Bosnia, Mladic: the Price of Justice

The fact that we are in a new historical epoch was underscored recently in the response to the news that Robert Mugabe and Ratko Mladic, two men who ruined their countries and caused the deaths of thousands, got their comeuppance. 20 years ago this would have been enormous, front page a-segment news. it would have been the topic of gleeful conversation among the well-informed and politically aware. But In this era of Trump and harassment and Brexit, hardly a ripple. It’s ancient history.

The Bosnian War, was a fascist temper tantrum that destroyed one of the most beautiful countries in Europe. FRDH podcast host Michael Goldfarb, covered that conflict and returned to Sarajevo on the fifth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement to make a radio documentary on how the country was recovering. In this FRDH podcast he uses archive tape from that documentary to illustrate the difficulty of bringing justice to the families of the dead. Mladic’s conviction 22 years after ordering the genocide at Srebrenica is not quite justice in full measure.

There is no place of greater safety for civilians and soldiers wounded in today’s wars. In 2016 alone there was nearly one attack every day on a hospital in a conflict zone.
The most infamous attack came in 2015, when the United States bombed an MSF hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.
Why? Are we seeing the end of the rules that governed warfare and provision of safe spaces for those caught in the crossfire? The origins of the Red Cross and humanitarian law go back to the middle of the 19th Century, to the battle of Solferino in 1859. The French Army under Napoleon III faced off against the Austrian Army led by Emperor Franz Joseph 1st. The politics behind the battle related to Italian independence but the battle is famous for much more.

300,000 men met on the field of battle near Solferino a small town between Milan and Verona. After nine hours of combat nearly five thousand were dead and more than 22,000 were wounded, many lying where they fell receiving no medical treatment.

A Swiss observer of the carnage, Henri Dunant, organized local people to bring some kind of relief to the stricken soldiers. Dunant, a man of private wealth, self-published a book about his experiences, it was the first step in the lobbying that would create the Red Cross in 1863 and the First Geneva Convention or the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field, the following year.

War today is different. Emperors no longer command armies into battle in great open spaces. Conflict is everywhere and involves everyone unlucky enough to be nearby.
In WW1 for every 10 soldiers killed 1 civilian died. Today that is reversed. For every soldier killed 10 civilians die.

Bolshevik Revolution 100th Anniversary Thoughts

The Bolshevik Revolution is to political change, what nuclear weapons are to warfare: the ultimate deterrent.
The question on this 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is what happens to a society when you take violent overthrow of the government by the governed as a last resort out of the equation. How does it affect a society’s ability to respond to the inevitable changes wrought by the passage of time?
Economic, political, social pressure’s build up as decades pass. These pressures weaken and deform the political system, certainly it deforms the politicians who work in that system. What happens then?
To paraphrase Langston Hughes, do Generations of dreams deferred, dry up like raisins in the Sun, or fester like sores … or do they explode?
Is it even possible to hold off the explosion?
The overwhelming violence in which the Soviet Union was born and its ultimate failure, has obscured our ability to think about revolution clearly.
It is wrong to judge revolutions by whether they succeed or fail. Virtually all revolutions fail. Either they fail literally and are reversed by forces of reaction or they fail metaphorically by compromising their lofty goals. The fairest way to assess the impact of a revolution is by the fact that it happened at all. Revolutions represent tectonic shifts in society, terrible rupturings that create decisive breaks with the past.
Michael Goldfarb asks Does the Bolshevik Revolution mean there will never be another revolution in a major country like the US?

The Bolshevik Revolution is to political change, what nuclear weapons are to warfare: the ultimate deterrent.
The question on this 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution is what happens to a society when you take violent overthrow of the government by the governed as a last resort out of the equation. How does it affect a society’s ability to respond to the inevitable changes wrought by the passage of time?
Economic, political, social pressure’s build up as decades pass. These pressures weaken and deform the political system, certainly it deforms the politicians who work in that system. What happens then?
To paraphrase Langston Hughes, do Generations of dreams deferred, dry up like raisins in the Sun, or fester like sores … or do they explode?
Is it even possible to hold off the explosion?
The overwhelming violence in which the Soviet Union was born and its ultimate failure, has obscured our ability to think about revolution clearly.
It is wrong to judge revolutions by whether they succeed or fail. Virtually all revolutions fail. Either they fail literally and are reversed by forces of reaction or they fail metaphorically by compromising their lofty goals. The fairest way to assess the impact of a revolution is by the fact that it happened at all. Revolutions represent tectonic shifts in society, terrible rupturings that create decisive breaks with the past.
Michael Goldfarb asks Does the Bolshevik Revolution mean there will never be another revolution in a major country like the US?

How Media Obscures Our Understanding of History

Media obscures history. Not intentionally, but the effect of looking at images without a deeper understanding of the context in which the images were created will keep the viewer from knowledge of an historical event. In this FRDH podcast, host Michael Goldfarb looks at how this lack of full understanding is hampering efforts to create a coherent political strategy to oppose President Trump.
He explores the seminal research into how media obscures not just history but also other aspects of life by thinkers like:
George Gerbner: http://web.asc.upenn.edu/gerbner/Asset.aspx?assetID=2597
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/the-man-who-counts-the-killings/376850/
& Neil Postman: https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusing.pdf
He also writes about the television programs that shaped the Vietnam generation, like Beulah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ2l_KTDcHU
This essay on how media obscures our undertanding of history is inspired by Ken Burns series “The Vietnam War.” Goldfarb asks, Why American society today feels like it is coming apart at the seams because when watching Burns documentary you realize there is no comparison between the objective reality of the Vietnam era and now.
The reality then: half a million troops in combat deployment, riots in American cities every summer with hundreds killed, major political assassinations as a regular feature of national life.
Reality today: a sense of panic that is comparable to the Vietnam era but not based in anything like the same scale of trauma.

Media obscures history. Not intentionally, but the effect of looking at images without a deeper understanding of the context in which the images were created will keep the viewer from knowledge of an historical event. In this FRDH podcast, host Michael Goldfarb looks at how this lack of full understanding is hampering efforts to create a coherent political strategy to oppose President Trump.
He explores the seminal research into how media obscures not just history but also other aspects of life by thinkers like:
George Gerbner: http://web.asc.upenn.edu/gerbner/Asset.aspx?assetID=2597
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/05/the-man-who-counts-the-killings/376850/
& Neil Postman: https://quote.ucsd.edu/childhood/files/2013/05/postman-amusing.pdf
He also writes about the television programs that shaped the Vietnam generation, like Beulah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ2l_KTDcHU
This essay on how media obscures our undertanding of history is inspired by Ken Burns series “The Vietnam War.” Goldfarb asks, Why American society today feels like it is coming apart at the seams because when watching Burns documentary you realize there is no comparison between the objective reality of the Vietnam era and now.
The reality then: half a million troops in combat deployment, riots in American cities every summer with hundreds killed, major political assassinations as a regular feature of national life.
Reality today: a sense of panic that is comparable to the Vietnam era but not based in anything like the same scale of trauma.

What is a Nation?

Referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia raise the question “What Is a Nation?”

What is a nation? What is a nation-state? Is it the same as a country? Are a people, or a tribe, the same thing as a nation? What does national sovereignty really mean? These are the key questions for our globalized 21st century.

What is a nation? Is it something you die for? Get murdered for? Is it something that can make you clinically insane, incapable of seeing reality? Is a nation something that can be created by treaty or politics? What does the birth of a nation look like? What does it smell like when it dies?

Michael Goldfarb draws on his decades covering conflicts rooted in frustrated attempts to express national feelings to look for an answer and comes up with more questions:

• Can the dozens of nations that make up western Europe hope to preserve their wealth and high living standards in a globalized economy without pooling their nation-hood into something greater?
• What is the importance of a nation-state in a world whose economy is no longer organized on national lines, In an era where the loyalties of global elites are to each other and not the lands of their birth?
• Will the 21st century see the creation of a United States of Europe and witness the splitting apart of the United States of America?

Referendums in Iraqi Kurdistan and Catalonia raise the quesiton “What Is a Nation?”
What is a nation? What is a nation-state? Is it the same as a country? Are a people, or a tribe, the same thing as a nation? What does national sovereignty really mean? These are the key questions for our globalized 21st century.
What is a nation? Is it something you die for? Get murdered for? Is it something that can make you clinically insane, incapable of seeing reality? Is a nation something that can be created by treaty or politics? What does the birth of a nation look like? What does it smell like when it dies?
Michael Goldfarb draws on his decades covering conclficts rooted in frustrated attempts to express national feelings to look for an answer and comes up with more questions:
Can the dozens of nations that make up western Europe hope to preserve their wealth and high living standards in a globalized economy without pooling their nation-hood into something greater?
What is the importance of a nation-state in a world whose economy is no longer organized on national lines, In an era where the loyalties of global elites are to each other and not the lands of their birth?
Will the 21st century see the creation of a United States of Europe and witness the splitting apart of the United States of America?

Without Memory There is No History, Here’s why

If an event happens and there is no one to witness and remember it, does it become part of history? If memory is eliminated is it possible to write or understand history? When FRDH host Michael Goldfarb researched his book Emancipation, about Europe’s Jews in the century and a half between being liberated from the ghetto and the Holocaust he came across stories of many interesting people in obscure places, completely forgotten because the community that might have remembered them had been eradicated. They were no longer part of history. Restoring them to the record became his obligation.
In this archive recording, originally made for the BBC, he tells the story of Gabriel Riesser.
It is particularly relevant to what’s happening in America today. This is about the ephemeral nature of civil rights laws, the tarnished promise of integration, how racial hatred is never dead and buried, and finally the foundation of all history writing: memory.