Teaching Florida's Ron DeSantis about what teachers do

"In December 1847, former slave, abolitionist and prolific orator Frederick Douglass created his own newspaper, 'The North Star'. Its motto was 'Right is of no sex — truth is of no color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren'.”

Echo essay published in the History News Network and CNN.

"I'm Headed to Florida to Teach-In Against DeSantis's Education Policies."

by Kellie Carter Jackson
Kellie Carter Jackson is the Michael and Denise Kellen 68’ associate professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. She is the author of “Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence” and co-host of the podcasts “This Day in Esoteric Political History” and “You Get a Podcast!”

Why historians like me are taking on Florida's Ron DeSantis

In St. Petersburg, Florida, I'm travelling to participate in a 24-hour teach-in for American democracy created by Common Power, an institute committed to fostering, sustaining and expanding voting and education.

Governor Ron DeSantis is the former U.S. Representative for Florida’s Sixth District. A native Floridian with blue-collar roots.

The goal of the event is to confront the political assault on Florida’s educational system by teaching truthful history and providing education on voter suppression and voter empowerment.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has taken the lead on demolishing what he deems as “woke” culture propaganda. He and Florida lawmakers are threatening tenure in higher education, seeking to ban women and gender studies and other LGBTQ programs.

Scholars and educators are terrified that the GOP will severely undermine the academic freedom to write, speak and research without the risk of losing one’s livelihood. Other states are following Florida in a terrifying game of “Simon Says” that reflects a desire to roll back or restrict civil liberties.

For 24 hours scholars, educators, activists and community leaders will teach on the importance of education that refuses to marginalize and erase the triumphs and challenges of African Americans, women and LGBTQ communities who have been vital in the struggle for civil rights and voting rights. The teach-in is intentionally set for May 17, the 69th anniversary of the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Brown vs the Board of Education 1954

Often such milestones remind me how far Americans have yet to go in combating White supremacy. As a history professor, I am constantly reminded that the public cannot depend upon Black History Month, Juneteenth, T-shirts, tweets and a few key speeches to do the arduous work of teaching US history.

In my own classroom, I am perpetually battling gaps in my students’ education or misinformation. I often a recall a student who asked me, “Who is Harriet Tubman again?” He then answered his own question with his own aha! moment by saying, “Oh I remember, she is the woman who wouldn’t get off the bus!”

Harriet Tubman born c. 1820, Dorchester county, Maryland, U.S.—died March 10, 1913, Auburn, New York.

Knowing the difference between Harriet Tubman or Rosa Parks is not just about being able to spout off trivia, but about understanding that the progress Americans live in was created by those who struggled, sacrificed and in many cases risked their lives to make America a free and equitable society.

Such progress is not judged by the passing of time. Among the newest of the many crises that America’s educational system faces is a struggle over the control of the history, curriculum, textbooks and college majors that define the learning goals of our education system.

Recently, Slate’s popular podcast, “What Next,” interviewed a teacher in Iowa who said he quit his job as a middle school social studies teacher after the school superintendent pushed back on him teaching the idea that slavery was wrong. According to The Washington Post, when contacted for further comment, the superintendent wrote in a statement that “the district provided support” to the teacher “with content through a neighboring school district social studies department head,” but did not answer the question whether she thinks teachers should be able to teach children that slavery was wrong.

I was incredulous, mainly because I write about the abolitionist movement and Black abolitionists in particular. One of the major hurdles abolitionists faced was educating the public on the wrongness of slavery.

In 1834, the American Anti-Slavery Society believed its most powerful weapon was not the sword, but the pen. Abolitionists began a petition drive that condemned slavery wholesale. A number of petitions were sent to Congress.

At first, antislavery petitions trickled in to gain political and public attention. By 1838, abolitionists sent more than 130,000 petitions to Congress demanding the end of slavery in the US capital and essentially in the nation. To combat antislavery tactics, Southern members of Congress worked to silence any debate.

The retrenchment that teachers are facing over the teaching of our shared history is nearly identical to a proslavery rationale in that both stymie open discussion of slavery and its impact on society. It is galling that, according to a video of the meeting obtained by the Post, the superintendent in Iowa said to the teacher, “We’re not supposed to say to (students), ‘How does that make you feel?’ We can’t — or, ‘Does that make you feel bad?’ We’re not to do that part of it.”

If that sounds absurd and even harmful, it’s because it is. Not being able to discuss topics fully and accurately such as slavery, segregation, genocide or the Holocaust in the classroom is not only wrong, it’s dangerous. Such a stance promotes an erasure of the most grievous moments in history, moments that hold painful and invaluable lessons. Lessons no one should want to repeat.

The evolution from slavery to abolition, to equality in the United States is a story replete with these same setbacks. In the sweltering summer of 1835, 3,000 people gathered in Post Office Square in Charleston, South Carolina, to destroy any antislavery literature. During the bonfire, they also burned three abolitionists in effigy.

In 1836, the House of Representatives passed a resolution known as the “Gag Rule,” preventing any action or petition related to slavery or abolitionism. 

Abolitionists might have had the pen, but slaveholders had policy. Safely sitting under seniority rules, they wielded White supremacist policy for the next 100 years — despite the fact that the Constitution guarantees citizens the right “to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

During the antebellum period, it was not long before words and rhetoric escalated to violence. Many might be familiar with the death of abolitionist, printer and minister Elijah Lovejoy of Alton, Illinois. In 1837, after his printing press had been destroyed three times before by anti-abolitionist mobs, Lovejoy decided to arm himself for protection. Once again, a mob attacked Lovejoy’s fourth printing press, which was hidden in a warehouse. As bullets were fired into the building, Lovejoy was hit and killed.

Just days before he had declared, “As long as I am an American citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please, being amenable to the laws of my country for the same.” But even in death, Lovejoy was vulnerable to violence. His grave in Alton was intentionally left unmarked to prevent vandalism.

I am not sure what is more disturbing, the fact that Lovejoy was willing to face a mob to protect his ability to print and publish abolitionist material or the fact that pro-slavery vigilantes were willing to use violence and commit murder to maintain their power in a non-slaveholding state. And just like Lovejoy, the memory and legacy of people of color, women and LGBTQ are subject to the same vandalism and erasure. Educators cannot teach history like it is an unmarked grave.

As someone dedicated to engaging our history to help create a better future, I share a pointed concern that we are entering a new era attempting to accomplish the same ends. The political and social stakes are high. Book banning and censorship in educating our students in history is no trivial matter.

DeSantis and other governors in Texas and Alabama curating a more politically palatable history for their own political gain is a dangerous game. All Americans ought to be unnerved by anything that tries to stop the flow of learning, knowledge and truth. African American history is not propaganda. The study of women and gender is not superfluous. And love toward any person is not dangerous.

In December 1847, former slave, abolitionist and prolific orator Frederick Douglass created his own newspaper, The North Star. Its motto was “Right is of no sex — truth is of no color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.”

Douglass explained that such a publication was necessary to demand the country address the grievances caused by slavery. 

In fact, Douglass argued “that the man who has suffered the wrong is the man to demand redress, — that the man STRUCK is the man to CRY OUT — and that he who has endured the cruel pangs of Slavery is the man to advocate Liberty.”

The disciplines of African American studies, women and gender studies and ethnic studies are about giving voice, volume and value to the countless ways marginalized people have contributed to American success, identity and culture. Accordingly, it is only fitting that scholars, educators, teachers and those in solidarity use their voices to speak out to keep these histories alive and present in Americans minds. Anything short is dishonest at best and deadly at the extreme.

There is never a need to fear the truth. I am excited to lend my voice to this teach-in and so many other efforts that are doing the hard and precarious work of preserving American history. For 24 continuous hours, scholars and educators will remind the public of the relentless work and contributions of American patriots, people who called on America to be its best self.

War is a tragic litany of collateral human damage and unresolvable sadness

A History News Network echo essay by Walter G. Moss:

Private Sorrows of Ukraine

The best quote I’ve discovered about war is from Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs (1993). 

“Cartoons against Putin's regime could lead to jail”

In the novel, the main character reacts to World War II in Europe:

"He was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust. . . . For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories."

With all the media available today we do sometimes become aware of war’s “private sorrows,” but not often enough. 

When we consider how important our own sorrows (like the death of a loved one) are to each of us, we should pause longer to reflect on all the deaths, maiming, and other tragedies that wars inflict.

Like the general public, historians (including myself) often fail in this regard. We are better at providing mind-numbing statistics regarding all the deaths and injured than we are at conveying much feeling for the millions of individual tragedies caused by wars. Sporadically, however, I have tried to correct this defect. On the first page of my book An Age of Progress? Clashing Twentieth-Century Global Forces (2008), I quote McEwan and then add,

Some feeling for all these tragedies is also sometimes conveyed by first-hand accounts. A few early ones are provided here, and readers can only attempt to imagine some of the other millions of tragedies which lie behind the gruesome statistics of the remainder of the century.

I then provided excerpts from the writings of a few U. S. soldiers that killed Filipinos at the very beginning of the twentieth century--in the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) “as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians died from violence, famine, and disease.” Here is just one sample:


Our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, and children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people, from lads of ten up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino was little better than a dog, a noisome reptile in some instances, whose best disposition was the rubbish heap.

Almost all wars have produced such “private sorrows.” But I have only occasionally touched upon them--see, for example, “A Memorial Day Lament for Capt. Wilfred Owen, Sgt. Joyce Kilmer, and the Needless Dead of Foolish Wars."

Now, however, having just observed the one-year anniversary of the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it seems appropriate to describe just a small percentage of the individual suffering wrought by this tragic war.

One of those tragedies occurred last year on the first day of summer, June 21. It happened in a pine forest near the Ukrainian Donbas city of Sievierodonetsk, and it killed a professional Ukrainian-Jewish couple in their early thirties, Taras and Olha Melster.

They had grown up in Kropyvnytskyi, a central Ukrainian city of 230,000, surrounded by wheat fields and relatively unscathed by the physical damage inflicted on so many other Ukrainian cities. The couple knew each other from age eight on, engaged in environmental protests together, went to college--he studying electrical work, she art--and married when they were 25. Six years later, they were living in a small apartment, owning a big dog, not yet having children, but hoping to soon. He was constructing websites, she had created an online decoration business. Like so many other Ukrainians of various ages and professions they both volunteered for military service, in their case on the very first day of the Russian invasion back in February 2022.

Evil Putinism

Even though the couple had little military training and she was the only woman in their unit, they found themselves on the front lines because of her persistence and major losses to more experienced soldiers. Their job? Hold their trench despite heavy Russian shelling and bombing; prevent the Russians from advancing. But after particularly intense Russian bombardment, another soldier discovered the couple’s bodies “next to each other, ripped apart.”

Another Ukrainian tragedy occurred the following month. But since I’ve already described it, I’ll just summarize it here. 

In July 2022 in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, about 160 miles southwest of Kyiv, Iryna Dmytriev, a thirty-four-year-old single mother, is pushing a pink and black stroller. In it is her only child, four-year-old Liza, who is afflicted with Down syndrome and was also born with a defective heart. When she was seven months old she required five-hour heart surgery.

As Iryna and Liza are walking Iryna suddenly hears a frightening noise above. She looks, sees a “massive” missile, and spontaneously huddles over the carriage trying to protect her daughter. But it did no good. The Russian missile killed Liza and severely injured mother Iryna, who was hospitalized for a month, with her left leg shattered and missile fragments requiring removal from her stomach and left arm. About the killing of her daughter Iryna said, Liza “was my life. . . . What Russia took from me cannot be forgiven. All my plans are destroyed.”

Another example of the “private sorrows” of wars that McEwan wrote about occurred in Dnipro, the Ukraine’s fourth largest city with a population of about one million. It’s on the Dnieper River, about 243 miles southeast of Kyiv. On January 14, 2023 a Russian cruise missile hit the apartment building where Anastasia Shvets, age 24, lived on the sixth floor with her parents and a cat. She was the only survivor in her apartment. According to Ukrainian authorities at least 44 other people in the building were killed and 80 were injured.

Anastasia’s mom had worked in a bank, and her dad had been a mechanic until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, when he lost his job and later volunteered to build roadblocks to secure the city. Anastasia and her mom also took in stray cats, fed them, and looked for people to adopt them.

On the day the missile struck, the daughter and her parents had just finished lunch, but the latter remained in the kitchen, where they made candles for Ukrainian soldiers hunkered down in trenches. Working a night job at a bakery, Anastasia left the kitchen to sleep for a while. But just minutes later she heard a “massive roar,” and the kitchen and most of the apartment was blown apart. Her parents’ dead bodies were pulled from the rubble the next day.

As with many Ukrainians, this death was not the first to bring her grief. The previous September her boyfriend, Vladyslav, died in battle during a Ukrainian counteroffensive in eastern Ukraine. All this tragedy has left her living with an aunt and grandmother, taking sedatives, being on sick leave, and being frightened of air-raid warnings and loud noises.

A final example of the war-inflicted suffering is that of Andrii Mishchenko, his wife Olha Taranova, and their 11-year-old daughter, Sasha. From living together in Kyiv, they parted like many couples early in the one-year-old war. In their case at the Ukrainian-Slovakian border. He eventually ended up on the front lines in eastern Ukraine doing dangerous reconnaissance work. She and Sasha are now in Trossingen, a small town in southwest Germany, which has also welcomed other refugee Ukrainian mothers and children. Fortunately, because she can work remotely, she is able to continue earning income from the IT (Information Technology) job she had in Kyiv.

Andrii and Olha communicate mainly by cell phone. Every morning he tries to send her a heart emoji; she responds with an electronic kiss, but also tries to send him videos of her and Sasha. In one exchange he wrote, “Kissing and hugging you tightly”; she replied, “I am yearning for you.” He responded, “Miss me but do not be sad.”

Once he ordered flowers to be sent to her German address. She used the flower box to send him German chocolates, a box he now keeps beside him when he sleeps.

One can only imagine the anxieties of this man and wife, separated by more than a thousand miles and warfare, when they cannot communicate. That was the case for three straight weeks in September during Ukraine’s counteroffensive.

Since they parted in early 2022, the family has only been able to get together twice. The first time was in Kyiv in August, but only for about four hours because Andrii’s unit needed him back quickly for a counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region. The second time, in December in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, they were able to spend five days together. They talked about Olha and Sasha moving back to Kyiv, but because Andrii would worry too much about a Russian missile killing them there, Olha agreed for her and Sasha to return to the safety of Trossingen.

The four sketches outlined above are just a small sample of the innumerable hardships and tragedies suffered by the Ukrainian people. We can read statistics like 13 million Ukrainians displaced from their homes (8 million of them now refugees in Europe), but they don’t mean much unless we think of millions of individual cases, most of them worse, like those of Olha and Sasha. Ditto for linking the at least 100,000 Ukrainian troops killed or injured with the Kropyvnytskyi couple Taras and Olha Meltser, found dead, “ripped apart,” in a trench together. And ditto for connecting the at least 8,000 Ukrainian non-combatants who have been confiramed killed and nearly 13,300 injured with the four-year-old child Liza (killed in Vinnytsia) ); her mother Iryna (injured); and the parents of 24-year-old Anastasia Shvets (killed), all non-combatant victims of Russian missiles.

The four cases mentioned above are just a minuscule sample of what McEwan called “a near-infinity of private sorrows.” And none of the four deal with cities or villages like Mariupol, Kherson, or Bucha where some of the worst atrocities occurred. (See, for example, “Putin’s Mariupol Massacre is one of the 21st century’s worst war crimes,” a late-February 2023 “60 Minutes” treatment of Kherson, and an AP News account of Russian tortures and executions in Bucha.)

Corpses In The Street: Mariupol Is Being Devastated By Relentless Russian Attacks- Radio Free Europe.

Nor do any of our four cases mention Russian missile or other attacks (a total of 707) on Ukrainian medical facilities that occurred in 2022. Nor do any of the four deal with the effects of the war on children’s education. (A recent UNICEF report stated, “Recent attacks against electricity and other energy infrastructure have caused widespread blackouts and left almost every child in Ukraine without sustained access to electricity, meaning that even attending virtual classes is an ongoing challenge.”)

Nor have our tragic examples mentioned rape, sending some Ukrainian children to Russia, or the imposition of Russian propaganda in Ukrainian areas seized by Russia--all of which have occurred. Nor have I written about all the Russian deaths--reportedly more than Ukrainian ones--nor Putin’s increased domestic curtailments.

And for what purpose have all these evils occurred? Primarily because in Vladimir Putin’s head all kinds of evil Ukrainian and Western threats whirl around. Some, like NATO’s expansion, may be genuine dangers; but others like the Western desire to dismember Russia, or Ukraine being dominated by neo-Nazis, are more like paranoid delusions.

The present essay has not addressed the need for a diplomatic solution to end the war. Nor has it minimized the risk of it leading to an escalation and perhaps even a resort to nuclear weapons. Moreover, the sources cited may not all be 100 percent objective. But, as one critic of the escalating level of Western military support for Ukraine has written, “There is no valid excuse for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its horrific ongoing war on that country.”

Remembering the failed policy of appeasement and the rise of Fascism

Echo essay by Roger Peace, published in the History News Network electronic magazine at this site here.

The US response to the Holocaust was part of a longer pattern of trying and failing to appease Fascism.

The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945

The six-hour documentary film on the U.S. and the Holocaust produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein has many merits. It vividly portrays and personalizes the horrors and inhumanity of the Nazi murder machine, examines the diversity of responses within the United States, and highlights State Department’s resistance to allowing more Jewish refugees into the country. Inspired by an exhibition of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the film reflects the museum’s extraordinary cache of recorded interviews and resources.

Most importantly, it teaches the right lessons. When asked what she hoped people would gain from viewing the film, Botstein, the child of Jewish refugees on her father’s side, said, “I hope they learn something and have conversations about their role in a democratic society and their responsibilities to fellow human beings. 

To be kind to your neighbor, to think about what you would do and what you should do when things get hard and complicated. How can we work together?”

Yet I also agree with critic Martin Ostrow, the director of a previous PBS film on America’s response to the Holocaust aired in 1994, that Burns and company treated President Franklin D. Roosevelt with kid gloves. “It's a shame,” wrote Ostrow, “the series brings nothing new to understanding Roosevelt’s troubling decisions and motivations.”

To understand the Roosevelt administration’s motivations and actions – or non-actions – one has to examine the U.S. and British policy of appeasement toward fascist states during the 1920s and 1930s. This larger story has been explored by a number of scholars, including Arnold Offner in American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (1969), David Schmitz in Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorship, 1921-1963 (1999), Jacques Pauwels in Big Business and Hitler (2017), and Jonathan Haslam, The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (2021).

Essentially, the policy of appeasement was based on the view that communism constituted a mortal threat to Western society, whereas fascism (!) was acceptable (?), if not a positive antidote to communism. 

Benito Mullolini (1883-1945) the Italian dictator, was Europe’s first 20th-century fascist dictator

Indeed, when Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy in 1922, U.S. officials welcomed his National Fascist Party as a force for stability and a bulwark against Bolshevism (communism). 

“In developing American policy,” writes Schmitz, “officials in Washington were mainly influenced by Mussolini’s establishment of a stable, noncommunist government that welcomed American trade and investments.” This view, in turn, “allowed American officials to ignore Mussolini’s brutal repression of all opposition groups, destruction of Italy’s constitutional government, and rule by violence.”

Conservative British leader Winston Churchill was of a similar mind. Following a meeting with Mussolini in Rome in January 1927, Churchill praised the dictator at a press conference, saying, “If I had been an Italian, I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.” (OMG!)

Mussolini provided the role model for Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Upon Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in January 1933, the American ambassador to Germany, Frederic Sackett, wrote, “From the standpoint of stable political conditions, it is perhaps well that Hitler is now in a position to wield unprecedented power.”

In 1937, after more than four years of Nazi dictatorial rule and anti-Jewish policies and propaganda, the U.S. State Department continued to maintain that fascist-type governments were compatible with U.S. interests, free trade, and the international order. 

A February 1937, report written by the department’s European Division defined fascism as a respectable movement of the propertied classes aimed at defending the existing order and private property against Bolshevism. Where fascism was in power, the authors judged that “it must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again turn to the Left.” The goal of the United States, as such, was to ensure that Germany would recover economically. Should the economy falter, they warned, “war is possible, if not probable.”

Some members of the U.S. diplomatic corps pushed in the opposite direction. Most prescient was George Messersmith. He had been in the Foreign Service since 1914 and served as the consul general in Berlin from 1930 to April 1934 before becoming minister to Austria. In March 1934, he strongly advised that the U.S. not renew the major trade agreement with Germany, the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Consular Rights, ratified in 1925, which was due to expire in 1935.

Messersmith argued that the treaty would only spur German rearmament. He pointed out that the long-range “mail planes” recently purchased by Germany were “easily convertible to bombers.” Contrary to Secretary of State Cordell Hull’s benefic view of international trade, he wrote in May 1934 that “a government with really peaceable intentions does not produce armaments, train its people in military exercises, and create such an extraordinary spirit in the schools, even among the very young.” Rather than build up the German economy, Messersmith hoped that economic instability would bring down the Hitler regime.

Disregarding Messersmith’s pleas, a special State Department committee recommended approval of the trade treaty, noting that trade warfare would mean the loss of nearly one billion dollars in American investments. The U.S. and Germany renewed the treaty in June 1935, which in turn enabled U.S. corporations to trade and invest in Germany without restriction. Messersmith lamented in 1936 that American firms were allowing their capital to be “used for the maintenance of the German industrial program and in some important directions for German rearmament, which is obviously not intended for defensive but for aggressive measures.” American business leaders, he added, “are not blind to all of this.”

U.S. business investments in Germany were substantial when Hitler took over in 1933, and continued to grow thereafter. “Perhaps the Germans could have assembled vehicles and airplanes without American assistance,” writes Pauwels. “But Germany desperately lacked strategic raw materials, such as rubber and oil, which were needed to fight a war predicated on mobility and speed. American corporations came to the rescue.”

As Nazi repression and militarization proceeded, U.S. corporate leaders faced the choice of whether to continue their operations in Germany or pull up stakes and take a financial loss. Virtually all remained. The reigning philosophy in Corporate America was expressed by Alfred Sloan, Jr., chairman of the General Motors board of directors, in a letter to a stockholder in April 1939: “According to my belief . . . an international business operating throughout the world should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management, or the political beliefs of the country in which it is operating.”

Ambassador William Dodd in Berlin criticized this economic appeasement. He wrote to President Roosevelt on October 19, 1936: “At the present moment more than a hundred American corporations have subsidiaries here or cooperative understandings. The DuPonts have three allies in Germany that are aiding in the armaments business. Their chief ally is the I. G. Farben Company, a part of the Government which gives 200,000 marks a year to one propaganda operation on American opinion.” Dodd also noted the investments of Standard Oil, International Harvester, and General Motors in German rearmament.

Another mark of appeasement was Roosevelt’s appointment of Hugh R. Wilson to replace Dodd. Ambassador Dodd had been a thorn in the side of the Nazi regime, avoiding Nazi celebratory events and beseeching the Roosevelt administration to protest Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, albeit to no avail. Wilson, during his first meeting with Hitler on March 3, 1938, complimented the dictator as “a man who had pulled his people from moral and economic despair into the state of pride and evident prosperity which they now enjoyed,” according to his own account. Eight days after the meeting, German troops marched into Austria.

German troops march into Austria on March 11-13, 1938.

U.S. diplomatic and economic appeasement carried over into the muted U.S. responses to Jewish repression as well as the establishment of strict immigration quotas. On June 16, 1933, Roosevelt effectively established his administration’s policy with respect to Jewish persecution in Germany in a missive to Dodd in Berlin: “The German authorities are treating Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited. But this is also not a government affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims. We must protect them, and whatever we can do to moderate the general persecution by unofficial and personal influence ought to be done.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to have second thoughts about the policy of appeasement in 1937. In February, he questioned a State Department report which concluded that “economic appeasement should prove to be the surest route to world peace.” In May, he wrote in a letter to William Phillips, ambassador to Italy, saying that the “more I study the situation, the more I am convinced that an economic approach to peace is a pretty weak reed for Europe to lean on. It may postpone war but how can it avert war in the long run if the armament process [in Germany] continues at its present pace – or even at a slower pace?”

Britain hoped to avoid war with Germany in the 1930s- Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (b. 1869-d. 1940) failed in his attempted diplomacy.

The U.S. and Great Britain abandoned the policy of appeasement, but only after Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939. Thereafter, the policy became anathema*. During the war, the U.S. aligned with the communist Soviet Union and fought against Germany and Italy, thus reversing its prewar orientation. The foreign policy establishment, meanwhile, blamed its abandoned appeasement policy on the antiwar movement rather than its own anti-communist vendetta – which it revived after the war.

“During the Second World War, millions of Americans fought and sacrificed to defeat fascism,” writes Lynn Novick, “but even after we began to understand the scope and scale of what was happening to the Jewish people of Europe, our response was inadequate and deeply flawed.”

Indeed, it was inadequate in a number of dimensions. The Roosevelt administration could have prevented U.S. corporations from aiding the Nazi state, particularly in rearmament. It could have united with the Soviet Union early on in opposing German expansionism. It could have spoken out strongly against Germany’s human rights abuses and opened the doors of immigration wider, even on a temporary basis, fulfilling the promise set in the bronze base of the Statue of Liberty, written by Jewish immigration activist Emma Lazarus in 1883, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

*Anathema- something or someone that one vehemently dislikes.

Russia is perpetrating evil and Ukrainian genocide

Russia's justifications for invasion don't Hold up any better now than in February.  Echo essay by Lawrence Wittner* published in the History News Network.

The Russian government’s justifications for its war in Ukraine―the largest, most destructive military operation in Europe since World War II―are not persuasive.

Although Russian President Vladimir Putin’s primary argument in defense of the Russian invasion has been the threat of Ukraine joining NATO, that action, had it occurred, would have been perfectly legitimate under international law. The UN Charter, which is an instrument of international law, does not ban membership in military alliances. And, in fact, a great many such alliances are in existence. Russia currently heads up the Collective Security Treaty Organization, a military alliance comprised of six nations in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Of course, Putin’s focus upon NATO is based on the notion that Russia’s national security would be endangered by the existence of a NATO nation on its border. But why should Russia’s national security concerns be more valid than the national security concerns of nations on Russia’s borders―particularly nations that, in the past, have been invaded and gobbled up as territory by Russia or the Soviet Union? Moreover, if a feared threat to national security provides valid grounds for a military invasion, this would also justify military attacks by many nations. Finally, the degree of danger to Russia posed by NATO might well be questioned, as the Western alliance has never attacked Russia during the 73 years of NATO’s existence.

Dangerous Putin strategies

Furthermore, as a practical matter, before the Russian invasion occurred, Ukraine’s joining NATO was not imminent, for key NATO nations opposed membership. Indeed, in late March of this year, more than two months ago, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky offered to have Ukraine give up its NATO aspirations and become a neutral nation. But the Russian government has not accepted this termination of the supposed NATO danger as a sufficient reason to end Russia’s invasion. Indeed, the Russian war effort grinds on, ever more ferociously and destructively.

Putin’s claim that Ukraine requires “denazification” is particularly hollow. Like most other nations, Ukraine has fascists among its population. But, unlike many other nations, where fascist views are rampant, and where there are large rightwing political parties, and fascist elements in the government, rightwingers in Ukraine draw only about 2 percent of the vote, and have only one representative in Ukraine’s parliament and none in its executive branch. As Russia’s vastly exaggerated claim of Nazi control of Ukraine is based heavily upon the existence of fascists within the Azov regiment, it’s worth noting that most of that fighting force was either killed or captured during the Russian siege of Mariupol. Ironically, Putin himself has been a strong supporter of neofascist parties throughout Eastern and Western Europe and they, in turn, have celebrated him.

Whatever the justifications, the massive Russian military invasion of Ukraine is a clear violation of the UN Charter, which has been signed by all the war’s participants. In Article 2, the Charter says: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” Lest there be any doubt about the relevance of this statement to the Ukraine situation, the International Court of Justice ruled on March 16 that the Russia must halt its military operations in Ukraine. After a UN Security Council resolution along these lines was vetoed by Russia, the UN General Assembly, by a vote of 141 countries to 5, passed a resolution demanding that Russia “immediately, completely, and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.” The only 5 countries that supported the Russian position were Russia, North Korea, Syria, Belarus, and Eritrea. Even some of Russia’s closest friends, such as China and Cuba, abstained rather than back Russia’s violation of international law.

Danger!

Aside from its illegality, the Russian war in Ukraine is clearly an imperialist war. It is an attack by one of the world’s mightiest military powers upon a much smaller, weaker nation, with the clear goal of seizing control of all or part of Ukraine and annexing it to the Russian empire. Although, the Russian government formally agreed to respect Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty by signing the 1994, Budapest Memorandum, in 2014, Russia seized Crimea and militarily intervened in eastern Ukraine to support pro-Russian separatists. In a lengthy public statement Putin issued in July 2021, he denied the existence of an independent Ukrainian nation. Then, three days before the massive Russian invasion of February 24, 2022, he announced that Ukraine was “Russian land.”

This June, in a clear reference to his military conquest of Ukraine, Putin compared himself to Peter the Great, the eighteenth-century Russian czar whom he praised for waging decades of war to take back Russian territory from foreign rule.

Of course, Putin and his apologists are correct when they observe that, at times, other major powers have also flouted international law and the opinions of the world community. But that abysmal standard for the behavior of nations could justify almost anything―from torture, to nuclear war, to genocide. It’s hardly a prescription for the just and peaceful world that people of all nations deserve.

Maine Writer- Meanwhile, the evil Vladimir Putin is ordering genocide in Ukraine when children are being captured by Russians for the purpose of brain washing them against their culture, language and history. 

* Lawrence Wittner is a Professor of History Emeritus at SUNY/Albany and the author of Confronting the Bomb (Stanford University Press).

January 6th insurrection and the history of White Supremacy

January 6th seditionists riot in the US Capitol.

Echo essay by Elizabeth R. Varon, published in the History News Network:

In an interview ahead of the House January 6th Select Committee hearings, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), stressed the “extraordinary and unprecedented” nature of the 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Congressman Jamie Raskin proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“You really have to go back to the Civil War to understand anything like it, but of course, there, you know, the Confederates never denied that Abraham Lincoln had actually won the election. 

The Campaign and Election of 1864

Instead, they just wanted to secede from the Union.” 

Congressman Raskin is partially right — Southern secessionists emphasized the sway Lincoln’s antislavery Republican Party had over the Northern electorate as proof that the North was irredeemably radical and that disunion was a necessity.

But, the story of Southern secession provides illuminating evidence that the January 6 insurgency was, indeed, precedented, rooted in long-standing efforts to preempt, delegitimize and suppress Black voting.

Aware that roughly 90 percent of Black voters supported Joe Biden in 2020, former president Donald Trump tried, through his “Stop the Steal” movement, to invalidate and suppress votes in African American population centers; he maintained, in effect, that “Black people had no right to vote him out of office,” as columnist Eugene Robinson succinctly put it. More than 150 years ago, Southern secessionists laid the groundwork for such arguments by maintaining that Blacks had no right to vote Lincoln into office.

Secessionists rallied White Southerners to their banner by warning that Republican rule would bring about a dystopia of racial equality, race war, race mixing, race competition — and Black voting. After the Republicans imposed emancipation, Southern Whites would be “degraded to a position of equality with free negroes,” forced to “stand side by side with them at the polls,” as Alabama secessionist Stephen F. Hale put it, in a frequently sounded alarm.

Moreover, secessionists argued that Lincoln’s election was constitutionally invalid because some Northern Black people had been permitted to exercise their franchise, voting for the Republican ticket in defiance of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) that African Americans could not be U.S. citizens.

The most influential expression of this view was a speech by Georgia secessionist Thomas R.R. Cobb on Nov. 12, 1860, delivered just a few days after Lincoln won the electoral college on the strength of Northern votes. Cobb claimed that Lincoln’s election violated the “spirit of the Constitution.” “This Union was formed by white men,” he noted, “for the protection and happiness of their race.” The Founders did give each state the power to declare who should vote, but they assumed that only citizens — Whites — would exercise that power. “Yet to elect Abraham Lincoln, the right of suffrage was extended to free negroes in Vermont, Massachusetts, Ohio, New York and other Northern States, although the Supreme Court has declared them not to be citizens of this nation,” Cobb frothed. Alluding to the resistance and flight by enslaved people, Cobb intoned, “Our slaves are first stolen from our midst on underground Railroads, and then voted at Northern ballot-boxes to select rulers for you and me.”

The Underground Railroad – Escape To Freedom

This argument resonated widely across the South during the tumultuous secession winter and spring of 1860-1861, during which Deep South and then Upper South states left the Union and formed the Confederacy. Secessionists repeatedly claimed that there was massive voter fraud in Ohio where “fourteen thousand negroes” supposedly cast illicit ballots for Lincoln, augmented by additional “half breeds, mulattoes and all other branches of the negro race.” A Georgia paper put it even more succinctly a few weeks after the presidential contest: “It is stated upon good authority that negro votes in the State of Ohio carried the State for Lincoln.” The author demanded in the same breath that no one should be allowed to take a seat in Congress who was “elected by free negroes.”

The argument that Black votes had swung the presidential electoral results was false. African Americans made up less than 2 percent of the population in the free states in 1860 and their voting was sharply limited. Only in five states — Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont — could Black men vote without significant restrictions.

The hostility to Black suffrage was widespread. 

Northern Whites were the source of the rumor that 14,000 African American ballots were cast illegally for the Republicans. Absent any actual evidence, the rumor spread, appearing in articles by Northern and Southern Democrats alike that claimed that Ohio had fallen “under Negro rule.”

Northern Democrats used the story to discredit Republican candidates and warn against further enfranchisement of Black people. Southern secessionists went further still and argued that Black voting delegitimized the Union itself. To them, the prospect of Black participation, should the Republicans free and enfranchise the majorities of enslaved people in many Southern plantation districts, was an existential threat. “We are often asked if it is really true that 15,000 negroes voted for Lincoln in Ohio,” secessionist editors in South Carolina asked rhetorically, rounding the number of voters up for effect. “We have the plainest evidence in the world that they did,” they insisted, citing Northern Democratic press accounts. And so, they concluded: “It is time that the latent spark of manliness and pride in the Anglo-Saxon blood of the South should be kindled, so that it may wrap the Union in ruins.”

Of course, secessionists did not feel obliged to provide proof of the alleged illegality or corrupting effects of Black votes. It was enough to assert, as a meeting of voters in Jasper County, Georgia, did in December 1860, that Lincoln’s ascendance had been “procured in part by a violation of the Elective franchise, in permitting negro suffrage.” This “contravention of the constitutional rights of Georgia and the South,” they resolved, was “just and sufficient” grounds for secession. A correspondent to the Charleston Courier, in the seedbed of disunion, pushed a similar argument. If Lincoln had been “elected by fraud, corruption and free negro votes,” the writer suggested, “no power on earth ought to be able to secure his inauguration, and the people have a right to say he is not their President.”

Broadly condemning the North for “progressive fanaticism,” secessionists in Washington County, Georgia., insisted that Lincoln’s election was tantamount to to "Negro Rule", because they could see “no difference between the submission to a negro ruler and one elected by negro suffrage.”

The election deniers of 2020, need not be aware of this rather obscure history to be shaped by it. It is no coincidence that Confederate flags were conspicuous in the January 6th insurrectionist mob or that the rioters were 95 percent White. Trump’s message to his followers on January 6th — that “you’re the real people, you’re the people that built this nation” — echoes Thomas R.R. Cobb’s message that the Union was “formed by white men … for the protection and happiness of their race.”

Moreover, the shared premise of these noxious claims is that White people’s citizenship, and their votes, count for more than Black people’s. Unless this centuries-old “big lie” is rebutted, January 6th will serve as the precedent for future attacks on legitimate elections.

Written by Elizabeth R. Varon, who is a Langbourne M. Williams professor of American history at the University of Virginia and author of "Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War."

Putin and the War on Food

 Putin's Ukraine War and Ecocide by Walter G. Moss
Published in the History News Network HHN:

(Maine Writer- In my humble opinion, I cannot understand how the Russian military continues to wage the Putin War on Food.  Evidence indicates that Russian military are hungry, stealing food wherever they can find it.)

Right now the two greatest evils threatening our planet are Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the continuing despoiling of our environment. 

Regarding the latter, climate change consequences come immediately to mind, but the ecocide (“destruction of the natural environment by deliberate or negligent human action”) presently being perpetrated by the Russian military in Ukraine is also important. Videos coming out of Ukraine clearly indicate that the amount of destruction--not only of people, but also of lands and structures--wrought by Russian planes, missiles, and artillery has been overwhelming. 

A Rolling Stone article of May 10, declared, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is poisoning the country’s land, air, water, and climate in a way that will have longstanding repercussions.”

Kenneth Boulding once wrote “Peace is ploughing and sowing and reaping and making things.” And the farmer, writer, environmentalist, and pacifist Wendell Berry stated, “To corrupt or destroy the natural environment is an act of violence not only against the earth but also those who are dependent on it, including ourselves. To waste the soil is to cause hunger, as direct an aggression as an armed attack; it is an act of violence against the future of the human race.”

Much earlier the Dutch humanist Erasmus (d. 1536) had written:

Peace is at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man; war, on a sudden and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals. 

Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun. The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills, new buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile, humanity and charity increase, arts and manufactures feel the genial warmth of encouragement, and the gains of the poor are more plentiful.

But no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortune seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action! The flocks are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husbandman butchered, villas and villages burnt, cities and states that have been ages rising to their flourishing state subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war.

In his study of British writers and World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell has a chapter, “Arcadian Resources” which contrasts that war with the peaceful pre-war rural British environment and pursuits.

This monument is to memorialize the Holodomor endured by the Ukrainian people in 1932-33. The Holodomor was a man-made famine in the Ukrainian SSR and adjacent Cossack territories between 1932 and 1933. During the famine millions of Ukrainians and Cossacks died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine.

Ecocide perpetrated by Russia is nothing new. In the late nineteenth century, the great Russian writer Chekhov bemoaned the “diminishing animals, drying up rivers, and deforestation” he saw his country furthering. 

In 1992, Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., in their Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Human Nature Under Siege, updated our knowledge of the saga of Russian ecocide.


By the time Putin came to power, at the very end of the twentieth century, he displayed little concern about environmental questions. In late 2021, The New York Times noted that “Mr. Putin long dismissed the scientific consensus that human activity was to blame for the warming of the planet. Rather, he said in 2018, climate change could be caused by “cosmic changes, shifts of some kind in the galaxy that are invisible to us.” But then the continued devastating effects of climate change, especially in Russia, finally convinced Putin to at least acknowledge it might be important to Russia’s future. Not important enough, however, to prevent him from ordering (in late February 2022) the invasion of Ukraine, which is bringing in its wake devastating environmental damage.

As early as 4 March, more than two months ago, “over 1,000 organizations and individuals from more than 75 countries released an open letter . . . voicing concern over the war’s environmental and human toll.” A month later a piece on the Global Citizen website indicated three major ways the Russian invasion was harming the environment: 1) It was worsening global warming; 2) It was polluting water, soil, and air; and 3) It was harming wildlife and biodiversity.

Let’s examine each of these points in more detail. First, as the U.S. agency NASA indicates, “Human activities (primarily the burning of fossil fuels) have fundamentally increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere, warming the planet.” The Ukrainian Donbas area, presently the region where most of the fighting is occurring, accounts for almost half of Ukraine’s greenhouse gas emissions. And as the Global Citizen article indicates, “Militaries consume enormous amounts of fossil fuels, which contributes directly to global warming.” Russian jets, which have bombed numerous Ukrainian cities, “can burn through 4.28 gallons of gasoline per mile, with each detonation releasing additional greenhouse gas emissions, and destroying natural carbon sinks like soil, vegetation, and trees.”

In addition, various other Russian wartime activities--including all the movement of vehicles, including tanks, and artillery--were increasing global warming. In early April, to cite just one other type of increase, Russian forces blew up at least a few nitric acid container tanks in Ukraine’s Luhansk Province. Not only did the explosions create air-pollution warnings, but such acid is used in manufacturing fertilizer and some explosives, and reproducing the lost acid would involve a process that releases nitrous oxide into the air. This oxide is a powerful greenhouse gas that has contributed to global warming.

In regard to our second category, pollution, one of the nitric acid explosions mentioned above led a government official to urge the local population to stay inside, close their doors and windows, and wear masks because of the polluted air. Even before the 2022, Russian invasion, the World Health Organization had ranked “Ukraine as the country with the highest health impact from air pollution in Europe.” This was mainly because of Ukraine’s high dependence on fossil fuels (like coal) for producing energy.

As a result of the Russian invasion, toxic-material emissions into water, soil, and the air from fires, destroyed buildings and damaged pipelines, sanitation systems, and industrial facilities like chemical and fuel storage sites have increased. For a while Russian forces occupied the Chernobyl nuclear site and caused a fire at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest. So far, the invasion has caused no major nuclear tragedy, but fighting around nuclear sites certainly increases the dangers of a future one.

In addition, all the movement of tanks and heavy vehicles increases air pollution; discarded ammunition sometimes leaks ammonia into waters; and as wars disrupt normal government environmental oversights, it becomes more likely that air and water pollution will increase because of such activities as trash burning and dumping human waste into bodies of water. According to an early May report, Ukraine’s deputy minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources stated, “From the first day of the war, we stopped everything that we were doing.” Instead the ministry began concentrating on collecting the war’s environmental-damage data.

Finally, in regard to the harming wildlife and biodiversity, it is illustrative to consider Polesia, sometimes referred to as “Europe’s Amazon.” Although the area also encompasses parts of Belarus, Poland,and Russia, the Ukrainian portion of the area is larger than that of the other three countries combined. Overall, its total landmass is about the size of half of Germany, and its contains pristine forests, large wetlands, and rivers, most significantly the Pripyat. It is also inhabited by large populations of such animals as bison, lynx, wolves, and 1.5 million migratory birds. A factsheet about the area states it is

home to some of the most biodiverse and culturally rich parts of Europe. The survival of many endangered mammals and millions of birds depends on this untouched landscape. The area not only has tremendous natural intrinsic importance, but also provides immeasurable benefits to people through ecosystem services such as water retention, flood mitigation, clean air, and carbon storage. Polesia also has a strong cultural heritage. Due to their relative isolation the indigenous population of Polesia, Poleshuks, have historically had little contact with people from other regions. Deep in the heart of Polesia, the traditional way of life like the use of local herbal medicine and traditional singing has been very well preserved.

In late March, shortly before it became clear that the Russian military was regrouping in order to focus more on eastern and southern Ukraine, an article on the NewScientist website declared that “Polesia is a war zone, pummelled and churned by Russian tanks. . . . the assault on Kyiv, launched from Belarus, ploughed straight through its eastern flank. So did the attack on the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant. . . . Russian advances have also begun to edge towards strictly protected areas in central Polesia.”

In April and heretofore in May, as Russian attack priorities shifted, Polesia has been less directly threatened, but the author of the NewScientist essay was right when he wrote that “Putin cares no more about the destruction” of this biodiverse area “than he does about bombing hospitals and killing civilian populations that stand in his way.”

Lest one think that declining biodiversity just means the loss of some animals we humans don’t need anyway, the British natural historian David Attenborough sets us straight. In his Netflix’s A Life on Our Planet (2020), after ticking off the likely increase in global warming, he tells us how to slow it down: “To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity—the very thing that we’ve removed.” For more detail on the exact connection between restoring biodiversity and slowing down climate change, readers should watch Attenborough’s program, where he makes such statements as “The ocean is a critical ally in our battle to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. The more diverse it is, the better it does that job.”

One final harmful effect of Putin’s war should be added to the Global Citizen’s list of three--increasing world hunger. Ukraine has traditionally been a major exporter of wheat, sometimes referred to as the “breadbasket of Europe.” As Erasmus indicated five centuries ago, war ravages farm life.

Other effects of the war cannot yet be seen clearly, partly because the war is ongoing and we do not yet know how it will end--it is still possible for Putin to extend it beyond Ukraine or resort to heretofore unused weapons that could do even more environmental damage.

Although in order to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels, it is also possible that the war may hasten some counties transition to renewable energy sources like solar and wind. It is also conceivable that for the same reason, countries might increase their own fossil fuels production while placing less stress on climate-change containment. One point, however, is without doubt. And that is that the Ukrainian war and the terrible destruction it is causing is diverting great amounts of money and world attention away from fighting climate change as a number one priority.

Thus, all of the certainties and uncertainties of Putin’s Ukrainian war make it easy to understand why a lover of the environment like Wendell Berry can hate war so much. Consider the last stanza of one of his early twenty-first century poems, “Look Out.”

Leave your windows and go out, people of the world,
go into the streets, go into the fields, go into the woods
and along the streams. Go together, go alone.
Say no to the Lords of War which is Money
which is Fire. Say no by saying yes
to the air, to the earth, to the trees,
yes to the grasses, to the rivers, to the birds
and the animals and every living thing, yes
to the small houses, yes to the children. Yes.