Category Archives: History

“Donald Trump claims executive power, but he also claims an arbitrary power to act without any system of law or procedure to constrain him.”

The New Yorker: Stop Saying That Impeachment Is Political. Daily comment by Adam Gopnik.

“Recall that both modern-day impeachments in this country were launched against Presidents who had won overwhelming reëlection victories. Impeachment in this sense is anti-politics; it presumes that there exists a constitutional principle that overrules the politics of popularity. The point of an impeachment is not to do the popular or the poll-tested thing but to have the courage to do an unpopular thing, because what is at stake is a larger, even existential matter. […]

It is the unprecedented gravity of our moment, still perhaps insufficiently felt, that makes this confrontation essential, whatever the political consequences. Pelosi, too, now acknowledges this fact. As she told The New Yorker in September, about Trump, “He has given us no choice. Politics has nothing to do with impeachment, in my view.“ The political consequences of impeachment are no longer the primary or even the secondary issue at stake; more important is the survival of the principle of the rule of law against the unashamed assertion of arbitrary power.

Postponing a reckoning until the next election implies that what is at issue in Trump’s attempted extorting of the Ukrainian government are a series of policy choices, which voters may or may not endorse. According to this reasoning, if Watergate had happened during Nixon’s first term, and he had been reëlected anyway, attempted political burglary and obstruction of justice would have become acceptable practice. By invoking law against arbitrary power, the Democrats may not “win,“ and who knows what the political outcome will be, but, as Pelosi says, there is no longer a choice. Law and arbitrary power remain in eternal enmity. You pick your side.”

Link via MetaFilter.

Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.

The New Yorker: The Invention of Thanksgiving. “Massacres, myths, and the making of the great November holiday.” By Philip Deloria, a professor of history at Harvard.

“The settlers pressed hard to acquire Indian land through “sales“ driven by debt, threat, alliance politics, and violence. They denied the coequal civil and criminal jurisdiction of the alliance, charging Indians under English law and sentencing them to unpayable fines, imprisonment, even executions. They played a constant game of divide and conquer, and they invariably considered Indians their inferiors. Ousamequin’s sons Pumetacom—called King Philip by the English—and Wamsutta began forming a resistance, despite the poor odds. By 1670, the immigrant population had ballooned to sixty or seventy thousand in southern New England—twice the number of Native people.

We falsely remember a Thanksgiving of intercultural harmony. Perhaps we should recall instead how English settlers cheated, abused, killed, and eventually drove Wampanoags into a conflict, known as King Philip’s War, that exploded across the region in 1675 and 1676 and that was one of the most devastating wars in the history of North American settlement. Native soldiers attacked fifty-two towns in New England, destroyed seventeen of them, and killed a substantial portion of the settler population. The region also lost as much as forty per cent of its Native population, who fought on both sides. Confronted by Mohawks to the west, a mixed set of Indian and Colonial foes to the south, and the English to the east, Pumetacom was surrounded on three sides. […]

The Thanksgiving story buries the major cause of King Philip’s War—the relentless seizure of Indian land. It also covers up the consequence. The war split Wampanoags, as well as every other Native group, and ended with indigenous resistance broken, and the colonists giving thanks.

[…]

“American Indian“ is a political identity, not a racial one, constituted by formal, still living treaties with the United States government and a long series of legal decisions. Today, the Trump Administration would like to deny this history, wrongly categorize Indians as a racial group, and disavow ongoing treaty relationships. Native American tribal governments are actively resisting this latest effort to dismember the past, demanding better and truer Indian histories and an accounting of the obligations that issue from them.”

Link via MetaFilter, from which I shamelessly stole the title.

“Das ist das erste Mal, dass ich … nicht von anderen bestimmt lebe”

WDR Doku: Die älteste Studentin: Doktorarbeit mit 94 Jahren. (YouTube, 29min)

“Rosemarie Achenbach ist fleißig. Dieses Jahr soll sie fertig werden, ihre Doktorarbeit. Mit ihren 94 Jahren ist sie die älteste Studentin an der Uni Siegen. Sie schreibt sich 2004 ein und schafft in der Regelstudienzeit ihren Magister in Philosophie mit der Note “gut”. Die Urkunde hat sie in der Küche aufgehängt. Dadurch beflügelt, hat sie sich entschlossen, eine Doktorarbeit dranzuhängen. Das Thema: “Der Tod in der Philosophie”: Wie geht Sterben? Was kommt danach?”

Eine beeindruckende Frau, die geistig und körperlich fit geblieben ist. Hut ab!

“Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.”

NPR Science: 50 Years Ago, Americans Made The 2nd Moon Landing… Why Doesn’t Anyone Remember?

“Fifty years ago, astronaut Pete Conrad stepped out of the lunar module onto the surface of the moon.

His first words were: “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.”

Conrad, who stood at just 5 feet 6 inches tall, was only the third human to set foot on the lunar surface. He did it on November 19, 1969, just four months after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first lunar landing. However, unlike Armstrong and Aldrin, Conrad and fellow astronaut Alan Bean are not household names.”