putin’s Russia. That viewpoint finds no place in the manuals.

” ‘Sovereign democracy’ is a political slogan, and it’s unethical not to point out that there are other political parties and other points of view that believe it is part of the authorities’ myth-making,” said Vasily Zharkov, a history lecturer and deputy director of the Institute of Eastern Europe, who attended the teachers’ conference.

Other events, such as the so-called Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, in which hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians overturned the official results of a presidential election they believed to be fraudulent, are explained as largely American-inspired plots.

“Tension was built up artificially in Ukraine, and a ‘revolution’ scenario was readied,” the history manual states. Supporters of the pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, “were stripped of their victory,” it says.

The social studies manual, “Social Studies: The Global World in the 21st Century,” observes that “from the beginning of the 1990s, the U.S. tried to realize a global empire. The basic political principle underpinning any empire is divide and rule. Therefore one of the U.S. strategies was to isolate Russia from all the other former Soviet republics.”

But the United States may be near “final collapse,” according to the manual, because “America can no longer integrate into a single unit or unite into a nation of ‘whites,’ ‘blacks,’ (they are called African-Americans in the language of political correctness) ‘Latinos’ (Latin Americans) and others.”

The manuals, which run to several hundred pages each, will serve as guides for the drafting of new textbooks to be introduced in September 2008.

“We are developing a national ideology that represents the vision of ourselves as a nation, as Russians, a vision of our own identity and the world around us,” said Leonid Polyakov, a professor of political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and editor of the social studies manual.

Polyakov was speaking at a meeting Putin held with high school teachers and academics after the teachers’ conference last month.

“Teachers will then be able to incorporate this national ideology, this vision, into their practical work in a normal way and use it to develop a civic and patriotic position,” Polyakov said, according to a Kremlin transcript.

Russian officials said the guides would not be mandatory for teachers and insisted that they did not represent an attempt to impose a single version of history.

“We must see the dark moments of history and its problems,” Surkov said at the conference. “But I presume that it would also be wrong to go as far as to completely deny the successes and achievements of our great country. . . . Without answering the questions of who we are, how we should live and what we are living for, effective political work and an effective economic system are impossible.”

Some educators said that any material that comes with a Kremlin stamp of approval is likely to sideline other curricular material.

“The scariest thing, and the fact that makes me really sad, is that these manuals and any new textbooks will be seen not as a recommendation or a choice for teachers, but as an order,” said Galina Klokova, who specializes in the teaching of history at the Russian Academy of Education.

The author of the “Sovereign Democracy” chapter in the history guide said as much when he responded on his blog to criticism from teachers that parts of the book were little more than crude Kremlin propaganda.

“You will teach children in line with the books you are given and in the way Russia needs,” wrote Pavel Danilin, a 30-year-old editor at the Effective Policy Foundation, a consulting firm that works for the Kremlin and is headed by Kremlin loyalist Gleb Pavlovsky. “To let some Russophobe [expletive], or just an amoral type, teach Russian history is impossible. It is necessary to clear the filth and if it doesn’t work then clear it by force.”

The teaching of history has always been a charged subject in post-Soviet Russia, especially when it touches on the rule of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, whose purges led to the deaths of millions and the notorious gulag system of labor camps.

A textbook that took an unflinching look at Stalin’s policies, including his nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and the mass deportation of Chechens and other Caucasians during World War II, was pulled by education officials in 2003.

That book also suggested that students discuss whether Putin could be considered “authoritarian,” a term his domestic and Western critics often use to describe him.

According to the new history manual, Stalin was brutal but also “the most successful leader of the U.S.S.R.”

“As for the methods of coercion used toward the ruling bureaucratic elite, the goal was to mobilize the leadership in order to make it effective in the process of industrialization, as well as in rebuilding the economy in the postwar period,” the manual states, while providing few details on the scale and horror of Stalin’s totalitarianism. “This task was fulfilled by means of, among other things, political repression, which was used to mobilize not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite.”

To historian Nikita Sokolov, the manual is so equivocal on Stalin’s terror that “his crimes are being taken into the shadows.”

“A very dangerous thing is happening,” said Sokolov, co-author of the book “Choosing Your Own History.”

“They want to take us back to unified thinking. The president and the presidential administration believe we lack the national self-confidence to confront and debate the past.”

But Vladislav Golovano, a middle school teacher in the Siberian republic of Yakutia, disagreed, saying, “Our history should not be cause for self-flagellation,” according to the Kremlin transcript of Putin’s post-conference meeting with teachers and academics.

Putin told the group that “we must not allow others to impose a feeling of guilt on us,” according to the transcript. “We do have bleak periods in our history, just look at the events starting in 1937,” he said, referring to the beginning of the Stalinist atrocities known as the Great Terror. “And we should not forget those moments of our past.”

The president went on to say that “in any event, we have never used nuclear weapons against civilians, and we have never dumped chemicals on thousands of kilometers of land or dropped more bombs on a tiny country than were dropped during the entire Second World War, as was the case in Vietnam. We have not had such bleak pages as was the case of Nazism, for example.”

Who’s behind the integration decision?

Los Angeles Times
Who’s behind the integration decision?
It’s the Pacific Legal Foundation, champion of right-wing causes for 35 years.

By Mark Tushnet,

MARK TUSHNET teaches constitutional law at Harvard Law School.
July 7, 2007

THE SEATTLE school integration case decided by the Supreme Court last month was brought in the name of a group called Parents Involved in Community Schools on behalf of Jill Kurfirst and her ninth-grade son. But it was a little-known, Sacramento-based organization called the Pacific Legal Foundation — a conservative public interest law firm involved in the case from the beginning — that developed many of the legal arguments five justices ultimately found persuasive.
Where did the foundation come from? The story begins with former Justice Lewis F. Powell. Shortly before he was nominated to the court in 1971, Powell, then a Virginia lawyer, wrote a memo to a friend at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce titled “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” In it, Powell worried that liberal groups had nurtured specialist lawyers and developed litigation strategies to defend government regulation. Businesses, he argued, were suffering because they had a “disposition to appease” and weren’t able to present a countervailing view of what constituted the public interest.

Powell’s memo prodded the business community to help create a number of not-for-profit law firms devoted to arguing a conservative point of view. Ronald Zumbrun and Raymond Momboise, former advisors to California Gov. Ronald Reagan, founded the first one — the Pacific Legal Foundation — in 1973. On its website today, the foundation says it exists to fight “tyranny” engendered by “overzealous bureaucracies and government red tape” and that it is a foe of “government regulators and environmental extremists.” Other issue areas: fighting racial preferences, combating eminent domain laws and encouraging government to take economic impact into account when designating critical habitat for endangered species.

After some initial enthusiasm, big business found these new public interest law firms less useful than it had hoped. The firms’ case selection policies were erratic, and the winnable cases they brought — mostly against environmental regulations and land use laws — had few implications for the business community’s larger concerns.

Big business soon turned to a newly developed, specialized Supreme Court bar in Washington (of which Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was a leading member) to pursue its more important priorities: tort reform through judicial restrictions on punitive damages and interpreting national statutes in a business-friendly manner to reduce and eliminate penalties for business misconduct. Conservative public interest law firms played only minor roles in these cases.

By the time Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died in 2005, most of the initiatives championed by the conservative public interest law firms — restricting federal power, putting constitutional limits on regulation and fighting environmental regulation — had hit a wall.

Still, Pacific Legal Foundation and other such law firms continued to operate, funded by donors interested in a conservative agenda. But always needing to raise more money from outsiders affected what the firms could do. They had to pick cases that garnered a lot of publicity, which meant they were not always the best for giving constitutional law a conservative cast. You can win cases (and publicity) if you can find “horror stories” about government regulation, but winning such cases makes few inroads toward more reasonable government regulations.

The Seattle case shows that conservative public interest law firms can win some big cases. These firms, however, are notorious for lacking follow-through. They get publicity from winning in the Supreme Court, not from slogging through the lower courts time and again to define the contours of the law on the ground. Winning in the Supreme Court may excite donors, but haggling with school boards over how to enforce the court’s decisions does not.

The foundation’s press release called last month’s ruling “the most important decisions on the use of race since Brown vs. Board of Education.” Five years earlier, Clint Bolick, a co-founder of the Institute for Justice, another conservative public interest law firm, hailed the Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of Cleveland’s school voucher program as a Brown for the 21st century.

These invocations call for some historical perspective. What’s happened with school vouchers since 2002? Basically, nothing. Indeed, what happened after Brown itself? Again, basically nothing — for a decade. As late as 1964, only a handful of African American children in the deep South attended schools with whites.

Things changed after 1964 not because of Brown but because that was the year Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act. It also made significant amounts of federal money available to schools for the first time, and threatened to deny that money to schools that didn’t desegregate.

Brown began to matter because the NAACP was determined to see the decision enforced, because its lawyers had organizational staying power and because the political environment favored integration.

We won’t know for a while what the fate of this year’s integration rulings will be. But the track record of conservative public interest law firms suggests that they won’t carry through on their victory. And what the political environment will be over the next decade is in our hands, not theirs.